Recent Faculty Publications

"Greening Cities, Growing Communities focuses on six community gardens in Seattle where there has been a strong network of knowledge and resources. These case studies reveal the capacity of community gardens to serve larger communitiy issues, such as community food security, urban ecosystem health, demonstration of sustainable gardening and building practices, active living and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and equity concerns. The authors also examine how landscape architects, planners, and allied design professionals can better interact in the making of these unique urban open spaces, and how urban community gardens offer opportunities for professionals to have a more prominent role in community activism and urban sustainability." - Greening Cities, Growing Communities

"Potential of restored and constructed wetlands to reduce nutrient export from agricultural watersheds in the Corn Belt"
Chapter 3, co-authored by David Kovacic
American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, 2008

The Upper Mississippi River Sub-basin Hypoxia Nutrient Committee held a workshop in September 2005 to bring together a distinguished group of researchers to identify the most effective ways to reduce nutrient losses from agricultural land in the Corn Belt. David Kovacic was invited as an expert panelist to develop strategies to reduce pollution loading through the use of constructed wetlands. The goal of the committee was to provide a technically sound and economically viable nutrient reduction strategies. The 14 topic areas cover hydrology and drainage issues, constructed wetlands, buffers, nitrogen and phosphorus factors, erosion control, and various tracking and evaluation tools.

Sites Unseen :
Landscape and Vision
Edited by Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

Winner of the 2009 Allen G. Noble Award from the Pioneer America Society for "a book that represents the best current scholarship in the field of material culture."

Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context. While other fields, such as art history and geography, have engaged poststructuralist theory to consider vision and representation, the application of such inquiry to the natural or built environment has lagged behind. This book, by treating landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, aims to bridge this gap, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory. As the contributors reveal, the landscape is a widely adaptable medium that can be employed literally or metaphorically to convey personal or institutional ideologies.

Landscapes can be read like languages, as arrangements of symbols that reveal cultural values. South Asian landscapes—rich with formalized symbols, from the Cosmic Tree in sacred groves to cities patterned on mandalas—are expressive of archetypes universal to humankind and externalize deeply felt emotions of social kinship and relationship with the divine. This book explores the interface between nature, culture, and the built landscape by tracing the meaning of archetypal symbols in Indic mythology, ritual space, and contemporary design practice.

City Bountiful:
A Century of Community Gardening in America
Laura Lawson
University of California Press, 2005

Since the 1890s, providing places for people to garden has been an inventive strategy to improve American urban conditions. There have been vacant-lot gardens, school gardens, Depression-era relief gardens, victory gardens, and community gardens--each representing a consistent impulse to return to gardening during times of social and economic change. In this critical history of community gardening in America, Laura J. Lawson documents the evolution of urban garden programs in the United States. The book focuses on the values associated with gardening, the ebb and flow of campaigns during times of social and economic crisis, organizational strategies of these primarily volunteer campaigns, and the sustainability of current programs.

Maybeck's Landscapes: Drawing in Nature
Dianne Harris
William Stout, 2005

This book examines Maybeck's ideas about landscape--here taken to include his garden designs as well as his grand landscape schemes for sites such as Twin Peaks in San Francisco. Maybeck produced stunning and at times gigantic pastel drawings, many of which are reproduced here in color.

306090 07
Landscape within Architecture
David L. Hays, Editor

306090 07: Landscape within Architecture (Fall 2004) explores the place of landscape within architectural education and its impact on the work of emerging theorists and designers. In recent years, ideas of landscape have assumed an unprecedented importance in discourses about architecture. Architects have turned to landscape in search of new approaches, strategies, practices, and techniques. How have academic programs in architecture addressed the new interests in landscape? How have those initiatives informed the work of students and recent graduates? In what ways have landscape architects been involved?

306090 07 brings together twenty-five essays by thirty-one contributors-administrators, professors, and students-representing twenty-two public and private universities in the United States and Canada. The volume offers a cross-section of contemporary arguments and approaches chosen for their diversity in addressing the common theme.

Support for 306090 07 has been generously provided by the Wadsworth Endowment Grant in the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in 18th-Century Lombardy
Dianne Harris
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003

This book presents a view of villa life as it developed during the 18th century on the vast estates dominating the fertile plain around Milan. Then governed from Vienna by a Habsburg regime bent on increased tax revenues, the great landowning families lived lives fraught with tensions and contradictions as they found themselves as colonized. The Nature of Authority employs a uniquely interdisciplinary method to trace the mingling of enlightened reform and a culture of display in the design and functioning of villas and villa life in eighteenth-century Lombardy. Through the examination of diverse forms of evidence, the book reveals how villas served as centers of complex sociopolitical and cultural transactions that fashioned a landscape, which was at once a beguiling vista and a tool in the enforcement of a strict hierarchy of use and value.

Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France
Edited by Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris
Cambridge University Press, 2001

This edited volume focuses on selected villas and their gardens in France and Italy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Essays by Mirka Benes, Dianne Harris, Claudia Lazzaro, Suzanne Butters, Tracy Ehrlich, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, Sheila ffolliott, Elizabeth Hyde, Chandra Mukerji, Hilary Ballon, and David Hays examine these landscapes within the context of the history, culture, and politics of the time.

Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000

Gardens, Landscape, and Vision is divided into three parts: landscape and agricultural transformation as documented in the medieval Arabic scientific literature and geographies, the typological formation of the garden and its symbolic meaning in the eighth through tenth centuries, and finally the role of vision and framing in the apparatus of sovereignty from Madinat al-Zahra' to the Alhambra.

In a 2002 review, Maria Menocal wrote, " Ruggles' always clear narrative interweaves all the fundamental threads of the historical and political events necessary to fully appreciate the cultural bases of everything that had to do with that dramatic transformation of the Iberian landscape. She seems as at home talking about the changing yields of crop harvests as about the variations in the concepts of paradise as a garden across different cultures and, as a result... she provides a sweeping picture of the 'Natural' world that was so carefully engineered in al-Andalus."

Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies
Edited by D. Fairchild Ruggles
SUNY Press, 2000

The essays in this book examine occasions when Muslim women from the twelfth century to the present took the stance of viewer, writer, performer or patron of art and literature. They explore the means of female empowerment, ascribing it to genealogical ties, the birth of male heirs, financial independence and the right to inheritance mandated by Islamic law, education, celibacy, and voice (which is dependent on the other categories). Some essays explore the limits to female agency in a world where the public social institutions were run by men; others focus on the rise of self-conscious feminism in the modern world and the active participation of women in public discourse and social institutions. The book includes contributions from Ellison Findly, Elizabeth Brown Frierson, Salah M. Hassan, Nancy Micklewright, Leslie Peirce, Kishwar Rizvi, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Yasser Tabbaa, Lucienne Thys-Senocak, and Ethel Sara Wolper.