Penn Press Log

Medici Gardens--Now Available

Medici Gardens: From Making to Design
Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto
328 pages | 6 x 9 | 54 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4072-6 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series

Medici Gardens challenges the common assumption that such gardens as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole were the products of an established design practice whereby one client commissioned one architect or artist. The book suggests that in the case of the gardens in Florence garden making preceded its theoretical articulation.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden--Now Available

Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden
Vera Schwarcz
296 pages | 6 x 9 | 44 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4100-6 | $55.00 | £36.00
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has been the site of several important and cataclysmic events in modern Chinese history. In this poetic and highly personal study of memory, trauma, and cultural renewal, Schwarcz brings to life the complex history of a richly layered corner of China's much traversed yet little known cultural landscape.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes--Now Available

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes
D. Fairchild Ruggles
296 pages | 7 1/2 x 10 | 28 color, 177 b/w illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4025-2 | $49.95 | £32.50
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series

A comprehensive survey of Islamic gardens, from antiquity through to the present.

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Ruggles Illuminates 'Cities of Light'

The film Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain examines a time during the Middle Ages when Christians, Jews and Muslims peacefully coexisted in southern Spain.  D. Fairchild Ruggles, author of the forthcoming Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, is among the expert scholars interviewed in the program.  If you missed the broadcast of this public television documentary, you may be able to catch it on cable or digital television. Visit PBS.org to check your local listings. 

If you've seen Cities of Light and wish to deepen your understanding of medieval and early modern Spain and the cultural interplay between faiths, here's a reading list.

Lens Versus Pencil: A Post from a Penn Press Intern

Intern Taylor Wemmer sheds light on the value of illustration in the following article.

Film and Lens or Paper and Pencil?

If someone asked me whether I would prefer a book full of black and white illustrations or a book full of color photographs, I would answer, “the one with color photographs, please.” Aren’t photographs the closest we can come to experiencing the true form of an object? Don’t photographs provide more details than a mere illustration? Not necessarily. For those who study plants, a black-and-white illustration can hold far greater value than a photograph. The usefulness of such illustrations makes them a vital component in the second edition of Dr. Ann Rhoads and Dr. Timothy Block's The Plants of Pennsylvania, a practical guide for plant enthusiasts with any level of experience.

Rhoads explains that "drawings, prepared by a skilled botanical illustrator, can depict important details that are necessary for accurate identification better than photographs.”

Care to test this out for yourself? Try to find the poison ivy in the photo below (from Wikipedia).

More Awards for Landscape Architecture Books

Elizabeth Hyde's Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV has received the 2007 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award by the Society of Architectural Historians "for the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design."

Cultivated Power is part of our Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, which also recently won a prize.  The American Society of Landscape Architects gave the series its 2006 Communications Award of Honor and praised the books for their huge breadth and impact.

Congratulations to Hyde and the other fine authors in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series, and to Series Editor John Dixon Hunt.

The Magazine Antiques Praises Morgan's Book on de Caus

Luke Morgan's Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design appears in the "Books about antiques" section of the March 2007 issue of The Magazine Antiques.  According to the review:

The chapter devoted to [the Hortus Palatinus castle garden, built for the elector of the Palatinate Frederick V and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart] is worth the price of the book alone, for Morgan ably demonstrates how all of de Caus's considerable skills and abilities came together at this difficult site; and because there are so many period images, the text comes alive in ways that descriptions of some of de Caus's earlier projects do not.

Tropic of Venice Contest Winner

Tropic of Venice author Margaret Doody knows Venice. So does Bonnie Hollis, winner of our Tropic of Venice contest.

Over 360 people took our Tropic of Venice online quiz. 15 answered all of the questions correctly to qualify for our prize raffle. Of those 15, Hollis was chosen at random to receive a $50 Penn Press gift certificate.

See how well you know Venice. Take the quiz for yourself.

1. Look at the buildings featured on the cover of Tropic of Venice. The tower behind the Doge's Palace and pretty much every other structure in the area, including the famous piazza, are named after what saint?
A. St. Mark
B. St. Peter
C. St. Norbert

2. In which Henry James novel does an American woman named Milly travel to Venice?
A. The Aspern Papers
B. The Wings of the Dove
C. Portrait of a Lady

3. The controversial multibillion dollar plan to save sinking Venice from the rising waters of the Adriatic Sea is known as:
A. The Grand Arms
B. The Noah Project
C. The Moses Project

4. Genuine Venetian masks created by Ca Macana and Mondonovo appeared in what Stanley Kubrick film?
A. A Clockwork Orange
B. Eyes Wide Shut
C. Barry Lyndon

5. Who painted The Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the grand altarpiece that was installed in Venice's S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in 1518?
A. Titian
B. Fra Bartolommeo
C. Raphael

The Making of a Miami Treasure

Like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, Vizcaya represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a new book by Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin, chronicles the development of one of America's greatest architectural treasures. 

According to the December 9th  Wall Street Journal review, the book seeks to counter an ideological bias against the American Renaissance style of architecture. "Mr. Rybczcynski and Mr. Olin judge the villa as they find it today and in the context of the historical process that produced it, rather than through a filter of modernist criteria."

A recent Miami Herald article says that Rybczynski and Olin's Vizcaya "locates the house and garden within the artistic and intellectual context of the times with wonderfully readable tales."

This week Witold Rybczynski travels to Miami, Florida to discuss the new book. He will give two public presentations featuring photographs from the book and a discussion of the architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration,  and art that make Vizcaya a national treasure. Presentation locations and times are listed below.

Wednesday, December 13
7:00 PM
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
3251 South Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33129
305-250-9133
For reservations, contact learning.programs@ vizcayamuseum.org.
For more information, call 305-250-9133        

Friday, December 15
8:00 PM
Books & Books, Coral Gables
265 Aragon Avenue
Coral Gables, FL
305-442-4408

Now Available--Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster

Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Editors
416 pages | 7 x 10 | 8 color, 60 b/w illus.
Paper 2006 | ISBN 0-8122-1980-5 | $34.95 | £23.00
A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series

This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place.

Planetizen.com listed Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina among its Top 10 Planning Books of the Year, calling the new book "an insightful tool for understanding the implications of this and other disasters on the field of planning."

Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Ellen Trachtenberg at ellenpt@pobox.upenn.edu.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.