ABSTRACT
As a youngster I hated to read. Yet, for some reason, my life journey found me crossing paths with so many thinkers who saw the connections linking language and landscape. My mentor, John Conron, an English professor, caused me to learn more about landscape architecture than anyone else. John introduced me to written narratives, stories under the surface in poetry, and stories as expressed in paintings.
Landscape Architecture as Storytelling starts by relating words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories to basic design points, lines, planes, and volumes. The basic design elements are then related to landscapes as objects; lines, edges, and seams; ground planes, vertical planes, and overheads planes; three-dimensional spaces; and finally sequences of spaces or what is referred to as serial vision. All along, the component parts of each tier are explored for how they communicate information that may be organized (authored) to provide for landscape narratives. That journey takes the reader through ten chapters: (1) Three-Tiered Analogy, (2) Typology, (3) Points, (4) Lines, (5) Planes, (6) Volumes and Volumetric Spaces, (7) Narrative, (8) Authoring a Landscape Narrative, (9) Storyboarding, and (10) Ethics in Landscape Architectural Design.
