Design with Nature

Seller of this used book 5 star. As promised. Material is easy to read and I hope it help with testing.

Excelente contenido, pero el libro venía un poco usado, a pesar de que en ningún lado en la publicación decía ser usado. Los usados supuestamente eran más baratos.

Ian McHarg's Design with Nature revolutionized landscape planning just at the time when the modern built environment was being recognized for its devastating effects on natural systems. McHarg devised techniques for planners to envision not just the finished product of human development, but its complex interaction with watersheds, wildlife habitat, viewscapes and anything else that could be represented as a layer on a map. Fast forward to today....Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are complex databases that organize information into the "layers" that McHarg proposed. GIS analysis has found its way into urban planning, oil spill response, wildfire management, epidemiology, endangered species management, socio-economic analysis and many other forms of spatial planning and design. Maps that are products of GIS analysis are digital versions of the tissue and mylar overlays of McHarg's vision and technique. This book is essential reading -- not because planners aren't using its ideas (almost universally, with GIS, they are) but because they don't understand GIS's debt to McHarg's pioneering thinking.

As a former colleague of McHarg's at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960's, and currently working in a planned community he designed (The Woodlands, TX), I decided to buy this book to try to understand the strange idiosyncracies of The Woodlands, TX.The book is very wordy, but it is well illustrated. McHarg successfully blended community design with natural boundary conditions (watershed management, geology, forestry, slope properties, etc) with the case histories he presented (some of which I remember when serving on an invited basis on jury's in McHarg's academic program). The book's strength is his advocacy of melding human planning needs with nature's boundary conditions.BUT, does it really work? Only at the expense of the time of people working and living in such a planned community. The inconvenient practices that go with such a planned community require a lot of adjustment that asks a bit much of people who work in such places but don't live there.But it works fine for the affluent and the unhurried who can afford it.

Ian L. McHard is one of the original compete landscape designer thinkers. I takes more than one great person. You need everyone together to figure out how areas work effectively. I used this book when I was studying architect at my university. It was a great requirement because it forced us students to try to understand that all kinds of profession people are needed to do anything effectely. Today i live in one of these areas that Mc Harg team help to develop. You can see how the team got most of what is there today from discussions with allot of people, all over this massive track of land in Baltimore County, Maryland that is even more effective looking than it was some 50 years ago.brian

The book arrived in great shape

I bought this on my Landscape Architect's suggestion, to help me understand his philosophy for steering nature rather than overriding nature.I was immediately drawn into the prose. It's quite a treatise, and deserves to be read attentively, not thumbed through. (Although it's admittedly fun to thumb through, owing to the interesting illustrations).

For the price it was worth it, even though the dust jacket was torn in more places than was expected, the inside of the book was almost like new, a good deal for $7.50, especially for a hardback. It complements my urban planning and environmental book collection.

Excellant book, a must read for aspiring landscape architects

The book is absolutely amazing. Well written, it joins a scientific approach with the memories and sensitiveness of the author. The book arrived at the expected time.

This seminal publication is as relevant now as it was in first edition which was groundbreaking pre computer age of 1970s.Great Scot!

La verdad es que el libro tiene sus momentos, hay partes más densas que otras, pero está muy bien para comprender cosas básicas y no tanto.

Good stuff! Andres Duany called this book the only book to read for planners or architects wishing to emulate nature.