In an era when many think the historic narratives of landscape architecture and architecture are irreconcilably distinct, Caroline Constant elegantly constructs “thresholds out of boundaries” (99). Written over twenty years, the essays collected in The Modern Architectural Landscape critique recognized projects from the 1920s design of Sunnyside Gardens in New York City to the 1980s competition for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, countering the assumption that architects did not play a role in “shaping new attitudes toward the field” of landscape architecture (vii). Constant persuasively describes how the relationship between modern architecture and landscape architecture has never been monolithic, but rather becomes “capable of elaboration and change by means of iterative processes of negotiation” (8). Formulating an alternative framework, she reassesses the “nature of the architecture-landscape continuum” (vii) in the West, suggesting it has been far more fluid than previously acknowledged.
Binding Constant’s nine essays (three new, six...
University of California Press