The Language of Landscape Anne Whiston Spirn

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape and thereby to avoid making profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes in landscape design. Using examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Anne Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes and calls for change in the way we shape and respond to them.

Anne Whiston Spirn is professor of landscape architecture and regional planning and director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Landscape speaks to us. But how? Anne Spirn's superb and unique achievement is to spell out the 'how' so that we can better understand landscape's variant dialects its distinctive personalities and respond intelligently, with appropriate emotion." Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor of geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Anne Whiston Spirn brings to her reading of landscapes the eye of an artist, the mind of a scholar, and the pen of a gifted writer. There are a few books that have the power to change the way one sees the world. This is one of them." William Cronon, author of Changes in the Land "Spirn has thought deeply about landscape and human responses to it. Her new book...offers a myriad of stimulating impressions and suggestions and pursues a wide array of intellectual issues...All will appreciate Spirn's sensitive eye and her vivid descriptions." Choice