Landscape Design in Color

Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers experiment with colour and lighting effects in their daily professional practice. Over the past decade, there has been a reinvigorated discussion on colour within architectural and cultural studies. Yet, scholarly enquiry within landscape architecture has been minimal despite its important role in landscape design.

This book posits that though colour and lighting effects appear natural, fleeting, and difficult to comprehend, the sensory palette of built landscapes and gardens has been carefully constructed to shape our experience and evoke meaning and place character. Landscape Design in Color: History, Theory, and Practice 1750 to Today is an inquiry into the themes, theories, and debates on colour and its impact on practice in Western landscape architecture over the past three centuries.

Divided into three key periods, each chapter in the book looks at the use of colour in the written and built work of prominent designers. The book investigates thematic juxtapositions such as: natural and artificial; colour and line; design and draftsmanship; sensation and concept; imitation and translation; deception and display; and decoration and structure, and how these have appeared, faded, disappeared, and reappeared throughout the ages. Richly designed and illustrated in full colour throughout, including colour palettes, this book is a must-have resource for students, scholars, and design professionals in landscape architecture and its allied disciplines.