Rewiew: Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens, edited by Marc Treib

Meaning in Landscape Architecture is a thematic collection of critical analysis as well as a didactic instrument based on the mechanisms of dialogue. The idea for the book comes from a panel organized by the same Treib in 2009 to unite the very same authors and induce a direct dialectic debate. An extensive critical commentary by each author written ex post follows each essay, establishing a kind of right of reply for each one. The original essays are in this way revisited in a historical perspective and reproposed as open texts, so that the reader is invited to make "temporal jumps" together with the same authors. The result is the composition of a "thinking machine", to repeat the expression already used by Jencks in the preface of his Meaning in Architecture, whose provocative format Treib re-elaborates.