Monographs by Alison B Hirsch
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
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Edited Books by Alison B Hirsch
EDITED BY JAMES CORNER AND ALISON HIRSCH:
The Landscape Imagination brings together Corner's wri... more EDITED BY JAMES CORNER AND ALISON HIRSCH:
The Landscape Imagination brings together Corner's written scholarship and addresses topics including theory in landscape architecture, creativity and processes of design generation, landscape architecture as a strategic medium, and reflections on built projects.
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Papers by Alison B Hirsch
Future Anterior, 2020
Can landscapes be moved? What does it mean for a landscape not to have a place when the former is... more Can landscapes be moved? What does it mean for a landscape not to have a place when the former is often equated with the latter in geographical terms? The following essay considers the relevance and resonance of place (and space) as related to landscapes of memory. By considering the increasing digitization of memory via the burgeoning geoweb, we aim to explore the future of memorial-making, which has long been a physical and material practice that treats site as a remnant of authenticity. While monuments often commemorate events that occurred elsewhere, landscapes themselves are frequently all that remains of histories long forgotten. The following considers whether these landscapes can be captured, transported and inscribed in the social imagination (as cultural memory) as an ex situ experience. We conclude with three illustrative memorial propositions and emphasize how geospatial media might be harnessed in contemporary memorial-making to transport us virtually to sites of memory and transport memorial landscapes into the space of our everyday lives. These propositions rely on the adaptability and accretional nature of new media technologies to commemorate ongoing processes of loss. Rather than commemorate the singularity of sites as uniquely sacred, these technologies enable awareness of larger networks of memory that draw people together across geographies and “chasms of difference.”
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Geography Research Forum, 2018
This article considers the continued agency of the body in movement as an active means of reading... more This article considers the continued agency of the body in movement as an active means of reading and reimagining the urban landscape. Using a design study, which reconsiders the gridded island of Manhattan through a walk down Broadway, the article introduces an activist landscape design methodology where field-walking as exploratory mapping yields multilinear narratives to generate landscape futures. The article begins with a description of this study, then transitions into its broader situation within and implications for landscape architectural methodology.
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Journal of Architectural Education, 2018
The urban unrest following the Rodney King verdict was a turning point for the city of Los Angele... more The urban unrest following the Rodney King verdict was a turning point for the city of Los Angeles, which became the physical stage for violent expressions of protest. Specific “flashpoints” triggered increasing unrest with a particular urban geography. This paper examines how many of the most consequential sites exist today without a palpable trace of the events that momentarily brought visibility to long-standing inequities and that indelibly transformed the city. The study considers the potential of preserving the spatial inheritance of the uprisings as restored sites of resistance, while addressing the pressing needs of disinvested areas today.
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Landscape Journal, 2015
This paper introduces the concept of “Neighborhood Commons” developed by landscape architect Karl... more This paper introduces the concept of “Neighborhood Commons” developed by landscape architect Karl Linn (1923–2005) beginning in 1960 in declining areas of North Philadelphia and then subsequently in Washington DC, New York, Baltimore, Chicago and other U.S. cities. After introducing Linn and situating his “Neighborhood Commons” in the socio-political context of American cities at this time, the paper presents the process of developing these commons as a collective ritual that parallels, according to Linn, rural “barnraising.” The use of ritual action for community development will be contextualized within cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s contemporaneous theories on the ritual process as a means of achieving communitas (see Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969). Finally, the paper proposes what implications such a method of working may have on designing shared spaces in the city today.
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Journal of Architectural Education, 2016
The term “diaspora” connotes a dynamic social formation—a process of settlement and a tenuous sen... more The term “diaspora” connotes a dynamic social formation—a process of settlement and a tenuous sense of belonging based on the negotiation between the collective memory of home and responsive adaptations to host locales. While a global phenomenon, the local impact of shifting patterns of settlement in the multicultural city transforms urban spaces through the varied and overlapping inscriptions of new and adapted rituals. Using a Landscape Architecture studio conducted at the University of Toronto as the experimental means through which to investigate diasporic and transnational urban settlement and its implications for design, this paper focuses on final proposals for the case study site—a particular area of contestation in Queens, New York—as well as the pedagogical methodology used to generate them.
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Landscape Journal, 2014
This paper examines the unique contributions of Lawrence Halprin, M. Paul Friedberg, and Karl Lin... more This paper examines the unique contributions of Lawrence Halprin, M. Paul Friedberg, and Karl Linn to major American cities during the transformative 1960s—a decade when most landscape architects continued to focus on the burgeoning suburbs. Landscape architects have been largely left out of the urban history of the 1960s’ “resistance” to typical urban renewal development, which neutralized familiar patterns of occupation and inserted “open space” as an anemic substitute for public space. The following article presents the urban scene that incited reactionary eff orts to achieve social continuity, then demonstrates how Halprin, Friedberg, and Linn contributed to these eff orts through participatory methodologies that reinstated the public life of the city. The paper both distinguishes their variant strategies and identifi es common ground between them. While each strategy might be embedded in their time and place, the combination of human engagement, place understanding, and bold design proposals provides useful precedents for current landscape architects striving to marry socially-oriented design with Design as a spatial and material art.
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International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design, 2014
While the garden is an immersive medium, it rarely diminishes the distinction between human and t... more While the garden is an immersive medium, it rarely diminishes the distinction between human and that which exists beyond the skin. Gardens require human’s perpetual management and thus, to some extent, control, of the biophysical world. When this control is surrendered, plants – once coddled – begin to engulf the landscape.
This paper introduces a fully immersive garden - a garden that likewise engulfs or cloaks the visitor - providing a seamless vegetative blanket that both insulates and unifies. By allowing ourselves to be fully engulfed in the garden, we release control and become part of our habitational field rather than separate from it. Responding to the performance art lineage, clothing oneself in the garden becomes part of the engagement process, as does the collective act of wearing this common cloak, creating a new topography based on shared experience.
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Landscape Journal, 2012
After witnessing public attempts at thwarting redevelopment projects dictated by government and b... more After witnessing public attempts at thwarting redevelopment projects dictated by government and big business, Lawrence Halprin and Associates formulated the Take Part Process in 1970 to stimulate citizen participation in environmental design. Though Halprin sought federal support to institutionalize "Taking Part," its development emerged from 1960s anti-establishment culture and was significantly impacted by the work of his wife in avant-garde dance and choreography. Despite claims that the process was open-ended, however, Halprin and his firm clearly had preconceived objectives. Using the application of "Taking Part" in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, this paper assesses the unresolved ambiguity between facilitation and manipulation latent in the process, as well as what might be learned from this tension between facilitation and manipulation in public process planning today.
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Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), 2011
In response to the disorienting effects of urban renewal and a broader public demand for particip... more In response to the disorienting effects of urban renewal and a broader public demand for participation in the 1960s and 1970s, Lawrence Halprin & Associates developed a public planning process called Taking Part. The following essay situates the process in its historical context and in the context of Halprin’s life and career—particularly as it developed out of the artistic symbiosis that existed between him and his wife, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin. A case study of the Take Part Process applied in Charlottesville, Virginia is presented to criticize its shortcomings and strengths, while arguing for the potentials of certain aspects in public process planning today.
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Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 2007
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Book Chapters by Alison B Hirsch
TRANSGRESSIVE PRACTICES TO TRANSFORMATIVE POLICIES landscape change, fast & slow, 2024
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Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas, 2023
Book edited by Eric Avila and Thaïsa Way, Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press
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Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City, 2022
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Representing Landscapes: 100 Years of Visual Communication, 2022
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Urban Landscapes in High-Density Cities, 2019
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Routledge Companion on Global Heritage Conservation, 2019
This chapter examines the intersection of place and practice, framing the question over conservat... more This chapter examines the intersection of place and practice, framing the question over conservation as less about tangible heritage and more about sustaining cultural practices that imbue particular places with social meaning. This inquiry is explored through methods of interpretive design at the landscape scale. The case study focus of the investigation is a contested site in Queens, NY, where Hindus, largely from “Little Guyana” just north of the site, deposit offerings (statues, flowers, fruits, fabrics, etc) into Jamaica Bay as an enactment of the Puja ritual. While the Bay has become a kind of substitute for the Ganges River for these citizens, Jamaica Bay’s Gateway National Park rangers argue the practice causes harm to the bay’s fragile ecosystem. The chapter assesses the balance of cultural and environmental values and how strategies of heritage conservation and interpretive design methods might contribute to the negotiation of such place conflict and sustain the site as a place of cross-cultural exchange.
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Innovations in Landscape Architecture, 2016
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The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner, 1990-2010, 2014
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Monographs by Alison B Hirsch
Edited Books by Alison B Hirsch
The Landscape Imagination brings together Corner's written scholarship and addresses topics including theory in landscape architecture, creativity and processes of design generation, landscape architecture as a strategic medium, and reflections on built projects.
Papers by Alison B Hirsch
This paper introduces a fully immersive garden - a garden that likewise engulfs or cloaks the visitor - providing a seamless vegetative blanket that both insulates and unifies. By allowing ourselves to be fully engulfed in the garden, we release control and become part of our habitational field rather than separate from it. Responding to the performance art lineage, clothing oneself in the garden becomes part of the engagement process, as does the collective act of wearing this common cloak, creating a new topography based on shared experience.
Book Chapters by Alison B Hirsch
The Landscape Imagination brings together Corner's written scholarship and addresses topics including theory in landscape architecture, creativity and processes of design generation, landscape architecture as a strategic medium, and reflections on built projects.
This paper introduces a fully immersive garden - a garden that likewise engulfs or cloaks the visitor - providing a seamless vegetative blanket that both insulates and unifies. By allowing ourselves to be fully engulfed in the garden, we release control and become part of our habitational field rather than separate from it. Responding to the performance art lineage, clothing oneself in the garden becomes part of the engagement process, as does the collective act of wearing this common cloak, creating a new topography based on shared experience.