In landscape-architectural design, a study of the site is naturally a crucially important design step. How can the preexisting layers, traces, and elements be broken down and made fruitful for the recomposition of the landscape?

This book presents an extensive typology of possible approaches to working with the site. With more than three hundred landscape designs from every time and place, it systematically presents the methods that underpin the processes involved in composing landscapes (e.g., reduction, decomposition, fragmentation, montage, and collage). Topics range from architectonic details to gardens all the way to cityscapes and cultivated areas, including New York’s Central Park, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian gardens, and the Seine landscapes in Paris.

An appendix containing several extensive indices, including an index of landscape-architectural terms, rounds out the usefulness of the book as a sound and solid manual of design.

Clemens Steenbergen, author of the successful book Architecture and Landscape, is a professor at the renowned TU Delft (Delft University of Technology) and one of the most experienced teachers in the world in the field of landscape-architectural design.