Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010225026 | SB470.C43 C66 2000 | Open Access Book | Book | Searching... |
On Order
Summary
Summary
Now back in stock, this highly sought after monograph represents the gardens and landscapes of the Spanish designer Fernando Caruncho. Renowned internationally for serene compositions based on timeless principles of natural forms and geometry, Caruncho has recently completed two landscapes in the United States, one in the rolling farmland of New Jersey and the other in Florida. Caruncho draws inspiration from a wide spectrum of precedents--the garden-academies of ancient Greek philosophers as well as important historic gardens in Spain, Italy, France, and Japan; in Mirrors of Paradise, Caruncho discusses his design philosophy and influences in a substantial interview with the authors. Caruncho's gardens range from small urban spaces to grand country estates, and his design trademarks include geometric grids, rolling waves of the shrub escallonia, refined and playful pavilions and gazebos, calm reflecting pools, and vistas that capitalize on the contrasts inherent in his plant palette. In their inventive and evocative fusion of the historic and contemporary, Caruncho's garden designs are masterful compositions that exemplify the formal garden for the new millennium.
Author Notes
Guy Cooper is a principal of Landscape Design Limited in London. He has designed gardens throughout Great Britain and Europe. He is the author of two previous Monacelli titles.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews 2
Booklist Review
Paris-based photographer Laurence Toussaint has masterfully captured the understated elegance of master designer Caruncho's Spanish gardens with images as perfectly composed as the gardens themselves. Ferns nestled along a woodland path soothe with verdant tranquility. Ochre courtyard walls explode with fiery brilliance. Birds'-eye views of expansive vistas reveal intricate designs. If Caruncho's name is relatively unknown outside his native Spain, all that is about to change with Cooper and Taylor's monograph, the first, which introduces Caruncho in an in-depth interview, and interprets his gardens, which range from imposing country estates to confined urban spaces. Caruncho's creations manifest a fascination with landscape design borne from his first love, philosophy. Influenced by the ancient Greeks, whose gardens were mystical places intended to attract the gods, Caruncho translates these grand ideals into gardens on an equally grand scale. Page by page, the viewer is drawn into Caruncho's world of serenity and harmony, grandeur and grace. And it seems as though the gods would, indeed, be pleased. --Carol Haggas
Choice Review
Landscape designers Cooper and Taylor, who write here on the work of one of Spain's most important contemporary landscape architects, previously published a broader study of international practice in residential design, Paradise Transformed: The Private Garden for the Twenty-First Century (1996). Though Caruncho is a brilliant designer, deserving of this expanded survey of his career, the book disappoints in a number of ways. The critical intelligence displayed in the authors' earlier work is simply not in evidence here; analyses of individual gardens fall short of the language and insights that might evoke the kinesthetic delights of an actual experience of each place. Neither the foreword by dean of American landscape architects Dan Kiley, claiming that Caruncho comes closer than anyone else to embodying the aesthetic values that Kiley sought to express in his own work, nor the authors' examination of historic influences on Caruncho's style, nor their interview with the designer, which ought to have been edited to clarify the development of his ideas, is worthy of the man or his genius. The photographs alone are able to suggest, at least partially, the beauty and mystery of these elegant garden sanctuaries. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. C. M. Howett emeritus, University of Georgia
