Product Description

In this remarkable book a landscape architect and a photographer show us, in word and pictures, gardens built by homeless or impoverished New York City inhabitants. Like traditional gardens, these spaces are designed for pleasure, social activity, or private retreat. Unlike traditional gardens, they are connected to an active and ephemeral use of the land. By focusing on what homeless people make not for material comfort but from social and spiritual need, the book offers insight into both the meaning of landscape and the place of a garden in the life of an individual under duress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1457323 in Books
• Published on: 1995-02-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From Library Journal
Nowhere is the ephemeral quality of makeshift urban gardens more apparent than in the very recent destruction of the settlement of "The Hill" so eloquently depicted in this work. The photographs, the text, and the interviews present a moving testimony to the universality of the need for a sense of order and permanence and offer new aesthetic definitions of open spaces for an urban society. As the stone gardens of the East embody the Zen search for a momentary sense of place, these collections of the refuse of a secure society record the creativity of the human spirit. The shape of these spaces takes many forms, from sanctioned community gardens to appropriated and squatter ones, from a tent city in Tompkins Square Park to a flag-decorated space on an abandoned Hudson River pier, but all speak of life and hope: homeless, perhaps, but not rootless. Recommended for large public collections.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.