Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award! The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity. Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.

When Sidney J. Hare (1860-1938) and S. Herbert Hare (1888-1960) launched their Kansas City firm in 1910, they founded what would become the most influential landscape architecture and planning practice in the Midwest. Over time, their work became increasingly far-ranging, in both its geographical scope and its project types. Between 1924 and 1955, Hare & Hare commissions included fifty-four cemeteries in fifteen states; numerous city and state parks (seventeen in Missouri alone); more than fifteen subdivisions in Salt Lake City; the Denver neighborhood of Belcaro Park; the picturesque grounds of the Christian Science Sanatorium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; and the University of Texas at Austin among fifty-one college and university campuses. In Hare & Hare: Landscape Architects and City Planners Carol Grove and Cydney Millstein document the extraordinary achievements of this little-known firm and weave them into a narrative that spans from the birth of the late nineteenth-century "modern cemetery movement" to midcentury modernism. Through the figures of Sidney, a "homespun" amateur geologist who built a rustic family retreat called Harecliff, and his son Herbert, an urbane Harvard-trained landscape architect who traveled Europe and lived in a modern apartment building, Grove and Millstein chronicle the growth of the field from its amorphous Victorian beginnings to its coalescence as a profession during the first half of the twentieth century. Hare & Hare provides a unique and valuable parallel to studies of prominent East and West Coast landscape architecture firms--one that expands the reader's understanding of the history of American landscape architecture practice.

Photographs and essays express "the way the American landscape has been forged by various cultures in the past and what the possibilities are for its future design."--Jacket.

Their journey is recorded in Reading the American Landscape, which includes essays by the members of the group and a number of American landscape researchers.

Profiled are 21 landscape architects, from Frederick Law Olmsted to Beatrix Jones Farrand who have had a significant impact on how our country looks. These profiles are paired with descriptions of 21 types of landscape design, from urban parks to country estates.