In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

Historic preservation efforts began with an emphasis on buildings, especially those associated with significant individuals, places or events. Subsequent efforts were expanded to include vernacular architecture, but only in recent decades have preservationists begun shifting focus to the land itself. Cultural landscapes - such as farms, gardens, and urban parks - are now seen as projects worthy of the preservationist's attention.

The definitive, one-stop reference to the history of landscape architecture-now expanded and revised This revised edition of Landscapes in History features for the first time new information-rarely available elsewhere in the literature-on landscape architecture in India, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. It also expands the discussion of the modern period, including current North American planning and design practices. This unique, highly regarded book traces the development of landscape architecture and environmental design from prehistory to modern times-in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. It covers the many cultural, political, technological, and philosophical issues influencing land use throughout history, focusing not only on design topics but also on the environmental impact of human activity. Landscape architects, urban planners, and students of these disciplines will find here: * The most comprehensive, in-depth, and up-to-date overview of the subject * Hundreds of stunning photographs and design illustrations * A scholarly yet accessible treatment, drawing on the latest research in archaeology, geography, and other disciplines * The authors' own firsthand observations and travel experiences * Insight into the evolution of landscape architecture as a discipline * Useful chapter summaries and bibliographies