The Garden Design Book for the Twenty-first Century by Diarmuid Gavin & Terence Conran

cover photo by John GloverDespite temperatures that are reluctant to comply, today is the first day of spring, and, as such, a great day to sink into a lush garden book. Outdoors is a big (14” x 10 ¼”), beautiful book by an accomplished garden designer and celebrated taste-maker. It is at once inspirational and practical -- my favorite type of design book.

It’s organized by garden themes, including rural, urban, entertaining, natural, family, productive, and relax/work. Each chapter includes broad-stroke examples of design principles at work and one or two case studies which examine a specific garden in greater detail. Gorgeous photography from gardens around the world illustrates a wide range of styles, all exquisitely designed. I was particularly enamored with the “natural” and “productive” chapters, but I found treats sprinkled throughout the book. There are some fantastic topiaries in the “rural” chapter on pages 56/57, and others in the “family” chapter on pages 168/169. Not surprisingly, the “relax/work” chapter appealed to my fondness for backyard retreats too.

The primary, thematic garden chapters are framed by two, text-driven chapters. The first includes a conversation between the authors about their inspirations. The last, entitled “practical,” is just that; it offers insight into planning a garden and working with a garden designer, as well as plant and material lists to consider.

This one is a keeper. Give it a look. It just might rush spring-like temperatures along.

by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast

The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life by John Maeda

As seen through the lessons gleaned from

My Stroke of Insight, a Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.

It’s serendipity that I read these two books back to back. Though their subject matters are divergent, they both spoke to me about the same thing: that we, as designers and individuals, have the capacity to perceive the complex with sublime simplicity, and to achieve the rewards of balance in our chosen fields and lives.

Curiously, the similarity between these books begins with appearances. Their covers are remarkably alike, both white with the title centered at the top, the author’s name centered at the bottom, and an illustration space in between. On Maeda’s, the primary image has an almost Spirograph look about it, which I took to represent the balanced middle, testing boundaries and swirling back toward the middle again. The primary circular graphic appears to be bouncing off the page to the right, while a smaller circular graphic comes into the frame, higher up and to the left, suggesting a steady stream of burgeoning ideas in development. Taylor’s cover illustration, a stained-glass representation that she made of the brain, rests on her book’s central axis. This supports her intention of sharing the beauty and clarity of the brain in balance. (See Taylor's TED talk here.) 

Maeda’s book defines nine (plus “the one”) laws of simplicity that can be applied to design, technology, business, and life. They are at once universal and specific. Since Maeda suggests that balance is vital to the laws of simplicity, I thought it would be fun to explore his laws from a left-brain/right-brain point of view, exercising my new understanding of the brain thanks to Taylor’s book. My aim was to discover if the laws of simplicity themselves represent the balance required to successfully enact them. Is simplicity a matter of left-brain or right-brain dominance, or the result of each working in balance?

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by Cynthia Huntington

I picked up this poignant memoir not long ago, upon visiting Provincetown for the first time. In short order I fell under the spell of both the memoir and the Cape’s outermost beach town. In The Salt House Huntington revisits a distant summer, the third in a young marriage spent living on the Cape Cod National Seashore within the rickety walls of a beloved dune shack. She and her sculptor husband relish a nomadic life that brings them to the dunes in the temperate months to explore their craft, each other, and the awesome cycle of the natural world that envelopes them.

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by John P. Eberhard with a Forward by Rita Carter

O.K., so it’s not a catchy title. Nor is it a particularly catchy book, but it addresses a topic that's becoming increasingly catchy. What is the role of the brain in our perception of architecture? How can we better understand the effect different types of architecture have on the brain, so as to create architecture that the brain responds to positively? In some ways it’s a bit of a no-brainer really: if we can isolate the architectural characteristics to which we intuitively respond, we can design more responsive buildings.

Eberhard’s book attempts to distill a complicated topic into terms an attentive general reader can grasp. I’m not sure I was attentive enough. It’s a tough slog. I agree wholeheartedly with his premise that architects would find it “useful to know that there was some solid evidence based on fundamental studies to back up their intuitions.” It’s just that I hoped I’d find that evidence at the ready in the pages of his book.

What I did find was a welcome introduction to the field of neuroscience. In an early chapter on our sensory systems, I learned that we have six senses not five. The new-to-me sixth sense is called proprioception. “It tells us where our body is in space –- what is up and what is down, how to catch a ball, and how to find objects in the dark,” Eberhard explains. Clearly this sense is critical to how we perceive architecture, but we're not particularly conscious of it.

Turns out a lot of what we’re responding to in our environment happens on a subconscious level. Emotions work this way. We can have an emotional

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by Alain de Botton

In the last chapter of his book, when discussing the possibility of evolving tastes, de Botton writes, “It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.” Certainly this is the achievement of de Botton’s book, to reveal what we may have known but failed to appreciate.

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