Cet ouvrage de Francis Hallé offre enfin à chacun la découverte de la diversité de son approche du dessin. Les botanistes connaissent les dessins schématiques très formels des modèles architecturaux, qui ont fait la gloire de Francis et de Roelof Oldeman depuis 1970.
Dans ces dessins, on reconnaît la position des méristèmes, des feuilles, des fleurs, l’orientation des branches mais pour chacun des modèles, on ne peut reconnaître une espèce d’arbre ni même un quelconque arbre vivant. Et pourtant, chaque botaniste est capable, en observant un jeune arbre vivant, de déduire à quel modèle architectural il se rattache, tel que défini par ces dessins schématiques.
A new biography offers a vivid portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the father of modern biological taxonomy, formalised and popularised the system of binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals. Linnaeus himself classified thousands of species; the simple and immediately recognisable abbreviation “L” is used to mark classifications originally made by Linnaeus.
This biography, by the leading authority on Linnaeus, offers a vivid portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished sources—including diaries and personal correspondence—and new research, it presents revealing and original accounts of his family life, the political context in which he pursued his work, and his eccentric views on sexuality.
The Man Who Organized Nature describes Linnaeus’s childhood in a landscape of striking natural beauty and how this influenced his later work. Linnaeus’s Lutheran pastor father, knowledgeable about plants and an enthusiastic gardener, helped foster an early interest in botany.
The book examines the political connections that helped Linnaeus secure patronage for his work and untangle his ideas about sexuality. These were not, as often assumed, an attempt to naturalise gender categories but more likely reflected the laissez-faire attitudes of the era. Like many other brilliant scientists, Linnaeus could be moody and egotistical; the book describes his human failures and medical and scientific achievements. Written in an engaging and accessible style, The Man Who Organized Nature—one of the only biographies of Linnaeus to appear in English—provides new and fascinating insights into the life of one of history’s most consequential and enigmatic scientists.
Read the article How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life by the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing winner journalist Kathryn Schulz: “A new biography …attempts to provide the fullest possible account of his life yet fails to grapple with the fundamental question it raises: if categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus?”
Bibliography
Broberg, G. (2023) The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus. Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press
Beavers have disappeared, and their prime food, aspen and willow, has drastically declined. Cougars, bobcats, and wolves are no longer here, victims of predator control from earlier times. Deer, moose, and bighorn sheep are scarce; visitors seldom see black bears, and the grizzly is threatened with extinction. Meanwhile, bison and elk flourish to the detriment of rangeland.
Wildlife management in Yellowstone has been under fire for decades. Chase reviews the park’s history and examines vacillating policies and political pressures that affect the park’s management.
He finds that attracting visitors is the overriding priority; their safety is the guiding philosophy, and rangers are mere policemen. Chase tells the story of Grant Village, a development site in prime grizzly habitat; he discusses the friction between rangers and naturalists and the exclusion of university biologists (though geologists are welcome).
Current wildlife policy stresses the “intact ecosystem,” i.e., no interference with nature; consequently, bison infected with brucellosis and sheep with “pink-eye” go untreated and stranded animals are left to die. Major environmental groups support this policy.
Chase, who heads an education program at Yellowstone, has written an explosive study. The first serial was for the Atlantic and Outside magazine. (March 24)
Accurately identifying and understanding habitats in detail is essential to any birder, naturalist, outdoor enthusiast, or ecologist who wants to get the most out of their experiences in the field. Habitats of the World is the first field guide to the world’s major land habitats—189.
Using the format of a natural history field guide, this compact, accessible, and comprehensive book features concise identification descriptions. It is richly illustrated—including more than 650 colour photographs of habitats and their wildlife, 150 distribution maps, 200 diagrams, and 150 silhouettes depicting each habitat alongside a human figure, providing an immediate grasp of its look and scale.
Each major habitat has an illustrated “climate box” that allows easy habitat comparisons. Thirty other illustrated boxes clearly explain complex phenomena affecting habitats—from plate tectonics and mountain formation to fire regimes and climate change. Requiring no scientific background, Habitats of the World offers quick and reliable information for anyone who wants a deeper understanding and appreciation of the habitats around them, whether in their own backyard or while travelling anywhere in the world.
Covers 189 of the world’s major land habitats.
It provides all the information you need to quickly and accurately identify and understand habitats worldwide.
This book features concise text, more than 650 colour photographs of habitats and their wildlife, an up-to-date distribution map for each habitat, and hundreds of helpful diagrams and illustrations.
Bibliography
Campbell, I., Behrens, K., Hesse, C., and Chaon, P. (2023) Habitats of the World:A Field Guide for Birders, Naturalists, and Ecologists. Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Princeton University Press.
A spectacularly illustrated journey into the intimate communities that native trees share with animals, insects, fungi, and microbes.
You can tell a lot about a tree from the company it keeps. James Nardi guides you through the innermost unseen world that trees share with a wondrous array of creatures. With their elaborate immune responses, trees recruit a host of allies as predators and parasites to defend against uninvited advances from organisms that chew on leaves, drain sap, and bore into wood.
Microbial life thrives in the hidden spaces of leaf scales, twigs, and bark, while birds, mammals, and insects benefit from trees’ more visible resources. In return, animals help with pollination, seed dispersal, and recycling of nutrients.
The Hidden Company That Trees Keep blends marvellous storytelling with beautiful illustrations and the latest science to reveal how the lives of trees are intertwined with those of their diverse companions.
Features a wealth of richly detailed drawings and breathtaking images of microscopic landscapes on leaf, bark, and root surfaces.
Includes informative fact boxes.
Draws on new discoveries in biology and natural history.
Written by one of the world’s leading naturalists.
Nardi: “No one expressed our disparate as well as shared heritage with these fellow creatures in more lyrical and moving terms than the writer-naturalist Henry Beston (1928):
In a world older and more complete than ours, they movefinished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses wehave lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”
Bibliography
Nardi, J. (2023) The Hidden Company That Trees Keep: Life from Treetops to Root Tips. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
“The principles set forth in The Disappearing City Frank Lloyd Wright’s advocacy of creating cities built to human scale, of planning the open spaces, making possible both community places and truly private places, of decentralizing the structure of our civilization – found their most thoughtful expression in his Broadacre City, an idea that grew from the 1932 book into a highly influential theory of city planning – and a radical critique, not only of the unhealthy, unwieldy American city but of his European contemporaries’ coldly rational urban warehouses for humans” (Fowler, Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist).
On Earth
“The value of this earth, as man’s heritage, is pretty far gone from him now in the cities centralization has built. And centralization has over-built them all. Such urban happiness as the properly citified citizen knows consists in the warmth and pressure or the approbation of the crowd. Grown Argus-eyed and enamoured of “whirl” as a dervish, the surge and mechanical roar of the big city turns his head, fills his ears as the song of birds, the wind in the trees, animal cries and the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart.
But as he stands, out of machines he can create nothing but machinery.
The properly citified citizen has become a broker dealing, chiefly, in human frailties or the ideas and inventions of others: a puller of levers, a presser of the buttons of a vicarious power, his by way of machine craft.
A parasite of the spirit is here, a whirling dervish in a whirling vortex. Perpetual to and from excites and robs the urban individual of the meditation, imaginative reflection and projection once his as he lived and walked under clean sky among the growing greenery to which he was born companion. The invigoration of the Book of Creation he has traded for the emasculation of a treatise on abstraction. Native pastimes with the native streams, woods and fields, this recreation he has traded for the taint of carbon-monoxide, a rented aggregate of rented cells up-ended on hard pavements, “Paramounts”, “Roxies” and nightclubs, speakeasies. And for this he lives in a cubicle among cubicles under a landlord who lives above him, the apotheosis of rent, in some form, in some penthouse.
The citizen, properly citified, is a slave to herd instinct and vicarious power as the medieval laborer, not so long before him, was a slave to his pot of “heavy wet.” A cultural weed of another kind.
The weed goes to seed. Children grow up, herded by thousands in schools built like factories, run like factories, systematically turning out herd-struck morons as machinery turns out shoes.
Men of genius, productive when unsuccessful, “succeed,” become vicarious, and except those whose metier is the crowd, these men, who should be human salvage, sink in the city to produce, but create no more. Impotent.
Life itself is become the restless “tenant” in the big city. The citizen himself has lost sight of the true aim of human existence and accepts substitute aims as his life, unnaturally gregarious, tends more and more toward the promiscuous blind adventure of a crafty animal, some form of graft, a febrile pursuit of sex as “relief” from factual routine in the mechanical uproar of mechanical conflicts. Meantime, he is struggling to maintain, artificially, teeth, hair, muscles and sap; sight growing dim by work in artificial light, hearing now chiefly by telephone; going against or across the tide of traffic at the risk of damage or death. His time is regularly wasted by others because he, as regularly, wastes theirs as all go in different directions on scaffolding, or concrete or underground to get into another cubicle under some other landlord. The citizen’s entire life is exaggerated but sterilized by machinery–and medicine: were motor oil and castor oil to dry up, the city would cease to function and promptly perish.
The city itself is become a form of anxious rent, the citizen’s own life rented, he and his family evicted if he is in “arrears” or “the system” goes to smash. Renting, rented and finally the man himself rent should his nervous pace slacken. Should this anxious lock-step of his fall out with the landlord, the moneylord, the machinelord, he is a total loss.
And over him, beside him and beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps is the taximeter of rent, in some form, to goad this anxious consumer’s unceasing struggle for or against more or less merciful or merciless money increment. To stay in lockstep. To pay up. He hopes for not much more now. He is paying his own life into bondage or he is managing to get the lives of others there, in order to keep up the three sacrosanct increments to which he has subscribed as the present great and beneficent lottery of private capital. Humanity preying upon humanity seems to be the only “economic system” he knows anything about…”
Sketches for the Broadacre City project by Frank Lloyd Wright
The Broadacre City
We are concerned here in the consideration of the future city as a future for individuality in this organic sense: individuality being a fine integrity of the human race. Without such integrity there can be no real culture whatever what we call civilization may be. We are going to call this city for the individual the Broadacre City because it is based upon a minimum of an acre to the family.
And, we are concerned for fear systems, schemes, and “styles” have already become so expedient as civilization that they may try to go on in Usonia as imitation culture and so will indefinitely postpone all hope of any great life for a growing people in any such city the United States may yet have.
To date our capitalism as individualism, our eclecticism as personality has, by way of taste, got in the way of integrity as individuality in the popular understanding, and on account of that fundamental misunderstanding we, the prey of our culture-monger, stand in danger of losing out chance at this free life our charter of liberty originally held out to us.
I see that free life in the Broadacre City.
As for freedom, we have-prohibition because a few fools can’t carry their liquor; Russia has communism because a few fools couldn’t carry their power; we have a swollen privatism because a few fools can’t carry their “success” and money must go on making money.
If instead of an organic architecture we have a style formula in architecture in America, it will be because too many fools have neither imagination nor the integrity called individuality. And we have our present overgrown cities because the many capitalistic fools are contented to be dangerous fools.
A fool ordinarily lacks significance except as a cipher has it. The fool is neither positive nor negative. But by way of adventitious wealth and mechanical leverage he and his satellites – the neuters – are the overgrown city and the dam across the stream flowing toward freedom.
It is only the individual developing in his own right (consciously or unconsciously) who will go, first, to the Broadacre City because it is the proper sense of the dignity and worth of the individual, as an individual, that is building that city. But after those with this sense the others will come trailing along into the communal-individuality that alone we can call Democracy.
But before anything of significance or consequence can happen in the culture of such a civilization as ours, no matter how that civilization came to be, individuality as a significance and integrity must be a healthy growth or at least growing healthy. And it must be a recognized quality of greatness.
In an organic modern architecture, all will gladly contribute this quality, as they may, in the spirit that built the majestic cathedrals of the middle-ages. That medieval spirit was nearest the communal, democratic spirit of anything we know. The common-spirit of a people disciplined by means and methods and materials, in common, will have – and withno recognized formula – great unity.”
Originally published in 1898 as To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebener Howard “the book”, writes F.J. Osborn “holds a unique place in town planning literature, is cited in all planning bibliographies, stands on the shelves of the more important libraries, and is alluded to in most books on planning; yet most of the popular writers on planning do not seem to have read it – or if they have read it, to remember what it says.”
The book gave rise to the garden city movement and is very important in the field of urban design. It was aimed to propose an alternative to industrialized cities at the late 19th century. It is a type of urban development somewhere between the city and the countryside, in what he calls town-country. It would be the best of both worlds.
The book led directly to two experiments that found that imitation and imitation of imitation have profoundly influenced practical urban development worldwide. The book was responsible for the introduction of the term Garden City in several languages – Cite-Jardin, Gartenstadt, Ciudad-Jardin, Tuinstad – and set into motion ideas that have helped transform the scientific and political outlook on town structure and town growth.
The original Garden City concept by Ebenezer Howard, 1902.
With urban renewal and the development of suburban communities as features of the contemporary American scene, the Garden Cities of Tomorrow becomes a “must” reading. In the words of Lewis Mumford: “This is not merely a book for Technicians: above all it is a book for citizens, for the people whose actively expressed needs, desires and interests should guide the planner and administrator at every turn.”
This book was first published in its current form in 1965.
Bibliography
Ebenezer, H. (1965) Garden Cities of To-Morrow. London: Routledge.
26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusion and Opportunity
Edited by Tony L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox | 2015
From the Nature of Cities: “Over the past decade, there have been conversations about the “livable city,” the “green city,” the “sustainable city” and, most recently, the “resilient city.” At the same time, today’s headlines—from Ferguson to Baltimore, Paris to Johannesburg—resound with the need for a frank conversation about the structures and processes that affect urban residents’ quality of life and livelihoods. Read as pdf.
Issues of equity, inclusion, race, participation, access and ownership remain unresolved in many communities worldwide, even as we begin to address the challenges of affordability, climate change adaptation and resilience. The persistence of injustice in the world’s cities—dramatic inequality, unequal environmental burdens and risks, and uneven access to opportunity—demands a continued and reinvigorated search for ideas and solutions. The outreach to our invited 26 authors began with two straightforward questions:
What would a just city look like, and what could be strategies to get there?
We raised these questions to architects, mayors, artists, doctors, designers, scholars, philanthropists, ecologists, urban planners, and community activists. Their responses came to us from 22 cities across five continents and myriad vantages. Each offers a distinct perspective rooted in a particular place or practice. Each is meant as a provocation—a call to action. You will notice common threads as well as notes of dissonance. Just like any urban fabric, heterogeneity reigns.”
