Description
Book SynopsisHow are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.
Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes the material's source and the urban site where the material ended up together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single material's movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers that
Trade Review
"Reciprocal Landscapes shows us what matters about landscape by revealing what matter is doing in it – where it came from, why it was taken, and how it was extracted, worked, fought over, and transported. Original in conception, rigorous in execution, Hutton’s book is nothing less than a brilliant synthesis of materialisms ‘historical’ and ‘new’; an incisive model for the critical analysis of landscape." – Douglas Spencer, Director of Graduate Education and Associate Professor, Iowa State University, USA
"Reciprocal Landscapes shows us what matters about landscape by revealing what matter is doing in it — where it came from, why it was taken and how it was extracted, worked, fought over and transported. Original in conception, rigorous in execution, Hutton’s book is nothing less than a brilliant synthesis of materialisms ‘historical’ and ‘new’; an incisive model for the critical analysis of landscape." - Douglas Spencer, Director of Graduate Education and Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University
Table of Contents1. Inexhaustible Terrain: Guano from the Chincha Islands, Peru to Central Park, 1862 2. Range of Motions: Granite from Vinalhaven, Maine to Broadway, 1892 3. Rivers of Steel: Steel from Pittsburgh to Riverside Park, 1937 4. Breathing with Trees: London Plane Trees from Rikers Island to 7th Avenue, 1959 5. Arresting Decay: Tropical Hardwood from Para, Brazil to the High Line, 2009
