South African Landscape Architecture: A Compendium and A Reader

Published by Unisa Press, sold only as a set of two books

About the books

The above two books are now in preparation at Unisa Press and are the first in what may possibly become a new series entitled South African Landscape Architecture. There is a need to collectively celebrate and document the achievements of South African landscape architecture academia and practice. The breadth of the profession sees practitioners and academics creating value in widely different spheres of the built environment.

South African Landscape Architecture: A Compendium

This publication is a collection of professional landscape architecture projects which have received awards of merit from the Institute for Landscape Architecture in South Africa. This represents some of the most significant landscape interventions the profession has produced over more than 25 years.

Over the last three decades only five publications on South African landscape architecture are available in print. These form the only source of written material for research purposes on many topics related to the profession in South Africa. If such resources are not conserved in some way, it will inevitably become increasingly fragmented and ultimately very difficult to collect. The Compendium thus collects this published material on the 63 Merit Award projects in its original form, in order to document this resource, given its historical and cultural value.

South African Landscape Architecture: A Reader

The discipline of landscape architecture in South Africa has been covered in five main popular printed media in the form of trade related journals and magazines. South African Landscape Architecture: A Reader is however the first collection of papers written by academics actively involved with landscape architecture research. The Reader serves as a platform for current South African landscape architecture research and theory to be locally and internationally distributed, making it widely accessible to peers involved with research. Publishing through Unisa Press (the largest local academic publishing house) is for these reasons an appropriate choice.

All the papers have undergone editorial review and every paper was double-blind peer reviewed (a process independently facilitated by Unisa Press). This book provides an accessible vehicle for the dissemination of this research.

While the longer papers are more theoretical, the shorter project descriptions focus more on the application of theory to design projects and are usually more comprehensively illustrated. Several of the authors are involved in practice and supplement their research with results from inquiry undertaken through practice – design as research. These project descriptions add tremendous value to the discipline and to an integration of academia and the profession.

This book will significantly add to the dialogue on the developing discourse of South African landscape architecture and enhance the reciprocal dynamic between praxis and academia.