Ken Smith Landscape Architect

Ken Smith: Landscape Architect Introduction by John Beardsley Designed by PentagramThe Monacelli Press, 232 pp., $50

In his 20-year career as a landscape architect, Ken Smith has designed public parks and private gardens, but also experimented, in museum shows and installation pieces, with projects that redefine the scope of his discipline and its media. Typical of Smith’s more experimental work is a design he completed in New York in 2007, for which he draped oversized man-made flowers, attached to a bright synthetic scrim, over the Cooper Hewitt museum’s 91st Street façade; photos of the project, which grace the cover of Ken Smith: Landscape Architect, make the juxtaposition of cartoon screen and staid Fifth Avenue mansion seem artificial, like the two images were culled from different sources and combined in Photoshop. Generally, Smith’s work is clever and conceptual, and the book presents a thorough documentation of fifteen projects Smith has worked on since 1992. It’s not exactly an exhaustive review of Smith’s career, but as an exploration of the possibilities of landscape architecture and one of its more interesting practitioners, the book is undoubtedly worth