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By Sven-Ingvar Andersson and Steen Høyer
Introduction and Translation from the Danish by Anne Whiston Spirn
C. Th. Sørensen is one of the great landscape architects of the twentieth century. His work is at once monumental and modest, artful and humane, refined and original, serious and playful, restrained yet free.
Sørensen’s body of work is enormous – more than 2000 projects – and encompasses a remarkable range – from small gardens to large institutions and new residential developments. Among these are monuments of landscape architecture and modern design. Sørensen’s work still seems fresh. It anticipated current explorations and investigated ideas and forms not yet fully explored. And it addressed issues of great concern today.
How can we build landscapes that express the special conditions of a particular time and place? How can we design landscapes that invite the creative participation of the people who use them and that still retain an artistic integrity? What is the relationship between landscape art and the arts of painting and sculpture? What are the special characteristics of landscape as an artistic medium, and how can these be exploited? How can an understanding of the history of garden design contribute to contemporary landscape architecture? Sørensen was concerned with all these issues; the same man who defined his work as garden art was also the inventor of the adventure playground. His ability to fuse art, function, and tradition belie the polarizations that plagued the profession in the decades after his death. Therein lies Sørensen’s greatness and his significance for landscape architecture today.
This book is currently out of print, but copies are sometimes available through secondhand booksellers and online through AbeBooks.