My Kind of Countryside
Distributed for Columbia College Chicago Press
192 pages
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32 line drawings
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7 x 9
“When walking, or perhaps more rarely when sauntering on horseback, one is in direct contact with surroundings, reifying a connection to natural rhythms. To forget the season, soil, and sky is to deny existence.” So writes renowned landscape architect Roger G. Courtenay in My Kind of Countryside. Whether walking the Piedmont of Virginia, canoeing the French Broad River near Asheville, North Carolina, driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, or exploring Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village, Courtenay turns to his local countryside for inspiration. In My Kind of Countryside Courtenay delves into the nuances of his craft, inviting us to share his encounters with a myriad of landscapes and revealing how he then interprets these experiences in his sketches.
John Warfield Simpson, author of Visions of Paradise and Yearning for Land
“The landscape is personal, whether it is an urban, suburban, rural, or wild place. It arouses the senses and engenders an emotional response that links a person to it in a thousand intimate ways. And each landscape is a unique combination of cultural, historical, and biophysical forces, offering those who look for the endless wonder beneath the surface of current development an enriching experience that fuses the past, present, and future. Roger Courtenay is such a time traveler. . . . My Kind of Countryside blends poetry, calligraphy-like drawings, and descriptive vignettes to instruct us in the structure, vocabulary, and meaning of place. And, as we accompany Courtenay on his wanderings about the countryside, we, too, become infected with his love of landscape along the way.”
Landscape Architecture
“Courtenay’s interest in the relationship between landscape setting and built form is conveyed with great reverence, through the wood, water, and fields of the Mid-Atlantic, the great houses of the Piedmont and Tidewater landscapes, Thomas Jefferson’s layout of the University of Virginia, and even one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes.”
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Geography: Environmental Geography
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