Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel

by Kenneth Helphand

320 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

300 color illustrations

Cloth ISBN 1-930066-06-6 • $50.00

Israeli landscape architects have been integral to their country's development, designing places that have become symbolic icons of the nation. The Valley of the Destroyed Communities at Yad Vashem, Haas-Sherover Promenade in Jerusalem, Ben Gurion’s gravesite at Sde Boker, Yarkon Park of Tel Aviv, all of Israel’s national parks, university campuses, most kibbutzim, and even entire cities have been designed and planned by Israel’s landscape architects. Yet despite their unique contribution to the nation's identity, their work is largely unknown outside Israel.

Dreaming Gardens is a pioneering work that provides, for the first time, a framework for understanding the contributions of landscape architecture in the creation of Israel. The development of the landscape architecture profession in Israel paralleled the development of the state, as immigrants brought skills and ideas from the Diaspora, creating a unique opportunity for designers to help shape their national identity. Helphand's clear writing, complemented by copious color illustrations, charts the shifting attitudes of this singular culture toward its land, landscapes, communities, and nation.

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"Dreaming Gardens is a solid, comprehensive historical survey of the contribution and role of landscape architects to the physical/visual shape of Israel since the late nineteenth century. Helphand’s scholarly tradition of cultural geography and his design sensibility result in a crafted narrative that deciphers the interrelationships between a land, a culture, the designed landscape, and the individual designers."

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Kenneth Helphand, FASLA, is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon and a frequent visiting professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is editor of Landscape Journal and author of Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape and, with Cynthia Girling, Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space.