Creative Regionalism : Renewing the Aesthetic Experience of Landscape in Environmental Design and Planning

Critical regionalism is a place-based approach to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning that emphasizes and embraces combining local and regional influences—natural and cultural—into the design and planning process. In such a world view, emphasis is placed on design responses to the vernacular and ecological characteristics of a region while respecting other historic and contemporary influences. Hopman carefully explains how and why this regionalist approach is invaluable to creating viable and sustainable landscapes and buildings. Architects and designers are shown the effectiveness of a resilient and continuously adaptive design methodology—a methodology that acknowledges both regional and global traditions and celebrates the creativity of individual designs that anchor the past with the present.

Hopman pays special attention to the importance of creating aesthetic experiences when designing a new landscape or built environment. Experiential aesthetics can guide and inform the designer in implementing regionalist ideas—how the experience of a place is reflected in cultural values, personal creativity, and the poetics and ecological tributes of the natural environment where we live and work. Creative regionalism is shown to be an effective way to design for the modern age.

In Creative Regionalism, Hopman highlights the best regionalist thinking by landscape architects, architects, planners, and educators during the last century. And Hopman’s historical and theoretical expositions are grounded with real examples: scores of twentieth- and twenty-first-century designs from around the world that Hopman has carefully studied and critiqued. He further explores the regionalist ideas of well-known living designers with interviews, reviews of the literature, philosophical inquiry, and reflection as a practicing landscape architect himself with three decades of studying, testing, and applying the concepts of critical regionalism into innovative landscape designs.