Elements of Visual Design in the Landscape

What makes a visually appealing landscape? How can the design and use of a landscape be harmonized? In this significantly revised and updated third edition of Simon Bell's seminal text, he further explores the answers to these questions by interrogating a range of design principles, applications and ideas.

Written for students, instructors and professionals, the book unveils a visual design vocabulary for anyone involved with landscape aesthetics including landscape architects, architects, planners, urban designers, landscape managers, foresters, geographers and ecologists. Structured around key design terms, which are explained and illustrated using an extensive range of examples from around the world, including North America, Europe and Asia, this book enables you to describe, debate and design the visual landscape. It starts with basic elements, before moving onto variable design components, and then the ways these elements are organized into compositions, in order to demonstrate how landscapes are created and how meanings and patterns are perceived within them.

This new full colour edition contains over 240 images; an updated introduction; examples from China, Vietnam and central Asia; a chapter on how to read and understand visual design elements in the landscape; a teaching model for instructors; and expanded appendix materials including a glossary, references and further reading.

Simon Bell is a forester and landscape architect. He is Chair Professor and Head of the Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and Associate Director of the OPENspace Research Centre at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He was president of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools from 2012 to 2018.