Surrounded by Books in an open terrain

A stack of ten or so decorate my table. This is 'follow your nose' research where i puddle about the backwaters of "Google Scholar" looking for books vaguely related to my topic that are... interesting. God, I do love the first few months of a PhD, where there is ample time to drift in a field of literature and really think about what interests me now. Here are some of the titles on my desk:

 

• Large Parks
• Recovering Landscape
• The Landscape Urbanism reader
• Framing places
• Non-Places
• City of Quartz
• Global Metropolitan

 

It feels to me that I am becoming less and less interested in architecture, and more concerned with the quality of landscape. That is to say, I am reconsidering what it is that the discipline of landscape might include; built fabric, infrastructure, gardens, parks, roads and wilderness are all part of the terrain of this expanding discipline. For me its not possible to consider one without the other as they are all part of an ecology that designers must be concerned with. The intereconnectedness of all these constructions spaces and places, while not the topic of my thesis, will hopefully be a part of the latent understanding of the terrain.