Large Parks presents essays on an increasingly hard to define landscape type, the urban park, viewed through the lens of size. Such study cuts across conventional binary categories of classification -historic or contemporary, built or unbuilt, competition-sponsored or commissioned- and enables review of landscapes not usually considered collectively. Large Parks includes essays by leading academics and practitioners, along with original graphic work and photographs. This material foregrounds a set of preoccupations in landscape discourse that relate in complex ways, such as ecology, public space, process, place, site, and the city. From a discussion of historic parks to intriguing new projects such as the Orange County Great Park in California, designed by a team led by Ken Smith, to Lifescape, Field Operations’s emerging proposal for Fresh Kills Landfill, Large Parks highlights the complexities that go into designing these massive and culturally significant works.

Large Parks editors Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves, contributors James Corner and Linda Pollak, and landscape architect Ken Smith will present their ongoing work through the lens of how largeness promotes a certain design approach.

Julia Czerniak is editor of Downsview Park Toronto (2001), which addresses contemporary design approaches to public parks and the relationship between landscape and cities. She is a registered landscape architect and founder and principal of Clear, a transdisciplinary design collaborative between architects and others that aspires to both strengthen its disciplinary identity and expand its range of operations. She is an associate professor at Syracuse University, where she teaches architecture studios as well as seminars on landscape theory and criticism.

George Hargreaves is the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1996 to 2003. He founded Hargreaves Associates in 1982 and continues as design director. The firm’s work has been published nationally and internationally and has won numerous design awards.

James Corner is a registered landscape architect and urban designer, and founder and director of Field Operations. His design work has been recognized with numerous awards and is complemented by a body of writing on landscape architectural design and urbanism. He is author, with Alex MacLean, of Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (1996) and editor of Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape (1999), which focuses on the revitalization of landscape architecture as a creative cultural practice. He is chair and professor of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Linda Pollak is coauthor with Anita Berrizbeitia, of Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (1999) and a principal in the New York firm Marpillero Pollak Architects. Pollak has received grants from the NEA, the Graham Foundation, and the Milton Fund of Harvard University for her research on the relationships between architecture, landscape, and the city, which has appeared in numerous journals.

Ken Smith is the founder and principal of Ken Smith Landscape Architect. His firm has won many awards, is widely published, and was recently awarded the commission for the master design of the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. He is a visiting lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.