Gareth Doherty

The most obvious paradox about "green landscapes" and Bahrain would be that most of the country is tan, the color of sand. But for Gareth Doherty, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, the paradox is about the resources required to create green spaces in arid environments. Paradoxes of Green's focus on Bahrain, the greenest of the Arab gulf states, taught Doherty a great deal about landscape – not the other way around. The tiny country with a mix of constructed green and indigenously arid environments is portrayed in eight chapters ("vignettes") that explore the relationship between the color green and the infrastructure needed (half of the city's water usage!) to sustain it.… (mer)

The theme for the fourth issue of Harvard GSD's New Geographies (there was a Zero issue) is a simple one—color in cities. Yet the many responses indicate it is a complex issue that hasn't really been addressed that much. As editor Gareth Doherty mentions in his introductory essay, the theme is not about race, color perception, optics, or other areas of color, but "the interrelationships, spatiality, and geographies of color in the built environment"—the physical nature of color. Often I describe how collections in journals and books benefit from varied responses to a theme (a description that might be trite enough to retire), but I think in the case of New Geographies 3 that variety is at the extreme end of the scale—in terms of geography, subject matter and form the diversity is stunning. What is praiseworthy is how the diversity of the contributions becomes the key to issue's success. Each essay (be it an interview with Petra Blaisse or Alan Hess's analysis of color in 1950s suburbia, to choose two examples) is a self-contained response to color in the city, creating a gradient across the issue, a gradient that is reinforced by the two-way, honeysuckle-to-turquoise color shift on the page edges (coincidentally, I think, is the location of Doherty's photo spread of Irish houses in the middle of the book, where the gray page edges let the red and green facades stand out even more). This gradient is echoed on the book's cover, where the table of contents resides, sans page numbers; pagination happens inside, but it's basically unnecessary, as this is a book to be browsed and savored, just like the presence of color in the city it wakes us up to.… (mer)