San Francisco-based landscape architect Andrea Cochran, FASLA, has built a reputation for composing poetic and sometimes whimsical landscapes and gardens.
Mary Myers, Ph.D., RLA, ASLA, chair of Temple University’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture, explores the contrasts, intersections, rhythms, and harmonies between materials, plants, and space that define Cochran’s 25-year career in the recently released, lusciously photographed Andrea Cochran: Landscapes (Princeton Architectural Press, $50). Eleven case studies of Cochran’s residential, commercial, and institutional landscape projects are supplemented by an admiring foreword from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Henry Urbach, who says Cochran’s work is infused with “the knowledge that landscape … is artifice, the practice of illusion.” Delving into Cochran’s invariably serene creations, Myers uncovers an ordered, yet imaginative mind and a deliberate, intuitive process. A visual stroll through delightful vistas.