Peter Gisolfi is an architect, landscape architect, and teacher whose built work reconciles the influences of context and program. His concern for the relationship of architecture to its setting translates into graceful connections between buildings and landscapes. His analytical approach to design was inspired by studies in music theory and composition as an undergraduate at Yale, and his graduate training in architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Finding the Place of Architecture in the Landscape is organized by settings, based on the types of places or landscapes encountered.
- Townscape is the landscape of cities, towns, and villages.
- Campus addresses the interdependence between buildings and open space that creates a composite designed place, a designed landscape.
- Landscapes and Buildings addresses exurban settings, open green landscapes – designed, vernacular, or natural.
- Gardens and Houses embraces the Italian villa idea and the Romantic landscape tradition.
- Transformation is the adventure of changing a building or landscape that already exists.
Mr. Gisolfi asserts that the most successful architecture relates clearly and unabashedly to setting – to landscape. This is a different approach to architecture and landscape architecture in its focus on spatial types instead of building types. This book examines 40 of his firm’s projects, large and small, with site plans, building plans, renderings, and photographs.
“His buildings adjust their style to the place, always unemphatically enhancing the landscape and disciplined by it. This book is filled with examples of the shaping of places, the physical development of architecture’s holistic realm.”
- Vincent J. Scully, Jr.
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