Book Signing with Roger Courtenay In partnership with Spelled ink Bookstore
Meet Roger Courtenay, the author of Coming in to View. This book signing is free to attend and open to the public.
Coming in to View: Explorations of Radical Shifts in Beauty Outdoors
Nature, and the world around us, is changing, evolving, rapidly, fluidly. Metamorphosing in front of our eyes with climate, political, social, economic and environmental upheaval. Our personal appreciation of landscapes encompasses all those places we may have touched, visited, or seen. Inevitably, a radical shift in our notions of beauty in the outdoors is underway across all types, from inner city to wilderness. Landscapes confront and influence our physiological, psychological, and aesthetic relationship with the natural world. We question what we see. How does the ambiguity of the present and future view relate to past appreciation? What does the future hold for our love of the outdoors? Environmental, artistic, design and planning realities are already conditioning responses across the planet’s amazing landscapes. This book’s narrative arc of 17 separate essays travels through landscapes from the National Mall in Washington DC to the remote highlands of Mongolia. Uncovering the strains and indications of change in what we now experience outdoors, anywhere, everywhere, whether familiar or unfamiliar, these essays seek to open our eyes to new prospects of landscape appreciation.
Author Bio
Roger Courtenay is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Sojourns in Quebec City, then Edmonton, Alberta, started his professional career, which led to practice in San Francisco and then Washington DC as a principal and vice president at EDAW and AECOM. His practice has focused on public works in the urban design, cultural, social, health and academic campus, and historic preservation spheres, across the USA and Canada, and on numerous USA embassies and consulates overseas. A life of international travel for business and pleasure, and long ‘addictions’ to backpacking, hiking, whitewater canoeing, riding and skiing have afforded access to a range of remote-to-urban landscapes in countries around the world - 35 at last count - and underwritten a wide appreciation and investigation of landscapes vernacular and designed. Roger’s education includes a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Arts (Sociology) from the University of Guelph, and a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,. Alongside practice, travel and writing, for the last eighteen years he has been busy at the working face of rewilding the small family farm in the rural Piedmont of Virginia.