Taking measures

Alan W. Petrucelli

A breathtaking look at the 'works of art' that dot America the beautiful.
—( Cape Cod Times)

Clare Melhuish

This is a wonderful book, containing extraordinary aerial photographs of the American landscape which reveal how it has been shaped by human activity, particularly in the 20th century. . . . The whole is a fascinating study of the way measurement is used to manipulate the land, and the relationship between social life and the land. . . . The book captures the essence of how the landscape--and particularly the mythical American landscape—affects us; an amazing achievement.
—( Building Design)

Corey S. Powell

Every page is a thought-provoking visual delight.
—( Scientific American)

Eileen Battersby

A breathtaking, informative and perceptive combination of literature, geography, science and photography exploring the natural and man-made topography shaping the monumental and varied landscape of the United States. It also endorses aerial photography as an art.
—( The Irish Times)

Library Journal

A loving appreciation of the land, space, and forms that architects, builders, road crews, and farmers have added to the America that can be seen from above. . . . Visually thrilling. . . . Highly recommended.

Peter Hamilton

The fruitful collaboration of a landscape architect and an aerial photographer has produced . . . a wonderful book which goes beyond pattern into meaning.
—( British Journal of Photography)

The New Yorker

A visually stunning book of aerial photographs by MacLean, with accompanying essays and drawings by Corner.

Tim Hilton

A remarkable and beautiful album. Aerial photographs are hardly ever inspiring, but these sing. They illuminate the vastness of a continent and its different cultures. There's a thoughtful, politically important commentary by the landscape architect James Corner.
—( The Independent on Sunday)

World of Interiors

This stunning collection of images doesn't simply rely on its ability to astonish. . . . Here we [also] have an environmental history of the American landscape, mapping the influence of Indian tribes in the Southwest, the French along the Mississippi, the British in the East.

Malcolm Jones

"A delightfully subversive look at America the beautiful." -- Newsweek

Kirkus Reviews

How we represent the land to ourselves affects the ways in which we value and act upon it, according to landscape architect Corner (Univ. of Pennsylvania). His text accompanies the beautifully suggestive aerial photographs of MacLean (whose previous book was Look at the Land), which document the ways in which we impose shape and meaning on our landscape: Irrigated fields contrast sharply with the surrounding desert; old homesteads, now abandoned, anchored people in an undifferentiated and dangerous landscape—their isolation from one another reflecting American individualism; and wheat fields follow the rolling contours of the land. "Revealed is the absurd and magnificent ingenuity of American people," Corner writes, "a people enmeshed with yet remote from their land."