Mira Engler PhD

Professor Emeritus, Landscape Architecture
Professor Emeritus, Urban Design

Education

EDUCATION
1977-1982                  
Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, with honors
1987-1989                  
Master of Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley
2006-2013                  
PhD Architecture, University of California, Los Angeles, Dissertation: “Gordon Cullen and the ‘Cut-and-paste’ Urban landscape,” Major Professor: Sylvia Lavin

On the Web

https://miraengl.wordpress.com/contact-information
https://https://www.linkedin.com/pub/mira-engler/47/8b7/642

Supporting Files

• Short CV
• CV-Short Format (04/26/22)

Research Interests

Landscape theory; the relationship between systems of landscape representation, mass media, and consumer culture; the history of ideas and debates about color in landscape architecture; the socio-political-ecological system of urban public space and infrastructure; and contemporary landscape design in the age of virtual media and culture

Current Projects

Book:

Landscape Design in Color: History, Theory, and Practice 1750-Today. Under contract. London: Routledge, 2023.

Book:

Immersive Landscapes and Virtual Media and Culture

Group Exhibition:

"Activist Art in Iowa" group Exhibition, Anderson Gallery, Des Moines, IA, November 7, 2019 through February 14, 2020.

Current Scholarship

• Landscape Design in Color: Theory, History, and Practice 1750-Today, 04/26/2022

  Color concepts and strategies are critical to landscape design, yet most people in the profession do not use a coherent color strategy in their work.

  Landscape Design in Color, isa survey of landscape design from 1750 to the present, highlighting the color approaches of 12 major contributors to the field from Europe to North and Latin America. The earliest of these designers worked with plants, both native and later imported. The next group incorporated nonvegetal landscape elements such as concrete, glass, and aluminum that defined the modern age, followed by synthetic plastics and paint. The final group expanded their colored material to take advantage of electronics technology, engaging with luminous, radiant, and translucent light color.

  The book reveals the ideas behind the color choices of these landscape designers and how the use of color has changed over the past two centuries: from being an instrument of disguise to an instrument of display, from an indicator of taste and status to a critique of deep-seated stereotypes (the idea that pink is girly, for instance). Color evolved from being primarily structural (in the service of composition) to decorative, to impressionist (an instrument to produce mood), to transgressive (an instrument of critique), to affective (in the service of immersive sensation), to consumable (market-based and attention grabbing) … and, finally, Instagrammable. The book details how throughout all these periods, designers had to contend with cultural battles—with the public and with the landscape profession—over what colors were deemed natural (from nature) versus artificial (art).

  This book will help professionals understand the roles color has played throughout history and guide them to a more creative engagement with the capacity of color to strengthen design ideas, produce special effects, and envision landscape and culture anew.

• , 09/27/2019

  publications:

  "Landscape Design and Consumer Culture in the Work of Humphry Repton and Gordon Cullen,” Amps, Architecture, Media, Politics, Society 13, no.2. 2018

   

  “Color(ful) Predicaments in Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Research Record, 6 (December): 102-117. 20

   

  Conference presentations:

  “Color(ful) predicaments in Landscape Architecture,” FATE, Kansas City, MI, April 2017.

   

• “Intersections of Landscape Design Studies and Consumerist Arts” in Reframing Landscape History, Society of Architectural Historians, 09/06/2016

  “Intersections of Landscape Design Studies and Consumerist Arts” in Reframing Landscape History, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Pasadena, CA 2016

   

  This paper locates landscape studies in the context of visual consumer culture, focusing on the production modes and marketing strategies of three media-savvy trendsetters in landscape and garden design: the eighteenth-century landscape gardener Humphry Repton, postwar townscape designer Gordon Cullen, and contemporary garden designer and host of HGTV garden shows Jamie Durie.

  Since the 1700s gardens and landscapes have performed as idealized lifestyle commodities via attractive images in mass media as landscape design and consumer markets became increasingly entangled. I examine the work and impacts of these three influential figures and trace the broad diffusion of their work through a representative sample of their “followers.”

  To promote their products and address the professional market, clients, and mainstream audience, they assumed the roles of tastemaker authority, image maker and educator, and informer and entertainer, respectively. Each laid the foundation for subsequent designers who drew on mixed media to promote not only their work but also the public experience of landscape. Though different in their message and significance, these designers successfully appealed to a growing consumer market within the context of the economy and media technology of their time.

  Drawing on primary and secondary sources, I show that they persuasively packaged and “sold” their “merchandise” and produced a new sensory-laden and immersive understanding of landscape. Their drive for professional and public appeal led them to bridge theory and practice, use the “art of compromise,” borrow and mix pictorial devices from high- and low-brow art genres, and privilege the perspective technique over others—elements that became identifiable trends in landscape design practice.

  By using media and consumerist arts perspectives in garden and landscape studies I offer a new interpretive path toward a historical knowledge that incorporates the landscape designer’s modus operandi and explains the broadening appeal and public experience of landscape design.

• The Image International Conference, Berkeley, CA, 10/24/2015

  "Detachable Images and the Making of the Postmodern City: The Work of Gordon Cullen,"  Intl' Conference on The Image, Berkeley, CA, October 2015

  By:

  Dr. Mira Engler

   

  During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media to mass audiences, via images that performed as advertising; a time in which Gordon Cullen (1904-1994) came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen. Cullen rose to the status of the official spokesman of The Architectural Review’s Townscape editorial policy and had a remarkable influence on both professional and lay audiences, and ultimately on the postmodern city. The paper traces Cullen’s influence through the diffusion and reception of his drawings. Using samples of published references and commentaries, it identifies the agents and apparatuses of this diffusion, and the nature and extent of his impact. It shows that Cullen’s sway derived primarily from the escalating tendency of images (or spectacles, in Guy Debord’s terms) to circulate in the mass print media stream, detached from their initial context and ideology. His images were subject to countless supple adaptations that imported both their stylistic traits and embedded modus operandi—the production of postmodern cities primarily through bricolage and montage, or “cut-and-paste” images—post-war consumerist design strategies that are still commonly used.

• CELA 2015 paper: Primetime Landscapes = Image Making + Mass Media + Visual Marketing , 03/27/2015

  "Primetime Landscapes = Image Making + Visual Marketing + Mass Media," CELA, manhattan Kansas, March 2015

  This paper explores the agency of image making and mass media in promoting and popularizing landscape design to both professional and lay audiences.

   

  Over the past three centuries, landscapes have performed as idealized commodities through mass media, for mass audiences, via attractive images. This paper explores the agency of image making and visual marketing in promoting and popularizing landscape design to both professional and lay audiences. Media-savvy figures, not necessarily trained as landscape architects, have had immense influence on the design of landscapes and have garnered massive popularity, not to mention a nice paycheck. These figures include the eighteenth-century landscape gardener Humphry Repton; the nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted; the postwar architectural draftsman Gordon Cullen; the landscape planner Ian McHarg; and the contemporary horticulturalist and landscape designer Jamie Durie, to name a few.

  I study the production modes, representational systems, and marketing strategies of three figures—Repton and his handcrafted and printed Red Books, Cullen and his Townscape publications, and Durie and his HGTV outdoor room series. The paper considers the degrees of similarity and difference in the work of each figure within the individual’s career and time period and collectively over the long haul. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, I show that each packaged and “sold” their landscape “merchandise” in the most persuasive way and produced a new understanding of landscape, one that is located decidedly within human experience and that is sensory-laden and immersive. The drive for broad public appeal led all three to borrow and mix pictorial devises from a number of high- and low-brow art genres—painting, theater, magic, and/or film—and to privilege the perspective technique over others. They also used everyday visual precedents, colloquial verbal prescriptions, and a step-by-step “how-to” approach to reach an increasingly diverse audience. To market their products they borrowed advertising strategies and invented interactive reader/viewer practices. These designers, though different in their messages and significance appealed to a growing consumer market that fit in the particular logic of the economy and media technology of their time. By looking at these figures the paper helps shed light on how landscape architects can better use current digital media and marketing strategies in pursuits of broader and more diverse audience and thus greater influence.

• upcoming book, Cut and Paste Urban Landscape: The Work of Gordon Cullen (Routledge, 2015), 03/07/2015

  Cut and Pase Urban Landscape: The Work of Gordon Cullen (London: Routledge, 2015)

  During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen.

  Despite Cullen’s wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen’s drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today’s design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still commonly used.