︎
Second Nature
2025 — Spring

Calendar
Syllabus
Investigations
Speculations
Texts
  ︎ Readers
  ︎ Other
Park Archives
Inspiration
Tutorials
Mark

Reading Packets

Geography of Capital

  • Burnham, Daniel; Bennett, Edward,  Plan of Chicago, Commercial Club, Chicago, 1909.
  • Cronon, William, Mapping Capital, Nature’s Metropolis, New York, Norton 1991, pp. 263-269.
  • Moody, Walter, Chicago Plan Commission, Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago, 1915.
  • Pattison, James, ‘The Chicago Plan’ to make Chicago Beautiful, Fine Arts Journal, Vol 29, Chicago, 1913.
  • United States Congress of the Confederation, Land Ordinance of 1785.
    Whiting, Sarah, Superblockism: Chicago’s Elastic Grid, Shaping the City, Routledge, NY, 2013, pp-70-86
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Parks and City Planning, 1870.

Constructing the World


Ontological Practices

  • Brown Bill, Thing Theory, Things (A Critical Theory Book), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, pp. 1-22.
  • Morton, Timothy, ‘We have never been displaced,” originally published in Olafur Eliasson, Reality Machines, Stockholm, 2015, p. 113-115.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park, 1881.

  • Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs People and Significant Otherness (excerpts), Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago.
  • Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (excerpt), published in Whitechapel Documents, Participation, 160-171.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Classic Park Plan, 1868.

Spatial Practices

  • deBord, Guy, Theory of the Derive, UbuWeb Papers, pp.1-6
  • DeCerteau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Walking in the City and Spatial Stories, University of California Press, Berkeley,  1984, pp. 91-110, 115-130.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, The Concept of the Park Way, 1868.

Historical Space

  • Aurelli, Pier Vittorio, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Instuaration Urbis, pp.85-139.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Parks in Europe and America, 1875.

Mental Ecologies

  • Guattari, Felix, The Three Ecologies, The Athalone Press, London, 2000, pp.27-69.
  • Gross, Elizabeth, Bodies-Cities, Sexuality and Space, Princeton Papers on Architecture, pp. 241-252.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, The Psychological Effect of Scenery, 1868.

Notions of Nature

  • Agamben, Giorgo, Umwelt and The Tick, The Open, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004, pp. 39-48.
  • Descola, Phlilipe, Beyond Nature and Culture, Preface, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013, pp. xv-xx.
  • Descola, Phlilipe, Conclusion, The Ecology of Others, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2013, pp. 81-88.
  • Wallace Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West, ed. Page Stegner (New York, 1998), 112.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Pictorial Essay of Central Park, 1871.

Organization Space

  • Easterling, Keller, Introduction, Extrastatecraft, Verso, London, 2014.
  • Corner, James, Landscape Urbanism, The Landscape Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, NY, pp.290-297.
  • Pope, Albert, Urban Implosion, Ladders, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1996, pp. 54-97.
  • Waldheim, Charles, Landscape Urbanism Reader, Landscape as Urbanism, pp. 35-51
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Landscape Themes for a Park in Chicago, 1871.

Political Space

  • Foucault, Of Other Spaces, trans. French Journal of Architecture, March 1967.
  • Brooks, Gwendolyn, “Two Dedications,” Blacks, Third World Press, 1994, pp. 442-443.
  • Agamben, Georgo, What is an Apparatus?, Stanford University Press, Standford, 2009, pp. 1-24.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law, Policing of Urban Parks, 1873.
2025 Spring — Second Nature