Following the end of World War II, the primary tasks for many countries were land clearance, reformation and reconstruction. These social and environmental concerns fostered many of the century’s most important developments in landscape design and architecture and set the course that we still follow today.

“The Architecture of Landscape, 1940-1960” provides a groundbreaking collection of worldwide perspectives on this vital and underappreciated era of landscape architecture, with more than 200 illustrations and 10 essays by noted historians and theorists from around the world.

The book is also the first critical assessment of this period, with information and insight previously unavailable to English-language readers.

The essay topics range from the removal and reuse of rubble in war-torn Germany to an assessment of House Beautiful magazine’s vision of the home of the future, including one design made entirely of steel, with a grill built into the living room.

A landmark work, “The Architecture of Landscape, 1940-1960” offers a comprehensive look at landscape architecture during an epoch when geographic limits became less important than a sense of world development and an international community of values and design ideas.

Marc Treib is professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of “Space Calculated in Seconds” and the editor of numerous volumes, including “Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review” and “An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster.”

— University of Pennsylvania Press