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PA Press author Alan Berger wins a Rome Prize · Apr 30, 11:54 AM

Our congratulations go out to Drosscape author Alan Berger for winning a 2007-2008 Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in the category of landscape architecture. Awardees are provided with a stipend, a study or studio, and room and board in Rome, Italy for a period of 6 months to 2 years.

Alan’s landmark study of waste landscapes Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America has just been released in paperback.

Here’s a sampling of praise for the hardcover edition of Drosscape:

“All-around wicked-smart guy Alan Berger proselytizes the productive integration and reuse of waste landscapes’ in this informative new book. The prose is dense, but important ideas about the redevelopment of toxic waste sites and how they are handled are nevertheless brought into focus. An enlightening smattering of illustrations—from aerial photography to charts to maps—forces readers to understand the frightening impact of unfettered urbanization.”
— Dwell

“Berger’s well-researched current discourse about the inevitability and causal factors of sprawl extends to an analysis of 10 urbanized regions. . .The result is support for a thesis summarized by Lars Lerup in the book’s postscript: ’. . . what [Berger] wishes to recover is not waste by the manna of the horizontal city.”
— Architecture

“Offers seductive views of the phenomenon of sprawl. . . . (Berger) obviously hopes to convey a little of the eerie, alienated beauty of the contemporary urban no-man’s land as well.”
— The Architect’s Newspaper

“If you’ve ever looked out of an airplane window over the American urban landscape below, chances are you’re familiar with the ‘drosscape’, the sprawling wasteland on a city’s periphery that supports the spillage and detritus of industrial life acres of contaminated land, redundant commercial space, and dumping grounds for infrastructure. Is it possible to reclaim this land profitably, sustainably, and holistically? Berger’s ‘Drosscape Manifesto’ suggests that with some creative thinking, it is. And judging from his aerial photos, it’s a task that’s long overdue.”
— Metropolis

“Berger synthesizes information from a diverse array of theoretical and statistical resources to equip the reader with a new set of languages through which to comprehend the working of the contemporary metropolis. . . . Drosscape exhibits the expanded range of capacities that a designer brings to such projects as well as a particular way of seeing the world unique to the landscape architect.”
— Landscape Architecture

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