As we publish Marc Treib’s selection of books, artworks, and films, he is travelling to Japan, one of his enduring sources of inspiration and study subjects. Treib moves fluently between Western modernist architecture, traditional Japanese gardens, and across confluences of landscape architecture, art, and theory—signalling that none of these fields stand or operate in isolation.

His latest two books, Noguchi’s Gardens: Landscape as Sculpture (2024) and Poodling (2023), were published by ORO Editions. Next spring, a study of the landscapes and urbanism of Alexandre Chemetoff will come out. We can hardly circumscribe his oeuvre of more than fifty titles, but Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review remains among the most influential for the landscape architecture readership.

Given such a prolific and formative body of work, the question we posed was simple: what does Treib read when he isn’t writing? What inspires him, and what would he suggest to landscape architects?

Marc Treib: For many years my reading has been divided between “instrumental” and “non-instrumental” publications. Instrumental refers to those I need for some writing or other project then underway; non-instrumental refers to articles or books read for pleasure or general education. Of course, one never remembers everything one has read—especially when one is asked to select their favorites on the spot—and if I made these selections tomorrow the nominations would probably be different. But here they are.

Of the instrumental books: As background material for a book about light in the works of two architects (Alvar Aalto and Tadao Ando) and two artists (Dan Flavin and James Turrell), rereading Lawrence Wechsler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of What One Sees (expanded edition, 2009) has been valuable. The book stems from a series of interviews with the Southern California artist Robert Irwin, who approached each site and a commission with no specific material or form in mind, often—if not always—effecting changes in the perception of the space using only minimal interventions. (His garden at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was an unfortunate departure from his normal practice).

In response to spending increasingly more time in Vancouver, British Columbia, I have been reading about Canadian history as well as the country’s literature. Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse is not only a beautifully written, engaging, and moving novel, but a deep psychological study of the effects of the Residential School system that so negatively affected the people of the country’s First Nations.

John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (2005), is a work spanning history, ecology, and indigenous belief, written in a style that enfolds the present and the past, and chronicle with legend. Vaillant’s writing style recalls that of John McPhee, whose The Control of Nature (1989) was an eye-opener, telling of the extensive human efforts made to counter the course of “nature”. Both this book and Vaillant’s had origins as articles in The New Yorker, which is why reading them was pleasurable, informative, and persuasive in contrast to so much of the convoluted academic writing with which we must deal.

Of the cinema, one film always remains high in my ranking: Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (Jalsaghar) (1958, in Bengali). This is a poetic and visually stunning work about an aristocrat in decline, a rising merchant class, and pride, all set against the beauty of the land, the architecture, and, of course, music and its performance. Shot in black and white, the cinematography and use of the view and contrasting values are stunning.