$45.00 U.S. (short discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Softcover with gatefold flaps
308 pages with 149 color photographs, 2 black-and-white photographs, 5 color plans and drawings, one color graph, and one color print = 158 illustrations
8.0″ x 10.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978–1–938086-54-0
Published September 2025
Distributed by University of Virginia Press
www.upress.virginia.edu
Published in association with the
Center for the Study of Place.
by David DuMez Hopman
Foreword by Frederick R. Steiner
An innovative new look at regional design and planning that merges history, theory, and practice.
“Critical regionalism” is a place-based approach to landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and development that emphasizes and embraces combining local and regional influences—natural and cultural—into the design and planning process. This worldview emphasizes designs that respond to the vernacular and ecological characteristics of a region while also respecting other historic and contemporary influences. In Creative Regionalism: Renewing the Aesthetic Experience of Landscape in Environmental Design and Planning, David Hopman explores how and why this regionalist approach is invaluable to creating viable and sustainable landscapes, buildings, and communities.
Hopman highlights the best regionalist thinking by landscape architects, architects, planners, and educators during the last century and a half. In addition, Hopman’s historical and theoretical expositions are grounded with real examples drawn from scores of 20th- and 21-century designs from around the world. Hopman also explores the regionalist ideas of well-known living designers with interviews, reviews of the literature, philosophical inquiry, and reflection that draws on his three decades as a practicing landscape architect and professor who has studied, tested, and applied the concepts of critical regionalism into innovative landscape designs.
In Creative Regionalism, architects, landscape architects, planners, and developers alike will be shown the effectiveness of a resilient and continuously adaptive design method—a method that acknowledges both regional and global traditions and celebrates the creativity of individual designs that anchor the past with the present. Hopman pays special attention to the importance of creating aesthetic experiences when designing a new landscape or built environment and how experiential aesthetics can guide and inform designers and planners in implementing regionalist ideas. By showing how the experience of a place is reflected in cultural values, personal creativity, ecological tributes, and the poetics of the natural environment where we live, work, and play, Creative Regionalism demonstrates the value of this innovative approach to designing and planning in the modern age.
About
About the Author
David DuMez Hopman is a licensed professional landscape architect and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where his teaching reflects his research interests in landscape aesthetics, critical regionalism, native plants, regional ecology and ecologically performative landscape designs . Creative regionalism and landscape aesthetics have incited and guided his professional activities as a practitioner of landscape architecture and educator for more than 30 years. Hopman’s projects include design and implementation of the first extensive green roof in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of North Texas above the Life Sciences Building at UT-Arlington and the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) certification for The Green at College Park on the UT-Arlington campus, one of the first three projects worldwide to receive such certification. Since 2014, he has undertaken extensive research and installations of aesthetically qualified native plant polycultures as the next step forward in sustainable urban planting design. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Columns magazine, The Field, Journal of Children and Poverty, and Landscape Research Record.
About the Contributor
Frederick R. Steiner has been the Paley Professor and Dean of the Ian L. McHarg School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania since 2016. From 2001 to 2016 he served as Dean of the School of Architecture and held the Harry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin. He also taught at Washington State University and Arizona State University, where he served as Director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy in Rome and the American Society of Landscape Architects, a past President of the Hill Country Conservancy, and a past Chair of Envision Central Texas. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of 22 books, including Design with Nature Now (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2019), which was named a Best Book of 2019 by the American Society of Landscape Architects, Design for a Vulnerable Planet (University of Texas Press, 2011), The Living Landscape (Island Press, 2008), and Human Ecology: How Nature and Culture Shape Our World (Island Press, 2002; paperback edition, 2016).
Slide Show
My photography presented here shows a wide variety of regional expressions. Each image is a trigger for me that evokes the wonderful experience of being in each of these places. It is my hope that my book, Creative Regionalism, will aid seasoned practitioners, design students, and thoughtful travelers everywhere in the understanding and appreciation of a similarly broad range of regional expressions, an appreciation that will facilitate a celebration of the cultural and natural influences of regionalism in the creation of place.
Praise
“In Creative Regionalism, David Hopman provides the most insightful treatise on the study and use of landscape theory in print today. I have spent more than four decades attempting to teach landscape architecture students that theory is not the opposite of ‘the practical’ but rather a means of explaining the essential underpinnings of design expression. And I am elated that Hopman clearly demonstrates how a deep grounding in theory can inspire the most creative design and planning solutions.
“In his well-written and beautifully illustrated exploration of ‘critical regionalism,’ Hopman clearly establishes how ‘regionally inspired design’ is intellectually stimulating in a way that focuses on curiosity and leads to discovery and delight. Throughout the book, he casts regional study and inspiration as the meeting ground of ideas from artists such as Dale Chihuly, philosophers, especially John Dewey, planners such as Patrick Geddes, and designers like Bill Wenk, Faye Jones, and Kongjian Yu. Hopman’s explorations also move well beyond stylistic design, as he takes the reader on a ‘defamiliarization’ journey through vernacular places, bioregional environments, and aesthetic inspiration often grounded in the visual but also readily found in ‘multi-sensory’ perceptions of regional places.
“Creative Regionalism is essential reading not only for landscape designers, planners, and architects, but also for policy makers and professionals engaged in the design, planning, and management of urban landscapes and communities.”
—Daniel Nadenicek, Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design
“In his enterprising and spirited book, David Hopman seeks to renew the aesthetics of landscape design through critical regionalism, an approach that embraces the essential natural and cultural elements that help define a region. He understands that landscapes are cultural and natural artifacts of an ecosystem’s dynamics and that ecosystems are characterized by flux and change. The promise of critical regionalism requires designers ‘to read the landscape,’ as J. B. Jackson implored more than 70 years ago when he founded Landscape magazine in 1951. To do so, designers must get outside, look around, take in what they sense and see, dig deep into the characteristics of a place, read and talk to others, and act accordingly so that, as Hopman proclaims, regionally based designs can ‘improve people’s lives.’ In Critical Regionalism, with its marvelous blend of history, theory, and practice and its compelling integration of text and illustrations, Hopman shows us the way.”
—Frederick R. Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor in the Ian L. McHarg School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, from his foreword