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9781409429357

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Reviews

'For Anna Ryan, the shore is above all a scene of encounter, not only between land and sea but also between different modes of knowledge. In her mapping of physical and cultural coastlines, she incorporates the insights of walking and surfing, photography and drawing, academic philosophy and everyday experience. This is a venturesome and satisfying contribution to our current conversation about situated ways of knowing.' John Elder, Middlebury College, USA 'Not since Joseph Conrad's Mirror of the Sea has the drama of land meeting sea been narrated with such insight and sensitivity. The encounter is certainly physical, but not only that, for an intertwining of self and environment also occurs there, with social and psychological consequences. Ryan rescues primary architectural themes from the darkness of common usage: the concept of boundary is illuminated, but also ideas of duration, measure, and materiality. As in Conrad, this text returns repeatedly to the cycle of departure and landfall, but here we are also taken farther afield. Alternately philosophical, historical, and personal, this book brings an entire world before us, at once situated, communicative, and engaging. It is a marvelous book that will help architects understand their task more deeply and general readers recall their experiences more fully.' David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA 'Beachcombing in the tidal zone where geography meets philosophy, Anna Ryan considers a variety of writings on the phenomenology of open spaces as experienced by the mobile, memorious, emotional, spatial creatures that we are. Then she brings these theoretical insights to bear on oral accounts she has gathered from people walking two very different coastlines, the sandy peninsula of the Maharees in Kerry and the monumental stonework of the South Wall in Dublin. A lucid account of contemporary thought in the wake of Merleau-Ponty, and of an innovative piece of participatory research.' Tim Robinson,

'For Anna Ryan, the shore is above all a scene of encounter, not only between land and sea but also between different modes of knowledge. In her mapping of physical and cultural coastlines, she incorporates the insights of walking and surfing, photography and drawing, academic philosophy and everyday experience. This is a venturesome and satisfying contribution to our current conversation about situated ways of knowing.' John Elder, Middlebury College, USA 'Not since Joseph Conrad's Mirror of the Sea has the drama of land meeting sea been narrated with such insight and sensitivity. The encounter is certainly physical, but not only that, for an intertwining of self and environment also occurs there, with social and psychological consequences. Ryan rescues primary architectural themes from the darkness of common usage: the concept of boundary is illuminated, but also ideas of duration, measure, and materiality. As in Conrad, this text returns repeatedly to the cycle of departure and landfall, but here we are also taken farther afield. Alternately philosophical, historical, and personal, this book brings an entire world before us, at once situated, communicative, and engaging. It is a marvelous book that will help architects understand their task more deeply and general readers recall their experiences more fully.' David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA 'Beachcombing in the tidal zone where geography meets philosophy, Anna Ryan considers a variety of writings on the phenomenology of open spaces as experienced by the mobile, memorious, emotional, spatial creatures that we are. Then she brings these theoretical insights to bear on oral accounts she has gathered from people walking two very different coastlines, the sandy peninsula of the Maharees in Kerry and the monumental stonework of the South Wall in Dublin. A lucid account of contemporary thought in the wake of Merleau-Ponty, and of an innovative piece of participatory research.' Tim Robinson, Folding Landscapes, Ireland '... every such section is slotted into the overarching methodology with an impressive clarity of purpose. That focus is matched by the lucidity of Ryan's prose, and collectively, these qualities ensure that Where LandMeets Sea is a remarkably assured and original contribution to cultural geography.' The Kelvingrove Review 'Anna Ryan's thoughtful coastal explorations read like a quest, or design, for a more cosmopolitan coast, melding ancient and modern.' Landscapes 'Ryan's breadth of reference and discursive unearthing od geographic and anthropological practice is illuminating to an architect reader, tracing the development of non-representational and geography as a means by which we might fuse or reconcile academic/philosophical and lived intuitive understandings of dwelling. The book is thus an 'articulation' of research and research methods which seek to span or leap this arc between theory and practice, philosophies of spatial understanding and lived relationships to place.' Architecture Ireland '... this impressive book [...] will be of interest to those interested in geographies of the coast, landscape more generally, cultural geography, and non-representational theory and the important question of how to operationalise it methodologically.' Emotion, Space and Society 'This glossy, beautifully illustrated and exemplified book draws on research with communities and visitors to two areas in Ireland the South Wall in Dublin Bay and the Maharee Pennisula on the south-westerly coast of Ireland ... this is a wide-ranging, readable, and thoughtfully presented book'. Journal of Historical Geography

Author Information

Anna Ryan is a Lecturer in Architecture, at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick, Ireland

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