The Architecture of Trees Contributor(s): Leonardi, Cesare (Author) , Stagi, Franca (Author)

"Any landscape architect worth their soil should pick up The Architecture of Trees, an all-encompassing atlas of all things tree-related."--The Architect's Newspaper

Biographical Note:
In 1963, as an undergraduate at Florence University of the Arts, Cesare Leonardi (1935-) opened a design practice with Franca Stagi (1937-2008), a postgraduate at Milan Polytechnic. Together they designed the celebrated Nastro, Eco, and Dondolo chairs before turning to urban and landscape design, renovation, and redevelopment in Modena and its surroundings.

Review Quotes:
"Chiming with this burgeoning consciousness is the reissue of Italian architect Cesare Leonardi's beautiful cult book The Architecture of Trees. Leonardi emerged from the 1960s architectural avant-garde in Italy; in the 1970s he turned his attention to landscape and, ultimately, trees. Together with Franca Stagi, he produced the book with the most astonishing pen-and-ink illustrations of trees, conceiving of them almost as architecture -- picturing them in elevation like building facades. It became a bible for landscape architects and designers and its reissue indicates a shift in attitude, seeing trees as something than merely ornament."
- Financial Times

"The Italian designers Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi spent their spare time obsessively sketching trees in all seasons for editions of The Architecture of Trees. The book is newly available in English, and expanded into a sumptuous format weighing six and a half pounds. It combines quill-pen outlines of leafed and leafless specimens - as varied within strict parameters as Bernd and Hilla Becher's factory photos - with bare-boned but poetic texts. Captions and a glossary shed light on how to identify epicarps (fruit skins) and flabellate (fan-shaped) foliage. An essay by Ms. Stagi meditates on how "nature experiments in infinite ways" within the confines of trees that "grab on to the planet" and thrive only where it suits them."
- The New York Times

"This giant and beautifully-produced book illustrating the structure of 212 tree species will appeal to fanciers of detailed, representational drawing as well as to horticulturalists and landscape designers, for whom it was written. The drawings celebrate the beauty and abundance of natural forms."
- Artblog

"In an age of digitized everything I was awed by the soft texture of Leonardi's ink drawings....A tree's architecture, its silhouette, tells us what it is, what we can expect from it, and how we can manipulate its shape to serve a purpose: for fruit, for summer shade, for winter silhouettes that stop us midstep, as a hiding place from grown-ups. Now that I have this book, I need a new living room table worthy of the book's contents."
- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The Architecture of Trees is both a reference guide and a work of art."
- Artists Magazine

"The text would be a valuable resource for any landscape architect, as would the plates showing the foliage color of dozens of species of trees, and the computer-generated diagrams of how their shadows fall at different times of year. But the heart of the book is the pen-and-ink drawings of trees found in Europe, each with and without its foliage and each shown in the same 1:100 scale. Their somewhat forbidding beauty is relieved in the back of the book, where lovely detail sketches of cones, berries and leaves punctuate technical descriptions of each tree."
- The Wall Street Journal