There are, however, some photographs that were taken of the built work several years after the drawings were made. They are small, often black and white and set off to the side. They are presented in a way that suggests they are inconsequential, certainly in contrast to the full-page drawings. One reason for this discrepancy between the proposed and the built is because Brunier did not experience many of the places he had imagined. Yves Brunier, 1962-1991, died after only five years of professional practice at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and with Isabelle Auricoste.

Because it highlights drawings rather than photographs of built work, Brunier's monograph is uniquely instructive. This is because it reminds us that, even though they are quite unlike built works of landscape architecture, drawings, rather than what is represented by them, are what landscape architects primarily make.

Brunier's "drawings" are vigorously present: "Infuriatingly bad colour schemes; brutal forms covered with tin foil; bright paint: technical props and crude materials like foam rubber, plastic, Q-tips, wire textiles, screws etcetera symbolizing building and landscape: all thrown together in what seemed great anguish and haste!" writes Petra Blaisse, who worked with Brunier at the OMA. What can explain Brunier's "drawings"? Only the drawings themselves and the recollections of six of his associates cited in the book. "Yves Brunier did not theorize. He wrote little. . . ." Marc Claramunt tells readers. Clearly his energy was transformed into drawings. But they don't look like the typical drawings by landscape architects. What, then, explains their attraction, even their beauty? Is it that they are messy? Is it because the materials are unconventional?

Are we here being deluded by Brunier's shock effects? Do we need a touch of horror to notice beauty, or rudeness to appreciate refinement? The unlikely collage materials in clumsily cut-out compositions demand visual alertness at the same time as, and maybe even because, they challenge familiar drawing conventions. It is not unlike walking through the woods and hearing an unexpected sound. The senses become alert. Attention is focused. In this case it is the unexpected composition that alerts our senses. It is, to risk an oxymoron, nature handmade and fresh to our eyes. An important key to understanding Brunier's compositions is that they portray the world in an "unphotographic" manner: paper cut-out hedges are overlaid with patches of paving and set against finger-painted skies, all of various perspectives that intersect one another. Everything is a little off.

But at the same time that Brunier's drawings represent the world spatially askew, there is also in them strong temporal acuity: daily light cycles, seasonal changes, the sense of a past. "His plans described the future, they were predictions. They were not necessarily correct in substance, but in sensation, colour, light, feeling, atmosphere. . . . More than architecture, landscape architecture is a prediction. Whereas architecture describes a stable state, landscape architecture triggers literally endless scenarios of life and earth, rebirth, transformation, mutation. That's why buildings cannot live without it," according to Blaisse. In addition to nature expressed by atmospheric qualities and tense visual juxtaposition, it is surprising how dominant a role conventional nature plays in Brunier's drawings. There are more trees, flowers, vegetables, vines, berries, and Latin botanical names than is often seen in the work of landscape architects, and certainly much more than would be expected from a landscape architect who crams them amongst blue rocks and metal fabric, and paints tree trunks white.

According to Rem Koolhaas, Brunier's "relationship with nature was invariably aggressive". What appears of this relationship in the drawings, however, is the presence of nature in the form of atmosphere, color, movement, and tension. The glints of light one is accustomed to seeing radiating through tree canopies are glittering there in the drawings. "The typical Yves stuff: banal, blunt, boring materials of the constructed objects were filled in with line-play or a confetti of colour. Normal plants seen in any city park were combined with these objects as if they were competing with each other, with the ground covers, in a way that made the tension almost unbearable! Things were forced into each other's company with no aesthetic or natural logic. It looked like banana slices on peanut butter or red jam slushes on a cheese sandwich! Yet it didn't become too complex. Each story was clear; some were even sober. . . ." writes Blaisse. Brunier's drawings will intensify your perception of nature.

Does this book suggest that drawings are of primary significance to landscape architecture? Certainly not. Drawings that are not aimed at built works are something other than landscape architecture. Brunier's work was neither visual theorizing nor intended for exhibition only. It aimed at and originated from the image of a built work. For example, at the Amat Hotel, the architect Jean Nouvel wanted to achieve a rusty feeling and look: "What Yves came up with was the entrance with its red gravel, pumpkins and nasturtiums - in effect a rather sophisticated orange harmony somewhere between the natural and the mineral - and the extremely radical way of planting the vineyard." In another project where a little existing stream had to be drained, it was transformed instead into a "frozen" river of stones with glass balls. To what extent the energy, beauty and rudeness of Brunier's drawings were successfully translated into built form will have to be determined later by those who come to know the actual sites.

In the meantime, perhaps because his life was cut short or perhaps for purely esthetic reasons, this book gives us a rare opportunity: to explore drawings that were headed for built work without having our perceptions prefabricated by the seeming realism of photography and the concrete of built work that follows drawing. This is an occasion to investigate the power drawings have to both obscure and reveal the built work to which they were headed, and I urge readers to take advantage of it.

Gina Crandell is the editor of Land Forum, a collaborating faculty at Iowa State University, and a practicing landscape architect in Boston.