From the opening quotes to the last photographs in these two books, we are led through two extraordinarily different but complementary stories in understanding the making of a landscape.

Architectural critic David Dillon begins with Roosevelt and connects FDR and the events of his presidency with the process of creating the memorial. With elegant dexterity, the text navigates the mine field of personal agendas, partisan politics, disadvantageous world events, aesthetic arguments, and public acceptance battles that continually threatened the memorial's construction from its inception, transforming what could have resulted in a historical recitation of events and people into what reads like a political thriller. In his narrative of four 'rooms' of the memorial, each of which recall one of FDR's four terms, Dillon explicates how a political view — whether from Halprin, Roosevelt, a political action group, or philosophy of history — shaped the expression. The textual tour is fulfilled by Alan Ward's photographs of the built memorial. Filled with vitality and people, Ward carefully tenders the range of emotions that Halprin and his collaborators worked to evoke, assaying Roosevelt's impact on us collectively as citizens and as unique individuals. Text and images are deftly intertwined to build an argument for the memorial's success in taking an inherently abstract and formless content — politics — and giving it meaningful and resonant physical expression.

As the memorial's primary designer, Lawrence Halprin begins with his own memories and tells a personal story of constructing a design — on paper and in the built landscape. Through lucid text and simple, communicative diagrams, Halprin blends history, technical data, symbolic intentions, programmatic goals, desires for emotive responses, and construction details. The result is a graphic and text argument that is so seamlessly convincing that it seems "natural," in terms of fulfilling an essential relation that is seemingly indisputable. And it is this seeming fullness and completion that is problemmatic. When used as a "companion on a tour of the Memorial" (according to its book jacket), Halprin's enumerated histories are so personal and filled with 'interpretation' that they leave very little room for visitors' personal views, creative imaginations, or alternative historical memories. As a landscape design education tool, the book is a case study filled with a range of lessons: technical construction issues; communicating design ideas to the public; choreographing successful collaborations with artists. Most importantly, the story demonstrates how abstract ideas and history are transformed into physical reality, making a rare and valuable insight into design process. In this regard, it will surely join Sketchbooks and RSVP Cycles as a 'classic' in landscape design literature.

Both books are insightful accounts of processes that would otherwise remain opaque. Yet, their greater value is their complement of one another in communicating design-making to the public. Halprin says that he wanted the memorial "to be an experiential history lesson." What he provides (in both book and built construction) is just that — a contemporary history lesson for how to construct a public landscape that is charged with collective history memory and individual aesthetic experience. Dillon's situating of Halprin's work within the politics that initiated it reminds us of the necessity for placing our work within larger conceptual contexts than their immediate physical environments. In a time when designers all too often bemoan that "The public doesn't understand us" or "What we do isn't valued," the accounts — as complements — offer a constructive model for demonstrating our talent as synthesizers and our work as an art that is not mere self-indulgence but of cultural significance.

Kathy Poole is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia.