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A Superman at the Supermarket, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Bob Adelman during the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965.

  • The landscape architect Adriaan Geuze (pronounced “Huh-zaa”) is changing our notions of what a park can be. But to understand his work it helps to understand his past in the Netherlands—unless you’ve never wondered about the formative years of an influential landscape architect: “‘Ecology in Holland is in grids,’ Geuze said. ‘Every frog in Holland is in a line, because all the water is linear … The smell of the tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my brains … All the boys were into soccer, but I could not play soccer.’ Waiting out the school day, he would think, he said, ‘I have a tree hut. I have secret places you don’t even know where they are.’ When Geuze was a teenager, his father took him along to international industry and agricultural shows. ‘We went to the German Hanover machinery expos, where there would be not five machines but five thousand machines. He took me on very big boats, at least in my imagination—ocean steamers—and even an oil platform. Even into the engine rooms, where the violent noise was there. When I am romantic, I am thinking about these things.’ ”