Book Description

This book is an auto-biography of Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic architect, planner, theoretician and a professor of planning at the University of Iceland. It gives a personal account of what shaped planning and design in the world and in Iceland as he experienced it in his lifetime. Valsson e.g. tells about his personal encounter with Ian McHarg, Buckminster Fuller and Christopher Alexander. Early TV started working on a future plan for Iceland, consisting, for example, of roads connecting Iceland´s settlements, across the Central Highlands. He also started an overlay mapping project, mapping both the hazard- and resource areas of the country, which created a basis for his Iceland-Plan proposals. Work on this he continued at Berkeley and at the University of Iceland as he started teaching there in 1988. Many of his articles and books deal with this subject. In 1980 Valsson started his PhD studies in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, California. In the philosophical section of his dissertation he presented his argument that the Western, mechanistic worldview was the underlying cause for today´s alienation, and that more holistic and integrative schemes were inherent in Eastern worldviews. TV´s dissertation is called A Theory of Integration for Design and Planning – Based on the Concept of Complementarity (1987). In 1988 – a year after Valsson returned to Iceland – he got an associate professor position in planning at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Iceland, and later a tenured professor position. The last part of this book describes Valsson’s 27 years at the University. The title of this present book: Shaping the Future – Ideas – Planning – Design, reflects how wide Valsson´s field of his operation has been.