Landscape History: Material and Metaphorical Regimes

Abstract

My formative education in the history of architecture hap pened informally thirty years ago, when I was a somewhat pushy Ph.D. student in historical geography at University College London. Researching English Georgian landscape history, including garden history, I not only read widely in that English tradition of architectural writing that focuses on landscape as well as buildings, but discussed my ideas with the authors I admired (for their writing style as well as subject matter) who still worked in nearby Bloomsbury. Their offices ranged from pop to posh. I knocked on the doors of Reyner Banham at the Bartlett School, Gordon Square, and John Summerson at the Sir John Soane's Museum, Lincolns Inn Fields, and, in between, at the Architectural Association, Bedford Square, on that of Robin Evans, who introduced me to recent theoretical currents on space, vision, and perspective and whose work deserves to be better known beyond architectural studies. During this period, the mid-1970s, landscape was becoming a key multidisciplinary arena of research and scholarship. Some of the most influential new work was emerging from art historians and literary historians, includ ing Raymond Williams and John Barrell (whom I also imposed on at the time).1 For a few like-minded geogra phers, particularly Denis Cosgrove, the development of landscape as a focus was part of the reshaping of cultural geography as a field of research.2 An architectural dimen sion was critical in my own approach, as exemplified in my book Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geogra phy of Georgian England (New Haven, 1999). Here land scape, indeed geography itself, was not just something outside a building, whether mansion or cottage, but articu lated in its interior space, especially through the placement of windows, mirrors, desks, chairs, doorways, and fireplaces. There is much scope here for conversation between cultural geographers who increasingly are drawn in from the great outdoors by domestic themes, and architectural historians who are attentive to the wider worlds implied in building design and fabrication?scholars such as Dianne Harris, Sandy Isenstadt, and Dell Upton. The prospect of multidisciplinary landscape research still seems bright, at least from my vantage point as newly appointed director of the Programme in Landscape and Environment for the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research