Picturesque Garden Research Articles

Architecture/Design

Books reviewed in this article:Chris Abel, Sky High: Vertical ArchitectureHilary Ballon, Louis Le Vau: Mazarin's Collège, Colbert's RevengeAaron Betsky et al, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller and ScofidioDeborah Howard, The Architectural History of VeniceJohn Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe

Signs and sites of friendship in Delille' s Les Jardins

The publication of Jacques Delille' s poem Les Jardins ou l' art d' embellir les paysages n 1782 was a major literary event.1 The author was already famous for his translation of Virgil' s The Georgics, an accomplishment which had won him — on its own — an election to the Acad—mic Fran—aise. Les Jardins attracted further attention because it engaged one of the most popular debates of its time. In this new work, Delille discussed the relative merits and faults of the so-called ‘French’ and ‘English’ gardens; yet contrary to many of his contemporaries, he did not reject André Le Nôtre' s rigidly structured designs in favour of William Kent' s allegedly more natural ones. Rather, he mapped a social hierarchy onto his formal precepts: Delille argued that the monumental, symmetrical forms that were for appropriate for a king were ill-suited to a modest property owner. Having thus solved this crucial politico-aesthetic problem, Delille was free to concentrate on the characteristics of an ideal picturesque garden.

Charles H. Cheney of California

In the 1910s, Charles Henry Cheney appeared as a dynamo in a new planning movement in California. He established the first state-wide conference on city planning, persuaded the legislature to pass the first city planning enabling act and encouraged cities to create a planning commission to prepare a master plan. Although most of the newly established planning commissions began to prepare a zoning ordinance, Cheney assisted their efforts because he perceived zoning as a primary element of a master plan. He drafted the first California city zoning enabling act to give unchartered cities the authority for establishing single-family residence districts, and prepared a number of zoning ordinances in the West Coast. However, in the 1920s, facing over-emphasis on the economic and social aspects of city planning, he became a guardian of beauty and drafted protective covenants including an art jury and architectural control for newly developed picturesque garden suburbs. Cheneymoved to Palos Verdes, one of those garden suburbs in Southern California, and devoted his life to its city building process until his death. This paper provides an overview of Cheney's planning practices and thoughts.

Virtual worlds, travel, and the picturesque garden

Debate concerning reality is often drawn in terms of sharply defined dichotomies--for example, between real (or actual) and virtual, authentic and inauthentic, and natural and artificial. In this paper we offer an alternative approach by suggesting a conception of a world that highlights a continuity and commonality with our sense of everyday reality. We accomplish this in part by an examination of the English picturesque garden as if it were a world partially constructed out of ideas and objects collected during travels to foreign lands on the Grand Tour. Such foreign travel transformed not only the English person's sense of self, but also altered the English landscape. We conclude that in one sense the real England is also a virtual reality.

Revisiting the cottage council estates: England, 1919–39

The suburban cottage council estates of inter-war England are an example of how hopes for social transformation emerging in a new physical environment produced by planning worked out in practice. Their roots lay in the anti-urbanism of the nineteenth century. To improve the physical and moral health of the population, reformists had rejected the contemporary city in favour of a more rural environment. The adoption of the pre-industrial English village as the model for development appeared to offer harmonious social relations and a sense of community too. Although these sentiments were diminished by the end of World War I, their legacy was still apparent. Under the influence of Raymond Unwin, the promotion by the Tudor Walters Report of picturesque cottages, streets, gardens and greens presupposed an improved way of life for the cottage council estates that drew upon these romanticized images of the past. Rarely has the social life that developed on the estates been associated with such images. Instead, one of the strongest narratives of suburban working-class life is the loneliness and desolation of the cottage council estates. The estates are usually depicted, especially by modern commentators, as bereft of any sense of community. In particular, the layout of the housing, together with the absence of other facilities and amenities are thought to have hindered the development of social life. Rather than engendering a sense of community, the physical environment is held chiefly responsible for its absence. This paper re-examines these assumptions about the relationship between city plan and social relations by detailing the development of social life in the inter-war period upon the Roehampton and Watling estates, two of the London County Council's cottage estates. Community, it is argued, was not absent from either estate. The precise nature of community that emerged on each estate, together with the wider development of social life, is linked not to the estates' physical planning, but instead their social composition.

Culture de la nature au XVIIIe siècle : le sens dans le jardin

The art of gardening stems from an ontological paradox whereby man as creature turns into a creator using nature for his own ends and perfecting it. In this sense the development of landscape gardening in the XVIIIth century signals the advent of man as master of nature. The paradox is tentatively solved when another sort of nature is put forward by idealist thinkers who try to promote intellectualist aesthetics to explain how nature can be naturalised, i.e. rendered more natural through the application of intellectual archetypes to the raw materials of landscape. The gardener of the late XVIIth and early XVIIIth centuries thus becomes the agent whose role is to bring nature to perfection through the application of culture. This first paradox is complemented and inverted by a second owing to the success of sensualist aesthetics in the age of the Enlightenment. The development of Locke's epistemology is characterised by the emergence of sentiment as a faculty of judgment whose decisions supersede reason in when they are seen as the expression of the voice of a nature now conceived of as predominantly interior. From Shaftesbury to Gilpin's or Price's picturesque gardens, an interior landscape appears which shows the mastery of the master of nature effected by this new interior nature. Eventually, nature wins as, following the winding path that leads from intellectual sense to sensualist sentiment, it invades the representations and the very nature of the gardener.

Decoding Sharawadgi: Taoist influence on the Chinese landscape garden

Abstract This paper explores the influence of Taoist philosophy on Chinese garden aesthetics from crosscultural and interartistic perspectives. Problematising the comparability between the Chinese landscape garden and the European picturesque garden that is based on the notion of irregularity and associated with Sharawadgi, it argues that the Chinese garden is essentially different from its European cousin. It further argues that as the product of an eclectic culture and of a holistic art the Chinese garden has received the strongest influence from Taoism through the agency of landscape poetry and painting. Such influence is seen both in the conception of its space and in the mode of viewing this space.

Bonaparte's Park: a French picturesque garden in America

Joseph Napoleon Bonaparte (1768-1844), older brother of Napoleon I, fled to America after the Battle of Waterloo. Soon after his arrival, he purchased an estate called Point Breeze near Bordentown, New Jersey, where he lived in peaceful self-exile for nearly twenty years. While there, Joseph created one of the most significant, yet little known, garden parks in American landscape history. An 1847 survey of his residence and grounds, written descriptions of his property, the work of contemporary landscape painters, and certain precedents in France clearly indicate that Joseph's garden was a picturesque landscape, French in origin, and one of the first significant manifestations of the picturesque in America.

Nikolaus Pevsner et al., The Picturesque Garden and its Influence outside the British Isles. Washington (D.C.), Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University, 1974. (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture ii) 121 p., 103 illus., $10.00

Nikolaus Pevsner et al., The Picturesque Garden and its Influence outside the British Isles. Washington (D.C.), Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University, 1974. (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture ii) 121 p., 103 illus., $10.00

Review: The Picturesque Garden in France by Dora Wiebenson

Book Review| May 01 1979 Review: The Picturesque Garden in France by Dora Wiebenson The Picturesque Garden in FranceDora Wiebenson Barbara Maria Stafford Barbara Maria Stafford Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1979) 38 (2): 199–201. https://doi.org/10.2307/989444 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Barbara Maria Stafford; Review: The Picturesque Garden in France by Dora Wiebenson. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 May 1979; 38 (2): 199–201. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/989444 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1979 The Society of Architectural Historians Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Picturesque Garden in France.

The Picturesque Garden in France.

Review: The Italian Garden, First Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture by David R. Coffin; The Picturesque Garden and Its Influence outside the British Isles, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture II by Nikolaus Pevsner; The French Formal Garden, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture III by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, F.

Review: The Italian Garden, First Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture by David R. Coffin; The Picturesque Garden and Its Influence outside the British Isles, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture II by Nikolaus Pevsner; The French Formal Garden, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture III by Elisabeth B. MacDougall, F.

The Picturesque Garden and Its Influence outside the British Isles

The picturesque garden and its influence outside the British Isles , The picturesque garden and its influence outside the British Isles , مرکز فناوری اطلاعات و اطلاع رسانی کشاورزی