Rethinking Landscape: A Critical Reader

ISBN-13: 9780415424639 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 250 str.

Ian H. Thompson

Opis

Our landscapes have never failed to entice and capture the imagination of writers, painters and philosophers and in turn their work has influenced our landscapes for centuries.

This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity.

Provoking thought and discussion, this book does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking."

This new reader is an unusually wide-ranging critical tool in the field of landscape architecture. It provides extensive excerpted materials from, and detailed critical perspectives on, standard and neglected texts from the 18^th century to the present day. Ian Thompson considers the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explore the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity. Uniquely the book will include original materials which are drawn not only from writers and thinkers in Landscape itself, but also from the philosophical, ethical and political writings which influenced people’s thinking about their contemporary environment and how they could begin to shape it.

Rethinking Landscape is intended principally for academics and advanced students in landscape architecture and for those in related disciplines such as town planning, urban design, cultural geography and architecture. It is written in an accessible style so that it can be used in undergraduate teaching (particularly on specialised theory modules).

Spis treści

Part 1: Pluralism  1. Is the Truth Out There?  2. Trivalent Design  Part 2: Aesthetics  3. Rationalism  4. Empiricism  5. The Picturesque  6. Biological Theories  7. Use and Beauty  8. Functionalism  9. Landscape as Art  Part 3: The Social Mission  10. Landscape and Power  11. The Failed Vision of Modernism  12. The Amelioration of the City  13. Participation and Collaboration  Part 4: Ecology  13. Meanings and Metaphors in Ecology  14. Varieties of Environmental Ethics  15. The Ecological Approach and Landscape Ecology  16. Sustainability  Part 5: Some other Perspectives  17. Phenomenology and the Experience of Landscape  18. The Genius Loci  Part 6: Conclusions and Suggestions  19. Pulling it all Together.  Further Reading

O autorze

Ian H. Thompson