1st Edition

Rethinking Landscape A Critical Reader

By Ian H. Thompson Copyright 2009
    272 Pages
    by Routledge

    272 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    Ian H. Thompson