The Architecture of Western Gardens – A Design History from the Renaissance to the Present Day - Hardcover

Mosser, Monique

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262132648 ISBN 13: 9780262132640

Publisher: MIT Press, 1991

Synopsis

Honorable Mention, 1992 Garden Globe Awards sponsored by the Garden Writers Association of America.

The Architecture of Western Gardens presents an international tour of garden design from the Renaissance to the present. As object and as literature, it is a sumptuous and unprecedented resource. The more than seventy essays by scholars from Europe and America all commissioned for this book - and over 650 illustrations raise the standard of garden literature to a new level. The result is an invaluable compendium that will serve as a fundamental starting point for exploring the many expressions of the place where nature and culture, project and diversion, work and pleasure meet.

Organized chronologically, the essays and illustrations make up a mosaic of the garden in the Western world. The humanist garden in Renaissance Italy, the concepts of the "Sublime" and the "Picturesque," mazes, grottoes, and other curiosities, city parks, American land art, and even Disneyland are among the topics treated. Discussions of characteristic aspects of history and theory are followed by analyses of individual gardens as paradigms of their type: the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, the Parc Monceau in Paris, the Park Guell in Barcelona, Stowe in England, and many more.

The illustrations are a model of how iconography can function as text. They include ground plans meticulously redrawn from original archival material to provide precise information on the scale and nature of many of the projects, as well as a wealth of drawings, reconstructions, paintings, and photographs.

About this title

Review

" All that is capricious and extravagant in man, all that there is of the wanderer or the vagabond, can without doubt be contained in these syllables: garden" -- Louis Aragon & quot; All that is capricious and extravagant in man, all that there is of the wanderer or the vagabond, can without doubt be contained in these syllables: garden& quot; -- Louis Aragon "All that is capricious and extravagant in man, all that there is of the wanderer or the vagabond, can without doubt be contained in these syllables: garden"--Louis Aragon

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262132648
• ISBN 13: 9780262132640
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544