During the war, the picturesque sounded very British, and the history of landscape gardening is associated with Britain. Keep in mind that there are also other issues. Were you surprised that Pevsner put forward gardening as the theoretical model for urban planning? Before that there was Learning from Las Vegas (1972) both are similar attempts to elevate the lowly to something more highly valued. They like to look at the qualities of these cities in a visual way and understand what they mean (for example, Rem Koolhaas's work on the Pearl River delta). You see similar ideas today with architects who are working in enormous cities in China. He and Hubert de Cronin Hastings (the Architectural Review's chief editor) were looking at the messy vitality of the urban scene and seeing how an artistic view of it could be brought back within the realm of design and art. What makes Pevsner's work applicable to present issues is its visuality and its comprehensive approach to the built environment.
In the late 1970s, the mere association with modernist architecture or urban design was enough to condemn you. Today's interest in Pevsner's work, in Townscape and visual planning-indeed, in the mid-century architectural and urban design milieu-has to do with the rekindled interest in modernism as something that is not inherently flawed. They absolutely do not think that it's about modern architecture adapted in a very free-form way to concrete problems of reconstruction. Most people think that Townscape was about making tasteful street furniture or lighting, seats, benches, and litterbins to match an urban design scenario. This is something that has fallen by the wayside. That is, Townscape is a very modern movement. The book concludes with a consideration of the utopian aspirations and views of the garden in different societies.Pevsner was also an advocate of modern urban design, which, for his critics, was even worse than modern architecture.īut if you fast-forward 20 years, people became interested in Pevsner again for the same reasons that they were not interested in him in the late 1970s. Turner and his talented commentator, John Ruskin, as well as through the garden designs of Humphry Repton and the lingering debts to the picturesque movement that haunt modernist theory. From Castle Howard in Yorkshire to French impressionist gardens the essays deal with several crucial aspects of the picturesque controversy, how practical applications of the Picturesque taste affected people's treaty with and experience of landscape gardens and even the larger landscape - this last is tracked through the work of the great painter J. Gardens and the Picturesque collects 11 of Hunt's essays - several of them never before published - that deal with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely." Ranging over subjects from the cult of the picturesque to verbal-visual parallels within gardens, from allegorical imagery to landscape painting, these essays brilliantly invoke Hunt's fascination with the idea of the garden both as a milieu - by which gardens become the most eloquent expressions of complex cultural ideas - and as a site of cultural translation, whereby one period shapes for its own purposes the ideas and forms inherited from its predecessors. John Dixon Hunt is widely considered one of the foremost of today's writers on the history and theory of gardens and landscape architecture.
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