Cultivated Wilderness : Or, What Is Landscape?

by Paul Shepheard

• ISBN13: 9780262691949
• ISBN10: 0262691949
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-03-01
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world-landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wildernessis about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them. In the author's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental-he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our current strategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce that covers up a multitude of other possibilities, many other ways to treat the surface of the globe-some of which are the landscapes revealed in this book. In a series of first-person narratives, reminiscent of his last book, the author pairs six landscapes, in order of descending scale from global to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of World War I's Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through these landscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in which the appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turning the land to profit is under review-and offers this book as his contribution to that review.

Table of Contents

Preface
Switzerland	p. 2
The Most Dangerous Animal in the World	p. 5
The Cultivated Wilderness	p. 7
Ely	p. 11
Innocence and Experience	p. 15
Dogs	p. 17
Pond Life	p. 19
The Seven Wonders of the World	p. 27
Archeology	p. 28
Alexander	p. 36
Perception	p. 46
Antarctica	p. 55
Land of the Noonday Moon	p. 56
Land of Heroes	p. 65
Land of Dreams	p. 72
Scotland	p. 87
Corpach	p. 88
Glenfinnan	p. 98
Creag Nan Clag	p. 112
Flevoland	p. 127
Amsterdam	p. 128
The Polders	p. 143
Flevoland	p. 151
The London Basin	p. 163
The River	p. 164
The Hills	p. 171
The Basin	p. 183
The Western Front	p. 195
Battlescape	p. 196
Timescape	p. 206
Parkscape	p. 222
Epilogue	p. 233
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