History of Landscape Design

Last semester, we ended our last class with a discussion of Goethe's premonition of the power that technology would bring humanity and the effect of technology upon Nature and traditional societies. Technology and modernity go hand in hand. What scientific discoveries and philosophical theories have colored Western thought since the beginning of the nineteenth century, giving it its increasingly secular slant?
How did the thrust toward radical modernity devalue history and also craft, and what countervailing influences arose as a result? Discuss the influence of John Ruskin on Victorian moral and artistic values.
What is eclecticism and what underlying attitude toward history gave license to eclecticism beginning around 1800 and continuing to the present day?
Discuss the ironic link between rapid modernization and historic preservation. Cite some examples from your reading of 19th-century period gardens.
What is "taste"?
How did Taste become an operative principle in landscape design?
Did a catholic attitude toward architecture and landscape design in the 19th century reflect a trend toward more democratic societies?
Discuss the role of 19th-century treatises and periodicals with regard to taste-making in landscape design.
The Victorian garden is a product of science and technology more than of aesthetic principle and philosophy. Is this statement an accurate one?
What new scientific practices and inventions had implications for landscape design (and agriculture) in the 19th century?
Discuss the role of the botanic garden in fostering Victorian garden style and practice.
Discuss the role of the gardener and the head gardener in the 19th century.
Describe the Victorian practice of carpet bedding.
In setting forth design principles that would bring harmony to the rich array of effects available to the Victorian gardener, what did John Claudius Loudon mean by the "axis of symmetry" and "congruity"?
Describe how Joseph Paxton's career as head gardener at Chatsworth and as a designer of some of Britain's first municipal parks illustrate the tenets of Victorian progressiveness, eclecticism, and humanitarianism.
Andrew Jackson Downing's biographer characterizes his subject as an "apostle of taste." Describe Downing's vision of the tasteful in relation to the developments occurring in mid-19th-century America and his means of effectively promoting it.
Even as Nature in America was being deified and wilderness given new status as part of a general reaction against humanity's growing power to exert control over the natural world, technology and nature were becoming increasingly fused. Discuss technology's penetration of hinterlands and the evidence of an invisible metropolitan expansion into wilderness areas as modern engineering extended water and transportation systems beyond existing urban boundaries.
The rural cemetery is a landscape creation of the 19th century. What is its relationship to the landscape of association and memory to the tradition of the Picturesque?
Discuss the role of the new rural cemeteries with regard to changing attitudes toward death and also with regard to urban growth and concerns of public health.