Study Questions: Week Five: Landscape and Cityscape as Aesthetic Experience: The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Revival of the Formal Garden

• Although the end of the 19th century witnessed one of the same kinds of vitriolic British debates as had characterized the proponents of the Picturesque and the defenders of Capability Brown at the end of the 18th century-that between William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield-the progressive ethos of the Victorian era had drained landscape design of its ideological underpinnings. The coexistence of a multiplicity of genres, all reverencing the past in some way or other, can be seen as a reaction to industrial-age modernity and the frank expression of building technology that would soon characterize modern architecture. Discuss the motive forces that underlie this desire to borrow design idioms derived from the past.
• Why is it now appropriate to use the term style to denote period influence, whereas in discussing landscapes of earlier eras we have avoided doing so, instead pointing out characteristic nationalistic or regional features as representations without labeling any particular genre as a "style"? Draw the distinction between style and representation.
• Discuss the philosophy and influence of John Ruskin.
• Discuss the difference between landscape as power and landscape as refuge, citing examples.
• Discuss the principles of urban design developed by Camillo Sitte in The Art of Building Cities (1889).
• What are the basic principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, and how were these applied to landscape design?
• The Victorian interest in botany and horticulture had brought many new species into cultivation, greatly enlarging the gardener's range of plant materials. William Robinson exhorted gardeners to consider plants less as specimens to be displayed and more as elements within a garden composition. How was this approach allied with the tenets of the Picturesque?
• What role did vernacular gardens play in the development of an Arts and Crafts approach to landscape design?
• Discuss the role of periodicals and books in influencing garden style in the Edwardian era.
• Discuss historic preservation and national heritage as motivating factors in Edwardian landscape design.
• Discuss the collaboration of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens and the ways in which an appreciation of the vernacular landscape of southern England nourished their work.
• Discuss the role of hedges in the Edwardian garden.
• Discuss the creation of French period gardens and the degree to which these represent efforts of historic preservation or historically inflected creative design.
• The relationship between the Italian garden and the English garden has a long history. Describe how Edwardian garden designers such as Harold Peto employed the design vocabulary and forms of the Italian Renaissance for their own expressive purposes.
• Discuss Cecil Pinsent's gardens of the Anglo-expatriates in Tuscany.
• Discuss the role of Edith Wharton, Charles Platt, and Rome Prize architects and landscape architects in promoting an Italianate style in America.
• Discuss the degree to which Italianate and Arts and Crafts styles were commingled in various Edwardian gardens by such designers as Thomas Mawson.
• Discuss the contributions of such talented amateur garden owner / designers as Norah Lindsay, Major Lawrence Johnston, and Vita Sackville-West to the Edwardian garden and its later manifestations.
• The American landscape garden designer and founding member of the American Association of Landscape Architects Beatrix Farrand combined Italian and Arts and Crafts influences in her work at Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere. At Eyrie Garden at Seal Harbor she incorporated Chinese motifs as well. Anaylze Farrand's landscapes in terms of their successful integration of these influences, their design originality, and respect for their American contexts.
• Both Italian and Spanish Colonial influences can be found in the early-twentieth-century gardens of California and Florida. Discuss.