The Vital Landscape: Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth-Century Britain
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jdh/epi055
ISSN1741-7279
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Architectural Studies
ResumoWilliam M. Taylor, Ashgate 2004. 276 pp., 6 colour and 52 b & w illus. £45 hardback. ISBN 0 7546 3069 2. William Taylor's book, according to the dust jacket, ‘explores the arrival of the biological sciences—most notably the sciences of “life” entailed in studies of botany and zoology, ecology and evolutionary science, physiology and psychology—in the nineteenth century and their impact on architecture and landscape architecture in Great Britain’. This prospectus set up certain expectations for me, which The Vital Landscape went only a short way towards meeting. Let me describe first what the book contains. I will come back to what I thought it might contain. Its central subject is the influence of Victorian ideas about nature on the design of horticultural forcing houses and glasshouses, the planning of the middle-class gentleman's house, and the layout of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘garden cemetery’, a burial ground with something of the...
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