Architecture can be analogous to a history, a
fiction, and a landscape. We expect a history or a novel to be written
in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The
catalyst to this tradition was the simultaneous and interdependent
emergence in the eighteenth century of new art forms: the picturesque
landscape, the analytical history, and the English novel. Each of them
instigated a creative and questioning response to empiricism’s detailed
investigation of subjective experience and the natural world, and
together they stimulated a design practice and lyrical environmentalism
that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries.
Associating the
changing natural world with journeys in self-understanding, and the
design process with a visual and spatial autobiography, this book
describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive
centuries, analysing an enduring and evolving tradition from the
picturesque and romanticism to modernism. Creative architects have often
looked to the past to understand the present and imagine the future.
Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old
as well as the shock of the new.
