Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British—and the international—eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.

By seeking to rediscover the profession's agricultural roots, this volume proposes a 21st-century shift in thinking about landscape architecture that is no longer driven by binary oppositions, such as urban and rural; past and present; aesthetics and ecology; beautiful and productive, but rather prioritizes a holistic and cross-disciplinary framing. The illustrated collection of essays written by academics, researchers and experts in the field seeks to balance and redirect a current approach to landscape architecture that prioritizes a narrow definition of the regional in an effort to tackle questions of continuous urban growth and its impact on the environment. It argues that an emphasis on conurbation, which occurs at the expense of the rural, often ignores the reality that certain cultivation and management practices taking place on land set aside for production can be as harmful to the environment as is unchecked urbanization, contributing to loss of biodiverstiy, soil erosion and climate change. By contrast, the book argues that by expanding the expertise of design professionals to include the productive, food systems, soil conservation and the preservation of cultural landscapes, landscape architects would be better equipped to participate in the stewardship of our planet. Written primarily for landscape practitioners and academics, cultural and environmental historians and conservationists, The Culture of Cultivation will appeal to anyone interested in a thorough rethinking of the role and agency of landscape architecture.

A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.

The grove, a grouping of trees, intentionally cultivated or found growing wild, has a long diverse history entwined with human settlement, rural practices and the culture and politics of cities. A grove can be a memorial, a place of learning, a site of poetic retreat and philosophy or political encampment, a public park or theatre, a place of hidden pleasures, a symbol of a vanished forest ecology, or a place of gods or other spirits. Yet groves are largely absent from our contemporary vocabulary and rarely included in today’s landscape practice, whether urban or rural. Groves are both literal and metaphorical manifestations, ways of defining spaces and ecologies in our cultural life. Since they can add meaning to urban forms and ecologies and contribute meaningfully to the significance of place, critical examination is long overdue. The editors have taken care to ensure that the text is accessible to the general reader as well as specialists.

The definitive introductory book on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization, this text addresses issues of identity, community, and sustainability along with a selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world. Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre give a readable, vivid, scholarly account of this major conflict as it relates to the design of the human-made environment. Demystifying the reasons behind how globalization enabled creativity and brought about unprecedented wealth but also produced new wastefulness and ecological destruction, the book also looks at how regionalism has also tended to confine, tearing apart societies and promoting destructive consumerist tourism.

As seen on BBC: An illustrated visit to four iconic gardens, each a product of its age, with stories of the creators and events that shaped them. The stories of these gardens’ creation include obsession, escape, social ambition, political intrigue, heartbreak, bankruptcy, and disaster. In unravelling these remarkable stories we reach back over the centuries to see these great gardens through fresh eyes. From the magnificent landscape garden at Stowe created by Bridgeman, Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown; the Victorian masterpiece of Biddulph Grange; the romantic Arts & Crafts retreat at Nymans; and Christopher Lloyd’s plantsman’s paradise at Great Dixter, you will hear of adventure, innovation, and visionary individuals who changed the way we create our gardens and the plants we grow. Katie Campbell weaves the stories of these four exemplary gardens into a history of British gardening from the earliest cultivated spaces to the present day, exploring trends, influences, and pioneers. Fascinating historic detail and atmospheric storytelling make this a compelling read. Includes a foreword by Chris Beardshaw, specially commissioned photography by Nathan Harrison, and extensive archive illustrations “A worthy accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name.” —The Irish Times “Campbell treads a nice line between juicy facts and the aesthetic qualities of the gardens. I adore her description of Jane Austen-ish tourists turning up in carriages, buying guidebooks and filling up the local inns, while commendably tipping the head gardener.” —The Independent