While the themes, sources, and materials of The Palladian Landscape span a range of disciplinary interests from art and architectural studies, economic, social, and environmental history, to philosophy and Renaissance humanism, Denis Cosgrove seeks to provide a geographical interpretation of a region of northern Italy in the specific period of the late Renaissance. However, he goes much further, using the thoughts, designs, and commissions of the architect Palladio as the central thread to weave a picture of a place, Venice, that is in a period of crisis as it seeks to survive a transition from a maritime power hinterland to a new land-based terraferma. As a cultural geographer, he seeks to understand how groups come to terms with and transform their material environments, and he therefore pays special attention to the intellectual forces and spiritual sensibilities that empower those groups as well as to the economic, social, and environmental constraints with which they have to contend. Although these two broad realms of human experience are often studied separately, Cosgrove brings them together in this study. He uses the leitmotif of architecture, and specifically the work of Andrea Palladio, to describe a localized transformation of the natural world into a landscape of expression of cultural meaning. Beyond this leitmotif, the work adopts an essay structure in which each chapter stands somewhat separately as a spatial narrative. It moves from the imperial city of Venice into its Italian territories, and thence from city to rural landscape to specific country estates. Having described localized transformations of urban and rural landscapes, Cosgrove then expands the scale again to consider hydrological engineering in the Venetian territories and some of the techniques involved in surveying and mapping the landscape. These return the reader to the more global view of a Venetian mentalit&é coming to terms with a changing geographical and historical world map.

In 1726, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, built an addition to his modest country house on the river Thames at Chiswick. The structure was a free standing villa, which is the subject of this book. The author explores the villa's architectural inspiration and the evolution of its design.

Studies the relationship between Palladian villas in the Veneto and the landscape, demonstrating how each was sited to enhance the drama of the overall architectural ensemble.

Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove's Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

This book examines the power definiteness of landscape from a social constructivist perspective with a particular focus on the importance of aesthetic concepts of landscape in development. It seeks to answer the question of how societal notions of landscape emerge, how they are individually updated and how these ideas affect the use and design of physical space. It also analyzes how physical manifestations of societal activity impact on understandings of individual and societal landscapes and addresses the essential aspect of the social construction of landscape, cultural specificity, which in turn is discussed in the context of the expansion of a western landscape concept. The book offers an unprecedented, comprehensive and detailed examination of societal power relations in the context of landscape development. The numerous case studies from the physical manifestation of modern spatial planning in the United States, the power discourses concerning the design of model railway landscapes, and the medial production of stereotypical landscape notions shed light on the complex and multilayered interactions of collective and individual landscape references. It is a valuable resource for geographers, sociologists, landscape architects, landscape planners and philosophers.