| Unit name | Classical Arcadia and Gardenesque (1720-1820) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ARCHM0102 |
| Credit points | 40 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Emeritus Professor. Mowl |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Anthropology and Archaeology |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This is the second of two core mandatory units, which cover the history of landscape gardening in Britain. The principal focus of the Unit will be the philosophical and literary responses to 'Nature' of English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The influence of writers such as Pliny, Horace and Virgil on the form and design of landscapes will be studied to determine why such Classical literature should have influenced plans in which architecture and planting, artfully disposed, replaced the flora and rigid formality of the previous fifty years. The key contemporary theorists are Pope, Addison and Shaftesbury; the garden practitioners are Vanbrugh, Kent, Batty Langley, Lancelot Brown, Humphry Repton and J.C. Loudon. These intensely intellectual Classical gardens of the first half of the eighteenth century gave way, through an expanding world view, to more eclectic designs - Chinese, Gothick, Turkish, Hindu - the so-called 'Rococo' gardens of the 1740-60. Brown's ideal, if bland, Claudian parkscapes followed only to be softened by Repton and with the new century came a return to formal enclosures, bedding plants and the 'Gardenesque'. It is a period where Classicism moves paradoxically into Romanticisim and it will be the chief aim of the Unit to convey this apparent contradiction. The Unit is intended to relate the formal aesthetics of landscape and garden designs to the cultural contexts that inform them.
Aims:
This Unit builds on the training in garden history methodology acquired in the preceeding unit (The Formal Garden 1620-1720, ARCH M70101). It aims to develop awareness of the ways that changing perceptions of nature derived from the literary and aesthetic literature, as well as from pictorial sources, affected the design and cultural connotations of landscaped gardens and estates. By situating the gardens and landscapes studied and visited in their social and cultural contexts, the unit will extend the comprehension of the history of garden design and landscaping as a subject in which formal values reveal intellectual concerns.
Students will develop their awareness and understanding of the iconographical reading of the elements within landscape gardens (architecture and sculpture), and of the wider cultural interpretations that can be deciphered from the landscape as a whole. The unit will extend the knowledge and appreciation of ideological and socially constructed theories of landscape reception by applying to specific examples and sites and theoretical perspectives.
Methods of teaching and number of contact hours Weekly Seminars (2 hours) and classes conducted through site visits over 12 weeks.
One essay of 5,000 words designed to test the students knowledge of and ability to contextualise appropriately the gardens and designed landscapes of the period.
Criteria for the award of Credit Points Attendance at seminars and site visits, and the satisfactory completion of the essay.
Contribution of Unit in determining student progression Satisfactory completion to proceed to dissertation.
Contribution of Unit to degree classification 20/120 credit points of the taught component of the degree, leading to qualification for progression to dissertation (20/180 credit points of MA overall).
