| Unit name | The Formal Garden (1620-1720) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ARCHM0101 |
| 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 first of two core mandatory units, which cover the history of landscape gardening in Britain. It will introduce students through a study of the gentlemen amateurs and landscape professionals who shaped the English landed estate, followed in each instance by site visits to relevant surviving layouts. These gardens will be set chronologically against the social and political history of the period. The Unit will open with an assessment of the gardens of the early Stuart Court and continue through the experimental years of the Interregnum to the Franco-Dutch layouts of the Restoration. It was a time when new species were being introduced on an unprecedented scale and when the plants themselves were as important as the contrived framework which displayed them. The Unit will end as early eighteenth- century Arcadias brought in more natural and informal designs where the flora took on a subsidiary role to the landscape.
Aims:
This initial Unit will introduce students to the methodology involved in studying gardens and assessing their aesthetic impact. It will encourage students to interrelate texts with first-hand experience of gardens as cultural artefacts. The politics of the period studied are particularly relevant to landscape theory and its practice, and this Unit will develop an understanding of how gardens and landscapes relate to and reflect social, ideological and aesthetic values.
The Unit will enable students to 'read' landscape and garden designs, interpret by experience the subtleties of planting schemes and garden iconography, and make informed judgements about the aesthetic properties of garden plans and their meaning as expressions of the political climate of the period. This Unit will demonstrate that the students are able to respond to the particular disciplines of studying texts and relating them to the gardens visited and analysed.
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:
40/120 credit points of the taught component of the degree, leading to qualification for progression to dissertation (20/180 credit points of MA overall).
John Harris, The Artist and the Country House, 1979 John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove - The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600-1750, 1986 David Jacques & Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary, 1988 Timothy Mowl & Brian Earnshaw, Architecture Without Kings: the Rise of Puritan Classicism under Cromwell, 1995
