The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day

Description

From small gardens to complete cities, humans have always moulded their environment to express or symbolize ideas - power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. It is Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe's distinction to have realized that these are manifestations of a single process, and to have linked them all together. Taking twenty-eight 'cultures' from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Post-Renaissance West, the authors first summarize the social and intellectual background, then describe how this is expressed in in terms of landscape, and finally demonstrate their case in a series of picture spreads showing what actually happened. The final section - about a fifth of the whole - is devoted to planning since 1945. This edition has been revised and expanded to bring the text completely up to date, and show the implications of today's trends in landscape architecture and planning for tomorrow's world.

Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) was the best-known landscape architect of his generation. He was a founding member of the Landscape Institute, and from 1939 to 1949 he was its President. In 1948, he became the founding President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). From 1954 to 1968 he was a member of Royal Fine Art Commission and from 1967 to 1974 a Trustee of Tate Gallery. He writes with his wife Suan Jellicoe. Susan Jellicoe is a landscape artist and wife of Geoffrey Jellicoe.

'Essential reading for landscape architects, and should become a textbook for everyone interested in the philosophy and practice or environental improvement ... Clearly this book is a major environmental event' - Design 'The compass of this excellent book is quite staggering' - Financial Times