History of British Landscape Architecture: 1500 to 1900

Graduate / Professional

This course focuses on the history of gardens, landscape parks, and the architecture of country houses, castles, and garden follies from 1500 to 1900 in Great Britain. Seminal works in the history of British landscape architecture and architecture are studied in detail. The course examines in chronological order the following topics: the architectural typology of the Norman Castle, its transformation over twelve centuries, and its interior landscape; Tudor architecture, including its castellated elements, at Hampton Court and Tudor garden design; the emergence of classicism in the country houses and buildings of Robert Smythson and Inigo Jones at the turn of the seventeenth century; the importation of Italian ideas of garden design conveyed through the stage sets of Inigo Jones at mid-seventeenth century; the implementation of Dutch and French formal garden elements into British gardens at the end of the seventeenth-century as carried out at Hampton Court under William and Mary; the application of military gardening and the revival of castle architecture in the work of the English Baroque architects Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor at Castle Howard and Blenheim; by contrast, the birth of the Palladian villa and garden in Britain, both on the small scale at Chiswick and the large scale at Holkham; the Templescape of Stowe in all four phases of its design; the beginnings of Naturalism and the ha-ha as landscape device in the work of William Kent and others; the manifestation of British imperialism in landscape architecture as exemplified in Sir William Chambers’ design for Kew Gardens, c. 1750s; Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s creation and development of the landscape park, its primary elements of design, its ecological underpinnings, and its influence on the nineteenth-century design of parks in England and on the work of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in America; the theory and practice of the Picturesque in three phases of its evolution, with a focus on the role of ruins in the landscape, both then and now; the beginnings of landscape architecture as a profession and the concept of “deceit” in landscape design in the published works of Humpfry Repton; lastly, the pursuit of the alpine sublime in the works of British artists, most particularly J.M.W.Turner, and the transportation of the sublime to America in the formation of the national parks and the establishment through landscape of a national identity. Where appropriate, connections between gardens of the past and those of the present will be made. The collection of the Yale Center for British Art is used for primary visual material, and a trip to England over spring break allows students to visit firsthand the landscape gardens and parks studied in this seminar. 3 Course cr F 9:25am-11:20am