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Author Olin, Laurie

Title Across the open field : essays drawn from English landscapes / Laurie Olin
Published Philadelphia, Pa. : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 352 pages) : illustrations, maps
Series Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture
Penn studies in landscape architecture.
Contents Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; 1 As the Twig Is Bent; 2 On Buckland and Drawing: First Impressions and Later Observations; 3 Village and Farm: Longbridge Deverill, Wiltshire; An Agricultural Landscape; Bronze and Iron Age Developments; Medieval Longbridge and the Emergence of Wessex; Norman Prosperity; Architecture in the Landscape: The Great Rebuilding; Climate, Ecology, and the Landscape; Longbridge at the Crossroads; 4 Et in Arcadia Ego: Landscape Gardens and Parks; Love at First Sight; Habits of Mind; Longleat; Italian Moods, Palladians, and the Landscape; Stourhead
Lancelot ""Capability"" BrownThe Landscape Movement Spreads; Pusey House; Buscot House; Wardour Castle, Buckland House, and Richard Woods; In Conclusion: Beauty Past Change; Suggestions for Further Reading; Acknowledgments; Index
Summary "Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life."So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work. With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape. As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is "an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth."
Analysis Architecture
Fine Art
Garden History
Geography
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Subject Olin, Laurie -- Travel -- England
Olin, Laurie -- Travel -- England
Olin, Laurie
Landscape architecture -- England -- History
Gardens, English -- History
Landscapes -- England
Gardens -- England -- History
ARCHITECTURE -- Landscape.
Gardens
Gardens, English
Landscape architecture
Landscapes
Travel
England -- Description and travel.
England
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 99015965
ISBN 9780812207866
0812207866