The Cultivated Wilderness ― Or, What Is Landscape?

Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real,material things in the world -- landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness isabout those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them.In theauthor's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategymakes landscape fundamental -- he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. NormanEngland, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation.The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our currentstrategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce thatcovers up a multitude of other possibilities, many other ways to treat the surface of the globe --some of which are the landscapes revealed in this book.In a series of first-person narratives,reminiscent of his last book, the author pairs six landscapes, in order of descending scale fromglobal to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of WorldWar I's Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through theselandscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in whichthe appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turning the land to profit isunder review -- and offers this book as his contribution to that review.