Author: Paul Shepheard File Type: pdf Paul Shepheard can make any subject arresting, whether it is ski resorts, cell division, theories of settlement or masterpieces of building. This is an exhilarating book, unlike any other. -- Robert Harbison Paul Shepheards previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world--landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness is about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what weve done in shaping them. In the authors words, this book is about seeing things that are too big to see. His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental--he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, 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 current strategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce that covers 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 from global to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of World War Is Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through these landscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in which the appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turningthe land to profit is under review--and offers this book as his contribution to that review.

Author: Marie Clausén File Type: pdf Having won more than one recent poll as Britains best-loved building, the appeal of Durham Cathedral appears abiding, which begs the question whether an iconic sacred building can retain meaning and affective pertinence for contemporary, secular visitors. Using the example of Durham Cathedral, this book sets out to explore wherein the appeal of historic churches lies today and considers questions of how and why their preservation into a post-Christian era should be secured. By including feedback from visitors to the cathedral, and the authors own very personal account of the cathedral in the form of an ekphrasis, this work seeks to privilege an interpretation of architecture that is based on the individual experience rather than on more conventional narratives of architecture history and cultural heritage policy. Recognising the implication of our choice of narrative on the perceived value of historic churches is crucial when deliberating their future role. This book puts forth a compelling case for historical sacred architecture, suggesting that its loss - through imperceptive conservation practices as much as through neglect or demolition - would diminish us all, secularists, atheists and agnostics included. **