Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
In its golden age, according to Erik de Jong, Dutch landscape architecture constituted a major, distinct phase in the European development of the art. In Nature and Art, de Jong examines five garden reconstructions—Het Loo, Heemstede, Zijdebalen, and the medicinal gardens of Leiden and Haarlem—within their unique cultural and geographic framework in order to establish the historical importance and singularity of Dutch garden art.
Interest in geometric gardens was shared by all strata of Dutch society from courtiers to burghers; paintings, travel books, and poetry of the period contain evidence of the landscape garden's popularity. While the Dutch professed an ideal of outdoor life, in reality it was not nature that held sway, but rather design, which subjected nature to the rules of art. The garden was not so much a place of solitary retreat as a work of art through which to reveal oneself to the outside world. De Jong sets specific Dutch creations on the European map alongside the works of Le Notre in France, and argues for their independent identity in a rival tradition of equal importance.

Nature and Art: Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650-1740 (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)

Arts & Photography

de Jong, Erik

History & Criticism

University of Pennsylvania Press

A garden is not an object but a process, as the artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay once observed, and one particular fascination of landscape architecture is its very real negotiation of that rocky terrain between conception and cultivation. The labors of the former, however, are not often seen by the public that experiences its material outcome. Published on the occasion of the 2008 Landscape Architecture Triennial for the exhibition at Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn, Landscapes of the Imagination presents landscape architecture as a design discipline, recognizing it as a dialogue with an especially unruly and impermanent form. A selection of 40 original designs and sketches from the rich European heritage of garden and landscape architecture forms the core of this book. Spanning from 1600-2000, these include designs by such familiar luminaries as Le Nôtre, Humphrey Repton, Peter Joseph Lenné, Ernst Cramer, Gunnar Asplund and Bernard Tschumi, as well as less famed designers--including one seventeenth century amateur/commissioner. These sketches, virtually unknown among the general public or even professional circles, emphasize garden and landscape architecture as a highly skilled conceptual art. Reference materials (engravings, photographs and text) offer the reader some insight into the design of these landscapes and elucidate the process of composition. Six plans are documented in their current state in a photographic essay.

Landscapes of the Imagination: Designing the European Tradition of Garden and Landscape Architecture 1600-2000

Architecture

nai010 publishers

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Books by de Jong, Erik