The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day

Throughout history men have molded their environment to express or to symbolize ideas - power, order, comfort, harmony, pleasure, mystery. The means by which this has been achieved have varied in scale and composition, from small gardens to complete cities, but it is Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe's distinction to have realized that they are manifestations of a single process, and to have linked them all together. To qualify as a 'landscape of man', an environment must be deliberately shaped at a specific time. Taking twenty-eight cultures, the authors first summarize the social and intellectual background, then describe how this expressed itself in terms of landscape, and finally demonstrate their case in a series of picture-spread showing what actually happened. The ground covered includes ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Moslem world, medieval Europe, India, china, Japan, pre-Colombian America and the post-Renaissance West in all its phases. The last section, about a fifth of the whole, is devoted to planning since 1945.