The Role of History in Contemporary Landscape Architecture

To what extent and in what way does contemporary landscape architecture invoke history? The lecture reviews a few earlier examples of how the past of a site has determined its present and then proceeds to suggest - with a range of current sites - how the past has been invoked and may be used. It also proposes that the "invention" of history can be a legitimate device in the creation of new gardens and landscapes and examines the success of different attempts to do so.

A former Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, John Dixon Hunt is Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the faculty in 1994 and served as chair in the department of Landscape Architecture through June 2000. He is the author of numerous articles and books on garden history and theory, including a catalogue of the landscape drawings of William Kent, Gardens and the Picturesque (1994), The Picturesque Garden in Europe (2002), The Afterlife of Gardens (2004), and The Venetian City Garden (2009). He edits the journal Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and was, until recently, editor of Word & Image. Current interests focus upon landscape architectural theory, modern(ist) garden design, and ekphrasis. He is the inaugural series editor of the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press), in which was published his own theoretic study of landscape architecture, Greater Perfections: the Practice of Garden Theory (1999). In May 2000 he was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture, and he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Bristol (UK) in 2006. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at King's College, Cambridge, and a Ph.D., from the University of Bristol.