Although widespread among several territories, the effects of the new “administrative vision” were most keenly felt in Prussia, where the landscape designer Peter Joseph Lenné, with a circle of reformers, developed a program of rural embellishment, urban planning, and aesthetic industrialization in response. Operating both within and against the bureaucracy, they aimed to redress the deficiencies of rationalized land management by engineering a Prussian arcadia rooted in classical aesthetics. I analyzed the various registers within which bureaucratic culture inflected Lenné’s designs and the avenues through which he appropriated administrative tools, including standardized representational techniques, to fashion a new landscape discourse. I spent many hours in the Rare Book Reading Room examining materials specific to Lenné’s work in Potsdam, including the full run of a journal published by the Prussian Horticultural Society, a practical handbook written by a Danish gardener who apprenticed for several months with Lenné in Potsdam, a scarce textbook on drawing and surveying used at the Royal Garden Academy at Sanssouci, and several rare publications containing contemporary images of gardens and parks designed by Lenné. I made significant progress on the book manuscript that will result from this project.
Michael Lee, University of Virginia, Fellow 2017–2018, Spring