The garden theory and landscape practice of Jean-Marie Morel.

摘要

The origins of the praxis of landscape architecture and of the modern environmental understanding of landscape design are situated in the picturesque garden theory of eighteenth century France's foremost landscape gardener Jean-Marie Morel. His long career and documented gardens provide a focus for examining the picturesque garden in both pre- and post-Revolutionary France. As a theorist and practitioner, whose knowledge of the physics and metaphysics of nature as well as horticulture and botany set him apart from his contemporaries, Morel is the most convincing advocate for the picturesque.; This dissertation is a comprehensive study of Morel's life and work, and argues that the basis of his theory and practice is a synthesis of the laws of nature and the metaphysics of empirical aesthetic sensibility. It demonstrates that Morel's theory incorporates major trends in eighteenth century natural science to build a theory of landscape design independent of prior aesthetics and practice. Morel's work is examined in relation to the established tradition of picturesque theory and the newly emerging organic understanding of the natural world, set within the larger frame of the changing perception of man's place in nature and late eighteenth century thought. Morel alone among his contemporaries emphasized that an understanding of the processes of nature was a necessary prerequisite to landscape design. Armed with a critical understanding of the dynamics of natural processes, Morel forged a theory of gardening flexible and complex enough to allow for future professional development. Indeed, Morel coined the French term for the landscape professional, architecte-paysagiste, as early as 1804.