Visual Planning and the Picturesque (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781606060018)

"If the whole of a town is in the end not visually pleasing, the town is not worth having."
-Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

Pevsner's Townscape presents a previously unpublished work by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983), one of the twentieth-century's most widely read scholars of art and architectural history. Begun in the mid-1940s, Pevsner's unfinished manuscript is something of an anomaly in his vast oeuvre of writings in so far as it sought to complement the body of thought emerging in postwar Britain that was concerned with urban design, generally referred to as "Townscape."

As assembled and annotated here, Pevsner's Townscape: On Visual Planning and the Picturesque comprises three parts. The first part analyzes English planning tradition before 1800. The second surveys English planning theory or, by Pevsner's lights, the theory of the picturesque. The third part is essentially a meditation on how this tradition and this theory shaped architecture and urban planning in England in the nineteenth century and, potentially, the twentieth as well. The work as a whole is a surprisingly fresh plea for a visual approach to urban design and common sense in architecture, one that sought to incorporate and mediate, rather than idealize and exclude.

Author: Nikolaus Pevsner
ISBN-10: 1606060015
ISBN-13: 9781606060018
Publisher: Getty Research Institute
Language: English
Published: 05/18/2010
Pages: 232
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.15lbs
Size: 10.70h x 7.70w x 0.80d