The Garden and the Machine

Eduardo Prieto, Essay, No Density, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Architecture’s role, Architecture&art, Architecture&nature, Beauty, Built landscape, Cities, Design, Essay, Europe, Factory, Glazed façade, Greenhouse, History, Horizontal experience, Industrial context, Landmark, Landscape, Machine, Madrid, Post-industrial Landscape, Theory, Vegetation

Few concepts have undergone an inflation of meaning as spectacular as that of the picturesque. For the writers of treatises in the Renaissance and the Baroque, the picturesque merely referred to what was worth painting; the definition was so broad – and ultimately useless – that it would have been lost to history had Joseph Addison not freed it from irrelevance at the beginning of the 18th century by turning it into something different: a novel object that produces a pleasant surprise and which, precisely for that reason, is “appealing”.