ABSTRACT
Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness.
The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |51 pages
The place of melancholy
chapter |9 pages
Placing melancholy in landscape architecture
chapter |6 pages
Defining melancholy
chapter |5 pages
The Sublime, the Beautiful, the Picturesque … and the melancholy
chapter |7 pages
Aesthetics
chapter |4 pages
Emotion
chapter |8 pages
Ethics
chapter |10 pages
Empathy
part |120 pages
The places of melancholy