Introduction

Architecture and agriculture has existed ever since humans first developed skills to grow plants and raise animals for food and fiber. With these skills they became rooted in one place, started to live and work with nature and constructed shelters for themselves and their animals as protection from the elements and for storage. It began a new relationship between humans, animals, and the landscape. No longer having to constantly move around to forage for food, human settlement emerged out of this new way of life and architecture began. It is the architecture of agriculture that is the subject of this book along with its connections to rural design, rural land-uses, and rural landscapes – historically, today, and in the future.