Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book identifies the simultaneous and interdependent emergence of new art forms, each of them a creative and questioning response to empiricism's detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world: the picturesque landscape, the analytical history and the English novel, which its early advocates conceived as a fictional autobiography and characterised as a history not a story. It describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive centuries. It focuses on an enduring and evolving tradition from the picturesque and romanticism to modernism, which has the 'living' ruin as its emblem and model. In conceiving a design as both a history and a novel, the book places architecture and landscape at the centre of cultural and social production, and emphasises their ability to engage and stimulate ideas, values and emotions that influence and inform individuals and societies.