Geoffrey Jellicoe has long been regarded internationally as the pre-eminent landscape architect of our time. The recipient of many honors, including a knighthood, he now ranks among the century's leading artists in any medium. His working career spans more than six decades, and embraces a truly staggering variety of landscapes and gardens. Project by project, this authoritative monograph examines the definitive canon of Jellicoe's work.
Divided into three major sections, the book chronicles Jellicoe's progress towards his remarkable late flowering after 1964, when he finally freed himself from the demands of running a formal practice to concentrate on developing his own unique vision and philosophy of man's relationship to his environment. The author's introduction provides an invaluable guide to the underlying vocabulary and idioms of Jellicoe's work: water, viewpoints, axes, paths, routes, groves, landmarks, secret gardens, elevation and gradation. Over fifty projects, both planned and fully realized, are described in detail, often with a preamble by the author, followed by Jellicoe's own comments, either drawn from his own unpublished papers or from his classic texts on landscape design.
The projects include his masterworks: Shute House, Sutton Place, the Moody Gardens and the Atlanta Historical Gardens. Several complete designs have been specially photographed by Hugh Palmer to show the development of Geoffrey Jellicoe's work over years of growth and change, notably at Ditchley, St. Paul's Walden Bury and Shute. Where available, Geoffrey Jellicoe's own plans have been reprinted in full color, some on 6-page foldouts; many of these have never been reproduced in book form before.
Michael Spens has enjoyed the benefit of considerable assistance from Geoffrey Jellicoe, whose own contribution to the book has been substantial. As a survey of the work of the century's foremost landscape architect, this volume is as important a contribution to the literature of landscape and garden design as his own The Landscape of Man, also published by Thames and Hudson.
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