Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape

Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award!

The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity.

Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.

Christine Macy has taught upper division survey courses in the history of modern architecture and in architectural theory and criticism for nine years. Sarah Bonnemaison has a doctorate in human geography and a professional degree in architecture. She has taught courses on tourism and landscape interpretation in art history and architecture departments in Canada and the United States.