The architect, historian and critic Peter Blundell Jones (1949–2016) considered architecture as an expansive field within the arts and humanities and social sciences that included landscape and urban studies. His focus within this built environment was firmly on people and place, which to him meant developing a comprehension of the broad human, material and social engagements with specific localities.
His favourite way to explore this human and environmental focus was through case studies of individual places, leading to a modus operandi to tackle the study of any place in a generous, rigorous and comprehensive manner that used the skills of related professions, of the sciences as well as of psychology and anthropology. Being able to adopt such interdisciplinarity determined the real value of his output, which was further enriched through the thick interpretation of placemaking in non-Western cultures.
This book, celebrating the East-West Studies in Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield co-founded by Peter Blundell Jones in 1995, presents 16 distinctive case studies in order to underline the relevance of his case study methodology and global legacy. It is intended to have relevance for a range of disciplines including the design ones of architecture, landscape and urban design and planning, as well as anthropology, history, geography and cultural studies.
Jan Woudstra is a landscape architect and historian who initially worked in private practice while teaching part-time at the Architectural Association in London. He has a PhD from the University of London entitled ‘Landscape for living: Garden theory and design of the Modern movement’. He joined the University of Sheffield as a full-time academic in 1995, where he collaborated with Peter Blundell Jones, writing a series of case studies on ‘Some Modernist houses and their gardens’, and co-founded the Centre for East-West Studies in Architecture and Landscape. He has published widely, with recent titles including The Politics of Street Trees (Routledge, 2022), edited with Camilla Allen, and Teaching Landscape History (Routledge, 2024), edited with David Jacques. He is currently working on a monograph on Robert Marnock, the ‘most successful landscape gardener’ of the nineteenth century.
Xiang Ren teaches and researches architectural history, theory and design at the University of Sheffield from 2018. Prior to that, he completed his MA and PhD under Peter Blundell Jones after years in design practice. He has regularly published case studies on place and heritage through vernacular, modernist and contemporary architecture of Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Nepal and the United Kingdom. He co-founded the architectural practice Studio Cloud with Jing Qiao in 2016, initiated the Peter Blundell Jones Library in 2021, and was the principal investigator of Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme Large Grant ‘Decoding Dong’ from 2023 to 2025.
