Landscape and Power in Vienna - Hardcover

Robert Rotenberg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801849616 ISBN 13: 9780801849619

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Each of the groups that has held political power in Vienna over the past three centuries has left its mark on the city's history, institutions, and architecture. In Landscape and Power in Vienna, Robert Rotenberg shows how such groups--monarchists and republicans, fascists and socialists--also influenced another, equally vital aspect of urban identity in this central European metropolis: the landscape. Working as both a historian and an ethnographer, Rotenberg examines the relationship among human experience, landscape design, and the ideas that design was meant to represent. Understanding this relationship, Rotenberg explains, makes it possible to examine a Viennese garden today and deduce the ideology of those who planted it.

From "Gardens of Order" and "Gardens of Liberty," to "Gardens of Reaction" and "Gardens of Renewal," the chapters of Landscape and Power in Vienna show how leaders and citizens shared ideas about landscape emerge in the kinds of gardens they produce. "Landscape itself is a language," Rotenberg concludes. "People learn the meanings of landscape in a city from the landscape itself."

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Rotenberg is professor of anthropology and director of the International Studies Program at DePaul University.

Review:

"An original, stimulating, and groundbreaking work. Its appeal will be wide and varied -- to historians, ethnographers, social scientists, and students of landscape architecture. What is particularly impressive is the combination of historical approach and contemporary analysis. In fact, it is one of the few books I have read that boldly and convincingly sets out to study gardens -- past, present, and future -- both for themselves and for their expression of a whole congeries of human motives." -- John Dixon Hunt, editor of Journal of Garden History

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0801849616
• ISBN 13: 9780801849619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 385