The New Pastoralism: Landscape into Architecture

The New Pastoralism is an exploration of a romantic ‘green’ and technological architecture that heals the traditional cut between the city dweller and nature. New, gently engaging architectures are arising that employ biomimetics, hydroponics, cybernetic feedback systems, micro ecologies and traditional construction methods with natural materials and vertical landscapes. These are used to create small, subtle, alive spaces that help remind us of our humanity. These soft constructions fulfil a hard–wired human desire to be connected to and delighted by nature. Unlike our ancestors’ romantic love of the dramatic power of landscape, these spaces offer a more gentle and artificially tamed nature of ‘pastoral’ delight. For centuries, Western culture looked to landscape and the pastoral in particular as a setting for the escapist desires to reconnect with the land and elements. More recently we looked to inner–city underbellies for the same romantic freedoms and wilderness. But these exotic desires are now evolving into more distilled and gentler experiences. The use of the skies, planting, water, wildlife and the seasons is becoming subtly incorporated into building layouts and onto building surfaces to offer a subtle new interface with our primordial desire to reconnect with nature

EditorIal 5 Helen Castle About the GUEST–EDITOR 6 Mark Titman Spotlight 8 Visual highlights of the issue Introduction 14 Dualism is Dead; Long Live the Pastoral Mark Titman Samuel Palmer and the Pastoral Vision 20 Colin Harrison The Golden Age: Between Wilderness and Utopia 26 Dominic Shepherd ‘You Can Touch But Do Not Read’: The ‘Future–Rustic’ Work of Kathryn Findlay 32 Mark Titman The Land of Scattered Seeds 40 John Puttick Wild City: MVRDV – Weaving Nature and the Urban 48 Marta Pozo Gil Surviving Versus Living: Nature and Nurture 56 May Leung Origin of Species 60 Michael Sorkin 68 Quit the Grey Limbo and Return to Paradise68 Matthew Cannon and Mascia Gianvanni Brave New Now 74 Liam Young Dirty Futures: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mother Nature 82 Geoff Ward The Persistence of the Pastoral 86 Nic Clear Landscape Utopianism: Information, Ecology and Generative Pastoralism 94 Gregory Marinic Digital Cottage Industries 100 Mike Aling iPastoral 106 Mark Morris Exist–Stencil 112 Jeffrey James Open Fields: The Next Rural Design Revolution 118 Alastair Parvin Next–Door Instructions 126 François Roche Pastoral Manoeuvres: Ecologies of City, Nature and Practice 134 Duncan Berntsen 138 counterpoint 138 Et in Arcadia ego Et in Arcadia est Kevin Rhowbotham Contributors 142