The Necropolis As Functional Landscape

Sadie Hough

[...] botanist, landscape designer and writer John Claudius Loudon envisaged the ideal cemetery as one in which 'architecture, beauty, scale, and style were not connected with aesthetics, but with fitness for function'. By the early nineteenth century the landscape garden had passed its Georgian heyday, commentators had begun to suggest that the pursuit of increasingly 'natural' designs had reached a dead end and Loudon called for a distinctive new approach. [...] Loudon was highly critical of early cemeteries in which he found the design indistinguishable from that of the pleasure ground, believing that in contrast they should create a mood of 'quiet repose', solemnity and grandeur; and that the specific combination of architecture and landscape borne of the functions of the cemetery should be instantly recognisable, never to be mistaken for either a public park or a country residence.

14.8 x 18.4cm, 12 pages, Risograph on paper, stapled

£3