Beauty alone didn’t suffice, it needed to include the awe, the greatness – even the terror – inspired by the scale of the world. But what made a landscape picturesque? In his essay ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’, John Ruskin defined the picturesque as ‘parasitical sublimity’. This new way of considering nature became predominant in the landscape painting of the time and gave rise to the word picturesque: fit to become the subject of a painting.ĭuring the following Romantic era, the picturesque became the paradigm of nature. Many of the terms that we use to describe a vista – splendid, beautiful, sublime – were used during this period to indicate a sense of aesthetics that defied the Enlightenment’s conceptions of harmony, regularity, and symmetry. At the time, the leisured classes showed a growing interest in the countryside as an escape to the rapid social changes occurring in the cities. All these factors resulted in the landscape of heathlands and chimneys that would later help consolidate Cornwall’s position as a leading tourist destination.ĪONBs, which along with other types of protected areas cover 28 per cent of the UK, need to be understood within the larger context of the British landscape tradition whose origins date back to the 18th century. We learnt about the intense mining that hollowed the land, polluted the waters, and fed the people before disappearing. We learnt about the implacable ocean winds that made the exposed uplands infertile, and the resulting concentration of the population along the sheltered valleys and porths. We learnt about the flushes of plutonic magma that gave Cornwall its once plentiful ores and its still mighty granite cliffs fending off the Celtic Sea. Working in St Agnes, Cornwall, gave us the opportunity to study a new territory, and understanding the forces – natural and human – that had shaped the site was paramount. Ian Chalk Architects’ area of influence didn’t extend beyond London. But had we stood at the same location a hundred years earlier, we would have witnessed something completely different: dead mud, toxic debris – the entrails of an open-pit mine. We reached a point overlooking a mist-matted valley. We walked around the site, scrambling uphill, under the drizzle and the trees, silent to the imposing landscape. It was a chilly November morning, and a damp sea breeze soaked the dead leaves on the ground. The first time we went to Hillside, we’d been instructed to design a sea-facing dwelling on the Cornish north coast.
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