192 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Form Relations 

 of Buildings 

 and Land- 

 scape Sur- 

 roundings 



may dominate a much larger landscape by being so placed, usually 

 on a height, that the views from them sweep the whole surrounding 

 country and that they themselves form the most important object in 

 the views to be obtained from anywhere in their vicinity. It was partly 

 the endeavor to assert this dominance over a large sweep of landscape 

 in the flat country of France and parts of England which brought 

 about the schemes of long allees and vistas like those at Fontainebleau, 

 Versailles, and Hampton Court. (See Drawing IX, opp. p. 78.) 



It goes without saying that a building as a unit in landscape must 

 bear a proper compositional relation in form and color and texture to 

 the other objects in the same scene.* We have already observed how 

 in a formal composition the other objects, even though they be such 

 things as trees, may be given formal shapes, or at least arranged in a 

 formal way. More commonly, the other objects in the scene will be 

 trees, hills, and so on, fundamentally different in form and particularly 

 in texture from the building. Pleasant form composition is however 

 no less possible in such a scene. To some extent the form of the build- 

 ing, even though it be the dominant form in the scene, indeed par- 

 ticularly in such a case, may be chosen to harmonize with the land- 

 scape composition. The form of a building crowning a broken and 

 aspiring hill may well be in itself, within architectural limits, irregular 

 and aspiring, and its upper part more so than its base, marking, as it 

 were, a culmination and concentration of the character of the whole 

 hill in its crowning architectural object. Perhaps the best known 

 example of this composition is Mont St. Michel. Similarly, for the 

 sake of harmony, a building in a great plain might be of a low simple 

 spreading form in which horizontal lines were dominant. It is emphati- 

 cally true, however, that harmony of this kind may be obtained at 

 too great sacrifice of other considerations. The low horizontal-lined 

 building on an aspiring hilltop for the sake of form contrast would 

 probably be a failure compositionally, but a tall tower dominating a 

 plain, either alone or, perhaps better, rising from a crouching, hori- 

 zontal-lined mass of buildings, would probably be a better thing in the 

 whole composition of the plain landscape than would the low buildings 

 without some such relieving feature : for example, the long low line of 



* Cf. Planting in Relation to Architectural Structures, Chapter IX, p. 186. 



