building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

about very soon became a symbol of life on the frontier. These places came very
close to the definition of cultural landscapes given by the World Heritage
Committee of UNESCO. The great American spaces referred to ultimately represent
“the combined work of nature and of man” 3 rather well.
On the one hand, the nomadic landscapes of the Native Americans, on the other
“the machine in the garden” 4 , the modern technology of the means of
transportation, which burst into the wilderness, moving the border of civilization
forward a little more every day.
The most sophisticated American intellectuals believed this relationship between
man and nature was developed by giving life to the so‐called transcendentalist
movement, which was probably the most interesting and authentic philosophical
contribution to the definition of the concept of landscape in America.
A new conception of man matched a new vision of the world and nature, in other
words nature circumscribed a new model of the individual with precise artistic and
intellectual interests. As mentioned previously, it was not only the philosophers
who expressed their considerations, but also artists, men of letters, politicians and
landscape architects. Our interest is to all of them.
In this respect, it must be said that the most important study, the most precise
analysis ever made, on which this research is based, was the book by Leo Marx
entitled The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(1964), which somehow gravitated around the image of the painting by George
Innes, The Lackawanna Valley (1855), but which had the defect of not lingering on
the landscape/architectonic experiments and on the problem of the frontier,
dwelling at length instead on the literary and poetic aspects.
In the course of the following year, the large amount of research, which followed,
privileged instead the analysis of problems which were more strictly urban. The
historical studies by John William Reps on the birth of the American cities
represented the prevailing trend in the sixties and seventies of the last century
3 Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. UNESCO, World
Heritage Centre, Paris, 2005, p. 83
4 MARX Leo, The Machine in the Garden. Technology and Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1979 [first ed. 1964] (Italian translation La Macchina nel giardino. Tecnologia e
ideale pastorale in America. Roma, Edizioni Lavoro, 1987)
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