8

‘Delightful house’ is an expression used by Abbot Marc-Antoine Laugier in his Essai sur l’architecture (1753). It was inspired by a description given by Father Attiret, a Jesuit at the imperial court of China, of one of the structures which adorned the Garden of Perfect Brightness ( Yuanming Yuan) – a kind of Chinese equivalent of the Petit Trianon in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. In that era of European Enlightenment, there was a cross-fertilisation between the European tradition of the pastoral landscape, inherited from Ancient Greece, and that of the secluded landscape, which emerged from China via the gardens of the Anglo-Chinese style. Later on, under the additional influence of the American ‘little house on the prairie’, this movement would give rise to the 20th-century ideal of the detached suburban house and subsequently to the spread in rich countries of rural-style residential architecture, ushered in by the motorcar. This urban ideal of living in the closest possible vicinity to nature is essentially a quest for landscape. In tracing the history of the motivations behind it, we arrive at a very contemporary problem that demands a solution, since this quest for ‘nature’ (understood as landscape) results in the destruction of nature (understood as ecosystem).