AUC PHILOSOPHICA ET HISTORICA
AUC PHILOSOPHICA ET HISTORICA

AUC Philosophica et Historica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philosophica et Historica) is a multidisciplinary academic journal focused on the humanities with more than 50 years of tradition.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, and EBSCO.

AUC PHILOSOPHICA ET HISTORICA, Vol 2015 No 2 (2015), 25–38

Americký trávník jako cvičiště občanské ctnosti

[The American Lawn as a Training Ground for Civic Virtue]

Jan Hlávka

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24647055.2016.2
published online: 06. 06. 2016

abstract

This article seeks to refute the thesis of contemporary environmental criticism of the aesthetic origins of American lawn culture. In contrast to the prevailing view about the aesthetic autonomy of the perfect front lawn, the author traces the history of the concept back to the eighteenth-century philosophy of internal senses as reflected in the thought of Thomas Jefferson. The author seeks to demonstrate that in Jefferson’s processual conception of civic virtue (a foundation stone of democratic society), moral sense and the sense of beauty are entangled with the workings of cognitive capacities. Thus, the architectural and landscape designs of Jefferson (as well as of those of his successors, A. J. Downing, F. L. Olmsted, and F. S. Scott) perform an aesthetic, moral, educative, and, above all, political function. The ideas discovered in Jefferson’s work are followed throughout the nineteenth-century industrialization and the spread of suburban housing to the emerging of post-war residential colonies, imposing ‘lawn politics’ by means of legal and social pressures.

keywords: lawn; landscape design; Thomas Jefferson; Andrew Jackson Downing; environmental criticism


periodicity: 2 x per year
ISSN: 0567-8293
E-ISSN: 2464-7055

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