Richard J Weller: A Grand Tour through the Anthropocene.

⁠In Episode 117 of A is for Architecture’s landscape architect Richard J Weller, discusses his beautiful book, To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century, published by Birkhauser this year. 

The book develops the historical practice of the Grand Tour – ‘an intellectual, cultural undertaking that was sort of a finishing school and an education for the aristocracy’ where, by travelling to the great sites of Antiquity, they would ‘buy art and take ideas and influences back home with them to England and model their gardens and their villas and their follies and their salons on the things that they had purchased and been influenced by’. Richard’s selection of 120 places ‘are emblematic of the contemporary global, planetary cultural conditions, [with text and drawings that delivers a ‘clear-eyed account of what these places are as a form of empirical evidence as to what we as a species have become in the Anthropocene.’

It's a fascinating book that touches on issues of aestheticization, the touristic gaze, virtuality and, possibly, a revived moral wanderlust.

Richard is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and Co-Founder, The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology.  

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick