The opening chapters of Robert Harbison's first two books - Eccentric Spaces and Deliberate Regression - begin in the garden. This, of course, is in the proper tradition of the canonical text and is also, curiously, a good place for a book on the understanding of architecture. Gardens are treated in both as a losing battle against time, overgrowth or decay - existing always more vividly in the imagination of the designer than they ever do in fact. The business of the architect is presented as a lifelong game of cat-and-mouse with the masked and sinister figure of the Intentional Fallacy.
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