| This study introduces and examines the emergence of a coherent tradition of rustic architecture in eighteenth-century Great Britain. Rustic is defined here as those designs or motifs that represent self-conscious attempts to create an image of primitivism by employing materials and forms which appear to be only slightly manipulated by human skill, such as boulder masonry, bark-covered log columns, and branches, twigs and roots. Perhaps the most compelling quality of rustic design is the ambiguity that is derived from one thing masquerading as another, that is, the metamorphosis of nature into art. Whimsical and theatrical, grotesque, and unsettling, rustic buildings contradict the dominant historical construction of a century ruled by balance, refinement, and reason by engaging aspects of the psyche usually kept subdued.;The central thesis posits that rustic designs were the architectural embodiment of crucial debates that reevaluated the relationship between nature and humanity. Although most modern historians simply place rustic buildings within the theoretical conceit of the "primitive hut" promoted by the Abbe Laugier and others, the development of the rustic tradition is much more complex and intriguing. British society's dramatically shifting constructions of nature---that is, nature filtered through the lenses of religion, natural history, nationalism, British history, myth, philosophy, sexuality, privilege, and property---determined the development of the rustic tradition in British culture during the eighteenth century.;This dissertation is not comprehensive survey of all rustic buildings created in eighteenth-century Britain. Rather, each chapter focuses on selected buildings and themes (such as natural history, hermitages, and pattern books) that exemplify the expression of rustic taste in a given place and time. Relying on printed sources and manuscripts, such as guide books, diaries, sketchbooks, pattern books, and garden manuals, as well as visits to surviving sites, this study analyzes how structures represented the ethical and social postures of the culture that created them. |
