I have read parts of this book by the Leiden art historian Caroline van Eck for my PhD research on material culture in architecture, and I kept picking it up because is so insightful, but also because it is written so elegantly. Each chapter is systematically set up but also refreshingly compact, and every paragraph formulates ideas you have read somewhere, but van Eck offers a different perspective and is able to lay new relations and thus creates refreshing insights.

The book traces the history of an idea. It focusses on the role of nature in nineteenth century architecture, as part of a question that I think is forever topical: how can we understand nature and in what ways can our relation to nature feed our architectural production? The nineteenth century, a period for a long time overshadowed by modernism, is brought to life as an exciting period where new nations asked to be represented, where scientific discoveries were translated into practice, where rational thinking and romantic thought fused into innovations that laid the ground for much of how we still think and design today. Van Eck’s tracing of long lines from classical thinking testifies to the many lives of cultural ideas, but also gives insights into how innovation originates from the existing.