New England Diary

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‘Education ought to work outdoors’

On Mt. Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak.

— Photo by Famartin

View from the patio at the Robert Treat Paine estate, called Stonehurst, in Waltham, Mass. The estate, now a museum, was created through the collaboration of famed building architect Henry Hobson Richardson and celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

— Photo by NewtonCourt

“Whoever owns the real estate and its constituents , the explorer owns the landscape.’’

—- John R. Stilgoe (born 1949) , historian and photographer who is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University. This quote is from his book Outside Lies Magic

He says:

“Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea.’’

#landscape