Читать книгу Connecticut Architecture - Christopher Wigren - Страница 10

Part One

SHAPING THE LANDSCAPE

All architecture begins with the land. Historically, the shape of the land determined where people settled, how they made their living, what materials they had to build with. In Connecticut, the fertile soils and open meadows of the Connecticut River Valley supported farming, while the swift-flowing streams of the Quinebaug-Shetucket and Naugatuck-Housatonic river systems powered mills and factories. Cities grew up on harbors or rivers at points where navigation was promising, and agricultural towns on hilltops away from the dangers of flooding or what settlers believed was unhealthy lowland air. At the same time, Connecticut builders haven’t merely built on the land. They altered the land itself to meet their needs and desires, to ease their work or give pleasure. They divided it into fields and towns, dammed streams and rivers, excavated hillsides, filled valleys, created parks and gardens: asserting, for better or worse, their mastery over their environment. But nature has ways of reasserting itself.