The spiritual heritage of western civilization is inscribed within the boundaries of the garden and the city. Eden and the New Jerusalem constitute visions of Paradise that are archetypes for the setting of everyday life from archaic Greece to twentieth-century America. In that each culture possesses its own "construction" of paradise, an examination of these (culture and construction) in parallel is the most rewarding premise for an exploration of human interaction with the visual environment.

This is precisely the premise that under-writes two important new books on architecture and garden design: Vincent Scully's Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, and a collection of essays edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot entitled The Architecture of Western Gardens. Both present a formidable facade to the reader. They presume an acquaintance with the vocabulary of the study of architecture (or at least the willingness to acquire one), and are quite expensive, even for "art books" ($40.00 and $135.00 respectively).

Even so, these books address major concerns and trace them over long periods, and thus warrant the attention of the interested specialist and the passionate amateur alike.

Vincent Scully, Professor of the history of art emeritus at Yale University and one of this century's most penetrating and influential writers on architecture, offers Architecture as an eloquent synopsis of a distinguished career. It covers the familiar terrain of the history of Western architecture (from the Pyramids of ancient Egypt to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C.), while incorporating a brief discussion of the architecture of pre-Colombian North America and the ancient Near East.

Nonetheless, Scully does not tread wearily through the book's itinerary (ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the Gothic cathedrals of France, Renaissance Florence, Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc...); rather, he takes to it with abandon, incorporating a sensitivity to the literary and cultural context that surrounds the buildings he studies, and using a sparkling rhetorical style that enlivens a subject liable to be wearied by either dense technical jargon or the purple prose of art speak.

Scully most effectively deploys his eloquence when he discusses single buildings and architectural ensembles. He illustrates the way in which the first-hand experience of a building, as he claims in the preface, is the only way to "see things as they are." In his description of the crossing of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Scully amplifies on this point:

Architecture: The Natural And the Manmade

By Vincent Scully

St. Martin's Press

$40. 00

"It can and must be experienced on the spot, if we permit the building to lead us, in terms of what it means, straight down the nave to stand at last in the crossing at heaven's gate. There, emphatically, we feel it rise up beyond matter around us. Our flesh is not denied, but transcended. We are in the center of an expanding universe. Then, in truth at the edge of vision, but well inside its limits, the great roses lift and spring in a harmony like that of the spheres."

Scully's analysis of the monuments of the built environment follows the logic announced in the title. He examines these constructions of Paradise as the intersection of the world of nature (as it is or as it is mentally represented by different cultures) with the second world built by human hands.

Before the Hellenic era, this relationship was one of imitation: The temples of Teotihuacan and the ziggurats of Ur are manmade surrogates for the natural "sacred mountain," the center of a spiritually charged vision of the natural world.

The temples of archaic Greece, however, engage nature rather than imitate it, and Scully traces this relationship through the successive periods that he discusses. He identifies a kind of engagement in which buildings and gardens articulate cultural and social ideas.

The Gothic cathedral presents an idea of the experience of divine transcendence, and the French classical garden presents a conception of the nature of social hierarchy and authority. Over the course of the book, Scully establishes a link between the matter of Paradise-creating and the ideas that lie behind.