By Harry Francis Mallgrave

A sweeping historical study, Building Paradise seeks to construct a garden ethic for the design arts. It is an ethic predicated on the idea that, with our recent ecological and biological insights, we can build more intelligently than the status quo of current design practices. The paradisiacal instinct is the motivation behind every artistic impulse. From its theological origins to the present, the idea of paradise-the garden as a place of peace, beauty, and happiness-has acquired numerous meanings. It was a motif expounded in the earliest cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, and it later became a dominant feature of Buddhist, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic practices.