The Imaginary Orient: Exotic Buildings of the 18th and 19th Centuries in Europe

In the eighteenth century the idea of the landscape garden spread all over Europe. At the same time the garden became the land of illusion: Chinese pagodas, Egyptian tombs and Turkish mosques, along with Gothic stables and Greek and Roman temples, formed a miniature world in which distance mingled with the past. The keen interest in a fairy-tale Orient was manifested also in architecture.

This "Orient", which could hardly be clearly defined geographically, was characterized by Islamic cultur...