GREAT GARDENS

A garden is…

"Oh I have wordy definitions of a garden, al right.  Lots of them.  I even like one– particularly the one about a garden’s being sculpture.  Not ordinary sculpture, of course,  Not the kind of sculpture that someone makes in a studio and then you walk around it and admire it from all the different angles, and mostly you have to think away everything else, to see what the sculpture had in mind.   I don’t mean that kind of sculpture.  A garden is much bigger.  Bigger in size, at least.  You can walk thru it.  You are inside something.  You have to feel you are inside something, even though you are out of doors, instead of being outside of something trying to think everything else away.  A garden is sculpture from any place you are in it, even while you are in motion, and there’s nothing outside that has to be thought away because that’s part of it too –just as you are." -James Rose,

Gardens Make Me Smile 1953

To paraphrase Rose -- the trouble is that even the best definition of a garden through a photograph, video or illustration is not the thing itself –  it is not the experience. 

James Rose w. design maquette, jamesrosecenter.org

Isamu Noguchi w. playground maquette, Isamu Noguchi Foundation

Isamu Noguchi has stated that “many landscapes are intentionally designed to communicate via a range of senses, which are absent when presented only two dimensionally. Does a two dimensional photo, illustration or painting capture the essence of a rose garden in June.

You can visualize it, but can you smell it?” 1. Philosopher David Hume writes that the sense of experience, the perception of space through our “visceral interaction with the world forms our ideas about it. Like other art forms landscapes don’t always carry literal messages, but can trigger sensations.”  

Experiences based upon two-dimensional representations do not tell us much about first hand experiences with three dimensional landscapes and the specific attributes of these experiences.

Many preference studies are based upon peoples experiences with two-dimensional pictures rather than experiences with actual landscapes, so they omit powerful dimensions of landscape experience, such as thermal comfort, smell sound, and tactile sensation.

Children experiencing Charles Jenck's Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Picassa.com)

Back to James Rose..

“A great garden is more like silence that like speech. It’s the luxury of not saying something.  It’s the “something” between the lines.”

1. Isamu Noguchi, A Study of Space, Ana Marie Torres. Monacelli Press, 2000

LANDSCAPE DESIGN AS SCULPTURE

“The importance of outdoor space I based upon the philosophy that residential site design is based upon the three-dimensional organization of space and not just the creation of two-dimensional patterns on the ground or the arrangement of plant materials among the base of a house.  Space is the entity where we live, work, and recreate.  Consequently all the site elements that make up the outdoor environent, such as plant material, pavements, walls, fences, and other structures, should be considered as the physical elements that define outdoor space.  A residential designer should think of design as the creation and organization of outdoor space and study how these components define and influence the character and mood of space.”

-

Norman Booth, Residential Landscape Architecture

"I like to think of gardens as sculpturing of space: a beginning, and a groping to another level of sculptural experience and use: a total sculpture space experience beyond individual sculptures. A man may enter such a space: it is in scale with him; it is real. An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space. Their function is illusionist. The size and shape of each element is entirely relative to all the others and the given space. What may be incomplete as sculptural entities are of significance to the whole." - Isamu Noguchi

Wade Cavanaugh + Stephen Nguyen's, "White Stag" in the Material World exhibition at MassMOCA.  

Am I surrounded by very mature English Oaks?

Following, in a very literal juxtoposition of two images, I've compared a site element (the use of plant material) with a sculptural installation. 

The hedge below is found in Regents Park, London.

Here is an

 Installation 

at the Camden Arts Center

 - 

"Continuous"

 by Anna Maria Maiolino 

**all photos Todd Haiman 2010

GARDENS AS SCULPTURE

On a trip to the New Museum several months back I encountered the sculpture of Urs Fisher. 

The physicality of these pseudo-organic large objects and voids I passed thru evoked images of a surreal garden with these masses of space representing the hanging limbs of trees, shrubs, man-cured hedges or topiary as positive spaces to the negative i passed through.

One begins to notice that Installation art is going some way towards re-integrating sculpture with its surroundings as sculptors have for years taking an interest in garden design.

Perhaps this finds its suggestion in japanese garden design with an emphasis on abstract compositional harmonies, rusticity,  borrowed views and  assymetrical configuration of design elements.  patterns and textures play their part as well.. a Shinto shrine exists as a space in nature.

However, It could be argued that "traditional" sculpture is considered three-dimensional, yet landscape design or gardens are more complex in that they have a fourth dimension... time. 

Perhaps there is a category, somewhere in-between the two disciples, where you place installation art, experimental gardens, etc., where  they truly merge?

Herbert Bayer

was perhaps one of the first to merge multiple visual disciplines.

The Marble Garden, 1955.  Slabs of unpolished white marble, found in a nearby quarry are arranged on a 38' square platform with interesting spacial relationships created due to shadows, shifting wind patterns and a fountain jet of water in the center. 

Bayer's influence is evidenced in successive modernists such as Ernst Cramer's "Poet's Garden".  Within a decade after this garden was exhibited at the 1959 garden Exposition in Zurich Switzerland it had a profound effect, maybe a "tipping point" on landscape designers and architects who then began incorporating landforms + earth sculptures into their body of work.