Assignment 1, Site Planning, Moonlit Garden

Assignment 1- Site Planning


I created a moonlit garden for a professor of music and violin a the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. These are my designs and image inspirations.

Site Plan- Moonlit garden

Pan's Labyrinth

Almost immediately upon reading John Hanson Mitchells piece from "The Wildest Place on Earth" I thought of the 2006 fantasy film by Guillermo Del Toro "Pan's Labyrinth". The story takes place after the Spanish Civil War and is shot mostly in the imagination of a young spanish girl and an overgrown labyrinth. Its a spectacular visual journey and I think speaks to what Mitchell was referring to when he talked about finding wilderness and adventure within the walls of a garden. In addition the prospect even greater wilderness and maybe even danger (!) in the surrounding landscape. I really enjoyed his analysis of the Renaissance garden when he said "Wildnerness or wild nature, was to the Renaissance mind a chaos that contained within it the essence of beauty, or possibility, which, with little human assistance, could be fully realized. The Italian garden was an abstraction of the cosmos, an image of a more perfect world." I really loved this statement and I tend to be drawn to a more wild, overgrown and unruly garden. I often wondered if this was my response to the sterile and boring American modern garden at every house and business but I also think its that constant yearning for adventure and fantasy that lures me to that design and approach.



I also think of the book the "Secret Garden" (Francis Hogson Burnett, 1910). The young girl at the center of the story finds a neglected and overgrown garden and grows to find refuge and healing in that same garden. The garden had been abandoned upon the death of the mistress of the house where she lives as an orphan and neglected little girl. The imagery of the unruly and unkempt garden in this story has an element of fear and death and embracing a place that is unconventionally beautiful. Perhaps the appeal of the garden in this story is finding beauty and refuge in something that is broken and overgrown but still holds on to the history of its days of being kept and tended.



I could sympathize with his approach to his own garden and when he says about his garden " I want it to look old. In fact, what i really want is a ruined garden, with fallen pillars, overgrown vines, and a mysterious past." Its the mystery that drives me and my affection for gardens of this type. This history and the unknown history of it is very seductive.
Additionally he talks about mazes and labyrinths and their representation in gardens and in history as a whole. Which led me to ask why as humans we seek a journey? The pilgrimage, the idea of finding the light at the end of the tunnel. What is it about the maze that makes us want to approach and seek the center, untangle and engulf ourselves in mystery and unknown? Or are we all seeking the answer to be at the center and the feeling of accomplishment and clarity when we navigate the labyrinth and reveal its meaning?

photo references:

http://2.media.tumblr.com/AXE04actIiu8wtn67Mb7Fk6Go1_500.jpg
http://img5.travelblog.org/Photos/27282/336108/f/2997882-The-Secret-Garden-0.jpg

Burle Marx

Question 1,

Both Laurie Olin and Peter Walker discuss the genius of Andre Le Notre. Simo and Walker say of him, via a discussion of Roberto Burle Marx, that he "...places objects on a plane not to glorify the object but to express the plane itself. And however enriched with patterning and planting the plane remains taut."

What is meant by this? Can you find examples in contemporary garden design or landscape architecture that express this?

I think Burle Marx using the landscape and the ground from which he built his art is a sort of metaphor for the constant struggle of man against nature, the man made sculpture on the natural plane of the ground. The landscape glorifies whatever is placed upon it and the beauty of the object built upon the plane is subject to the person viewing them. I think his art in his later years was also a response to the often overgrown and hard to manage landscapes that he created in his early years. The single object and the plane was a simple idea that exemplified the nature of landscapes and objects placed on them. He seems to use hostility in his art to show struggle. To me the single object on a landscape enhances the natural landscape more and shows the struggle between something that was not formed organically from the earth, such as a statue or wall in a garden, and the natural organic lay of the land. He was trying to call attention to the simple beauty of the land itself which I think is a beautiful approach. His simplification would make more of an impact on me than the density of his early work and to let the viewer see more clearly the inherent beauty and structure of the land that he was working with rather than it to be covered in dense vegetation. However I think the dense planting gardens of his early career was a direct translation of his view of the Brazilian landscape. It’s interesting to think about what might lay underneath all of that vegetation in the Amazon and to truly see the bare and naked landscape of South America. I could see how Marx could have progressed to minimalism from growing up surrounded by density and high growth. I think it was only natural for him to eventually reach a place where he was interested in glorifying the simplest of the land and its taut plane.

Nat Geo Manhatta Project

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/manhattan/miller-text

This is the link to the Nat Geo project if anyone finds two extra seconds to check it out. Its a beautiful project and the photo gallery is worth a glance and very relevant to our last project.