green in urban spaces ii - hochschule anhalt fh · lecture prof. rainer schmidt 07/02/2007 green in...

lecture Prof. Rainer Schmidt 07/02/2007

Green in urban spaces II

the meaning of gardens

Prof. Rainer Schmidt – 22 October, 2010



„resource landscape“

The reasons for the shift of the scale are among other things the rapidly rising population as well as the

mechanization of all areas of life. Due to this the reckless exposure to our environment lead amongst

the cognizant far ranging threats to the basis of our existence like water, air and soil to even less

alarming destructions on hardly quantifiable resources, like the “resource landscape”.

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meaning of landscape

Landscape has as a collective term for all visual aspects of our natural environment primary an

aesthetic meaning. Thus it is not as vital as drinking water or the air we breathe but it coins our

conditions for living to a degree that is far more than visual. A destruction of this basis of existence has

to show the far ranging consequences that can hardly be estimated mainly because of their

psychological structure.

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meaning of gardens

Thus garden design can contribute more than just to beautify a wilted beauty with the methods of a

cosmetic surgeon. Not least in the past many meaningful works of garden design showed the whole

spectrum of human thought and feelings in an impressive way: the visual characteristic of a

“harmonically” and paradisiacally sensed nature and thus the delineation of a of a better world at the

same time. This potential of gardens as a mediator of an utopia or an alternative concept for the world

should be increasingly centered nowadays.

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meaning of gardens in different epochs

The tendency, to open the garden towards the landscape attests to the will of a carefree, amicable

relation to nature on the one side, but on the other side bears the germ of an exceeding destruction of

nature through a initiating or already existing supremacy over nature.

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That something like a amicable relation to nature was never considered, is clearly reflected by the all

styles underlying ideal of beauty: nature was normally considered as beautiful, when it was refined by

man. The opinions in the different epochs merely differed on the extend of the necessary intervention,

to create a beautiful garden design out of the raw nature:

While during the period of renaissance and baroque it was indispensable that the regulating hand of

the designer appeared ubiquitously in form of cut hedge-walls, straight, linear path systems and

elaborate precious plantings, during the period of the English landscape gardens it was the task of the

designer to act in the behind, to create as aesthetically assumed garden scenery. Landscapes that

emerged following those principles should appear like they were created by nature, but they contained

a high level of design ideas like every formal garden.

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In Europe this can be retraced by means of the ideals of garden design from the closed introverted

garden of the medieval times to the step wise opening in renaissance and baroque through terracing

and visual comprehension of the exterior landscape into the garden, over the ideal of beauty

resembled from nature in the case of the English landscape garden, up to the transfiguration of nature

we know from a lot of attempts in the 20th century.

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meaning of gardens

Gardens are paradises. Already the tale of the first beings, Adam and Eve is inseparable with the

description of garden Eden, the biblical paradise. So it is not astonishing, if gardens at all times

incorporate the thought of reobtaining a small piece of this lost paradise. That the visual characteristic

of this unifying thought had to be antithetic under the influence of the particular modern way of thinking

in the course of time is evident.

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meaning of gardens

A garden would be a contemporary continuation of this tradition if it allows the contact to nature that is

highly important for the human mind on the one side and shows nature as a factor depending on

multitude of anthropogenic necessities on the other side – from the human arbitrament up to

perceptional psychology.

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meaning of gardens

As the idea of a paradise incorporates the idea of a perfect, balanced relation between man and nature

and the assumptions how to imagine this perfect relation were directly coined by the particularly

predominating relation between man and nature, a change in this constellation must have a change in

the display of the projection as a consequence.

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green in urban spaces ii - hochschule anhalt fh · lecture prof. rainer schmidt 07/02/2007 green in...

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