Temporary Gardens

Raffaella Sini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781317422143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

The last 30 years have seen a surge in temporary gardens. The flexibility and new challenges invested in non-permanent landscapes has made them a creative and stimulating testing ground for professionals and impromptu designers. Raffaella Sini examines the historical evolution of the genre, exploring theory, narratives, and strategies informing 80 temporary gardens built in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, and the United States.

Key topics include:

• temporary gardens in 1970s avant-garde art and 1980s public art;

• temporary gardens as opportunities to work with live processes, practice

inclusion, and explore concepts of social justice and ecology;

• temporary gardens to redefine the vocabulary of garden design; and

• temporary gardens in tactical urbanism.

The book comprehensively decodifies the full range of ephemeral gardens: uprooted, mobile, itinerant, movable, postmodern, installation, exhibited, conceptual, theme, pop-up, guerrilla, grassroots, meanwhile, interim, provisional, activist, community, and parklet.

Beyond physical duration, time-focused design in gardens affects the entire process of conceiving, building, experiencing, and managing green spaces; using short-term formats, anyone can invent, trial, and experiment in a condensed experience of landscape.

The temporary garden emerges as critical cultural ground for the discourse in landscape architecture, art, ephemeral urbanism, and in urban, landscape, and garden design. It is inspirational reading for designers and students alike.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/​9781315688770-1

The last 30 years have seen a surge in temporary gardens. The flexibility and new challenges involved in conceiving and building non-permanent landscapes have made them a creative and stimulating testing ground for professionals and impromptu designers.

The reasons for the rising popularity of temporary gardens in both privatized and public domains are to be found in a historical review that embraces this century and the last. The temporary garden has addressed social and cultural demands that were not being satisfied by other forms of designed landscapes. In doing so, the temporary garden has found itself entangled in situations other than those encountered by permanent gardens, manipulated by actors new to horticulture and built for objectives that not much share with the conventional domain of garden design.

Since the late 1980s and the 1990s, temporary gardens have been leading actors of garden festivals organized to revive the cultural and social significance of de-industrializing cities; in the guise of public artworks, they have redefined the language of garden design thanks to the creative endeavours of artists, designers, and landscape architects. While much has been written about these experimentations, there is a void of knowledge that encompasses periods that precede or follow them. Temporary gardens addressed food security in times of crisis during WWI and WWII. In the late 1960s, they were an expressive medium for artists participating in a global environmental movement that was questioning and subverting mankind’s disruptive relationship with the earth. Meanwhileparklets and other temporary landscapes were realized as interim recreational spaces by forward-thinking municipalities in search of inexpensive solutions to revitalize cities. Since 2000, ephemeral gardens have been alternative forms of temporary urbanism promoted by the public and private sectors or sprouting as bottom-up activism; colonizing the city, they transform public space into a collective and interactive playground.

So, why has the temporary garden flourished in such diverse places, answering divergent calls, and adopted by diverse agents in contrasting social and political situations? What are the temporary gardens’ defining traits, and how does the typology differ from permanent gardens and from other forms of ephemeral urbanism?

A part of this book examines temporary gardens as responses to broader changes in society, instruments that best seemed to address the challenges of a cultural and environmental-social global crisis that began in the second half of the last century.

The critique of temporary gardens has contextualized them in the discourse revolving around garden exhibits and their significance, or within the research and experimentation of certain groups of designers. Highly symbolic-metaphoric spaces, ‘postmodern gardens’, ‘installation gardens’, ‘exhibited gardens’, and ‘conceptual gardens’ are mostly evaluated on the basis of their underlying meaning, the messages or concepts these gardens are supposed to convey, and are praised for their contribution to a renaissance of the avant-garde in landscape design.

At the other extreme, ephemeral gardens have been homologated to contemporary practices that shape an alternative urbanism, in the wake of today’s growing conscience of instability and the increasing privatization of urban public space. ‘Pop-up gardens’, ‘guerrilla gardens’, ‘meanwhile’, ‘interim’, or ‘provisional’ gardens, ‘activist gardens’, ‘community gardens’, and ‘parklets’ are progressively colonizing cities. These grassroots or commissioned gardens are framed within the phenomenon of temporary urbanism and evaluated on the basis of their contribution to the social and cultural sustainability of cities; some literature studies the practices that revolve around the gardens’ construction, use, and management.

Some qualities abstracted from the garden and the attribute of temporariness make the ephemeral garden an extremely attractive and flexible medium, which answers to a variety of human needs and desires; the aim of this book is to decipher those qualities.

Temporary gardens are that experimental ground where designers can investigate and question ideas and practices that inform landscape, garden and urban design. This publication speculates that the transference from temporary gardens to permanent projects does not only rely on the features, materials and mediums that support the gardens. The processes that revolve around the garden’sconstruction and use, the strategies explored to craft the spatial and visual story of the garden are what seem transferable both in the teaching and in the profession of the landscape architect.

The information used to reconstruct the historical narrative and perform a design critique of temporary gardens has been sourced from an extensive literature review, while notions related to individual gardens have been provided by their designers (drawings, written narratives, and photographs). The literature review embraced a time lapse that stretches from the 1920s, when the exhibited garden first came into being, the post-WWII period till this day. By analysing and comparing temporary gardens, there is an attempt to understand differences and similarities and draw some generalizable data. Identifying traits that define temporary gardens helped in distinguishing them as a stand-alone genre.

Time-focused design is an essential factor that distinguishes the overarching typology of the temporary garden. The attribute of temporariness in gardens affects not merely their physical duration but the whole process of conceptualizing, building, experiencing, using, and managing the garden. To test this assumption, a number of 80 temporary gardens have been scrutinized. Core concepts related to the design critique were abstracted from the literature review and tested on selected case studies.

The temporary garden has been analysed and appreciated as an extension of design-based research. The outcomes of this enquiry may provide valuable knowledge to practitioners, educators, and students in landscape architecture and urban design, as well as members of public and private institutions in cities.

1.1 DEFINING THE OBJECT OF RESEARCH AND NAVIGATING THIS BOOK: METHODOLOGY AND RESOURCES

Temporary gardens are a worldwide trend; they seem to reflect ambitions and expectations that are not specifically connected to one place or nation, although they are predominantly a feature of affluent eastern and western economies. Similar ephemeral gardens appear in diverse cultural and political contexts. However, most of the conditions that encourage temporary activities, including gardens, are not global; the interest in temporariness seems to be a luxury afforded by cities that are part of the post-industrial economy (Bishop and Williams 2012). Temporary gardens’ affiliation to environmental, conceptual, and installation art in the 1970s, to public art since the 1980s, and recently to temporary urbanism, as well as their grounding on garden design and landscape design, whose themes encompass geographical boundaries, have determined their transnational status.

In defining the scopes, meanings, and perspectives of temporary gardens, it was decided that the phenomena were to be investigated in a historical timeline. This research unearths the gardens’ spatial design and its meanings, and highlights their double nature as design products and design processes; the study of the gardens’ eidetic content – their capacity to hold and express ideas, engaging people’s minds – and an investigation of the practices revolving around their conceptualization, making, and use, seeks to extend the history and theory of garden design as well as promote the use of the temporary garden as an object of design enquiry. For this purpose, a case study approach and a design critique were aligned to historiography. This meant synthesizing core concepts from the literature review, and then testing these assumptions on selected temporary gardens created across various years by several designers, artists, and landscape architects. Over 50 designers were contacted and provided drawings, texts, and images of their realized gardens. These include juried, commissioned, and exhibited gardens as well as publicly accessible and grassroots gardens.

Using three methodologies – historiography, a case study approach, and a design critique – this publication wants to make a relevant contribution to the history and theory of garden design, landscape design, public art, and temporary urbanism, and propose the temporary garden as an object of design-based research.

To define the object of enquiry, the research focused on the base typology: the garden, which is traditionally the place where mankind encounters and manipulates nature. Since the 1900, an extensive and diversified literature has documented the creative interactions between artists, designers, and several actors with nature, taking place in galleries, temporary events and festivals, and urban contexts. Such interactions take the shape of installations, performances, exhibits, pop-up events, urban agriculture, impromptu, and meanwhile green interventions in cities. However, albeit temporary, and dealing with nature, not all these phenomena can be regarded as gardens.

In broad terms, the garden is defined as ‘an enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables’ (Oxford Dictionary); ‘a piece of ground adjoining a house, used for growing flowers, fruit, or vegetables’ (Collins English Dictionary); or a ‘public place where flowers, trees, and other plants are grown for people to enjoy’ (Cambridge Dictionary). These terminologies seem quite consistent and restrictive in the purpose or meaning of gardens. They suggest the garden is a defined area (a space) that entails a proactive interaction of people with nature and has a practical purpose tied to vegetable and fruit production or, at the most, particularly when made for public use, a display and enjoyment of plants.

However, the garden’s purpose – cultivating plants – is not merely tied to mankind’s survival. The presence of ornamental plants supposes a higher, more spiritual purpose, which is tied to the construction of symbolic meanings and expression of beauty.

Traits common to all gardens are:

• Space: the garden is a defined, usually enclosed area.
• Scale and context: all gardens seem to have a physical or conceptual boundary that defines them as inner spaces. The garden might be considered as a smaller portion of a wider territory, which is its tangible and cultural context of reference.
• Activity/actors: in a garden, human intervention is apparent, and the garden is designed for a purpose.
• Scope: the garden involves cultivating/handling/manipulating/exhibiting and enjoying plants.

For the purpose of this publication, the specifics of the garden underlined above were synthesized into four traits: the temporary garden is a space, it is designed for a purpose, it contains plants, and it is short lived. These basic characteristics guided the selection of case studies. Based on those specifics, the research objective was to investigate the mutation of the conventional traits of the garden. What are the spatial logics that define the temporary garden? If the garden is a designated space, what is it associated with; what is its relationship to the site it dwells on? What are the practices, and who are the actors that revolve around the garden? Why has that garden been built, and what is its purpose? How does it express the actors’ interactions with nature?

A comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of the garden as an object of design enquiry is given by Mark Francis and Randolph Hester (1990), who argue that, traditionally, the garden has been examined as an idea, a place or an action, whereas the power of the garden lies in its ‘simultaneous existence as an idea, a place and an action’. Understanding simultaneously those aspects of the garden leads to a deeper and more holistic perspective on the meaning – or purpose – of the garden, its existence as complex spatial reality, and the processes that revolve around it.

The definition of ‘temporary’ is itself challenging, in consideration that, seen from a certain perspective, everything only exists for a definite lapse of time. Case studies have been selected on the basis of the intention of temporariness expressed by their promoters, designers, and users. For instance, several case studies are ‘meanwhile’ or ‘interim’, terms used in the debate on temporary urbanism, which denote uses that are provisional or in the wait for permanent solutions to take place. On the other hand, exhibited gardens are intrinsically temporary; they are not built in the wait for something else to take place.

A catalogue classification scheme (Deming and Swaffield 2011) has helped to articulate the definition of ‘temporary garden’. The catalogue is a collection of items identified and brought together based on some shared quality (for instance, typical properties, patterns, behaviours, or themes); the following step was to search for patterns that occurred, which afforded further insight in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The history of temporary gardens
• 3 Decoding temporary gardens
• 4 The temporary garden as testing ground for conceptual ideas
• 5 Temporary gardens in the city
• 6 Conclusions
• Index