The Making of Place

Modern and Contemporary Gardens

John Dixon Hunt

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780235660
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Gardening is rich in tradition, and many gardens are explicitly designed to refer to or honor the past. But garden design is also rich in innovation, and in The Making of Place John Dixon Hunt explores the wide varieties of approaches, aesthetics, and achievements in garden design throughout the world today.The gardens Hunt explores offer surprising new ideas about how we can carve out a space for respite in nature. Taking readers to gardens public and private, busy and hidden away, to botanical gardens, small parks, university campuses, and vernacular gardens, Hunt showcases the differences between cultures and countries around the globe, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Australia. Richly illustrated, The Making of Place is sure to enchant and inspire even the most modest of home gardeners.

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION: TYPOLOGIES AND OUR IMPROVISATIONS

1 I was reminded of this useful term by Robert Williams’s review essay on Brown’s work, ‘Making Places: Garden Mastery and English Brown’, Journal of Garden History, III/4 (1983), pp. 382–5. However, the recent use of the phrase ‘place-making’ by Will Self, in an acerbic and satirical piece on real estate marketing, gives me pause: see Will Self, London Review of Books (18 July 2013), p. 34.

2 See ‘De la relation du terrain aux genres de jardins’, in Jean-Marie Morel, Théorie des Jardins, 2nd edn (1802), pp. 115ff. A later French attempt to make such classifications was by Edouard André, L’Art des Jardins: Traité général de la composition des parcs et jardins (1879), chap. 6.

3 Leberecht Migge, Die Gartenkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts, trans. and ed. David H. Haney (Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 184–8. See also Haney’s introduction, pp. 16–20, from which I quote.

4 As analysed in Anthony Vidler, ‘The Production of Types’, Oppositions, VIII (1987); and in Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp. 154ff.

5 Michael Leslie and John Dixon Hunt, eds, A Cultural History of Gardens, 6 vols (London, 2013) has a chapter on ‘Types of Gardens’ in each of the volumes for that cultural period. I am grateful to those authors for their detailed typologies; that on modern gardens is by Peter Jacobs, and his typology has been most useful in devising my own chapters here.

6 This point is made by Raffaella Fabiani-Giannetto in ‘Types of Gardens’, in A Cultural History of Gardens, ed. Leslie and Hunt, vol. III, p. 43.

7 The Internet, too, yields many organizations that can help individuals make gardens: the Garden Industry Manufacturer’s Association and Horticultural Trades Association, or the Federation of Garden & Leisure Manufacturers in the UK.

8 Bernard Lassus, Jardins imaginaires: Les habitants-paysagistes (Paris, 1977). Lassus examines popular gardens made by their owners.

9 These are the two examples offered by Bernard St-Denis in ‘Just What is a Garden?’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (SHGDL), XXVII (2007), pp. 61–76, upon whose enquiry I draw here in what follows.

10 Richard L. Hindle, ‘Stanley Hart White and the Question of “What is Modern?”’, SHGDL, XXXIII/3 (2013), p. 175.

11 Thomas C. Cooper, ed., The Roots of My Obsession: Thirty Great Gardeners Reveal Why They Garden (Portland, OR, 2012), p. 81.

12 Yve-Alain Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around “Clara-Clara”’, October, XXIX (1984) addresses this issue, but see specifically remarks on pp. 36, 44, 61.

13 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982). Berman’s following comment on modernism ‘as a struggle’ is on p. 6.

14 Christopher Tunnard identified ‘architectural plants’ in Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938), a term he borrowed from M. Correvon; earlier William Robinson had used the same term in Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris (London, 1869), when describing the planting of parks there.

15 Bernard Lassus, The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), p. 116.

16 I am grateful here for the discussion of this topic by David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–6, from whom I quote in this and the following paragraph, with my own italics.

17 Marc Treib, ed., Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 36–67; the axioms are listed on pp. 53–5. His Noguchi in Paris: The UNESCO Garden (San Francisco, CA, 2003) takes it for granted that this is modern, which his own design of both books endorses, which tends to confuse the arts of book-making and garden-making. See also his ‘Postulating a Post-modernist Landscape’, in Settings and Stray Paths: Writings on Landscapes and Gardens (London, 2005), pp. 206–19. For an incisive, short explanation of gardens in the modern mode see Peter Walker, ‘Classicism, Modernism, and Minimalism in the Landscape’, in Minimalist Gardens (Washington, DC, 1997), pp. 17–23.

18 His book was published in 1939 and again, with additions and deletions, in 1948. For a review of this important book see my Introduction to the reprint of the 1948 edition: Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (Philadelphia, PA, 2014).

19 Tunnard also wrote on ‘Modern Gardens for Modern Houses: Reflections on Current Trends in Landscape Design’, in the Bulletin of the Garden Club in September 1941, where he saw gardens as ‘stages’, with ‘every occupant a player’.

20 This French period is surveyed in Dorothée Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France (New Haven, CT, 1993). And a useful portfolio of photographic plates from the later 1937 International Exposition in Paris contains 48 photographic places of other modernists like the Belgian René Pechère or the Englishman Oliver Hill; see Jacques Gréber, Jardins modernes (Paris, 1937).

21 Most of these designers are discussed and illustrated in Treib’s ‘axioms’ in the book he edited, and they are generally well known. Porcinai has come into more prominence recently with a book on him by Milena Matteini, Pietro Porcinai e l’arte del paesaggio (Milan, 1991), and the collection of essays on his work, edited by Luigi Latini and Mariapia Cunico, Pietro Porcinai. Il progetto del paesaggio nel XX secolo (Venice, 2012). Cramer is the subject of Udo Weilacher, Visionary Gardens: Modern Landscapes by Ernst Cramer (Basel, 2001).

22 For these types, which are not taken up here, see John Dixon Hunt, A World of Gardens (London, 2012), chaps 15, 8, 16.

23 David Leatherbarrow has argued for the antecedents of such modernist landscape architecture as Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette – see Mark Cousins et al., eds, ‘Is Landscape Architecture?’, in Architectural Studies, 2 (Beijing, 2012), pp. 34–6; so too did Elizabeth Kathryn Meyer, ‘The Public Park as Avant-garde (Landscape) Architecture: A Comparative Interpretation of Two Parisian Parks, Parc de la Villette (1983–1990) and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (1864–1867)’, Landscape Journal, X/I (1991), pp. 16–26.

1 DOMESTIC AND GARDENERS’ GARDENS

1 Dennis McGlade and Laurie Olin, ‘Planting’, in A Cultural History of Gardens, vol. VI, ed. Michael Leslie and John Dixon Hunt (London, 2013).

2 Garrett Eckbo, The Art of Home Landscaping (New York, 1956) has a section on ‘Case Studies’, ‘carefully selected to illustrate typical problems’.

3 Quoted in an article in the New York Times (23 May 2014) about Crispin Odey who caused a fuss, in what the Guardian described as a ‘fowl extravagance’, by erecting a large neoclassical temple for his chickens in the West of England; see Rosemary Verey and Katherine Lambert, Secret Gardens: Revealed by their Owners (Boston, MA, 1994).

4 Published, suitably, by the Center for American Places, Christoper Grampp’s From Yard to Garden: The Domestication of America’s Home Grounds (Chicago, IL, 2008) traces the various paths to gardendom, with particular focus on California, where the author is a landscape architect; Candida Lycett Green and Christopher Sykes, The Front Garden (London, 1981) and Mary Riley Smith, The Front Garden (Boston, MA, 1991) celebrate the garden that presents itself to the public.

5 Peter Latz, ‘The Idea of Making Time Visible’, Topos, XXXIII (December 2000), p. 85.

6 This is illustrated in my A World of Gardens (London, 2012), fig. 56.

7 The writer is Jacopo Bonfadio, who at almost the same time as Bartolomeo Taegio and in identical words, identified this humanistic art of gardening: see the introduction to Bartolomeo Taegio, La Villa, ed. and trans. Thomas E. Beck (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), pp. 58ff.

8 Penelope Hobhouse describes her ‘obsession’ with garden-making in ‘A Garden of Happiness’, in The Roots of My Obsession: Thirty Great Gardeners Reveal Why They Garden, ed. Thomas C. Cooper ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: TYPOLOGIES AND OUR IMPROVISATIONS
• ONE DOMESTIC AND GARDENERS’ GARDENS
• TWO MASTERS’ GARDENS
• THREE GARDEN FESTIVALS AND EXHIBITION GARDENS
• FOUR VERNACULAR GARDENS
• FIVE PARKS
• SIX SMALL PARKS: POCKETS, LINEAR AND VERTICAL
• SEVEN CAMPUSES
• EIGHT MEMORIAL GARDENS
• NINE BOTANICAL GARDENS
• TEN SCULPTURE GARDENS
• ELEVEN DROSSCAPES
• TWELVE REINVENTED GARDENS
• THIRTEEN GARDENS ON PAPER
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX