QI - Chinese Landscape Design

The Chinese word for landscape is “shanshui”, which literally means mountains and water.”

"Joys of the Fisherman", Wang Fu  1410

It is traditional to think of focal points in a landscape as statues, sculpture, topiary, buildings, follies, water features or plant specimens.  But what about topographic foci?

For centuries in Chinese landscape art, mountains (and water) were the emphasis in the landscape. And likewise this was also the emphasis in Chinese landscape design, whether in a large landscape or small garden design.

Rocks and boulders were and still are representative of these features. They provide the same or similar vertical emphasis that a statue, building or folly would, but with a more naturalistic “unbuilt” form.

They are not only foci, but also destination points along a journey. A strong contrast to the level or lower-lying ground plane.

Similarly a “bowl” which is an inversion or depression in the groundplane is at direct contrast with a mounded vertical feature.

In a depression, people are naturally and psychologically attracted to discover the mystery within and then ultimately ascend back up to higher ground.

"Palace of Nine Perfections", Yuan Jiang circa 1200 (scroll painting)

The Chinese word for landscape is “shanshui”, which literally means mountains and water.” In gardens, fantastic rocks represent the the rugged grandeur of the Chinese landscape and the great unyielding, solid, hard mountain ranges, the “yin” that contrast with the “yang’ –rivers and streams (soft, wet and cool, restorative qualities).

A wonderful exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of New York highlights these natural forms. Mountains and their symbolic equivalents which are boulders and rocks,.. serve as a primary source of inspiration in these antiquated Chinese gardens.

"Summer Mountains" Qu Ding  mid 11th century

"Elegant Gathering in the Apricot Garden", Xie Huan circa 1400

Ji Cheng's great work on garden design, the "Yuan Ye" or The Craft of Gardens, was originally published around 1631 and is the oldest surviving and perhaps earliest manual of landscape gardening in the Chinese tradition.

Ji Cheng’s text immediately wins the modern Western gardener’s admiration for its insistence on the need to adapt a garden’s designs and contents to its natural location. His western counterpart of thought, Alexander Pope, employed designers to consult the genius of the place. That is,.. landscape designs should always be adapted to the context in which they are located. It pays close attention to the selection of rocks and boulders as philosophical roots within the garden, therefore an inseparable part of the landscape.

“Rocks are not like plants or trees, once altered, they gain a new lease on life.”

“Pile up the rocks to emphasize the height, excavate the earth to increase the depth.”

Sydney Chinese Garden of Friendship, alextravelblog.com

Ji Cheng was a practicing garden designer in the first half of the 17th century. He designed gardens for several well-known individuals in the late Ming dynasty. It is believed that Ji Cheng’s clients supported the original publication of this book.

The Yuan ye offers no precise prescription for garden design, mostly practical advice and poetic visualization.  Ji Cheng states that “There is no definite way of making scenery, you know it is right when it stirs your emotions.” It is “qi” –-the pulsating breath of life that must be the result of the designer’s efforts.1  

(Most Chinese philosophical schools followed the same fundamental principle that everything in existence is composed of the same fundamental “qi” or breath.)   Ji Cheng speaks of taking advantage of "borrowed scenery", similarly screening out what is offensive.  He continues with suggestion of segregating space (garden rooms or compartmentalization), wall outlines, stone selection and much more.

In her preface to the translation of the Yuan Ye, Alison Hardie reiterates that Ji “emphasized the importance of basing the landscape design on the existing landscape, and uses poetic descriptions to build up an atmosphere which will inspire the would be designer to create a garden which can express the emotions he/she is experiencing.”

1. Landscape Design, A Cultural and Architectural History: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

HEDGES

The word "hedge" appears to stem from the Old English word "HEGG" which is believed to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon words ;

HAEG - hurdle 

HECG - territorial boundary dead or planted

HEGA - living border boundary 

1

Hedges are a bordering and design tool. They enclose and subdivide fields, orchards, yards, parks and gardens. They form vegetative edges, topographic spaces, garden rooms, gateways, screens, enclosures, foci and forms within the landscape.

The term Hedgerow used to refer to 2 hedges running side by side separated by a track or pathway. These hedgerows served 2 traditional purposes , that of being a barrier to livestock and as a means of marking out territory or property boundaries. The term however tends to be used these days to describe a hedge of shrubs and occasional trees that create a border between fields and gardens or to create a privacy wall for a homeowner.

An extreme privacy hedge

www.dicts.info/img/ud/hedge.jpg

It is believed that the Romans may have first planted hedges in Britain but most of the few ancient hedges date from Saxon times, making some of them 1000 years old. The Saxons organized ‘strip farming’ in which each community of people would have a field which was divided into strips separated by grass verges. Each strip was one furrow long (one furlong or 201 metres). People were given a number of strips to farm by the lord of the manor. This system changed in the late Middle Ages when landlords wanted to put boundaries around their property, so they enclosed their land with walls or hedges. Enclosure Acts in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed farmers to put more hedges round their fields and most of Britain’s 300, 000 miles or so of hedges date from this time.

“During the 16

th

and 17

th

centuries, dense hedgerow patterns provided shelter for persecuted Protestants in France and Holland to organize their clandestine religious meetings. During the WW II the dense bocage in Normandy caused the invading Allied forces much trouble in advancing to conquer the Nazi regime.”

2

In the past hawthorne (

Crataegus monogyna)

was the most popular choice for hedgerows in the ancient woodland for marking territory or as barriers to contain livestock. Nowadays hedges are commonly constructed of various plant and non-plant material for more ornamental purposes yet still as a privacy tool.  Boxwood, Privet, Beech, Cherry Laurel, Hedge Maple, Hornbeam, Holly and Yew are but a few of the more desirous plants used currently for hedges.

 Designer Luciano Giubbilei's masterful use of hedges at a Chelsea Flower Show garden in 2009

1. Hedgerows, Hedges and Verges of Britain and Ireland

2. Natural History Museum of Britain. www.nhm.ac.uk/index.html

*all photos copyright Todd Haiman unless otherwise noted

LOST LANDSCAPE

The Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley in New York State were the inspiration for a group of painters in the early to mid 1800’s - The Hudson River School.  It is through their eyes that we have a sense of that original landscape.  As development and climate change continue to change our landscape it is their depiction that we consider an accurate indication of that virginal world.

Sketching outdoors, these artists paid careful attention to the correct rendering of the minute details of the landscape, although they were not afraid to literally move mountains in order to create an effect that would fit their sense of the “Picturesque.”

While the great European landscape painters traditionally inspired them, the Hudson River artists, were in search of an art form that would allow them to express and celebrate that which set America apart from Europe. And they found it in the paintings that captured the grandeur of the American Landscape.

“Kindred Spirits” is perhaps one of the best known of these paintings.  The painting by Asher Durant, depicts his friend, the deceased painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a rocky ledge overlooking the Catskills

It is titled after a phrase in a Keats sonnet and has long been considered one of the finest examples of Hudson River School painting. It was commissioned by Jonathan Sturges, one of Durand's most important patrons, as a gift for Bryant, and it remained in the Bryant family until his daughter, Julia, donated it to the New York Public Library early in the 20th century. The painting’s idealized composition brings together several sites, including the Clove of the Catskills, Kaaterskill Falls and Fawn’s Leap, in a way that is not geographically possible.

The author Bill Bryson describes his affection for the painting....“It shows two men standing on a rock ledge in the Catskills in one of those sublime lost world settings that look as if they would take an expedition to reach, though the two figures in the painting are dressed, incongruously, as if for the office, in long coats and plump cravats.  Below them, in a shadowy chasm, a stream dashes through a jumble of boulders.  Beyond, glimpsed through a canopy of leaves, is a long view of gorgeously forbidding Blue Mountains. To right and left, jostling into frame, are disorderly ranks of trees, which immediately vanish into consuming darkness.  I can’t tell you how much I would like to step into that view. The scene is so manifestly untamed, so full of an impenetrable beyond, as to present a clearly foolhardy temptation.  You would die out there for sure -- shredded by a cougar or thudded with a tomahawk or just left to wander to a stumbling, confounding death.  You can see that at a glance.  But never mind.  Already you are studying the foreground for a way down the stream over the steep rocks and wondering if that notch ahead will get you through to the neighboring valley. Farewell, my friends. Destiny calls.  Don’t wait supper.”1

Bill Bryson continues to jest about the scene.  He questions how much artistic license these painters took with replicating the scenery --  “Who, after all, is going to struggle with an easel and campstool and box of paints to some difficult overlook, on a hot July afternoon, in a wilderness filled with danger, and NOT paint something exquisite and grand?”

This painting hung in New York Public Library for decades until several years ago, when desperately needing funding, the Library sold it at auction to Walmart heiress, Alice Walton for 35 million dollars to display at her new museum. 

New York art lovers reacted with outrage  seeing it as a civic landmark. “60 Minutes” TV Correspondent Morley Safer commented that the “grand inherent irony is that all that Wal-Mart money was gleaned from the systematic destruction of the very American landscape Ms. Walton so expensively celebrates.”

 Thomas Cole "Sunrise in the Catskill Mountains"

Frederick Church "Morning Looking East"

1. A Walk in the Woods: Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998

INSPIRED LANDSCAPE

The Marquis Rene-Louis de Girardin (1735–1808) was a French writer and designer of landscapes, who had inherited a significant fortune from his grandfather, the chief tax collector for Louis XIV. He saw several English landscape gardens during his travels in the early 1760s, and in 1766 settled at Ermonville in Oise, France, where he laid out his influential landscape garden.  He was strongly aware of the importance of associations in gardens, used to trigger memories, stimulate ideas, and create a narrative.

Girardin's textbook on gardening,

De la composition des paysages

(On the Composition of Landscapes) was published in 1777 and republished in 1805, under the name René Louis Gerardin. "Of the power of landscapes over our senses, and as a result upon our soul" was his pre-eminent view on the purpose of gardens.

"The composition of landscapes," he wrote, "can open the way to the renewal of the moral principles of the nation." He wrote in the last chapter, "...If you want to achieve true happiness, you must always seek the simplest means and the arrangements closest to those of nature, because only those are true and will have a long-lasting effect."

Girardin's garden at Ermonville stands as the most prominent example of a Rousseau-inspired garden. In his novel "La Nouvelle Helois" Rousseau imagined a perfect landscape, where people could be true to themselves. This imaginary garden became a model for French landscape gardens. Girardin made the park at Ermenonville a living illustration of Rousseau's ideas; making carefully constructed landscapes, like paintings, designed to invite the visitor to take long walks and to feel pure with simple emotions. The paths were designed to follow the hillside paths, climbing up and down, to give various views and perspectives, from the shadows of groves of trees which then extend into sunlight, meandering to let the viewer delight in the scene from different angles and light. Girardin said that gardens should be composed of a series of scenes, like paintings. Each designed to be seen from a different point of view and at different times of day to achieve an emotional effect. Some scenes should evoke solitude, others the pleasures of bucolic life, others the ideals of harmony and innocence. These scenes would be discovered by following a winding path through the garden, with a series of different views coming as surprises.

It is commonly known that his friend, Jean-Jacque Rousseau died on his estate in 1778, and was buried on the

Île des Peupliers

in the

Élysée

that Girardin had created. Surrounding Rousseau's cenotaph is a circle of poplar trees set upon a tiny island.  According to landscape historian Elizabeth Rogers, "Imitations of Rousseau

’

s gravesite became one of the great garden design flourishes of the late eighteenth century."

Isle of the Poplars/an homage to philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau

As an aside to these Rousseau-inspired landscapes, Christophe Girot* recounts an essay by French historian Michel Conan on the "static foundations of landscape scenography". He argues that the "art of the picturesque forwarded a static understanding of landscape where movement was absent, or not acknowledged. The picturesque landscape was experienced rather as a succession of immobile scenes as in the example of the romantic promenade of Ermonville.... the voyage through the landscape could only be understood as a succession of immobile scenes lending themselves to the memory and aesthetic interpretation."  Girot then asks us to review these spaces in-between the scenes of landscape beauty... "the black holes" and reconsider their value to us.

*"Vision in Motion: Representing Landscape in Time", The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 2006

**Map of Ermonville: 

Ermenonville : le parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau

TABULA RASA

The philosopher John Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” stated that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate ( “a scraped tablet” or “tabula rasa” as it is literally defined ) upon which experience imprints knowledge. Anotherwords, our entire resource of knowledge is gradually built up from experience or sensory perceptions of the outside world.

There is also the architectural or landscape “tabula rasa” modernist theory that everything must be original, arising from a clean slate.  This was advocated by Le Corbusier. Knock down the old, and in with the new.

In her excellent text on “Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture”, Catherine Dee states four reasons for the inappropriateness of the tabula rasa approach. With the tabula rasa approach there is an ignorance of sustainability, an absence of context, precedent and history to the site.  There is a lack of sensitivity to the ecological value of established vegetation and lastly, it ignores the uses and meaning of the site for the local people.

The question arises philosophically...Can you really begin anew without some evidence of the past? All things are created in context with the past. All creations come with a precedent, a history, which in some way influences the next recreation, generation or iteration.

In Ian Mcharg’s seminal text “Design with Nature”, he argued against the arrogant and destructive heritage of urban-industrial modernity, a style which he described as "Dominate and Destroy."  He sought to interweave the worlds of the human and the natural, and sought to more fully and intelligently design human environments in concert with the conditions of setting, climate and environment.

At Jacob Javits Plaza in Lower Manhattan is a public space that has evolved through four, now five iterations in the last thirty years. Originally an open plaza, Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" was installed and became a lightning rod in commissioning site-specific art.  After court-ordered removal, traditional benches and planters were installed until Martha Schwartz redesigned the space. While many praised it's design, others were radically opposed to it.  Now it is in the process of being demolished and Van Valkenburgh Associates design is currently under construction.  While all designs were site specific, could we consider the treatment of this landscape as “

tabula rasa?"

http://www.archidose.org/writings/javits.html

2012 design by MVV Associates, © MVVA

THE FATHER OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES

A. J. Downing (1815-1852) popularized landscape gardening among America’s growing middle and upper middle classes through his aesthetic sensibilities.  He wrote the first American treatise on landscape gardening -- A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America

(1841), which established him as a national authority on that subject and went through numerous editions (the last was printed in 1921).   Following British models, he categorized landscape design styles as “The Beautiful” (calm and serene) and “The Picturesque” (dramatic), with the style to be determined by the existing landscape context. He was the first great American exponent of the English or natural school of landscape gardening as opposed to the Italian, Dutch and French artificial schools.

He was an advocate for the creation of public parks in America and the health value of interaction with the natural world. He stood for the simple, natural, and permanent as opposed to the complex, artificial and ephemeral.

As editor of the Horticulturist and the country's leading practitioner and author, he promoted a national style of landscape gardening that broke away from European precedents and standards. Like other writers and artists, Downing responded to the intensifying demand in the nineteenth century for a recognizably American cultural expression.

Lindley's Horticulture by A.J. Downing. Originally published 1852. (Author's copy)

Believing that architecture, too, needed to conform to site character, he brought architect Calvert Vaux from England in 1850 to assist him in his practice, including the design of Matthew Vassar’s estate, “Springside”, at Poughkeepsie, NY. (Six years later, Vaux named his second child Downing Vaux in tribute to his mentor.) Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., a friend and colleague, was one of the many visitors whom Downing entertained at his villa on the Hudson River at Newburgh, NY. Downing’s influence is strongly reflected in the Olmsted and Vaux design for Central Park,

Downing spent his life in the spectacular natural setting of the Hudson River valley. Through his professional practice, travels, reading, and extensive correspondence, he gradually became aware of the individual and collective needs that he served. Landscape gardening, Downing came to feel, had to respect not only a client's desires and means, but also the nation's republican values of moderation, simplicity, and civic responsibility.

While influenced by European, especially British, writers Archibald Alison, Uvedale Price, Humphrey Repton and John Claudius Loudon) he recognized that America should not emulate European gardening styles.  First, Americans should make use of American material, hence his interest in all native American species.  Second, America, was not aristocratic and should celebrate it republicanism, hence his designs for middle class and a few lower class cottages and gardens in his architectural work.  He also understood that his country was young and still rapidly expanding and that horticulture could serve as a way to attach the white settlers to their new home.  Finally, he recognized two important developments in horticulture: the rise of scientific inquiries and the development of a class of professional landscape designers/gardeners who were artisans, not artists.

Recognized as the foremost U.S. landscape designer of his day, he was commissioned in 1851 to lay out the grounds for the Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian Institution. His death at 36 in a steamboat accident prevented him from seeing his plans to completion.

An urn at the Smithsonian Institution commemorates his work. (Images ©Smithsonian Institute)

Downing is imminently responsible for Central Park.  He called for and politicked for the creation of a great park in New York City worthy of the city.  If it were not for his untimely death he presumably would have been chosen to design Central Park.  Instead, his suddenly uncoupled partner Calvert Vaux would then join with Frederick Law Olmsted in the creation of countless notable landscapes.