Regulating Nature: How the function of a garden dictates its form

Gardens are a particularly interesting situation in the fabric of a city. Cities are entirely manmade environments designed to suit the needs of their populations. A garden is, in general, a natural or semi-natural spaces that acts as an addition to the city environment. This is a very different situation than the relationship that normally encountered when designing architecture (that of a building to a site). The level of human regulation that a garden is subject to is determined by the purpose that the garden is meant to serve. A garden may act as a foil for the city, as a way of recording the original environment of a space, as a relaxation area, or as a recreation area.

Alan Sonfist - Time Garden

The natural space of a garden punctuates the manmade city space. The relationship between the two spaces can say as much about the city as it does about the natural environment. This is accomplished through the tension created between the contrast of the two spaces (especially when a garden is not highly regulated). One great example of a highly unregulated garden is Alan Sonfist’s Time Garden which is located in New York City. This garden is a careful recreation of the natural flora that originally occupied the space that is now New York. This extreme break from the order of the city serves as a form of punctuation and as a living natural record.

Catherine Mosbach - Jardin Botanique Bordeaux - Plan

A garden can also record the natural environment in a slightly more ordered way. Catherine Mosbach’s Jardin Botanique Bordeaux, for example, presents the natural flora as one would present objects in a museum. She carefully compartmentalizes different vegetation and presents many different sorts of environments within a very confined space. Though form of presenting the natural environment is less authentic it also allows visitors to the space to gain a broader idea of what the space the city occupies would have actually been like.

Gardens are also often meant to serve the needs of the population of the city. Traditionally the purpose of gardens has been to provide a place for relaxation and respite from the city itself. Spaces designed for this purpose tend to be more structured that the previous examples because they, like the city itself, are designed largely to accommodate people. Gardens meant for the purpose of relaxation can be either private or public. Gardens that are private tend to contain more order because they typically occupy a smaller space and very often have walls which are a strict regulating feature.

Parc De Villette
Competition Entry -
Diagram of form generating layers

The final purpose a garden might serve is for the purposes of recreation. Often such gardens are the most highly ordered because they are meant to serve specific purposes other than simply providing a place to relax. Oma and Rem Koolhaas’s entry for the Parc de Villette competition in Paris is an extreme example of a garden as a regulated space. This garden is intended specifically as a space for activity. The design of the garden is entirely geometric and regulated by mathematical formulas and algorithms. It is essentially a structured space that includes some natural elements as opposed to a natural space with some structural elements. 

Modern Domestication of Nature

By Tyler Silvers

As cities become more and more dense with man-made constructions, the demand for creative allocation green spaces has risen substantially. Landscape architects are challenged to form space that speaks toward both the natural beauty of the site and cater to the human need for order and structure. In the process, however, modern urban landscapes seem to have lost much of what makes nature in itself a space that overflows with an unmatched splendor through the slow but steady domestication of nature in form.

Although beautiful, modern urban landscapes, such as Gabriel Guevrekian’s cubist garden at Villa Noailles, tend to cater more to the human need for structure rather than turning their focus on the natural forms and processes particular to the site before human occupation. With his cubist garden, Guevrekian seeks to form an elegant oasis for the occupants – with much success in this aspect. His use of formed concrete and subtle terraces lead the eye toward a central node while the triangular shape of the space plays on the perspective of the eye.  The design of the garden allows occupants to enjoy the elegance of the architect’s interpretation of the landscaped area. The garden focuses the viewer attention on just that – a highly domesticated space. Rather than enjoying the natural, native beauty in itself, occupants are enthralled with a diluted, stylized version of the architect’s vision for the site. On a grander scale, the effect designing more and more controlled environments creates an inaccurate representation of how “nature” truly defines itself; the interdependent ecosystems making up nature are lost in the folds of modern urban garden design.

Image Courtesy of stylepark.com

In order to reform the correct representation of nature in the minds of the general populace, designers have begun to look back to a time before the rise of urbanization. Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape, for example, offers a new form of urban landscape that takes root deep in the history of the particular site – Manhattan, New York. Sonfist’s green space is designed around the idea of bringing back the landscape that was once prominent in the area before the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17^th century. As noted by the New York Government Park Services, Sonfist conducted “extensive research” on the “botany, geology, and history” of the community and utilized native trees, shrubs, rocks, soil, and flowers to create a living memorial to the natural landscape that once dominated the area. The simple idea of the Time Landscape seems to have been well received in the surrounding community as people gathered to assist in the construction of and subsequent maintenance for the park. With his seemingly simple design, Sonfist provides an effective manner by which to reintroduce nature (in its true sense) into the context of the modern city.

Time Landscape: Past, Present, and Future

Painting by Paul Rodgers

As urbanization continues to rise and cities continue to advance, nature, in its true form, will continue to be diluted of purity. Perhaps one of the most effective manners by which to truly preserve natural form is to realize the loads of history below our feet.