De/framed visions: reading two collections of gardens at the Xi'an International Horticultural Exposition

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The preparation of this essay was enabled by a University of California, Berkeley Faculty Research Grant. Special thanks to Professor Xili Han of the University of Beijing. Notes 1. Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being (London: Vision Press Limited, 1956), p. 19. 2. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, ‘The word itself’, in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 5. Emphasis mine. 3. Ian Nairn, The American Landscape (Random House: New York, 1965), p. 10. 4. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), p. 277. 5. Karl Kullmann, ‘Postmodern transformations to the paradox of place’, in The Inaugural Australasian Landscape Architecture Design Workshop (Brisbane: QUT Press, 1996), p. 34. 6. George Seddon, Sense of Place (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1972). Christian Norberg-Shulz, Genius Loci (New York: Rizzoli, 1979). Jackson, ‘The word itself’. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 7. The design workshop was convened and sponsored by the University of Southern California American Academy in China. Henceforth, I use ‘Expo’ to refer specifically to the Xi'an Horticultural Expo, and ‘expo’ to refer to horticultural expos in general. 8. Bernard St-Denis, ‘Just what is a garden?’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 27/1, 2007, pp. 61–76. 9. Donald Appleyard, ‘Understanding professional media: issues, theory, and a research agenda’, in Irwin Altman and Joachim F. Wohlwill, eds, Human Behavior and Environment (New York: Plenum Press, 1977), p. 58. 10. For example, Kevin Lynch's urban imaging methodology has been critiqued for omitting the influence that media etc. exerts in extending imaging beyond the confines of the immediate visual and proprioceptive senses. See Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Lagopoulos, ‘Introduction’, in Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, eds, The City and the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 11. Robert B. Riley, ‘From sacred grove to Disney World: the search for garden meaning’, Landscape Journal, 7/2, 1988, pp. 136–147. 12. He Shanan, ‘Foreword’, in Donata Valentien and Christoph Valentien, eds, Shanghai: Neuer Botanischer Garten/New Botanic Garden (Berlin: Jovis, 2008). 13. Adriaan Geuze of West 8; Benedetta Tagliabue of EMBT; Catherine Mosbach of Mosbach Paysagistes; Eelco Hooftman of Gross.Max; Martin Rein-Cano of Topotek 1; Stig L. Andersson of SLA; Martha Schwartz of MSP; Wang Xiangrong of Atelier DYJG; and Vladimir Sitta of Terragram. 14. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, c. 1986), p. 25. 15. Martin Gardner, ‘Labyrinthian way’, The New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1975, p. 10. 16. Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 79. 17. Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 6. 18. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 185. 19. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 56. 20. Buckminster Fuller, ‘Fluid geography’, in The Buckminster Fuller Reader (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 143. 21. Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the virtual, building the insensible’, Architectural Design Profile, 133, 1998, pp. 16–24. 22. Gary Shapiro, Earthwards (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 91. 23. In Stephen Bann, introduction and translation, ‘The landscape approach of Bernard Lassus’, Journal of Garden History, 3/2, 1983, pp. 79–107. Bernard Lassus. The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 24. Stephen Bann, ‘From Captain Cook to Neil Armstrong: colonial exploration and the structure of landscape’, in, Simon Pugh, ed., Reading Landscape (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 225. 25. Riley, ‘From sacred grove to Disney World’, pp. 136–147. 26. In noting the ‘closure of the map’, Hakim Bey observed that the last patch of ‘untaken’ Earth was claimed by a nation-state in 1899, making the twentieth century the first without terra incognita. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1985), p. 100. 27. Bann, ‘The landscape approach of Bernard Lassus’. Lassus. The Landscape Approach. 28. Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 25. 29. Ibid., pp. 172–173. 30. Conceived as a design workshop entitled ‘Creative Nature’ by the University of Southern California American Academy in China, participating universities comprised: Peking University; University of Hong Kong; Feng Chia University; Columbia University; University of Toronto; University of California, Berkeley; the Architectural Association; and Universidad Torcuato de Tella. 31. Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny (London: Academy Editions, 1994), p. 18. 32. Phillip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 158. 33. Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, ‘The tentative constructed plan as intervening device’, Architecture and Urbanism, December, 1991, pp. 48–57. 34. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (New York: SoHo Press, c. 2011). 35. Massumi, ‘Sensing the virtual, building the insensible’, pp. 16–24. 36. Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, ‘Gifu — critical resemblance house and elliptical field’, Architectural Design Profile, 121, 1996, pp. 27–34. 37. Bernard Cache, Earth Moves (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 40. 38. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The garden of forking paths’, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962, translated from the Spanish, 1956). 39. Jane Gillette, ‘Can gardens mean?’, Landscape Journal, 24/1, 2005, pp. 85–97. See also John Dixon Hunt. The Afterlife of Gardens (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). 40. Marc Treib, ‘Must landscapes mean?: approaches to significance in recent landscape architecture’, Landscape Journal, 14/2, 1995, pp. 46–62. 41. Ibid. 42. Robert Smithson, ‘A sedimentation of the mind’, in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 90. 43. Bernard St-Denis, ‘Just what is a garden?’, pp. 61–76. 44. Peter Marcuse, ‘Walls of fear and walls of support’, in Nan Ellin, ed., Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), p. 103. 45. Donata Valentien and Christoph Valentien, ‘The Chenshan Botanic Garden in Shanghai’, in Donata Valentien and Christoph Valentien, eds, Shanghai: Neuer Botanischer Garten/New Botanic Garden (Berlin: Jovis, 2008), p. 39. 46. Rob Aben and Saskia de Wit, The Enclosed Garden (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999), p. 10. 47. John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 23. 48. Hunt, Greater Perfections, pp. 20 & 24. 49. Bianca Maria Rinaldi, The Chinese Garden (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011), p. 14. 50. Stanislaus Fung, ‘Here and there in Yuan Ye’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 19/1, 1999, pp. 36–45. 51. See Christophe Girot, ‘Towards a general theory of landscape’, in, Topos, 28, 1999, p. 33. 52. St-Denis, ‘Just what is a garden?’. St-Denis references John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), pp. 87–89. 53. Aben and de Wit, The Enclosed Garden, p. 10. John Dixon Hunt, ‘Introduction: the immediate garden and the larger landscape’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 19/1, 1999, pp. 3–6. 54. Kenneth Helphand, [untitled], in Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester Jr., eds, The Meaning of Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 104. 55. Xi'an World University Park (University of Southern California American Academy in China, unpublished design brief, 2009). 56. Rinaldi, The Chinese Garden, p. 12. 57. Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction: variations on a theme park’, in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. xii. 58. Cache, Earth Moves, p. 109. 59. See Aben and de Wit, The Enclosed Garden. 60. This is particularly true of the University Gardens that sought to amplify the ‘other’ senses; the question is whether the visual was restricted enough to allow the repressed senses to blossom. 61. Randolph T. Hester Jr., ‘Garden as metaphor for landscape architecture’, in Mark Francis and Hester, eds, Meanings of the Garden (Davis, CA: Center for Design Research, 1987). 62. In Bann, ‘The Landscape approach of Bernard Lassus’. 63. James Corner, ‘Ecology and landscape as agents of creativity’, in George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner, eds, Ecological Design and Planning (New York: Wiley, 1997), p. 82. Also referencing James Corner, ‘Landscape as question’, Landscape Journal, 11/2, 1992, p. 164. 64. Following J. B. Jackson's articulation of landscape as always culturally determined, Richard Ingersoll argued that landscape is framed more by the mind than physical obstacles. Richard Ingersoll, ‘Landscapegoat’, in Architecture of Fear, p. 254. 65. In the case of the Xi'an Expo, the organizing agency granted free entry to all Xi'an residents; an egalitarian decree to be sure, if indeed those of lower socioeconomic status could afford to take the leisure time off from the typical seven day working week. 66. Horace Walpole, History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (New York: Ursus Press, c. 1995), p. 43. As referenced in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of The Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 91 and p. 313. 67. See Valentien and Valentien, Shanghai: Neuer Botanischer Garten/New Botanic Garden. 68. John Prest, The Garden of Eden (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 92. 69. James Corner, ‘Botanical urbanism: a new project for the botanical garden at the University of Puerto Rico’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 25/2, 2005, pp. 123–143. 70. Shanan, ‘Foreword’. 71. Lassus asked whether our world has become the garden that modernity promised: ‘As the world has grown smaller, losing the immeasurable dimension of its landscapes which have submitted to the measurement of machines, techniques and apparatuses, it should have been transformed into a Garden of Delights or a Garden of Eden. But has it been?’ In Bann, ‘The Landscape approach of Bernard Lassus’. 72. Hui Zou, ‘Deep and distant ethics: the fictional approach in Chinese gardens and urbanism’, in Reconciling Poetics and Ethics in Architecture (Montreal: McGill University School of Architecture, 2007), available at: http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/theory/conference/papers/.