[Feature: Viewing the City from Parks] Gardens as Art that Transcends "Boundaries"—"A Drop of Water in a Pond is Itself a Garden"

2021/06/07

Image: Parc de la Villette, Paris

I stroll along the forest paths and wooden bridges over the ponds in the park, then sit down on a bench in the green shade. Suddenly, a kangaroo comes walking leisurely from the other side. Soon after, a group of penguins appears from a side path and passes busily before my eyes. Of course, there is no need for surprise—they, like me, are beings enjoying a stroll.

The vivid scene of visiting the "zoo" in Basel, Switzerland, in early summer remains fresh in my memory. It was 1976. This was not a simple matter of an open-air approach that does not confine animals to cages. Nor was it a leisure facility for citizens. When I opened the guide in my hand on the bench, my eyes caught the description "Zoologischer Garten Basel" (Basel Zoological Garden) rather than "Zoo Basel." This place is, first and foremost, a "garden."

To categorize the phenomena of the world into the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, to observe and analyze each scientifically, and at the same time, to understand the world as a whole through the intellectual activities of the human realm that transcend them—having just begun my life as a student in a German university and specializing in art history and aesthetics, I was overwhelmed by the traditions of natural science and philosophy that form the foundation of European scholarship. On the other hand, I also had in mind Japanese zoos and gardens, which tend toward interest and entertainment. Here, however, kangaroos and penguins do not simply rest in the position of being objects of our observation. I cannot help but think that they, as they stroll, are also observing us humans.

A stroll is a physical act that breaks down the "boundary" between the privileged observer and the observed object. Perhaps it was because of such insight that Yukichi Fukuzawa emphasized the importance of walking.

The basis of art lies in the creation of images. By borrowing actual objects at hand, one creates a boundary and generates an absent spiritual value there—for example, try drawing a single horizontal line or a circle on a blank sheet of paper on a desk. Even if it is a faint pencil line, upper and lower, heaven and earth, or unity and surroundings, inside and outside, existence and nothingness—precisely order and chaos—appear on the desk. An image is born first from the setting of a boundary. At the same time, however, it cannot be an image unless it transcends that conventional expression. How an artist creates new boundaries in color, light and shadow, shape, sound, or physical movement, and how they shift, overturn, and leap beyond them, is what establishes the generative work of Cézanne, Rodin, Mahler, and Isadora Duncan.

Modern and contemporary art and culture have walked a path of struggle, seeking how to inherit and overcome the boundaries of tradition.

R. Steiner's "Goetheanum" (1928) and F. Gehry's "Vitra Design Museum" (1989) are close to Basel, but let us now head toward the "Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut" (1955) standing on the hill of Ronchamp in the Franche-Comté region of France. The architect Le Corbusier, focusing on the overall form as a Catholic pilgrimage chapel, embodied the creativity of providing an altar on the exterior eastern wall to enable outdoor Mass. The momentum of this wall and the volume of the chapel as a whole bless the "pilgrimage" up the hill.

However, looking back, regardless of time or place, religious architecture is a space that presents an absolute "boundary." This is because a transcendent world of a different dimension from everyday life actually exists there. In the first place, no one other than the believers who have faith in what lies beyond that "boundary" is even permitted to enter the architectural space. However, in the 20th century, rationalism overlooked this "boundary." Today, no one reproaches a "pilgrim of beauty" sitting on a pew for believers while browsing the world cultural heritage search app "Europeana" on a smartphone. Even in social spaces, "boundaries" fluctuate in this way.

Basel is an ancient city that produced Europe's greatest humanists; Erasmus lived there during the Renaissance. The zoo opened in 1874, the oldest in Switzerland. The university is near the zoo. It is impossible that the historian Burckhardt, the philosopher Nietzsche, or the psychologist Jung did not stroll through the grounds between classes.

They had no way of knowing the work of landscape architect Kurt Brägger, who remodeled it into a lush landscape garden (1954–1989), but there is no doubt that they sat on benches and fixed their gaze on the "boundary" between the human realm's intellectual roots and the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Such benches have also been provided in botanical gardens since ancient times.

Padua, Italy, is known for Giotto's "Scrovegni Chapel" frescoes (1305), which marked the dawn of early modern and modern painting, but in the study of garden history, no one fails to visit the city's "Botanical Garden (Orto Botanico)." Established in 1545 as an affiliate of the University of Padua, it became the world's first and oldest botanical garden and subsequently served as a model for all universities and research institutions across Europe. Padua is a city adjacent to Venice. This trading port on the Adriatic Sea was proficient in the navigation of exotic alien worlds—the "other countries and other people."

From its inception, the Padua Botanical Garden aimed for the collection and practical use of medicinal herbs not found in its own country and the establishment of systematic botany. Since greenhouses and cultivation gardens were also essential, it implemented the display and opening of formal flowerbeds and other features for public recognition and acceptance.

Here, while sitting on a bench during a stroll, we may confirm that the establishment of this botanical garden was a system based on "polarity" functions. That is, the interest in the exotic—exoticism—created a system consisting of polar functions: home country/foreign country, known/unknown, technical knowledge/theoretical knowledge, and cultivation/appreciation. In other words, exoticism also leads to the world of images where the "boundaries" of self/other, subject/object, production/reception, and presence/absence are a field of struggle—namely, the "judgment of taste" (Kant) called art.

Among these polarities, I would particularly like to note the function of "cultivation/appreciation" in botanical gardens. This is because this function has been cherished as a fundamental operation of gardens and also serves as the basis for modern urban parks and new garden issues.

Let us broaden our perspective to garden history. In ancient Roman life, houses often had a courtyard (peristylium) and a back garden (hortus). The courtyard was furnished with flowers, ornamental plants, and water basins, and murals with mythological themes were painted. It was a space that also played a social role and became a political space from the early modern period onward (yard, Hof). The back garden was a space for cultivating vegetables, fruits, and other edible and medicinal plants. The history of two gardens with different functions—practical "cultivation" and extra-ordinary "appreciation"—existing within a single residential space is extremely significant.

This polarity was inherited by palace gardens and urban spaces from the early modern period onward as the "pleasure garden (Lustgarten)" and the "utility garden (Nutzgarten)." In a single palace, a configuration might be adopted with a pleasure garden on the south side and a utility garden on the north side. The former signifies a place of "reception and appreciation," ranging from the viewing of flowerbeds and fountains to music and theater shows, dancing, parties, and recreational mazes, whereas the latter refers to "production and cultivation," such as vegetable gardens, cooking, medicinal herb cultivation, and natural history practices.

The German term for pleasure garden was once used by Martin Luther, implying a temptation toward non-everyday joy, meaning the "Garden of Earthly Delights" based on the Bible or the "amusement parks" that occasionally appeared in civic life. Eventually, from the 18th century, the "recreation garden (Erholungsgarten)" in today's nuance became widespread. However, I want to pay attention to that nuance. While utility refers to everyday creation, re-creation means the recovery of consciousness (erholen) toward a non-everyday place, a shift in consciousness—that is, the "re-creation" of an act. It is not simply diversion, leisure, or entertainment.

This brings to mind Bernard Tschumi's "Parc de la Villette" (1989) in modern Paris, which provocatively constructed a recreation garden. Indeed, the passage-like deconstruction—which denies the Vitruvian fundamentalism that is the norm of architecture, sets grids and other unique boundaries on a vast garden site, and features a clash of halls, museums, and shopping malls—forces a shift in consciousness upon the citizens strolling through the park: what is a garden? Because it is a park that demands an activity from Parisians that transcends the boundaries of appreciation and reception, there was criticism, but this stance is justified.

The "park," which appeared from the late 18th century, is a garden that possesses a wide landscape and accommodates the recreation of citizens. Since large parks available for public use existed even among palace gardens, parks and gardens do not differ in terms of operating the polar functional system mentioned earlier. However, in the critical situation of modern cities facing rapid expansion, the improvement of civic life is an urgent task. Amid demands for environmental maintenance and urban redevelopment, including greening, park planning forms the core. Paris prides itself as a leader in this regard.

However, when strolling through La Villette and paying attention to the setting of boundaries centered on the canals within the garden and the connection between urban living facilities and the botanical garden, one is reminded of the tradition of boundary-setting in traditional European botanical gardens and gardens. For example, let us take the "Château de Chantilly" in France. Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, commissioned the architect Le Nôtre to create a section with a hamlet (Hameau) in the English-style garden (1774). In the setting of canals and streams in the creation of the Hameau, one can recognize a shift in consciousness that fuses the boundaries of the opposing living worlds of the court and the rural village.

The fact that the experimental La Villette attempts a unique dialogue with the natural landscape is something that should be closely observed. In Japan, the term "landscape" was forced into misunderstanding because Shigetaka Shiga's translation "fukei" (scenery) took root after the Meiji era, but based on Chinese and Japanese traditions, "sansuikei" (mountain and water scenery) or "daichikei" (landform landscape) are more appropriate to the meaning. Today, the activities of garden designer and botanist Gilles Clément as a landscape architect in Paris continue to announce the modern significance of botanical gardens.

The etymology of garden (Garten, jardin) is indeed the Indo-European gher or ghortos and the Latin hortus, meaning a place or shape surrounded by hedges, walls, or forests. But the essence does not lie in a static shape or structure. Rather, what is important is the dynamic functional systematicity of dividing, creating boundaries, and further changing, shifting, and constantly remaking them.

The reason we emphasize the special concept of "polarity" is to capture the dynamics of the garden. A garden can be seen as a three-way kinetic permeation body created not only by the consciousness, will, and technique of the creator but also by the dynamism of the materials themselves—animals, plants, and the earth—and by the recipient who literally experiences the garden physically and re-creates it. To capture this dynamism even in a small way, one has no choice but to find dual structures that mutually posit opposites, such as stop/go or life/death—"polarity"—and to experience and describe the changes in state that occur there.

Goethe, from the morphology of animals and plants and the phenomenology of color perception, named these changes in state "metamorphosis." A work of art is a world that embodies metamorphosis, just as a block of marble is transformed into a statue of a goddess, but there is no other art that unfolds this transformation as much as a garden work.

From this somewhat complex discussion, we may return to the established theory of expression media in the clear field of fine arts and plastic arts.

Painting/Image — Sculpture — Craft/Design/Video — Architecture — Environmental Design — Garden

This series of expression media is a progression from two-dimensional flat paintings to three-dimensional solid spaces, then to socio-institutional spaces and natural/movement spaces, and finally to gardens that connect to the vital space-time of animals and plants. It is a traditional categorization based on spatiality and temporality, but there is no other comprehensive art that brings as much dynamism to the world of art as the "production/experience" of a garden.

The most noteworthy functions in zoological and botanical gardens are cultivation/appreciation and production/reception, and these functions became established in civil society as gardens in the 19th century. The "Jardin des Plantes" in Paris started from the Royal Medicinal Herb Garden of Louis XIII in the 17th century and welcomed the naturalist Buffon as its representative in 1739. The "Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew" in London was established in 1840 following the Royal Kew Gardens (1759). Lamarck, who discussed zoological philosophy and evolution (1809) as a founder of modern biology, conducted research at the Jardin des Plantes. In 19th-century London, the Zoological Society of London established a menagerie (1828) in Regent's Park for its members, and soon, under the society's name, the Zoological Garden (1847) opened its gates to civil society.

Yukichi Fukuzawa, who stayed in London in 1862, likely visited the garden and the newly established reptile house and aquarium (1853). In Fukuzawa's translated term "dobutsuen" (zoo), there is a vibrant sense of surprise and empathy toward a city where citizens can come into contact with the world's living creatures and their study.

Nevertheless, European gardens seem not to hesitate to ask further questions. It is a quiet question: what is material life, and where are the boundaries of minerals, rocks, the earth, and water? Other than zoos and botanical gardens, "mineral gardens" do not exist, except for actual mines or collections in "cabinets of curiosities." However, a garden is always also a garden of the earth (landscape) and minerals. Then, "what is water?"

I realized one day that "water" is a liquid "substance" that constantly changes its form, a variable "mineral." When Goethe (1749–1832) took up his post at the Weimar court, he first settled in "Park an der Ilm." He was granted a small garden pavilion in the park, which he seems to have liked. This man of letters later achieved great results in botanical and zoological research, and his achievements are noted by experts even today, but the beginning of such natural studies was mining and mineralogy. The Ilm River is a small stream, but its source is the Ilmenau mine about 50 kilometers upstream. Since there are also caves and tunnels in the canyon-like Ilm Park, if we stay in Weimar for a long time, we are taught by Goethe that the root of human life lies in the liquid "substance" in which earth and water are fused, in its metamorphosis.

This understanding can also be confirmed in another garden: the "Herrenhausen Gardens" (1665) in Hannover, Germany. Here, a parterre (ornamental flowerbed garden) is placed in front of a small palace, followed by an area with numerous ponds, and further south, a woodland belt unfolds. All are designs of a formal French-style garden, but we must walk through the garden carefully. Generally, when we hear "French-style garden," we tend to have a prejudice toward "belvedere" (viewpoint) ideology from the second-floor terrace of the palace, keeping in mind a perspectival production where the absolute power of the ruler extends to the end of the distant woodland belt and dominates the world. However, "Herrenhausen Palace" is not like that at all. The protagonist of this garden is the hydraulic expression created by the numerous geometric pond surfaces and fountains through clever water pipe placement in the middle-ground pond area.

This garden is said to have been designed by the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz (1646–1716). A passage in his main work, "Monadology," suddenly mentions "gardens" and "water."

Every portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every member of an animal, and every drop of its fluids is "also such a garden or such a pond."

This mathematician, unlike Descartes, rejects "I think, therefore I am." The stance where the spiritual subject distinguishes and "bounds" itself from the objective world is put in parentheses. Leibniz and Goethe grasped water, earth, and rocks as liquid substances and further regarded the polar functions of presence/absence as a circular movement. The part is the whole, and the whole is the part.

I will list two gardens that come to mind where such states of water can be confirmed in Japan.

They are old and new Japanese works that join water with rocks and beton. The garden of Bon-on-gan (circa 1314) at Eiho-ji Temple of the Rinzai sect in Tajimi City, Gifu Prefecture, which overlooks the Toki River and reminds one of a place for ascetic training. Also, the "D.T. Suzuki Museum" (Yoshio Taniguchi, 2011, photo) in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, thoroughly conveys the waves of transformation and connection of boundaries, such as body/liquid substance and language/nature.

In 1981, the social philosopher Habermas argued that modern society would accelerate specialization and compartmentalization—that is, boundary-making—to the extreme in the fields of science and technology, ethics and morality, and art and culture, falling into a crisis of fragmented diversification. This is the danger of strictly performing boundary-making, the exact opposite of a garden that transcends boundaries. It was a prophecy that hit the mark; in fact, even in the near future of cross-domain networks and urban redevelopment design, it is difficult to discern whether it is integration or fragmentation. If verification in line with Japanese culture and tradition is also indispensable, I would like to close the display and head to a garden.

Rereading Tachibana no Toshitsuna's "Sakuteiki" (11th century) on a garden bench is fine, but I still want to go for more strolls. Since space is limited, these are merely notes, but the following gardens will surely speak again of the spirit of re-creation that transcends boundaries.

First, "Murin-an" (1896) and "Tairyu-sanso" (1905) in Kyoto by Jihei Ogawa VII, who respected the Lake Biwa Canal. In the modern era, the "plant mimesis" seen in "Monet's Garden" (2000) in Kitagawa Village, Kochi Prefecture, modeled after the painter Monet's garden in Giverny. The double contingency of Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Enoura Observatory" (2017). And the "Former Second Faculty Building Small Garden" (1951) by Isamu Noguchi on the Mita Campus of this Juku.