Abstract
This chapter uses the construct of the garden to explore the correspondences between physical topography and its mythology, reality and its transcription, in contained and uncontained landscapes. The text analyzes the articulate assemblage of the ancient landscape in the Bay of Naples stretching from the urban spaces and art apparatuses of the city of Pompeii, across the semi-wild terrains of the shore beyond its walls, and out into the atmosphere above the waters. Elaborating further, the text also articulates the reciprocal reflection of man-made and natural wefts and the confluence of history and autobiography in an atmospheric time proper of the Pompeian landscape. The text, then, discusses two alternative ideas of garden, the nature garden and the people’s garden, corresponding to a shift in ethos and two opposite ways of regarding nature in more general terms. The latter corresponds to man regarding nature as a provision of natural services, the former to considering man as an observer immersed in the natural ecosystem. The text, then, interprets the historical transition converting the hunting parks into metropolitan parks in the European capitals, going from game hunting to service providing, as a consolidation of the feudal structure of thought into the modernity. In conclusion, ethical alternatives to the unsustainable exploitation of natural services can replace the understanding of the world’s relational dynamics for the careless action of consumption of its resources.
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Notes
- 1.
The text was published in the magazine Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité in 1984, but presented as a conference with the title of Des espaces autres at the Centre d’Études architecturales in Paris in 1967. The reference here is to the English translation by J. Miskowiec.
- 2.
Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf’s idea of Cosmopolis also falls into such a type of heterotopian space (Edwards and Woolf 2003).
- 3.
As Ciarallo notes, in the De re rustica, a literary tradition of agricultural almanacs that remounts back to Hesiod’s eighth-century BC Works and Days is combined with a practical manual for Victorian ladies. On the other hand, Virgil, Columella’s contemporary, keeps his Georgics on a lyric key.
- 4.
About the nature-culture-nature series, see subchapter ‘Analogies by resemblance and proportion’ in Chap. 8 of this book.
- 5.
Paraphrased by the author from Gemini
- 6.
Paraphrased by the author.
- 7.
The Italian version of Tischbein’s letter reads: “Il padrone della nave ha fatto un lauto bottino: ha trovato danaro e merci in quantità, seterie, caffè, e inoltre dei ricchi gioielli, appartenenti a una giovane mora. Era interessante vedere la folla che a migliaia si spingeva sui canotti per vedere da vicino i prigionieri e specialmente la mora. Vi erano anche alcuni che avrebbero desiderato comprarla…”.
- 8.
Translation by the author.
- 9.
In a generalized panic, generated in truth by the clash between two institutional bodies and the reciprocal suspicion among the individuals that formed them, rather than by the conflict between two political factions, the Gironde prevails. The scheme is brought forth by means of indiscriminate massacres that replace the Reign of Terror with the equally bloody regime of the White Terror.
- 10.
Here, Koolhaas is quoting John Reps’ The Making of Urban America (Reps 1965, pp. 331–9). It is a multiple-indirect quotation, since Reps’ passage is, in turn, quoting Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’ project statement ‘Description of a Plan for the Improvement of the Central Park’, registered in the archives of the Commissioners of Central Park of 1858, as published in Frederick Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball’s book about Olmsted (Olmsted Jr. and Kimball 1928).
- 11.
Tubingen is, thus, as alternative to the industrial territory as to the man/nature divide advocated by the American system of National Parks for the preservation of nature.
- 12.
Founder of the Landscape Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania, McHarg’s work would be used as a founding platform for the landscape urbanist movement.
- 13.
Culturalist is, in fact, Schultze-Naumburg’s idea of man/nature symbiosis on which Tunnard elaborates: “anything manmade should be a harmonious part of the landscape”, aiming at the restoration of the original “symbiosis […] undone in the second half of the nineteenth century” by economic circumstances winning out the “understanding of nature’s beauty” (Tunnard 1978, pp. 119–20).
- 14.
The evolution of Berlin’s Tiergarten does not differ much from that of Hyde Park in London, created as Henry VIII’s hunting grounds in 1536. The early eighteenth-century geometric gardens of Kensington Palace were split in two parts with the introduction of the Serpentine River and Long Water by Henry Wise and Charles Bridgeman at the request of Queen Caroline in 1728. West lies the formal design of the Kensington Gardens, an Italian garden exhibiting a Dutch garden core, east is the metropolitan park in the service of the urbanites. Hyde Park, admired by the future Napoleon III in the years of his second exile, becomes the model for the implementation of the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vicennes in the frame of the urban renovation of Paris during the Second Empire.
- 15.
Landscape is identified with a provision of ecological services just like woman has been traditionally regarded by man as a provision of natural services. See, to this regard, the comparison between the male bachelor of Koolhaas’ Manhattanism with the female nomad of Ito’s Tokyoism in Chap. 2 of this book. Also see John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about female immanence (Berger 1972). Even today, nature is widely termed ecological services. Deleuze Guattari’s ‘becoming-woman’ and ‘becoming-animal’ processes advocate for a collective emancipation from this anthropocentric, and androcentric, movement of history across geography.
- 16.
See Fabre’s series Souvenirs Entomologiques. Étude sur l’instinct et les moeurs des insects, 1879–1909.
- 17.
See also Wilhelm Bölsche’s Die and Become of 1913.
- 18.
“For this reason, [Saint] Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there, and those who saw them could raise their minds to God, the Creator of such beauty” (Francis 2015, p. 11).
- 19.
In his essay accompanying the edition of von Humboldt’s Geography of Plants, Stephen Jackson gives a detailed description to the ‘Instruments Utilized in Developing the Tableau physique’ in comparison to those used by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure for scientific measurement during his explorations of the Alps a couple of decades before (Jackson 2009, pp. 221–6).
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Pasini, R. (2019). Gardens Grown Wild: In-Between Topography and Its Mythology. In: Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_6
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