The Architecture of Western Gardens

Edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot

The M.I.T. Press

$125.00

A similar conception brings together the 70 essays that make up the 550 pages of The Architecture of Western Gardens. The subject could easily lend itself to the production of a glorified coffee-table ornament, but Mosser and Teyssot have compiled a serious and dizzyingly erudite work that investigates both traditional areas of scholarly endeavor and more novel topics.

The conventional themes that the book very amply explores include the humanist gardens of renaissance Italy, Baroque and classical gardens and the English landscape garden. The more eccentric essays outline the relationship between garden history and cartography, and the phenomenon of the amusement park.

The essays in The Architecture of Western Gardens are arranged chronologically by five periods, but they do not form a comprehensive or even uniform history of garden design. Rather, they use a grape-shot technique to cover both general topics and specific examples. Recurring concerns in the essays include the uses of architecture in gardens in the form of fragments and folies and, especially, the visual representation of gardens.

Like Scully's book, this volume probes a vision of architectural and landscape design as an integral part of the humanities, and is preoccupied with the "reading" and interpretation of successive constructions of Paradise.

An articulation of the relationship between the city and the garden animates both books. Lionello Puppi's essay on "Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Garden" in Gardens argues that the Renaissance garden, which was defined as an imitation of nature in opposition to the city, developed into a venue for "artifice" of all kinds.

This parallels the developments in English landscape gardening in the 18th century, in which an ideal natural setting was created (including architectural fragments such as ersatz Greek temples and Gothic churches); this setting bears little resemblance to nature itself. The garden is, in fact, an environment just as artificial as the city.

In his chapter on the art of portraiture in the French classical garden, Scully shows how garden design and urban design are driven by similar ideological and cultural forces. He defines the gardens of Versailles as an instance of what he calls portraiture, the transferal of meaning to landscape. In the case of Versailles, this transferal involves the use of geometry to create a hierarchical and rational environment that mirrors both the social order and its head, the Sun-king.

This ideal extends beyond the realm of garden design to that of urban planning. Scully points out that gardens surround the chateau of Versailles on one side only; on the other lies the town, which is laid out according to a similar logic of hierarchy and rational order. Three avenues radiate out from the center of the chateau and seem to extend to the ends of the realm.

In the following chapters, Scully shows how the vision of rational order embodied at Versailles dominates the successive shaping of gardens and cities. In certain passages, he offers a searing critique of the way in which modern architecture, led by its high priest, Le Corbusier, subverts and dehumanizes this ideal.

Scully's message is compelling, especially to an urban audience that, he claims, has forgotten how to experience and appreciate the dynamic dialectic of nature and human creation in architecture. These books offer a powerful lesson in awareness--they speak of hints of Paradise Spun into the fabric of everyday life.