Landscape Architecture: Tower Garden (11.10.2005)

Our reading discussed the importance of landscape architecture’s ability to calm our constant desire for order. I understand that “Its human instinct to try to create perceptual order wherever we look, no matter how much disorder surrounds us” so

“walking into a setting shaped by a landscape architect has such a powerful effect. All the disarray has been filtered out for us. We suddenly glimpse what the world would look like if it were the work of a single hand, a single eye, a world created to please our emotions of place. It’s a gratifying—and often disorienting—sensation” (638).

The time I have spent in nature has proven this concept. I, however, think that society is still finding ways to make nature seem like it needs to be more orderly. This tendency can be found in the definition of a garden as “often preceded by some defining word, as flower-, fruit-, kitchen-, market-, strawberry-garden, etc” (640). Maybe it’s just my obsessive nature, but it seems like whenever I try to give something a specific name, I immediately start thinking about how everything relates to that name. For example, when I went to the Taniguchi Oriental Garden, I tried to connect every aspect of the landscape to the garden’s definition. But then again, maybe I’m just weird. Does anyone else feel this tendency? Does naming gardens make them less calming? Or are they just names with no real meaning?

Regardless, the necessity of nature is evident. Not worrying about order allows us to feel that “whether somebody says I don’t know how anything came to be or God made everything, they are simply pointing to a feeling of the mystery: of how everything is but nobody knows what it really is or how it came to be…If you will remember every day to feel the mystery and if you will remember to feel that you are more than what you look like and if you will remember to be a mystery itself then you will be happy every day, and all kinds of wonderful happenings will come up for you” (186). When we don’t try to look for order in our surroundings, we are able to view them in their entirety, removing ourselves from the situation and allowing the childhood sensation to overcome our bodies.