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"Where can we practice a mindful way of
dealing with the world better and more directly than in its microcosm, the
garden?" The Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast reveals already in this
rhetorical question why he designs private gardens and gardens near public
buildings, despite much success with large-scale work. In fact, by addressing the
elemental concerns of his profession, he seems to bring his ideas into focus for
projects in the public realm.
Normally Kienast's private gardens are
not publicly accessible and by now some locations even have to remain a secret
since a regular architecture tourism had begun after initial publications of
Kienast's designs in professional journals. Word spreads quickly across Europe
when a garden designed by a landscape architect moves beyond the conventional and
displays architectural and artistic peculiarities. With its survey of 22 garden
creations, Kienast-Gardens offers therefore the possibility to inhabit these
private gardens through texts, images and plans.
This book is impressive not only
vis-à-vis the projects it introduces but also in their presentation. All gardens
are illustrated with duo tone photographs. Although this reduces color
differentiation, it allows the experienced eye to discern the characteristics of
the designs all the better in the gray gradations. Christian Vogt is a renowned
photographer who has perfected the difficult art of garden photography.
It is essentially through these
photographs that architecture comes into relief within the idea of garden
architecture. Vogt's images show what Kienast intends: to bring together the
precise utilization of garden elements, function, form and statement, and to tell
stories.
"Designing gardens means experiencing
stories. Stories may have an end, while gardens are never completed. In this
sense, our garden stories - at least the good ones - don't have an end, but new
chapters are always being added to them."
This quotation from the book
represents a central position in the work of Kienast and his partners. For
Kienast, garden architecture is without doubt linked to current events, and is
mindful of art and science, film and video, music, literature and philosophy.
"Part of the crisis in recent garden architecture is based on the fact that we
are so terribly purposeful and leave the question of reason, and sense to the
proven care of the old philology," says Kienast. For that reason, gardens and
parks should tell new stories, for gardens are not only places of the past but
also the future.
"History, however, is a two-sided
word. It describes the events and reports of what happened to the location, at
the location, and it describes what the location communicates and what one tells
about it. One cannot be separated from the other. History is always a telling,
reporting language" writes garden historian Brigitte Wormbs in her introductory
essay to Kienast's work.
The gardens are presented
chronologically and one soon realizes that the landscape architect retreats more
and more, not to be a minimalist but to approach a certain determination and
precision. The designed space, rather than the desire of the garden artist to
immortalize himself with an original design, is fore-grounded. "We do not have to
produce chaos, because it emerges on its own; the exterior space, however, must
be a sensual place," says Kienast, who is a learned gardener and thus knows
plants and their characteristics precisely. He uses the diversity of the plant
world, yet adopts in each garden design only a small spectrum: "We like both
local and foreign elements, trimmed and wild growth, and less as well as more." |
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Even landscape architects would have
to refresh their horticultural knowledge in order to explore the full potential
of living plants, as he explained in an interview with Topos, the European
magazine for landscape architecture: initially, reduction draws from everything,
then makes a selection. If, in the beginning, there is already little, one would
not call it reduction, but poverty. Here Kienast criticizes also his professional
colleagues who would rather minimize the spiritual content than reduce the
elements. This would become evident if they attempted to elaborate on their
initial design ideas but instead would only show a lack of content and
speechlessness. Kienast: "I think that landscape architects have not noticed that
they should reflect on design."
Kienast is surely one of the few
German-speaking landscape architecture professors who comment without reservation
on the profession and on questions of design. He ranks among the few major
protagonists in contemporary garden art who are searching for an independent
design language without blindly following trends in their search for a personal
style. Kienast was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1945, studied landscape
planning at Kassel University in Germany and graduated with a doctoral
dissertation on botanical sociology in 1978. Since 1979, he has had his own
office partnership, became a professor in Rapperswil (Switzerland) and then in
Karlsruhe (Germany) before taking a position at the Swiss Technical University in
Zurich. Kienast's collaborations with noted architects are just as well known and
successful as his participation in major competitions, both as prize winner and
jury member. His office has completed projects in Berlin and Hannover and is
currently working in London - in collaboration with the architects Herzog & de
Meuron - on the expansion of the Tate Gallery.
Keinast-Gardens is dedicated, however,
exclusively to private gardens which are a mainstay of Kienast, who was raised in
a gardener's family and who started on the terrain of a nursery in the
Thujastrasse, his autobiographic garden. This is the first garden described in
the book. The garden changes constantly and displays a pluralist style that
refers more to time than to space. Large cut animal topiaries recall his
childhood and are known and copied internationally as a symbol for the Kienast
garden. Here, as well as in other gardens, a design principle of the garden
artist becomes evident: inconsistencies and contradictions are not only
tolerated, but intended. Thesis and antithesis are not to be effaced, but raised
to a principle. They are to be clearly readable and recognizable in his gardens.
In this context, "reading" can also be taken literally, since physical writing is
evident in some of the newer garden designs. "Et in arcadia ego" states in large
concrete letters a balustrade symbolically in a Swiss garden. A garden in
southern Germany is adorned with the sentence "Ogni pensiero vola", a reference
to the sacro bosco of Bomarzo. But here the writing appears monumentally, in the
old wording but with a new form and function, in a new material. The elements
admit associations, interpretations and explanations.
Many of the presented gardens seem
meaningful, in search of interpretation and, in addition, the texts attempt to
elaborate on the actual site conditions as well as the poetic and architectural
meaning of the design. However, following Kienast's own words in the preface, we
should not forget - in the face of all earthly gravity that defines our
actions - that the garden is first, and above all, a place of festivity, of an
overladen sense of delight. "In the garden, beyond academic mediation, ecological
meaning, subtle place interpretation and artistic potency, we experience the
pleasures of life, great and small, more intensively."
Not every viewer may succeed in
relocating this intensity in the presented gardens, since the excellent
photographs radiate also a professional coolness. As is typical for architectural
books, not one person is visible in the photographs. Empty chairs, raked gravel
paths, no playground tools, no gardening tools, no animals. Now and then one is
almost startled by fallen foliage lying on the lawn. Petty readers could also
admonish the fact that text and images were not linked properly in this volume,
which was quite long in the making. Nevertheless, it is an important contribution
to European garden design, far more than a mere project documentation of a
well-known landscape architect. Here are the beginnings of a definitive landscape
architectural design philosophy that retains, within all its rigor, a certain
playfulness.
Robert Schäfer, chief editor of
Garten + Landschaft (since 1975) and of Topos-European Landscape Magazine (since
1992).
Translation from the German by
Mikesch Mücke, assistant professor of architecture at Iowa State University.
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