Dramatic transitions for poetic spaces: notes on the potential of public walledgardens in cities

摘要

In between the lazy hum in his head and the gradual heating of the afternoon, Jan Vlerk began to wonder why the walls of the buildings were so thin, why more and more facades were billboards, and why the surfaces of roofs and walls, field-ground and faces of people, began to flow into each other. And became light of weight, and began to float slowly up and down, to hang above the earth like the smog city air of a winter's morning; untouchable. Nothing was familiar and he could no longer find his house.The implied pre-modern distinction between three types of nature was largely perpetuated in Western modernity. The dark 'wyldernesse' of the Middle Ages was (along with the Vices such as Hatred, Villainy and Avarice) kept out of third nature. The wall protected the garden inside. In the Renaissance, poets such as Petrarch (1304—1374) elevated the wilderness to the beautiful, albeit with a limited rhetoric to describe landscapes.Designed landscapes acknowledged the view beyond the garden borders. The garden wall could be breached. Although also celebrated as loci amoeni in literature, areas of untouched nature remained a background to field and garden. English picturesque landscape designers imitated this venerable background when third natures were created as simulacra of first nature. The garden wall was hidden in a ditch.