Accordingly, many of the Master’s gardens employed thematics associated with the labyrinth and the grotto; of hiding and revealing, of voyeurism, exotica, minutiae, and narrative . In the descriptions that follow, I roughly corral the nine Masters’ Gardens into three categories; labyrinths, rooms, and representative gardens. Using this draft rubric, I explore three Masters Gardens in detail, three at a more cursory level, and the remaining three in passing. My choices in this regard certainly reflect a hierarchy of my experiential and theoretical impressions of particular gardens.Of the labyrinthine-type gardens, the Maze Garden by Martha Schwartz Partners is the most overtly fabricated . Comprising a set of high walls incised transversely by equally spaced arched passages, the garden presents itself as an open labyrinth. In this regard the sensation of moving amongst the array of walls and apertures is reminiscent of Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial design, where the object is perhaps to test Walter Benjamin’s edict that we must have approached and left a place by all four cardinal directions to truly know it.But this effect is quickly subverted; firstly, the grove of willow trees that supplies a canopy over the garden is forever offered but seemingly never substantiated as the trees themselves remain evasively encapsulated within chambers between wall sets. Secondly, the alignments of the garden walls perform a cunning rotation which serves to subtly disorient the visitor and provide niches for actuating the third effect: self-reflection.
At the entrance to the labyrinth, a freestanding wall is clad on one side with dark mirrors. Like a magician showing the audience an empty hat before drawing out a rabbit,vertical grow rack these mirrors purport to be as they appear; a harmless arena for mass self-vanity.Moving into the walled matrix, we are habituated to more dark mirrors at the end of each elongated space. Further still, as the geometry rotates and tapers, mirrored chambers are increasingly encountered, some small, some large. One threshold further discloses a penultimate roofed cavern. Here, a grove of willows is finally revealed, albeit through deeply hued glass which serves to obfuscate the demarcation between the real and the represented. But this is not the final revelation, which is delivered as one follows the cavern around to the exit. From this privileged position of hindsight, we are placed behind the looking glass and discover that the mirrors throughout the garden are one-way glass. At the largest interfaces—attracted like moths to a lamp—entire groups of people gaze innocently at their reflections. In the smallest chambers, young couples make use of their mistakenly private niches and engage in intimate embraces, unaware of the public viewing gallery beyond the glass. As unwitting participants in a social experiment, visitors have been lured into carefully orchestrated traps using human vanity as bait.In this context, the disorienting walled maze and hall of mirrors trade light-heartedly in the excitement that we derive from ‘getting lost, of finding a way back, and ultimately a way out or to a goal’. However, mazes operate through turning pleasure seamlessly into confusion so beneath this playfulness lays a disturbing metaphor in the infernal prospect of there being no goal or exit. Within this context, the open labyrinth model upon which the Maze Garden is based reflects an increasingly complex contemporary life-path where we expect a maze to harbor choices, divergences and dead ends. In contrast—as if tracking a fatalistic passage through life—labyrinths were historically manifested more as a single route spiraling inward to a central goal and then back outward to reconnect with the point of origin. The Garden of Bridges by West 8 takes this motif of the single path and entangles it as a Gordian Knot . In the place of walls, the garden uses the same bamboo employed in the frame to inundate the site.
Into this dense forest is incised a single narrow trail, which continually twists and turns back, affording occasional glimpses of other people elsewhere on the same path. In instances where the path loops over itself, implanted bright red arching bridges enable grade-separated passage. When immersed in the bamboo everything is close at hand and body based; as Robert Harbison observes, we allow plants to confine us in ways that would be unpalatable in stone.Gaston Bachelard conveyed the sense of immensity that the forest imparts, noting that this bodily impression openly contradicts geographical reality. 18 Similarly, Yi-Fu Tuan concurs that even if small, the forest gives the appearance of being limitless when we are lost within it. At just 10 000 sq ft, The Garden of Bridges is saturated with this effect, with the notable digression of occasional respite in the form of the bridges. As we climb up and emerge above the canopy with a clear overview, vision takes over as we strive to take our bearings by reasserting general orientation amongst the landmarks of the Expo site before descending back down into the thicket. The deceit is that the bridges represent false ‘pyramids of reason’ within the labyrinthine forest, since the path below is always obscured, meaning that the overview is useful neither for reconciling one’s journey thus far, nor reconnoitering the future route. We can see our companion at the top of another red bridge, but cannot tell whether to head forwards or backwards to get to them. Instead, we rely on a combination of dead-reckoning recall and faith in the universal consistency of Cartesian space; earlier, we walked ahead of our accomplice, so therefore, they cannot be in front of us now. On a single path, to avoid getting lost no matter how geometrically complex, we need only to keep a record of where we came from in differentiation to where we are headed—a tough ask when the empirical world of entangled bamboo and bridges says otherwise. Where the Garden of Bridges fills the frame to generate the effect of the thicket, the Big Dig garden by Topotek 1 uses the opposite tactic of a frame opened on one side and an empty field to present the surface of the garden plot in its entirety to passers-by .
A parabolic hole at the centre of the site is calibrated so that the bottom is never revealed; the void becomes in effect vertiginous and infinite. The illusion of tunneling through the mantle toward the other side of the world is manifested instead as a collaged soundscape, so that sounds of other cities and landscapes emanate from the depths. The effect invokes Buckminster Fuller’s observation of changes in perceptions of spatial relations as a result of the aerial warfare of WWII, on which he noted that ‘the world has been surprising itself by coming in its own back doors and down its own chimneys from every unlooked-for direction’. This act of tunneling takes perceptions that originate from afar and incises them into the composition of local space, producing as Brian Massumi notes, ‘a fusional tension between the close at hand and the far removed’. In the ultimate local-global exchange, ‘as the distant cuts in,vertical planting tower the local folds out’.The garden is reminiscent of Bernard Lassus’s 1970s bottomless Well design concepts, which proposed a deep vertical shaft into which stones could be thrown to infinity. These speculations explored the psychological space of depth; not in terms of the abyss that reveals the feared absence of foundations,but rather, as a refuge for the imagination in a world without uncharted spaces for the mind. As Lassus notes, with the complete mapping of the surface of the earth in the age of exploration erased the terrestrial or horizontal frontier. A replacement frontier came in the conquest of the ‘immeasurable verticals’, culminating in the first moon landing. As a counterbalance to these giddy heights, Lassus invests poetically in a depth beneath the surface that we tread on, also ‘immeasurable, vertical and obscure’.Stephen Bann interprets this to mean that garden design should involve the ‘poetic creation of depths’. Whether indirectly invoked or actually constructed, Bann sees a landscape of depths as the creative balance to ‘an increasingly strong preoccupation with the vertical dimension’. It is as filling the holes left by archaeology will re-balance the cosmically distant with the terrestrially deep, stabilizing landscape’s regular field of operations, the surface itself. Topotek’s scheme trades not in poetic depth as a counterbalance as per Lassus but rather in didactic depth. For Lassus ‘dropped pebbles travel forever’,thus fabricating the illusion of the terra incognita that the world lost when it ‘closed the map’. For Topotek’s ReinCano on the other hand, the pebble metaphorically returns, with compound interest, from the other side of the noisy and full world. Indeed, as Bann notes ‘the last white patches have vanished from the map of the world’ because ‘China has finally lost its monstrous otherness and become a Mecca for tourists’.Fittingly located in China, the Big Dig is like the last tiny residue pin-hole of this filled up map. But it is a false holdout, since—like an intrepid climber who scales a Swiss mountain only to discover a restaurant perched on the summit—others are already present, having taken a convenient shortcut.
Unlike Lassus, in this hole there is no depth, only more surface, since every hole has a lining; ‘the hole lining is the hole’. Indeed, if we ignore the inconvenient balustrading around the hole and focus on the surface, the parabolic fall-away becomes a Pierce’s Puzzle, which confounds what is the hole and what is not. Are we— like the caged fox that decides it is free while the rest of the world is incarcerated—actually already in the hole without realizing it?The room-type gardens fall into two sub-categories; cloister-like rooms operating as islands within the garden, and open plan rooms spanning the width of the garden. Passages Garden by Terragram falls into the latter category, using the wall as a spatial calibration device . A stone path that leads in to the garden cuts through several walls at oblique angles before disintegrating down into a body of water. Ahead, a low aperture in a bright orange wall allows glimpses of the paving stones re-integrating from the water to reform the path. Water seeps from a fissure that runs the length of the battered back retaining wall, refreshing the pond and heightening the sensation of being in a situation that is in tension and flux. With the impassable aperture preventing egress to the recomposed path, visitors strike out across an expanse of white river stones peppered with diminutive pine trees. Here, at an opening in the other end of the orange wall, a single smooth rock levitates precariously at eye level, the gravity field of its copious weight appearing to deflect the overhead beam. In Chinese garden tradition, stones hold a special meaning and allure; like a talisman, this rock the place to which visitors are drawn, to paw at the marbled surface, realign it around its pivot, and to contemplate its meaning. The circular cloister at the heart the Botanist’s Garden by Gross.Max operates as a retreat deep within the garden . Constructed from tightly stacked roof tiles, the wall forming a Hortus Contemplationis is battered at an angle reminiscent of the ancient city walls encasing Xi’an. This geometry, combined with the bulk of the wall neutralizes the cacophony of the Expo. The garden planting seems innocuous at first, but in time a second layer of delicate exotic botanica comes in to focus. Whereas elsewhere in the Expo, monocultures of floral displays are measured in hectares, within this botanical heterotopia, species are indulged one specimen at a time. Of a similar scale, the Quadrangle Garden by Atelier DYJG employs the repetition of four rooms that have been deflected from rectangles. However, unlike the Botanist’s Garden cloister, which by virtue of the mass of the wall is oriented wholly internally and vertically, complex apertures in the walls of the quadrangle rooms provide for a kaleidoscope of fragmentary glimpses of scenes in the surrounding garden.Of the three gardens that overtly represented other landscapes, two embodied more mythical landscape types while the other embodied a nation-state. On the latter, whereas many of the non-architected exhibits at the Expo attempted to represent a particular province, the Landscape Garden by Mosbach Paysagistes gathered all of China into its representational net.