![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Gaudi and gardens
Jun. 7th, 2010 11:11 amThe June 2nd entry on theorist and garden designer Robert Cheatham's blog will interest a number of the regular readers of this weblog:
http://freedoniagardenworks.blogspot.com/
Cheatham works with a postmodernist, post-religious, post-pretentiously-environmental approach to the world of "fire and stars," as in the hilltop patio/firepit featured in this post. He goes on to write about the right-angled world of modernism versus "the unruliness of the garden," and concludes with reflections on CAD (computer assisted design programs used by architects) versus Antonio Gaudi's unruly architectural organicism. Cheatham's conclusion is worth quoting verbatim:
"The advent of the computer has changed, paradoxically at first glance, this situation somewhat if you look at the work of Greg Lynne and Frank Gehry who inhabit a terrain of intuitive 'sculpturization' of forms that only the computer can make possible. Needless to say, these forms are still firmly within a modernist esthetic of production. If one is looking for a more seamless integration of form and labor that favors a human scale, these are not the places to look perhaps.
"And so we are led back to the garden again, a place where architects go to create their 'follies' as such structures are called, somewhat deprecatingly. One could just as well call many of the modern forms of architecture follies but somehow the connection with the garden betrays a subtle devaluing of worth.
"On the other end of the scale, we have the film Avatar where the metaphysics of the garden reaches surreal heights (again, we might add, by courtesy of the computer). This perhaps puts us at the heart of the problem, not removing us (except in the way that all art removes us to a different place. Hopefully.)
"It may be that the tomatoes in pots outside our back door offer just as much food for thought."
http://freedoniagardenworks.blogspot.com/
Cheatham works with a postmodernist, post-religious, post-pretentiously-environmental approach to the world of "fire and stars," as in the hilltop patio/firepit featured in this post. He goes on to write about the right-angled world of modernism versus "the unruliness of the garden," and concludes with reflections on CAD (computer assisted design programs used by architects) versus Antonio Gaudi's unruly architectural organicism. Cheatham's conclusion is worth quoting verbatim:
"The advent of the computer has changed, paradoxically at first glance, this situation somewhat if you look at the work of Greg Lynne and Frank Gehry who inhabit a terrain of intuitive 'sculpturization' of forms that only the computer can make possible. Needless to say, these forms are still firmly within a modernist esthetic of production. If one is looking for a more seamless integration of form and labor that favors a human scale, these are not the places to look perhaps.
"And so we are led back to the garden again, a place where architects go to create their 'follies' as such structures are called, somewhat deprecatingly. One could just as well call many of the modern forms of architecture follies but somehow the connection with the garden betrays a subtle devaluing of worth.
"On the other end of the scale, we have the film Avatar where the metaphysics of the garden reaches surreal heights (again, we might add, by courtesy of the computer). This perhaps puts us at the heart of the problem, not removing us (except in the way that all art removes us to a different place. Hopefully.)
"It may be that the tomatoes in pots outside our back door offer just as much food for thought."
