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Garden city describes both an historical movement, a type of urbanism advanced in the late

nineteenth century in response to the Victorian city, and a landscape practice which shares

conditions with an urban practice. Historically, the Garden city’s inception lies in a diagram

drawn by Ebenezer Howard, the nineteenth century city reformer. Howard’s diagram is a

set of concentric circles, alternating built zones and landscape zones. “It is illustrative only

– to be modified when put into practice”1 and it is this reluctance to prescribe specific detail

or to foresee every contingency that is the strength of the Garden City in the history

of twentieth century urbanism. The lack of specific city and garden design at the heart of

this Ur diagram, has or permitted a versatility and freedom of movement for the designers

of the Garden City. Letchworth, Onkel Toms Hutte, Radburn, Corbusier’s city for three

million, Harlow, McHarg’s plan for Washington, and Singapore are some important exam-

ples of twentieth century urbanisms which have been driven by the possibilities of the

Howard diagram.

Unfortunately, these liberating discoveries, new types of public space, new gardens,

new types of infrastructure, and new relationships to the natural world, have largely

been overlooked in the development of one aspect of the garden city – the suburb. Defined

and directed by real estate planning and realization, the suburb is part of a complex and

intermeshing nexus of property speculation, transport and infrastructure interests.

garden.city

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surrounding country, the artist in this manner reducing to practice the axiom laid

down by Quatremère de Quincy that to imitate in the fine arts is to produce the

resemblance of a thing, but in some other thing becomes a resemblance of it. It is

this production of an image or an idea I copy which distinguishes the artist from the

mechanic, who can only produce an exact or facsimile copy.2

The conscious act of horticultural separation is labelled the gardenesque, and is

given a location, “Generally, in laying out villas in the neighborhood of a manufac-

turing town, the gardenesque style is preferred”.3

With the invention of the term ‘gardenesque’ Loudon codifies a set of instructions

to ensure difference between a garden and the surrounding landscape. The differ-

ence is located on the boundary of the indigenous and agricultural landscape,

and the property line of the new garden. Difference is prescribed in horticulture,

topography and specific boundary making. Plants are to be displayed in groups and

in different species.

... all the trees, shrubs, and plants are planted and managed in such a way that

each may arrive at its highest state of individual perfection, and display its beauties

to as great advantage as if it were cultivated for that purpose alone, while, at that

same time, the plants relative to one another and to the whole scene or place to

which they belong, are placed regularly and systematically.4

The shrubbery … It is a scene in which the object is to arrange a collection of

foreign trees and shrubs in a dug border. 5

… but we would add to the variety, and of consequent interest of shrubbery and

pleasure ground walks, by the introduction along them, at various distances, of

what might be called botanical episodes. For example, we would introduce near the

walk, and connected with it by subordinate walks, such scenes as a rosery, a heath-

ery, a rock garden, an American garden, a garden of British plants, gardens of

particular genera of shrubs or flowers, such as of Ribes, berberis, Spiraea, Cytisus,

Aster, Dahlia.6

Loudon instructs that boundary making can be accomplished with plants as well as lawns,

fences, and terraces.

Profligate with resources such as land and building materials, the suburb attracts extreme-

ly high environmental costs and necessitates expensive and attenuated services and infra-

structure such as roading, pedestrian networks and storm water handling systems.

All these forces conspire to reorganize the landscape of the suburban site.

Topographically, existing contours are modified and existing flow paths are converted to

drainage systems. Horti-culturally, planting of the suburb is reduced to entry statements,

street tree planting and gardens. Public space is often leftover space: land which is

difficult to build on, wetland or flood plain, or marginal land. This ‘public space’ is often

hidden from the non-resident public.

Just as the urban possibilities of the Garden city have become subsumed by

the development of the suburb so too have the possibilities of the landscape and garden.

The contemporary suburban garden is concerned with the horticultural; both the specimen

and the new species. Its purpose is the display of the horticultural, the raising of certain

species or combinations of species, especially flowers, and the ability to grow species from

a particular transported eco tones such as the subtropical.

These concerns are played out within a private and domestic bounded domain. Boundary

making is both a virtue and technique of the contemporary garden, demonstrated by

the fence, wall, and hedge. Boundary making and horticultural selection are techniques

that desire differentiation. These devices ensure security and privacy, a bounded and

defined world in which garden practice continually recycles familiar tropes.

These strategies of differentiation were developed by J.C. Loudon, the Victorian garden

writer and designer. While the eighteenth century landscape was concerned with the open-

ing up of the garden to a complicated negotiation with the natural world, Loudon sought

a technically defined separation. The famous eighteenth century description of Kent’s

practice,“he leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden”, is a neat explanation of

the elision of the boundary. These negotiations, the ways of ensuring the connection of

garden to the surrounding landscape are not only technical, (the invention of the ha-ha

as a smoothed boundary), but also poetic and allusive, the garden was a subject that could

encompass political and classical allusions. Loudon’s writing and practice is intent on

reversing or transforming this dense and allusive field into a technical discipline which

sought specific prescriptive means to make gardens and he grounds his argument in the

writing of Quatremère de Quincy.

When, therefore, nature is closely imitated in its general effects by the landscape

gardener, exotic trees should be introduced instead of those common to the

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……even the turf should be composed of grasses different from those of the

surrounding grass fields.7

In very small villas the lawn may embrace the garden or principle front of the

house, without the intervention of terrace scenery, and it may be separated from

the park, or park like field by a light timber fence; but in more extensive scenes it

should embrace a terrace, or some avowedly artificial architectural basis to the

mansion…8

What makes Loudon’s work so critical and important for garden design and the develop-

ment of the suburb in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is how remarkably

unchanged and unchallenged the fundamental precepts of Loudon’s original instructions

are. The great garden designers of the twentieth century, Church, Burle Marx, Jellicoe,

while producing many important and beautiful gardens have not seriously challenged the

fundamental principles of Loudon’s original prescription of boundary and horticultural

difference. In the development of the suburb, the gardenesque has become a critical force

in both its development and limitation. The boundary making of the Gardenesque is a key

re-present traditional strategies and relationships between buildings, public spaces, and

landscapes in our cities

This process is described by a GIS programme, Arcview. Arcview both establishes

a descriptive system that makes conditional equivalences between landscape and urban

programmes and enables and describes the intentionalities of a prescriptive garden prac-

tice to both intersect and effect landscape and city.

The aim of the garden.city is not to develop new techniques for urban design but rather

to develop an open ended process which opens up possibilities for new ways of living in the

contemporary city.

garden.city

garden.city is a project that attempts to find a process or a strategy which can open up the

structures of the contemporary city and landscape , break open their tightly constructed

organizations and both contest and construct a new way of thinking about and building a

new landscape and city.

The first step in this project is to establish a kind of connective strategy between the

two practices by effecting equivalence between the landscape and an urban regime, to

part of the suburbs own concern for private space. The invention and development of the

suburb has both absorbed and reinforced the conditions of the gardenesque.

This book describes a new Garden city, in which landscape techniques enter into an

active relationship with the social and cultural practices that make up an urban system

to generate new landscape and urban possibilities. garden.city describes a meeting, an

adjacency but also implies something more, a mixture in which each practice retains

constancy but at the same time exchanges something of itself with the other. This process

of exchange and connection is driven by an intentionality that makes connections between

city and landscape and gives direction to landscape, environment, infrastructure and

architectural programmes. The garden.city project finds this intentionality in a specific

landscape practice, garden design.

The project reconceives garden design, stripped of the cultural accoutrements that

surround it, and rethinks the practice as a series of intentions or instructions. Garden

design then is regarded as a prescriptive instrumentality which links and directs the land-

scape and city. The garden.city project sets up a process in which landscape and urban

programmes are focused into particular intersections and juxtapositions through a set

of instructions derived from garden design practice. These instructions are used to direct

and develop landscape and urban conditions towards an intentional plan that is able to

make a possible segue. This equivalence can be effected by thinking of the landscape and

the city as conditional states rather than types or styles. These states are limited. Their

boundaries give simultaneously an interior and exterior. The bounded state is given a

name, a territorial assemblage9 something that is both traditional, a territory, based on

social and cultural mores and assembly of constituent parts. Concurrent with the drawing

of the boundary is the possibility of opening. This openness is porous, flowing both inwards

and outwards as conditional states advance and retreat change and adapt to form new

assemblages.

Landscape and urban practice have their own integrity yet each is open to the other

through shared conditions. Some of the conditions of the landscape are, horticulture,

topography, hydrology. Some of the conditions of urban practice, particularly the suburban

regime, are simple prescriptive guidelines; how many houses per hectare and the conse-

quent requirements for the roading and drainage networks.

The garden.city project uses a landscape practice, garden design to both connect

and affect an opening between these two states. The project focuses on the materiality and

operational condition of garden making practice. The garden shares certain material

elements with other landscapes, the most obvious are; horticulture, topology, and

water. However garden practice differentiates itself from other landscapes by a series of

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operational conditions, gardens ‘do things’ to these materials in a different way to other

landscape practices.

As well as the opening and connection, garden.city uses a prescriptive version of

garden design practice to force the other practices into a reconsideration, re-examination

and a recombination of previously unrealised adjacencies. In this way a more complicit and

open-ended processes is generated which opens up new possibilities for the landscape

and city; garden, architecture and infrastructure.

This prescriptive rendering is found in that historical example, the Gardenesque. While

the Gardenesque is responsibly for the reactionary and stolid nature of contemporary

garden design, an exploration of its technical nature, its material and instructional char-

acter, helps the project to develop conditional equivalence in both the landscape and the

city. The project takes advantage of the Gardenesque literalness to develop a simple

instructional code for the intersection of landscape and garden and city.

description

Traditional descriptive techniques used to represent the landscape and the city detach the

subject from its field. The traditional garden plan strengthens the logic of the Loudonesque

from functional criteria to more conceptual intentions. Another valuable function is

buffering, where certain conditions are bought alongside each other. The potential for

these conditions to act on each other can be described by a buffer or intermediate zone

which shares qualities of the adjoining conditions. The buffer is theoretically infinitely

subdividable into more and more crossovers and inter-penetrations.

Because ArcView works at a regional scale and naturally encompasses the bigger

scaled site, its standard landscape diagnostic tools automatically generate a richer and

denser field of information. In addition, Arcview’s data driven mapping and analysis

models help to delay traditional design concerns; such as meaning or typology or style,

which often surround the design of city and landscape.

The garden.city project finds new possibilities for the city and landscape by re-examin-

ing the traditional suburban model. The suburb, the most successful form of urbanism in

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, goes beyond urban and landscape concerns.

Naturalised into western and now global life, such disparate topics as city infrastructure,

the nuclear family, social discipline, real estate, are all contained within its life. The

1980s New Urbanism movement has been the most important challenge to the traditional

suburban model. This urbanism is concerned with an exploration of greater infrastructure

prescription by eliding both house and surrounding landscape. Similarly, the subdivision

plan includes only the minimum of site information and removes all contextual information

exterior to the site.

The garden.city project uses a GIS programme, ArcView, as a descriptive design tech-

nology that can describe how landscape and urban practices can connect.

Traditionally used in landscape practice as a mapping and analytical tool, Arcview

builds a series of maps showing site conditions such as; aspect, slope analysis, contour

and conjected condition, such as the position of overland flow paths. The maps generated

by the programme can be displayed as plans or as models. Arcview is also able to manip-

ulate the resultant maps in certain ways to obtain analysis and insight into certain site

condition. Maps can be combined into a variety of combinations; privileging certain data

over another or combining data in certain ways. Data can be bought into contact with each

other and set up complex boundary and border relationships.

One important technique is mapping and reclassification. While these tools are

traditionally used to record and describe site data, they can be used to recombine data to

make compatibility maps; for example aspect, slope, and water flows can be used to locate

site zones in which certain plant growth conditions could be met. These conditions can be

graded from high probability of growth to low growth probability. This faculty can extend

planning, especially in the work of Peter Cathorpe. New Urbanism also offers a renewed

interest in the idea of community and this is developed through a particular urban type –

the traditional European town square/public space in centre. However while New

Urbanism attempts to bring the public realm back into the suburb, it continues to accept

the basic separation of house, garden and infrastructure of the traditional suburb. Using

a similar mass production methodology as the traditional suburb, it gives inhabitants

a regime of choices, the freedom of the buyer to do what they will within their lot.

The garden.city project re-examines the suburb through the landscape and particular-

ly the garden. By looking at the garden afresh, we can ask, where does the garden start

and stop? outside the house? the terrace? the whole suburb? The project advances the

physical make up of place to foster a new collectivist approach in the facilitation of new

things; a new assemblage set up to interact with neighbour and environment. garden.city

proffers a range of choice about different models of urbanism and choices, which become

more evident when freed of conventions. The project strongly connects up a new interest

in nature with a collective. Different forms of ‘neighbourliness’ are generated by the new

landscape, the project transfigures topography and planting. The new infrastructure

changes social relationships.

The project demonstrates the generative possibilities that a designer can bring to the

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subdivision model, giving a different emphasis to the garden and nature. There is an

interest and emphasis on how nature operates. Speculative possibilities are raised for

garden, suburbia, and suburban life and the naturalised relationship of suburbia is ques-

tioned. Even concrete things like the traditional relationships between houses and street

can be reconfigured. The latent role of gardens is revealed.

Traditional garden design is actively complicit in the design of the contemporary

subdivision through the sharing of important practices, for instance, the important subdi-

vision practice of marking private property is shared by a similar garden practice of

boundary making. Traditional garden design practice is often characterised as being hide-

bound, concerned with the domestic scale and horticultural character. The garden.city

project is concerned with the liberation of the practice of garden design from these

constraints. Traditional ways of understanding gardens, such as a style, a type, or an

historical category, limit the ways designers can approach understanding gardens. This

project suggests that these ways of understanding the garden, may be put aside for a

focus on the materiality and operational condition of garden making practice. By using

these operations, this project explores these different material connections and puts

forward liberating discoveries.

The garden.city project reassess the history of landscape architecture and finds

subjects that have been marginalised in either the practice, or theory of contemporary

landscape architectural discourse. This project uses history differently to find moment

and emphasis, as a design of history rather than the traditional art history model. The

Gardenesque is an important moment in the history of landscape architecture. There was

a move to more practical, practice- based ideas away from the theoretical discourse

of eighteenth century landscape. This was also a more egalitarian moment as garden

practice moved into the middle classes and the Gardenesque is central to the establish-

ment of the suburb. The project used the technical nature of the Gardenesque to provide

instructional links between the landscape and city.

In the design of a conventional subdivision, GIS is used at planning stage by site

planners and engineers. The gardens are added last, usually by landscape contractors, or

the house occupier. The garden.city project reworks techniques drawn from GIS, through

unexpected and unfamiliar combinations, using GIS as a defamilisation device. By taking

the information literally, by observing the particular GIS methodology, and by accepting

the results as forming the strong and powerful strategy the conventions of subdivision

design and the individualistic yet conformist attempts at garden design can be side stepped.

1 Howard, E. (1944) Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Fourth Edition. Faber and Faber, London.2 Loudon, John, (ed. Jane Loudon) (1860) An Encyclopaedia of Gardening, Longman green, London, p4583 Ibid., p487.4 Ibid., p487.5 Ibid., p4816 Ibid., p4817 Gardener Magazine (Dec 1832) quoted in Oxford Companion to Gardens, 1986 8 Ibid.9 Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix. 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota.

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garden cities of to-morrow

Ebenezer Howard’s book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow1 advocated a new form of urbanism,

a middle way between the free market industrial city and socialist utopia. While the book

advancing practical solutions that addressed a spectrum of city planning challenges such

as land use, design, transportation, housing and finance, Howard actually avoids specific

plans for the new city and hardly mentions gardens at all. In his 118 page treatise, only six

pages were devoted to a description of a diagram of the new city.

Howard’s diagram of the Garden City was a set of concentric circles alternating built

zones and landscape zones. These circles radiated from a circular space “containing 5 and

a 1/2 acres of beautiful and well-watered garden surrounded by public buildings

each standing in their own ample grounds”.2 “Encircling these public buildings was the

landscape ring of Central Park – an area of 145 acres, planned to accommodate ample

recreation grounds within very easy access of all the people”.3 This in turn was encircled

by a Crystal Palace, a wide glass arcade, with shops and permanent exhibition space. Its

circular form, Howard wrote “brought it near to every dweller in the town, the furtherest

removed inhabitant being within 600 yards”.4

Howard continued these concentric rings outward to accommodate residential housing.

“Each standing in their own ample grounds”,5 with varied architecture and design, “some

having common gardens and co-operative kitchens”.6 These were to be ringed by the

verdant backdrop of Grand Avenue, which divided the city into two belts. Within this avenue

Howard located the cities schools and churches. Grand Avenue was bounded by two further

rings of residential housing which in turn were encircled by an industrial ring containing:

factories, warehouses, dairies, markets, coal yards, timber yards, etc which fronted the

circle railway. The sidings of which connected with a main railway line which passed through

the estate. Radial thoroughfares bisected the concentric rings. Finally a green belt of

agriculture and forestry surrounded the whole town interspersed with institutions which

included farms for epileptics, asylums for blind and deaf and convalescent homes”.

The lack of a clear plan for the new city was matched by the lack of any description

or design as to what the ‘garden’ of the Garden City might be. Houses in Howard’s ‘resi-

dential zones’ of the city are described as “standing in their own grounds”7 and the Grand

Avenue, a dominant element in Howard’s plan is described by him as a “belt of green”.8 The

form, character and design of the domestic garden is left unexplained and unexplored.

The key diagrams which Howard used to illustrate his model were, as he pointed “illus-

trative only – to be modified when put into practice”,9 and this reluctance to prescribe

specific design detail or to foresee every contingency is perversely the very strength of the

project. The generality, abstraction and emptiness of city design and garden design at the

heart of this Ur text, has allowed a versatility and freedom of movement for the designers

of the garden city in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

In Howard’s book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, the garden is simply a diagram with all

of the openness and freedom that such a diagram affords. Howard, strips the notion of

the garden of all of its associated meaning, leaving it open to what it could become. Elided

of any prescription, any possibility, whether it be: park, internal landscape, belt, street

landscape or cultivated domestic yard is conceivable.

1 Originally published in 1898 as To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform and re-issued with slight revisions in 1902 re-titled Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Faber and Faber, London.2 Howard, E. (1902) Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Faber and Faber, London.3 Ibid.4 Ibid5 Ibid6 Ibid7 Ibid8 Ibid9 Ibid

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letchworth

Letchworth, the physical realisation of Howard’s garden city model was designed for

30,000 inhabitants by the architectural partnership of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin

in 1903. Following Howard’s lead to the extent of clearly separating the town from the

surrounding countryside Parker and Unwin set aside 1250 acres for the new city and 2,800

acres for an Agricultural Belt that would act as a permanent girdle to the town.

Parker and Unwin’ plan sought a more subtle organic sense of order as suggested by

the terrain. They took advantage of the location of hills, streams, an old Roman road and

even larger trees to define the plan and sited the town centre on the highest and flattest

point of the land. Using a formal arrangement of the municipal and cultural buildings

which embodied a Beaux-arts style they located a large town square and hemicycle at one

end, surrounded by public building including a Town Hall, Museum and Art Gallery and

Public Library.

However the structure of the built town became defined by its infrastructure. The rail-

way and the road bifurcated the town into four areas with different zoning characteristics:

to the north-west an old enclosed common and housing, the north-east, workman

cottages, football grounds and allotments, the south-east factories, sidings and work-

In Garden Cities of To-Morrow, the garden is simply a diagram with all of the openness

and freedom that such a diagram affords. Howard strips the notion of the garden of all

of its associated meaning, leaving it open to possibilities. Elided of any prescription, any

possibility, whether it is park, internal landscape, belt, street landscape or cultivated

domestic yard is conceivable.

Letchworth demonstrates the landscape possibility of this potent diagram, the private

residential garden, the planted public street, and the nature/reserve’. A model, which has

really become the dominant type for the design of the twentieth and twenty-first century

suburb.

1 Unwin, R. in Purdon, C.(1913) The Garden City Letchworth, J.M.Dent & Sons, London. 2 Ibid3 Ibid

man’s cottages, and the north-west the town centre, station and housing. Industry, instead

of forming a uniform periphery to Howard’s circle was grouped into an industrial park

adjacent to the power plant and railroad.

In contrast to the diagrammatic nature of Howard’s design and the functionalist zoning

distribution of the towns urban structure, a deeply traditional view and use of the garden

was promulgated. The four landscapes present in Letchworth were linked; the individual

garden, the street landscape, the ‘nature’ of the common, and the agricultural landscape

of the town belt.

This seems to be the result of two ideas. Firstly a very romantic, literary view of the

landscape and garden, ”each street has a slightly different character, so that you may walk

around the town and think yourself to be in a garden all the whole”1, and secondly, partic-

ular zoning regulations. “Most building in Garden City will be open to view on all sides, and

so, should be treated accordingly; the sides and back being built of materials as good as

the front”2. (Regulation 7(3)). “The garden attached to every house shall be dug over, laid

out, and planted sufficiently to contribute in a reasonable degree to the amenities of the

situation as soon as practicable, taking into account the season of the year when the build-

ing is completed…”3 (Regulation 17-(a) Gardens).

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city of to-morrow

Then suddenly we find ourselves at the feet of the first skyscrapers. But here

we have, not the meagre shaft of sunlight, which so faintly illuminates the

dismal street of New York, but an immensity of space. The whole city is a park. The

terraces stretch out over lawns and into groves… Here is the CITY with its crowds

living in peace and pure air, where noise is smothered under the foliage of green

trees… Here bathed in light stands the modern city 1

Le Corbusier’s plan for the Contemporary City was based on a super sized grid laid over

a level site, surrounded by a protected zone of woodland and fields. The centre of this

gridded city was a multilevel transport interchange, surrounded by a large park support-

ing twenty-four, sixty-storied towers in grid point pattern. Surrounding this central area

was a perimeter of housing blocks of two types: a traditional perimeter block with a large

courtyard/garden/recreation area in the centre and a more open linear type block with

large return or redent along the perimeter. A green belt or fresh air reserve encircled

this configuration.

Similarities with Howard’s diagram are obvious; the Central Park with the public building

embedded within it, the perimeter of residential housing and the surrounding green belt.

However other qualities clearly differentiate the two, in particular Le Corbusier’s carefully

considered treatment of the landscape in relation to his various architectural forms.

To accommodate the apartment dweller’s desire for a private garden in their three

and four storied ‘redent’ housing blocks, the sides of the buildings are opened with green

gardens, boring through the building like Swiss cheese. “The garden is paved with red tiles,

its walls are hung with ivy and clematis; and laurels and other shrubs cluster thickly

in large cement pots”.2 Collective garden areas wrap around the foot of the building and

are laid out in a combination of sports field, and kitchen gardens.

The Central Park landscape by comparison is composed as a traditional English

picturesque scene complete with grass and large specimen trees.

Located within a strong axial grid the office towers are nevertheless freed from

this structure by the garden landscape. From a distance these immensely tall, glass

sheathed office towers appear to float in a sea of greenery, effectively dislocated from their

empirical grid. Similarly the landscape of the ‘redent’ housing blocks produces a similar

effect, as the landscape seems to erode the perimeter of the blocks fusing garden and

street landscape.

While the city’s morphology is governed by the Beaux-arts grid, the view of the towers

in the park from the surrounding terraces, would assume a life of its own, becoming the

icon for the modern city, the tower in the landscape.

A good example is the Alton West Estate on Roehampton Hill overlooking Richmond

Park – the tower in the English countryside. Designed by the Architects Department of

London County Council, this mixed housing estate was built between1952-58. Located on

a 130-acre site on the southern side of Roehampton, this housing estate is made up of

point blocks, slab blocks, maisonette blocks, terraces and houses. Bounded by roads on

three sides and a park on the other, the site was and still remains occupied by large

eighteenth and nineteenth century houses and gardens. As a consequence of this, the

housing estate not only overlooks a park but also exists within a series of historic gardens.

Le Corbusier’s City is a conglomerate of basic garden typologies: the individual garden,

the communal garden with allotments, the sport fields, the English picturesque garden and

the park. All remain essentially unchanged (although they are placed within a radically re-

configured architecture). However the rereading of Corbusier’s sketch atRoehampton (and in

many other cities) lead to a fundamental reordering of the garden in the modernist period,

a disappearance of the private garden, to be replaced by the communal public garden.

1 Le Corbusier, (1929) The City of To-morrow and its Planning, John Rodher, London. 2 Ibid.

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radburn

Radburn, a new town in New Jersey, planned by Clarence Stein in the 1920s, is an

American response to the challenge of Howard’s original diagram. Stein includes Radburn

in his book Towards New Towns for America1, where he explicitly invokes Howard’s

polemic with the goal, it is “intended to create a garden city in America”.2 Stein begins, like

Howard with a diagram for the American Garden City. The diagram is referred to as a

‘superblock’, a rectangular block of land surrounded by a roading network. The superblock

is divided into two zones, an outer zone of housing and an inner zone of parkland. Sharing

some similarities with Howard’s original diagram, Stein configures a park in the centre

surrounded by a ring of houses.

Stein explores the technical qualities of the diagram. The outer zone of houses is

accessed by a series of cul-de-sacs, which are drilled at right angles to the surrounding

roads into the housing zone. Housing is arranged around these cul-de-sacs in a loose ‘u’

shaped arrangement. Gardens and the internal park are located on the other side of the

houses and house plans are orientated to this parti. Garages and kitchens face the cul-de-

sac and living and dining areas face the private gardens, which mediate between the living

areas of the house and the park. The resulting housing configuration resembles the tradi-

tional apartment block, the perimeter of housing surrounding a central court, turned

inside out. The internal courtyard has become the road, the road has become the garden,

monolithic housing form has been broken down into fragments and the garden has

eviscerated the insulae. Stein describes the scene, “but above all it is the natural green

that dominates and controls the picture”.3 Stein concludes, “Your architecture cannot

look bad when time makes it part of the bigger composition of the landscape”.4

Radburn elides traditional landscape concerns of public and private. The public nature

of the park at the centre of each super block is made private by the surrounding houses

and small lanes. The privacy of the gardens is mediated by the boundary elements – the

hedges, “are of varied height, some particularly hide, others disclose, the garden beyond”.5

The service areas are planted, “trimmed hedges between the driveways and houses

and trees and grass in the turning circles”.6 Traditional landscape categories and types

are mixed and changed. There is a seamless flow through the new landscapes with the

housing embedded in a garden matrix.

1 Stein, C. (1951) Towards New Towns for America, University Press of Liverpool, Chicago.2 Ibid.3 Ibid.4 Ibid.5 Ibid.6 Ibid.

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onkel toms hutte

Onkel Toms Hutte is a Siedlung, or public housing scheme in Zehlendorf, Berlin designed

by Bruno Taut in the 1920s. Dominated by a landscape of birch and pine species which Taut

retained, the site is bisected east to west by two infrastructure elements: the Argentinische

Allee and the U Bahn.

Two, three storied housing blocks line the Argentinische Allee. Housing to the south

runs parallel to the road while the housing to the north of the street is broken into blocks

and runs at right angles to the street, The rest of the housing in the Seidlung occupies a

conventional street grid. These are mainly two-story row housing with individual gardens

to the rear which then open to shared communal gardens.

The entire Seidlung is dominated by the presence of the mature landscape of birch

and pine. These serve to link the various landscape of the Seidlung, street, garden, and

park through their scale and irregular placement. The housing layout and planning is also

carefully modulated to both the traditional urban hierarchy of arterial, street and garden

and to the overarching order of the remnant forest.

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harlow

The British New Town Movement of the 1950s and 60s embodies a revival of the Garden

City Movement in England. In 1910, Howard had advocated the building of a ring of garden

cities around London to relieve the urban pressures of nineteenth century London.

Letchworth and Welwyn where the only two garden cities built in response to that call from

1917 to 1939. However after the Second World War the idea of the garden city, now called

the New Town, ascended.

Harlow is one of the new towns. Located west of London in Essex, it is situated be-

tween the Hertfordshire hills to the north and Rye hill to the south. Designed in 1947 by

the architect Frederick Gibbard in collaboration with the landscape architect Sylvia Crowe,

the town is placed between two major transport routes: a railroad along the northern

boundary and the MII along the southeastern edge.

The topography of Harlow is rolling series of valleys with small streams; the geo-

graphic centre of the city is the intersection of two valleys. The urban town centre, the High,

is located to one side of this landscape pivot, and connected to the major infrastructure

networks. The town is laid out in cluster neighbourhoods which are carefully positioned on

the higher parts of the site, leaving the stream valleys untouched. This has the effect of

cutting the town into roughly four quarters. Connecting all parts of the town with the

surrounding countryside are long stream valleys, known as ‘green wedges’.

Sylvia Crowe describes the development of Harlow in a symposium on landscape

architecture in the New Town.1 Bemoaning the typical individual garden and small public

space of contemporary civic development; “it brings us back to the all over spot pattern of

the garden cities”,2 Crowe advocates “…closer urban units set in a green matrix of open

spaces…”3

Crowe promoted a tight urban landscape around housing areas; small children’s

playing grounds, trees in paving and flowers in window boxes. Outside the immediate

vicinity of housing, she believed the landscape should be a multipurpose space, a cross

between the country park and sport ground.

Crowe describes the planning of Harlow, where the housing and factories are planned

in separate zones divided by the green wedges. Crowe augments the wedges by concen-

trating the school’s sport fields, play areas and pedestrian links in the wedges. The wedges

also act as a link between the town and country. Crowe advocates using these areas as

a productive landscape for grazing and timber production.

In Harlow the traditional public landscape of the park is exchanged for the green

wedges, a conflation of the sites natural topography and the functional needs of a growing

city. Gardens are small and compact and closely associated with the housing, which in turn

is closer and denser.

Harlow reconfigures the concentric, radiating model of Howard’s garden city diagram.

The town is split and dissected by the landscape of green wedges, yet the linkage of the

garden to the common and to the surrounding country side is worthy of the first built

garden city, Letchworth.

1 Crowe, S (1958) Recreational Landscape in England, Landscape Architecture, Autumn,V.49, p. 32-35.2 Ibid.3 Ibid

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mcHarg’s plan for washington

In 1967 Ian McHarg was asked to make recommendation for improvements to the urban

landscape of Washington DC.1 He began this survey of the urban landscape by developing

a study at the scale of the Washington region. The city is located at the intersection of the

Potamic and Anacostia rivers. The geology of the region starts at the confluence of the

river flats and rises to the uplands which in turn are dominated by the Piedmont. Having

discovered and defined the indigenous vegetation patterns that match these geological

areas McHarg turned to the L’Enfant’s2 City Plan. He demonstrated the influence of the

landscape on the formation of the city and the gestures that L’Enfant made to heighten

those connections “nature has done much for it, and with the aid of art it will become the

wonder of the world.”3

McHarg demonstrates how the Capitol and White House are located on the edge of the

escarpment, the transition area from the uplands to the river fans. These two centres of

power connect to each other through a cross axis meeting on the Washington memorial

then the axis past each other making even larger connections to the landscape. The Capitol

across the Potamic to Virginia, the White House across the tidal basin to the Potamic.

McHarg assembled and integrated the various maps to develop a value system across

the catchment with the rivers, water sheds, the escarpment edge, and the flats of highest

value. He recommends the conservation and enhancement of the important geological

features of the site and the restoration of the indigenous vegetation in appropriate areas

“…it becomes possible to establish a palate of plant expression for every site and every

project…”4 McHarg goes on to propose “swamp cypress, wild rice swamps, magnolia bogs,

the great beech forest. Each of these dramatic and rich expressions and many others could

be reintroduced, extended or heightened”.5

The project is an attempt to rethink the landscape of the great neoclassical city through

the preservation and restoration of indigenous flora and fauna. The traditional landscape

of Washington; flower planting from annuals to Prunus species, is reconsidered in the light

of a new landscape concept or process – the ‘ecological method’, which advances a

methodology for developing a new American garden for the imperial centre.

1 Wallace et al, (1967) Towards a Comprehensive Plan for Washington DC, US Government PrintingOffices, Washington DC.2 Pierre Charles L’Enfant, (1754 – 1852). French architect and engineer responsible for the design ofWashington, D.C.3 Wallace et al, (1967) Towards a Comprehensive Plan for Washington DC, US Government PrintingOffices, Washington DC.4 Ibid5 Ibid

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peter cook projects

During the 1970s Peter Cook developed a number of paper projects, which attempted to

move the traditional techniques of occupation away from the architectural toward the

landscape. The first project is the Secret Garden 1972.1 Cooks writes about this project

as metaphor for a break away from conventional architecture systems, through an escape

into the garden. “The secret garden; in which we dream dreams as we did as children;

spontaneous and unprejudiced; where objects and experiences can be ambiguous; build-

ing is vegetation, atmosphere is presence and architecture”.2

Cook’s images of the secret garden are like an entry to a cave under a mountain, with

multi-coloured and lurid strata and curious ganglion encrusted openings. His next projects

are Lump Projects (1973), where Cook developed the geological strata-like formations.

These are followed by the Sponge Projects (1975), which Cook variously titles; patch-

work/orifices/nests/gunge/permeable, sponge/sleek surfaces/crevice. The geological

forms of the Lump Projects become more mobile. The images show orifices, secretion and

insertions: architecture is a presence in the congealed body.

The Arcadia Projects (1976-1978) are an effort to extend the lump/sponge projects to

a bigger landscape/city. Cook discipline’s the new landscape with a spatial ordering device,

usually a grid. In Arcadia, the sponge lump work is spread over a composite landscape,

a blobby terrain with fragments of terraces, orchards, and pergolas. The topography is

ordered by an unsteady grid that becomes more twisted and bent as it engages with the

particular landscape.

In other Arcadia projects, Cook’s beloved landscape of southern England with its

hedgerows and copices engage with the new topography. The result is a series of archi-

tectural hedgerows running through grided walls set at right angles to the road

and disappearing into the rising contours. The concealment of architecture behind the

hedges in the Hedgerow Village Project (1971) has transformed into the ‘city becoming

the hedge’. The last of the Arcadia projects, the Arcadia Lofts Project (1978) sees Cook

returning to an architectural typology, the terrace and tower, which he names ‘mesh

marsh and trickling tower’. The architectural forms simultaneously erode and encrust the

building with an organic plant/topographic layer

Over this eight year period Cook attempts to rethink architecture as a landscape

drawing on the existing landscape of southern England and an imaginary landscape – part

topography, part geology, part body.

1 1

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singapore 1980 - 2000

Almost ominously, it seems as if nature will be the next project of development,

throwing the mechanics of the tabula rasa into a paradoxical reverse gear: after

development Eden.1

Singapore was driven to re-create itself as a Garden City at the hands of Lee Kuan

Yew. In a calculated strategy to attract overseas investors and ameliorate the visual and

psychological effects of burgeoning industrial development, the Prime Minister sought to

transform Singapore into a Garden City. This he believed would not only improve resident’s

mental and physical health but also convince potential investors that Singapore was an

efficient and effective place. ”In wooing investors, even trees matter”2, Yew told the

Singapore Economic Board. Well kept trees and gardens were a subtle way of reflecting

Singapore’s concern with and attention to detail. “A well kept garden” Yew believed, “would

demonstrate to outsiders Singapore’s ability to organise and be systematic”3 and in addi-

tion, “the greenery of nature would soften the harshness of Singapore life“.4

Developing his own knowledge base about soils, vegetation, tress, drainage, climate

and fertilisers, Yew directed that the grass “has got to be mown every other day, the trees

have to be tended, the flowers in the gardens have to be looked after.”5

Initiating a massive 30 year planting programme which involved a search for, and prop-

agation of suitable tree species from through out the world, Yew realised his vision which

now unfolds before the visitor on their famous ride from Changi International Airport. Over

the entire island is an exotic verdant pastiche of South American and Madagascan land-

scapes which spreads like an emollient blanket over Singapore’s groundplane. A unifying

horticulture of Musa, Strelitzia, Bougainvillea, Travellers Palms and rainforest trees, these

species effectively link the various infrastructural and urban elements of the city.

The trajectory of the city’s development from colonial entrepot to city as network,

was driven by the development of the city’s infrastructure particularly the Mass Rapid

Transit system (MRT), a circuitry of high-density travel corridors with 48 terminals.

Historically, Singapore’s urban form reflected the traditional racially segregated urban

layout of the colonial city. Its contemporary urban form has morphed into a new kind of

urbanism, centring on the MRT terminals. Distinguished by a remarkably consistent and

undifferentiated architecture these urban clusters contain schools, housing, light industry,

shops, and offices. In abandoning the traditional urban model there has been an associat-

096

ed internment of the traditional urban model of squares and streets and a public and

private building hierarchy. In present day Singapore, buildings/landscape accommodate

many functions in an above and below ground blend of office space, shops and food courts

with high density housing, hotel accommodation and specific urban experiences embed-

ded in this new matrix. Singapore, an undifferentiated network of infrastructural functions

is given urban cohesion and meaning by the garden. The garden of Singapore is the urban

‘glue’ which holds the city’s infrastructure and satellite form together.

1 Koolhaas Rem, Mau, Bruce (1995) Singapore, Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis, S,M,L,XL. BenediktTaschen, Koln, Germany.2 Kwang ,Han Fook. (Ed.)(1997) Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas, Ist Edition, Singapore.3 Ibid4 Ibid5 Ibid

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The Trinity Apartment Garden project is an exploration to determine whether the landscape

forces of larger scale sites can interact with garden conditions to produce a garden within

an urban location.

The project site is a large private garden for a new apartment development in Parnell,

Auckland. The brief is for a large common garden to the west of the apartment and small

private gardens to the east and north. The site is at the end of the Parnell ridge, which runs

south to north before descending to the port of Auckland. The location is an historically

important Auckland landmark made up of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, St Mary’s, and

the Deans house placed within an English landscape of large European trees and grass.

The project site is bounded by the Anglican Cathedral across Parnell Road, Birdwood

Crescent which runs to the north, private suburban housing lying to the west, and a small

cul-de-sac with new terrace housing to the south. The terrain of the site drops from the top

of the ridge down towards a gully of regenerating indigenous vegetation.

A series of site maps was plotted using GIS. These included: hill shade, site aspect, and

vegetation maps showing the conjectured spread of existing vegetation, the exotic vegeta-

tion from the top of the ridge and the indigenous vegetation from the gully. Other maps

included a ‘100-year flood’ overland flow path. Major overland flow paths were tracked from

the top of the ridge across the site. The conjectured horticultural map pointed towards the

garden trinity apartment garden, parnell, auckland 113

115114

possibility of horticultural interaction between the indigenous and exotic.

Certain garden conditions or operations were introduced into the mapping process.

These were water control – through directing and containment of water from overland flow

paths and horticultural exchange – between the indigenous and exotic plants. Two water

control operations were used. The first was water direction. From the eastern part of the

site water is channelled and directed down the neighbouring cul-de-sac by way of two large

earth mounds positioned on the southern boundary. The second garden operation that

was used was water collection. Rainwater, which would normally fall on the site now

falls on the roof of the apartment and is collected and utilised in the construction of a

large water garden directly on the western side of the apartment.

Indigenous vegetation from the gully to the west and exotic vegetation from the

Cathedral landscape in the east are mapped across the site as zones. Exotic species are

planted in the band adjacent to Parnell Road and native species are planted at the western

side of the site. A buffer zone is created at the intersection of these two zones and a mix-

ture of exotic and native species planted.

The Parnell Road gardens are planned to make a connection to the English landscape

situated around the Cathedral. Oak trees are planted randomly in both the footpath and

front gardens. A heavy poured concrete wall is located on the boundary for acoustic

separation. The map of exotic vegetation crossing Parnell Road has led to a subtle

topographic transformation of this wall and the apartment gardens. As the band of con-

jected vegetation crosses the site, over both land and building, there is a sense of smooth-

ing and blanketing which covers the site. Exploration of this emollient quality in more detail

has suggested a topographical deformation of the boundary wall. This in turn has led to

a visible smoothing operation, which effectively melds wall and garden. Deformed into

a sloping form with the garden rising up, the wall is fused to the garden with Virginia

creeper – a deciduous climber and ground cover which clothes both surfaces.

The apartment’s communal garden has three major components. The first is an

horticultural display garden running down the southern boundary which is dominated by

two large earth mounds. The second element is the water garden. This area is made up

of the roof water collection area and a raised lap pool. The third element is a steel

pergola which covers the car park ramp on the western boundary and offers privacy for

the lap pool and water garden.

The water directing mounds are overlapped by the horticultural plan. The lower mound

falls within the indigenous zone while the upper mound falls within the cross over zone. In

the indigenous zone, native species have been mapped over the top of one of the earth

mounds. This mound is recontoured as a more faceted form. Native species are distributed

on the different faces of the mound in a botanical classificatory manner, with each facet

being used to display a particular species. The mound’s topography is also folded in a

particular way to enable the residents to retreat from the main social space of the garden.

The second mound is treated in a similar way with the distribution of exotic/native

planting in a specimen driven arrangement. Where the mounds meet the property bound-

ary they are abruptly truncated. Retaining walls on the cul-de-sac boundary to the south

are constructed from sheet steel, the top of the wall reflecting the profile of the mound

topography.

On the north west boundary the native planting zone falls across the car park ramp.

This is covered with a light steel pergola. The pergola is folded to form its own irregular

topography and planted with the native clematis, pauwhananga. The exotic/native planting

zone falls across the water collection pond. This area is treated as a water garden with

a variety of wetland species planted in rows. Timber boardwalks cross the pond enabling

residents to enjoy the pond and gain access to the garden.

The garden attempts to make connections outside the property boundaries of the

site. The visual links are clear and the Parnell Road pedestrian or driver can recognise the

horticultural links across the road with similar Quercus species growing on either side

of the road. Similarly the occupant and user of the apartments will see the native garden

to the west of the site raised and visually connected to the native species in the large park

(Auckland Domain) beyond the site. Actual boundary elements such as walls are similarly

blurred. The Parnell Road boundary wall is deformed to make visual and physical connec-

tions to the garden behind the wall and the Cathedral landscape across the road.

The result is a garden which is not limited by the physical boundaries of the site but

moves from the horticultural particularities of the specimen to the regional condition of

water flow and topography.

flow

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water gardens water gardens

water gardenswater gardens

lower entrancelower entrance

exotic + water gardens exotic gardenscourtyards

courtyards

courtyards

exotic + watergardens

native gardens

native gardens

water + native gardens

exotic + water gardens

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contour, slope, and conjectured conditions such as overland flow paths. Drawing on the

expertise of Dr Bill Bussel, an authority on Pacific horticulture in Auckland, a set of site

diagrams was developed that used the site conditions to find the best areas on the site for

the production of particular species.

Developing a site condition matrix we combined and reclassified the site to develop a

zoning diagram to indicate a scale of site attractiveness. This revealed the sites which offered

the best growing conditions for the most plants to the sites least attractive for crop cultivation.

The scale was graduated into five zones and the best three were selected for intensive crop

cultivation. The specific site conditions determined what exact crops to grow. The least horti-

culturally attractive zones were then identified as building sites. The map was reclassified into

two zones a cultivation zone and a building zone. The building footprint is split by two major

overland flow paths.

The result is two maps; the first a horticultural diagram full of intensities, a swirling map

of potential with specific horticultural zones responding to particular site conditions. The other

map is an undifferentiated and silent outline with the potential to become activated through

adjacencies to both local horticultural conditions and more general site conditions. The shape

of the footprint is a loosely connected series of shapes running roughly north south. This figure

The Innovative Housing Competition project is an exploration of how garden and architecture

can be generated out of a landscape process in which site conditions and the horticultural

particularities of subtropical crop production intersect to produce a site planning strategy.

The project site is a competition for an innovative state housing development in Ellerslie

Auckland, sponsored by Housing New Zealand. The brief called for forty-eight units of mixed

pensioner and family accommodation and specific reference was made to the recently pub-

lished innovative guidelines for Pacific Island housing. Situated in a shallow valley, surrounded

by two ridges which run down to the main street of Ellerslie, the site lies near the end of one

of the ridges, facing south. Roads bound the site to the west and south and a car park on the

southwest corner. Suburban housing surrounds the rest of the site.

This project is generated out of a consideration of existing landscape forces, site conditions

and garden practices of Pacific Island peoples living in Auckland. The project concentrates

on the particular and unique horticultural practices that Pacific Islanders have developed in

Auckland including the introduction of indigenous and exotic crops from tropical habitats. The

choice and cultivation of these crops has been modified by Auckland’s subtropical climate,

high rainfalls and humidity in spring and autumn and some frosts in winter. The main crops

cultivated in Auckland are banana, taro, citrus, and pele.

Using GIS maps were generated which included: existing site conditions such aspect,

is roughly paralleled by similar, though smaller forms to the west. The architectural possibili-

ties contained within this diagram were further explored in a series of studies and the building

footprint was simply extruded into a two storied structure to give the required building volume.

The smaller buildings to the east were identified as being suitable for pensioner housing

while the bigger blocks to the east of the site were identified as being more useful for family

housing. The layout indicated that the development could be accessed from both the west

and east leaving a large, undisturbed communal space between the blocks. Buildings are

connected by a major roof structure, which mimics the existing ground contours and runoff

from this roof structure was allowed to fall into the existing flow paths.

The result is an unmodified topography, heavily occupied by an intensely busy ground

plan of intensely grown crops and two urban streams. The housing is constructed as a single

structure made up of simple modular units which open directly to the gardens and streams.

The integration of natural site conditions and garden conditions, produces a garden of useful,

edible horticulture. The architecture that emerges from the process is connected to a wide

range of landscapes from a vigorous and intensive garden culture to the larger landscape

concerns of rainwater collection and overland flow paths.

The result indicates the rich potentialities of garden and living, bought into unexpected

yet fruitful coexistence.

house Innovative Housing Competition, Ellerslie Auckland

site above hillshade. below slope

above aspect. below water above water + slope. below water + aspect

above banana. below citrus above taro. below vegetation zones

gardens

above overland flow paths + building foot print. below extruded foot printwith water above buffered water + building. below building + extruded water

above split building + buffered water. below split building above building + garden. below building + garden and site

147

The Beijing Housing Development project was an opportunity to explore how an interaction

between site conditions and garden practices could be used to develop specific techniques.

These techniques were: the location of houses on a site, an assurance that they were

coupled to the landscape, and the determination of a way to develop an architecture

compelled by both the site and garden. Project parameters included the decision to alter

the existing site topography as little as possibly, repair and restoration of indigenous

horticulture, and minimum disruption of water flows on site.

The project is part of a Master Plan1 for a vacation house development near the south-

ern Chinese City of Guangzhou. A design for five speculative houses gardens and

landscapes near Beixing, the development is located in the hills in close proximity to

two lakes. The upper lake is surrounded by precipitous granite hills with a vegetative cover

of wilding Conifers and Acacia. Separated from the upper lake by a dam, the lower lake

has more subtropical vegetation, lychee orchards and bamboo and a calmer topography.

The climate is subtropical but is subject to monsoon like rains which can deliver a deluge

of up to 2 meters.

The house sites are located around a small inlet on the upper lake. At the head of

this inlet is a disused quarry. An access road is planned to run around the inlet The

house sites are placed between the road and lake. The brief for the houses called for

vacation beijing housing development, guangzhou, china 149

151150

from the road to the lake. The zone nearest the road is utilized for service functions,

garages and storage. The middle zone is utilized for bedrooms and bathrooms. The zone

nearest the lake is utilized for the living and eating areas. These zones occupy shallow

terraces linked by internal gardens – part of the house yet linking to the outside garden

via bridges across the dry river streams. The roof of the houses is a folded reinforced

slab, its shape imitating the existing slope. This ensures minimal disturbance of the

groundwater flow patterns.

Construction materials of the houses and the terraces are in-situ concrete with large

honed granite slab finish. Internal walls are concrete with plaster finish and the roofs

are reinforced concrete slab with large granite slab finish on insulated slab. All exterior

walls are glazed with large sheets of glass in commercial glazing sections.

The project is an attempt to build an architecture from a study of the site’s natural

conditions. These conditions are privileged over traditional architectural concerns

and in turn reduced to a particular conflation of functional zoning based on a

simple occupational study and a spatial equivalence in a topographic element – the

terrace. This collection of zones is then simply roofed and glazed yet remains open

and connected to the important landscape forces and flows of the site the physical

proximity, the dry/monsoon r streams or physical connection of the cross contours

paths that connect garden to house thru internal gardens, and onto top public

reserves.1

The result for the user is a dense yet connected map of particular landscapes which slide

effortless between the different site conditions: public to private, house to garden, indige-

nous to cultivated garden, conservatory stream to house.

1 The Master Plan is for a one hundred house development planned by Rod Barnett, Duschko Bogonovitch and

JJ Chen

three pavilions on the northern side of the inlet, with a family house to the west and a large

mansion on the southern side of the inlet.

GIS maps were generated which detailed overland water flow paths, aspect, and slope

analysis. The overland flow path maps identified sites which would not interfere with water

flow across the site. These maps were combined with slope analysis and aspect maps

to give sites with slopes of 0-4 degrees (less site disturbance) and sites which optimize

the sun by facing south.

These maps were used to build a diagram to locate garden streams and determine

building sites to ensure minimal site disturbance. Overland flow paths were excavated then

back filled with crushed granite. The new streambeds both direct torrential rainfall

and retard and dissipate monsoon flow. The garden and house sites are located between

the streams. Gardens are planted with indigenous Chinese trees and shrubs, bamboo,

rhododendron, magnolia, and Michelia species, their location determined by the site

aspect maps. Paths run down the site through the gardens, as well as across the site, link-

ing house sites with garden and reserves. The result is a ‘striped’ territory with streams,

gardens, and house sites alternating across the development.

The architecture of the houses is developed as a series of functional zones descending

context

above site. below overland flow path

above revegetation. below slope 0-4 deg above north facing. below building platforms

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The Paremuka project is a design case study developed to explore the idea of generating an

urbanism from the exploration and engagement with the landscape – specifically garden

design practice and landscape ecology.

To realize a way of liberating garden practice from its conventions, the project exam-

ined customary practices of garden design and their roots in historic garden theory and

practice. It also explored the practice of environmental design – from the regional con-

straint diagramming of Ian McHarg, to closer scale ecological restoration programming

and specific revegetation techniques.

Through these investigations a moment of connection with forces outside the conven-

tions of contemporary garden design was developed and a segue, or seamless flowing

of conditions was found. To ensure this seamless connection a new technique was devel-

oped to establish a relationship between garden design practice and environmentalist

landscape practice.

This technique utilises a GIS programme to both map the site and generate speculative

possibilities. The programme then sets up a process in which the interaction between

ecological processes and garden operations are generated and mapped to suggest new

urban possibilities.

The project’s definition of technique was developed by considering certain aspects of

173suburb paremuka

174

garden practice. To test the possibilities of the connection between garden design practice

and environmental design practice the project developed a design study that used the

suburb or more specifically the subdivision as a testing ground for this exploration. From

the inception of the suburb, the relationship between the house and garden, subdivision

and landscape has been an integral part of the development of the suburb. The success of

this particular urbanism, from the English Garden City movement to the post war American

subdivision can, in large part be attributed to the garden as part of its ideological make

up. Yet the actual condition of the garden in the suburb, (defined as a bounded domestic,

horticultural and living space) has remained remarkably unchanged from the turn of the

century English model. Its role is ideological. A range of larger social and cultural reasons

has contributed to this situation, and these include: individualism, the nuclear family,

desire for privacy, real estate demands and private property. All have contributed to the

sanctity of a suburban model, which has changed little from the first suburb of Letchworth1

built over one hundred years ago.

The Paremuka project was interested in how the intersection of garden and land-

scape could be represented. Part of the problem that has limited the exploration of other

modes of garden design investigation is the way contemporary gardens are represented.

located in Waitakere City, in the western suburbs of Auckland. The site had two

attributes which made it a suitable site for this investigation. Firstly, the possibility

of easy vegetative growth. Auckland has a sub tropical climate with high rainfall and

a temperate climate which encourage the growth of a wide range of exotic and

indigenous plants. Secondly, the site also has a varied topography, which could gen-

erate possibilities of terracing and contouring. The south side of the valley is char-

acterised by farmland; some regenerating bush and rolling grass land. The north

side of the valley is categorized as having a steeper topography with a mix of regen-

erating bush and exotic trees, mainly pines. A vineyard also occupies part of this site.

This area is becoming rapidly developed – housing subdivisions have started at the

eastern end of the valley and are moving up the southern side of the valley. The proj-

ect occupies one block of approximately 700 metres by 300metres. Sturges road runs

along the upper part of the site and the Paremuka stream runs along the bottom. The

site faces north and is characterised by a sloping topography, mostly 0-8 degrees.

the process

a process of site mapping was developed which identified:

The self-referentiality of the garden seems to create a similar self-referentiality in

representation. No geography, no city, no place, enters the garden representation. Instead,

there is a scenic compositional arrangement which fits within the prepared boundaries of

the garden. This issue was explored through the use of a GIS programme, ArcView. ArcView

is not a design tool in the conventional sense. It is a mapping and analysis tool which offers

a way to move beyond the sceneographic, towards something more concrete. In broad

terms, the capacity of ArcView offered a way of decontextulising garden practice from the

particular design conventions that surround it, namely: typology, styles, and particular rep-

resentational techniques. ArcView offers a way to shift beyond the convention of garden

representation, in particular the ‘garden in the subdivision’. It offers a way to avoid the

parceling of the site using the convention of autonomous subdivision planning by referring

to the conditions of the existing site. The value of ArcView then was the crudeness and

literalness of its method of inquiry. In some ways the literalness and one dimensionality of

ArcView’s methodology, its unblinking crudeness, is itself a value as it unthinkingly effaces

the shibboleths of subdivision design, garden convention, and ecological purity.

the project site

Geographically situated in the foothills of the Waitakere Ranges Paremuka Valley is

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1 Slope as represented by contour and digital elevation model.

2 Overland water flow as represented by prevalent water flow direction and flow

accumulation, specifically the effect of a 100 year flood on the site.

from this data a more specific plan was generated which identified:

1 Areas of the site above 8-degrees in slope.

2 Areas of the site which would be specifically effected by a one hundred-year flood.

3 The river.

4 Buffer zone to the existing ridge road.

The next move was to intersect specific site conditions with the conventions of contempo-

rary and conventional garden design. These where found in a close reading of Loudon2, the

nineteenth century English garden writer. A series of qualifying criteria are drawn from the

Loudonesque prescription. These became translated into functional instructions able to be

activated by ArcView. Thus Loudon’s directives to establish a garden by constructing differ-

ence between the garden and surrounding landscape, become instructions to establish

zones for optimum garden cultivation by selecting areas of the site with slope less than 8

degrees and away from floodpath areas. The horticultural implications of these instruc-

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tions were explored and the resultant site map is divided into three horticultural zones

based on the site’s topography: a river zone, a slope zone, and a ridge zone. These zones

are planted with an array of exotic garden plants which suit the zones conditions.

The river zone is planted in particular wet/bogy species such as Alnus, Betula,

Cordaderia, Dianella, Fraxinus and Gunnera.

The ridge area is planted in dry loving plants like Acacia, Agapanthus, Banksia,

Casuarina, Cistus, Echium, Lagerstroemia, and Pinus and the slope zone is planted in a

mixt of these two types.

The areas of the site, which are unsuitable for garden cultivation, are classified as not-

garden. The not-garden areas are outside Loudon’s prescriptive boundaries, and are treat-

ed as sites for the revegetation of indigenous vegetation.3 Three broad vegetation zones are

located according to topography. The area by the river is planted in typical riverine indige-

nous vegetation such as; Kowhai, Kawakawa, Kahikatea, Karaka, Titoki, and Mahoe. The

slope area is planted in Karaka, Rata, Kohekohe, Puriri, and Rimu. The ridge area is plant-

ed in Kauri, Miro, Tanekaha, Totara,and Mapou.

The result is a horticultural plan, which is made up of three garden areas planted in

exotic plants, and three not-garden areas planted with indigenous species.

The garden and the not-garden zones connect through the process of plant migration.

The non-garden areas interact between themselves, e.g. the river zone with the slope zone.

Species in each zone that have a specific tolerance for the neighbouring zone can cross

over. Plants in the garden zones interact with themselves, the river zone with the slope

zone, the slope zone with the ridge zone. Species in each zone that have a specific toler-

ance for the neighbouring zone can cross over.

There is also interaction between the not-garden and the garden areas. Aggressive

native species spread into the garden areas, and certain virulent weedy exotic species

become established in the not-garden zones.

The garden areas and the not-garden areas and their associated buffers combine to

form a horticultural map of the site.

Distribution of species is calculated on a typical mean of one plant per square metre.

This figure is transposed to a hypothetical 100m2 block. The actual size of each zone is then

determined and this figure is multiplied by the plant distribution figure to give the number

of plants for each zone. Species distribution in the buffer zones are based on how aggres-

sive the invading species, exotic or indigenous, are. This invasive quality is given a rating of

either 75%, 50% or 25%, and is reflected in the number of species in the 100m2 block. The

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percentage is multiplied by the actual size of the area to give the number of invaders per

m2.

The cheapest and most effective method of planting is hydroseeding. This technique

involves mixing plant seed with mulch and an adhesive agent which is then sprayed onto

either a flat or sloping ground plane. The result is an intensively planted ground plane with

a profusion of species; both exotic and indigenous, occupying all of the ground not other-

wise occupied by infrastructural elements.

The speculative timeline for the development of garden.city is:

Year 1 The seed mixture is sprayed in the spring. Germination occurs over a one

month to one-year period (native species being generally slower to germinate). A

mat growth of uneven height (1m. maximum) covers the majority of the soil, while

functional movement paths are created around the site.

Year 2 Plants have reached up to 1m in height and paths start to be formalised.

Aggressive species start to dominate.

Year 3 Plants have reached up to 2m. in height. Extra tube stocks (smallest grown

species) of broad leaf native species are planted amongst the indigenous areas.

housing. Along the river are smaller, broken terraces and individual houses are located on

these ’islands’. On the higher slopes bigger terraces accommodate larger housing blocks.

The housing stock is two storied, semi-detached housing and approximately 275 housing

units are accommodated. Stormwater collection ponds are located in the indigenous areas

(the not-gardens). These ponds retain stormwater from house roofs and roads for cleaning

(through vegetation filtration and sedimentation) before being release into the river. The

roading infrastructure of the project links a road running parallel to the steam with the

existing ridge road. The link road runs at right angles to these roads following the direction

of a smaller overland flow path. Smaller traverse roads run at right angles along the ter-

races to connect to the housing blocks.

A blanket of exotic vegetation crossing boundaries and hierarchies dissolves the tradi-

tional garden with its semi public front garden and private rear garden. Streets and foot-

paths cut through the new garden, old hierarchies of street planting, appropriate trees,

entrance statements and the public landscape, of the subdivision is elided for an highly

ordered yet dynamic horticulture, through which services cut a functional path. Public

landscape in the subdivision, normally the marginal, vestigial land, is revegetated

with indigenous planting in the same manner as the garden vegetation. The result is a thick

Vision is starting to be compromised, movement is becoming difficult off pathways,

sound is becoming muffed and weeds are suppressed. Paths are becoming more

formalized and steps, are constructed.

Year 4 Rich botanical selection and interaction is evident. Planting becomes more

mysterious.

Year 10 and over The landscape becomes historical and autonomous. Seeding itself

it is taking on its own life with unexpected results, moving beyond the intention of

the original planting plan and maps.

The implication of the Loudonesque prescription was explored in the site’s topography. The

not-garden zones are left as original contours. In contrast, the garden areas are terraced

to distinguish them as different. Instruction for this terracing operation is driven by the

functional concerns of the typical subdivision. The dimensions of each terrace are between

two and three-metres high and roughly 30m deep.

The horticultural map is laid over the amended topography making a complex inter-

section of horticultural and topographical difference. The typical infrastructural concerns

of the suburb now intersect with this intricate condition. Housing is placed in a contingent

manner on the garden/terraces. The size of the terraces determines the different types of

mat of vegetal growth in which the inhabitants burrow, kids make paths, shortcuts, and

tracks – the boundary between what is private and public uncertain. This leads to an

inescapable landscape where both occupants and visitors alike are confronted by the lack

of traditional garden conventions as they move about their landscape – between the

exotic garden, indigenous landscape and the multiplicity of possible combinations. This

busy and vibrant interchange between the two states is not static, but is a continually

changing and evolving landscape. The whole subdivision becomes its own entity through

the cohesive and overwhelming logic of the planting.

The formal and physical structure of the project now raises the question, how should

people occupy this landscape? On what terms can people build here? Some preliminary

observations might be that people occupy zones rather than private property. What might

be the implication of this type of occupation? The zones of occupation seem to form

mainly on the terraces. The terraces form their own neighbourhood through a variety

of factors, including the relationship of the housing to the landscape and the view and

each other rather than towards the roads and services. The terraces could engender com-

munities rather than the property parceling. Roading assumes a lesser importance in

this project. One speculative possibility is that the inhabitants of the terrace could choose

the type of infrastructure they required, – for instance: where does the road go?, is it

181180

tarsealed?, paved? Speculative possibilities raised by terrace configurations are: how are

the terrace walls constructed?, battered?, or walled? How are these junctions created?

What materials are used? All these possibilities show how it is possible to make up a

bigger world by smaller interactions. Other possibilities that are opened up are the creation

of informal contingent path systems: how do paths transverse the terraces? i.e. ramps.

This opens up the possibility of a completely separate pedestrian communication structure

with no reason to access the roads. Some speculative possibilities that arise from the

planting ideas are the roles inhabitants could play in how plants are appropriated

and which area they occupy. This could lead to rules about the removal of plants by trans-

planting them and moving them elsewhere. This could lead to group decisions being made

about the provision of open space. All these suggestions point to an empowering of the

traditionally docile suburban dweller. The relative topography determines a community.

People on each terrace form friendships, group/body corporates, and the landscape helps

to naturalise human relationships.

The Paremuka project demonstrates that garden design is capable of moving beyond its

contemporary conventional structures and sites to generate new possibilities for its own

practice. Garden design need no longer be limited to the domestic sphere, tied to an indi-

vidual owner, and limited by property boundary conditions. In the Paremuka project some

of the conventions of the traditional garden, exotic horticulture and artificial topography

assume new freedoms and possibilities of scale and experience. The Paremuka project

revealed the ease of scale in which these refigured conventions, horticulture and topogra-

phy could operate, and the feeling of potential and possibility that could be generated at

a greater scale.

The Paremuka project also explored the possibilities of contemporary environmental

design. In many ways the condition of environmental design is similar to garden design, an

immensely rich corpus of work but with a limited almost one-dimensional focus within

the practice of landscape architecture. In the case of garden design the focus is on the indi-

vidual and domestic, in the case of environmental practice, the focus is on ‘saving the

world’. This project demonstrated that environmental landscape practice could develop a

richer range of possibilities through a particular engagement with the intentionalities of

garden practice. Certain moments in the site demonstrated powerful potential, such as the

overland flow paths. The material of such conditions led to a series of connections and the

development of richer intentions, mediation’s, and modifications, beyond the conventional

environmental reconstruction and restoration.

The development of ways of escaping from the contemporary conventions of garden

design were inextricably linked with an exploration of the GIS software, ArcView and its

abilities and limitations. The implications which came with the use of Arc View are that

garden conventions have to undergo some kind of transformation to enter this system. This

is an escape route, a way of freeing garden design practice from its conventions. GIS tends

to make zones, to set up rules, and take the process literally. This makes it stronger and

able to cut across garden and subdivision conventions and open up new ways of represent-

ing the changing possibilities for the new garden.

Using the intentionalities of garden design practice to determine the form of the

new suburb, the Paremuka project has demonstrated that new forms of urbanism could

be generated, even within the hidebound ethos of the developer subdivision. This privileg-

ing of the garden over other more conventional concerns of the suburb has led to a

revaluation of some of the most revered and central tenants of suburb design; the individ-

ual detached house and its associated private bounded garden. These shibboleths are

almost miraculously dissolved in the face of a seemingly overwhelming logic of garden

driven development. Private boundaries are elided for a delicious horticultural confusion of

the indigenous and exotic, giving rise to a new way of living in the suburb. The Paremuka

project promotes a physical integration/differentiation of the garden which changes the

social/cultural conventions predicated on customary subdivision hierarchies. The promise

of the Paremuka project is not limited to its site but has the potential to inform the region

and the city.

1 Letchworth, the physical realisation of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model, designed in 1903.

2 Loudon. C. (1871) An Encyclopaedia of Gardening Comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture,

Floriculture, Arboriculture, and Landscape Gardening, Longmans, Green and Co. London.

3 Lucas. Di (1998) The guide for planting and restoring the nature of Waitakere City, Waitakere City, Auckland, NZ.

auckland site

above contour. below DTM above aspect. below hillshade

187

100 year flood indigenous vegetation patterns

above hill slope above 8 degrees. below buffered hill slope above overland flow paths. below buffered flow paths

191

road and river buffers slope and water combined = not garden

193

slope under 8 degrees and no flood zone combined = garden indigenous vegetation on not garden

195indigenous veg on not garden buffered

exotic vegetation on garden buffered

garden + not garden

199

201

refigured topography planting + contours

203

new topography + new vegetation

205

contours vegetation + stormwater

207

contours vegetation , stormwater + housing

001

contours + planting contours, planting + infrastructure

216

master plankey A individual houses. B terrace houses. C link road. D transverse roads. E stormwaterrunoff collection ponds

219

intersection of river and slope zones river/slope study area with planting plan

river/slope zone planting plan. A exotics in slope area. B exotics in river area. C natives inslope area. D natives in river area. E slope exotics in river garden. F river exotics in slopegarden. G natives in slope garden. H native succession in river garden. I exotics in slope notgarden. J exotic succession in river not garden. K river natives in slope not garden L slopenatives in river not garden

opposite. river/slope zone study area with contours, planting plan, houses and roads

river/slope zone study area with planting, houses and roads. key: A housing. B river road. C reservoir above river/slope zone: view of housing. below view of study area with houses

001river/slope zone view of study area with housing in the background

001opposite section key. above river/slope zone: housing with indigenous planting. belowhousing with indigenous panting in foreground

001reservoir with indigenous planting in foreground and garden planting in backgroundriver/slope zone native planting in foreground with garden planting in background

231

intersection of slope and river zones slope/ridge study area with planting plan

001

slope/ridge zone planting plan. A exotics in garden zone. B exotics in slope garden zone. Cnatives in ridge zone. D ridge exotics in garden. E slope exotics in ridge gardens. F nativesin slope gardens. G natives in ridge garden. H exotics in slope not garden. I slope natives inridge not gardens. J ridge natives in slope not gardens

opposite. above slope/ridge zone: planting plan with refigured contours. below planting plans, contours, houses and roads. key: A link road. B transverse roads. C housing

001

opposite. slope/ridge zone planting plan with infrastructure key A housing. B link road. C transverse roads. above slope/ridge zone: study area from indigenous zone. belowindigenous zone from road

001slope/ridge zone view up link road with houses and transverse roads opposite section key

239

001above slope/ridge zone view of housing with garden planting in foreground. below housingin slope zone with garden planting slope/ridge zone with indigenous native planting in background

slope/ridge zone garden planting in foreground with indigenous planting in background

matthew bradburygarden.city