The ‘processual’ type gardens that I identified as characterizing a number of University Gardens—and to a lesser extent some of the ‘representational’ gardens—fall under this umbrella. Each attempted to build significance around fluid concepts of ecology and process, ideas which are by no means new, but are yet to establish agreed safety lines of communication between author and audience. The result was that zeitgeist gardens had no fallback position and tended to rely on their own self-referential narrative. In these instances semiotic transferal—whether intended or fabricated—was demonstrably absent on the ground, and the limitations of the garden as a conveyor of complex syntax was exposed. Perhaps for this reason, ‘processual’ type gardens were highly unvisited, especially in the context of the wildly popular ‘labyrinthine’ and ‘room’ type gardens. However, an even stronger force divided the communicability of different gardens than their reliance on normative themes or manufactured artifice; this had less to do with the contents than with the container—or frame—that holds it together. In general terms, ‘framing’ and separated the masters and university gardens along mostly partisan lines, with the former employing it and the latter dissolving it. As will be discussed, disbanding the physical enforcement between the garden and the landscape remains fraught terrain for a garden exhibition; to quote Robert Smithson, ‘if art is art, it [still] must have limits’.Although to be sure, it does prefigure a more encompassing impulse to de-frame garden expo sites from their symbiotic cities. Traditionally, the idea of the garden depends on the frame to separate out a representation brought forth from the background of the continuity of the world. Hedges, fences, walls and even ha-has constitute familiar components of the landscape architect’s palette for physically framing a garden. Numerous scholars have asserted the integral nature of this primary representational mechanism. Bernard St-Denis observes that the origins of ‘garden’ can be traced to ‘fence’ as ‘the inaugural act and demarcation device’.Peter Marcuse notes that the etymology of the garden is ‘an enclosed space’, and that in many languages garden and wall are closely related. In this regard, Donata & Christoph Valentien connect garden to the High German garto meaning ‘something that is fenced in’. Aben & de Wit observe the tautological nature of the ‘enclosed garden’ given that etymologically both words essentially mean the same.
Indeed, the frame is so intertwined with the idea of the garden that it forms what John Dixon Hunt termes the ‘criterion of enclosure’. In the Western context, the garden frame has been transformed from the full enclosure and vertical orientation of the Islamic garden and medieval cloister garden ,vertical grow rack to the partial opening and controlled external visual vistas of the renaissance garden, to the dissolution of the wall in deference to the expansive horizontal frame of the baroque garden. The picturesque garden represented the most radical subversion of the frame, seamlessly implanting an articulated simulacrum of a landscape into the midst of that same landscape, although as Hunt notes, even picturesque gardens were ‘circumscribed simply by the limits of [their] own sophisticated art’.In the twentieth century, the modern garden broke down walls between the domestic interior, and eschewed representational meaning for pure function and comfort, but also concomitantly built walls between the new privacy of the garden as domestic living space and the external public realm. The postmodern garden has had a more catatonic relationship with the frame, utilizing it or not, contingent on the efficacy of the cultural/corporate denatured landscape that formed the basis of its representational scope. In the Chinese context, the domestic courtyard tradition of the Confucian garden is defined to a degree by the architectural framework. The Daoist garden is imbued with a more complex and absorptive boundary given the ‘non-dualist cosmology’ of this tradition. Situated within the unity of the vast order of the cosmos, the Daoist garden draws borrowed views of all persuasions—natural or cultural—into its representational net.The frame that results can be understood as stretched and contorted in complex and representationally illusive ways, but definable nonetheless since these borrowed scenes do ultimately relate to definable locations in the garden itself. Across all of these historical typologies, the frame alleviates the garden’s representational ambiguity, whereby the artifice of the garden unavoidably uses the same materials as the world that it attempts to represent. By defining unequivocally what is in and what is out, the garden frame bolsters differentiation between landscape that in some form both precedes and succeeds the designer; and between unconscious nature and its representation that is the product of creative embellishment and yet uses the very same materiality as the landscape beyond.However, the garden frame is potentially a more sophisticated threshold than a binary boundary struggling to demarcate representation from wildness. Far from being a barrier in the manner of a city-scale impediment such as a freeway, the garden wall acts as a membrane that filters combinations of physical movement, visual connectivity, oral information, and even olfactory experience. It is this membrane that enables the relational inflection that has characterized most gardens throughout the ages; to gather up the external physical or social landscape while simultaneously maintaining a degree of separation from this surrounding territory.
In this regard it is helpful to think of the garden frame not as a porous wall—although in a material sense that may be true—but as a ‘net’ that Kenneth Helphand described as ensnaring elements of the landscape for interpretation and display in the garden. Despite these potential nuances, the two collections of Expo gardens typically operated at polar opposite ends of the framing scale. With the exceptions of the Landscape Garden , and the Big Dig , clearly visible and physically impenetrable frames of masonry or bamboo enclosed the other Masters’ Gardens. Like medieval cloister gardens framed off from a feared nature, in these situations, the frame was articulated so strongly to enforce representation; from the background noise of the Expo ‘landscape’ setting, but also from other Masters gardens. Given that all of the Masters Gardens were designed in isolation individually in remote locations, they function essentially as stand-alone garden machines, necessitating the frame to insulate from contamination by neighboring exhibits. Most University Gardens, on the other hand, did not utilize a tangible demarcation. Ironically, despite being decloaked, the result was to make the projects invisible to many Expo visitors, who could simply not ‘see’ them as gardens, such was their unwitting camouflage ‘in plain sight’ within the noisy arena of the Expo site. While the extroverted nature of the sloping waterfront and hilltop site conditions account for some of the design impulse to deframe, amplifying the effect of interface rather than the introversion, it was also a by-product of the integrative design workshop methodology where site boundary negotiations between participating universities were encouraged and facilitated. The design brief document challenged the university design teams to move beyond ‘language, image, character, or subjectivity characterized by the romantic, expressionistic, picturesque, or vernacular” substituting in its place a methodology of “process, … collective engagement translative definitions”.The result of these ‘collective and translative’ operations was to place emphasis on mitigating the edge conditions between gardens. In this regard, a media analogy is appropriate: whereas the traditional Chinese garden has been described as slow, like film,vertical grow tables where the effects are constructed via a sequence of sympathetic scenes,the horticultural Expo was more analogous to a live television feed. Likening television to the structure of the late capitalist city, Michael Sorkin noted that ‘television’s main event is the cut between broadcast bits’ with the ‘the design of television all about erasing differences amongst the bits’ so that the broadcast makes sense.According to Sorkin, the project of the designer in the contemporary city is to fuse components so that they become more understandable and palatable. The university gardens can be read in these terms, attempting to smooth out the jumps, both between individual garden exhibits and the overall web of the Expo site.
As Bernard Cache observes, in this context the frame is ‘no longer an autonomous and predetermined form that imposes itself’ rather its ‘articulation is mobile and equilibrium results from the play of tensions that run through the system as a whole’. The garden becomes an active field in which its interior, edges, and exterior are in engaged in a feedback loop. By comparison—in theory at least—the enclosed Masters gardens can be viewed as perpetuating an anachronistic template of the garden as ‘other’, differentiated from its context as an implanted unit . In practice, this strategy remained more successful in the Expo context, if, for the very least, at a psychological level of piquing curiosity and drawing people in. Without a frame, this controlled incremental experience was substituted in the University Gardens with total visual overview. When a garden can be surveyed in its entirety, visitors were more likely to consume it from afar than to indulge in its experiential qualities.Also implicit in the collective negotiated design process and the dynamic edge between the centre and external periphery of the garden was that gardens operate somehow as test-beds for operations at the landscape scale—in the same way as the pavilion is typically revered within architecture as an incubator for more expansive architectural praxis. However, the relationship of the garden to the landscape is far more dialectical than its architectural equivalent, and what goes in the garden is not necessarily an experiment for subsequent deployment in the landscape. The garden is more of a counterbalance than a small fragment of landscape; the two interact of course, but from a garden, a landscape does not necessarily grow. There are certainly exceptions to this rule—such as ‘seed dispersal’ concepts that were popular in the 1980’s where the garden was engineered to disseminate its genetic produce on the wind—but the point is that in these examples the garden is sacrificed to its expansion or duplication into the landscape Nevertheless, while not prefiguring landscape-scale operations, gardens have a more encompassing role as potent cultural litmus papers; as Bernard Lassus notes, ‘gardens have almost always foretold in advance the relationships between … society and nature’.In this regard, gardens are more persuasive as reflectors— either of self or society—than empirical experiments that generate results applicable to the world at large. This efficacy of the garden differentiates it from the landscape on the whole, although when we start to consider the consciously designed landscape as opposed to the general cultural landscape, the issue becomes more obfuscated. My interpretation of James Corner’s characterization of the real limits to landscape architectural practice in the world illuminates this convergence. Given that landscape architecture influences only a very small percentage of outdoor construction projects, with other aesthetically unconscious operations undertaking the lion’s share, Corner positions landscape design as a primarily ‘metaphorical and ideological’ rather than solely demonstrative or performative praxis; one that uses its cultural currency to edify and illuminate an ecological message—to provide a foundation on which to reflect, rather than attempt to physically cure the world within its own diminutive footprint.This is, I would argue, is also descriptive of the role of the garden. Therefore, while a garden doesn’t necessarily equate to the landscape, the two genres increasingly converge and overlap in contemporary theory and praxis. At a conceptual level, the university gardens pertinently navigated the convergent muddy territory between gardens as reflectors and gardens as demonstrative landscapes. The move to de-frame is the key mechanism in engaging this terrain, although the one threshold that the design teams had no control over restrains its effectiveness: the fence around the Expo site itself. In this regard, the perimeter boundary is physical but also social; while the frame may enable representation by physically separating nature from the continuum of the world, division is also imposed through less tangible but equally powerful social forces. Indeed, to conflate the picturesque as an example, the ultimate frame was formed less from ha-ha’s or the limits of representation, than along lines of society and class. Beyond entrance gates and perimeter fences, garden shows are historically typically also be framed within these societal terms.