Nice, attention-grabbing title for a blog post, isn't it? Hat tip to my friend Stephan Trueby, an architectural and design critic, who pointed me to The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a thirty acre private garden in the Borders area of Scotland created by architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks. It is a joining of terrestrial nature with fundamental concepts of modern physics (quantum mechanics, super-string theory, complexity theory, etc.), and the literal and physical manifestation of the craftsman as philosopher, re-uniting the "head and hand divided" (Richard Sennett).
The garden is also a book, and Jencks writes:
"When you design a garden, it raises basic questions. What is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually? Some of these questions are practical, others are philosophical, and the latter may not occur to us while laying out a garden, but they are implied. When in 1988 I started designing a garden with my wife Maggie Keswick, at her mother's house in Scotland, we were not concerned with the larger issues, but over the years, they came more and more to the fore. The result has been what I have called 'The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.' The reason for this unusual title is that we - Maggie, I, scientists, and then friends that we consulted - have used it as a spur to think about and celebrate some fundamental aspects of nature. Many of these are quite normal to a garden: planting suitable species which are both a pleasure to eat and easy to grow in a wet, temperate climate. And others are unusual: inventing new waveforms, linear twists and a new grammar of landscape design to bring out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos."
Hypnotizing. The person who made this is smart guy!
Posted by: oakland defense lawyer | May 19, 2011 at 12:10 AM
hahaha cute, poor dog looks very lonely haha anyway...
I saw a project of a friend that was a garden, maybe like yours in 3D which was amazing, we were on a big bubble you know like a planetary but was amazing.
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