GARDENS IN TIME: A REVIEW

NOTES ON THE MAKE-DO GARDEN

by Stanislaus Fung

GARDENS AS CULTURAL MEMORY IN SUZHOU

by Yinong Xu

Stanislaus Fung and Yingong Xu are amongst the first generation of scholars educated both in China and abroad. Both are currently at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Their critical essays on the Chinese Garden often focus on conceptions of time, and how they differ from that of in the West. In Notes on the Make-do Garden, Fung positions the garden as neither an embodiment of a glorified past nor idealistic future. Xu approaches questions of restoration, and how the act of garden making and re-making is to adapt and develop a living narrative intrinsic to the site. Both authors demonstrate the garden as a form of place- making that is able to positions its owner relative to dual temporal realities; society of the day and the values that transcend generations. As Suzhou and China race towards a future where the only certainty is a total departure from the past, where the fragmented suburban landscape is mute to any collective identity, the Garden as described by Fung and Xu appears as an endeavor capable of projecting a cultural identity in relation to living past.

The Make-Do Garden is a fictitious garden created in text by Huang Zhouxing (1611-1680). Huang's essay, "Record of the Make-do Garden," is written in 1674, and participates in a larger interest, particular to the seventeenth century, in imaginary gardens as a vehicle for literary investigation (Stanislaus, 1)

Stanislaus Fung provides a translation to the opening of Huang's Record:

Since antiquity, gardens have been remembered on account of people, and people have also been remembered on account of gardens. Nowadays there are many owners of gardens in the world. How could Huang Jiuyan not have a garden? Indeed, Jiuyan proudly told a guest, "My garden has no fixed location. I merely select the place where the landscape is finest under the Four Heavens, and construct it there. What is called 'the finest place' is in the world, yet out of this world, is not in the world, yet not out of this world. Since I have searched for it from the day I was born, and have only found it after several tens of years, I have not been inclined to speak of it to men of the world." The guests said, "Please describe its general features." Jiuyan replied, "Certainly."

Huang proceeds by describing the landscape of the fictive garden, two accounts of its land and water dominated halves respectively, and concludes by relating the two halves, like ying and yang, with each other. His garden is encircled by an impenetrable ring of mountains. The only opening is through a cave, no larger then the human body, and screened at its entrance by a waterfall. Thus it is isolated from the rest of humanity. It is both of this world and set apart from it.

Fung notes that the layout of the garden is the inverse of a well known fourth century poem "Record of the Peach Blossom Source" (桃花运) by Tao Yuanming (365-427AD). In Tao's poem, a fisherman stumbles upon a peaceful peoples who know no strife. They live in peace amongst peach blossoms and isolated from the society since the beginning of Imperial China under the Qin (221-208 BC). The fisherman leaves but is never able to find the ford back to the Peach Blossoms.

Even in its name, the Make-do Garden suggests temporal transience. Stanislaus Fung presents the imaginary garden as a device that positions its author and viewers neither entirely in the present nor the past. The Make-do Garden is neither entirely Tao's Peach Blossom Grove, nor locked its ring mountains and physical reality. The garden is neither nostalgic nor an idealized future, Arcadia nor Utopia. It is not "insulated" within the flow of time. Its identity lies between multiple histories.

Fuciao Village, Suzhou

1. looking east. connecting with the Grand Canal
2. Looking west towards Dushu Lake

3. looking north. Fuciao Temple. last remnant of Fuciao Cun village

I was lost and about to return to Suzhou when the road took a turn and the bus came up and over a bridge to expose a long view of an expansive lake. On its banks, a  temple, bathed in evening light shone out. It was the only moment of colour in the bare landscape. To its south lay a swath of newly leveled earth, to the north the wide muddy lake. 

I hopped off the bus to take a closer look. The temple is accessed across a canal via an old stone slab

bridge. The new elevated roadway presses hard up against the foot of the old bridge so that to cross, you must first bow to clear the new bridge before taking to the old one. Once across, two small lions guard the wooden doors painted red. Though the yellow walls were newly painted, the doors are bolted shut.

A young man claimed the temple keeper had long since passed away. He had never been inside, nor had the man carrying groceries home at the bus stop. An old man out back who’s memory might have been more generous proved otherwise. With a nervous smile of silver teeth and a near indecipherable dialect, he explained that he was a guest worker from the hinterland. 

Across the road, North American-like housing rolled out to accommodate Chinese-scaled demographics have replaced village rice polders. We know this from Google Earth images taken only two years ago. The images also tell that the temple once served a village, since raised to make way for the new road. It identifies the lost village as Fuciao Cun, Pontoon Bridge Village, located on a trunk waterway that connects the Grand Canal with the Wusong River.

The violent erasure of Fuciao Village and the survival of its temple provoke both an urgent and critical response to contemporary Chinese urbanism and a faith rooted in a powerful reconciliation of a vanished village with its environment. The manner in which the high temple roof alters the horizon and how the water mirrors its golden walls once described a location for Fuciao Village between sky and water, and challenges New Fuciao to rationalize its place within a radically different context today. 

thesis abstract

 xienjiekou underground  mall, nanjing

Landscapes in Motion:

mobility and the perception of space and time in the Jiangnan, China

When standing on the street lined by six-story luxury department stores at Xienjiekou, Nanjing, one would not suspect a parallel sprawling subterranean mall underfoot. A web of escalators pull crowds under to gawk at shops averaging four meters wide by six meters deep, spread out for blocks on end over two stories. If Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York summarized an epoch of reaching skywards, this is an investigation of buildings on their sides, a layered, complex urbanism that stretches horizontally that thickens the very surface of the earth.

Nanjing is amongst the fourteen cities that comprises a mega-city region in the area historically known as the Jiangnan, south of the Yangtze River Delta, China. With 80 million inhabitants, it is the most populated urban agglomeration in China and its principal economic workhorse.  It is also part of a larger global phenomena of emerging city clusters, from Boston to Washington to the Randstad in northern Europe, that have economically more to do with each other than apart. Such city clusters are not simply larger scaled cities with their suburbs. Unlike the homogeneous and fragmented Fordist suburban landscapes - the Jiangnan is a single organic complex of stacked and coexisting landscape-scaled processes stretching out over 300 km between each of its three main nodal cities.  

The primary linkages within this mat urbanism are rail-based. A proposed network of regional bullet-trains together with municipal subways provides modes of movement that will fundamentally alter the function and perception of the Jiangnan as a whole. It offers an opportunity to fulfill the economic advantage of clustering cities. It also permits the layering of other processes and flows - urban and rural, human and biological, productive landscapes and excess non-places - embedded within a fine-grained rail-based framework. If North America was shaped by the automobile in the past century, what will the experience be of moving horizontally at unprecedented speeds and distances within the Jiangnan of this century.

The capturing of speeds and vast multi-layered territories demands alternative methods and mediums of investigation. Mapping permits the quantitative exploration of different systems and their increasing density over time. Photography frames the qualitative experience of movement within the contemporary condition. Lastly, an architectural proposal seeks to combine cartography and imagery in a tangible, material exploration of landscapes in motion that is the condition of the Jiangnan.

11. Jiangnan: an expression of global or local determination ?

Between 1405 and 1433, admiral Zheng He brought his fleet, several hundred ships strong, to the nations between South East Asia, the Middle East and coastal Africa. It marked a desire to reach beyond China's borders; to seek relations and trade, influence and co-operation, between China and the world. Yet state sponsored expeditions abruptly stopped, and China ceased to look outwards until reforms in the 1970's. 

If the binary cause-and-effect explanation that is globalization enabled by technology fails to account for the timing of the globalizing phenomena, then what is it about this era that has re-awaken the outward Chinese gaze for the first time in 500 years? Perhaps the emergence of Jiangnan the megalopolis is not as much a condition of globalization as it is an expression of local determination and resilience. 

08 conditions of the Jiangnan Megacity Region

Some time since the rise of the English industrial city and the present day, the megalopolis has replaced the traditional nuclear city as the primary working unit within the global economy.Their form is neither that of the traditional city, nor it's planned suburbs: Instead of a single dominating core, they have multiple specialized urban centres. The fabric between them is characterized by swaths of unproductive land adjacent to sprawling factories, and slums at the feet of towering corporate districts planned only months before. 

Megalopolises are also often situated in resource rich geographies, wetlands and river deltas, yet they often threaten to overwhelm the very biological diversity they owe their wealth to. Meanwhile, the desire for increased mobility coupled with immense geography demands new modes of transportation. Yet while high speed transit corridors can bind multiple municipalities into a single comprehensive agglomeration, the regions they attempt to connect are often may be historically and culturally independent that may resist sacrificing local identity for a larger economic union. 

Jiangnan, a collection of 16 Chinese cities, is one such megalopolis well positioned to become a major player internationally. With over 80 million inhabitants today, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou amongst others, are positioned to receive vast numbers of inland immigrants in a country where most of the population remains rural. Yet, urban growth already precipitately straddling the riches arable deposits in the country, where the Yangtze River meets the China Sea. Within one year, travel times reduced by high-speed rail to an hour at the region's widest 300 km girth, proposes to bundle what have been distinct cities evolved over millennia. It remains to be seen if differences in food, opera and even language can persist to insist regional identities in the face of even-handed agglomeration. 

At a time when China is on the brink of mass urbanization and globalization, the union of these 16 cities is inevitable and indeed economically necessary. The question is how to operate within its dualities; dross-capes adjacent production-scapes, urban growth and ecological health, increased mobility versus local cultural resilience, so that the depths of cultural achievements can be realized  with economic prosperity. What is the role of the architect within Jiangnan, the Megalopolis.

04 place making in the suburb: summary of a class discussion

Spacial Determinism is dead.

New Urbanism is an aesthetic gimmick that imposes an architecture

as restrictive as the very housing stock it proposes to replace.

suburb bashing is tried and tiring. 

how then dose one build meaning in suburbia? 

is there something worth saving?

is usage in fact more variant, vibrant and sustainable than the built form suggests?

what if infrastructure could be like an arm of the official city,

reaching branching into to every community,

connecting the desperate pockets of activity

into something more than the sum of its parts -

a collective consciousness?

03 Thickening HWY 7

the heart of york region, ontario canada 

a.k.a. no man's land between hwy's 7 and 407 at yonge street

Despite being York Region’s primary east-west corridor, Highway 7 is anything but the backbone of the region. It is over engineered as a throughway yet undersigned as a place in itself. Fragmented yet vibrant ethnic communities tied over vast distances exist along its route, but the pockets of activity are isolated. If York Region is to enjoy the benefi ts of connecting across ethnic and economic lines, Highway 7 must be transformed from a bypass to a destination in its own right.

Ontario’s recent Places to Grow Act mandates three new urban centres along a 20km stretch of Highway 7. In one of the urban nodes, densities are targeted at as much as 13 times greater than current levels.* This immediate influx of people represent an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the Highway 7 corridor, and it raises several questions: Can its transportation function be improved while layering additional uses, like linear parkland, for a programmatically richer and more attractive corridor? Can the banal highway become an urban armature that boasts civic amenities needed for culturally sustainable region? In short, how can we leverage new development to realize a Highway 7 as the central spine that links York Region’s fragmented activities into something more than a sum of its parts?

* Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. Places to Grow. Langstaff Gateway Study Area. 2008