Visions of Paradise Found

The spiritual heritage of western civilization is inscribed within the boundaries of the garden and the city. Eden and the New Jerusalem constitute visions of Paradise that are archetypes for the setting of everyday life from archaic Greece to twentieth-century America. In that each culture possesses its own "construction" of paradise, an examination of these (culture and construction) in parallel is the most rewarding premise for an exploration of human interaction with the visual environment.

This is precisely the premise that under-writes two important new books on architecture and garden design: Vincent Scully's Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, and a collection of essays edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot entitled The Architecture of Western Gardens. Both present a formidable facade to the reader. They presume an acquaintance with the vocabulary of the study of architecture (or at least the willingness to acquire one), and are quite expensive, even for "art books" ($40.00 and $135.00 respectively).

Even so, these books address major concerns and trace them over long periods, and thus warrant the attention of the interested specialist and the passionate amateur alike.

Vincent Scully, Professor of the history of art emeritus at Yale University and one of this century's most penetrating and influential writers on architecture, offers Architecture as an eloquent synopsis of a distinguished career. It covers the familiar terrain of the history of Western architecture (from the Pyramids of ancient Egypt to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C.), while incorporating a brief discussion of the architecture of pre-Colombian North America and the ancient Near East.

Nonetheless, Scully does not tread wearily through the book's itinerary (ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the Gothic cathedrals of France, Renaissance Florence, Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc...); rather, he takes to it with abandon, incorporating a sensitivity to the literary and cultural context that surrounds the buildings he studies, and using a sparkling rhetorical style that enlivens a subject liable to be wearied by either dense technical jargon or the purple prose of art speak.

Scully most effectively deploys his eloquence when he discusses single buildings and architectural ensembles. He illustrates the way in which the first-hand experience of a building, as he claims in the preface, is the only way to "see things as they are." In his description of the crossing of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Scully amplifies on this point:

Architecture: The Natural And the Manmade

By Vincent Scully

St. Martin's Press

$40. 00

"It can and must be experienced on the spot, if we permit the building to lead us, in terms of what it means, straight down the nave to stand at last in the crossing at heaven's gate. There, emphatically, we feel it rise up beyond matter around us. Our flesh is not denied, but transcended. We are in the center of an expanding universe. Then, in truth at the edge of vision, but well inside its limits, the great roses lift and spring in a harmony like that of the spheres."

Scully's analysis of the monuments of the built environment follows the logic announced in the title. He examines these constructions of Paradise as the intersection of the world of nature (as it is or as it is mentally represented by different cultures) with the second world built by human hands.

Before the Hellenic era, this relationship was one of imitation: The temples of Teotihuacan and the ziggurats of Ur are manmade surrogates for the natural "sacred mountain," the center of a spiritually charged vision of the natural world.

The temples of archaic Greece, however, engage nature rather than imitate it, and Scully traces this relationship through the successive periods that he discusses. He identifies a kind of engagement in which buildings and gardens articulate cultural and social ideas.

The Gothic cathedral presents an idea of the experience of divine transcendence, and the French classical garden presents a conception of the nature of social hierarchy and authority. Over the course of the book, Scully establishes a link between the matter of Paradise-creating and the ideas that lie behind.

The Architecture of Western Gardens

Edited by Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot

The M.I.T. Press

$125.00

A similar conception brings together the 70 essays that make up the 550 pages of The Architecture of Western Gardens. The subject could easily lend itself to the production of a glorified coffee-table ornament, but Mosser and Teyssot have compiled a serious and dizzyingly erudite work that investigates both traditional areas of scholarly endeavor and more novel topics.

The conventional themes that the book very amply explores include the humanist gardens of renaissance Italy, Baroque and classical gardens and the English landscape garden. The more eccentric essays outline the relationship between garden history and cartography, and the phenomenon of the amusement park.

The essays in The Architecture of Western Gardens are arranged chronologically by five periods, but they do not form a comprehensive or even uniform history of garden design. Rather, they use a grape-shot technique to cover both general topics and specific examples. Recurring concerns in the essays include the uses of architecture in gardens in the form of fragments and folies and, especially, the visual representation of gardens.

Like Scully's book, this volume probes a vision of architectural and landscape design as an integral part of the humanities, and is preoccupied with the "reading" and interpretation of successive constructions of Paradise.

An articulation of the relationship between the city and the garden animates both books. Lionello Puppi's essay on "Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Garden" in Gardens argues that the Renaissance garden, which was defined as an imitation of nature in opposition to the city, developed into a venue for "artifice" of all kinds.

This parallels the developments in English landscape gardening in the 18th century, in which an ideal natural setting was created (including architectural fragments such as ersatz Greek temples and Gothic churches); this setting bears little resemblance to nature itself. The garden is, in fact, an environment just as artificial as the city.

In his chapter on the art of portraiture in the French classical garden, Scully shows how garden design and urban design are driven by similar ideological and cultural forces. He defines the gardens of Versailles as an instance of what he calls portraiture, the transferal of meaning to landscape. In the case of Versailles, this transferal involves the use of geometry to create a hierarchical and rational environment that mirrors both the social order and its head, the Sun-king.

This ideal extends beyond the realm of garden design to that of urban planning. Scully points out that gardens surround the chateau of Versailles on one side only; on the other lies the town, which is laid out according to a similar logic of hierarchy and rational order. Three avenues radiate out from the center of the chateau and seem to extend to the ends of the realm.

In the following chapters, Scully shows how the vision of rational order embodied at Versailles dominates the successive shaping of gardens and cities. In certain passages, he offers a searing critique of the way in which modern architecture, led by its high priest, Le Corbusier, subverts and dehumanizes this ideal.

Scully's message is compelling, especially to an urban audience that, he claims, has forgotten how to experience and appreciate the dynamic dialectic of nature and human creation in architecture. These books offer a powerful lesson in awareness--they speak of hints of Paradise Spun into the fabric of everyday life.