Authors: Marco Voltolina, Francesco Grugni
A Chinese classical garden is a space of great complexity, a carefully balanced combination of rocks, water, plants and buildings. Some scholars even claim it is “the most sophisticated architectural genre ever created” (Missingham & Selenitsch, 2001, p. 1). One of the reasons for this complexity is that a Chinese garden is made not only of its physical layout and appearance, but also of multiple layers of perceptions, associations and thoughts. These elements only exist in the mind of the visitor, but they are as real as the atoms that make up the hills, lakes, flowers and pavilions of the garden. Beyond physical space, we can recognize three layers: the layer of multisensoriality, the layer of meaning, and the layer of imagination.
First, we will examine multisensoriality. While it is true that in Chinese gardens great efforts are put in creating harmonious views and sceneries, sight is definitely not the only sense to be stimulated: sounds, smells and tactile perceptions are just as important. An experience in a garden would be incomplete without hearing birds chirping on the trees and cicadas singing among the flowers, without appreciating the fragrant scent of magnolias and sweet osmanthuses, without feeling the spring breeze on one’s face and through bamboos and pines. Pavilions were often built specifically for enjoying these impressions: for example, in the Humble Administrator’s Garden (Zhuōzhèng Yuán, 拙政园) of Suzhou, we can find the “Listening to Rain Pavilion” (Tīngyǔ Xuān, 听雨轩), where the visitor can appreciate the sound of raindrops hitting the leaves of a banana tree (fig. 1), and the “Drifting Fragrance Hall” (Yuǎnxiāng Táng, 远香堂), where one can take pleasure in the scent of lotuses (fig. 2). The concept of multisensoriality is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. In fact, for the Daoist thinker Zhuangzi (4th century BCE), an image is “not concrete material existence, but living ‘Dao’ including image, shadow, light, sound, and fragrance” (Yuan & Wu, 2008, p. 174). As most of these perceptions change with the weather and the season, a new dimension is added to the experience of the garden, making it deeper, transforming it from 3D to 4D (Zhao, 2017, p. 245).
Figure 1. Banana trees and pond in front of the “Listening to Rain Pavilion” in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou – CC BY-NC 2.5
Figure 2. The “Drifting Fragrance Hall” and the lotuses in the adjacent lake, Humble Administrator’s Garden, Suzhou. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0
The following layer, or “fifth dimension”, is that of meaning. The labyrinth of paths, courtyards and builldings of the garden is mirrored by an equally intricate “mental maze of scholarly interpretations and well-chosen metaphors” (Keswick, 1978, p. 150). Symbolisms, associations and references to famus myths, poems or paintings are “a primary emotional element of the garden form” (Morris, 1983, p. 164) and can be found almost everywhere: sometimes explicitly, as in inscriptions that announce the name of a particular pavilion, and sometimes implicitly, as with the presence of meaningful species of plants. To make an example, we can examine the “Gather Emptiness Study” (Jíxū Zhāi, 集虚斋) in the Master of Nets Garden (Wǎngshī Yuán, 网师园) of Suzhou. The purpose of this building was to be a quiet place for practicing meditation, and all of its details have been designed accordingly. When entering it, one would read the name carved on a signpost and be reminded of Zhuangzi’s words: “The Dao gathers in emptiness – emptiness: the fasting of the mind” (Zhuangzi, 2019, ch. 4). The same idea is found in the adjacent courtyard, where two clumps of bamboo, located on the sides of the study’s entrance, suggest an idea of humbleness and purity, represented by their hollow stems (fig. 3). A cultured visitor would then realize that this whole arrangement evokes the image of a secluded hut in the middle of a bamboo grove, an idyllic place where a recluse would live, contemplating Nature and the flow of the Universe, as described in the verses of Tang Dynasty (618-907) poets like Chang Jian (early 8th century): “The bamboo path leads to a reclusive site, / The meditation lodge nestles deep in trees and flowers” (Cai & Cui, 2012, poem 23). The picture would then be completed by the artworks inside the building (fig. 4), examples of the ancient tradition of “ink bamboo paintings”, a technique through which artists expressed their feelings and interior harmony, and by the “moongate” in the courtyard (fig. 5), a circular opening in the wall symbolizing perfection.
Figure 3. A bamboo clump in the courtyard in front of the “Gather Emptiness Study” in the Master of Nets Garden, Suzhou – CC BY-NC 2.5
Figure 4. Paintings depicting bamboos, displayed inside the “Gather Emptiness Study” in the Master of Nets Garden, Suzhou – CC BY-NC 2.5
Figure 5. The “moongate” in the courtyard in front of the “Gather Emptiness Study” in the Master of Nets Garden, Suzhou – CC BY-NC 2.5
The last layer, that of imagination, is a consequence of the previous ones. The perceptions and ideas conveyed by the garden lead the visitor to create a personal, subjective, psychological idea of the place. According to the Chinese writer and philosopher Zong Baihua (1897-1986), the idea of space that one gets when wondering through a Chinese garden is not based on geometry, but on music and dance (Yuan & Wu, 2008, p. 177). Paraphrasing, we can say that it is not a rational, objective experience, but an emotional, subjective one. Multisensoriality can spark synesthetic perceptions: one can hear the sound of raindrops just by looking at lotus flowers in a pond, or feel a cool breeze during a hot summer day just by hearing those same lotuses rustling in the water. The meanings represented by names and symbols are meant to arouse sentiments, reflections, ideas, and this is possible because they convey ambiguous, indefinite messages. Indeed, it is when something is left empty, undefined, that it becomes a fertile soil for our creativity. This is the case, for example, of Chinese landscape paintings, where we often find large voids (fig. 6): when we look at them, our mind is stimulated and tries to fill the blank spaces with its imagination. The whitewashed walls that define and divide the spaces of Chinese gardens follow the same principle: as their edges and corners are usually hidden by rocks and plants, they become abstract white planes, void backgrounds that awaken our creativity and suggest an idea of infinity (fig. 7). As Daoist thinker Lao Zi (c. 6th – 4th century BCE) wrote, “What exists thus makes a thing profitable; emptiness thus makes it useful” (Lao Zi, 2015, ch. 11).
Figure 6. Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225), Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring, ink on silk, 27.4 x 43.1 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Figure 7. A whitewashed wall in front of the “Zither Chamber” in the Master of Nets Garden, Suzhou – CC BY-NC 2.5
Thanks to this complexity of layers, the Chinese garden has been for centuries one of the main venues for the creation and appreciation of Art (Chang & Gao, 2018). The perceptions and ideas suggested by gardens have inspired countless painters, poets, calligraphers and musicians, leading to the creation of some of the finest masterpieces ever conceived by humans. Chinese gardens, however, can not only spark the imagination of the cultured scholars and artists that inhabited them in Imperial times, but are still a source of wonder and amazement even for contemporary tourists. When casual visitors take a simple walk through one of the famous gardens of Suzhou, their minds are tickled by an incredible variety of stimuli, that spark their creativity while conveying a general sense of peace and tranquillity.
The concept of multiple layers that we have just described found one of its highest expressions in Chinese classical gardens, but was actually present, to different extents, in most pre-modern architectures. We can think, for example, of Gothic cathedrals, with their elaborate acoustic effects, their deep allegorical meanings and their rough, irregular decorations.
With the advent of Modernity, such complexity was flattened, reduced to one single layer: that of physical, geometrical, rational, objective space. This process started in the 15th century, with the invention of linear perspective. If we look at a Renaissance painting, for example the Flagellation of Christ (fig. 8) by Italian artist Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492), we find a conception that is radically different from that of a Chinese painting, a medieval fresco or a Byzantine mosaic. In this work, in fact, the goal of the painter is to represent reality exactly as one would see it. Italian geographer Franco Farinelli (b. 1948) argues that, with the beginning of Modernity, “one of the five senses, the eye, becomes autonomus” (Farinelli, 2007, p. 32). We can experience this, for example, in the first Reinassance building ever constructed, the Spedale degli Innocenti (fig. 9), in Florence, designed by Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). If we stand at one end of its arcade, we realize that, while our eyes suggest us that the parallel lines of the floor converge towards the vanishing point at the opposite end, our other four senses tell us that this is impossible, that parallel lines never meet (ivi, pp. 33-34). Faced with the dilemma of believing either to what he saw or to what he felt, the Modern man chose the former. Multisensoriality thus yielded to the dominance of sight. Drawing, a visual medium, became the main tool for architectural design. The division between mind and body became deeper, as well as that between viewing subject and viewed object.
Figure 8. Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492), Flagellation of Christ, c. 1468-1470, oil and tempera on panel, 58.4 x 81.5 cm, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Figure 9. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), arcade of the Spedale degli Innocenti, 1419-1445, Florence. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
To create a perspective, whether in painting or in architecture, the artist had to deal with precise measures, and started to care more and more about the quantitative side of things rather than the qualitative one, laying the ground for the Scientific Revolution that occurred between the 16th and the 17th century. According to German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the act of measuring is part of the essence of modern science or, with the words of his compatriot, the physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), “That is real which can be measured” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 169). As science became the dogma of Modernity, the layers of meaning and imagination gradually lost their power. In the architecture of the Modern Movement, mantras like “form follows function” and “less is more” reveal that there is no longer room for what is superfluous or accidental, for voids: the main goal has become that of maximizing efficiency.
In the last decades, the rise of digital technologies has challenged once again our conceptions. The immaterial “anti-space” of the Net has made its appearance, denying the physical, geometrical space of Modernity (Mitchell, 1996, p. 9). A new multiplicity of layers now permeates our cities. A museum is no longer just a building that contains artworks: it is also an app that contains texts, pictures, recordings and videos that explain those artworks. A bus stop is not simply a shelter on the side of the road: it is also a QR code through which one can know in real time when the next bus will arrive and buy tickets for it. A restaurant is not only a place where people go to eat: it is also the sum of all the reviews on TripAdvisor and the pictures on Instagram that its clients have shared on the web. And a city hall is not just the office of the mayor and the city councilors: it is also a website that provides services to the citizens and allows them to participate to the governance of the community. Beyond physical space, flows of bits and data generate a new complexity.
There is one fundamental difference, however, between the multiple layers of Chinese gardens and those of digital technologies: the purpose of the former is to evoke, while the latter serve to communicate. What does this mean? As we have seen, the scent of lotuses, the symbolism of bamboos and the whitewashed walls convey ambiguous, indefinite messages: they suggest vague ideas to the visitor, who then uses his imagination to create his own subjective perception of the garden. What happens with apps, QR codes, social networks and websites is exactly the opposite: these digital media provide the user with information that has to be as precise, complete and objective as possible.
Of course, there are both positive and negative sides to this issue. On one hand, having access to huge amounts of (hopefully) reliable data allows us to be more aware of the decisions we make, thus improving our lives. Thanks to apps, QR codes, social networks, websites and an ever-expanding variety of other tools, we can get to know more about the history and meanings of the artworks we see in a museum, we can efficiently plan our trips with public transportation, we can base our choice about where to have dinner on the experiences of hundreds of people, and we can give our contribution to collective decisions. On the other hand, however, we loose more and more the opportunity of using our own creativity. Let us think, for example, to how archaeological sites have been changing in these years. Today, one can go to the ancient Roman ruins of Pompeii and have a “virtual tour”: thanks to Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies, it becomes possible to see what the city looked like two thousand years ago (“Pompeii…”, 2017; fig. 10-11). The visitor thus gains a deeper knowledge of Roman history, architecture and daily life. At the same time, though, what ruins have represented for the Western civilization in the course of its history is now completely deleted. For centuries, in fact, poets, painters and architects have been inspired by the remainings of ancient Greek and Roman buildings. For them, ruins acted as “a catalyst to propel the imagination back into the past” (Swaffield, 2009, p. 87), and this was possible because they were incomplete, thus allowing the mind of the viewer to freely complete them with its own fantasy.
Figure 10. Ruins of the Capitolium of Pompeii. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
Figure 11. A reconstruction of what the Capitolium of Pompeii looked like in Roman times. Participants to a “virtual tour” of Pompeii would see something of this sort. Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
In their famous book Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972, American architects Robert Venturi (1925-2018) and Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931) claimed that communication now dominates space, becoming the main feature and purpose of architecture (Venturi et al., 1972, p. 8). This is achieved through an extensive use of symbols but, again, their role is very different from that of bamboos and “moongates” in a Chinese garden. The kind of symbols we find in the Las Vegas Strip mostly consists of logos or advertisements that intend to convey a specific message to the travellers who cross the city with their cars.
Communication has not only acquired a key role in architecture, but it is more and more becoming the center of our whole society. We are going towards what Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (b. 1976) has defined as “Dataism”: a worldview that finds in information the source of all meaning and authority (Harari, 2016, p. 426). As he explains, “Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and that the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing” (ivi, p. 427).
In our lives, we are often overwhelmed by the amount of inputs and messages that we constantly receive. “Information overload” is now one of the main problems of our society: it has been demonstrated that the increased efficiency in informational processes can lead to anxiety, stress and alienation (Heylighen, 2002, pp. 13-14). We feel a loss of control over our lives, as our minds are passively flooded by amounts of information that are too large for our brains to process. It becomes more and more difficult to distinguish essential data from what is superfluous or irrelevant.
Today, we may need new places like the Chinese gardens: places where we can be the protagonists of our experience, actively using our creativity; places where perceptions and meanings stimulate our mind without overwhelming it, always maintaining an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity. Imagination and communication do not necessarily exclude each other: they could be combined in a new multiplicity of layers. It is up to the architects of the 21st century to devise innovative ways to face this challenge, and to understand the role that digital technologies can play in it.
Let us conclude with one of the most valuable teachings of Zhuangzi, reminding us that efficiency is not the only goal we should strive towards, and that sometimes a void or a useless thing can be just as good:
“Woodworker Shi […] saw an oak planted as the village altar tree. It was so huge that a herd of several thousand cattle could have stood in its shade – its trunk was a hundred arm-spans round, tall as the hills, and a hundred feet straight up to the lowest limb. […] but the woodworker did not so much as glance at it and walked right past without stopping. […] ‘It’s waste wood! Make a boat from it and it will sink; make a coffin from it and it will rot; make a utensil from it and it will break; make a gate from it and it will run sap; make a pillar from it and insects will infest it. You can’t make lumbar from such a tree; it’s useless! That is why it has lived to such an age.’ After Woodworker Shi returned home, the altar oak appeared to him in a dream. ‘What were you comparing me to? Did you mean to compare me to those lovely trees, like the sour cherry and pear, the tangerine and pomelo – fruit bearing trees that are ripped apart once their fruit ripens? Disgraced by all that ripping, their limbs split and their branches torn, they find only bitterness in life and end by dying before their natural years are up. They bring it on themselves, being torn up by the common crowd. It is thus for all types of things. Now, I have sought to be useless for a very long time, and though I came close to death I have now reached my goal – for me that is of great use indeed! Were I useful could I ever have grown so big?’
[…] ‘Men all know the utility of usefulness, but none knows the utility of uselessness!’” (Zhuangzi, 2019, ch. 4)
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