Freeway Park

Larry Halprin design Freeway Park to be a system of defense against the freeway that passes below and around it. Halprin chooses to work with forms, structures, and materials that are simple in contrast to the chaotic city in which the park is located. Because of these choices, Freeway Park offers its viewers a place to escape the bustling city life and enter a relaxing and pleasant atmosphere that seems far removed from its urban location.

The gateways to the gardens are wide, open, and are a continuation of the concrete sidewalk. They are not meant to possess grandeur, but rather provide an easy transition from the city into the garden.

The use of cement continues through the gateway and into the corridor that guides you throughout the garden.

This simple, concrete corridor is created in the rectilinear form. Blocks of cement create interlocking pathways that mimic the buildings of city skyline in a playful design.

Part of the garden opens up to a massive cement structure of interlocking blocks. The cement blocks feature an engraved line pattern, which visually elongates the blocks and stimulates images of skyscrapers. This area reminds its viewers of the parks urban location while proving playful structures to explore.

In one area of the park, Halprin plays with water and creates a waterfall that juts out of the interlocking blocks of concrete. The image of water falling from up and down with blocks that stretch from left to right further enforces the rectilinear form.

The edges of the cement corridors are lined and defined by equally simple green plant material. At the gateway, there appears to be more cement than plant material, yet as you walk farther along the path and into the heart of the garden, you are engulfed by the plant material. Rich edges of trees form a canopy overhead, blocking all views of the freeway and providing a buffer from the sound. This high sense of enclosure offers protection from the city.

The corridors intermittently open up into gathering nodes. The multilevel cement blocks provide benches on which passersby’s can take a seat.

The edges of the gathering spaces are kept playful yet simple, featuring an interlocking floor pattern similar to the interlocking pattern of the corridors. The edges of these gathering spaces are, yet, again, defined using only plant material.

By starting off with an open gateway and then leading into tight corridor and gathering spaces surrounded by plant material, Halprin offers the experience of slowly walking into the thick of the woods without even needing to step foot out of the city. The simplicity in the form, structure, and choice of materials in Freeway park creates a public garden that is sophisticated without being overwhelming. These choices create a place where people can enjoy a relaxing break from the busy, noisy, and chaotic city that surrounds it.

Sissinghurst Garden

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines contrast as the “enhancement of the apparent brightness or clarity of a design provided by the juxtaposition of different colors or textures.” This juxtaposition is precisely what Vita Sackville-West uses in her design of the Sissinghurst Garden. By creating contrast in each one of the garden rooms, Sackville-West calls attention to these notable differences to create such striking, rich, and playful spaces. These contrasts are featured everywhere in the design from the site view, to the form used throughout the garden, to the masses of plants that fill the garden.

From a plan view of the garden, we can see that Sackville West plays with contrast between rectilinear and biomorphic form. The gathering nodes, corridors, gateways, and edges are all rigid with clearly defined rectilinear edges. The planting schemes, on the other hand, are irregular and biomorphic. For example, the plan of the orchard has clearly defined straight paths running through it, while the planting design of the trees within the orchard follows no rectilinear form and appears almost random.

As we enter the garden and shift away from the plan view, we can see that there are still contrasts within each of the garden rooms themselves. The corridors and pathways are laid out in a rectilinear fashion with right angle floor patterning. The gathering spaces, which are compartmentalized into different rooms of the garden, are also rectilinear in form. The plant material, on the other hand, is widely biomorphic. By using a mono-culture planting design, dense groupings of plant material are formed to create rich biomorophic masses. The contrast between the two is most striking where the biomorphic plant groupings meet the edge of the rectilinear design. In order to maintain this sharp contrast, the low hedges that surround patches of plant material are kept rectilinear, while the plant structures are allowed to billow over them.

Contrasts are found even within the structures of the plant material themselves.By placing plants with highly contrasted structure next to each other, it draws more attention to each of these plant masses and creates a more visually striking design.

 

      

In the planting design, Sackville-West focuses on the structure of the plants before the color of the flower, although the color of the flower was not completely neglected. Plants within a certain color scheme were placed together, so that the contrast in walking from one room to another would be stark.

The canopy height is yet another way in which Sackville-West plays with contrast. Within the garden are masses of plant material with varying canopy heights. The rectilinear hedges that surround the flower masses are low, while the hedges that frame and define the corridors are high. The canopy height of the plant material falls just above the lowest hedge, while the canopy of the trees falls just above the heights of the tallest hedge. This creates a scheme of canopies that intersect well with one another and frame certain views within the garden. Here we can see how the low hedges, the tree canopy, and the trunks of the trees frame the view of the plant forms in the middle of the two.

The use of contrast is a technique that can be used to highlight certain structures. In the Sissinghurst Garden, contrasts are found in every aspect of the design from plan view to the planting design. Each of these contrasts contributes to the playful, striking design of the garden and creates an intriguing experience for the people within it.

James Rose - Anisfield - Bach Garden -The James Rose Center

Professor Joseph Volpe,Maozhu mao

James C. Rose was a prominent landscape architect and author of the twentieth century. Rose was a high school dropout, but this didn't stop him from being accepted into Cornell University as an architecture student. Later he transferred to Harvard University as a landscape architecture major. In 1937, he was expelled because his design style didn't fit into Harvard's program. Despite his dislike of the institution of school, Rose would often make appearances as a guest lecturer at schools of landscape architecture and architecture. Before his death he was able to fulfill his lifelong dream of establishing a design study and landscape research center, The James Rose Center. After Rose's death in 1991 after losing a battle with cancer, he donated his home in Ridgewood to the James Rose Center. Except his early work, he never did any drawings like planes, elevations, sections. He prefers to work directly in the landscape.

Anisfield Garden

The mass and void study, the relationship to the plants and the architecture. 

Here is the tree planting, he is unwilling to lose any trees on the site.

He is inspired by the Japanese garden rather than build a Japanese garden here. The black stones and white gravels together with the stone table there seems have a Japanese style.

The parking lots here are surrounded by ordinary plants and playful stone set. The geomorphic form creates a beautiful space to welcome people. 

He works with the contractor on the site, very carefully cutting up the space. Because he did not do any drawings and he wants to protect every tree, we can see irregular tree trunks in the middle of the stairs. 

The stones just represent the contour lines make the land form become a kind of beauty that directly jump out of the ground. And the stone mainly recycled from the site, rather to get several truck and get somewhere to dump.

He use the rain garden before the name is invented, the roof here is designed to lead the water to this very rain garden. 

The trees here are designed to be here, also several stone lies beside the tree trunk make here very natural. But all these are carefully designed to create a wonderful corridor to get through.

The white gravel path here is one of the most beautiful things in this garden.

He uses the recycled timber here to setup the stair, and every step has different shape on each stage, you can see another protected tree here with irregular proportion.

The wooden bench here has great proportions and relationship to the deck behind. 

The tree trunk get through the deck and people love to sit in front of it and enjoy the tranquil time and space.

Here the playful pavement, he mixes the blue stone, river stone and gravel. Just like put the path on the water.

Saihō-ji (西芳寺)

Professor Joseph Volpe,Maozhu mao

The Saihō-ji, the formal name "Kōinzan Saihō-ji"(洪隠山西芳寺) is one of the oldest garden in the world. The garden is famous for its more than 200 species of moss in the garden. The temple was first used as a temporary place for the Mikado (Japanese emperor), after several years, it becomes a temple. It’s in Kyoto a city with a long history, so the temple also gets a long history, it had been destroyed several times because of the fire, war and flood, but people always rebuilt the temple, get some changes there and also improve the garden.

From 1928, the temple is open to the public but after July 1977, people who want to visit there have to make appointment several weeks before he actually get there and only after the Buddhist ceremony. You get only about one hour’s time to experience the beauty of the garden. So in this way, the garden minimized the number of people and gets good protected. 

Two pine trees here at the entrance of the garden, is almost a typical Japanese thing in old garden with the beauty of age.The shape of pine trees are heavily pruned with great care, to create this certain form.

The cherry blossom here gets multiple trellises to get control the form of the cherry, making it smaller. In the historical garden, everything is about control. To control the plants means you understand the plats and work with their habits finally change them.

The Japanese prefer to get a cleaner place, so you have to wear appropriate shoes in different situations. And you can see water channels are everywhere, they follow the edge of the architecture, collect the rain water from the roof.

The Japanese have a kind of love – the love of age. They respect the elders and also respect the old plants, old buildings. So people here do all what they can do to keep the old tree alive. Like setting up some trellis to support the trees just as the image shows you.

Mosses are so beautiful that they are everywhere. There have over two hundred species of moss cultivated. Moss is a kind of plant that needs high maintenance, they cannot live even a tree leave fall from the branch and covered on it.

Carefully look at this path, you can see some stone in the path way get different color, that’s because the stones which are brighter means they are the replacement. Those stones are carefully picked to keep the path in the original way.

The little path here allows people to experience the gorgeous moss land and the plants around and finally ended at teahouse.

The plants here in the picture is azalea, they never let it grow wild. The blooming can only last for several days as a great celebration and cut the flower to avoid the adventitious bugs. The only reason why they take that form is because it’s blooms in that form.

The water in this garden is kind of muddy, but the little island there still plays an important role in the garden. The little bridge there also become a part of the beautiful scenery.

The garden is more than a place with old trees, moss, and water there. It’s also a place for people to think, get meditation in the green world build up with moss. In 1994, Saihō-ji was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as part of the "Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto".