Garden Design

Chapter 7: The garden today.

The most recent garden tradition emerges in northern Europe during the first half of the century. It shows distant descent from the English landscape garden and a strong strain of Japanese influence, while the impulse of the Bauhaus school of architecture gave it a twist towards a new use of free form.

Today's gardens, associated with Scandinavia, with a deceptive air of casualness, they are unassuming gardens, relying on simplicity and sensitivity to organic growth. Ostentation or a heavy hand destroy them.

In Switzerland, gardens by Gustav Ammann show how the rigid design of the classic gardens has been broken down into a liquid pattern of informal shapes, interpenetrating on different planes. The success of these designs depends on the translation of the classic proportions and spatial relationship into organic forms and on the introduction of sculpture or its equivalent to re-assert the human influence.

In Brazil and North America the tradition was carried to its next stage. The pattern is organized back into formal shapes. (...)

Sylvia Crowe.