Nature talking with nature

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Charles Jencks

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But, in one way, the tradition of three natures has been extended and inverted. For all of these types rest, conceptually, on what I have called 'zero nature', the planet, that level of nature that interests me particularly--the cosmos, its laws, the underlying physics. We say that a hurricane, earthquake or volcano is 'an act of nature' (and so from a legal and insurance point of view it is). Gravity, electromagnetism and light show 'the laws of nature' and all living nature--that is numbers 1, 2 and 3--derive from, and are dependent on, these more basic laws, their constants and materiality. Thus it follows that in landscape and garden design one is using nature to present different Natures in an artful form or, since we also grow, live and die, a garden creates 'nature talking with nature' (as my title puts it). Part of the point is acknowledging the juxtapositions and conflicts between the types. The Nobel Laureate, the chemist Ilya Prigogine, often spoke about the new sciences of complexity as being 'in a dialogue with nature' because they revealed the dynamic processes of feedback and change over time. This transformation is the essence of a garden, and those I am constructing are chiefly engaged with presenting zero nature in conversation with the others. Often this discourse is carried out, literally, with letters, phrases, a rebus, and unfolding DNA codes in short, an iconography referring to zero nature built with non-living matter, or sculpture (7). Zero nature, on one level, simply is dead, but self-organizing, matter.

One set of gardens concerns landforms made from sand, gravel, topsoil and turf sculpted into sharply edged curves. The curves derive from the context and various functional objectives, but the underlying iconography derives from the way nature often self-organizes into flowing fractals. Plato, Cezanne and Le Corbusier were only a little right. They thought that underlying nature were cubes, cones and spheres--the primary solids--whereas Benoist Mandelbrot has shown that most of nature is actually based on fractals. These self-similar forms are often pulled together by 'strange' or chaotic attractors. For instance, the weather has two attractor basins that, visually, produce oval swirls with a butterfly shape. And that form led to what is called the famous runaway process known as the Butterfly Effect. The heart and brain also produce attractor basins. Galaxies, like hurricanes, usually self-organize in highly visible spiral-attractors, and the biggest thing in the universe seen so far is the wall of galaxies given the Texan designation 'The Great Attractor' (because it pulls in everything around). It seems to me obvious that garden art should present these recently discovered truths about zero nature, and do so with drama and delight because they are the very ground of our being. What do landscape attractors look like?

Attractors in the garden

When sand and gravel are pushed around by ploughs, and eroded by rain, they naturally form into curved basins. I explored various such shapes and found that they also related to the Henon and Ueda Attractors (named after their discoverers) (5, 6). Functionally, landforms are superimposed pathways, but they are also something so obvious that it had escaped me: living contour maps. In effect, those layered models of cardboard, that every student labours to construct as a base for architecture, have an extraordinary aesthetic already built into them. It only waits to be articulated. But it took me awhile, and the construction of four such landforms, before I fully realized the potential for following and crossing these lines, and understood how important it is to get the curves continuous and sharp. The art of landforms, although primitive, consists in laying the topsoil with a sharpened edge so that when the turf is put on, it can continue the strong line. In morning or evening sunlight the curved paths then cast clear shadows, the shapes pop into focus, and the landform has a physical or haptic presence. Without such sharp lines they lack life. A comparable case for water can be made. Every landform needs its counter or opposite to bring out its quality, either a body of water, or a hard material like metal, concrete, plastic or stone (7). In effect, the underlying zero nature is being dramatized by third nature, a strange attractor presented by a highly artificial garden.