Point----At the right nod and the right moment: Investigations of Gilles Clement and his “moving garden”

Author: Yan Luo 3262035

This paper is to explore a mode for a designer to guide human landscape to proceed. Clement’s “moving garden” is an aspiration. Instead of confining every element in geometric axes and grids, Clement regards a “moving” way ---- a spontaneous growth to leave the factors in the system to their own devices.

If “moving” can be interpreted as an epitome of nature, it shows that things have their biggest liveness when evolving in their own way to perform excellence in diversity through contradiction rather than being elements in a singular narrative or frame. If so, this research aims to formulate a mode to retrieve our design into a point for activating this liveness in landscape architecture.

This research will discuss in on hand by the practice of “De la vellete” park by Bernard Tschumi, the theory of Gestalt psychology as well as the feature of border in the ecology, which are used to show that acts of design can be streamlined from a normative pattern and diverse contradicted factors embedded in the system of landscape as new dynamics; on the other hand, I will quote the “accretion” theory by architect Kisho Kurkawa , the “process landscape” by George Hargeaves and review the process of how the “less” interacts with the “more” and finally become “between” in the history of architecture, in order to articulate where the point is and how to catch it in the dimension of time.

Finally, by using this framework, this research hopes to reach a consensus that the most suitable mode of design does not mean to make or create an evolution but to activate one at a right node and a right moment.

Keywords:

moving, diversity, contradiction, landscape, evolve, point, node, moment