online: 9 november 2009 modified: 8 november, 10 december 2009 8 november 2009 public order and imagination
in an ornamental garden
...geometrically shaped bushes and hedges and lawns and flower beds surrounded by tall trees growing in ordered positions (though each tree may have been left to grow without conscious shaping or cosmetic surgery?)...
...a woman pushes a buggy carrying a child of walking age while a man carries on his shoulders an infant who is perhaps too small to walk very much... parents as slaves or servants, or willing givers of support and assistance, to the ever new life with which they are gifted or burdened... (a bit of each, no doubt)...
...a dozen or so adults and infants walk or ride these rectangular paths obedient to the abstract intentions of landscape designers and gardeners and the still present culture of command and control, as i call it... perhaps others would see this garden as a place of public happiness...
...a man (in religious costume) walks sedately with a woman (in secular clothes) who walks with an irregular or jaunty swing (or muscular impediment or lack of poise?)...
...three elderly couples holding hands as they walk in a way that i do not remember happening before the 1960s...
...thinking now of a symposium on design methods and their consequence in architecture (that I attended a few days ago*)... i wondered at the condemnation of design methods as leading to over-rational and ugly buildings... no doubt that is what has actually happened (since the dream of those us who organised the first design methods conference in 1962 encountered the reality of design practice) but i think this bad consequence came of our failure to realise that, in any process of design or art, imagination must come first and be supported by reason and research, and not vice versa (for if rationality predominates imagination flies away)... but i doubt if most architects and industrial designers have realised that design methods are intended to provoke and make possible a collective imagination based on the thoughts and experience of many... far more than can be lived by a single designer... and this new kind of designing needs a new language that design methods are intended to provide...
...as I walked briskly through the surrounding forest i felt much happier and more alive than in the garden... and now i sit surrounded by hundreds of fallen acorns where earlier i saw dozens of crows walking about and pecking at whatever eatable things they find on the ground... and being chased by a small child...
later:
...i forgot to mention the sound of a man singing to himself while walking over a footbridge... he was holding a page of music before him as he sang...
* Comparative Methodologies in Architecture, Art, Design and Science: Bringing the World into Culture, edited by Piet Lombaerde, UPA University Press Antwerp, 2009, ISBN 978 90 5487 630 4. This book, written before the symposium, is a Liber Amicorum to celebrate the work of the engineer-architect Richard Foque. He is one of the few architects i know to have used methods that enable those who will be affected by a new building to participate creatively in its design.
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