R. Garden, Küsnacht* The Culture of the Wilderness Designing a garden means fencing in a piece of land, cultivating it and marking it out from the surrounding wilderness. However, if there is no original wilderness surrounding it but, at the most, suburban gardens running wild, the question is what to mark off and to decide on the new contents of the area. Reflection and apparent contradiction thus generate the syntax of the garden. Classical elements of bourgeois gardens in the immediate vicinity of the villa have been subjected to a special kind of new interpretation. A densely planted and precisely trimmed cube of linden trees highlight the theme of the architectural-vegetative relationship between the trees and the building. The collection of special, cultivated species staged in seemingly natural surroundings resulted in contradictory perceptions; the garden as a choreography of a cultivated wilderness takes on the aspect of an aesthetic picture puzzle. Settings generating spaces and continuous sequences of spaces create varying densities and transparencies. The concentration on the familiar, the inner space, is promoted. The degree of aesthetic perception is a question of the specifiable recognition of an order that we are able to detect in an apparent wilderness. Botanical knowledge adds weight to the order and makes it legible.
Client:	Private
Architecture:	Meili, Peter Architekten, Zurich
Period:	1998-2001
Work stages:	All work stages
Surface area:	3'700 m²
* A project by Kienast Vogt Partner