DESIGN A CHINESE SCHOLAR GARDEN EXERCISE

It is an very enjoyable quick homework from the course Design Approach led by Pro. Greg Missingham, who knows Chinese garden better than most Chinese architects or landscape architects and has his own creative theory and approach methods in designing traditional Chinese scholar garden.  

NAME

For Chinese Scholar garden, name is something essential to the whole sense of the garden. It is not just a simple symbol says who owns it or who uses it. The name is the  reflection of the owner's/user's characteristic, wish, value view, life attitude or combination of them.  Usually, the name is related to poem or story which illustrates the identity of the garden as well.

水陆草木园

水陆: means the water and land, general description of the combination of different topography of the environment.

草木：means the herbs and trees, the total collection of plants.

水陆草木 is the first sentence of 《爱莲说》，"Ai Lian Shuo" or "The Love of Lotus". This prose was written by Dunyi Zhou/周敦颐 in early Song Dynasty (960-1127). It expresses the lobe of lotus' characteristics to metaphor the characteristics of gentlemen. 

SITE

Locate the 水陆草木园，which is about a suburban block size in Royal Botanic Garden. Botanic Garden is the place where displays all the collections of plants. At this point, it fit the 草木 best. Meanwhile, it has few pounds and hills, the different topographies, matching 水陆. 

ALLEGORIES

Different plants are compared with different human characters. In this prose, Dunyi Zhou compares four different flowers and each of them also a sign for one season as well. The garden is telling stories about season changes and human characters.

Four Directions ........Four Seasons

Reflecting seasonal change is the soul of Chinese garden. The romance in different season is vary but attractive to scholastic. Most of them are poets and artists. Their gardens usually are the places inspiring them. In an other words, they looking for inspiration in their gardens.

A year around, different plants growth and bloom in different time. There are season icon plants, they show the changing of time in the garden.  

In different time of the year, the activities happening in the garden changes as well. Thus the buildings and structures are designed to provide comfort and entertainment to users.