Metagardens Category: Landscape Posted in Land + Living by: James on 6/26/2006 9:43:00 AM Gardens for the new emergent times Spanish born garden designer Fernando Gonzalez is the principle and founder of Metagardens, a gardens design firm based in London. Fernando says that “the boundaries between the artificial and the organic are more blurred than ever before” and his innovative design practice seeks to address these challenges of the digital age through both built and experimental projects. Through computational techniques and an exploratory approach to design it proposes to go beyond the ordinary and conventional. We live in a post-human environment where the relationship between the biological and the machine is more of a symbiosis than of contradiction. Our cybernetic culture sees Nature as something manufactured far away from ‘naturalistic’ theories that dream with a romantic and uncontaminated environment outside of our culture or, even worse, as a return to the past. But while the rest of the artistic disciplines are mutating to adapt to the new challenges garden design practices and theories are still based in outdated ideas incapable of dealing with the complexity of the new situation. Link: Metagardens

EVOTERRARIUM Evoterrarium is a step forward into the evolution of gardens, a smart machine composed of a fluid biodegrable plastic skin attached to a steel skeleton over the brick walls of a backyard. The suburban garden is transformed, from simple geometry into a mutable, dynamic and highly articulated system where it is possible to grow any kind of unusual plants inside of terrariums, capable of heating and cooling the space inside as real greenhouses. AERIAL Roof gardens are usually characterized as a collection of plants in an enclosed and static orthogonal space. For the design of Aerial, this garden at the top of a skyscraper, we used a technique borrowed from computer imaginary called ‘displacement map’ that creates real bumps over a flat surface according to the values stored into the texture of an image; in this case the negative image of a piece of wood. The result is a soft skin made of fibreglass panels working as an extension of the actual roof towards the street acting as a second layer increasing the possibilities of different experiences by the occupants. SHIME-NAWA Taking as inspiration the 15 stones floating on a sea of gravel and moss in the garden of the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, Shime-Nawa (a Japanese term referring to the ropes delimiting a sacred area) was based in that ‘magical’ rectangle and transformed through a computer simulation into ten force lines affected by the different gravity forces represented by virtual stones. The result is a fluid and flexible garden where the stones made of red fabric and black fibreglass ropes interact with the solemnity of cypresses and the movement of sago palms. ELECTRONIC DREAMS Electronic dreams is a new kind of gardening; fully programmable where human behaviour and nature interact thanks to virtual technology. Put on your equipment (data-gloves and lightweight stereo glasses), plug your backyard into a computer, insert a Cd or go online and start surfing for horticultural pleasures: herbaceous borders, Japanese gardens, navigate on real-time through historic gardens or grow your own artificial plants.