City and Nature Master Garden
Location Xi’an, China | Client Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition Organizing Committee | Size 900 square meters | Status Completed 2011 | Photographer Gen Wang | Tags Culture and Art
MSP created a minimalist work of contemporary land art that reflected the antiquity and timelessness of China, and the flexibility and durability of its culture and people. The combination of living willows and solid grey walls represeted the harmonious co-existence of nature and city.
‘City and Nature’ was an immersive artwork made of four elements: one-way mirrors, bronze bells, traditional grey brick walls and paving, and weeping willow trees, whose fluid shapes contrasted with the walls: yin to yang.
Grey brick has been a key Chinese construction material for centuries. For people living in courtyard houses, walls separate the inside and outside; walls also separate city and country.
The weeping willow has a special place in Chinese poems, stories, calligraphy, and painting. It symbolises longing, for friends or home, or a happier past. A willow twig or stem may be given to departing friends or relatives to invite them to stay: the words “willow” and “stay” are homophones in Chinese. The gift also wishes them luck for their destination, just as a willow stem will grow wherever it is transplanted.
The ‘city’ consisted of 3 meter high walls of locally-made traditional grey brick. The walls formed a series of long narrow corridors, open to the sky. Most of the walls were two meters wide, and had weeping willow trees planted in their cavities. The branches leaned over the corridors, and were hung with over 1000 small bronze bells, tuned according to the width of the corridors below.
Some of the corridors were parallel; others became narrower or wider at the ends. These were fitted with mirrors, giving the illusion of endless length. Visitors entered the corridors not from their ends, but through a series of brick archways at 5 meter intervals, which allowed them to move from one to another in an endless series of choices; some of the arches led only into mirrored rooms.
At the end of the sequence of corridors, when the visitor’s perception of space had been teased by the different shapes, a dark roofed corridor looked out through a one-way mirror into a large, mirrored triangular space, filled with a grid of willow trees and evergreen groundcover plants. The reflective surfaces around the space suggested an endless green forest just beyond the glass: an endless city becoming endless nature.
As visitors left through one of two roofed corridors, they realised that the mirrored end walls were actually one-way; they could observe the visitors behind them, just as they themselves had been watched on their way in by previous visitors.
Martha Schwartz Partners was one of nine international landscape design firms to be invited to design a small garden installation on the theme of “the harmonious co-existence of nature and the city” at the 2011 International Horticulture Exhibition in Xi’an, China. The brief specified that the designer should use local building materials and methods, and that the garden should be accessible to a Chinese point of view.
