Garden Futures: Exhibition Texts
The first joint exhibition of the Architecture Museum and the Design Museum, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, is divided into two museums. On this page you can study the exhibition texts from both buildings before your visit, read them while moving around the exhibition space, or return to the texts again after visiting the museum.
The Exhibition Text in the Design Museum
In many cultures, the garden has been a paradise and a place of refuge, a reflection of identities, dreams, and visions, a world in miniature. Be it a strictly arranged work of art or a naturalistic perennial paradise: the form that people give to their gardens always reveals their own relationship to nature – and sometimes that of entire cultures and eras.
The exhibition Garden Futures: Designing with Nature traces this relationship across time and societies. In small details and in big ideas, in guerilla gardens, on suburban lawns, and in artistic endeavours, it explores where the design ideals for today’s gardens come from, and looks for new models.
For many artists, designers, and landscape architects, the garden has always been much more than a romantic retreat – it is a testing ground for new ideas, a place to imagine and achieve a better future. Today, in the face of climate crisis, globalization, and food insecurity, the garden has again become a laboratory for new concepts of sustainability and social justice, a place of hope and promise.
The world as a garden
Gardens have always been seen as a sanctuary in which to create a domesticated version of the wild nature beyond. Today, however, we are bound to ask: who needs protection from whom? There is not an inch of the planet that has not been impinged upon or affected by human activity.
The question that now exercises the minds of designers, planners, and researchers is this: if we cannot avoid having an influence, might not that influence be made less destructive or even turned into a positive one? What if we understand our environment as a garden, a place to cultivate, care for, and grant its own agency? The projects shown in this room bring this idea to life. They demonstrate that the garden fence is outmoded, at least metaphorically speaking. The idea of a refuge just for ourselves is ousted by the concept of a garden that permeates our cities and communities, offering equitable and ecological spaces for people, plants, and animals alike.
Dreams and Ideals
Where do our garden ideals come from? The works and projects in this room provide various answers to this question. For instance, many an exotic flowerbed has deep roots in the history of colonialism. What the dream of a luxuriant but easy-to-maintain recreational paradise looks like is determined not only by gardeners, but also by designers staging their colourful garden products.
Paradise
Across time and culture, gardens have always been an expression of the relationship between the natural and the human world. The examples shown in the media installation illustrate this. Monotheistic religions celebrate the Garden of Eden as a symbol of earthly – albeit unattainable – bliss. The walled hortus conclusus (literally “enclosed garden”) of the Middle Ages affords both physical safety and spiritual seclusion from the wilderness outside. This also holds true for the opulent oases of the Middle East which were translated into ornamental patterns on carpets. The Japanese garden forms a bridge to the beyond, while the perfectly manicured formality of French Baroque gardens reinforces the ideal of the absolutist ruler as the centre of power. These images are accompanied by voices from philosophy, art history, landscape architecture – and from the garden itself.
What’s in a Garden?
The garden as refuge and paradise, a place where humanity and the natural world are in perfect harmony: this narrative is ingrained in stories and images of many cultures and epochs. Often the garden appears as an almost ethereal world, a mirror of values and ideals. And yet it is defined by two very solid recurring elements. Firstly, an enclosure: unless it is separated from its surroundings in one way or another, a garden does not traditionally count as a garden. Secondly, labour: although this is often skillfully concealed, subduing nature takes a lot of hard work. To assist in this endeavour, specialized tools have been developed in a centuries-long process of continual optimization. Specially designed garden furniture, meanwhile, reflects social ideals and documents how gardens in the industrialized West emerged as personal spaces for private leisure and recreation.
Garden Politics
The idyll is deceptive! Gardens have always been less of a refuge and more of a battlefield than we perhaps thought. Our garden ideals – which we always believed to be personal – have long been shaped by influences both political and commercial. Exactly whose interests are manifested in gardens becomes apparent on closer inspection of the objects of garden history. The works and projects shown in this room each highlight a different aspect of garden politics. Who owns a garden and how it is to be integrated into the urban fabric – these are questions to which many different planning concepts have sought to give answers. In times of crisis, governments might declare growing vegetables a patriotic duty, while citizens with grievances have often wielded spades to lend emphasis to their demand for a say or for sustenance.
Working in the Garden: New Tools
For centuries, gardening tools have been connected to manual work. They helped with pruning, planting, digging, hoeing, and irrigating. Today, the tools to design gardens and green spaces are extending beyond physical objects. Artists and designers are experimenting with ways to enlist digital tools to create healthier environments, tackle issues of biodiversity or urban heat.
The Exhibition text in the Museum of Finnish Architecture
In many cultures, the garden has been a paradise and a place of refuge, a reflection of identities, dreams, and visions, a world in miniature. Be it a strictly arranged work of art or a naturalistic perennial paradise: the form that people give to their gardens always reveals their own relationship to nature – and sometimes that of entire cultures and eras.
The exhibition Garden Futures: Designing with Nature traces this relationship across time and societies. In small details and in big ideas, in guerilla gardens, on suburban lawns, and in artistic endeavours, it explores where the design ideals for today’s gardens come from, and looks for new models.
For many artists, designers, and landscape architects, the garden has always been much more than a romantic retreat – it is a testing ground for new ideas, a place to imagine and achieve a better future. Today, in the face of climate crisis, globalization, and food insecurity, the garden has again become a laboratory for new concepts of sustainability and social justice, a place of hope and promise.
The Garden: A Testing Ground
How do we go about designing a garden, and why do we do it? What is it that drives us, which ideals do we follow, and what guides our decisions? The case studies in this space illustrate possible answers to these questions. While each reveals a different approach to gardens and gardening, there is something they all have in common. For the individuals and communities introduced here, the garden is a testing ground for dreams and visions, a place for confronting historical and political realities, coming to terms with life, and redefining how we relate to our environment. Invariably, gardens are places of learning – never completed, forever growing. The gardens presented here do not provide miniature worlds or idyllic escapes; instead, they are prototypes of hope, and each new bud can mean that the world is changing for the better.
Allotment Garden
The Allotment Garden hosts a series of events during the exhibition. The space can also be booked for one’s own grassroots-level activities around the garden theme. The Allotment Garden is a space where you can take a breath and digest what you have experienced in the exhibition. You can touch everything in this space.
There are approximately 60 allotment garden associations in Finland, with approximately 6000 garden plots. In the bustling garden communities during the summer, thoughts and plants are exchanged. Friends are met and family life is spent during work breaks. The community also includes animals of the urban environment, who enjoy the offerings of plants and open soil. The cottage is a place of retreat and rest, and it can reflect the personality of its owner.