.JPG)
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a 30 acre landscaped garden near Dumfries designed by Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. Its cosmic dimension comes from its landscaping themes on black holes and fractals, and elegant scientific equations built in to natural features.
In the accompanying book of the same title which I came across in GoMA library today, there is a short passage under the chapter heading The Poetics of Going Slow, which reads:
Renaissance garden designers, following ideas developed in the seminal Villa Medici at Fiesole, noted the importance of slow perception. A landscape garden should not be a place through which one races on the way to go somewhere else, but rather a place of imaginative exploration.
The question here is -
Is the city, in this case Glasgow, not its own landscaped garden, and its own constellation?
'Garden of Cosmic Speculation'
An Album of the City's Adolescence
Map me no maps, sir: my head is a map, a map of the whole world. Henry Fielding
Nothing flows quite so slowly as a map...
On the walls of my kitchen I have several of Glasgow:
Timothy Pont's General Map of the Clyde Area, c.1596.
James Colquhoun's First 'Portrait' of Glasgow, c.1641.
Joan Blaeu's 1654 Praefectura Renfroana (The Barony of Renfrew), a representation of Timothy Pont's earlier map.
Thomas Richardson, Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.
Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.
Hugh McDonald's concentric map of Greater Glasgow c.1852 (which accompanied his Rambles Round Glasgow in the 1850s)
Ordnance Survey 1st Edition 1857-8
Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.
Ordnance Survey 1967
Ordnance Survey 2008
As I cook I travel through time... and space.... a city growing up gradually....
My kitchen, at least its walls, could be seen, then, as
something of a wide-angled metropolitan mural, that is, a map which travels
through (and charts) the 'growing up'
and transformation of the city over the course of several centuries.
Call it an album of the city's adolescence... (stained in places with spaghetti).
James Colquhoun, First 'Portrait of Glasgow, 1641.
Thomas Richardson, Map of the Town of Glasgow and Country Seven Miles Around, 1795.
Edward Meiklehame, Map of Glasgow 10 Miles Round, 1852.
Ordnance Survey County Series Lanarkshire, Glasgow, 1858.
Bartholomew Survey Atlas of Scotland, Plan of Glasgow, 1912.
OS Map Glasgow 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)