![]() ![]() It is composed of marble platforms (recycling the current courtyard's stone) punctuated by giant vases descending in height from the western (lobby) side to the east (education center) side. The upper garden is designed as a space for communal experience or solo contemplation. Given the garden's context – within the MoMA, at times it offers a respite from the stimulation of the museum and at other times stimulation of its own. The garden is designed as a series of different spaces for gathering, circulating, contemplating, and relaxing. Hybridizing six plants imported from Asia to Europe in the 17 th and 18 th Century (plants that are now commonplace in Europe), these prints are at once fantastical and nonsensical and speak to both the aesthetic of Chinoiserie while signifying the botanical appropriation from the East by the West. New Chinoiserie prints serve as a generative device. ![]() Appropriating, exaggerating, fanaticizing, and making up, artisans and designers were prolific in the their fantasizing and Chinoiserie became an aesthetic and design movement that operated in the decorative arts, fine arts, design, and architecture and landscape architecture. Chinoiserie emerged as a Western aesthetic that was a constructed fantasy of an exotic other. Western artisans and designers began to experiment with the creation of a new aesthetic – that of Chinoiserie - to fulfill the fantasies and consumptive demands of Europeans. As trade with the East developed in the 17 th Century, demand for imported luxury goods soared and the West became obsessed with the East. The research phase of the studio focused on developing an understanding of Chinoiserie as it originally emerged in the 17 th and 18 th Centuries and a contemporary refiguring of the design and aesthetic movement. Situated in a Modernist museum celebrating Modern art, the garden's context is anything but neutral. The site for the garden is at once physical and conceptual. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building. The garden's footprint is approximately a half acre but the Sharawadgi Garden excavates a sunken garden beneath the current garden creating an upper level accessed from the main MoMA lobby in the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building and the MoMA restaurant and a lower level accessed from the lower level of the Lewis B. ![]() The site is at once intimate and rarified, yet in a museum with annual visitors approaching three million. It replaces the current MoMA sculpture garden (its current incarnation designed by Philip Johnson and maintained by Zion Breen Richardson Associates). Sharawadgi Garden is located in the Museum of Modern Art courtyard. Scale, planting, organization, and fine craft blur the reading of the garden between Chinese and Western, appropriate and appropriated.Ĭhinoiserie allows the garden to escape any sort of Chinese 'authenticity' (which would be an impossible feat) and becomes a new spatial and aesthetic experience of the West. In a contemporary setting, acknowledging the impossibility of designing a Chinese garden in the spatiotemporal context of New York, this garden hybridizes the West and the East by exploring a contemporary Chinoiserie. As imported Chinese luxury goods became more widespread in the West, Western artisans and designers began to produce their own goods designed in a "Chinese" style, but in fact created an entirely new style born out of the Western imagination. Sharawadgi Garden wrestles with the challenge of designing a contemporary hybrid Chinese and Western garden for the MoMA courtyard space, currently occupied by Philip Johnson's Modernist sculpture garden.īeginning with Marco Polo's accounts of the 'exotic' and 'otherworldly' East, China has maintained an othered position in the Western fantasy. ![]()
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