Verwandte Artikel zu Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (Penn Studies in Landscape...

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture) - Softcover

Buch 17 von 38: Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

Ruggles, D. Fairchild

 
9780812225143: Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812225147 ISBN 13: 9780812225143
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes immerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India.
Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra.
Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections.
Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes is a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

D. Fairchild Ruggles is Professor and the Debra L. Mitchell Chair in Landscape History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

<p>Preface<br><br>Gardens are at once highly meaningful, expressing the position of humankind with respect to the earth and cosmos, and utterly ordinary, reflecting the need to produce a food crop in order to survive the fallow season and plant anew another year. Moreover, the urge to garden, to domesticate the wild landscape by clearing it of all but selected plants, watering them, and tending them until they flower and bear fruit, is a basic human endeavor that requires few resources and no grand conceptual scheme. Although gardens and landscape works requiring complex irrigation or drainage systems may occur on a large scale and reflect either the ambition of kings or the ability of a community to organize itself, others are quite humble and occur spontaneously.<br><br>This book looks thematically at Islamic gardens and cultivated landscapes, placing them on a continuous spectrum with the city and architecture at one end and nature and wilderness at the other. The Islamic garden is a popular theme among architects and enthusiasts, and every year a new volume is produced with handsome illustrations of stunning gardens. However, a great many of these focus entirely on elite formal gardens, defining them as enclosed spaces that are geometrically laid out and interpreting their symbolic meaning narrowly as "paradise on earth." The removal of the garden from the broader context of landscape, agriculture, and water supply results in a limited and superficial view, giving extraordinary emphasis to religion and dynastic politics while ignoring other factors that contributed equally to garden form and meaning.<br><br>This is not a book about the origins of the Islamic garden or its formal properties. Unlike Islamic architecture&#8212;where we can observe highly recognizable forms in mosque, palace, and tomb design&#8212;in Islamic history there is really only one formal garden plan, with a few variations on it. This is the so-called <i>chahar bagh</i>, or the four-part garden laid out with axial walkways that intersect in the garden center, discussed in Chapter 4, and the various stepped terrace variations of it that proliferated in the Safavid and Mughal realms, discussed in Chapter 10 and throughout.<br><br>Gardens begin as secular endeavors, stemming from the practical need to organize the surrounding space, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Three early chapters address these practical issues. Symbolic interpretations of the meaning of such domestication and fertility came later in the history of garden making, so that the good garden became a sign of human success, and a productive landscape a sign of divine favor. There have been several inspiring theological interpretations of gardens as signs of paradise for Muslims, but the evidence suggests that the actual early gardens were not regarded thus. In this respect, it is important to remember that while theology and history both seek the truth, they ask and answer different questions. With respect to the built environment and the interpretation of it, the questions that I attempt to answer here are purely historical.<br><br>One of the traps that writers about Islamic gardens often fall into is the emphasis on extant gardens, interpreting the historic past by means of easily visible and attractive gardens that have not been explored archaeologically and whose plantings are historically inaccurate. For instance, the Generalife Palace's Patio de la Acequ&#237;a in Granada has been celebrated as a living and authentic Islamic garden, when in fact its soil levels and plantings are entirely modern. Among architects, historians, and site conservators there is a regrettable tolerance for botanical inaccuracy at historic sites, despite the fact that we now have an array of archaeological techniques to identify many of the plants and trees that were once grown there. Examples of successful garden archaeology help explain what we can and cannot learn about gardens from such approaches in combination with written texts and painted representations of gardens.<br><br>Equally problematic are the attempts to interpret the real gardens of this earth through the shimmering veil of Arabic and especially Persian verse; lacking historical reference and archaeological data, these are more successful as studies of poetry than as descriptions of actual gardens. The Taj Mahal has been studied thus: the references to judgment and the Throne of God in its program of inscriptions have prompted scholars to interpret the monument in compelling theological and political terms. But these Qur'anic inscriptions explain neither the unusual position of the tomb in the garden nor the relationship of the Taj complex to the pleasure garden on the river's opposite bank.<br><br>Finally, the garden form was such a powerful artistic form in many areas of the Islamic world that it was adopted by non-Muslims&#8212;such as the Rajputs of Mughal India&#8212;as a way of expressing alliance with Muslim rulers and thereby indicating a shared cultural identity that transcended their more obvious religious differences. The garden was not an exclusively Muslim production; it arose from a specific climate and set of techniques for controlling the landscape and thus reflected regional concerns that were common to all the peoples sharing that landscape. The point here is not that the garden was produced outside of religious and cultural contexts&#8212;indeed, the transformation of landscape is one of the most powerful expressions of the human experience, the awe at regarding the cosmos, and the fear and hope at contemplating death. But it is a fundamental argument of this book that neither religion nor culture alone can explain the meaning, mechanics, and productivity of that set of gardens that historians, in retrospect, label "Islamic."<br><br>Perhaps because the history of Islamic gardens was written, until quite recently, by persons who were outsiders to Islamic religion and culture, the range of scholarship on gardens varies from a kind of a historicity to insulting stereotypes. While the worst of such endeavors can be dismissed as outrageous orientalist fantasy, one must wonder whether, in trying to recreate the experience of landscapes and inhabitants that vanished long ago, any historian is liable to project his or her own desires and expectations. For myself, I am aware of the attraction of representing Islamic Spain and Mughal India as successful melting pots of ethnicity and religion, as if the mingling of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism in those cultures could instruct the modern world. Cultural diversity and difference was a signal characteristic of the early Islamic world; yet while gardens reveal the diversity of plant material, their more powerful dimension is continuity. The evidence clearly shows that, while agriculture is deeply affected by political strife, the actual practice more often than not transcends political, religious, and ethnic boundaries. For this reason, it is almost impossible to distinguish between gardens made for Muslim and for Christian patrons in southern Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In general, agricultural innovations are quickly adopted when the benefits are recognized, provided the political and cultural climate allows it.<br><br>The book extends from the seventh through the twentieth centuries. Although the earliest chapters begin with the advent of Islam, they do not follow a strictly historical progression through the various successive dynasties. Instead, thematic grouping of issues in which subjects such as mythic gardens (Chapter 7) and manuscript representations (Chapter 6) are explored without trying to...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812225147
ISBN 13 
9780812225143
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
Niederlande