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Architects vs gardeners — Gordon Brander

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An architect, at least in the traditional sense, is somebody who has an in-detail concept of the final result in their head, and their task is to control the rest of nature sufficiently to get that built. Nature being things like bricks and sites and builders and so on. Everything outside has to be subject to an effort of control. A gardener doesn't really work like that. Unless it's, as Mark's mentioned, Versailles, which is, to me, the most grotesque of all gardens, since it's the total denial of nature and the complete expression of human control over nature. So it's a perfect forerunner to the Industrial Age, Versailles. But what I think about, I suppose my feeling about gardening, and I suppose most people's feeling about gardening now, is that what one is doing is working in collaboration with the complex and unpredictable processes of nature. And trying to insert into that some inputs that will take advantage of those processes, and as Stafford Beers said, take you in the direct

This idea was coined by Brian Eno in Composers as Gardeners. An architect, at least in the traditional sense, is somebody who has an in-detail concept of the final result in their head, and their task is to control the rest of nature sufficiently to get that built. Nature being things like bricks and sites and builders and so on. Everything outside has to be subject to an effort of control. A gardener doesn't really work like that. Unless it's, as Mark's mentioned, Versailles, which is, to me, the most grotesque of all gardens, since it's the total denial of nature and the complete…

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