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on the garden type, from the kitchen garden intended for self-
provisioning, the decorative green space, and the colourful
flower garden, to the landscape park, and from the severely
formal garden all the way to urban ‘guerrilla gardening’.
Gardens are distinguished by their special atmospheres.
The tranquillity of the Paradise Garden corresponds to the
contemplative mood of the cloister that surrounds it. The pic-
turesque effect of a landscape garden as an image of ideal, un-
molested nature was designed to lend comfort to spirits that
suffer from social constraints. Particularly striking among the
descriptions of various moods offered by the garden theoreti-
cian Christian Cay Laurenz Hirschfeld is the ‘gently melan-
cholic area’, for which a concealed location is decisive, along
with deeply down-hanging leaves and generous quantities of
shadow, silence and solitude. Also effective in atmospheric
terms are certain sounds; Hirschfeld mentions ‘trees in whose
crowns hollow noises hover’, and the ‘muted murmuring of
water’. The formal garden, based on the far-reaching domina-
tion of nature, on the other hand, is conceived in a compara-
tively rationalist manner. The character of gardens and parks
is especially unmistakable when they heighten the special
features of the local topography, thereby rendering typical
characteristics of the > landscape accessible to experience, for
example by shaping pre-existent gradients as terraces, using a
rise to highlight a view, or shaping a dell with a brook into a
waterfront place.
Literature: Hirschfeld 1779/1990; Rombach 1991> door and gateArchitecture gathers together. A well-situated, incisive build-
ing or central public square gathers together the otherwise
arbitrarily distributed structures of a quarter into a coherent
ensemble. Through edifices and squares, places are designedGate
Gathering