Planting dwelling thinking. Natural history and philosophy in sixteenth-century European dried gardens

European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with the emergence of early modern botany and its relation to the traditional genre of pharmacopeias. This study reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections and argues that the design and development of these herbaria or dried gardens (orti sicci), as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on nature and about the relationships of humans with the natural world than the ones with which they have been linked. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens—some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants—, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus that contributed significantly to early modern natural history and philosophy.

‘Where have all the flowers grown’: the relationship between a plant and its place in sixteenth-century botanical treatises

The article investigates Renaissance naturalists’ views on the links between plants and places where they grow. It looks at the Renaissance culture of botanical excursions and observation of plants in their natural environment and analyses the methods Renaissance naturalists used to describe relations between plants and their habitat, the influence of location on plants’ substantial and accidental characteristics, and in defining species. I worked mostly with printed sixteenth-century botanical sources and paid special attention to the work of Italian naturalist Giambattista Della Porta (1535–1615), whose thoughts on the relationship between plants and places are original, yet little known.

Planting patterns and exotic plants in nineteenth-century Bucharest public gardens

The first two public gardens in Bucharest, as well as some of the oldest in the South and East regions of nowadays country of Romania, were designed, built and planted around the mid-nineteenth century by a German-born landscape gardener named Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer. These two public gardens were designed according to modern nineteenth century landscaping concepts and were planted with exotic species of flowers, shrubs and trees not common at that time either in Bucharest or anywhere in the Romanian provinces south or east of the Carpathians. To better understand the design, development, and meaning of these gardens, this paper aims to analyze the specific palette of ornamental species of plants and the planting patterns that were used for the Kiseleff and Cișmigiu gardens in Bucharest and to outline the importance of their use.

Beyond White Architecture: Therapeutic gardens for patients with tuberculosis in the sanatoria of the Greater Lisbon area (1870-1970)

This article discusses the concept of therapeutic garden— its definition and importance, — in the context of the specific architecture of sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis, in particular the case of Lisbon’s sanatoria from 1870 to 1970. It contemplates both national and international networks of circulation and transfer of knowledge before and after the medical and architectural revolutions at the turn of the twentieth century. These revolutions were accompanied by significant changes in the city’s structure concerning the control of epidemics and social diseases. Architects and physicians, among other experts, are the main characters to be scrutinized, alongside with their architectural and scientific production and their entanglements. At the same time, I seriously take into consideration their interactions with the spheres of power, specifically in what relates to management and decision making.

The garden in the modern hospital architecture of the ‘Carioca School’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The purpose of this article is to explore the role of gardens in the architecture of hospitals of the so-called “carioca school” of architecture, between the years of 1930 and 1960. In other words, to analyze gardens in the works of carioca architects who surrounded the architect Lucio Costa, or whose projects were influenced by the conceptions of this first generation of modern architects, who first graduated architecture school at the National College of Fine Arts and then, after 1945, at the National College of Architecture, in Rio de Janeiro. The importance of gardens in the architecture of hospitals was mentioned in Edward Stevens’s book “The American hospital of the twentieth century”, in 1918, a publication which can be found at the UFRJ Architecture School library, as well as in the Brazilian doctors’ book collections at the time. Stevens dedicates a chapter of this book to the landscape theme, where he states that the hospital designer and the landscape architect should work together. On the other hand, Pasteur’s discoveries and their implications in the management of hospital space did not occur without the mediation of landscaping. They resulted in changes when it came to choose the site for the hospital building within a city, as well as in its formal typology - from the Tollet model of pavilions, to the existence of green areas surrounding high buildings, and overlapping nurseries. It is also relevant to bear in mind that public nationalist buildings played an important role after the revolution of 1930 in Brazil as they represented the state, and this resulted in significant projects. We are therefore going to present four hospital buildings which were analyzed in our research on the integration of the Arts in the architecture of hospitals. Although the Lagoa Hospital, by Oscar Niemeyer, the Sanatorium Complex of Curicica, by Sérgio Bernardes, the IPPMG, by Jorge Machado Moreira, and the Souza Aguiar Hospital, by Ary Garcia Roza, all have different programs, formal typologies and links with their surrounding area, they are good examples for debating the presence of gardens in the Modern architecture of hospitals in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Three of these examples have fortunately included projects by landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx - the Lagoa Hospital, the IPPMG and the Souza Aguiar Hospital. The two former hospitals have had their buildings be surrounded by large gardens, in order to mitigate the harmful health effects related to the inclusion of hospitals within urban areas. The latter has been built in the 1960s with a complex program, in a dense historical area downtown, but adjacent to an urban park. It includes a vertical garden, which delimits, along with a panel in the hall (also by the same designer), a hallway for the user, between the urban and the healing space.