The Chinese Garden

With their centuries-long development, the English Landscape Garden, the formai French Garden, as well as Japanese and Chinese Gardens constitute an unparalleled repository of design solutions familiar throughout the world. They are frequently drawn upon as reference works, but often in a haphazard fashion and from vantage points foreign to designers. The series "Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Architecture" presents historic garden types from the perspective of contemporary landscape and garden design.
Starting from the world's most distinguished parks and gardens, they point the way toward the essential compositional principles, main elements and how they can inform contemporary projects, providing a rich source of inspiration for new designs and creations. The key characteristics of the Chinese Garden - its scenery of naturalness, a wide repertoire of visual relationships, central elements such as water, stone and plants as well as an intricate interplay with architectural structures - offer numerous points of inspiration for park and garden design in our time.
Projects in China, but also in European countries and the USA, created by Ieoh Ming Pei, Ai Weiwei, Kongjian Yu/Turenscape, Valentien and Valentien and many others, demonstrate a wide range of ideas for present-day design challenges.