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Terrarium

Terrarium collects research and reflections on the relationship between space, soil, vegetation and the biotic community, linked through the metaphor of the terrarium. The book aims to encapsulate the notion of the Terrarium from a design perspective, both as a symbol and as a project.

 

Affective Encounters

It sometimes only needs small gestures to reveal what is valuable and meaningful. Terrariums are miniature worlds, artificial enclosed environments, where we can study natural processes. They intrigue us because of their otherworldliness. Just as gardens do. “The garden is the smallest fragment of the world and, at the same time, represents its totality, forming right from the remotest times a sort of felicitous and universal heterotopia.” (Michel Foucault) However, whereas terrariums can be understood as objects for observation, with us humans as the outside controlling agent, in gardens humans are part of the same environment, of the same ecology, both observer and participant. They interact with the space and its dynamics, simply because of their presence. Instead of the scientific distance of a terrarium the garden provides embodied experience. 

The Wasserkrater Garden (Bad Oeynhausen DE, Agence Ter, 1996) serves as an example to unfold a novel perspective on the relation between humans and nature. Gardens have always had the power to thrive outside existing formal structures. They can be considered as inefficient, useless, and marginal, providing spatial configurations that escapes normative expectations regarding function and direction: not functional "green space" or "natural" recreation area but places of playfulness. (Louis Marin) They allow the unexpected, the irregular. They address the body’s immersion in the world, guided by emotions, interaction, performance, “things”, technology, experience, the feeling that a place can evoke. The threshold between inside and outside, outside and inside creates a temporary refuge from the outside world, a sheltered place, and at the same time a place outside, in the margin. From this outside position, at a distance from the public domain and daily life and from the regulated and programmed spaces of society, the embodied experience gardens can evoke an understanding of nature that we are part of and is part of us, not emphasizing identifiable natural territories but exposing the dynamics of nature, of the spatial and temporal aspects of nature, and our own engagement. 


In Silvia Mundula Kevin Santus and Sara Anna Sapone ed. Terrarium. Earth Design Ecology Architecture and Landscape Mimesis 2024. pp. 36-53