At its most radical, the modern meta-garden dispenses entirely with natural elements. The Shonandai Cultural Center, which includes a children’s museum, civic theater and planetarium, is an example of an entirely fabricated landscape whose only natural component is water. Its creator, architect Hasegawa Itsuko, defines the composition’s mash of plaza pools, pyramidal roofs, spheres and an undulating stream, as “another nature.”

The cultural center is located in Fujisawa, a Tokyo bedroom community, and Hasegawa has talked about the “liquidity and diversity” of her sites, of the process of planning and conceiving architecture as a “work of making topography.” That fluidity and inclusion of landscape contouring is evident in the conflation of silvery surfaces, cage-like panels of steel, perforated aluminum trees, a riverbed made from tile, stained glass, vine-hung stainless-steel pergolas, and a set of cosmic spheres. 

Hasegawa was the first woman to win an architectural competition of this type, and reactions among the older male fraternity of Japanese designers were less than flattering, with one well-known architect comparing her plan to a “naïve child’s drawing;” another deriding it as “gaudy, pop, idiosyncratic, and eccentric.” There are certainly playful elements in the design, with sea shells embedded in its floors and concrete walls, tile pavers embossed with animal tracks, and green and blue marbles placed above perforated ceiling panels. This is a garden very much within the public domain. When its winding stream, made from artificial tiles, is filled with water, children magically appear to paddle and play, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale village in the midst of a cluttered urban residential zone. Unbeknown to the gamboling toddlers, the yari-mizu, or winding stream, is an ancient garden component.

Interestingly, the completion of the project was also a small but significant triumph over gender discrimination. Hasegawa recalls obstructionist male local officials treating her, “as if I were a radical social activist.” As a woman, she recalled, the local bureaucrat assigned to supervise the project, felt that “like the sumo wrestling ring, women should not be allowed to enter a construction site.” Hasegawa prevailed, and the project was completed in 1990.

The absence of natural materials does not appear to have diminished the popularity of the site, or its recognition by locals as a garden. This raises some interesting questions. If the unstated intention of the contemporary landscape artist is to create a modernist utopia, a futuristic garden prototype, is it possible to do so by means of purely synthetic materials?