The Garden of the Cool Change - A garden in suburban Melbourne designed on classical Chinese scolar garden principles

The first of two, related projects, The Garden of the Cool Change is a project for a hypothetical garden in suburban Melbourne, designed on Chinese principles - though it is NOT a classical Chinese garden. The project explores connections between poetry, painting, the garden and architecture in China and inklings of similar connections in Australia. The Garden of the Cool Change uses Australian means to do what a naturalised Song, Ming or early Qing, Jiangnan Chinese transported to the present might have attempted: to make an allusive, condensed picture of European Australia and some of its iconic experiences that are peculiar to its place. At the same time, the garden is a (curious) suburban dwelling, a private place of contemplation, art and writing and a centre for entertaining friends. It is not any Chineseness that matters, but the potential for experiential and intellectual richness as an unfolding, inhabited and embodied place. We think that designing is a particularly fruitful way to study something. The whole enigma of design is in its synthetic, non-reductive character - necessary in art - as opposed to the logical exploration or analysis in scientific thinking. Our project is an ongoing, open-ended experiment. Several particular interests drive our efforts: in translation and in design approaches, strategies and methods - how do Chinese gardens attempt 'maximalism' (lots of ideas packed into one artefact) and 'simultaneity' (a 'symphonic' composition), for example. But, our interest is especially in works of art which exist not entirely in the material artefact, but through that comprehension which is only possible with participation. Mostly, the paper describes The Garden of the Cool Change and the principles on which it is based. It considers briefly the development of the project as it has been recorded in conventional files, lectures, drawings, participation in Exhibitions, Decision Diaries, written papers, Precedence Diagrams, seminars, the preparation of a multimedia design approach and design methods tool and the design of a second, quite different garden together with their mutual influences and interactions - noting particularly two sets of rules for describing gardens that have been developed as the result of the research. The paper concludes with reflections on what has been learned from this experiment.