Alhambra-Redux
Once upon a time, an American landscape architecture student, on his way to Morocco for a term-abroad design study, stopped in Granada and walked, day and night, the Alhambra.
At this point I must stop before telling more, and ask:
Are you curious about how myths, legends and reality might weave in and about each other in landscape, design and culture?
So was our landscape architecture student. During his Alhambra walks, despite being confused by historical ambiguities, he was absolutely enthralled by craft that made transfiguration experience a reality.
Abuzz with that experience, he departed for Tangier and his Moroccan term-abroad design study. If you are still reading, I figure you are into it. So, here we go.
Following his Alhambra experiences he concluded the following.
ALHAMBRA
Full body baptism! Walking through the Alhambra, I experienced a sensual overload that I compare to an adult full body baptism. The impact of my walk through these gardens changed my landscape design thinking.
I had been through four years of landscape architecture studies. In not one class were the potential layers of sensuality hinted at. The actual layers of sensuality that immersed me in my first 24 hours walking these gardens — the layers and inter-relationships of plants, gardens and architecture — the visual and emotional movement between all of them simultaneously — enjoyably speechless! I was left enjoyably speechless.
Moving through the Alhambra I was beset upon by strangely beckoning light effects in the little rooms. Wonderful sequences of intimate human spaces linked by the details of plants, their leaves, architectural decoration, the glorious colors of flowers and polychrome, all dramatised by streams of sunlight and moods of moonlight. Four dimensions everywhere.
Sunlight played through the architectural traceries — the light and the geometry — the geometry and the shadows. Reminded me of another take on Monet. It was the power of sunlight simultaneously revealing, suffusing, animating mystical details. It was my baptism into Islamic art and design. I am convinced that beauty has the capability to transcend cross-cultural differences.
Questions arose that I could not deny. What was Islamic? What was Christian? What was Arab? What was Moorish? And, what was Spanish? And the manipulation of space definition and the variety in spatial sequence — was that how the original designers and builders saw it? Or, is that how we speculate they saw it? I asked myself, where can we find truth, or even accuracy, in history?
Everywhere were overhead vaults, plaster carving, wood marquetry, hand-crafted details that my eyes could not visually comprehend. An extraordinary sensory experience. The details were so intimate, so personal that I felt like I could climb inside them. They welcomed me to seek some kind of internal experience. It was all about the worlds-within-worlds of micro inspection.
There were places where I could just stand still and with my eyes identify the different depths of layers of decoration and within each layer there were independent intertwining depths of geometry or plant-inspired arabesques — everything intertwined — micro to micro — then micro to macro — then macro to macro — then macro to micro — and at the end I had turned in on myself — was dizzy, not knowing where to turn, not knowing upon what to focus my eyes. Had I encountered some kind of portal like Bo had described as the goal of Jacob’s Ladder?
Never before experienced this effect of architectural decoration! In Brussels, Bo had shown me Horta’s architectural details — silky, smooth, languid, sexy — Art Nouveau. But this — this was boringly basic geometry transformed into interlocked iterations of beauty, each a challenging journey for my eyes. Seemed like there was always something new to discover and the journey was never over. As if I was participating in eternal beauty — eternal discovery folded back in on itself. Transfiguration?
Many objects in these gardens, many objects in these little architectural jewels of rooms took my eyes and thoughts into an internal dizziness that fatigued me — fatigued by beauty. Is that not an amazing statement? Fatigued by beauty? That is why I called it a baptism.
This was breathtaking beauty on a human scale that an American like me had never experienced. It was accessible. It was enticing. My god, I thought, this design, placing before humans this multi-sensual, transfigurational discovery of intimate beauty, should be everywhere an urban public realm reality.
Such was my baptism.
Transfigurational it was.
PAGANINI
Sachy, my girlfriend (nicknamed LittleWing) at university, and I listened to and shared a lot of classical music. She had talked to me about Niccolo Paganini. For awhile I thought of it as a phase she was going through. But, one day she said, “CJ, Paganini was a designer who was stretching the limits of his musical instrument and the way it communicated emotions — you might find a little bit of yourself in his music. You should listen to his 24 variations of a theme for solo violin.”
Not long after I took her advice and listened to his 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Opus 1 by Midori. One caprice, number 6, The Trill, was the only one that spoke to me when I first listened. Number 6 had a strange melancholy emotion that it plucked from deep inside me.
That same emotion was plucked during some of my walks through the Alhambra. First I thought it resurfaced because Sachy was not with me to enjoy these gardens. But it continued to resurface. I had to ask questions about music, emotions and gardens.
And then I read Washington Irving’s short story Rose of the Alhambra. Paganini returned in that story. Very intriguing coincidence. A story that used gardens and music as an ethereal communication device. An ethereal communication channel in the garden? This was not the normal landscape architecture. But it had my interest. A communication channel in the garden that was not interpretive signage?
Suddenly, and with clarity, I thought interpretive signage systems, so much a part of a landscape architect’s palette, were such a crude way to communicate in gardens which were in themselves so inherently rich in sensual content, in artistic content. Gardens could communicate without words. Humans feel gardens. Humans feel landscapes. Something rich and essential is missing in that domain of garden and landscape communication.
What kinds of roots connect humans with gardens and landscapes? I felt a design challenge in there — somewhere. I found myself again in what Bo called, the transfiguration game.
GITANOS
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This was weird. I had been in a world of sweet beauty all night until I heard this from across the valley, from the Albaiçin carmens, from the Gitano caves. It was pain. It was passion. Humans don’t go to a garden to see pain and passion… do they?
Gitano mysteries. Music, humans, connections, roots — weirdness. Real life variety. Not in my garden.
In my landscape architecture way, it was as if humans had forced their way on nature — raw and fighting. I did not know it then but I was just introduced to the intensity of the sexual Spanish courtyard around which Fedorico Garcia Lorca built most of his writing. I came to call his work and the Andalusian gardens, Lorca’s delights.
DUENDE
This duende concept enlivened me. I could myself feel an emotional, maybe a spiritual bond between myself and a garden. Sachy felt the same. We had shared that many times — without putting words to it. But my question was how to design that into a garden.
And Lorca’s comments about how the garden is the respite from the urban rubato in the early 20th century is as valid today over a century later. He knew the importance of accessible green!
Reading Lorca brought me to think that Paganini and Washington Irving were both pilgrims on a road, as was Bo, in search of a transfiguration experience. They were searching for that experience where garden and music generate a transference of beauty in that magic way that humans call a “heart-to-heart” experience.
MADINAT AL HAMRA
The red city, Madinat al Hamra, that was how Don Raphael called it, the Alhambra.
Let me put it this way — if like my university education, yours never put you into the landscape or a garden during a full moon and asked you what are the powers in these places that can spell-bind humans? And if your instructors never brought you to understand those feelings as the power you hold as a designer in landscape architecture, then you’ve been had!
Above me in Madinat al Hamra was a waning moon just past full. I must repeat from my diary as I looked at Arabic inscriptions — didn’t understand, couldn’t read Arabic — but the calligraphy was beauty even without meaning. My eyes drank it in.
Don Raphael said; “The aroma of the poetry is lost in the translation.” He paused, then continued, “This poetry is breathing.”
I felt it.
He said, “Throughout the ethereal architecture of the halls, it is the poetry through which the luxuries of the senses are transcended by luxuries of thought and imagination.”
Tell me, my friends, has any landscape architecture design instructor brought you to that rich edge of design before? And I thought this quick stop in Granada was just going to be a box-ticker!? I was amazed and fired up by these gardens. My fire to get to the home of the Moors, Morocco, was searing!
Hearing the poems in these gardens took this visitor somewhere the beauty of the architecture and plants couldn’t. This is the richness of garden I wanted to know how to design — to take visitors beyond the luxuries of sensual beauty!
LAMÉ IN GARDENS
My night in the Alhambra brought me to the doorstep of understanding the incredible breadth of inspiration that humans can gain from a garden. Never had I ever imagined such garden wealth.
As I wrote in my diary, Don Raphael brought out a flashlight and shone it on the mocarabes and muquarnas of alizares. Alizares were small glass mosaic tiles brought, in material and technique, by the Umayyads from Damascus a thousand years ago.
Between a backing tile and a transparent glass front they used both gold and silver leaf along with, from Afghanistan, blue lazurite, lapis lazuli, which was as expensive as gold in the day.
We examined sparkling restorations under the flashlight at night. They were imbued with an ethereal music softly pulsating, longing to be heard.
Don’t ask me what I heard or saw because it filled my heart with pleasure — not my mind, not my intellect. Special, these were special gardens. You have your Central Park, you have your Dan Kiley and Lawrence Halprin — but these were special and I had to get to the root of them.
Lamé, the key must be in the lamé.
I’ve revisited that night many times and I’ve questioned myself — had I been under some spell? Had Don Raphael and Dona Blanca given me a mix of herbs in my meal or drink? Had Lorca’s lamé taken me? Because my memories float me through an evening dream in the Alhambra. That dream resists any logical penetration, any cultural connection.
Maybe, just maybe I had gained insight into the special powers, the transfigurational potential of landscapes and gardens. Maybe, I saw my design future as a landscape architect in the garden lamé.
EPILOGUE
These were his conclusions. He tells the entire story, warts and all, free on Wattpad: Days and Nights in Spanish Gardens. Here is the link: https://www.wattpad.com/story/417830065-days-and-nights-in-spanish-granada
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