Open to the sky - Malene Hauxner

Open to the Sky.

In 1993 Malene Hauxner published her highly acclaimed doctoral dissertation "Fantasiens have" [The Imaginary Garden]. Open to the Sky is a continuation dealing with the second stage of modernism from 1950-1970. Building and landscape, spaces and works, city landscape. 

 At the end of the Second World War, people in the western world were left with the bitter knowledge that human nature was unreliable and dangerous if unrestrained. There were a desire to educate, form and cultivate.

A key place to see how man treats his environment, and thus understands his inner nature, is in the aesthetic landscape of garden art. In the post-war period it became the determination of man to overcome his instincts and bestiality and to distance himself from nature; as a result the cultivated, processed and man-made was perceived as right and beautiful.
By cultivating external nature, unifying inner and outer, and turning the garden into an outdoor room, aesthetics became a tool for understanding the new society, which demanded tranquility, cleanliness and regularity, control, standardization and democracy within the framework of the community. Beauty lay in the man-made, the garden became the domaine of the builder and the gardener; the aesthetic of the architect prevailed over that of the manager.
The cultivation of nature is presentated in this book as a project of landscape and garden art in the post-war period. It took place within a new aesthetic language that was controlled and ascetic in idea and architectural and angular in form. The gardens are boxes with bases of stone and "Spanish walls", or open spaces composed of earth and plant works. Within this concept they differ. Common to all is that they are open to the sky.
English language edition.

Richly illustrated.