Small Modern Gardens Can Be Built Anywhere On A Landscape
One of the best things about a modern garden is that you can build one almost anywhere on a landscape. It can be constructed as an accent to building architecture, an adjunct spatial compliment to hardscape design, or the creation of a special environment for people to relax and enjoy a break from the routine.
Spatial challenges are resolved by scaling materials and geometric patterns down to a size that is appropriate to the limited space at hand. Smaller stones and center profile materials are arranged around angles and radii in such a way as to make the most of available area and to generate the illusion that there is actually more room within the garden than there actually is.
Modern Water Gardens Combine The Organic With The Abstract
Modern water gardens combine the organic with the mathematical and the abstract. The purpose of anything modern is to place the mind of man over the forces of nature. Since we typically associate nature with greenery, the use of plants around a modern water garden has to be minimal and highly selective. Hard straight lines, sharp right angles, abrupt intersections, stark rising forms, and linear movements that occasionally fan at into a radius all work together to establish stark, Spartan view of the world. Water then introduces to this structure a sense of life that has been reduced to its most raw and elemental base. Carefully placed outcroppings of greenery in the form of dark green shrubs, small trees surrounding by gravel, and darker grasses such as Mondo all blend together to create a feeling of emerging potential that stops itself before becoming too lush and organically comforting.
A Tropical Garden Adds A Touch Of Paradise To Landscape Design
If you own a contemporary or modern-style home in the Houston area, you can call Exterior Worlds to create a tropical garden whose design adds a touch of paradise to the abstract motifs that characterize contemporary design. Our tropical gardens are custom installed to support not only to home architecture, but to key points of interests, special structures, and outdoor works of art on display. We have access to some of the most exotic plants in the world and the expertise in botany that is required to create a sustainable living system that can flourish in the predominately inorganic realm of modern landscaping.
Contemporary Lighting & Modern Lighitng Design
Modern outdoor lighting places heavy emphasis on architecture in such a way as to create a sense of living outdoors. It is more effect oriented than function oriented— as if the feeling of being inside has been taken from the home interior and placed around structures and gathering places throughout the yard. Selective illumination is then spaced around trees and gardens to distinguish the organic nature of outdoor space from the more sterile and cerebral elements of the inside of the house. This has to be done very carefully, though, so we do not undermine the feeling of modern living we aim to create.
Outdoor Gardens Are The Backbone Of Landsape Design --
Modern outdoor gardens are the backbone of modern landscape design and contemporary landscape design. These designs minimize the importance of organic features in landscape architecture and look instead to geometric forms, relationships between geometric points, and sophisticated materials that communicate a mentalist and highly subjective aesthetic.
The geometry used is always that of familiar geometric shapes or derivative forms thereof. Quadrilaterals are favored linear forms that allow gardens to follow building walls, contemporary koi ponds, infinity pools, and residential home architecture. Triangular forms are often built to compliment avant garde contemporary sculptures. Circular designs are commonly used as focal points within the landscape, or as aesthetic foundations for contemporary fountains.
Modern Landscape Design, Contemporary Landscape Design, Urban Landscaping
Modernism, in the context of landscape design, is a result of forms and functions that reflect the need for outdoor living spaces that enhance contemporary lifestyles. As Garrett Eckbo, one of the central figures in modern landscape architecture, said, landscape design is the “arrangement of environments for people.”
Contemporary garden design tends to focus on scale as opposed to formal landscape designs that are based on axial relationships. It also foregoes the more classic landscape design forms and larger scale from Greek, Roman, and classical architecture traditions. This design motif became popular in the 1950’s baby boom, particularly in California where weather and lifestyle was very conducive to this innovative style.
How Modern Home Gardens Compliment Your Modern Style Home
Modern home gardens are contemporary corollaries that either directly reflect or indirectly compliment the architecture of a contemporary or modern style home. As we have discussed in other articles of our website, contemporary and modern architecture are aesthetics that exists primarily on the mental plane of consciousness and as such tend to shy away from embracing too much organic presence. They also tend to avoid the use of recognizable forms and prefer instead to rely upon simple geometric patterns and shapes arranged in challenging or complex arrays.
The complimentary power of a modern home garden adds to a house is that of a multi-dimensional experience. As a blend of reflection and contrast, a modern home garden forces you to look at hardscapes, Spartan plantings of greenery, and home architectural keynotes as a forced unity of apparent contractions fused into a synthesis that insists on aesthetic cohesion in defiance of all expectation.
