Los elementos construidos buscan el óptimo desarrollo de las actividades en el jardín: senderos y caminos, muros de contención, puentes, espejos de agua, etc. Al igual que los elementos naturales, deben responder a un orden, sea por la semejanza con la Naturaleza o como contrapunto con respecto a ella. La propuesta va en la búsqueda de la belleza a través de la visión de conjuntos exuberantes de vegetación, donde las especies autóctonas estructuran el espacio y las exóticas enfatizan el cambio estacional. A modo de extracto de su concepción y aplicación de la disciplina, aquí se muestran cuatro jardines claramente inspirados en sus respectivos entornos naturales, tres en distintas zonas chilenas y el cuarto en la Patagonia argentina. Juan Grimm, architect from Universidad Católica, is one of the most prestigious and recognized Chilean landscape designers. In fact, he was recently the international speaker in the last conference of the Society of Gardens Designers of London, a major gathering of landscape artists. His gardens are characterized by an emphasis on the relationship with the natural landscape, whether by integration into the surroundings, the use of distant views or the creation of an open space inspired on the landscape where it belongs. As he notes, "human construction inevitably destroys the environment. The work of the landscape designer will be to repair those injuries by linking his work with the existing architecture and landscape, in a perfect suture to create a new balance in the humanized landscape". Recognition of the environment is essential, therefore, to structure the garden spaces to configure an integral part of this landscape with no boundary between the two. Among his more common resources is the placement of plant masses to generate visual links with the surroundings, either through the creation of 'windows' framing views, the addition of species similar to the indigenous or the introduction of natural or built elements in harmony with that landscape.
Another common feature is the sustainability achieved by the incorporation of native vegetation, the substitution of large areas of lawn with ground species that hold moisture, the creation of water storage tanks for irrigation and the preferential use of local materials. The artificial elements seek the best development of activities in the garden: paths and roads, retention walls, bridges, reflecting pools and so on. Just as the natural elements they must also respond to an order, either by likeness to nature or as a counterpoint to it. The proposal is the pursuit of beauty through the contemplation of lush vegetation, where the native species structure the space and the exotic emphasize seasonal change. As an excerpt of his conception and the implementation of his discipline, we present four gardens clearly inspired on their natural environments, three in different zones of Chile and the fourth in the Argentinean Patagonia.
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