Imagery in the garden can connect place and idea in a way that moves the viewer, and moves garden design beyond the banal. To learn more about this vision, read on.

I trust that my common sense has not deserted me in my dream for a millennial garden. Let me know what you think. Let me know immediately if you want to help.

The Millennial Garden™ as I conceive it is a public outdoor space like no other, a garden in the broadest sense, planted as much with art and technology as with trees and shrubs, together communicating an explicit and deeply felt message. Through the interaction of lush natural effects with high-tech special effects and evocative imagery, the Millennial Garden explicitly celebrates ideals like the unity that should underlie community, ideals that we so rarely find in our fragmented society. No such public outdoor space has been fully realized.

Public space, cynicspace, cyberspace
"The surest test of the civilization of a people...is to be found in their architecture," a historian observed 150 years ago. If any test can improve on that for our era, it is the test of public space, whether parks, public gardens, squares, plazas, commons and greens. For each beautiful public space that we know, we can cite scores of counter-examples. Too often we pick up a public space to read, flip through it, and put it down only half-read, because what passes for meaning is a small idea, superficial and boring. It has been dumbed down for no other reason than ease of conception or maintenance. That is the default setting in our spaces.

In the post-modern era, the affirmation of diversity has undermined our common store of meaning; put another way, relativism and multiculturalism have shaken our belief in absolutes. Big ideas have been downsized, trivialized. The metaphors that might express them are downplayed if not banished from public space. And if a public space does aspire to express a bold idea, the visual text may seem like a foreign language. As fewer people understand that language, they are free to infer what they wish, or infer nothing at all. But without a commonly understood design vocabulary of metaphors or parables, expressing a big idea in the abstract counts for nothing. No one, except the designer and the cultural elite, understands abstraction, so the underlying big idea will die on the vine, unless saved by something very concrete like commemorating a local hero or local event. Write a lofty plaque, paint a mural, plant a tree, and call it a day. What a waste!

Construct an urban playground or neighborhood park on a tight budget, add a few years, and the graffiti read like broken promises. Cut glass replaces cut grass. Neglect only begets more disrespect. In too many neighborhoods, even safe ones, real space becomes cynicspace, at best so ugly that any act of gratuitous beauty is dead on arrival, at worst so damaged that it bears witness to gratuitous violence. Wherever we turn, we experience a growing uneasiness over the state of our cities and the challenges facing young people growing up in them.

Indeed, many teens find that cyberspace and virtual reality, like drugs, hold more allure than real space. The special effects of interactive animation stimulate as much as they simulate. The heady effects of speed and violence in computer games may seem safe, but the risks are of another kind: the opportunity cost of not interacting with the real world and of not growing up socially engaged. But real space is what shapes us, for better or worse. Place is prologue.

It would be merely camp if the growth of cynicspace and cyberspace were not matched by an erosion in civic and community values even among the affluent. Alas, no sooner do we talk of a global community than the local community is in trouble, fragmented by local disconnect and discord, the antithesis of the spirit of the village common. In pop songs, movies, and print, the media are saturated with cues of this dissonance. To dismiss all of this with a shrug as mere coincidence is delusional. We must do more than accept this disaffection. We must provide the antidote to the disconnect and the discord. We must find new ways to affirm, despite all the counterhype, the unity in community.

A New Kind of Public Space
We must do something bold not in cinema, cyberspace, music videos, pop songs and television ads, but where we live: in real time, in real space. We need no more merely neutral, bulletproof, idea-proof urban spaces. Public space is a precious asset that ought to express some deeper community aspiration than a common desire to relax in safe and attractive surroundings. We must champion a new kind of public space. As E. M. Forster urged, Only connect! Why shouldn't the design of public space aspire to make profound connections in new ways? Indeed, it must begin by connecting the body to the mind, connecting relaxation to reflection. Like a good book, a well-conceived public space ought to express big ideas, and express them not in cliché but in a fresh way that moves us, stirs us, enriches us. That is public space in the affirmative.

How easily we forget that public spaces once embraced big ideas in a big way, some as pragmatic as the introduction of a community water supply, others as sacred as nirvana. These spaces made their points clearly, without preaching. That combination of legibility and restraint was the environmental equivalent of teaching by example. People understood the design intent because they shared a common vocabulary of symbols and metaphors, and their designers used them.

How easily we also forget, in an age that celebrates preservation and looks backward for design inspiration, that great public spaces, even ones that celebrated the classics, once also embraced the latest technology for their own special effects. Public space design in our time ought to be at least as creative, vital and technically savvy as cinema, cyberspace, and television ads, and at the same time as democratic and open as a traditional village green.
We need to rededicate public space design to such boldness. The challenge is to create not just another perennial garden, but a Millennial Garden, leading by example, taking outdoor space design to the next level.

The Millennial Garden
I envision a public space where technology and nature, music and other art forms, regulars and first-time visitors, converge and merge. The Millennial Garden is very much a real garden, but it is so much more, no less a planted space for embracing a vision of meaning imparted by explicit imagery and interactive elements. Vivid imagery and high technology at play in the Millennial Garden could so easily bring all age groups to a deeper, more intense appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things, natural and technological.

The Millennial Garden embraces all the arts: pictorial, photographic, plastic, and performing. Jewelry design, furniture design, industrial design, stained glass design, textile design, computer graphics: the Millennial Garden connects to them all, invoking the notion that all arts, too, are one family.

Just as one art form connects to another, nature connects to technology. Public space design, in both form and function, has always owed something to basic science and technology. Perennial favorites: form derived from Euclidean geometry, function assured by adherence to the laws of physics, soil mechanics, and horticulture. The Millennial Garden goes further. Not only does it find advanced sources for imagery and form in scientific disciplines from astronomy to zoology, but it also draws on the latest advances in technology--optics, lasers, hydraulics, acoustics, holography, computer chips, computer morphing and compositing--to deliver visitors an experience that is vivid, imaginative, and interactive.

Reimagining the World's Big Ideas
When I say that the Millennial Garden is planted with imagery and forms, I do not simply mean superficially sprinkling art and technology in a pleasant outdoor setting. The Millennial Garden connects to a big idea, and brings it down to earth. It does so by making small connections metaphorically.

Imagine a maze in the form of a computer chip, with fiber optic lighting underfoot, or a mosaic of holograms seamlessly embedded in a winter-garden glass wall, the image transforming from violin to butterfly to flower petals to shell, or a wall image of Gandhi morph into Martin Luther King, or the sad face of a child light up with a smile.

Across the whole space, a coherent network of such small connections builds a stronger structure of meaning than one big connection. A design infused with many layers of meaning connects on a multiplicity of levels, visual, broadly sensory, emotional, intellectual. Even secular minds understand that God is in the details. And in that rich network visitors of diverse backgrounds will each find something with which they can connect. As a medium for communicating big ideas, the Millennial Garden is user-friendly.

The Millennial Garden is not encyclopedic in scope, attempting to do it all. No single space could possibly accommodate all good ideas. Good design must always walk the fine line between "less is more" and "less is more of a bore." No, the Millennial Garden is not a "theme park" by another name.

There are endless possibilities for the big idea that might inspire the Millennial Garden, even if we limit those possibilities to those that are affirmative and constructive, in ends and means. Shock therapy has nothing to do with safe havens and has no place in this vision. Forget pursuits like greed and cowardice. If the Millennial Garden is about community in the broadest sense, it is also infused with a spirit of celebration and passion for other kindred aspirations.

For example, think of liberty, creativity, and perseverance; sportsmanship, honesty and courage; harmony, diversity, and unity; compassion and humor; respect and forgiveness, serenity, spirituality, and redemption; reverence for nature and the pursuit of beauty.

Our eyes may want to glaze over at such lofty and preachy terms, for they all seem so abstract, but we cannot deny their claim on almost everything that we do of which we are truly proud, or that others do which we truly admire. We could further refine the list by taking a fresh look at what the global community has come to value over the past millennium. We should be open to all sources, East and West, secular and spiritual, ancient and new.

Any one of these aspirations, or any cluster of them, could serve as the big idea. The choice will reflect the spirit of the place, the moment, the community, and the sponsor. The visitor's experience of the Millennial Garden's big idea embedded in the imagery and forms on all sides will put petty day-to-day aspirations in the context of the aspirations that really matter, perennials from a different nursery.

Affirmative Interaction
The Millennial Garden experience is two-fold: immersion in lush nature and engagement with special effects. Amid the plants, rocks, and water the visitor comes upon unexpected features that both meld with the natural setting and invite participation. The features do not overpower the setting but harmonize with it, and express ideas through both representational and abstract multi-sensory imagery, with flair, humor, and passion. In every coordinated detail--color, texture and sound--the aesthetic approaches what might be termed synaesthetic. Special effects that are as novel for us as fireworks, fountain displays, and winter garden conservatories were in centuries past can once again stir the imagination. Participation will occur on many levels, from passive to interactive, as visitors stroll or sit and linger.

A visitor's movement across a laser beam triggers an image or a musical phrase, just as visitors to Italian Baroque gardens once triggered surprise water jets. Solar and shadow movement controls a cycle of natural sounds and imagery.

Imagine the fascinating possibilities, at dusk and at night, for projection on garden surfaces of all kinds. Instead of a static statue, a real tree trunk seemingly metamorphoses into a human form. At another location, hovering in space, a series of images of children dissolves one into the next. An image of a sword dissolves into a plowshare. a tree into a fountain, a spider web into a carousel into a kaleidoscope. Ice into prism into refraction into rainbow. Woman into man into child. Black into white into Asian. In winter , a block of ice sculpture glows with 3D imagery.

Magical images affirming the universal family--the interconnectedness of all people and all things, the nature in us, the us in nature, and doing so without text or spoken words. Such special effects were all but impossible a decade ago without time-lapse photography and Herculean efforts in the darkroom, and were confined to museums, television, and coffee table books. Now through morphing, compositing and projection such images of virtual metamorphosis can be released in the garden.

How do you jump-start a Millennial Garden?
The concept of the Millennial Garden is so new that it is too far beyond conventional wisdom for a conventional implementation strategy. It is bold idea in search of a bold and visionary sponsor who understands that the Millennial Garden makes sound business sense, and is willing to participate in the team building process-designers, elected officials, sponsors, community groups-and underwrite the up-front costs of merging a design to a site. After all, if a Millennial Garden is to embody a big idea, that idea, and the process from initial germ of an idea to final planting of that idea, must be profoundly "personal" to that community.

Where should Millennial Gardens be planted?
Anywhere, but at the top of my list are neglected or even hostile urban sites, in underserved communities in any part of the country, indeed in any country, at least one to three acres (one hectare) in size, easily accessible to the community, and capable of accommodating up to several hundred users at any one time.

Thanks for taking the time to review this exciting vision. Let me know what you think. And again, let me know immediately if you want to help.