Solmaz M. Kive, The Other Space of the Persian Garden, Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal, Vol 2, No 3 (2012)
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Abstract
The Persian garden is claimed to be an “other space,” a place utterly different from yet fundamentally connected to the rest of places. In the light of Foucault’s discussion of “other spaces on one hand, and the representation of garden in the twelfth-century Persian poem Haft Paykar on the other, this paper is concerned with the way the places of everyday life are conditioned by the Persian garden. As a microcosm, the Persian garden bears the image of Paradise, of the perfect place. As an actual place, it is elevated to an earthly paradise, a perfected place. Considering it as a perfect, unqualified ideal place which remains unattainable and, at the same time, an entirely ordered place, which is perfected into an ideal place, the paper considers the interplay of the two forms of the ideal place (the perfect and the perfected) to discuss the way the Persian garden simultaneously contrasts, typifies and nullifies the other places.
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