Ismaili Centre’s garden a blooming city retreat

For most North Americans, a garden is a place to see, but at the Ismaili Centre/Aga Khan Museum, it’s a place to be.

Though the differences aren’t always obvious, they are profound. The Islamic garden functions as a sort of microcosm of the world; the earthly elements — water, light, vegetation as well as order and symmetry — are all incorporated into the design.

In the western tradition, gardens tend to serve more decorative purposes. In Canada, gardening is as much about landscaping as culture. It is more focused on filling space than animating it.

By local standards, the recently completed garden at the Ismaili Centre seems bare, minimalist, almost unfinished. There’s little evidence of the fixation on flowers, on the picturesque, to which we are accustomed. The idea behind this garden is the experience of its various spaces.

It has a quiet, contemplative quality that makes it a place apart. Located atop a high point on Wynford Dr. fully exposed to the Don Valley Parkway, Eglinton Ave. and the endless banality of the surrounding environment, this is a garden that allows visitors to put some distance between themselves and a city that continues to be its own worst enemy.

Where better to contemplate the tragedy of a city unable to rise above its own banality, a city run by a mayor with no vision and a council whose members rarely venture beyond their own backyards?

On the other hand, the whole suburban context of the Ismaili garden was built by people like Tory, whose main concerns are cars and where to park them. Ironically, though, his anti-urbanist instincts make him the personification of a Toronto fast being left behind and buried by projects exactly like the Ismaili Centre.

The extraordinary attention to detail and love (and money) lavished on the complex stand out starkly in a city that has never aspired to more than being the blur seen from the window of a speeding car.

Its designer, Beirut-based landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic, went to great pains to create a space whose scale, materials and intentions are thoroughly humanist.

“I was scared in the beginning,” Djurovic admits. “The place has no character, no spirit, no soul. There was nothing here to respond to. But it’s going to transform the area; it will be a catalyst for change.” Let’s hope so. The first goal, he explains, was to “buffer the garden from the highway, the city and modernity.” A border of trees, shrubs and plants line much of the site. As Djurovic points out, “It is an introverted garden, an adaptation of the Islamic garden that belongs to this time. I needed it to capture you and slow you down. It’s about stealing a moment of reflection and contemplation. It’s a place where you can find spirituality.”

The centre’s garden has a quiet, contemplative quality that makes it a place apart. It allows visitors to put some distance between themselves and a city that is its own worst enemy

At the heart of the garden is an arrangement of five immaculate pools — Djurovic calls them “water mirrors” — that come as close to built perfection as anything in Toronto. Carved from black granite, these exquisite structures offer no room for mistakes. If the edges are a millimetre high or low, the water doesn’t flow properly.

This preoccupation with the smallest elements of the garden along with its overall geometry brings a sense of harmony and order to things. Yet with its crushed gravel paths and stone benches, it doesn’t feel stultifying in its formality. The garden is as comfortable and it is uplifting.

“My clients didn’t design this for themselves,” says Djurovic. “It had to be for future generations.”

Building for future generations; what a thought! That’s not happened in Toronto for, well, generations. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca