Sharawadgi

Sharawadgi or sharawaggi is a style of landscape gardening or architecture in which rigid lines and symmetry are avoided to give the scene an organic, naturalistic appearance. This concept was influential in English landscape gardening in the 18th century, starting with Sir William Temple's essay Upon the gardens of Epicurus, and reports from China of the Jesuit missionary, Father Attiret. Sir William Temple first used the word sharawadgi in discussing the Chinese idea of beauty without order in garden design, in contrast to the straight lines, regularity, and symmetries then popular in European gardens. The style indicates a certain irregularity in the design.

Sharawadgi was defined in the 1980s as an "artful irregularity in garden design and, more recently, in town planning". The word inspired the coinage of the term "Sharawadji Effect" by composer Claude Schryer, which is used in relation to music and the listening experience.

The term sharawaggi (more frequently spelled sharawadgi) typically referred to the principle of planned naturalness of appearance in garden design. It was first used by Sir William Temple (1628–1699) in an essay, written in 1685 but published in 1692, "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus". Temple may have picked up the term from a Dutchman who once lived in the East Indies.Horace Walpole associates the term with irregularity, asymmetry, and freedom from the rigid conventions of classical design; by the time of it was used by Walpole it had become a common term in the lexicon of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.

However, the original word for sharawadgi has been a matter of debate. Some had attempted to reconstruct a possible Chinese origin of the word, for example, "sa luo gui qi" (洒落瑰琦) meaning "quality of being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace", another proposed san luan (散亂) or shu luo (疏落), both meaning "scattered and disorderly", in combination with wei zhi (位置, position and arrangement) to mean "space tastefully enlivened by disorder". After reviewing the suggestions, however, Susi Lang and Nikolaus Pevsner concluded that the word cannot be firmly established to be a Chinese term.Michael Sullivan suggested that it is a corruption of a Persian word, while a number of other scholars proposed a Japanese origin. E.V. Gatenby and Ciaran Murray thought that it originated from the Japanese term sorowaji (揃わじ), which means asymmetry, irregular. However, it is argued that this suggestion relies on possible meaning and similarity in sound only, without any other corroboration. Based on history research and linguistic evidence, garden scholar Wybe Kuitert proposes that it stems from the Japanese term shara'aji or share'aji (洒落味、しゃれ味), used to describe decorative motifs in works of applied art. Although there is no attested usage of shara'aji in the Edo period when the term was first borrowed into English, both its components shara and aji were important aesthetic concepts in the era, and would have been used in tandem by craftsmen of the period. Shara has a number of possible meanings relating to witty wordplay and association, its meaning extending to emblematic word games in applied arts; while aji means "taste". The term shara'aji had been used a few times in literary criticism; and is still in common use for items such as kimonos.

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