But a 10-year development plan, nearly complete at a cost of $1.4 billion, has set a new mood — avant-garde — with 10 buildings by architects like Frank Gehry, Steven Holl and Fumihiko Maki, as well as a revamped streetscape.
When humanity's ancestors discovered, a million years or so ago, the exquisite pleasure of a hot meal by the fire, they might very well have set the mood with a little night music -- a shimmering cadenza played on a slender bone flute, perhaps, or a hymn to the spirits belted out a cappella.
Sisi's comments this week against what he called "terrorism and violence" have set the mood for a showdown.
It will naturally be met with a critique of its affordability, but here the Conservatives have set new mood music that they may live to find rather grating: they have never approached education through an economic lens, never paraded academies as a saving, never brooked any interrogation over how much their reforms cost.
Following the burial of Berkin Elvan – a teenager who died after being hit in the head by a teargas canister during last summer's protests – two more deaths have set the mood in Turkey further on edge.
Less welcome is the interruption to "Another World", where after the steady violins have set the mood, he breaks the intense moment to explain his fears for the environment and the grieving process which inspired the track.
Although he died in 1953 at the age of 74, Russia's cruel, dictatorial leader Joseph Stalin had fostered gross mistrust of most everyone; the residue of his reign might have set the mood for my interrogation.
But there are moments that linger: Plaid Cymru's Leanne Wood crushing Nigel Farage when the Ukip leader suggested migrants with HIV were health tourists, an intervention that may have set the national mood – Ukip is lower in the polls than many anticipated.
So now, tucked among the trees, on quiet lawns and on stone terraces, works by the likes of Rodin, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Henry Moore, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Bourgeois have set about changing the mood of the gardens.
Radical Islamists have set the continent's mood and increasingly they are determining who people are voting for.
