MORAVIAN GARDEN - DISCURSUS IDepth Charges - An evolutionary approach to restoring depth will work just fine. Cannibalizing both the truly historic and the simply overrated fake historic aspects is possible through a method of appropriation versus demolition. Grafting depth onto the insipid requires that the best be salvaged and incorporated and the worst be simply savaged. Land is what matters. Position and juxtaposition reign supreme. The translation of one form to another, in an incremental manner, will reveal the potential (repressed) linguistic dust present in the most pathetic examples of building. This 'dust' is a fertile duplicity that will allow great latitude for true cultural renovation.
Image (left) - Spilberk Castle (Brno)
The Case of the Insignificant - A small Moravian garden. To the east, hills (and the rising sun); to the south, hills; to the north, hills; to the west, hills (and the setting sun). It is very small and very insignificant.
Within its tiny borders, formed by stone walls -- walls surmounted by fences and the walls of the country house -- is a series of plots, traces of the former the farmyard.
These plots have an explicit rectilinear nature and are the remains of utility. To transform them, now, in the 21st century, to an aesthetic and purely intangible significance (a tangible insignificance) is to purposely violate the orthogonal and utilitarian. This also implies the addition of semantic depth -- a dimension of pure 'writing' against the formal and functional history of the site.
The first act was re-pointing the exterior of the south-facing retaining wall, above the river/stream and below the garden. The next, ongoing, is to obscure that very geometric structure, that is the mineralogical -- or stone on stone. The ever-tempting signature conifers were moved or removed early on from within the garden. The stone walkways were dug out and realigned (unaligned/maligned). The straight lines were inflected, or warped or lost within new vegetation. The edges became volumes and the layers (terraces) were altered without relation to the formal four-square plan. An ellipse replaced a large blue spruce and its green (lawn) became a new center (mini solar system). The green ellipse is wrapped with plants (planets), and ever-changing in seasonal qualities. The center is the place where the sun makes its most vivid presence known in the garden. The dimension is calculated to accommodate the outstretched human body (the sun-bathing human body), or a table and a few chairs. At this center, in centripetal fashion, the lower terraces unfurl from the forces set in play by this green void.
A second ellipse is under way, a few steps below and to the west, a subsidiary system. It borders the vestigial vegetable plot and is violated by a currant bush and a plum tree, both hangers-on from the previous regime. This western ellipse is also a patch of grass edged by a new, curving stone sitting-wall and plants, including a somewhat ancient and mature lilac at the northwest edge. To leave the higher ellipse and pass to the lower, one must engage the rainwater cistern, with its awkward open cubic form protruding from the ground. Above it rises a towering Thuja (cedar) -- positive and negative volumes representing both the presence and absence of the outmoded garden. The cistern is empty (because it leaks). The Thuja is slated to be cut by half (because it is out of scale). This juncture is the messy collision of the former state and its successor -- the crashing together of two systems.Image (above) - Author's shadow (Skryje)
The lower garden (of which the second ellipse is part) will be expanded (by its extension into the lowest portion of the garden below the plum tree) and defined by a shift in grades (wide grass steps will lead out to the 'Strand' -- the strip of garden just above the stone retaining wall and below the first ellipse). Tsuga canadensis (hemlock) have been introduced (very young plants) to grow up at this edge and close in (as an evergreen perimeter). The Strand will become a sand or gravel swathe (it is now grass). It too will have an irregular 'wave' edge condition and be framed by vegetation. Within it, the view will 'close' (sitting), and 'open' (standing). From the first ellipse the view will be over the Strand to the far bank of the river, the lindens, and the south hills. The multiple 'horizons' build from within the garden to the penultimate 'horizon', the curving green mass of the hills against the sky. These horizons are not lines.
The most ridiculous and sublime measures are required to alter the views of the garden from the outside. The stone walls and the house volume are excessively orthogonal from the exterior approaches. Below the wall, a cataclysm of plants is required to stage the illusion of thickness and vagueness (distance). To block these last vestiges of the skeletal past will require fulsome, corporeal excess of planting -- thick, uneven, woolly, wild, extravagant gestures of colonization and conquest. The heavy structure of the architecture must vanish beneath the luxuriant, generative contingency of massed, polyvalent, polyglot, polymorphous green. This ambient edge and new amorphous volumetric condition will ensure that the last traces of precision and intrepid rigor vanish (to the eye and soul) and merge with the effervescent froth of the animated universe of garden and not garden. Here the real nature of shade and light will mix and confound the lasting imprint of utility and its cousin, banality. The great cycle of the seasons and the revolution of the heavens seek, too, respite in the idleness of green shadows.
Image (below) - Moravian landscape (Skryje)
There are numerous types of order that disturb the soul -- one alone will suffice. The stringent, often puritanical inroads of utility and function are prime agents of inner tedium. To loose the proto-generative is to enhance the seductive veil thrown over such measures by nature and by artifice, those gestures that loosen the bonds that hold in thrall the vivid undercurrents of the world and its secret vivaciousness. Shadows are generative -- the nurseries of imagination. As sub genius loci effects, shadows, the play of light and darkness, are the eternal return of a spirit that animates life, time, and desire. Yes, Winter and Spring, Summer and Autumn. But most of all, Spring and Autumn are idyllic, signature times for gardens and for architecture (for garden architecture). The stillness of Winter and the cacophony of Summer are balanced in the twin, generative gestures of the year's morning and evening. (2002)Discursus II (May 2004)