Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse
From a letter from Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse sent on the 13th August 2006
What – especially – I cannot remember of the ‘Parabola Garden’ is to what extent it combines – or will combine, once the beech allée is gone – the services of hub and vantage…ie I know it serves to protect - but how far also does it serve to face - the slope and the refusal to complete the oval argue a motive of further onlooking – but how intransigent is that wall at the base? – does the prospect over step it? – how do the new paths conform to, or defy, that decisive, or provisional finality?….
The shapes you have to deal with are anyway fascinating in themselves – the idea of a space defined by both cut-off and curvature! – to what extent does – will – the gathered spatiality veer towards its own inner life – or a leap - the patience of the squaring of the curved corner! (do you remember if Bachelard ever takes those two favourite loves of his together as a single amalgam? – I rather think he does – well, here would be a prototype!) but so, too, that final invasive abruptness – disallowing (Praeneste, Epidaurus) the logic of scenic or theatrical spectacle!
This unexpectedness - so tender, so harbouring an expectation – so sudden – so almost – snubbing a finale (“let be be finale of seem”?!) well fits with what little impression I have formed of Hadspen through my (propitiously?) disjunctive visits (tea with your father and Jeannie on a terrace - extensive perambulations with Jeannie as sympathetic Cicerone – quarantined forays into the walled garden) namely – that – under your stewardship – a startling dialogue seems to be emerging between (can I say?) the ancestral and the disinherited conscience – the residual and the contemporary ways of being in the world……
Perhaps already in the eighteenth century intimations – if not of ‘unbelonging’ then of greatly stretched belonging – arose as one bestrode the ridges and the counties multiplied…. today it is impossible not to feel a tension between the harmonious latitudes attendant on the dwelling – v the approaches to a panoramic sublime on the heights – as if the measure of place itself became untenable when lifted to the illocality of free-ranging space. (Not only Bachelard and the poets, but also the best of the geographers – never art historians in my experience! - have deliberated such a relation: Yi Fu Tuan, for instance, wrote an illuminating book developing the dialectic between space and place).
I felt, while walking with Jeannie, your placing of an airy vertical sculpture down on the meadow adjoining the house was somehow striving to instil into the domestic levels an anticipatory disconcerting vastness…I am the last person who wishes to diminish the achievement of the eighteenth century –
I idolise those eloquent and floating aprons of lawn permitting access to far-smiling acres – or – a rebours – obediently forgetting themselves for the sake of their ‘frontispiece’ – as Palladio liked to title the façade of the house – that invention of a grateful latitude is the proper compensation of dwelling – privileged – lethal – (to huddles) – it may be – but who will imagine a default of poetry is such fresh license granted space? (with perhaps the potential of a spatial erasure of place already latent?)
The question, for us, becomes the new catechising of that licence – the dispossessing of the assured entitlement – the suit of a gratitude – incredulous – tremulous – for not always easy – disowning – expanse – Would this be the case of the ‘open’ at Hadpsen – its folding back into the domestic – the ancestral – register a sharper, more endangered configuration of serenity?
So, to return to the parabola garden, one then sees perhaps, why from our point of view, as well as theirs, it is still suited to being a dislocated hub for now just remains this discreet abeyance (of a pivotal outdoor foyer) from the societal routines of the house –
On the face of it, I like the inlay of the FOA path lattice – amongst other things, it seems to organise the asymmetry of the slope, and bring it to rest on a rather Gaudiesque footing (didn’t Gaudi, if I remember, fetishize the parabola?) I seem to recall a dramatic cross view, on the axis of the beech allée, to a steep, wooded hillside? A purely visual, supra-mural focus that did not physically disturb the interior space has perhaps the gesture expecting one day its announcement here (or was there perhaps something already in place?)
There is a rather seductive non-conformity between the aspects of geometry and gradience in the walled garden – even, the deployment of the path lattice has got to work with a series of bristling chasses-croises.
Not only the somewhat frenetic networking of the lattice – but also its non-deference to a centre – is so Hermetic! (Hermes alone of gods disliked the self importance of a sphere of influence, eschewing any personal power-base). I can’t but on my own terms of reference see this energetic pattern of paths – pent up, impatient with its formal confinement – as inscribing Hermes’ love of testing the boundaries, into the (indispensable) Hestian provision that sine qua non of courage – of the vessel of containment….(ancestral belonging and contemporary disinheritance combining ‘in loving strife ‘ … again?)
Should all the central lozenges be planted?
Will there be preserved a haunt of emptiness running through the design to prefigure the elsewhere – majestic – open? So to bear down on us availability, responsibility to Bachelard’s ‘intimate immensity?–
In any case – what a stimulating project!
Everything said here I shall probably want to discard at once when I revisit the site! What does haunt me though – is that the direction taken by the parabola garden – whatever it may be – might not be – from your point of view – an isolated project – the site is too pivotal, and too precious – not to need that it both absorb and anticipate your reading of the legend of Hadpsen as a whole – (whatever that may be!). As we said of .. , it is a pity there that here is no real sense of companionship between its various spaces – no legend of their necessary spatial congruity – the further image steps out of the FOA plan of the garden its being the hive of the quest for connection. I long was nourished by the manner of the greeting of the house – so judiciously honey – on its hill –