Thank you very much I am currently organising dates etc and will be in touch.
You sound very disheartened - don’t be! I feel sure you will end up with some exceptional plans and ideas.
With pleasure.
There will be open days after we get going, but if you just want to go on your own one cold day then drop an email to Sue Begg (copied-in, above) and just say whenever, so we know.
Best to get to the garden through the front drive route, ignoring all discouragements .Its important to go up into the woods opposite and look back.
I hope you designers are made of sterner stuff than me; I find the empty space overwhelming, and try to keep away.
Is it possible to visit the garden prior to the initial submission date - I feel I would really have to see and be in the garden to elicit my response to site, place etc
Thanks. I couldn’t have had a more reassuring description of what I’m trying to do at Hadspen, and am much happier for it. Your comment about ring fencing a blue sky project made me think that of course I had tried to put up a little picket fence in an effort to contain the gardeners and plantsmen. You very successfully convinced me that this approach did indeed compound the problem.
I owe Anne Wareham a considered response about what I think about the design process. In the meantime I have forwarded yours to her since it provides such a good starting point for what I need to say, but at the same time that letter can be a sort of response to yours.
Over the last few weeks the daily rate of registration has tripled; it may not last but thank you for giving the scheme an outing at the EGS. Your sampling of likes and dislikes I find oddly reassuring, although I’d be wary of any student who said they liked the paths unequivocally without going to site……
When questioned by the faculty Director, the landscape architect, somewhat patronizingly, replies: ‘Oh, these are concepts in landscape design which you would probably find hard to grasp’.
To which the Director: ‘Well I’m an intelligent woman, and I’ve got all morning …..’.
Made me smile!
You were asking in an earlier email how physical scientists advance enquiry and defending design practice as research.
I became more aware of the problems of advancing enquiry when I stepped back from research myself and became involved in the process of research management. I ran Peer Review Committees which allocate government funding to individual researchers and departments. It is difficult to get committees to assign money from an all-too-limited pool for really ground-breaking research, i.e. for attempting things that may fail - even though those committees may be made up of scientists who themselves wish to carry out such fundamental research. I’m sure your social scientists will have something to say about the behaviour of groups here. The funding councils try to improve the process: sometimes by setting up separate ‘blue-sky’ funds (but then debating whether this just ring-fences the problem) and by really pushing the message out to the community that a well-conducted process of enquiry which comes up with no answer may be just as worth while pursuing as one that does. Such an enquiry will have other benefits: training of young researchers, guiding other workers in the same field by defining the problem better, etc.
….the more I have been thinking about the composition of the above paragraph, the easier it becomes to draw parallels with your process of designing for Hadspen and, perhaps, the more convinced I become by it…
I shall now view you as a blue-sky programme judged by a (non)peer-review panel managing a learning process that may be allowed to ‘fail’ in order to better define the problem. So long as you write it up for a journal somewhere my world-view is now put to rights!
I’m afraid there will always be ‘traditionally-minded’ scientists who view research as trying to find very small things (fundamental particles) or very far-away things (quasars) with very large (and usually very expensive) things (particle accelerators and telescopes), but I would join in the defence of attempting to understand how humans experience, interpret and interact with their environment (whether natural or built) as being research - but I doubt every instance of design practice is tackled as such an open question.
In the meantime… I discussed the Hadspen project with the EGS design students yesterday - I’d be interested to know whether your registrations go up this week as a result - might show whether my audience was listening! Certainly some were very engaged by the idea and I hope they will enter the competition. We did a quick straw poll on the FOA design, with about 15% liking, 45% not liking and 40% wishing to suspend judgement. Having discussed the traditional principles with the class: simplicity, unity, balance, scale, etc, etc, as a framework for approaching a design project, FOA’s approach made an interesting contrast!
As a kind of coda to what I was saying about design, Rafael Vignoly told me the following:
His office had won a Princeton competition for a new faculty building for some very abstruse branch of science (let’s call it astrophysics).
At a meeting with the senior academics he was introduced for the first time to the landscape architect, who expounded his ideas for the project.
When questioned by the faculty Director, the landscape architect, somewhat patronizingly,replies: ‘Oh, these are concepts in landscape design which you would probably find hard to grasp’.
To which the Director: ‘Well I’m an intelligent woman, and I’ve got all morning …..’.
Your solution to the Parabola question is the more elegant for being a
critique of the website activity. Hamilton Finlay is exactly right: all
that wisdom presented simultaneously, monumentally and ironically.
Actually, I think we are not so far apart. I have been puzzling over my next
problem, which is to clarify for the competitors in the spring what it is
that I want my new garden to reflect. This needs to take a rather concrete
documentary form.
Prompted by your letter, I now see that this document already exists in the
form of everything posted on the website. I’ve always felt that the
commentary and correspondence should be valued in the same way as the
Foreign Office proposal; both elements should be taken as our ‘Guidance
Notes’ for competitors.
Almost any interpretation of this information would produce a list of the
issues that the Parabola designs have to address. Given how equivocal the
response to Foreign Office, and how diffuse the written responses
themselves, these issues can never be completely resolved in any design. But what isnt’t said, or isn’t addressed, now can only be a deliberate decision, in itself integral to a particular design approach. I am thinking for isntance of the competitors who might decide to plant out any views to the landscape beyond the wall. By this process genius of place acquires a status appropriate to any landscape project, as something that can be ignored but can’t be denied.
Do you think all this represents challenge enough?
Greetings from the ‘Antipodes’..
What a great idea this whole projec t… I have waded through quite a lot of
the correspondence and almost drowned a couple of times …
Isn’t all the cleverness and wordiness on the site a bit much? These aren’t
qualities in themselves that we need after all so much as visual imagination, determination and green fingers. How to make the presentation more gestural and powerful?”
So many words leads me to think that maybe perhaps (my ‘informal’
submission!) the ‘voids’ between the path layout (love em) might consist of
ALL the ‘’high falutin’ words lying prostrate atop some gravely material!
(would Hamilton Findlay approve?!)
Or perhaps ‘plantsmanship’ might take the form of all the photographs taken
of this area’s past glories … again prostrate ‘cut and pasted’ to fill the
‘voids’… maybe a few ‘tufts’ of ‘local’ pasture grasses and garden weeds
emerging from all that ‘gloss’!
Or just maybe a ‘pure’ forest of ‘Bronze fennel’ or some white trunked Sp of
Tree to appease those who garden by plants …
I suggest whatever concept is arrived at it remain for say 3 years and the
ball will roll once again …
Best Parabola’s
Since my apostasy on the paths, I note that you, Y, and Tim R have all written to say in various ways that it wasn’t that any of you disliked them. What does Liz say?
NO - I’M QUITE HAPPY TO SAY I DON’T LIKE THEM - I WAS JUST ABLE TO VISUALISE THEM IN PLACE AFTER VIEWING THE SITE WITH YOU. AND FAIR ENOUGH; I WAS TEASING REALLY. DO YOU LIKE IT?
Surely, if I follow the rigour of my own process, I cannot know the answer to this until July at the earliest. I know, and have described, what they set out to do. Put this another way- not knowing if I like them, not even trying to decide , is a discipline I have learnt to live with very happily ; but I’m not asking anybody else to do so.
WITH NO VALUE JUDGEMENT INTENDED FOR EITHER OF US, I HAVE NEVER MET ANYONE WHOSE THOUGHT PROCESSES WORKED SO DIFFERENTLY THAN MY OWN!
It may be that my processes are too much formed by the day-to-day experience at LSE of observing a design studio within the social science academy.. In a tight corner the social scientists always claim that designers are being too prescriptive. It is a fine line, but a proposition is often the only way to advance an enquiry. What does your astro-physics background tell you? The point is that design practice IS research, and needs to be dignified as such by everybody.
What it never is is a wooly mystery; this is just what the designers make it when they are running for cover. Look again at what some of your colleagues are claiming in the correspondence.
I’LL LET YOU KNOW HOW THE STUDENTS RESPOND NEXT WEEK. And I look forward to it.