Niall Hobhouse to Alejandro Zaera-Polo
You asked about comments received on the Hadspen scheme, and whether they bear, directly or indirectly, on your proposal. To make this easier we have printed out all the correspondence so far, and have highlighted specific criticisms and discussion. (Each stapled ‘package’ represents a month of letters, and should in each case be read from the back, following the sequence of exchanges as far as this is possible).
I think we can agree that some very specific aspects of the proposal may require more thought at a later stage. For instance: the path widths, the problem of planting a sharply pointed corner, the water channels, the pond, and the question of whether the paths are set level in section - or are laid with the terrain (and if the former, what happens at the corners?). None of these points have any impact on the basic diagram, and some will be resolved much more easily when we know more about the approach of the gardener.
I have not attempted to extract from the correspondence the broader criticisms that have been received. Professional designers have on the whole been hostile; many of their comments do reflect individual style, preference, or practice in making a garden. It’s not surprising that some of these are quite hard to integrate into the pattern of zig-zags. I cannot tell you, incidentally, the number of appeals I have heard to design ‘principles’.
Another, much more general, attack has been on the process that you and I adopted together. That is, it is felt that the paths are too restrictive or prescriptive for the designer to be able to add much. (The plants-people are mostly dismissed by the designers, and have in any case remained very silent). There has been a deal too much discussion about all of this, and a lot of misunderstanding. My own very simple view is that it is open to these critics, in competition, to come up with something more convincing .
Finally there have been a few impassioned comments to the effect that it is hard to feel any visceral connection between the path-grid and the site. Clearly these are the ones to take most seriously, although I agree that we won’t necessarily know the answer for some time. Overall, I do believe that there is a strong and legible connection between project and place; I thought it would be helpful for everybody, including FOA, if I tried to say why.
Some of the arguments are surprising because they were not necessarily part of our original thinking on the project, but they are none the worse for that.
Looking now at the cleared site, the strongest characteristic of the interior space defined by the wall is its relationship to the landscape outside. In fact, it is impossible to ignore what happens outside, or indeed the relationship between inside and outside. A planting scheme that set out to exclude the bigger landscape and also the views inwards (otherwise the most conventional approach to any walled garden) would in this case be the most aggressive possible way of intervening . Of course I am not saying that such an approach would be wrong.
Once one has accepted this relationship between inside and outside as something any scheme has to address in one way or another, then one can make the following comments on the path-grid:
1. The curves, and the sharp corners, offer the maximum opportunity for precise, and varied, interrogatory views of the landscape beyond.
2. This characteristic does indeed seem to privilege the idea of moving through the garden (though it absolutely does not exclude areas of tranquility and seclusion). Many people have commented that the dynamic structure of the paths themselves speak more to movement than to sitting still; now perhaps we can see why.
3. I feel the inside/outside relationship as all about understanding, or re-finding, the horizontal viewpoint. The principle (which drove the grid) of using the minimum possible gradients for the paths becomes interesting in this context because the gradients have a strong tension from the horizontal, even as the paths themselves are ‘forced’ down the slope.
4. I still like Raoul Bunschoten’s comments, in August, about the relationship of wall to planting that is determined by the zig-zag form.
5. In asking an architect to make a proposal, I was perhaps expressing a preference for an architectonic approach - or at least for architectural thinking.
This is clearly what I got; and to the extent that a planting brief is emerging that favours something strongly spatial, then your plan might yet fit well with bold volumetric experiments in planting.
6. Finally (and this is as much true of what we now know about the site, as it is of your project for it) all of the above encourages the view that gardening does always involve a questioning of what we understand as natural.
I do still much prefer the idea of making a sort of instrument of enquiry that endlessly throws up surprises, sometimes even subversive surprises.
It is worth noting that this is a preoccupation that has been reflected, sometimes obliquely, in the theoretical exchanges on the website: - gardening as activity in itself, or as the making of an artifact? gardens as isolated from the landscape, and as places of isolation in themselves? how to recognize as as one gardens both the passage of time, and previous interventions on the site? and finally, the impossible issue of who a garden is actuallly made for.
Over the last six months I’ve heard lots of diverse and uncompromising answers to all these questions; they generate strong feelings, but it is very obvious that not everybody can be right.
PS The best, at least most imaginative, suggestion for what we do so far has been to leave the space exactly at it is, blank and empty. This seems like a really good challenge to received ideas of ‘nature’.