Alejandro Zaera-Polo to Niall Hobhouse
I just got your package of stuff and saw these two e-mails. Did not have time to read the correspondence, but looked at your comments and flicked through the printed material and got a hint of the conversation.
I agree with you that the details of the path construction need to be developed further, but I believe this would be the purpose of a detail design phase, if you decide to move forward with this option. I think your reading of the project is very precise and interesting, and I am sure some of these readings may be embedded in the design development of the scheme.
In respect to the design, I still stand very much behind the project. I understand that professional designers will be hostile to the approach, because is probably the opposite of what a “picturesque” landscape designer would have done, and, with some exception, the profession of landscape designers is basically operating within the picturesque. I think what is confusing for everybody is the point where the design is left, being very restrictive in some respects and totally non-specific on other levels. That was what we decided to do from the beginning, and I still stand by it. It is a limitation that recognizes our lack of expertise in planting etc… as a possible advantage to produce a garden. This is something that interests me a big deal as a position: to “breed the project” rather than relying in the preconceptions of the conoisseurs. It is true, this is against the idea of the garden as an artifact, which may be one of the pillars of the traditional idea of a garden. The idea of relating the garden to the outside is also something that defeats the traditional preconception of the garden as a delimited domain detached from nature and heavily crafted… But maybe this is finally the point of the design that we thought did not exist… to challenge the conventional notions of a garden and to play with the ambiguity between nature and the garden.
I believe that the system is still incredibly flexible to allow gardeners to create whatever they want, except if they want to create “figures” with the plants (circles, columns, and other forms of figures enforced onto the natural material by traditional garden-making). Paradoxically, this only confirms the strength of the design despite our attempts to avoid designing… The zig-zag pattern will enable to produce gardens that are about texture, color material, rather than geometry or form, and we quite like the limitation that this will impose on the future gardeners, because we do not like gardens where there is an imposition of geometry onto the natural material. Somebody may say the grid is an imposition, but is the minimum imposition: it guarantees a minimum level of physical permeability through the field and a level of resolution of the drainage and irrigation systems. It is a grid that has grown determined by the shape of the envelope, the positions of the accesses and the slope of the terrain; I do not know if the connection is self evident, but there is certainly a very strong connection… And perhaps being less evident is a quality of the approach. If the grid is too limiting for some experiments, , you can erase sectors of the grid to allow for larger areas of planting… But the whole garden will not be able to be figurative… It will be about material and texture.
Maybe this relates to your last bold proposal of leaving the space as it is. Not sure it will work though, but we do work often with a Spanish landscape designer, Teresa Gali, who is fascinated by the idea of throwing seeds in a field with a certain technique, almost like painting a Pollock in nature. Unfortunately she is not a gardener, but a landscape designer… I am going to send her the link right now.