Alasdair Forbes to Niall Hobhouse
An immediate and abiding concern is whether the parabola, in your mind, is essentially an autonomous project or part of a global plan for Hadspen. Do you have your own ideas about the eventual lines or rhythms of approach to the garden? Are you imagining the winning design will be strong enough to exert its influence outside the walls? Even so, there needs to be a reciprocal influence from the outside in, which, for the ultimate success of Hadspen as a whole, needs to involve more than the dialogue with outside horizons visible within the garden. In particular, it is damaging to leave the liaison with the house unclarified.I do not mean that link needs to be straightforwardly continuous. But now is the moment for sorting out in your mind how to prevent it remaining a somewhat confused no man’s land. It worries me that contestants may never have walked directly from the house to the parabola. Will this be possible for them on the open days? One cannot finally love a space sufficiently in isolation from the company it keeps. This is maybe a counsel of perfection, and a complication which at this stage you could do without! But it bears directly on the scale of opprtunity that, under your guidance and dedication, Hadspen perhaps uniquely affords.
Most of us today garden within a horizon of threats to our gardens that we are only able to limit by the judicious use of screens and other defences. At Hadspen, there is no need to abbreviate spatial memory and promise in this way! This is indeed a circumstance to be respected. The whole notion of how much to put into or leave out from the parabola should depend on what is available to complement it elsewhere (I think this should count with you even if there is as yet no clear understanding of just which spaces will eventually be available to whom). There should be anticipations, confirmations, discrepancies, echoes between everything! Or that is how I need to work. But then I could never have organised so rousing and public-spirited a project as this, and I look forward to going on learning a lot from it in the coming weeks and months.