Strange Brew Pt.2 - Urban Physic Garden

Well-being has been a much overused buzzword during the past few years of economic uncertainty. Uttered across the political spectrum by those who seek salvation from the havoc wreaked by unfettered consumerism and unregulated markets, it is proffered as an aspirational alternative endgame to the one we currently find ourselves in. And very often in such pondering pitting profits against peace of mind, gardens are invoked as panacean places which play a role in redressing the perceived imbalance between contemporary social systems and the individuals who inhabit them.

Obviously the association of gardens with well-being, health and the good life is nothing new, given that they have historically always provided spaces of safety and sustenance. Whilst the concentrated cultivation within them of plants exulted for their beneficial medicinal and therapeutic applications is a common thread which links the medieval monastic hortus conclusus, Islamic paradise gardens, and present day plots.

It is a thread picked up by the Urban Physic Garden, a worthy successor to last year's successful Urban Orchard on the same Union Street site in Southwark, London. Organised by Heather Ring and her cohorts from the Wayward Plant Nursery, in partnership with Better Bankside's Urban Forest regeneration project, the Urban Physic Garden transforms an unused brownfield site into a space of intrigue and enchantment.

As with last year's project the design aesthetic is a bright lo-tech eco chic, cobbling together a variety of recycled elements into a coherent and appealing whole. Split into distinct zones formed in the shape of the pharmacy cross, hanging signs announce them as specific wards, each one containing plants relating to treatments in their relevant medical fields. A striking use of colour (red, white and blue) creates a strong backdrop for the planting whilst graphic elements adorn walls and structures adding to the eye appeal.

Whilst the plant associations may at times appear to be rather obvious or overly didactic, it is the overall use of the space which truly addresses the issues around ideas of well-being. An old ambulance acts as a cafe dispensing tonics for the weary who coalesce upon a long communal bench, whist the the site acts as a venue for a varied series of events over the summer. The garden serves as a community locus with plants as both the relational context and content for generating networks and strengthening bonds between locals and visitors.

As if this project wasn't enough to keep landscape architect Ring fully occupied, she also contributed the fascinating 'AlgaeGarden' to this year's International Garden Festival at Les Jardins de Métis in Quebec. Created in collaboration with plant scientist Dr. Brenda Parker and artist Synnøve Fredericks, the installation explores the aesthetic and productive possibilities of algae.

Whilst this year saw the end of the break clause in the lease on the Union Street site, 2012 holds the promise of a longer term Recycled Nursery Garden project for the next three years in nearby in Borough - all's well that ends well!

Strange Brew Pt.1 - Jardin de l'Alchimiste

Jardin de l'Alchemiste in Eygaliéres in the Bouches-du-Rhone department of France, is situated next to the 16th century Mas de la Brune, the historic residence of Pierre Isnard, a steward to the Duke de Guise. Isnard evidently harboured a medieval fascination with magic and as a consequence incorporated certain alchemical symbols into the architecture of the mansion. This provenance inspired the current owners Marie and Alain de Larouziére, and provided them with the conceptual framework for the garden which they made in 1997. Spurning traditional ideas of arrangement in favour of creating a metaphorical journey representing the alchemical quest for the philosophers stone, the legendary substance thought to be capable of turning lead into gold, the garden is certainly unique.

Intended as a philosophical essay on the process of enlightenment, evoked through the spatial layout of the garden and it's horticultural arrangement, the narrative drive of the garden is provided by the historical associations of local plants, their forms and colours. Numerology plays a role in the design layout (the numbers 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 33 having a alchemical importance), whilst reference is implied to astronomy (Saturn, Mercury, the moon and the sun). As such the garden suggests a certain element of theme park whimsy, yet the planting manages to counterbalance any such tendencies with it's imaginative array of Med-friendly plants which form a kind of hermetic vocabulary enunciating the ideas the garden presents.

The design of the garden by Arnaud Mauriéres and Eric Ossart, the French/Moroccan duo responsible for creating a hybrid design style fusing the Modernism of Luis Barragan with traditional aspects of Islamic paradise gardens, is certainly not typical of their work but rather reflects a more arts based approach to gardens which nods to their involvement in the early years of the International Festival of Gardens at Chaumont-sur-Loire.

The garden is entered though an Eleagnus maze formed from the Hebrew word 'Bereshift', the first word in the Torah, meaning appropriately enough 'in the beginning'. This leads through a wooded area of cypress, oak and pine into an ethnobotanic garden which explores the historic uses of local herbs and plants in medicine and magic, with an emphasis placed upon the relationships between place, belief and tradition. The planting palette incorporates such usual suspects as sage, lavender, nettle and St John's Wort, alongside walnut, olive, almond and apple trees, as well as roses.

The formal aspects of the layout of this part of the garden bear certain recognisable Mauriéres and Ossart trademarks such as the use of square geometry, with four large and eight small beds, and a central linear rill. This neatly breaks up the space into distinct areas whilst a bi-secting arbour covered with twenty-two types of vine, provides an effective visual screen and a practical place for repose and reflection.

From this area the visitor progresses through what are described as the three Works - the Black, the White and the Red, symbolising periods of personal development, and distinctly differentiated from each other through the use of colour, light and enclosure.

The Work in Black represents the individuals birth and physical growth and utilises a reduced palette of black and green elements. Slate pathways lead between tall beech hedges creating a series of alleyways, the first empty, the second and third containing eleven pots. The Aeonium arboreum in the third passage providing striking sculptural counterpoints to the rhythmic motion through the space.

The dense, dark and slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of these spaces is dramatically contrasted with the Work in White, an enclosure filled with Miscanthus sinesis 'Variegatus' and Rosa 'Iceberg' and 'Snow Fairy', representing intellectual and emotional development.

A circular portal in the hedging projects the visitor in to the Work in Red, the garden of the soul and spiritual enlightenment planted with red roses. A circle of pomegranate trees frame a pond in the form of a six pointed star with a singular central fountain, representing the philosopher's stone, and the culmination of the journey from darkness to light, from the base to the precious.

Given that the garden is defined by the ideas it attempts to articulate, it undoubtedly requires a certain leap of faith to appreciate it's intent. Whilst certain areas provide habitable spaces, it is definitely less a place to linger than a performance in which each visitor is the central actor. However the deft design work of Mauriéres and Ossart manages to balance the conceptual with the corporeal, and succeeds in producing an individual and quirky work of artifice.

Mediterranean Modern Pt.2

Whilst not as prevalent in garden or landscape design as it was in architecture, Modernism nonetheless gained significant ground through the work of a range of international designers in the early and mid parts of last century. Christopher Tunnard, Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church, Pietro Porcinai, Luis Barragan and Roberto Burle Marx, all embodied Modernism's bold social vision and gave it expression through their designs in a variety of unique ways.

But an iconic work by a lesser heralded figure is the garden at Villa Noailles in Hyères, situated just 65 km east of Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. The house designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens for avant garde art patron Charles de Noailles, occupies an enviable position above the town with sweeping vistas of the Mediterranean's azure waters, which in it's heyday were enjoyed by the likes of Picasso, Man Ray, Dali and Bunuel. The garden, constructed in 1928, was designed by the landscape designer and architect Gabriel Gueverkian who had worked for Le Corbusier in Paris in the early 1920's.

Much in the spirit of the period it was created in, the garden's design is based upon geometrical abstraction, reducing the landscape to a series of coloured modules, mostly tiled with occasional outbursts of planting adding textural contrast. The design of the triangular site creates a flattened perspective, effectively reducing the 3D space to a 2D picture plane intended to be viewed from above, through especially framed viewing windows on the lawn terrace. The employment of such painterly strategies of line and plane removes any reference to the organic forms of nature, strongly stamping it with the mark of cultural artifice (perhaps somewhat ironically given that Charles de Noailles later became president of the French Horticultural Society and wrote the book 'Mediterranean Plants and Gardens' with Roy Lancaster).

The fact that it exists almost as an isolated promontory to the side of the property, with little to encourage entry or occupation, questions it's role in terms of conventional garden activities, reinforcing it's aesthetic role as a visual work. Such a rejection of function, shifts the form of the garden into the realm of decoration, or even ornament (a fundamental crime in the rulebook of Modernism!). The use of pattern and perspective shedding utilitarian concerns in favour of the visual, challenges traditional horticulturally defined notions of what a garden is supposed to be.

As such it fits nicely into Modernism's quest for novelty and to overturn the old order, but it also embodies the more playful aspects of Radical Post-Modernism which highlight surface, trompe l'oeil and the power of the image. This playful tension exposes the fact that the dividing line between the two movements is far from clear, suggesting that the underlying impetus of each is a questioning of orthodoxy, albeit expressed in different vernaculars. As French philosopher Jean-Francios Lyotard suggested in his seminal text on the subject 'The Postmodern Condition', "A work can only become modern if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at it's end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant".

Villa Noailles provides just such a sense of constancy, an enduring sense of continuity between two centuries, linking the radical tendencies of Modernism with the contemporary critical agenda of Post-Modernism, by creating a creative tension between the visual and the functional features of gardens and encouraging a new plurality of design languages.

Mediterranean Modern Pt.1

By the end of the 20th century the high flying ideals of Modernism which had launched with dreams of a brave new world one hundred years earlier, had become rather grounded in the fin de siécle age of Post-Modern pluralism. To a large extent Modernism's progressive tendencies in architecture and art throughout the century, with their enlightenment drive to improve social organisation through creativity, ran aground in a socially fragmented era of global communication age, disenchanted with grand narratives.

Perhaps the most widely acknowledged failure of Modernism was in architecture's attempt to redefine living by using design as the blueprint for social organisation. The movement's high priest, Le Corbusier, laid out a series of manifestos in his books from the 1920's, 'Towards a new architecture' and 'The City of Tomorrow and it's Planning', employing an industrial vocabulary to suggest that homes would become 'machines for living' in a future golden age.

These ideas found idealistic purchase in the post-war years with enthusiastic public authority responses to designing the urban realm. Yet over the following few decades the combination of low quality materials and changes in the social fabric turned dream homes into nightmares, as concrete jungles of tower blocks and streets in the sky became poverty traps, creating geographic and political divides, as neatly expressed in J.G. Ballard's classic novel 'High Rise'.

Although the causes of such failures were actually manifold, it was often the architects who took the brunt of criticism. Indeed Le Corbusier's most notable social housing project Unité d'Habitation (also known as Citié Radieuse) in Marseille has suffered the vicissitudes of adoration and attack ever since it's construction. Built in 1947-53, the original intention of the block was to be a vertical garden city for industrial society, in which high density would allow liberation of the soil for nature. Obviously such urban aspirations were admirable in the era of post-war settlement when European reconstruction was funded by the Marshall Plan, but subsequent decades took their toll in terms of neglect. Today the block has a certain fashionable BoBo chic and an air of being a heritage treasure, with renovation being accorded due care.

Design-wise the modular bottle rack structural concept of the plan was conceived in terms of harmonious proportion, with all elements associated with the building, from exterior spaces to door handles, designed in relation to human scale, based upon the golden section and Fibonacci series.

Le Corbusier's idea was to create an overall system based upon natural laws governed by mathematics. Although given the severe geometry of the building the references to the structures underlying nature seem to be somewhat stretched, with the possible exception of the roof terrace.

Perhaps intended as a witty diversion from such rigid formality, a series of amorphous planters contrast strikingly with with the straight lines of the surrounding seating and pool, providing a little incongruous light relief. Almost a visual echo of the hills 5 miles in the distance surrounding the city, the planters suggest another vision of the future to that of Modernism's ambitious intentions, with their organic forms suggesting a dystopian world in which nature has reclaimed the constructed urban realm.

Although a sense of balance of the organic and synthetic is present, given that the material the planters are constructed from is beton brut (bare concrete), and also the fact that currently they are barren of any flora. Whether any appropriate planting could ever survived the sun baked site for any duration would indeed be a matter of speculation.

Or perhaps the planters reflect the subliminal aspects of Radical Post-Modernism lying in a pre-nascent state in the belly of the Modernist beast. They can be read as hints at a contextual counterpoint which plays off the wider landscape as an essential element of cultural habitats, mutely undermining the grandiose anthropocentric impositions that ultimately undermined the Modernist project.

The Long View

The work of Richard Long provides a healthy antidote to the beloved and much overused mantra of garden designers 'the spirit of the place' which invokes an essentialist approach to creating place. As a pioneer in the fields of Conceptual and Land Art, Long has focused on the transitory and subjective elements of time and space which define the landscape, as encountered in his chosen form of practice - walking. Long has traversed the length and breadth of the UK and latterly many other parts of the globe in his process of exploration and documentation.

His meticulously crafted minimalist stone sculptures created in-situ in the landscape as well as inside galleries, create dialogues with their surrounding environments, whilst their respective forms of representation investigate the temporal notions of Here, Now and Then, within each context. But at the heart of Long's work is the solitary nature of experience and the means by which we communicate this with each other. The most obvious form of recourse is through language, a tool Long employs with a haiku-like economy and dictionary style succinctness, with his accounts of the walks he has undertaken. Descriptions of trajectories, weather conditions, objects encountered, geographical landmarks and the physical acts of the excursions themselves, create narratives of journeys and scenarios of place. Imbued with an ephemeral and solipsistic sense of proprietary, they question the materiality of site and give lie to fixed identities of location.

The journeys travelled join place to place, striking an accord with a contemporary sense of global connectedness. Yet far from the glamour of the digital age, the act of walking suggests a much more base enterprise, indeed a very fundamental means of transport and communication, and an embedded sense of rapport with the world. Through walking, Long decodes space, time, materials and movement to reveal both the similarities and the differences between landscapes.

His exhibition 'Human Nature' at Haunch of Venison roams as far afield as Spain, Switzerland, China and South Africa, as well as in his West Country 'home' environs of Dartmoor. Gathering together the various mediums he employs, presenting texts, sculpture, mud wall paintings, photographs, as well as stone sculptures. The show ably articulates his investigations into the temporal and spatial aspects of experiences which shape notions of place and our relationships with it.

The work of fellow traveller Hamish Fulton has traversed similar terrain over the years, charting in a similar manner to Long the process of walking across the landscape. '31 walks from Water to Water 1971-2010' at the Folkestone Triennial, catalogues a series of such walks with an aquatic theme, undertaken over his 40 year career, on an impressive large scale 5 x 4.6m metal sign.

Whilst A2 sized posters on various walls located around the town, linguistically map out walks of a more local nature, all having been completed in Fulton's native Kent county, in which Folkestone is located. Fittingly the street locations weave Fulton's walks into those of passing pedestrians creating their own urban trails, and their own personal narratives of place.