Captured Landscape

Architecture and the Enclosed Garden

Kate Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317194521
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus, is a place where architecture and landscape come together. It has a long and varied history, ranging from the early paradise garden and cloister, the botanic garden and giardini segreto, the kitchen garden and as a stage for social display. The enclosed garden has continued to develop into its many modern forms: the city retreat, the redemptive garden, the deconstructed building. As awareness of climate change becomes increasingly important, the enclosed garden, which can mediate so effectively between interior and exterior, provides opportunities for sustainable design and closer contact with the natural landscape. By its nature it is ambiguous. Is it an outdoor room, or captured landscape; is it architecture or garden?

Kate Baker discusses the continuing relevance of the typology of the enclosed garden to contemporary architects by exploring influential historical examples and the concepts they generate, alongside some of the best of contemporary designs – brought to life with vivid photography and detailed drawings – taken primarily from Britain, the Mediterranean, Japan and North and South America. She argues that understanding the potential of the enclosed garden requires us to think of it as both a design and an experience.

Captured Landscape provides a broad range of information and design possibilities for students of architectural and landscape design, practising architects, landscape designers and horticulturalists and will also appeal to a wider audience of all those who are interested in garden design.

This second edition of Captured Landscape is enriched with new case studies throughout the book. The scope has now been broadened to include an entirely new chapter concerning the urban condition, with detailed discussions on issues of ecology, sustainability, economy of means, well-being and the social pressures of contemporary city life.

1 Defining the territory

The ambiguous nature of an enclosed garden

Discovery

It’s the beginning of June. My friend and I have come, by recommendation, to visit the gardens of the Mottisfont Abbey¹ in Hampshire, UK. After looking around the building we walk away, past the old stable block, into the grounds. So far, nothing appears striking enough to justify the garden’s reputation.

We arrive at a closed-off section of the garden. There is a gravel path to the right that we take and it leads us to a small neatly shaped opening. It gives no clue as to what might be in store, apart from a faint waft of scent in the air caught in a coolish breeze. We walk on through a confined space lined with hedges and a wall high enough to cut off any direct view. There is no apparent exit. As we continue we see a pool of light on the ground, and another opening appears to the left. We walk through it into a large courtyard containing several sheds, full of people milling about; queuing for ice creams, choosing plants to buy, looking at a small exhibition, sitting down with cups of tea around a group of outdoor tables. Conversation fills the air. This is a courtyard large enough to support a series of activities – the visiting members of the public as well as the gardeners who tend the grounds – yet small enough for us to feel the sense of containment that the walls provide. Beyond the crowds we see another small opening in the far wall with light streaming through, which catches our eyes and we are drawn towards it. The journey continues and we pass through the wall, into paradise.

Pinks, irises, lilies, foxgloves, peonies, lilies, salvia, geraniums and many other plants surround us, all in full bloom, dispersed among one of Britain’s national collections of old roses. A cloud of scents envelopes us as we walk in. The intensity is overwhelming. Our senses are seduced and we are immersed in the experience of the enclosed garden.

The garden invites us to walk along a straight path toward the centre, toward the sound and movement of a constant trickle of water from a pool. A never-ending variety of colour combinations, texture, scent and shape encourage us to explore. We can disperse and be lost in among the drifts of herbaceous plants, sit on a bench in a shady corner, or find a patch of lawn to sit on.

We start to be aware of what is creating this experience, a dialogue between the architectural and garden components. The garden is divided into two interconnecting areas by high brick walls on all sides. Each has a central focal point that helps us negotiate our way around. Paths are placed strategically and the sparse openings in the walls provide ‘windows’ that provide us with distinct framed views.

An experience like this is a reminder that to understand such gardens, it would not be enough to think of them by looking at pictures or exploring diagrams, by reading the ‘plan’, or even as visual phenomena to be observed only. They demand an active involvement by the participant. What they are is an immersive experience, just as a play or concert is the performance, and not the written script or score.

Exploring the idea

Captured landscape is as much an idea as a reality. By internalising landscape within boundary walls, we transform it, and thereby demonstrate our beliefs and attitudes towards nature.² Creating a boundary wall around a piece of land enables us to comprehend it as a defined and owned space. The construction of an enclosing wall also has material consequences, making it possible to control or alter many features of the interior, including the climate. In Figures 1.1 and 1.2 the act of making a boundary around a plot of land in very different locations gives each space a distinct definition. Figure 1.1 is in the Netherlands, where the owner has staked out a sheltered place in the dunes; Figure 1.2 is in the South of France, where a church has claimed space around it in an undefined landscape. In each, the interior space, an enclosed garden, is as essential to the character of the dwelling place as its internal architecture and its outward façades. By manipulating the enclosed landscape, keeping untamed nature at bay, we intensify our relationship with nature, whether our purpose is for cultivation or enjoyment, for our bodies or our souls. In many cases this can be described as a poetic act. Some of the most memorable places around the globe are those where architecture, architectural components and landscape collude and affect our sensibilities.

Figure 1.1
Fisherman’s allotment in the Dunes with vegetable plots, with boundary clearly marked out. Wimmenummer Duinen Egmond aan Zee, North Holland.

Figure 1.2
Church and graveyard protected by wall in open countryside in Les Alpilles, France.

Figure 1.3
Limits to limited space.

Figure 1.4
Restricted views.

Figure 1.5
Room in a building.

Is it an interior space with no ceiling or is it a garden that has the properties of an indoor room? An enclosed garden is neither and both, an ambiguous space by its very nature. Because our eyes are not free to travel to the horizon when we are within them, unlike other garden spaces, its scale can have the familiarity and even the security of a room, particularly within an architectural context. The view is interrupted by a horizontal plane that continually brings our focus back into the space, visually separating us from what lies beyond it. The enclosed garden gives limits to limitless space.

The term outdoor room is well known in the realm of landscape and garden design, whereas in architectural design the relationship between interior and exterior space since the early twentieth century, particularly in the West, has tended to have more emphasis on a visual connection between the two. However, there is a lineage of enclosed gardens described as outdoor rooms that can be traced back throughout the history of garden design, and has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hidcote Manor,³ for example, is not so much a garden as a series of outdoor rooms, devised to protect tender plants on an exposed site. It became one of the most influential gardens of its time. Hedges maintained with architectural precision enclose the Red Borders garden. They give it shape in winter months, and provide a backing in summer for the rich, vibrant crimsons and oranges of its herbaceous plants (see Figure 1.6). Wherever the location, outdoor rooms create spaces distinct from their surroundings, whether they are adjacent to buildings, within the cityscape or the open countryside. They can make a contribution to our daily lives, such as providing extensions to living areas and increasing the usable space of a dwelling. The patio garden in southern Spain, where the climate invites outdoor living, exemplifies how such spaces can be integral to the functioning of the building (see Figure 1.7).

Figure 1.6
Hidcote Manor, UK hedges act as walls to the Red Borders garden, and a retaining wall finishes off one of the sides, together with an architectural statement of two symmetrically placed pavilions. The orderly rows of severely-cut, pleached hornbeams complete the enclosure at a higher level, and provide us with a visual connection to the next ‘room’, and a restricted view of the land beyond it.

Figure 1.7
An enclosed garden in Cordoba is used for a business meeting when it is still shaded and pleasantly cool.

Characteristics and component parts

The whole question of the rela...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Defining the territory: the ambiguous nature of an enclosed garden
• 2 From patio to park: the enclosed garden as a generator of architectural and landscape design
• 3 Taming nature – and the way to Paradise
• 4 Ritual and emptiness – and the rigour of developing an idea
• 5 Sensory seclusion: the affective garden as a scene for living
• 6 Detachment: the separation of the garden from the building
• 7 Green city: the persistence of urban gardens
• Selected bibliography
• Illustration credits
• Index