Monthly Archives: September 2008

London with a green roof

London as it should be - greened

Thank you to Allen & Overy for opening their offices under the Open House scheme – and congratulations to them for having an office with genuinely green credentials. Roof space is used for solar panels, roof gardens or wildlife habitats (brown roofs). As the office brochure remarks ‘One of the best features of Bishops Square is the ability to hold barbecues in the summer or evening drinks on the terrace’. For me, it was a pleasure to see the City taking a small step towards the London equivalent of New York As it Should Be.

The City should designate its Square Mile as a Green Roof Zone.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Garden

The Durbar Court should become the Durbar Garden Court.

The HQ of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is open this weekend as part of London’s Open House scheme. I came away with two ideas. First, they should treat the Durbar Court as an indoor garden for senior civil servants to tend. It would give them useful experience of the cultural differences between the UK and other countries. Second, they should commission a new building, with gardens inside, outside and on top. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s design, completed shortly after the ‘Indian Mutiny (aka India’s First War of Independence) could then become a Museum of Empire, dedicated to involving visitors in a discussion of the pros and cons of imperialism and globalization. Douglas Hurd, when he was Mrs Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary, used to say that Britain was a country which could ‘punch above its weight’. I wish we could either stop punching or learn to punch well below our weight. This would be a genuinely ethical foreign policy – and a lush display of semi-tropical plants in the Durbar Court would be a step in the right direction. The original design, by Digby Wyatt, had the Court open to the skies, which must have been cold. It is believed that it was glazed over to receive the Sultan of Turkey in 1867. The Durbar Court is now used for receptions and would be a softer and less imperious place if well planted.

Or should it remain unplanted in the interests of historical accuracy?

Roberto Burle Marx as a context-sensitive designer

Paving at Copacabana Beach, design by Burle Marx, photo by Christina

As a painter, Roberto Burle Marx was an international abstract expressionist. But as a garden designer and landscape architect he showed a high degree of sensitivity to context – I say ‘surprising’ only because I was so slow to appreciate the complexity of this point. His planting was voluptuously Brazilian, like his mother, and Marx could see no reason for using European plants. Nor did he see any reason for the hard detailing to draw inspiration from the land of his father: Germany. Instead, he drew upon the country whose language is spoken in Brazil. The accompanying photograph is of Copacabana Beach – but could just as well have been taken in Portugal. Until I went to Portugal, I thought this amazing design was an example of Burle Marx inventiveness as an abstract painter. I was very wrong.

Ted Fawcett on Gardens in English and Chinese Poetry

Red, white and pink flowers in a Yangzhou gardenIt is a pleasure to discover Ted Fawcett’s love of gardens is undimmed. Writing in the Historic Gardens Review (August 2008 Issue, p.12), he observes that ‘Gardens are the poetry of landscape. They contain, in concentrated form, views, water, trees and flowers and so, like poetry, purvey an essence’. The implication is that landscapes are prose and gardens are poetry. He quotes a beautiful verse from Po Chu-i (AD 772-846) ‘at that time the best-known poet in the world’:

The red flowers hang like a heavy mist;

The white flowers gleam like a fall of snow.

The wandering bees cannot bear to leave them;

The sweet birds come there to roost.

Did Morel, Meason or Olmsted invent the term 'landscape architecture'?

Gilbert Laing Meason's Landscape architecture of the Great Paintings of ItalyA reader makes the following point: ‘On your site you stated that: “The name “landscape architecture” was invented by a Scotsman in 1828’ but, landscape architecture actually originated in France. There, in the year 1804 Jean-Marie Morel introduced; ‘architecte-paysagiste’ in order to distinguish (his profession) garden architecture from landscape architecture.’ There are in fact 3 candidates for the questionable credit of having invented the term landscape architecture: Morel, Meason and Olmsted.

Jean-Marie Morel (1728 — 1810) published a book on the Théorie des Jardins (Paris 1776). He had trained as an architect and became an advocate of the ‘natural style of landscape gardening’. He worked for Girardin at Ermenonville and, in 1804, coined the term architecte-paysagiste, for which ‘landscape architect’ is a fair translation.

Gilbert Laing Meason, a Scotsman, wrote the world’s first book using the English term ‘landscape architecture’. It was published in 1828 and Meason had little interest in gardens. His inspiration came from the great landscape paintings of Italy and the writings of Vitruvius. In combining the nouns landscape and architecture, his concern was for what architects could learn from landscape paintings. The difference between Meason’s and Morel’s terms equates to that between a fish box and a box of fish. Buildings contribute to containing space; landscapes are the spaces contained by buildings, landform and vegetation. It is a fundamental distinction.

Frederick Law Olmsted was the first man to use ‘landscape architect’ as a professional title and one cannot doubt that he learned of the term from his partner, Calvert Vaux, who learned of it from Andrew Jackson Downing, who learned of it from Loudon who learned of it from Meason. I therefore regard Meason as the man who invented the term ‘landscape architecture’ and, despite other respectable claims, Alexander Graham Bell as the man who intented the telephone.

It is regrettable that Olmsted did not, so far as I know, read either Meason or Vitruvius. They could have provided a firmer theoretical base for the new profession than Downing or Vaux. John Dixon Hunt comments that ‘there was never a body of specialists to compose treatises specifically for what we have come to call landscape architecture, as Vitruvius did for architecture’. But if, like me, you take Meason as the inventor of landscape architecture then the necessary base can be uncovered by pushing aside a few leaves. To help with this task, we have published the most relevant chapter from Meason as  an eBook. Please see:  http://www.gardenvisit.com/ebooks

Contextual design and sculpture in Castleford

Our guest contributor, Christine Storry writes that ‘Intuitively, I think the place to start thinking about the issues of identity for the area is with arguably Castleford’s most famous son, sculptor Henry Moore.’

Moore had a deep interest in the siting of his work and often makes me feel a little guilty about reading on trains: he said it was a waste of a wonderful opportunity to observe the landscape. The photograph is of Moore’s bronze “Die Liegende”  in Stuttgart (image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore).

If my memory serves me correctly, I think I heard the architect of a dull paving design for Castleford Town Center say that there were patches of black paving to reflect the underlying coal seam. This would count as a response to context but I doubt if it would command as much support as giving Moore an honoured place in Castleford’s urban landscape.