Dutch Baroque Gardens

3 Replies
Honselaarsdijk © British Library

Honselaarsdijk © British Library

The British Library is making some  of its most important books available online with its Turning the Pages technology. The first garden book in the series was published as Tonneel van Nederlandse Lusthooven which translates as The Theatre of Dutch Pleasure Gardens.  There are high-resolution colour imges and accompanying audio. It is a brilliant production. But the title  Dutch Baroque Gardens is questionable. France was the country which set the standard for High Baroque gardens and the examples in this book have a different character. A Dutch friend suggested the classification Dutch Classical Garden for the style of Honselaarsdijk – and I think he had a very fair point. It is unlike Versailles – and if Baroque is ‘the style of the Counter-Reformation’ then it is not very appropriate for such a Protestant country as Holland.

How green is my garage?

9 Replies

Bill Gates is famous not only for revolutionising communications but also for being the proud owner of the largest green roof garage in Seattle.

Maserati recently ran a garage design competition…and entries included not only green garages…but an insanely cool garage that is everything about setting and concept (if just a little light on resolution).

The winning entry shown on this youtube clip is car as ‘art’ and perhaps might be a useful way of thinking ‘green garage’ for Lace Hill.  

Is this the landscape of future architecture?

9 Replies

Should one call this architecture or landscape architecture or neither or both? It is a competition entry for 2010 Competition Entry for International Business Center with an Intercontinental Hotel in Yerevan. The designer explains: ‘Instead of a towering Iconic image, disconnected from historic, horizontal Yerevan, Lace Hill stitches the adjacent city and landscape together to support a holistic, ultra-green lifestyle, somewhere between rural hillside living and dense cultured urbanity’. The images are good but, if I were one of the judges, I would want to see some cross-sections and floor plans before awarding a prize.

image courtesy Forrest Fulton

Please can we have more houses with happy smiling faces

8 Replies

It could be a normal request in briefing letters to architects: ‘Please give my house a happy and beautiful face’. The house in the above photograph is not convulsed with laughter but I read the slightly raised eyebrows as a sign of good humour – and the face of the house shares a beautiful simplicity with Botticelli’s face of Venus. I would like the house to have flowing tresses of vegetation and some beautiful steps could symbolise lips. Can the faces of buildings be classified as masculine and feminine? .

Garden as setting for life's drama

6 Replies

Anna Gilman Hill’s ‘Grey Garden’ in the East Hamptons is the setting for a movie on the lives of mother and daughter Little and Big Eddie. Anna Hill has been described as “one of the world’s greatest feminine horticulturalists.”

Yet the women who acquired her garden were challenged by the legacy she left them.

The Grey Garden, and the women’s struggle to maintain a viable garden in a beachside setting, somehow parallel their lives as individuals.

http://www.whatweretheskieslike.com/2009/03/grey-gardens-from-garden-perspective.html

The future of the future?

5 Replies

When Marcel Duchamp painted ‘The Passage from Virgin to Bride’ in 1912 New York was still deeply in shock from the loss of the unsinkable Titanic earlier in the year. On April 15, 1912 headlines had read: ‘God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship.’ Yet, all it took was an iceberg in the darkness to shake man’s faith in technology. Perhaps the 6th May suffrage marches in the city similarly shook the pscyhe of the men of the city? Yet by 1917 the women of New York had the right to vote.

Sara Bard Field is said to have had conventional beginnings as a Baptist missionary wife. It is recorded that “she gradually evolved intellectually, emotionally and spiritually” finding the love of her life, working for suffrage and the right to birth control.

In 2010, once again icebergs are causing sleepness nights as temperatures heat up and polar ice caps continue to melt. This time perhaps young women are in danger of asking for ‘presidencies’ (think Sarah Palin), equal participation at the UN and who knows what else?