Comments on: Romantic new cafe garden and elegant architecture in London’s Chiswick Park?

By: melanie nelson

melanie nelson — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:06:51 +0000

I visited the revamped park and gardens last weekend and as a dog owner having visited many of west londons parks and walks I think its fabulous with the wild bits which the dog loves but particularly the cafe which is understated good well detailed architecture which sits well with the original house. I believe there are some issues with the lack of air conditioning but it is well planned with plenty space for visitors and what public architecture should look like.

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:47:39 +0000

Dairmuid Gavin would not be my first choice of garden designer for Chiswick! He has an industrial design approach to gardens, forgetting that gardens, like women, have souls. But whimsy would be an appropriate quality and one can think of William Kent having a, very English, whimsical approach to matters of the spirit. Rousham is Kent's best surviving project and since it is difficult to know whether he was laughing or serious when doing the design one can conclude the answer was 'both'.

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:24:03 +0000

In 2008 the Chelsea Flower Show featured a whimsical ‘Cafe Garden’.
[ http://www.shootgardening.co.uk/article/the-caf-garden-by-dairmuid-gavin ]

Perhaps a little entrepreneurial mixing of gardening and food at Chelsea might lend the sort of inspiration and innovation to the making of cafe gardens that could have positive benefits for Chiswick?

By: Vicki

Vicki — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:33:40 +0000

This is such a shame. I used to live near Chiswick park and it used to be a beautiful place to go with the family.

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:36:44 +0000

In one sense, it is absolutely correct that the ‘English’ landscape tradition has very ancient roots. They reach back to Italy, to Ancient Greece and to the roots of Indo-European culture. But in another sense, Chiswick does represent a very important departure. It is a stage in the break-up of the Baroque Age, philosophically, artistically, politically and in other ways. An interesting aspect of the new cafe, by Caruso St John, is that it can be seen as a stylised Grecian temple. But temples were homes for gods believed to live in sacred landscapes – not in carpark type spaces. Their context was of the greatest importance, as it was for Chiswick House in Chiswick Park. There is a great need for modern buildings to have good relations with their contexts and Chiswick would be a great place to develop the relationship.
[Re the siting of Greek temples, Malpas writes: ‘The Greek temple, as Scully presents it, is not merely a building constructed for the practical purpose of providing a site for certain religious activities. Instead, the temple brings the gods into their proper place, in a way that locates them as separate from human beings, and yet also in the vicinity of human beings, and at the same time, brings thet landscape – earth, sea, and sky – into view in relation to the god, and so also in relation to human beings themselves. The temple brings into view a ‘sacred’ landscape, which is also a meaningful landscape, and it does so through the way in which it works in relation to the landscape in which it is situated – through the way it works to ‘enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict’ that landscape’. (J. E. Malpas Heidegger’s topology: being, place, world 2006 p.198)]

By: Thomas Mickey

Thomas Mickey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:37:55 +0000

Is it true that Chiswick is the earliest example of English landscape tradition? at least that is what I have read. To say that English landscape began in the 18th century seems too simple, too narrow, and does not speak to the centuries before. Maybe the term ‘modern’ needs to be added. So Kent at Chiswick initiates modern English landscape.