Thank you for the gentle nudge…

We must apologise for our lack of response. We got tangled in our current projects and forgot to think about your proposal. Ricky’s perception is probably true. It is difficult to enter into the project because one has the feeling that we are tampering with something so delicate -and to some degree mysterious- that we are slightly afraid to commit.

The brief is also too open-ended. I have the feeling that we are not very experienced in this type of commission because it is formulated almost like an art project, where the commission is vaguely defined to give freedom to the artist. We are perhaps not used to this kind of freedom and respect. And a certain aversion to put work on projects that may not happen, which is a problem usually associated to open-endedness. (I was just reading about MVRDV’s Serpentine Pavilion cancellation, which I think is a disaster for young architects in London, due to combination of the architects’ mindless ambition and an excessively open-minded client…) We are more used to clients telling us what do they want, by when and how much do they want to spend on it. That gets us started immediately. I suspect we do not know what to do with freedom. In fact I think our real strength is to extract potentials from tight constraints.

In this case, the only discipline we have managed to identify is gardening, and we know nothing about it. So, we are stuck and we drift immediately to more pressing and certain situations. We need to overcome the cultural gap between your open-minded gentleness and our demand for discipline and determination.

To start bridging the gap I tell you a possible format for this commission:

1. You tell that you want to turn the garden into a tourist attraction, with a shop, a visitor centre, a circuit or more…

2. In order to make the project work you have estimated a turnover of X that will allow you to invest Y in this project.

3. In order for the project to be viable it can only remain closed for Z months and it has to open by a certain date which will give us a construction schedule.

4. You tell us what the different scenarios you imagine for the use of the garden, in terms of density of visitors, type of visitors, activities to take place, etc…

5. You mark in a drawing what features/cultures of the current garden need to be ideally preserved (i.e. circle of colors around the wall, particular trees that can not be moved…) I think Ricky’s suggestion is a good one. I would suggest for you to come to the office for a session of brutality, away from the garden fragrances and colors where we can talk about objectives, sketch circulation ideas, slopes, drainage, earth stabilizing systems, set up deadlines and construction budgets, under the light of bare neon tubes…
And after the neon session we can have dinner… What do you think?

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