Thank you again. Can I respond to your letter a bit in the abstract? I am truly fascinated by your very considered spatial response to the garden as intervened in by FOA. But my instinct is to let others take that discussion forward. Partly it is that the facilitor/client role I have taken seems to demand a disciplined discretion. It would be awful if anything I say now informs the imaginative response of the Competition entrants later.

Your explicit sequence: outrage - intrigue - then, engagement is just terrific.
Actually, I’d been hoping for more general outrage. Britishness, I assume. I am trying to persuade the people from Gardeners World that, for the first of their ‘thread’ of coverage (and if they do it) we should, if necessary, fabricate some articulate indignation.

At the very least the key idea is out: gardening is only ever about process, never closure (except in makeover-TV). Everybody who is interested in the Hadspen discussion now, and eventually every visitor who comes to the garden in the future, is emeshed in the designing of the space.

What flows from this is the present uneasy status of the FOA proposal within this process.
Any spatial representation - a drawing, say - needs to be treated with suspicion.
It is not that something along the lines of the current proposal won’t eventually be built. And it seems to be doing its job very well by licensing a radical imaginative response (some of it hostile) on the part of the - very broadly conceived - community of designers (i.e. anybody who is interested). It certainly had that effect for you.
The downside of this is that once any piece of paper exists an important freedom is undermined. In some sense, everybody then looks at it as though it is something already built. Professional designers generally, though not FOA I hope, are corrupt participants in this - it allows them to take control.
The test of what FOA have done is whether its ‘research’ approach allows it to adapt itself to the unfolding critique.

So I am juggling now, a bit feverishly. The proposal as it stands is … a provocation, a device, a graphic abstraction, a diagram, a mechanism, an armature, even; whatever, not, or not yet, a design. Would it interest you to have some more involvement in the assessment process as it unfolds?

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