I am amused (and more than a bit ashamed) that, with all the technical flourish of the Foreign Office Architects presentation, we didn’t offer a scale.
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Perhaps it is no wonder that half the world now responds to the cleared site by saying it’s smaller than anticipated and the other half by saying the opposite ?
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The internal area of the Walled Garden is apparently 3095 square metres, or 33,300 sq feet. I’m away at the moment; as soon as I am back we will measure the length of the straight wall and post it. People can work out a scale from this.
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On your other questions: one can certainly envisage a design approach that calls for any of the features you mention (and many others). At this stage I would be doubtful about a proposition in which the design detail, built quality, or cost, of any such features was a critical part of its presentation. That is, WHERE to put a viewing platform, or a bench, say, is the important question; my experience of building anything is that if one gets this right then all the other issues can be resolved easily, appropriately and within an overall budget.
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Two other things: we will certainly be including guidelines on budget in the competition Brief by the time we get to the detailed specification for the shortlisted competitors. These last are the ones whom we expect to pay to develop full-blown planting schemes. In this context, I would favour a ‘whole-of-life’ approach to costing that tries to combine the capital costs with longer term maintenance. (There is an exchange with Kim Wilkie on this topic in the archive material on the website).
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The other thing is that the Foreign Office scheme is of course intended to keep to a minimum what is actually built. During our discussions we made a very definite decision that their intervention would be limited to the laying out of paths and not, for instance, to rearranging the contours in any way. One could easily conceive of a gardener or designer’s approach that sets out to subvert,or oppose, Foreign Office’s research; but the intention is that it should be quite hard to ignore.
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Does this help?
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