Allegorical Garden - Site, Initial Thoughts and the Art of War.

One of my projects this semester is to design an allergorical garden for made up clients, which I have based on me and 'The Male' in our old age as a wealthy rock star and critically acclaimed paeleoanthrobiologist, guess who is which? So I had my clients and was then given a rather intesting site. 

It is a reasonably large garden site on Writtle College campus, the site is currently used for a street tree viability survey and is quite heavily wooded. It also has historical and archeological significance as it is the site of King John's Hunting Lodge (both of which tie in nicely with my client rather lengthy and elaborate back stories). It is bounded on three sides by an approximatly 2.5 meter deep moat, which contains a small amount of water.

  Photo taken from the North boundary facing to the South West.

Photo taken from the East boundary facing to the West.

Photo taken from the North West corner facing South.

Photo taken from the North East corner facing West.

 

A view of the moat from the Northern boundary. 

Since I was a child I've always had an affinity with woodland and water (as I lived on an estate with a half mile lake surrounded by marshy woodland), so I feel quite natural and safe working with this kind of environment. I know the trees planted  here are not native species and have not be naturalistically planted but they are of a great ecological and aesthetic value, so I wanted to try and keep as many of them as possible in my final design. Also the different densities of planting on the site have already given distinct areas of spaciality, which can give me a base to work with. 

As soon as we were on the site and were asked to think of a song, poem or story I knew exactly which book I would use. My client's elaborate backstories and the nature of the site fired me like a bolt from a crossbow to the Art of War by Sun Tzu. I had purchased this book during the summer and after reading became a permanent resident of the *ahem* bathroom cabinet. I don't think that many people have read the Art of War, certainly not in my circles of friends and associates anyway, and I got some pretty odd looks from my contemporaries as we walked around the site. 

 Now my justification for picking the Art of War is pretty simple as part of the elaborate backstories for my clients was a large portion of time spent in China, where both studied martial arts, and the anthropologist studied the history of martiality in this region of Asia, therefore definatly coming across Sun Tzu's book. The spiritual nature of the text also matches well with the personailities of both the clients. 

As the Art of War has been used as a management training tool, as well as the definitive book on war, I found it relatively easy to translate alot of passages about battle formation and scouting patterns into a cohesive guide for spatial design. Also many of the passages about the nature of the commander and the honor and obligations of each officer and warrior could inform basic rules concerning the site and its layered properties. 

Hopefully the cohesion between my client brief, site history and context and my chosen text will allow me to create a useful spatial design solution.