Landscape Visions

A + K A - ivy growth  K - Wild Garlic Flower

  Jacques Wirtz focuses on structure within the landscape and uses this to collect and guide the observer. His style is sculptured and sweeping, using clipped evergreens to dramatize his vision across large expanse if need be, such as in Les Jardins du Carrousel 2004, Paris created by Wirtz International Landscape Architects which Jacques founded in 1950, which his sons continued. The cloud-clipped hedge was typical of Wirtz, an organic formal linear element which bounded the garden space, which worked then to either contrast with the vertical geometric city form, or blend into the informal vertical tree or woodland backdrops of stately gardens. These feminine lines were important to Wirtz. During his time, he contested with the over-planted vibrant flower beds punched with colour.    Alnwick Castle, England, demonstrates the Wirtz family’s meticulous precision in setting out the garden structure, with expert alignment of manicured hedge and lawn, almost to the Japanese s...

Quick sketches and a busy desk, trying to organise the section work and annotation 

Only very quick sketches this week, one being learning how to draw horses quickly as there will be many to place in the environment. I decided to base these on Charlie Mackesy's style as he captures the shape of the horse beautifully and the sort of softness and linework of the horse seems to suit being around drawn amongst people https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-64081878.amp

  Piet Oudolf is the ‘King of Perennials’ enjoying their structure and their nature of returning, growing, and spreading year on year, in much the same way as Gertrude Jekyll admired them. His modern take is their arrangements as screaming blankets of perennials, the colours of which become silent structure in the winter months as the garden pales and silvers. This planting style is very evident at the Hauser and Wirth Garden, Somerset.   Oudolf’s touch is usually demonstrated by seas of swath planting, such as along the High Line in New York or Lurie Garden in Chicago. This swath planting seems to punctuate itself perfectly into the city. Personally, I’ve always found my experience at the Hauser and Wirth Garden tame, usually a dull saunter around a blobby countryside garden (sorry Oudolf). In Lurie however, the structure of the plants contends with the geometric skyscraper back drop. This image of Lurie demonstrates the effectiveness, glistening gold and silvers of low winte...

X + Q X - ivy on beech, found on a local walk Q - debri from snowmelt in a river found in Garmisch, Germany. 

The metaphor for the site described simply is 'hills of an estuary', the 'bodies of ancient horse gods' forming the valley through which the estuary twines. This is reminiscent of both the romantic vision of wild horses running through estuarine sands, and the nearby Bristol channel itself.  The route through the site required anchoring with a main vein through the site, for use of larger groups and pop up space. This manoveours though smaller islands of water, tree shade and fine lawn hillocks, with tertiary pathways through these spaces.  Visiting Thomas Heatherwick's botanic glass houses at Bombay Sapphire inspired this movement of landscape space, as the structure is designed to reflect flow. In his case, the flow of gin out from the factory into the chalk aquaifer-fed stream which runs 'as clear as gin'. 

  Yves Brunier   Yves Brunier died young at 28 years old, but was revered by his peers, and had the passionate mentor, Rem Koolhaas, who persuaded him towards landscape architecture 4 years before his death in 1991. His condition of AIDS led Koolhaas to believe his exploitation of clashes between culture and nature through collage were an aggressive outlet of this struggle with the disease. Yves understood a tensions between city and country, and would impatiently produce collage and drawings to contented with, I perhaps imagine, a highly intelligent struggle in his mind and need to physicalise the pieces.   Shown here is Brunier’s Model for the Garden Rooms of Museum Park, Rotterdam. Collage conveys mood, here Brunier demonstrates the different feels of the rooms within the garden. The magic is that you don’t really need to know what is there completely. The collage conveys enough about scale, sense of place, entrances, routes, colours and tone, the figure in the foregro...

I joined a paint-along session run by artist Tori Ratcliffe to try and improve my watercoluring. I learnt about working up from pales layers to pure hues, then adding darker patches using salt, keep certain areas wetter for blending effects. I found relaxing about the process and enjoying imperfection was key, with loose penwork at the end to bring elements back together.  I prefer this to pencil and Photoshop rendering, but I'm not sure I have the time or confidence to apply this to the North Place sequential sketches project as yet