Introduction
The paradox of the enclosed garden Enclosed gardens are perennially compelling. Since I was a student, they have captivated me with their intensity, their myriad forms of containment and the ambiguity of their presence. I have visited these captured landscapes, old and new, in different parts of the world, taught generations of students to design horticultural enclosures as part of their architectural design, studied the design history of the shaping of enclosed gardens and experimented with my own. This experience has taught me that staking out, wrapping round and capturing the landscape with a built environment, can express many different sensibilities in memorable architectural settings. These spaces appeal to all the senses. As we walk around a stone flagged cloister, for instance, the acoustic of the space makes the sound of our footsteps ring out as it bounces off the walls, and at the same time we are aware of the visual rhythm of the openings in the inner cloister wall as we pass them. We can smell the plants, feel the wind and still be sheltered from the weather, safe from the outside world. This outside space is both bound and unbound; it might be the urban environment in whose sprawl most of us live, or it might be a more open countryside whose intermittent boundaries may be trees, ridges, rivers or roads. The enclosed garden mediates between dwelling and nature, building and landscape, and this is one of the keys to the longevity of this architectural expression. The hortus
conclusus is often called an ‘outdoor room’ through its similarity and complementary properties to the internal building space we loosely call a room. Its fundamental typology provides many different possibilities for a specific response to its location.
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