An Object/Machine in the Menil Garden
ARCH 2O5 Autumn 2019
Instructors:
Gabriel Esquivel
Nancy Al-Assaf
In 2009, David Chipperfield Architects was engaged to create
a new master plan for the Menil campus. The plan recognizes as fundamental
principles the meandering green spaces and dialogue between arts pavilions and
residences and calls for more. As a challenge to the Chipperfield plan our studio
decided to look at the Campus not only about creating an urban edge along Richmond St. The studio focus on the idea as
the Menil Campus being a garden condition with a series of objects building and
pavilions scattered along its landscape, in other words we decided to view the
project from the inside.
All of the Menil
campus buildings are entered at ground level, creating a dominant notion of
what ground is. Our projects began to challenge the relationship of ground and
object producing a variety of conditions.
Urban Condition, Image Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America are some of the concepts the studio attempts to illustrate; the
dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and
sweeping transformations brought by our culture of technology, beyond Marx’s
argument in “The Machine in the garden” expressed in literature by the
recurring image of the machine in the garden—that is, the sudden and shocking
intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene. We have a new culture of
technology and image, these objects in the landscape should reflect different
realities, visions and images of landscape, taking a look at the contradictions
in American culture—and particularly the conflict between the old bucolic image
of landscape its new image as a product beyond the first idea of technology and
the machine.
