Space is a matter of time
The Enclosed Garden exercise has been a field of research and experimentations around the question of time and its integration in architectural language.
We found that in general, the role of the architect ends once the project has been judged, completed and built. But the building exists, lives. The architectural body is in constant evolution. Fatally, the constructed building is subjected to external destructive agents, to entropy: the structure becomes fragile, the materials are altered, the building dies.
What would become architecture or the act of planning if the genesis of the project were intimately linked to the notion of time ?
The notion of time, absent of actual architectural language, would take material form in a resilient architectural body.
First of all, it is a question of being deeply rooted in the roots of the Bassenges’ Farm site and of planning for the long term. At the very heart of the plot, there is a break in the slope, witnessing the hard work of the land in the past. This “gap” highlights the friable, volatile properties of the parcel, as it is none other than a moraine, in perpetual erosion.
To project in the long term is to read the material stratigraphy of time, the territorial palimpsest.
The goal was to develop an eroding machine.
We worked with materials that were distinct in their physical properties in the face of time, their permeability. Jaumont limestone for the exterior wall and the erosion machine, and earth from the excavation of the site's foundations for the interior circle made of rammed earth.
This machine to erode deeply inspired by the geological structure of the Pyramids of Euseigne (VS), work on the transfer of the masses. This critical mass is projected in a punctual way on the rammed earth wall thanks to a system of gothic buttress. By the mass, the rammed earth will compress punctually. This will have the effect of reducing the speed and intensity of erosion under the weight of the arches.
By this gradient of forces, columns of unaltered, compressed rammed earth will take shape thanks to this erosion machine.
The spatio-temporal passage between the inner and outer circle, will let appear in the course of time a Hortus Conclusus, inner garden, timeless.