An infinite mobile garden. Sound impossible? That's what Mitnick Roddier Hicks managed to design for the 2007 International Garden Festival in Chaumont, France. The design, titled Etant Donne, is comprised of mirrors and openings that give views into a seemingly endless gardenscape.
Etant Donne is actually mobile, too, able to be moved and set up easily on any reasonably flat land.
MRH on their work: A garden to go! That is, two historical conceptions landscape- packaged, unfurled, and made mobile. A transportable horizon produced by two opposing mirrors to form an endless allée of trees, a mise-en-abîme, sitting along a narrow and dense strip of greenery arranged to produce a new landscape among a purposely bare, placeless and indeterminate terrain, the sort to which we are becoming ever-more accustomed.
Roll it out upon a parking lot, a rooftop, or any available piece of space. It is homeless, yet playful, and takes pleasure in the joining together of disparate elements and conflicting sensibilities. The project embodies two opposing attitudes towards the arrangement of garden space: the formal geometry of the infinite allée and the loosely arranged, and very tactile, plantings of the stroll garden through which one passes before viewing the immaterial and limitless garden that exists between the reflective walls.
Nature is constructed though multiple frames, images and reflections collaged together to produce a new form of contemplative garden experience. It is both abstract and sensuous, and questions the status of landscape and embodied experience relative to the changing nature of the world. It is neither geometric, picturesque, mannered nor wild yet alludes to each of these long-standing sensibilities by running them into and across one another to produce a perceptually dynamic and conceptually complex experience.
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
Interesting post. I wish NYC had an international garden festival!
view bryan.nyc's profile
I like the idea of using mirrors in the garden to increase the feeling of space but I worry about birds running into them and killing themselves.
view Michael W.'s profile
Michael W. that's exactly what I thought!
view mollybb's profile
Also, what about places with extreme heat and sun - here in Denver the temp in the sun can be 20 degrees higher than the shade, I'm thinking all this reflected light would create a solar cooker and instead of trees you'd have tinder.
view Blue_roses's profile
neat idea. but the practical part of me questions whether water-spotting would be a problem on these mirrors. seems like a rainstorm could ruin the effect unless you bust out the windex afterwards...
view JDog's profile
This is the sort of discovery that can make you crazy if you already thought of it and did nothing! I have mounted big pieces of broken mirrow against a wall where a beautiful variated vine with berrys that change with season from green to fuscia to deep blue (name unknown!), and it made the wall disappear and the vine look much deeper. Also, I think, gives more light and thus vigor to the vines.
view Aulaire's profile