Public Park
Wissahickon Valley, Pennsylvania
2024
Mistakes are evident when a perfect idea meets the ground and responds to reality. “Mistake” is not necessarily a pejorative term; it is merely evidence of slippage. Perfection is boring when it is predictable. Spaces get interesting at points of irregularity.
The garden proposal begins with a field exercise intended to generate mistakes from which I could learn. For this site, I did my best to survey perfect 30’ x 30’ squares to mark out a perfect grid comprising half an acre, beginning from a conspicuous and natural starting point near the Orange Trail. The perfect vision then met the ground and encountered topography, biomaterial, and the creek, all of which disrupted the platonic grid, warped its form, and turned it into something real.
Because the perfect idea only becomes apparent when it is legible in the landscape, the proposal for this graden demarcates the intersections of the real grid. The garden deploys paths and planting to make the real grid tangible, allowing arrowwood hedges (Viburnum dentatum) and waymarkers such as river birch (Betula nigra) and Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) to conform to invisible lines. As the garden travels through time, the trunks and hedges will remain aligned while branches will grow in response to light, water, and other onsite conditions and begin to obscure the original aligned plan. The eventual erasure of the grid can show how “perfect” ideas lose their shape when encountering the natural entropy of the world.