The aimless walks in the city of Victoria during the days of our first visit took us to the large areas of gardens in the outskirts, where an organic web of beautiful pathways would eventually lead you out in the open field that surrounds the city. In our continuous discovery of ever more and more gardens, this area revealed itself to us as an active field of unpredictable potential. We were mesmerised and intrigued.
OBSERVE
The gardens amount to a 1:1 area ratio to the city and they draw an almost continuous green belt around it.
The main boulevards are dispersed into small streets which, passing through a membrane of garages, smoothly become sinuous pathways boarded by an endless variety of textures and degrees of transparency.
The experience of perpetual change in the local atmosphere while walking through the gardens is an emergent effect of the creativity manifested in cultivating one’s garden and tending to one’s daily affairs. It seems as if a very specific know-how structures the generous amount of time and diligence they grant to the gardens.
TRACING LOCAL NARRATIVES
As creativity is expressed through different skills, we wondered what these skills were and where they come from. This took us back to the founding of the city in the 1950s , when people from all over the country, but especially from the surrounding villages, came to Victoria to build a new city, a new chemical plant and to start a new life. As it is manifested in the gardens, the ancestral skills of self-providing were embedded in their daily routine, as a form of incorruptible heritage that they brought with them. This was then enhanced by a series of technical skills acquired from their new, highly technical and regulated jobs on construction sites and at the chemical plant.
The manifestation of these mixed skills can be traced in the layout of the gardens, the details of fencing, in plot arrangements on slopes or little bridges. With their incorruptible heritage and their new technical knowledge they managed to corrupt their present which was supposed to mark the birth of the “new man” and his modern lifestyle.
The web of pathways through the gardens is therefore an image of resilience and the proof that changing one’s context does not completely dismantle his traditional way of functioning. One does not become a blank reprogrammable machine on which a new lifestyle algorithm can be installed.
TAKING STOCK
This resilience can be understood following the specific use of space and the specific use of time in the gardens as opposed to the normalized use of space and time in the city.
The programmed area of the city is in its nature so artificial that populating it was only possible by imposing strict rules and limitations on space use: from traffic signs and park enclosures to the flat assignment system.
This overregulated city then fades out into the gardens that are the result of exclusively local negotiation of rules and limits, in the absence of any property titles. Any conflict here can only be solved following its own momentum without referring it to a higher hierarchical instance like a civil code or a set of building regulation. When someone’s vine doesn’t grow properly because it is shaded by a high walnut tree in a neighbours garden, the solution can only come through a bona fide quarrel.
People not only negotiate with each other on space, but they also have a special kind of time use following and negotiating with natural rhythms: night/day, summer/winter, and rain/drought. In this way of resonating with plants and fowls temporal patterns, the time spent in the gardens becomes an experiential time which is different from the artificially normalized time use particular to the city.
Nature has not only recurring time patterns but also exceptional events that the garden people are responsive to. After a summer hailstorm we met a lady that came to her garden in the middle of the day to check whether the storm had messed up the beanstalk grid, in order to rearrange it and tie the plants again.
The continuous practice of gardening and the time invested here created what we like to call a territory of “materialised spatial practice” that is somewhat uniform but alive: changing, expanding, disappearing and evolving. Sometimes you will see the same kind of wooden pole used, in a line on the limits of the garden, for building the garden fence and also, on a grid in the middle of the garden, for holding up the tomato plants. Space form and space use are equally visually present here.
PROVOKE
The quotidian life unfolds in a back and forth motion between the normalised and the experiential spheres. This motion draws a sort of expended household. Fragments of the programmed city are thus appropriated in an unusually familiar manner and connected to the gardens. We identified this overlaid yet highly present link as the constitutive structure of the present city of Victoria.
The gardens of Victoria were for us the key of understanding its past and current dynamics. Can they also be the key for its future?
We see a project for Victoria as a form of continuous research on augmenting the local narratives by designing a process of gradually engaging the community. This process should be able to eventually overwrite current policies of space use in the programmed city by expending the negotiating practices specific to the gardens. Any architectural gesture needed in pursuing this scenario would then only come as a mere media for spatial happenings.
The aimless walks in the city of Victoria during the days of our first visit took us to the large areas of gardens in the outskirts, where an organic web of beautiful pathways would eventually lead you out in the open field that surrounds the city. In our continuous discovery of ever more and more gardens, this area revealed itself to us as an active field of unpredictable potential. We were mesmerised and intrigued.
OBSERVE
The gardens amount to a 1:1 area ratio to the city and they draw an almost continuous green belt around it.
The main boulevards are dispersed into small streets which, passing through a membrane of garages, smoothly become sinuous pathways boarded by an endless variety of textures and degrees of transparency.
The experience of perpetual change in the local atmosphere while walking through the gardens is an emergent effect of the creativity manifested in cultivating one’s garden and tending to one’s daily affairs. It seems as if a very specific know-how structures the generous amount of time and diligence they grant to the gardens.
TRACING LOCAL NARRATIVES
As creativity is expressed through different skills, we wondered what these skills were and where they come from. This took us back to the founding of the city in the 1950s , when people from all over the country, but especially from the surrounding villages, came to Victoria to build a new city, a new chemical plant and to start a new life. As it is manifested in the gardens, the ancestral skills of self-providing were embedded in their daily routine, as a form of incorruptible heritage that they brought with them. This was then enhanced by a series of technical skills acquired from their new, highly technical and regulated jobs on construction sites and at the chemical plant.
The manifestation of these mixed skills can be traced in the layout of the gardens, the details of fencing, in plot arrangements on slopes or little bridges. With their incorruptible heritage and their new technical knowledge they managed to corrupt their present which was supposed to mark the birth of the “new man” and his modern lifestyle.
The web of pathways through the gardens is therefore an image of resilience and the proof that changing one’s context does not completely dismantle his traditional way of functioning. One does not become a blank reprogrammable machine on which a new lifestyle algorithm can be installed.
TAKING STOCK
This resilience can be understood following the specific use of space and the specific use of time in the gardens as opposed to the normalized use of space and time in the city.
The programmed area of the city is in its nature so artificial that populating it was only possible by imposing strict rules and limitations on space use: from traffic signs and park enclosures to the flat assignment system.
This overregulated city then fades out into the gardens that are the result of exclusively local negotiation of rules and limits, in the absence of any property titles. Any conflict here can only be solved following its own momentum without referring it to a higher hierarchical instance like a civil code or a set of building regulation. When someone’s vine doesn’t grow properly because it is shaded by a high walnut tree in a neighbours garden, the solution can only come through a bona fide quarrel.
People not only negotiate with each other on space, but they also have a special kind of time use following and negotiating with natural rhythms: night/day, summer/winter, and rain/drought. In this way of resonating with plants and fowls temporal patterns, the time spent in the gardens becomes an experiential time which is different from the artificially normalized time use particular to the city.
Nature has not only recurring time patterns but also exceptional events that the garden people are responsive to. After a summer hailstorm we met a lady that came to her garden in the middle of the day to check whether the storm had messed up the beanstalk grid, in order to rearrange it and tie the plants again.
The continuous practice of gardening and the time invested here created what we like to call a territory of “materialised spatial practice” that is somewhat uniform but alive: changing, expanding, disappearing and evolving. Sometimes you will see the same kind of wooden pole used, in a line on the limits of the garden, for building the garden fence and also, on a grid in the middle of the garden, for holding up the tomato plants. Space form and space use are equally visually present here.
PROVOKE
The quotidian life unfolds in a back and forth motion between the normalised and the experiential spheres. This motion draws a sort of expended household. Fragments of the programmed city are thus appropriated in an unusually familiar manner and connected to the gardens. We identified this overlaid yet highly present link as the constitutive structure of the present city of Victoria.
The gardens of Victoria were for us the key of understanding its past and current dynamics. Can they also be the key for its future?
We see a project for Victoria as a form of continuous research on augmenting the local narratives by designing a process of gradually engaging the community. This process should be able to eventually overwrite current policies of space use in the programmed city by expending the negotiating practices specific to the gardens. Any architectural gesture needed in pursuing this scenario would then only come as a mere media for spatial happenings.