Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
Center in Minneapolis, it is currently on view in New York at the Urban Center under the sponsorship of the Architectural League. As the title suggests, Solomon explores that margin where controlled nature and structure coexist, where the inside and the outside merge. (The word garden, she tells us, derives from the Indo-European root gherd, meaning enclosure.) The garden that is expressed architecturally (romantic English gardens and herbaceous borders are not her subject) extends the protective privacy of the home. It expands the house like a porch or even an awning or canopy.
Evocative, then, as the drawings are of place, they also raise the philosophical question of defining inside and outside. Swiss critic Jean Starobinski, in his essay on this topic, writes that “philosophers and biologists alike have stated that an outside begins at the point where the expansion of a structuring force stops. One could just as rightly say that an inside comes into being the moment a form asserts itself by setting its own boundaries.” Though exposed to the natural forces of the out-of-doors, gardens still relate to the life of the interiors—boundary is the key word.
Solomon's study of the European formal garden as derived from the classical garden is presented chronologically, from 1545 to 1723, in the exhibition catalogue, and over time the garden structure becomes increasingly complex, a view that has rarely been given with such precision. Beginning with the simple rectangular lawns and intervening pathways of Ancy-le-Franc in Burgundy, the pergolas, arbors, topiaries, mazes, and colonnades of trees multiply over the centuries. But green architecture is only half the story. The other half is the pale blue-green of water, in fountains, canals, basins, and pools, adding music to the gardens. “Water descends on axis or circuitously,” she writes in tribute to those engineering feats that conducted water from terrace to terrace with only the law of gravity to give it force.
In her drawing of Marly, also called Marly-la-Machine, one sees the grand waterworks that were planned by Louis XIV with Hardouin-Mansart to feed the waters of Versailles between 1677 and 1714. Here, architecture gives the water shape as well as direction.
Palladio's Villa Barbaro (1560) was in essence a gentleman's farm, and in Solomon's drawing the symmetry of the agricultural fields reflects the symmetrical wings of the villa itself. She carries through the semicircular portico of the Villa Giulia in Rome from the villa to garden to water basin. The number of architects and landscape architects who had a hand in this plan would comprise a Who's Who of sixteenth-century Rome: Vasari, Michelangelo, Bartolomeo Ammannati, and Giacomo da Vignola.
By contrast to the hillside terraced gardens of the Italian villas, the more open French gardens of Gaillon and Vernueil offer broader horizons. For the latter, she draws the four grand terraces of promenades and parterres reflected in canals that hark back to the castle moat. Gaillon is a garden and chateau now in ruins, but form and symmetry survive in her drawing. There is nothing static about these; the viewer is always on the move into the farthest recesses of the gardens.
She ends with a drawing of the Portico of San Luca at Bologna, the arcaded walkway from the city to the eleventh-century Santuario della Madonna di San Luca on a hill. Here the inside becomes a pathway through the outside: “a promenade open to the vistas and closed to the rain.”
Although the Continent may have provided Solomon with the historical images for her drawings, her memories of garden architecture began with childhood walks on San Francisco's Marina Green, the grass rectangle that runs along the bay near the Yacht Harbor. She defines this personal archetype in her idealized drawing of it, set within a grid: “The Urban Garden: The green rectangle equals paradise,” or pairidaeza, the ancient Persian concept of enclosure. This greensward, as a basic component of the formal garden, became her “reassuring landscape,” a term employed by another landscape architect, Ian McHarg, to denote a landscape that becomes meaningful from an early association and that one seeks thereafter to recreate or rediscover in other environments. From this bit of urban paradise, she has traced garden history back to the basic form of the tilled field, the agrarian garden. The straight lines of man's first holding become for her the origin of the architectural grid.
Although Solomon's drawings have become an art form in their own right, she puts her theories to practice as a landscape architect of real projects, in particular, for the proposed Turia Gardens in Valencia, Spain; for an estate in Oregon; and for four gardens in Omaha, Nebraska. Closer to home, she has applied the principles of Renaissance architecture and Bramante axiality to a series titled “Crissy Field and the Palace of Marina Green,” a proposal based on her childhood haunt. The focus of this plan is the Crissy Field area, an unused Army airstrip along the bay that lies between Marina Green and the Golden Gate Bridge and is separated by a major road from the Presidio, an 1860s military garrison originally built in the Italianate style. On first view, the site plan resembles the configurations of the Renaissance gardens, but a closer inspection reveals elements suitable to contemporary California life, retaining nevertheless the traditional axes.
Solomon also continues to observe history, colored pencils in hand, most recently on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, an experience that culminated in a series of nine drawings of Roman streets and the patterns that originated the Western city. She began with the handout map of Rome given to all Academy fellows during orientation, and traced this map in as an overlay, a theme in all the drawings, with a wide serpentine line, the Tiber, as a motif. This juxtaposition records the passage of time from the original inception of the architectural plans to the progressive realization of structure and landscape.
In looking at these drawings, one is reminded that before Bramante was an architect, he was a painter, and, as British critic Stephen Gardiner writes in Inside Architecture, Bramante “saw architectural design in terms of planes and spaces as he might have seen a painting.” These drawings are like the paintings he might have seen. “Rome is Rome still,” Henry James wrote in Roderick Hudson. Here the pergolas, arbors, and garden walls of green hedges have given way to masonry facades that wall in narrow streets and piazzas that lead to vistas of other classical or baroque facades. The outside, the open space, now becomes the inside, the interior.
“The sky is a precious commodity,” says Solomon. “Needing this rare light, Romans have persistently used clearings to catch the sky's brilliance. Places, piazzas, voids—the city is a network of inhabited walls enclosing the mirror images of streets.” One remembers emerging from just such a narrow street and coming upon the Fontana di Trevi for the first time.
In some of the drawings, architectural details float in a surreal fashion above the canyonlike streets; Annibale Carracci's Blue Mercury is in flight over the Piazza Farnese. A sign reading “Lollypops” gives away the century in another one that includes the Teatro di Pompeo. In the Piazza del Popolo, she captures the effect of that great open space with the obelisk; the twin image of the church forms a gateway to the streets of Rome. And she writes on the drawing of the Piazza S. Eustachio: “A landscape is a place enclosed by buildings.” The reversal is complete.
Solomon knows everything about the color of stone. The grays and terracottas of Roman buildings turn into multishades of beige in her latest drawings of San Francisco houses cascading down the grid of hilly streets there.
Essentially all the drawings, of Renaissance gardens or of contemporary city streets, are about passageways from interiors to exteriors and the individual's private experience of borders—cafés under trees, shops under awnings, and fishing piers are some of her border images. But also as the body moves in a disciplined pattern, the mind is free to wander. “Order encloses magic,” is how she expresses it, as muted colors and blurred edges in her drawings evoke the qualities of gardens and places remembered.
Some of the memories she jogs are of literary gardens, those lawns and allées fixed in the imagination with a reality equal to experience. Seen through her eye, Henry James's description of the memorable lawn that stretches out behind the gabled brick house at the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady takes on a deeper significance: “Privacy reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior.”
“There is magic,” concludes Solomon in one passage, “when illusion is reality and opposites merge.” For her, the common ground, where the inside and outside meet, has become