Hortus Conclusus~As a Shared Ecological~Creative Practice : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor on sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

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chatgpt.com

Felt Relations~Sympathy : What things feel when they shape each other.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond.

Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, Marlen Elders.

In The Gathering Shadows of Material Things.

Tim Ingold.

The Sympathy of Things.

Lars Spuybroek

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Original research material from Interiors UCA Farnham 2014.

With a refined selection of materials, Zumthor creates a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. In doing so, he emphasises the role that the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The garden is enclosed on all sides yet open to the sky: an architectural setting that offers both protection and openness. Zumthor describes such spaces as "sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

For Zumthor, the garden is more than a collection of plants. Every species evokes distinct memories of light, smell, sound, and touch. Gardens become places where sensory experience and memory are inseparable:

"Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

He continues by describing the garden as the most intimate form of landscape:

"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place." (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The enclosed garden becomes a sanctuary—a small protected world held within a larger landscape. As Zumthor observes, "something small has found sanctuary within something big" (Zumthor 2011: 15).

The medieval illustration Orchard from the Bible of Wenceslaus IV (Austrian National Library, Vienna) visualises this idea through the illuminated depiction of husbandry and communal labour within the secure enclosure of a walled garden. The image presents pastoral work as both productive and contemplative, echoing Zumthor's conception of the hortus conclusus as a protected space where cultivation, community, and intimacy converge.

Working with one's hands, cultivating the earth within sheltered spaces, becomes a shared pastoral practice that binds people to place.

Zumthor reinforces this pastoral character by placing a pavilion at the centre of the garden. He imagines it as a place for future gatherings and quiet contemplation, anticipating "the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves" (Zumthor 2011: 15). The garden is therefore experienced not only visually but through the full range of the senses.

Elizabeth Knox's The Vintner's Luck similarly evokes an intimate relationship between landscape and human experience. The taste of wine becomes inseparable from the soil that produced it; earth and wine are of the same substance, united by locality and landscape.

Alexander Kluge develops a related idea in Gardens Are Like Wells, suggesting that every person possesses an "enclosed garden"—an inner space of reflection that exists regardless of one's outward life.

He writes that monasteries in medieval Europe functioned as wells in which "the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith." At the heart of these monasteries lay an enclosed garden, where the finest plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated (Kluge 2011: 19).

Significantly, Kluge argues that these gardens existed outside the ordinary routines of monastic life. They were timeless places, dedicated to the Virgin Mary while remaining open to classical and alternative traditions, including Homer, Ovid, and the Gnostics. The enclosed garden therefore became a place where literature, contemplation, and spirituality could coexist. It represents an interiority capable of uniting mind and perception amid the complexity of contemporary life.

Kluge concludes that civilisation requires spaces that remain outside systems of production and utility:

"Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety." (Kluge 2011: 21)

This sentiment resonates with Richard Sennett's assertion that "we need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning." Such spaces provide opportunities for reflection, remembrance, and emotional renewal beyond the demands of everyday life.

The Development Company for Television Programmes (DCTP), in Gardens of Information, also adopts the emblem of the hortus conclusus. Here, the enclosed garden symbolises the relationship between barren landscapes and places of meaning. Their ambition is "to rescue facts from human indifference" and "to make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information" (Kluge 2011: 21). The garden becomes a metaphor for transforming fragmented knowledge into coherent and meaningful experience.

This understanding connects with ideas of spatial practice in the twenty-first century. Rather than forming relationships through abstract systems, institutions, or grand narratives, meaning emerges through inclusive practices rooted in particular places. The hortus conclusus can therefore be understood as a model of concentrated identity—an inquiry, a person, or a practice held within an intimate setting where thought, making, and community come together.

Drawing : From Blindness to Evidence/Figures, Doors and Passages.

Outpost 131024

Taking Sides.

On The Phenomena of Vision : From Blindness to Evidence.

The debt at the origin of all drawing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Derrida in 'Memoirs of the Blind' opens our eyes to this strange filiation, to this sort of conversation or duel between different generations of 'Taking Sides'. It not only teaches us much about blindness, vision, and drawing – about philosophy and art – but leaves us another way to understand the legacy of drawing and vision, the legacy of representation, the legacy of legacy itself.

I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

Mrs Talmann, spoken words from The Draughtsman's Contract

It thus will have seen to it to interrupt the legacy of a monocular vision in order to lead us by the hand towards this other legacy that is passed down in darkness. Opening eyes, then, yes – but only in order to cancel them, and to recall that the draughtsman's contract always concerns a pleasure and a condition that are not only out of sight, but out of this world.

Jacques Derrida.

Memoirs of the Blind.

The Self Portrait and Other Ruins.

Witnessing/Testimony/Legacies/Inheritances.

Like a dream, then, of whispering clouds, one can almost hear this obscure communication between past, present, and future, between Derrida and Greenaway, between them and us, between all those 'taking sides' on the other side of vision – in the night.

These are Derrida's themes in 'Memoirs of the Blind'

Blindness, dispropriation and the interruption of a lineage or filiation: the cancellation of what makes representation possible, the difference between the body proper and the supplement, the living body and the scarecrow, and the ruination and death of all foresight, all representation, and all legacies. 

A singular genealogy, a singular illustration of oneself among all these illustrious blind men who keep each other in memory, who greet and recognize one another in the night,

Derrida.

An exhibition ( of selected works) that reflects Derrida's inquiry on vision through the metaphor of blind men and visionaries.

Drawing/Filiations, the relations of one thing to another from which  it is derived or descended.

The Draughtsman's Contract.

Peter Greenaway.

A film about the differences between drawing, painting and sculpture, about allegory and ruin, about masks and funeral monuments, about strategies and debts, optics and blinds, about living statues and sounds represented in drawing. But above all it is about witnessing and testimony, about legacies and inheritances. The very themes of 'Memoirs of the Blind'.

Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas.

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place

Hortus Conclusus : Enclosed Garden

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”

To construct a contemplative room, a garden within a garden.

Pavilion as both a monumental physical structure and as a site of emotional encounter.

With a refined selection of materials he has created a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment, in so doing he is successfully emphasising the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture. (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

A garden in an architectural setting.

“ Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.

(Zumthor 2011: 15)

Illustration of “Orchard” from Bible of Wenceslaus IV,Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community.

Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

Gardens Are Like Wells: Alexander Kluge

Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”

Monasteries in medieval Europe were wells in which the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith. At the centre of these monasteries was a garden, the most important part of which was enclosed. It was here that the most beautiful plants and medicinal herbs were concentrated. (Kluge 2011: 19)

Interestingly Kluge notes that these gardens were not everyday places, they were “timeless” because they were not subject to the general daily rituals of monastic life. These gardens were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but exposed perhaps to other texts, Homer, Ovid or the Gnostics. This relationship of literature finding a place of contemplation in the enclosed garden speaks perhaps of an “innerness”, an ability to unite mind and eye in the confusing realities of our age.

Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety. (Kluge 2011: 21)

“We need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning” Richard Sennett

(Sociologist)

Gardens of Information: DCPT (Development Company for Television Programmes)

Using the emblem of the Hortus Conclusus/The Enclosed Garden to stand for the relationship between the barren wastes on the one hand, and the happy isle on the other.

“To rescue facts from human indifference”

“To make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information.”

“A precursor of individualism, but has unmistakable traits in a way individualism never can.” (Kluge 2011: 21)

Spatial Practices for the Next Millennium.

Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.