Page 276 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

Fig. 1 Fig. 2
GARDENS OF MEMORIES,
GARDENS OF FORGETFULNESS
Vincent KRENZ
SCRIPTA MANENT, HERBA VOLAT… If the work of the architect is often compared to writing
In the old park, desolate and frosty (how many architectural ‘vocabularies’, ‘lexicons’ and ‘grammar
two spectres have been evoking the past. books’ occupy the shelves of our libraries; how many metaphors,
‘Do you recall our blissful times?’ such as the famous ‘legibility’ of blueprints and how many –
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‘Why ever should you wish me to remember?’ as Gianni Contessi notes – texts are published by architects?),
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‘Now when you hear my name does your heart beat landscape architecture, for its part, often seems as volatile and
faster? Do you still see me in your dreams?’ ‘No.’ ephemeral as the spoken word: scripta manent, verba volant. While
verlaine building plans permanently record the results of a long process
Fêtes galantes, ‘Sentimental dialogue’, punctuated with sketches, variations, clarifications and details,
translated by Peter Low garden designs often only reveal an ideal state destined never
to exist except in the aspirations of its designer. Have the trees
The gardens talk not, except in this my book. achieved the proportions of those painted in watercolours on
la fontaine the sheet of paper? The seasons that have passed since they were
Fables, viii, 10, ‘The Bear and the Amateur Gardener’, planted have already seen an adjustment to the course of a path
translated by Elizur Wright whose meanderings were so often cut across in order to save time,
the removal of a grove that hampered the croquet games, or the
Genesis: it all began, we are told, in a garden – ‘In the beginning planting of some species admired in a neighbour’s garden by the
was the Word’: does the plant kingdom resemble the spoken word, owner of the property.
blown away by the wind, transformed and forgotten the moment As a garden is composed of living plants, many of them
it is uttered? Historical gardens are like a voice that quickly deciduous, no one is surprised at its metamorphoses, and it is not
becomes muffled, almost imperceptible; the remembered sights unusual for human intentions or faculties to be attributed to it:
become confused in our memories and gradually fade away until Birnam wood lays siege to Macbeth, and a resident at Beau-Rivage
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we have soon lost all recollection of them. Palace, inspired by the park’s beautiful sights, wrote in 1937: ‘Le cèdre
Beau-Rivage Palace. Ouchy-Lausanne. The ‘grande terrasse’
seen from the west. Postcard, c.1920.
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Fig. 3
du Liban dont la branche succombe – Au lointain souvenir d’un passé became apparent that the calculations of reinforced concrete, made at its
‘Two years ago, when our large terrace was rebuilt over the stores, it
douloureux, – Le sombre araucaria, à l’heure où la nuit tombe – Sous le
souffle du vent, se parlent-ils entre eux?’ [At nightfall, does the cedar of beginnings in 1906, had an insufficient safety coefficient in comparison
Lebanon whose branches are bowed by the distant memory of a today’s requirements…’: it is only in this roundabout way, through a
sorrowful past, whisper to the dark araucaria in the breeze?] sentence in the report from the hotel’s board of directors in 1958,
Eloquent prosopopoeia – if I may be excused the pleonasm: that the date can be ascertained for the disappearance of a French-
it is more difficult to imagine a consultation between columns, a style flower garden planted in 1908. Its design was attributed to one
parliament of pilasters, a dialogue between obelisks or a symposium of the most famous landscape architects of the twentieth century:
of balusters… Achille Duchêne, creator, with his father Henri, of the Champ-
With ancient gardens, upkeep and neglect often amount to de-Mars gardens in Paris and the Blenheim gardens for the Duke
the same thing: both gradually erode the original design – to the of Marlborough, and restorer of the gardens of Versailles and of
point of obliterating it. For the garden more than anywhere else, Vaux-le-Vicomte. The archives have little to say about its creation
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‘the omnipotence […] of the architect is not exercised in the force of the – possibly seen, in the absence of any major structural works, as
construction, which in reality does not depend on him, but is exerted solely mere ornamental planting – and it might be believed to be pure
through the fragile exercise of the design’. 4 fabrication or some Lausanne legend, were it not for some rare,
Thus the history of gardens often seems to write itself in the yellowing albumen prints testifying to its ghostly existence (fig.1).
negative. Modifications only seem to be recorded in the archives The fact that the names of such well-known designers never appear
when they are so significant that it is necessary to submit them in the archives – which, on the other hand, mention that the paving
to public enquiry or obtain special funds; most of them – cutting contract was awarded to the Société de construction de Neuchâtel
new paths, creating or breaking up plant groupings, hedges, for 7.15 fr. per m – does cast some doubt on this attribution. These
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borders or flower beds, or minor tree-cutting or planting projects schemes, in which the beds of perennials spread out in concentric
– are the work of gardeners employed in the day-to-day upkeep of rings rather than unfurling in the elegant arabesques inspired by
the gardens. The costs involved, incorporated into a maintenance the designs of Désallier d’Argenville beloved of the Duchênes,
budget, are only sporadically the subject of separate estimates, may or may not be the work of the celebrated French landscapers.
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and rarely recorded in plans considered worthy of inclusion in However, their organisation into cutwork parterres bears witness
the archives. to a renewed preference for the geometric garden that was very
much in vogue at the time, spearheaded by the restorers of Vaux
THE TERRACE and Versailles.
My spaces are fragile: This was the only private garden of the Palace, an annexe
time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. built in 1908 to the west of Beau-Rivage that opened directly
Nothing will any longer resemble what was, onto the public promenade. Post-war social habits, corrupted by an
my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory, American lifestyle increasingly emulated by the Continental elite,
I shall look at a few old yellowing photographs led to a greater permeability between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’
with broken edges without recognising them. spheres. Social events – teas, aperitifs and even dinners – were held
Georges perec outdoors, and this very often spelled the end of planting schemes
Species of Spaces 6 that were never meant to be viewed except from a distance or
Jean-Baptiste Bertolini and Achille de La Harpe architects, Site plan Jean-Baptiste Bertolini and Achille de La Harpe architects,
with preliminary sketches of the garden, black lead pencil on tracing paper. Site plan of the hotel at Ouchy [and] Contour map of the plot around
the axis of the building, signed and dated 29 December 1857, bottom right.
Black lead and colour pencil and Indian ink on paper.
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