text Isabel Duprat

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Experiencing places, landscapes, cities, historical or contemporary gardens with a keen eye and excited emotion gives us a repertoire of images and sensations. All together and mixed, they lead us to the moment of creation and drawing, when we pick up gems from the vast collection stored in our minds and that we often aren’t even aware they are there. This is what happened to this garden designed for a friend's chiropractic and physiotherapy clinic, a great admirer of gardens, a very active accomplice throughout the entire process.

 

The house, which was renovated and adapted by Carlos Sawaya Bracher, had belonged to a Japanese couple. Elements of the Japanese architecture were on the roof, in the openings, walkways and window frames.

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The garden would fill the L-shaped area enclosing the meditation and yoga space, which were to be built. Occupying the core of the future clinic, this garden would connect the reception, the rooms, the meditation annex and the administration area. It should soften walls and limits while, just as a lung does, exhale comfort and calmness to the passageways and living areas. A 250 square meters area with many practical functions to be fulfilled and that would be nothing more than a passageway if this empty space between walls and limit walls was not turned into a place of wellbeing, where it could furtively attend to its functional purposes.  

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How to create a garden that would converse with the house without being a Japanese garden cliché, but one that would bring references and above all provoke genuine sensations? That is what I proposed for myself to do.

 

The perfect scale, yes, one could indeed say perfect, of the beautiful historic Japanese gardens, is one of the magical aspects that fascinates me the most, as well as the use of water and the sounds it is able to convey and the magically placed stones. I dedicated myself to the understanding of the space of the clinic from this point of view.

 

I designed a water mirror embracing the yoga room, providing some shelter from the other activities and with its movement and sound contributing to the practice of meditation. During the long walks I would take in Southern Bahia, I was enchanted to see how the clay dripping from the beach cliffs would sculpt tiny lakes with sinuous bottoms in delicate reliefs that would take the colour of the sea in various shades of green when the high tide filled them with water. I made the water mirror in this form, sculpting its bottom so as to give different shades to the water. The grey colour brings the colours of the house to the water whilst at the same time reflecting the sky.

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At the relief's lowest points, on different levels, small fountains draw circular movements, giving a greater dimension to the mirror. Both the water's soft sound running down over a stone in one corner of the lake and the sound of the water falling on the groove covered with pebbles are very pleasing to the ears. How difficult it is to get the sound of water right for hearing. To hear water falling does not always have a soothing effect. It can give the uneasy feeling of an open faucet. As such, this is something to be payed attention to. On a visit to the MET in New York City, I noticed, through a friend's alert eye, that the Nogushi Fountain, from which the water would flow over the stone, should produce no sound at all. But the sound was delicious and, because of this, intriguing. The sound was produced due to the distance between the point at which the water fell and the ground, a darkened emptiness beneath the pebbles. The groove in the water mirror reproduces this idea.

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The trees were chosen according to their smaller size and lightness, like the yellow Cassia fistula and the Schinus molle, so as to provide a greater dimension and more depth to the place. Tall trees in a small space would leave it looking smaller still. Taller, vertical trees provide the antecipated closing of the limits, before they become invasive. Philodendrons, irises, ferns and Sobralias spread their textures and colours and accompany the stroll through the garden. Colourful clinging plants cover walls blending one into another.