Our design reinterprets the arbor or pergola as an animated element for the 2014 Jardin de Metis Competition. The competition challenged designers to reinterpret the art of the garden.
A steel frame holds a network of clear tubes pulsing with water filled with seeds deposited into the system by visitors. A bench at either end of the entry is also a seed box. People can come into the arbor, deposit seeds and watch them flow through the tubes. As seeds germinate, a strainer catches them. Visitors may take the seeds and plant them into the soil just beneath a shallow sand bed. The sand is a soft and uniform canvas for showing the establishing plants and the shadows cast by the structure. The sand also provides a beach for relaxation.
The combination of the sand canvas and the tubing is meant to shift the attention of the visitor to a different scale and a process not commonly considered. Looking at the seeds close up in the tubing, touching them, and being exposed to the seeding process reinterprets the garden and heightens awareness to the unseen cycles of life in the garden.
Project by Jonathon Anderson, Esther Garcia, Ken McCown, Nasar Saghafi, Joshua Vermilion and Phil Zawarus. Click on images for full screen lightbox view.