The Idea of Villa Castagna
A garden is both a real place, and a cloud of possibilities. What you will find here will be both something real, and something that may or may not become real. For this reason you will find no map: Instead you will meet fragments, part real, part possible.
No Instagram images were found.
Pages
Links
Instagram
Archives
- July 2019
- May 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- August 2018
- June 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- December 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- December 2014
- November 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- November 2013
- June 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- April 2010
Categories
- All Posts
- Architectural paintings
- Architecture
- Art
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Baroque architecture
- Baroque Gardens
- Book Commentaries
- Catalogue of painting by G. P. Panini
- Comment
- Construction
- Country Houses
- Daylesford
- Design
- Elizabethan Architecture
- English Gardens
- Fabriques
- Garden History
- Menu
- Montacute
- Movie Commentaries
- Paintings by G. P. Panini
- Plants
- Restoration and Conservation
- Reviews
- Rome
- Town and Village
- Uncategorized
- Villa Castagna
- Villas
- Wombat Hill Botanical Gardens
Tags
- Art Deco architecture
- Arts and Crafts
- Arundel Castle
- Australian Gardens
- Bagatelle
- Baroque Gardens
- Bolzano
- Burghley House
- Chaumont
- Chestnut trees
- Chinoiserie
- cladding
- Clough Williams-Ellis
- Colosseum
- creative gardens
- Daylesford
- Dunmore Pineapple
- Elizabethan architecture
- English Gardens
- Evelyn Waugh
- Fabriques
- follies
- Fontainebleau
- Fountains
- future ruin
- Garden History
- Garden Sculpture
- Gaspar van Wittel
- Giulio Romano
- Grand Designs
- Grosssedlitz
- hanseatic timber building
- Harold Peto
- Highgrove
- Hobbit
- Ian Hamilton Finlay
- Iford Manor
- jemima grey
- Journal of the History of Gardens
- Kelmscott Manor
- Lord of the Rings
- Lorenzo Maitani
- Luigi Rossini
- Mantua
- Marcel Duchamp
- milk crate
- monkey puzzle trees
- Montacute
- natural timber finishes
- Orvieto
- Palazzo del Te
- Piranesi
- Portmeirion
- Poundbury
- Roman topography
- Rome
- Schloss Luisium; Wörlitz; architecture; Neoclassicism;
- silvertop ash
- Structures
- suburban design
- Tim Richardson
- Trautsmandorff
- Trento
- triglyph
- Tynesfield
- Vanvitelli
- van Wittel
- Vignanello
- Villa D'Este
- Villa Doria-Pamphilj
- W.G. Sebald
- Willem van Nieulandt II
- Wombat Hill Botanical Gardens
- wooden churches
- wrest park
- The Villa Castagna Daylesford website operates under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 licence. For a summary account of the terms of this license see Creative Commons
On Fabriques and Monstrous Future Ruins
‘Someone, he [Austerlitz] added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden [the fabrique, in short]—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels [or a Melbourne apartment tower like Fulton Lane]. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’ (From W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, pp. 18-19.)
This strikes me as very perceptive. I was looking at the Fulton Lane development in the city of Melbourne and did indeed experience just this reaction. It was wonder at the sheer size and bulk of the thing, overlaid with fear. The undercurrent of thought was indeed along the lines of ‘what if’: what if is fell, collapsed, decayed, or was struck by an aircraft. The fabrique, on the other hand, is indeed designed to have the kind of reaction Sebald describes: friendly intimacy, filled with reassurance, hope, and a sense of the richness of human culture. Of course, Sebald is here picking up on the idea of the ‘future ruin’, which came into circulation at the end of the eighteenth century and was taken up by Adolf Hitler, no less (according to Albert Speer’s memoirs.)
Share this:
Like this:
Related