Ten commandments for designing a garden

This 10 videos were created for the interactive installation that launched the Garden’s Interpretative Centre in 2013. It proposes to revisit the design process of the Gulbenkian Garden, here presented through an original text by architect Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles: Ten Commandments for the Construction of a Garden.

Over the 10 commandments one can perceive the different concepts, moments and secrets that, at the moment it was conceived and sill today, determine the spatiality of the happy and pleasant place the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Garden is. A landscape that works with the memory of the place, and, as said by Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles himself, builds “the link between matter and idea.”

“A garden is the sublimation of a place making it joyful and pleasant”

“The presence of water, translated in its aesthetic serenity, its rhythmic movement and musical dynamic”

“Nature understood in its biological diversity and in the rhythm of life”

“The light’s splendour achieved through the contrast between shade and light and through the harmony of colors”

“The depth of perspectives and the outline of the successive frames highlight distances and forms”

“Integration into the surrounding landscape as long as it is ordered and beautiful”

“Accept, as the basis for conceiving a garden or landscape, the «natural order», that is, nature free from de meaning of human society”

“The «natural order» and the «cultural order» come together to answer mankind’s needs”

“In the design of a garden or a landscape we must exalt simplicity and avoid decoration”

“A garden and a landscape are the result of ideias and projects, they are never the result of decoration, their greatness and beauty lies in what’s essential to them, in just the right measure”

More than commandments, these principles are the synthesis of a landscape design theory of which the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Garden is paradigmatic.