Christian Duvernois, landscape designer and author of Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles (Rizzoli 2008), sketching thoughts about the "Rammed Earth Sculpture Garden" in my New York studio at Location One.
Christian's Marie-Antoinette offers a fascinating history of the development of the garden, from the sanctuary the cloistered medieval garden provided against a hostile world to the pronouncement of Man's dominion over Nature expressed by Le Nôtre's formal French classicism.
Marie-Antoinette's initiative at Trianon revitalized Versailles by ushering in the next generation of thought and practice in landscape design, bringing to bear the philosophical discourse of the day exemplified by Rousseau and his Theory of Natural Man. In striving to balance the high artifice of Le Nôtre with a return to the pristine beauty of nature, Marie-Antoinette's gardens were both laboratories for the new sciences of botany, biology, and chemistry as well as forums for the new social structures of modern, increasingly urban life to come, anticipating the contemporary environmental issues of sustainability and the organic movement in agriculture and husbandry.
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