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Architects: Other Architects, Retallack Thompson
- Year: 2017
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Photographs:Peter Bennetts
Text description provided by the architects. In order to make the NGV garden more visible, we first have to render it invisible. Garden Wall hides the garden and then gradually reveals it via a series of corridors, apertures, and rooms. Our installation is less the walls themselves than the spaces between, which were already latent in the garden.
Garden Wall is a site-specific installation that divides the NGV’s Grollo Equiset garden into a sequence of outdoor rooms. Each of the rooms frames particular features found in the garden, heightening encounters with sculpture and furniture, trees and planting, paving, and lawn. A subtle touch, sound, and scent layers enhance this sensory experience. The wall itself is a simple structure made up of white frames clad in a woven mesh. Shifting in nature from translucent to opaque, from ephemeral to monolithic, the wall recedes into the background or commands attention depending on the time of day, quality of light, movement of people, or angle of view.
Originating in the crude fences and berms that enclosed the earliest human encampments, walls are architecture at its most elemental. But there is no such thing as a basic or neutral wall. Without walls, there could be no checkpoints, fortifications, prisons, or enclaves. Any structure that separates people is inherently political. By enclosing certain parts of the garden and excluding others, extending pathways while complicating passages, Garden Wall provides an opening for discussing architecture’s political dimensions and the global proliferation of walls, borders, and barriers.
