(Apologies...any photos you see on this blog will not be edited. I'd usually like to do that for photos I'm sharing, but it's not feasible while I'm travelling.)
I'm officially on my journey! When I wrote the introductory post for this blog, I was still in England, feeling like this research trip was never going to really happen. But turns out it is, which is still a little surreal. Hopefully by week two I'll get my head fully around the fact that I'm really in France, really doing cloister garden research, and really going to be travelling through Europe for eight weeks.
The France leg of the trip (which will be two weeks in total, with one more little jaunt back into France later in the trip, en route between Spain and Italy) started off a bit stressfully, with the realization that I needed an International Driving Permit, which one can only obtain in the US. After some panic-Googling (and praying!) I discovered that I could get my license Officially Translated, which would also work. The only catch being that I'll need to do that in every country I drive in, which is going to be all three that I visit. Hurrah...? I won't be driving for the whole of my time in France, but for about half of it I will be.
The Modern Cloister in the title of this post was the Couvent de l'Annonciation in Paris, a convent of Dominicans (male ones--use of the words "convent", "monastery", and "priory" tend to vary from country to country, and I still haven't figured out the nitty-gritty conventions around that. Something I'm putting off until my senior thesis) which was established in the 17th century. As with many religious institutions in France, it was destroyed during the Revolution in the 19th century, but subsequently rebuilt in 1874, 2 km away from its original site. The cloister garden was redesigned in 2010, by a local landscape architect.
The above is what, essentially, I knew when I went to visit the Couvent. What I found when I got there was something that I'm still rather conflicted about. When the garden was redone in 2010, the landscape architect decided to sink the level of the garden down an entire story, to expose the windows of the basement rooms of the couvent. However, this means that the Dominicans can no longer access their cloister garden from their cloister, and they've turned to using a little strip of land at the back of the couvent for their time outdoors. This strip of land is, put simply, not ideal for their uses (and rather ugly). In addition, in redoing the garden, the landscape architect didn't consider the precedents in cloister garden design, and instead invented something entirely new, which does not seem to fit with the character of the buildings or the intended use. I'm not a proponent of the idea that garden design for certain spaces needs to stay the same through centuries and centuries, but I would at least like to see new designs for cloister spaces take old cloister garden designs into account! (Although, granted, that's precisely what I'm studying here, and the reason for which I'm studying it, in a sense, which makes me a bit touchy about the whole thing.)
The UNESCO World Heritage Site was Mont Saint-Michel, which is a place I've been wanting to visit for several years--it was fortuitous that it fit into my research so well! It used to be a convent of Benedictine monks and has a very interesting cloister and history of gardening in the cloister. It's the only irregular cloister I know it--it has one oblique and one acute angle, making it not a perfect rectangle, due to the constraints of having a monastery built on a tidal island/hill/mountain.
One of the things that makes the cloister there fascinating to me is the double row of columns around the edge. They're offset from each other, so that it's impossible to get an unobstructed view into the cloister except at an angle. It was making me think about the role of columns in making the viewer of the garden think about the fact that they're looking at the garden. It reminded me a bit of the role of jali screens in Islamic architecture, in the way that they make the viewer conscious of the act of viewing.
(It also has one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen in my life!)
The relic of Cluny (an incredibly famous monastic complex, which is now mostly in ruins) was the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. It's "descended from" Cluny, and now is the "father abbey" of the Congregation of Solesmes, which is the last remaining congregation of cloistered Benedictine monks in the world. (There are other congregations of Benedictines, they're just not cloistered, evidently.) They were incredibly gracious to allow me to come and see their cloisters, because Benedictine cloister rules are no joke--they're meant to keep the world out, and the Benedictines don't take that lightly. (A friend of mine observed that I might be the first woman to have entered their cloisters in decades--I countered that it could have been centuries.)
And their cloisters were fascinating. One of them uses a technique which in French is called "parterre de broiderie", or "earthen/garden embroidery", making a complex pattern of low box hedges which doesn't "come clear" as a design unless seen from above. This design was apparently drawn up by Andre le Notre originally for the Hopital des Incurables, which surprised me--I wasn't expecting to find an Andre le Notre design in a cloister!
The other cloister is not completed--it only has three sides, just because of how the buildings have been built or not. It's a fascinating study in the way that cloister gardens can be both/either negative or positive space, and how new cloisters arise when new buildings are needed by a religious community.
At this point you may be wondering why 2/3 of these cloisters were Benedictine, when I'm notably studying Dominican cloister gardens. The tradition of cloister gardens in general arose with the Benedictine order, and I think it's important to understand how Benedictine cloisters evolved into the modern age, both for background and to contrast with the development of Dominican cloisters. For the same reason, I'll be seeing some Augustinian cloisters later in this trip--the Dominicans arose from the Augustinian Canons. Rest assured, though, that during the week that I'm actually publishing this post (the second week) I saw quite a few more Dominican cloisters. :) And that post will be coming soon! Hopefully sooner than this one did.
As for general How The Trip Is Going updates...good, so far! I'm really enjoying my time in France, quite a bit more than I expected to! Everyone waxes poetic about the South of France, but the North of France right now is all green and gold, and I'm somewhat obsessed with how beautiful the countryside is, with flowers blooming all in the hay fields and along the highways. And the little towns are so charming! Also, because of my budget I've been basically living on baguettes, brie, and apricots, and let me just say, it's a tough life. (I'm kidding. Apricots and brie are such a good flavour combo, and apricots even have a little divot in them that lets you tuck a chunk of brie into them. Fabulous.)
Also, while I was in Paris I got to go see the Parc de la Villette, which is something I've heard a fair bit about just in the process of getting my BLA (I think our Department Head covers it in the LA 101 course that all the incoming freshmen have to take which is/was one of my favourite LA classes to date), and it was excited to get to actually be in the space, even if I was exhausted at the time and didn't spent a lot of time there. (Look it up! It's fascinating.)
So! I'll probably be talking more about my impressions of France in my next post, but I have to get this up at some point, and that point needs to be today, so I'm going to stop talking, find some pictures to insert, and hit publish!
Thanks for following along!
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