Garden Museum
Exhibition celebrating the career of John Brookes.
The John Brookes retrospective ‘the man who made the modern garden’, designed by Beasley Dickson Architects opened at the Garden Museum on 30th November 2017. The exhibition celebrates the long career and works of John Brookes, his current projects and legacy in the English landscape.
Brooke’s established an architectural rigour in his work, and forged deep interactions between the adjacent buildings and his gardens, most notably on a domestic scale: ‘Neither the garden nor the house can afford to work in isolation’. His pioneering approach to garden design and a modern aesthetic of hard and soft landscaping paved the way in which architects continue to lay out gardens to this day.
The exhibition design drew from his method of setting a rigorous structure to the garden layout, either derived from the architecture or a distinct feature of the landscape, with plants coming second as the decoration. By rationalising the gallery into a regular grid the exhibition design forged a space within which the viewer could imitate the experience of looking out into the garden, whilst forming a podium to display the work.
The scale of the gallery space, echoes the scale of the gardens detailed in his seminal book the Room Outside. The layout forces intimacy and alludes to a more domestic language. A mirror of being inside, looking out, and simultaneously being within the grid of a Brookes’ garden. Materials were chosen that recalled the simplicity of garden materials: plaster, panelling, timber frame. The grid is broken by two curved walls, as natural lines of a garden, breaking to the beyond. Evocative of the garden designer and their interruption of nature. Glimpsed views between panels and timber frames guide the visitor through the exhibition with a sense of exploration. A selection of Brookes’ books and final garden designs were presented on a bureau for the visitor to rummage through.
