Designing the Garden of the Unexpected

Mother once mentioned that the Matrimandir gardens were as important as the Matrimandir itself. However, work on the gardens has proceeded much more slowly than work on the structure, which is now almost complete.

In the early days, Mother invited Narad to design the twelve gardens surrounding the Matrimandir. Ultimately, he felt unable to do this and, for many years, little was done in the inner gardens area except contouring and basic landscaping. New energy started to flow into the gardens when, some years ago, Roger Anger designed the Unity Garden beside the Matrimandir and invited submissions for designs of the twelve gardens.

When none of the submissions were found acceptable, a Matrimandir garden design team formed to research what Sri Aurobindo and The Mother had said about the qualities represented by the twelve gardens and, in collaboration with Roger, to come up with new designs.

Some years ago, they submitted the designs for the first three gardens – Existence, Consciousness, Bliss – to the community and were given the go-ahead to construct them. Today, these gardens have materialized and a fourth, the garden of Progress, is almost ready. However, work has been suspended on the implementation of the other eight gardens as questions have arisen about the proposed designs.

“When we decided to pause everything in these gardens, the natural energy around here to go on developing spontaneously transferred itself to the Garden of the Unexpected,” explains John Harper, one of the present executives of the Matrimandir. “One motivation,” says Hemant Shekar, a member of the team who will steer the design process, “is to bring in some fresh energy. Another is to create something slightly less stressful because in the main gardens there seems to be a lot of expectation and we want to remove that pressure so people are more willing to work together. We also want to experiment with different methods of gardening.”

The Garden of the Unexpected

This garden was conceived of by Roger. Jacqueline, his long-time partner and collaborator, explains it was in response to Aurovilians who wished to visit the chamber not knowing what to do with their children during this time. “Roger wanted to create a space at the entrance to the Matrimandir gardens where there would be an atmosphere that would bring the children to inner quietness, where they would ‘catch’ something and become silent, go within.”

While Roger didn’t give a detailed description, the following indications emerged from his conversations with Aurovilians. It would be an “initiatory place” for children; not an ordinary playground, but a place of wonder and for discovering the unexpected; and a place of ‘reversed reality’, for example, a place where one can feel the sky on the ground and the ground in the sky.

While Roger specified the location, to the north west of the Matrimandir behind the Garden of Unity and mini-amphitheatre – he did not provide or supervise any design proposals before he passed away in 2008.

So how to develop and choose a design for this garden? The Matrimandir executives decided a new process was needed and invited Aurovilian Natasha Jain, who has a background in systems design, to suggest one. After researching other design processes around the world, she came up with a proposal which was further shaped in discussions with the executives, the Working Committee, Council, Residents Assembly Service and Elvira from Koodam.

The process

At the end of May, the Matrimandir executives put out a call for people to register if they wished to submit designs for the Garden of the Unexpected, along with the design brief. The design brief included Roger’s indications concerning the purpose and atmosphere of this garden, along with the need to consider factors like safety, sustainability, the need to include indigenous flora and fauna and to emphasize natural rather than ‘hard’ landscaping to allow for future evolution. The total budget for the garden was fixed at 60 lakhs rupees.

The registration period is now over. Fourteen people have registered (a further three are in process), twelve of whom are Aurovilians. (The others, all of whom know Auroville well, are a landscape designer from Chandigarh and a local team of architects who have been interns in Auroville). The designers are given one month to come up with their initial proposals, after which Aurovilian architect, Sonali, will make a detailed quantity survey of each design, as well as ascertaining if it conforms to the design brief.

The designs, without the designers’ names attached, will then be sent to an expert panel for assessment. The panel consists of Piero and Gloria from Auroville, the architect, B.V. Doshi, a Japanese landscape designer and gardener, Kei Ishikawa, Narad Eggenberger and two ex-Governing Board members, Mallika Sarabhai and Ameeta Mehra. The experts will give very detailed feedback on each design under four main headings – concept and aesthetic (i.e. how much does this proposal resonate with the ideals of Auroville); interactive and engagement (does it create a sense of wonder, discovery?); sustainability; and practicality of implementation.

Each designer will receive the experts’ feedback on their design and then will have a further two weeks to finalize their design if they wish to remain part of the process. The designs then go back to the experts who will give a final rating.

At this stage the highest rated designs (three if there are twelve or less submissions, five if there are more than twelve) will be forwarded to a panel of Aurovilians for the final decision on which one is to be chosen.

Anybody on the Master List can register to be on this panel. Panelists are required to register by mid September and to study all the designs carefully (the designers’ names will not be revealed). They are strongly encouraged to participate in an information meeting where architects will explain the parameters the designs must satisfy and how to evaluate them. “The views of the experts will be presented and explained,” says Natasha, “and then the panelists can make their decision right away or go home and consider it. What we are trying to do is to inform people who have no background on such topics, to help them make an informed choice.”

Panelists will score each of the four main design parameters of each design. The design with the highest overall score will be chosen.

To ensure it happens in an impartial manner, the whole process will be overseen by an Observing Committee, consisting of one member of the Working Committee, one from the Council and the Matrimandir executives. Members of this committee will not participate in selecting the design to be implemented.

Will it work?

Clearly, the organizers want to encourage a very different approach to garden design to the one we have seen so far, one that gives imagination and creativity a free rein away from the pressure of designing one of the twelve ‘sacred’ gardens. However, the initial brief would seem a bit daunting for an inexperienced landscaper. The fact, for example, that the existing contours have to be respected and the layout of the 12 radial pathways from the Matrimandir up to the Oval road, as well as the width of the paths, cannot be modified in this garden may be a dampener upon allowing the imagination to run wild. And would-be designers may be scared off not only by the reference to the ‘initiatory’ quality of this garden but also by the need to provide a Bill of Quantities as well as a site study, including analysis of the microclimate, geographical features, drainage pattern, etc.

Although the team point out that this is a standard requirement for all the gardens at Matrimandir and that they have already provided most of the data required for the design work, it does seem as if non-specialist architects or landscapers need not apply. And certainly not children….

However, an attempt was made to remedy this. Before the registration was announced, two invitations were extended in the News and Notes for people to host an evening or a morning of activities where people, including children, could share ideas about this garden.

“Unfortunately,” says Natasha, “even though people shared ideas via email, no one went ahead with hosting the activities, so we had to take their ideas in written form. We compiled it into a document called the inspiration material and put it in the application kit for all those who registered to submit a design proposal. All designers could use it as inspiration for their designs.

“We did not see a very involved participation from the community in the ideas stage, but we are quite satisfied with the number of people who have registered for submitting a design proposal.”

Other questions relate to how the garden design will be chosen. Will the expert panel, however experienced they may be in their respective fields, truly understand what Roger was envisaging for this garden? And what about the Aurovilian panel? Clearly, the decision to allow them to make the final decision reflects a wish to improve community involvement in the gardens, something that the Matrimandir executives feel has been lacking over the past years. But will it necessarily result in a better decision being made?

Much will depend upon the guidance provided and upon the intuitive capacity of the panelists as well as how seriously they approach this task. The danger of lobbying for a particular design seems largely taken care of by ensuring the anonymity of the designers and by the presence of an Observing Committee. Natasha points out there will be sketches and good visuals of the concepts. But even so, how many non-experts can look at a concept on paper and envisage how it will look on the ground?

And how many us, whether experts or non-experts, can assess, let alone understand, the ‘initiatory’ quality of a garden or truly comprehend the world of a child (which, presumably, is why the Aurovilian panelists are encouraged to ask children, or the child within, to answer the question on how well the design creates a sense of wonder, discovery and ‘inverted reality’).

Books written by adults for children are rarely successful because they reflect an adult’s sense of a child’s world. Will gardens designed by adults for children be any more so?

Having said this, the proposed process for arriving at a design decision is a thoughtful one that aims at balancing expert input with community participation. If it works, say members of the process core group, it may be used for making future design decisions on the remaining Matrimandir gardens.

Who knows, it could even become a model for community decision-making in other areas of our lives here.