Every new town we have visited this week is the students' "favorite town." It's amazing how many beautiful cities there are in the world. Our visit to Hyeres today (pronounced like "yair") was to see two gardens. Castel St. Claire is the former garden of Edith Wharton, an American writer and expatriate to France, who lived in the house from 1927 - 1937. (Remember
Age of Innocence and
Ethan Frome?) Walking around her English style garden, one could easily imagine her taking walks there in between writing sessions. Her house sits high in the mountains with panoramic views towards the city, dotted with red tile roofs, and the Mediterranean Sea as the background. Lush, overgrown, and romantic, the students saw one of their first "gardens" as we moved to residential scale today.
Edith Wharton's garden.
The second place was Villa Noailles, a modernist garden discussed in every landscape history class. One of Marie-Laure de Noailles and her husband, the Vicomte de Noailles' gardens was the first to anticipate Cubism in garden design. Color and form are the main players in this garden with the plants secondary. The rectangular and triangular forms rise in different elevation to create movement amongst prisms much in the same way as Picasso's Cubist work. The garden is usually seen in plan and not typically visited at the groundplane. The house itself, though designed in 1925, could be mistaken as contemporary in its form and clean beauty. Cut outs on the large front lawn terrace frame views much like Edith Wharton's garden--in fact her home is only a short walk away. Another shows a view from the pool with windows that dropped into the floor. Because today is Good Friday and a holiday in France, the house was closed to the public. The curator of Architecture, however, graciously came to work for an hour today to give us a personal tour of the site.
Off the subject, but still about houses, I have a new working theory about why so many European don't shave their legs: the shower is too small to lean on and reach them. Just a theory.
Every new town we have visited this week is the students' "favorite town." It's amazing how many beautiful cities there are in the world. Our visit to Hyeres today (pronounced like "yair") was to see two gardens. Castel St. Claire is the former garden of Edith Wharton, an American writer and expatriate to France, who lived in the house from 1927 - 1937. (Remember Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome?) Walking around her English style garden, one could easily imagine her taking walks there in between writing sessions. Her house sits high in the mountains with panoramic views towards the city, dotted with red tile roofs, and the Mediterranean Sea as the background. Lush, overgrown, and romantic, the students saw one of their first "gardens" as we moved to residential scale today.
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