The project: Der Garten von Las Fosses is a water and sculpture garden created by Markus Heinsdorff in 1994 on a historic estate near Agen, France. Architecture, water, light and landscape combine into a walk-in total work of art with walls, bridges, water basins and a seven-metre-high artificial waterfall. The project was complemented by works by guest artists.

Markus Heinsdorff and the Artists’ Garden of Las Fosses

That old farmhouses, with their stables, barns or wine cellars, are converted into holiday homes is nowadays a matter of course across Europe. Above all in old cultivated landscapes with a touristic appeal, such as Provence in France or Tuscany in Italy, entire villages and stretches of countryside with centuries-old agricultural structures have, in recent decades, been converted into holiday quarters and weekend retreats. In most cases, little remained of the buildings beyond the prettily polished-up outer walls; the farmyards or kitchen gardens around the house, however, generally mutated into garages, sun terraces or lawns with low-maintenance ornamental shrubs.

The artists’ garden of Las Fosses in Gascony differs fundamentally from this rural holiday-home prototype, found in regional variants throughout Europe’s holiday regions. It was designed in one sweep as a unified experience, not, like other holiday-home gardens, gradually adapted to the comfort preferences of its users.

Markus Heinsdorff, the creator of the walk-in open-air artwork near Agen, is a sculptor, not a garden designer. He has staged inner-city open spaces and large, representative halls in administrative buildings with mobile installations and machinery, thereby setting the three dimensions of space effectively in motion and raising them into awareness, artistically.

In the garden of Las Fosses too, Heinsdorff has grouped sculptural elements freely around the heterogeneous buildings; but the main work was to bring order to the previously almost chaotic ensemble, dividing the open space into precisely defined units of experience and function – in other words, revitalising and ennobling the archaic rural structures through a meaningful sequence of (in part quite novel) recreational facilities and garden elements. For the pictorial design of the buildings and gardens, Heinsdorff invited his artist friends Jon Groom and Andreas Horlitz. They significantly complemented the work in several details. The result is a multi-part modern “pleasure garden” that gently guides the wandering eye, that traces, in its individually characterised sections, the stages of taking possession of and cultivating landscape, and that thus conveys, with today’s pictorial means, something of the primal fascination that has always been at work in garden creations of the most diverse eras and cultural regions of the world.

The elongated plot of Las Fosses lies above a busy national road, amid fields and orchards on a gently sloping valley hillside. On the hill side it is enclosed by the long row of irregularly shaped old farm buildings. On the open valley side, a low, overgrown wall separates the garden from the fields. The view out into the broad Garonne landscape is at most restricted by the tall poplars beyond the wall. A centuries-old gate tower gives access to the garden’s square from the narrow side. Together with the almost defiant stone bar of the farm buildings, the gate tower awakens memories of the estate’s stately past. The small black-and-white square Jon Groom painted onto the plaster above the gateway takes the peasant heaviness out of the gate.

Markus Heinsdorff has taken up the architectural hints on the plot and worked them out, formally, with only a few interventions. Thus the seemingly accidental juxtaposition of agricultural relics gained an almost hierarchical order, one that repeatedly evokes archetypal garden forms in its basic structures. Walls – like trees, shrubs, stones or water – are among the basic elements of every garden form; indeed, it is the enclosure that first turns a tamed, cultivated piece of nature, a field or a meadow, into a garden.

In all culturally and historically significant garden types – be it the ancient Egyptian vine or fruit arbours, the “hanging” water and shade gardens of Mesopotamia or the Islamic world, the atrium complexes of the Romans, the monastery, castle and courtly love gardens of the Middle Ages, or the meditation gardens of the Far East, designed like landscape miniatures – the tall geometric enclosing walls and the set-in hedges and fences form the coordinates of the aesthetic green order. Where the terrain is sloping, however, masonry terraces and connecting steps provide an effectively staggered sequence of comfortably walkable levels. Above all in the Renaissance, which in turn drew on ancient villa gardens, grandiose garden artworks were created with elaborately levelled and walled terraces and stairway axes, in part on extremely steep hillsides.

In the gently sloping country-house garden of Las Fosses, two rose hedges and a parallel, low terrace wall accompany the level driveway that leads axially from the entrance gate to the residence and gives the otherwise loosely staged outer garden, opening onto the landscape, a geometric anchor and a colourful backbone.

For this part of the garden – it has the character of an orchard – Heinsdorff has created four sculptures. On the lawn terrace in front of the former farm buildings, a long, reclining steel wave corresponds with a rotating, upright round disc that glows blue on one side and bronze-coloured on the other – a pictorial homage to the elements of air and water and to the fertile farmland of the valley already praised by Hölderlin: “... greet for me the beautiful Garonne ...”

The damp, flowing element in particular, already heralded emblematically by the wave form in the entrance area, is repeatedly, imaginatively invoked and played through, like a theme with variations, in the garden of Las Fosses. On the tree meadow, an almost monumental steel sculpture makes its mark: from a ship- or lancet-shaped, extremely shallow water basin set in the grass, four towers of arrows, taller than a man, rise up, mirrored in the water but joined at the top by a crossbeam. This ship, itself filled with water and seeming to float in the lawn yet bearing a far too massive load, is an impressive modern paraphrase of that age-old, beloved theme which found its most beautiful expression in the playful rococo Navicella fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome; there, the bubbling water in the boat ironically invites passers-by to climb aboard.

Metamorphoses of familiar everyday objects are also the theme of Heinsdorff’s two other large sculptures on the meadow: the three-metre-high, slotted steel climbing frame in the shape of a vase, a hollow body that only gains a closed wall through the unfolding, clinging plant growth, thus growing into a vessel. Or the dovecote: a raised ring of sheet steel that one can climb into; through its rectangular openings at eye level, it offers views of the surroundings on every side, cutting a sequence of framed pictures out of the landscape panorama. The viewer, like a photographer, can choose the picturesque view for himself.

Here too, Heinsdorff turns a positive form – the dovecote tower, viewed from outside – into a negative form, to be experienced from within; as with the water-bearing ship on the meadow, the associated motif is, as it were, turned from inside out. And just as the masters of the romantic landscape garden kept open surprising vistas onto particular buildings across the naturally cultivated landscape, so too Heinsdorff, in his panorama tower, offers views that make the landscape a component of the art.

In the immediate surroundings of the house, that is, where life is lived intensively, the design elements become denser. Towards the valley, Heinsdorff has placed a terrace with a flight of steps in front of the house; it makes the slope perceptible and establishes the connection to the covered seating area next to the house and further in, into the square of the inner courtyard. Two fountains mark the transition from the outdoor to the indoor area, demonstrating, in an eloquent gesture, the passage from one form into another: from a tilted clay jug, water flows without pause into an upright clay jug of the same size; a hidden hydraulic system ensures that the miracle of the eternal gift of water never ends.

In the inner courtyard, the ship model from the front garden then finds its practical application. Resting on three stone columns is a heavy, massive, ship-shaped stone table, both of whose points appear to have been removed; they lie, flanking it, on the ground as seats. Into the surface of the table – in earlier times, the future was read from the entrails of fish – Heinsdorff has set a mosaic with four illusionistically hovering fish and a saying by Paul Valéry: “The wind is rising; try to live your life.” Once again, then, an allusion to the elements of life, water and air, which are experienced here in the open particularly intensely and consciously.

From the inner courtyard, a door leads across into the walled square of the water garden. There, all the design elements – buildings, sculpture, plants, light, air and water – enter into an intense symbiosis. To protect the old swimming pool, placed on the slope by previous owners, from the noise flooding up from the national road, Heinsdorff has had a six-metre-high wall built towards the valley; it fulfils, almost incidentally, a whole series of vital additional functions.

From the pool terrace, a narrow, open pavilion leads across, like a bridge, to the outer wall. It houses two heatable stone seats and a jacuzzi basin set into the ground, that is, a whirlpool which – to a design by Jon Groom – is lined with a zebra pattern. Set diagonally into the outer wall rising up the slope are two cubic structures. One – it contains two built-in beds – serves as a rest room and is accessible from the jacuzzi hall via a raised walkway. The other cube conceals the technical installations in the basement, but the changing room and toilet of the bathhouse above.

On the hill side, axially opposite the delicate jacuzzi temple, Heinsdorff has opened the low boundary wall in order to form an artistic piece of nature with boulders: a waterfall, over which the water rushes down right up to the swimming pool.

Here in the water garden, then, highly complex modern bathing technology corresponds with playfully deployed elements of nature; indeed, the artistic contrasts are consciously heightened further: directly next to the elaborate machinery of the whirlpool lies a small biotope, a water-lily pond, a piece of primal nature. In another corner of the water garden, banana plants stretch up into the air. Diagonally opposite lies a kind of wooden boat keel as a crossbeam over the gate leading out into the rear hillside garden – a further playful variant of the ever-recurring primal boat of Las Fosses.

The most memorable piece in the experiential landscape of the water garden, however, is the seven-metre-high lighthouse, which, despite its technically elaborate fittings, has an almost vegetal appearance, standing like a blooming mullein: on three tiers, one above the other, the light mast carries three lamps each, which open and close on demand like the “sleepy eyes” of a car; aluminium louvres, driven by small motors, rise and fall, sending an individually differentiated light into the nocturnal garden.

In this recreation zone, designed for intensive daily use, the design interventions thus become denser. The sculptural and horticultural elements gain a practical function, just as, conversely, the technical installations are brought into an aesthetic form and integrated into the design.

The plain cube of the rest room – the cubic “cave” in the noise-protection wall, with the coloured glass window designed by Jon Groom – gains, much like the rhythmically furnished jacuzzi hall, an almost ceremonial aesthetic quality within the sequence of open spaces around the house, one that goes far beyond its practical use. Beyond the bathing facilities, however, in the little-used rear part of the garden, the artist Andreas Horlitz has distributed five large white light spheres across the grass on the slope in such a way that the depth of the garden remains perceptible even at night. A poetic vision opens up: stars that have fallen to the ground form an image, a beautiful riddle. As a spatial designer, Heinsdorff thus comes quite close to that ideal of garden art valid in all cultural epochs up to Art Nouveau: the built-in elements of the garden and the horticultural design come from a single hand. Here, architecture and green planning were not, as is almost everywhere else the case, coordinated at widely separated planning stages, but, as in the famous garden creations of the Renaissance, the Baroque or Classicism, conceived as an artistic unity.

Before working in France, Heinsdorff had hardly ever engaged with horticultural or garden-historical considerations; nor did he engage with the cultural-historical peculiarities of the region beyond a few motifs. At Las Fosses he reacts intuitively to the contingencies of the terrain. The result is a garden with clearly differentiated, individually characterised zones of use.

In the landscape of the Garonne valley, shaped by the geometry of endless orchards – the plums of Agen are famous throughout France – the loosely planted, open tree garden with the steel sculptures appears quite unconstrained. This “English landscape park” is set off effectively from the “French-Mediterranean garden” in the immediate surroundings of the house: geometric forms – the axis of the driveway, accentuated by rose hedges, and the terrace walls – mark out the zones dedicated to the rituals of daily holiday life.

The almost hermetically enclosed space of the water garden, however, with its Japanese bathing basin, the artificial waterfall, the elementally reduced plant arrangements, the tall boundary wall, the light pavilion, the wooden walkway and the fan of light, lets Far Eastern garden and recreation forms shimmer through as a vision. The trail of light in the grass of the rear garden leads, by pictorial means, back from the concentrated recreation zone into open nature.

Markus Heinsdorff has proven at Las Fosses that artistic work within an architectural, open-space ambience can be far more than the usual application of prefabricated art objects according to the tiresome additive principle of “art in architecture”. Here, Heinsdorff engages not only with intellectual conceptions but also with the physical needs of the users; the objects become a sensory counterpart within a private world of experience. This pleasure garden is not furnished with collected art objects; it is itself a work of art. Its components were invented for the site and created on site; they invite sensory use. They fulfil their aesthetic function by functioning practically – and vice versa.

Gottfried Knapp