Garden design is a kind of becoming, to become an arrangement that could be connected with the world. According to the theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, becoming-garden is a rhizome, which deterritorializes classic garden and then reterritorializes it when meeting residential system of modern architecture, drawing its own map along the line of flight to become a new rhizome.
The site of this project is located in a villa district in the southern suburbs of Suzhou. The client wanted to demolish the old house and to build a modern garden-villa. Most villa districts show a figure-ground relation, a house set in the center with bounding walls surrounded, so that a boring area is formed. The house is only a volume containing its interior and the yard is just a piece of open land without any spatial permeation between interior and exterior.
Our design strategies are firstly to split the whole into four two-story volumes, forming a central courtyard; then corridors are set alone bounding walls and pavilions are placed at joint points when needed, so that a main garden is formed in the southeast of the site, between the main building and the corridors. People enter the villa by the entrance in the northeast, going along the corridors, passing through the main garden, arriving at the central courtyard, or turn to the west firstly, getting into the central courtyard and then visiting the main garden in the southeast. The inner and outer space provide an interesting promenade experience and a strong layering feeling. The transparent façade of the main salon in the southern volume intensify visually the permeation between inner and outer spaces.
Another important issue is to utilize the vertical layout of the villa building, two floors with a basement, to form a three-dimensional garden. A series of courtyards and terraces are placed on the 2nd floor, which make people forget the floor; A “L” shaped swimming pool, a sunken courtyard and duplex space are set, which make people forget that they are on the basement floor. In this way the conception of “Floor” is fuzzified, there seems to be infinite spatial experiences in this limited building.
