I wandered around the grounds of the Burnaby Art Gallery on Sunday. It was Rhododendron Day so the grounds were teaming with families taking in the sun and activities. The Rhodo festival is hosted by the City of Burnaby and the Burnaby Rhododendron and Gardens Society each spring when the flowers are in full bloom. Hundreds of these woody shrubs and trees were heavy with blossoms of white, peach, purple, and red. The weight of the flowers was barely contained by the ornamental beds of the Century Gardens.
While meandering along the pathways, I thought about Lisa Robertson’s essay “Arts and Crafts in Burnaby: A Congenial Soil” (2000). In this essay, Robertson explores the design history of the site and its transformation from a strawberry farm to the Fairacres Estate in 1909. In keeping with the Arts and Crafts tradition, architects Fripp and Robert Sterling Twizell focussed on traditional building materials and techniques in the design of a retirement house and outbuildings for Henry and Grace Ceperley. The grounds were designed to echo the rooms of the house.
“Not only are the various traditional social spaces of the house legible in the external structure – these spaces are rhymed in their uses by various garden structures that visually extend outwards from the main axes of the house. From the line of the semi-circular morning room Twizell extended a rough log eating-pavilion; to the north a rustic and massive vine pergola quoted the function and structure of the verandah; off the gentleman’s lounge a terrace with game board mirrored the interior leisure space.” (Robertson 95)
The social functions of the house extended to include the outdoors blurring the architectural boundaries and transforming the pastoral into the domestic. The grounds were for picnics, games and gatherings: a place for family and socializing, a place for leisure and sentiment. “The Arts and Crafts dearticulated and mirrored boundaries rendering these two spaces as interchangeable social sites. ‘Lifestyle’ became the newest recreation.”(Roberston 97)
It’s interesting to consider the further transformation of Fairacre Estates into Deer Lake Park and the shift from the private leisure of the Estate into a place of public leisure. Many questions come forward for me; what are the similarities between the Arts and Crafts movement and the contemporary DIY movement, what language do we use to talk about growing food plants, how are these activities understood by different generations, how might a blurring between the rural and the urban impact food production and consumption? At this point, I feel there are more questions than time to list them all.
Planting begins next week…
Reference:
Robertson, Lisa. “Arts and Crafts in Burnaby: A Congenial Soil” Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2011.