Convention tells us that architecture concerns the design of buildings. That interior design is what goes inside architecture, and the garden or landscape is what fits around that architecture. One might say that it is about time for some unarchitecture. Gardens and architecture have little in common if they are merely defined as moss and walls or flowers and windows, lawns and roofs or trees and glass. At the root of things, they are equally about sun and light from the sky. Where rain is allowed in and air passes through or about surfaces on which leaves may fall. They are both about change, growth and decay.
The idea of the garden room begins with the substance of context before the design of organisational space and space for the sake of form, a simple exchange of emphasis which prioritises the enclosure of context over the design of a mere building. It means that the garden is not something one designs around good architecture. Rather, that good architecture begins with the garden, when distinctions between in and out cease to predominate in the design of space. Unarchitecture begins when the building becomes an extension of its garden. Not because it cares less about the importance of good spatial organisation and flow, geometry or design theory in architecture; on the contrary, it merely establishes the garden at the beginning of its spatial theory.
It goes to say that unarchitecture concerns the spatial primacy of the garden room.
And it so follows that if unarchitecture is begun by the garden room, then buildings are about the unclosure of space. That is not to say that the concept of enclosure ceases to exist in the design of space, rather that the design of space is itself redefined. In this new definition, what has been identified by convention as the site, its boundaries and the building setbacks, cease to be seen as limits which bound an area, but are imagined as an unbounded volume in its context; urban, suburban or rural. Which is to say that the trees in and around the site, the house next door and the open fields or distant hills, the rising sun and the evening wind, become the cues, the primary bylaws to begin design by, within which building bylaws and the land office are both uncritical though necessary parts.
Architecture thus begins when lines are drawn to relate rather thanseparate. Walls only happen to accentuate the moments when they are absent. Doors and windows are placed only when they can be kept open, and where the outside, the garden and borrowed landscape flow in and through the building with the grace of a ventilating breeze. And surfaces are seen as the means to trace the passing of time. The garden room only finds life through time leaving its trace: architecture can similarly evidence its immersion in time through its garden, since the walls which unclose architecture are the same walls which enclose the garden room.
Unarchitecture is architecture's acknowledgement of its garden room.