User:Phillip John Smith/Gabriel Guevrekian

Gabriel Guevrekian was born by some accounts in 1900 (Imbert 1993, Marefat 2007, Turner 1996 ), by others in 1892 (Tscholakov 2007). The latter seems the more plausible as he received his diploma of Architecture in 1919 and worked in Vienna with the famous Architects Oscar Strand and Joseph Hoffman until 1922. He was born in Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and then moved with his family to Tehran before moving to Vienna to study. (Imbert 1993, Marefat 2007, Turner 1996) He went from there to Paris where he worked for French formalist and visionary Henri Sauvage initially and then in Robert Mallet-Stevens office until 1924. Among others, he also worked with le Corbusier, Andre Lurcat and Sigfried Gideon. (Imbert 1993, Turner 1996)

The modern gardens of Guevrekian and his contemporaries represented a shift from relating the garden to nature to a relation of the garden to human. As Dorothee Imbert says “Designers of these gardens did not attempt to represent a slice of the natural world – neither seeking a Cartesian or Virgillian ideal – but instead displayed a plastic composition of lines and surfaces built with living and inert materials, and framed like a picture.” (Imbert 1997 p.170) The garden became an extension of the house, an architectonic form.

He was actively involved in the early stages of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) which he chaired from 1928 until 1932, a position appointed him by le Corbusier (Turner 1996). The government of the newly formed state of Iran then invited him to return to his homeland. He served as its general secretary and design many governmental and public buildings.

However, his most interesting work all occurred in his early career in Paris where an explosion of art and architecture was reframing the post-war European society. Primarily an architect Guevrekian is best known for his contributions to landscape architecture. Surprisingly, he created only three gardens of interest all of which are considered Cubist gardens, none of which survived any length of time.

Garden Designs
The gardens were; his Jardin d’Eau et de Lumiere (Garden of Water and Light) for the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts; his garden for Charles de Noailles and Marie-Laure de Noailles at Hyeres on the Cote D’Azur and a garden for the Mallet-Stevens designed Villa Heim for the fashion mogul (by some accounts Guevrekian was also the architect of this house). (Desmoulin, C and Lyonnet, J)

Robert Mallet-Stevens had produced earlier works like les Roses Rouges which were hailed as jardin moderne and jardin d’avant garde. He also designed a garden for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. Through Mallet-Stevens, Guevrekian received an invitation to submit a modern rendering of the Persian Paradise Garden. (Wesley 1981 p.17)

Garden of Water and Light
The garden was an equilateral triangle broken up into triangular elements. In the centre were four tiered reflecting pools that sat below a rotating, internally illuminated sphere. These were surrounded by tiered plantings and hemmed in by two low walls of small triangles of glass in white and shades of pink. The sphere and the reflecting surfaces meant that light was reflected in all directions within the garden. By night the internally illuminated sphere projected light outwards enlivening the composition. (Imbert 1993 p.128, Adams 1993 p.32, Dodds 2002 p.185)

Avant-garde was just starting to receive public acceptance as a legitimate art form and Guevrekian used his painterly skills to produce a vaguely cubist plan design which was then realised as a collage with “plants regarded abstractly as textural and chromatic elements only.” (Imbert 1997 p.180) Although initially labelled in the press as a Persian garden, Guevrekian had “reached much further into the Cubist vocabulary of Braque and Picasso to create a completely original design.” (Adams 1993 p. 30) It eventually to become referred to as the Cubist garden and critiqued in light of such works as Picasso’s Man with a Mandolin as in Richard Wesley’s 1980 critique. (Adams 1993 p.30)

Readings of his work
Whether that was the artist’s intention, as for subsequent gardens, is hard to determine. As Imbert points out “due to the paucity of written evidence, the garden designers’ intentions remain largely undocumented; that they appreciated the implications of the cubist movement for their field, however, is most certain. (Imbert 1997 p.169) Criticisms of the work as being too literal a translation of, or direct reference to, cubist painting is both unfair and imperceptive (and usually based on Wesley’s critique or similar ideas). Although his primary artistic medium was painting, Guevrekian designed with more influences than cubist painting and a greater understanding of modern media and techniques than he is often given credit for. Also, criticism of the Paris garden shows a complete disregard for the Persian Paradise garden element which was his primary brief.

George Dodds provides this reading of the Paradise garden; “Paradise garden are idealised and isolated enclaves in which a water element representing the four rivers of paradise divides the space into four equal precincts.” (Dodds 2002 p.192) Given the very limited space that Guevrekian had to work with and the need for people to be able to parade past, Dodds reads the four reflection pools as being this element with the garden halved for convenience. “The early Mesopotamian settlers conceived of the sky as a triangle and depicted it as a mountain. The moon, which brought relief from the relentless sun, was depicted as a tree atop the mountain of the sky. As trees mark an oasis and the moon is a life-giver, so the sap of the moon-tree must be water – the elixir of life.” (Dodds 2002 p.192-193) Guevrekian uses the metal sphere as both representative of the moon and tree, a technique he uses in later designs. The tree feeds the “water” in the pools below and the plants beyond.

Dodds also reads the form as being a “straight-up” axonometric rather than the “shallow and compressed” perspective that Wesley draws directly from Picasso. (Dodds 2002 p.191) Guevrekian uses the axonometric, a popular architectural type where all measurements remain true in an idealised form. He develops this idea further with Robert and Sonia Delauny, whose simultaneist art he draws upon and whom he later works with to form the purist movement.

The main criticism of Guevrekian’s gardens is that he fails to truly translate the two dimensional medium of cubist painting into the three dimensionality of a garden. Indeed, is it possible to return a style that essentially compresses into two dimensions three spatial dimensions, and a fourth of time, back in to an essentially four dimensional medium? This criticism supposes that was his intention. Modern readings see Guevrekian’s awareness of the print media, of the transience of his gardens and their use as stepping stones to a future not yet visible. (Dodds 2002, Imbert 1997) This

His subsequent garden for the de Noailles shows a further understanding of the emerging art forms of film and photography. The garden was for a villa Mallet-Stevens was designing that had an imposed space whose triangular shape the client and Mallet-Stevens viewed as suited to Guevrekian’s new design style. Noailles had consulted both Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier before employing Mallet-Stevens. He wanted artifice in his landscape. The Villa commanded great views of the Cote d’Azur and Noailles wished to contrast this strongly with an enclosed and architectonic ensemble that framed the natural whilst delineating ownership. (Imbert 1997 p.130-132)

Misdirected Criticisms
Dodds notes the connection to surrealist writings of Raymond Roussel and Andre Breton in his use of water and reflection (2002). Contemporaries such as le Corbusier, Andre Vera, Paul Vera and Jean-Charles Moreau were all using similar techniques, drawing on earlier landscapes like those of Alexander Pope. Later designs influenced by Hyeres were the Veras and Moreau’s design for the Hotel de Noailles and le Corbusier in his Besteigui garden. (Dodds 2002 p.189) The use of Man Ray as photographer for the site, as the Veras had with the hotel design, controlled the views that the garden was judged from.

It was perhaps an historic and ironic reference to the Claude Glass of the English Picturesque that these gardens were emphasising the false and idealised nature of gardens. The main effect these jardins moderns had was to “extend the abstract, orthogonal order of the modern architectural interior into landscape. The connection to Cubist painting, Dorothee Imbert argues, was superficial, a matter of imitation rather than principle.”(Imbert 1997 p.11)

Valid Criticisms
Artistically, Guevrekian fails to make use of plants as the dynamic medium they are. His designs treat plants statically, planted full-sized, making no allowances for growth. The disregard for the needs of the plants in the Noailles garden and the differing growth rates soon disrupted the balance of the design and prompted Charles de Noailles, himself a famous amateur gardener, to replant the design entirely, not long after its instigation. It was, however, a progression on the Paris garden by its regard for physical occupation.

Guevrekian achieved his best rendering of a Cubist garden in the Villa Heim, another Mallet-Stevens house he designed the landscape for. The tiering of this house allowed Guevrekian to play with layering and composition in a way the other, flatter designs did not. Not to the extent that le Grain achieved in his garden for Jeanne Tachard but le Grain had imposed his modernist program over the top of an existing, traditional, spatially designed garden to interesting results. Strangely, this is the least documented of the three gardens. Guevrekian was well involved with the CIAM by this time and had distanced himself from the earlier designs both directly and polemically. He played down their importance in interviews and through the CIAM issued statements against the use of decoration and embellishment. CIAM was strongly Socialist and was concerned only with the function and logical use of architecture and the elimination of pure aesthetics. (Dodds 2002 p.197-198) These works of bourgeois decadence may at this point have been an embarrassment to him in his position as chair of CIAM.

In 1933 he returned to the newly established state of Iran on behest of the government. Although he designed many building in this time very little is documented. He created nothing of great note as practicalities in the emerging nation didn’t allow for the experimentation of his earlier years. He left in 1937 to return to France remaining in England for three years before taking up a teaching position in Sarrebruck. He then ceased work from 1940-44 refusing to work for the Nazis under the Vichy government in France. In 1948 he moved to America and worked at the University of Illinois until his retirement in 1969 (Marefat 2007).