Contemporary · Systems & Incentives · Essay
The French Garden and the English Garden
Will Manidis · 2026
"New systems are usually built like French formal gardens — a geometry imposed from above that flattens whatever was already there — when they could instead be built like English landscape gardens, which study the existing terrain and work with what's already load-bearing."
Versailles was designed on paper before anyone visited the site — its geometry imposed on the land, the land's own contours flattened to fit. The English landscape tradition did the opposite: walk the ground first, then ask what it's already trying to become.
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