Sweet Farm (1994–1997)

The master plan for this 85-acre private park creates an episodic journey that heightens the visitor’s experience of the existing landscape. The project is comprised of a series of architectural, sculptural, and landscape interventions along a network of paths through a varied natural landscape. These interventions include picnic areas, a woodshed, tower, mink cage garden, and belvedere that serve to enhance and point out the natural and man-made landscape features, as well as the sensuous aspects of the site by making you look and listen in particular ways – as if you are seeing them for the first time. The project also considers temporal aspects which allow for a continuous reading of the site’s history – the time it takes for growth or decay; seasonal changes; and the use of the remnants of its various human histories – pasture, gravel pit, mink farm and logging.

This private sculpture and landscape garden now includes buildings, paths, sited benches, viewing platforms, and renovations of abandoned structures. The first phase of the garden was executed over a span of three years and was completed by the team in 1997.

This project has been hailed as a one where “the senses are sharpened by the perfect balance of artifice and nature” (Tony Hiss). It has been recognized in more than ten publications as visionary in its understanding of how architecture may blend reverence with presence on the landscape. An exhibition of its development, including photographs of the finished work, travelled across Canada from 1998 to 2000.This project uses architecture to both revere and interpret the landscape as a way of creating essential and sensory experiences.

 This project also demonstrates PLANT’s ability to make architecture that not only reveres the landscape, but also interprets it in order to provide essential and sensory ways of experiencing.