Stuart Gomes and Tom Carney both graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2022. They are going on to pursue their careers in architecture in Edinburgh and London respectively. Their thesis project A Garden for an Anchorite was a catalyst for a developing interest in capturing an understanding of existing infrastructures as a way to form new architectures, learning from ancient methods of cultivation within the landscape.
Working within the grounds of the island commune of Mont Saint Michel and the bay in which it finds itself, their thesis project has been built upon during a year’s academic research and design to formulate a response to its nature. A Garden for an Anchorite learns from the nature of the bay that surrounds the island and reinterprets it to give an imagining of a new provision for the ancient rituals that take place within the island.
A Garden for an Anchorite is a considered curation of landscape conditions from the bay of Mont-Saint Michel, re-scaled to the northern shore of the Abbey island. A series of granite and copper polders, sourced from adjacent quarry islands and copper mines, anchor a garden to a dynamic tidal landscape of silt flats. These polders, reclaimed field conditions in miniature, allow for the cultivation of local produce including oysters, mussels, bread and cider, providing for the daily needs and seasonal feasts of the Abbey refectory above. The various architectures within the garden, in turn, serve as the tools to harvest the ingredients used in preparing each meal.
With the setting of a new horizon cast to the ancient pilgrimage crossing of Genest to the northwest, apertures found within the island walls provide a series of cones of vision which capture specific landscape conditions from the bay, marsh land, polders, rivers, agricultural provisions and silt flats. In the Anchorite’s garden these conditions are re-calibrated, re-stitched, folded, unfolded, cut, scaled and re-scaled as walls and walks, harbours, fields, masks and stairs. Thus, creating a new parterre for the Abbey mount as a rich experiential field, a distilled environmental, geographical, cultural, religious and social terrain.
Existing landscape tectonics of the bay offer models of resistance and resilience for the architectural garden. The garden harbours both a vulnerable tethering and a protected anchoring of space as places for: cultivating, dwelling, crafting, sheltering from the wind, rain and tides. The project echoes life within the bay; its historical, religious, environmental, and social practices, all in a manner that welcomes the inevitable reclamation of the bay.
