Beyond modern organicism. Helen Fowler’s Gardens for the O’Gorman house (1947-56).

Abstract

Modern landscape architecture has figures such as Roberto Burle Marx or Luis Barragán as relevant references in Latin America. However, the work of women who worked on landscape architecture in the same time and context, such as Mina Klabin, Katarima Kramis or Helen Fowler, has been less approached. Developed at their husbands’ shadows, their works are often presented as a complement to theirs, rather than as a work by itself, thus their contributions has never been fully considered. The understudied gardens designed for the O’Gorman house by painter and botanist Helen Fowler are especially significant. Designed from an exhaustive knowledge of the terrain and the local Mexican flora, which the author studied with perseverance, Fowler’s work proposes an alternative to the way of inhabiting the basaltic landscapes found in El Pedregal de San Ángel, on the outskirts of Ciudad de Mexico. Starting from an organic relationship between home and garden, where the boundaries between the two are dissolved, Fowler’s work aims to go beyond the mere physical continuity. Instead of domesticating the territory through a landscape tailored to humans, the exacerbation of its exuberance, and even its own threatening aggressiveness, is proposed as a method of displacement of experience that, opening the way to new narratives that link the symbolic with the sensible, are able to build a new type of relationship with our environment.