GESTALT in the labyrinth
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For those of you just joining us, know that I have a seven-circuit labyrinth in my back yard. I started it Labor Day weekend in 2008 and “finished” it in Jan/Feb 2009. It has been a work-in-progress ever since. Let’s take a look at how the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS —> GESTALT —> SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION cycle works in a recent iteration.
My next-door neighbor has talked me into allowing the labyrinth to be on the Tour of Homes this October, benefiting the Children’s Museum down the street in the park, so I’m slowly moving into refurbishment mode. Part of that has been taking a good look at the northeast corner, which heretofore has been just kind of there.
I had already done some work there, corralling the plant life into two quasi-beds, plus putting down some flagstone to define the bench area. But it needed more.
(Bench built by my talented brother-in-law Daniel.)
First, a review: The southeast corner is the fire pit.
The northwest corner is a statue, the Dancing Faun, kind of a stand-in for the forces of Dionysus: primal, chaotic. (Apollo, the opposing force of rationality, has his own statue elsewhere.) This corner, too, could probably do with a little more focus, but cras melior est on that one.
(Always in need of tidying up…)
The southwest corner is a little step-down nook with a bench backed by my neighbor’s shed. The bench is a slab of limestone that had been a step into the kitchen outbuilding on the old homeplace of my wife’s family in Virginia.
And so you can see how the northeast corner could use some attention.
Without getting too hippie-woo about it, I thought that the bench needed something to set it off like the southwest nook as a spot to sit, look out on the labyrinth, and meditate/think/zone out. My first idea was to imagine a circle, the circumference of which touched the labyrinth and the person seated on the bench:
So I laid out an arc of bricks:
A view from the bench:
This was a couple of weeks ago. I decided to let it sit there and annoy me for a while.
And annoy me it did — the geometry was off, both visually and energy-speaking-wise. I futzed around with the layout of the bricks, but it still didn’t work. GESTALT kept nagging at me: what was missing? What was wrong with this picture.
I finally decided that the problem lay with the basic concept: putting the viewer on the circumference of the circle just made me feel on the outside of that circle, and that’s not good for the hippie-woo. A little bit of SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION later:
Enlarge the circle to include the whole bench. Simple enough. From there:
Dismantle the bricks.
Stretch a string from the center of the labyrinth to the back of the bench (axis).
Measure from the diameter of the circle, establish the center.
I spray painted guides for the circumference, but they were not accurate enough for my purposes. I ended up measuring a piece of bamboo — of which I have an abundant supply — and using that for my radius.
An interesting thing happened at this point. The bricks in the labyrinth are almost all from the old coal furnace chimney that was on the back of the house before we added on in 1993. I’ve had a stack of them to which I return whenever I add a little more landscaping, and with this corner of the labyrinth I returned one more time. When I expanded the size of the circle, I needed three more bricks — and there were exactly three more bricks left. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.
The completed circle:
But wait — there’s more!
What if instead of the solid circle we opened it up to the labyrinth:
Yes/No?
What if I made the radius the inside of the bricks instead of the outside, i.e., the circumference of the northeast corner intersects with the circumference of the labyrinth? That would be a more seamless visual, ne-ç’est pas?
And what happens to the interior of the circle?
More work is required.
