Hay-Lo
Hay-Lo
Métis Garden Festival, Reford Gardens, Sur la Métis, Québec
Whether arriving from forest or field, we are drawn to the two structures. Ducking beneath a lintel built from the Bas-Saint-Laurent’s ubiquitous hay bales, we enter the circular rooms and are enveloped by the aromas of the forest and the harvest. The summer sun penetrates the oculus of the hay room, warming the soft void and enticing us to climb and play. In the smaller structure, the awakening scent of spruce needles reinforces a focused experience of the surrounding forest floor. The interior is coated with pine-pitch and counterbalances grassy smell of hay. We look up through a halo of ferns to the clear blue sky and cathedral of the trees beyond. In these gardens, we are invited to play for an hour in immersive chambers of sensory abundance.
Hay-Lo celebrates the primordial, sensorial aspects of the garden through refuge, enclosure and tactility. Using as its building block the cylindrical hay bale found throughout the Gaspésie region, we have created two distinctive and contrasting garden rooms, each relying on a simple dome structural system. Unexpectedly, Hay-Lo subverts the product of the mechanized harvest into something cultivated and immersive, built on the human scale.
Project timeline: 2019
Client: Métis Garden Festival
Scope: Concept Submission
Project Type: Garden | Installation
Size: 6000 SF
