The Finite/Infinite Garden is a collaboration between BAM and Peter Walker & Partners. It is defined by one device that creates two contrasting conditions. A simple circular parterre garden is bisected by a pathway lined with two walls, each covered with mirrors on both sides. Centered in the pathway is a line of Sycamores on a five-meter spacing. For the viewer inside the two walls the pathway and its trees are transformed into an infinite landscape by the ‘barbershop’ effect. The line of Sycamores becomes an orchard that multiplies into infinity. The cobble path becomes a datum that extends endlessly into the deep space of the mirrors.    

The exterior of the mirror path presents an opposing condition to the expansive infinity of the interior. The parterres, half-circles in plan, are completed as tranquil and uninterrupted circles in the mirror. A viewer rounding the parterres reaches a final gesture: two rows of slender Poplars create a secondary axis perpendicular to the Sycamores. In the mirror walls a puzzling alley forms across the circles of the parterre. The treetops of the opposite parterre mysteriously complete the images of the trunks in the mirror.  

The Finite/Infinite Garden recalls Peter Walker’s early landscape experimentations, aimed at finding minimalist expression for the landscape. Finite/Infinite is at once more grand, more global, and more cerebral. Walker workshopped with BAM in our Beijing studio using mirrors and model trees to outline fundamentals of the design. BAM carried the design forward through further model studies, detail mock-ups, construction drawings, and construction.