“A Ditch With A View”
I’m Ken Smith. I’m a landscape architect based in New York City. I first came up to Metis in the middle of April when the snow was up to my knees to see the site because I needed to understand the site conditions first hand. But even in April it was very beautiful-- the connection to the river was very powerful, and I was really intrigued with this engineered drainage ditch that led out to the water of the Saint Lawrence River. Also when I was up here there were a number of these large mature Spruce trees that had fallen over with the weight of the winter snow and I decided on the spot to use them to make the rustic structures to support the window sashes, I had already planned on using. I went to a salvage yard in a snow covered pasture and found piles of these old window frames of various sizes that had been removed from a monastery that were very beautiful and also well crafted. So my impetus was to derive materials from the local region, both cultural and natural, and use them to construct a set of large frames in the landscape that would redirect one’s focus and redefine one’s perception of the built and natural landscape.
I was also very much interested in the idea of taking a space that’s not normally considered beautiful, like the utilitarian engineered drainage ditch, and to reframe it in a way that people might look at it differently and find beauty in something that’s actually quite ordinary. And so we built a series of three large window frames with spans of 24 feet that cross the drainage ditch.  They vary in height with the one closest to river having a height of 16 feet, the middle one 12 feet height and the one farthest from the river 8 feet height.  In this way they recede in scale the farther they are away from the Saint Lawrence River. Each frame is painted a different shade with white closest to the river and blue-gray in the middle and darker gray near the woods at the back of the site; this reinforces the frames receding away from the river. The installation takes a classical idea of framing the view of the borrowed landscape but uses a contemporary approach of appropriated materials and alters the subject matter by focusing on a common drainage ditch.
I think the challenge of the site was to capture the scale of the place because the gardens aren’t very big but the surrounding is big, the river is quite large, and it feels more like a sea than a river. You can look all the way across and can only barely discern the land on the other side.  For me the piece had to relate to the small scale of the ditch but it also had to relate to that much larger terrain of the river beyond.  So the scale starts small with the individual window sashes and gets bigger with the aggregated units in the large spruce tree frames to reflect that reality of the place.
I think the other thing that I did that was successful was to not use very much color in the piece. It’s basically shades of white and blue-gray or natural wood. Of course in April I didn’t understand this, but coming to the Reford Gardens in full summer and seeing the abundance of blues and greys in the garden tells me that that kind of blue-grey palette was actually very appropriate. There’s something about the sky and the gardens of this place that resonate in that kind of monochromatic palette, so I think that was a very good choice.