One of the principles that André Le Nôtre used in designing
these gardens is one called animorphosis,
which is a geometrical distortion principle that
allows things to shift in scale and look from a certain
perspective, extremely distorted and meaningful and then from
a different perspective sort of snap into it.
And the best example of this, for those of you know it,
is Hans Holbein's painting of the ambassadors
with that weird strange blob at the bottom, which if you stand
against the wall and look at it like this
snaps into being a skull.
So animorphosis was used for centuries
for hiding visual messages.
Le Nôtre used it to create a situation where from a certain
perspective, which was always stepping out the back door
of the Great Hall, the garden would look perfectly
proportioned as a painting.
And so it was meant to actually have a two dimensional
life at that perspective and because many of his guests
never went into the garden.
But then if you did.
It became a completely different experience.
It became huge compared to what you
saw so you had the experience that going out
into it paid off in some way.
Animorphosys.
According to angle and alignment, the garden owns it,
and the eye gardens down the eye sliding.
The observer is a precise spot that a human sometimes enters.
A garden is always seen from an extreme angle.
This is because we're not very tall compared
to the world, which runs out in breadth way ahead
of the vertiginous.
Thousands will remain, and even neck to neck will this align.
Stand here.
See that distant distance?
Stand there.
There's a way to compute the angle of incidence,
says Euclid's Eighth Theorem.
To real in the world, we need a single viewer said the view.
Who?
Said the person who never left the back door, who
is still standing there in the door frame.
I see a world so precisely distorted
that I sit on the terrace sipping champagne
with a friend, and as the lights come on the painting
grows within the trees and is the trees.
And if all of this fits within.
Le Nôtre used animorphosis to make the world come home.
Sad, cataract, in a music box, there is no animal that cannot
learn.