Personal Eden by Edward James

/ Landscape /
"Las Pozas" is a garden in the jungles of Mexico, the creation of sculptor and artist Edward James, rightfully considered the most striking example of surrealist architecture.

Salvador Dalí called Edward James "more insane than all the surrealists put together", and James himself considered himself the grandson of King Edward VII of Great Britain.

Edward was born in the family of Evelyn Forbes, who came from an old noble family, and William Dodge James, the heir of a trading magnate. The story of an aristocratic family deserves to become the basis for a novel. Edward's childhood and youth were spent in the West Dean House estate, in the county of Sussex, surrounded by beech forests and spacious meadows.

 

René Magritte: Photo portrait of Edward James, repeating the composition of the painting "On the threshold of freedom", 1937. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the 30s of the XNUMXth century, rejecting bourgeois rationality, the Oxford graduate plunged into the elements of the surrealist movement. James was not just a friend of Dala and Magritte, but he supported the artists materially - buying paintings, paying bills and studio rent. As a result, his private collection of surrealist paintings became almost the largest in the world. And James sold most of it at an auction to invest in "Las Pozas", a garden that once appeared to him in a dream and pushed him to leave England, going on a trip to Mexico. Like all surrealists, Edward James believed in signs and prophecies.

"Oh, Don Eduardo, the white ash fell and burned everything!"

In 1947, in the city of Cuernavaca, Edward hired a guide - Plutarko Gasteluma, who told him about the picturesque surroundings of the village of Xylitla. There, while bathing in a river in the mountains of the Sierra Madre mountains, James received the second "sign" from above - hundreds of tropical butterflies, like ghostly nymphs, surrounded the bathers. Edward bought a plot of land with an area of ​​more than 30 hectares at an altitude of 610 meters above sea level. In this natural park there was everything that represented Paradise in the fantasies of a European - fragrant flowers, evergreen trees with sprawling crowns, picturesque waterfalls and rocks with secluded grottoes. And for the first two decades, this was enough for Edward James to feel happy and free from the shackles of civilization.

He dedicated himself to orchid breeding. Like a fanatical English gardener, he crossed local species with specimens brought from the Hawaiian Islands. But all the flowers were suddenly destroyed during a natural cataclysm - a snowfall in 1962. Returning from a trip to New York, instead of 18 thousand orchids, Edward James found a cemetery instead of a garden. There were no snowy winters in the tropics for generations, so there was no question of protecting plants and greenhouses, and the local residents did not even understand what was happening, they decided that the snow was ash from a forest fire.

After coming to his senses, Edward James decided that he needed a garden that would be eternal. Even when he went to Mexico, he did not stop communicating with his surrealist friends. His guests were artists, poets and sculptors. Evening conversations under the canopy of the tropical forest spurred James's imagination to create images of a stone garden.

A refuge for surrealists and ocelots

Gothic arches, labyrinths, stairs leading to nowhere, columns with lotus capitals, spirals and obelisks. Concrete structures unfold and twist like giant snakes, chaotically intertwining with each other. The mixing of forms and styles creates the effect of a monumental setting for a fantastic film and immerses the person who comes to "Las Pozas" in timelessness - whether it is a city of the distant future or abandoned ruins of Buddhist temples. Edward James did not want to obey architectural traditions, he wanted to create his own whimsical temple.

"I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies"

Photo: Julia Faveri
Photo: Victor Delaqua
Photo: Julia Faveri
Photo: Victor Delaqua
Photo: Julia Faveri

Some of the structures have their own names, for example - "Stairway to Heaven", "House with three stories that can be five", which, however, did not mean anything, since on any given day James, obeying his own whims, could call them new

Photo: Julia Faveri

About one and a half hundred local residents - masons and carpenters - worked on the construction of monumental structures. It can be said that for more than two decades, the eccentric millionaire was the main employer and breadwinner of the inhabitants of Xylitla. And in the evenings, if Edward James felt a surge of inspiration, he gathered local children in one of the rooms of the quaint "Cinema" building and arranged theatrical performances for them. "Las Pozas" became a refuge for dozens of animals that Mexicans hunted - wild cats, raccoons, porcupines.

Photo: Avery Danziger, 1978.

"I saw such beauty that one person rarely saw; therefore, I will be grateful for the opportunity to die in this room, surrounded by forests, a great green gloom of trees, and a green sound," wrote Edward.

Tragically, however, death overtook Edward James not in his personal, man-made Paradise, but during a trip to Italy in 1984. For several years, "Las Pozas" was abandoned, and the remains of James's collection were sold at auction to pay off debts owed to the builders. But in 2007, "Las Pozas" became the property of Xilitla - a charitable foundation created by friends and admirers of James to preserve his surrealist heritage.

Photo: Mikael Jansson, shoot for Vogue, 2016.

A source of inspiration in the Jungle style

The mysterious garden of sculptures has become a real Mecca for photographers, architects and designers. They come to "Las Pozas" for inspiration and new "green" ideas.

Photo: Mikael Jansson
Photo: Tim Walker
Photo: Tim Walker
Photo: Tim Walker

In 2013, the famous fashion photographer Tim Walker took a photo shoot for WMagazine with Tildoy Swinton in "Las Pozas". "Before coming here, I had no idea how big and incredibly ambitious this project is... This is the power of a dreamer," says Walker. In 2016, my colleague, photographer Mikael Jenson took a series of photos for Vogue here.

"Las Pozas" can be considered an embodied idea of ​​surrealism, as André Breton defined it: "Thought, (and in our case architecture) - without any control from the mind, freed from any aesthetic or moral concern."