Performance Gardens – Entry Park

As a landscape architecture graduate student in the College of Design, Layne presented this master plan for the entrance park area to the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC.  Depicted in both model and graphic form, Layne’s concept included five sculptural gardens intended to provide student and faculty with both recuperative meeting spaces and outdoor musical and theatrical performance venues.  Each of the four gardens, the experiential pathways and landmark plaza are designed to act as outdoor stages and as locations for performance and ceremony for the purpose of increasing interaction between students, faulty, and the surrounding community.  Ascending the hill toward the campus proper, four performance gardens arranged in a sequence of historical periods depict Monolithic, Greco/Roman, Middle Ages and Renaissance historic periods.  The development transformation of these four gardens points toward the next step in creative human evolution, the hilltop-mounted North Carolina School for the Arts.

• The Secret Garden depicts a natural setting where man as hunter/gatherer seeks advice from wood nymphs.
• The Temple Garden reflects the beginning of agriculture when man builds in stone and pays homage to the Gods.
• The Keep Garden talks of a time when knights are all-powerful, brick is the building block of castles and cloisters, and food is grown behind garden walls.
• The Faux Garden expresses the controlling influence of the aristocracy who has the time and means to create houses of retreat using mortar an concrete set off by formal pleasure gardens.