The Inhabited Garden: The Spatial Experiments by Bernard Rudofsky and Tino Nivola in the Nivola Garden on Long Island

The spaces of the Nivola House-garden on Long Island (USA) were created in the years 1949-1950 by Tino Nivola and Bernard Rudofsky as an impromptu design project, designed in the process of its construction. It is a set of outdoor spaces created gradually in a collaborative work between art and architecture, developed from the actual life which occurred in those spaces. The design is rather simple: an aggregation of architectural objects – free- standing walls of various dimensions, benches, wood screens, a pergola, a fireplace and an open air room – placed together with the vegetation, the existing trees and the path through the grass. It follows the paradigm of the idea that architecture lies in the reflection and experimentation with ways of living and inhabiting, rather than in novelties, such as new materials and new ways of building, as it seemed among the majority of the modern architects. The house-garden must be seen as an experience. To be understood, it is necessary to grasp it in its making, through the records that tell us about the process of realization and the life that took place here. This text aims to reconstruct the meaning of the project, starting from a dialogue with Claire, daughter of Rudofsky, which took place in August 2018, intertwining it with the reconstruction of the physical traces of the design project itself. The narrative accounts open the thematic sections and are then anchored to theoretical reflections and references.