Seeon Monastery Master planning

The Benedictine abbey, founded in 994 A.D., experienced ups and downs in its 800-year existence in the individual epochs. But it has always remained a culturally and spiritually important place in the Chiemgau and is still the best-preserved island monastery in the foothills of the Alps.

History
After the great fire in 1561, the monastery developed under the abbots Dullinger and Kolb to high prosperity. Especially the 17th century recorded an enormous structural transformation process. The oldest historical plans from 1636 document this development.

For the character of the open space, three cultivated open spaces stand out on these plans, which were of course hard demarcated to the outside. Otherwise, the island was treeless - certainly until secularization. For the new formulation of the present open space the question arose, how much of the tree existence is to be preserved, so that the monastery in its remote effect still remains readable as structural jewel in a lake.

The second half of the 18th century as the transition from the Baroque to the Romantic period completely changed the gardens. Presumably, the monastery gardens remained in their original form until 1803.

The process of change of the designed open space - also in Seeon Monastery - took place in the first half of the 19th century. With the demolition of the bridge and the creation of a wide earth embankment, a new situation arose: from island to peninsula. And the copses that approached grew and the old picture disappeared.
In this context, I would like to quote Goethe:
"The romantic of a region
is a quiet feeling of the sublime
under the form of the past
or, which is the same, of loneliness, absence and remoteness."
But immediately afterwards he also meant:
"Classic is the healthy,
Romantic the sick."
"If the Renaissance garden was called a piece of alienated nature, the romantic garden seems to be a piece of sentimentalistically exaggerated and thereby finally inauthentic nature."
The question is whether this was in the spirit of the monastic idea.

Sketchy approach
With mental sketches we have tried to interpret the process of the different epochs with its overlapping stratifications in order to find an answer for the redefinition of the open space based on the old traditions and the new demands of a cultural and educational center on a monastery island.
The monument authority wishes an open space development as a romantic garden.
For the design this means a balancing act between monastic austerity and the free landscape-painterly composition.