Crack Gardens

(Tectonic fissures, colonized. Photo by Tom Fox.)

The ASLA Professional Awards were announced yesterday, and garnering an honor in the Residential Design category is The Crack Garden, by CMG Landscape Architecture.

Inspired by the tenacious plants that pioneer the tiny cracks of urban landscapes, a backyard is transformed through hostile takeover of an existing concrete slab by imposing a series of "cracks". The rows of this garden contain a lushly planted mix of herbs, vegetables, flowers, and rogue weeds retained for their aesthetic value.

Looking out of place among projects whose budgets seem crass in an age of credit crunch and foreclosure, an impostor in a cabal of slick hyper-modernity and conspicuous designery, The Crack Garden is a refreshing sight.


(Photo by Kevin Conger.)


(Photo by Nancy Conger.)


(Photo by Kevin Conger.)

Quoting the project statement at length:

“The Crack Garden is an exploration of the identity of site and the clarity of intervention. Pre-existing places have an inherent identity that is based on their history, materiality, and activities. The design is conceived as an intervention that functions as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it. The intervention can reveal the physical and material qualities of the place, and/or become a catalyst to incite new program activities. In the case of The Crack Garden, completely remaking the garden was highly unlikely because of the tiny budget. By fully embracing a strategy of design as intervention, the garden relies on its previous identity as much as it does on the changes that were imposed.

“The conceptual basis of The Crack Garden is to reveal the potential for beauty that underlies the concrete and asphalt that is the predominant ground plane material of the urban landscape. The interventions into the site of The Crack Garden were primarily actions of removal rather than the addition of new layers and material. By eliminating portions of the existing concrete and exposing the soil beneath, potential is released, and new opportunities for the garden arise.”


(Photo by Tom Fox.)

Perhaps inspired by the garden, a crack team of guerrilla gardeners will undertake tactical missions to etch similar tectonic fissures in the parking lots of failed suburban malls and abandoned inner neighborhoods of post-industrial cities. With pneumatic drills or with pick axes and some elbow grease, they'll wound the earth's (un)natural asphalt skin, so that forgotten ecologies may return and hopefully fester.

And if they can afford the grotesquely exorbitant registration fees, our gardeners will then submit their covert operations for next year's ASLA Professional Awards.

Rainwater Harvesting in Al-Andalus

(“Centuries ago the arabs were well known for their command of water management and, today, in this project the descent of surface water is embellished.” Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

The 2008 ASLA Student Awards were announced last month. As usual, to figure out which project to post, we filtered the winners through our blog's ratty crochet of thematic threads: but all remained. They're all interesting, intelligently described and evocatively illustrated. Unfortunately, we haven't the time to make individual entries for each one. We're still going to single out one, however, and maybe a second one later, for no other reason than it is by a student at a non-North American university.

That student is Marti Mas Riera, of Universitat Politecnica De Catalunya, Barcelona, and his project is a rainwater harvesting scheme for the Arabic Fortress Hill of Baza in Andalucia.


(Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

To understand the scheme, it's best to trace an imaginary journey a single drop of rainwater would undertake in Riera's recontoured hill.

So let's say it falls into one of the new gardens on the summit.


(Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

There, it somehow doesn't get absorb by the aromatic plants or seep through the vegetated spaces between the pavers. Instead, propelled by gravity, it rolls down into one of the “geometric fissures.” Once in these trenches, it is then channeled down to one of the 4 new plazas at the bottom of the hill via a narrow access path, on the middle of which is another collection canal.


(Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

This canal is connected to an overhang of unspecified stone material, through which our intrepid little drop enters the plaza in a temporary waterfall before it gets swallowed by little holes drilled into the basalt pavers. Under these pavers, below the plaza proper, is a water storage tank.


(Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

There, it waits until something needs watering.


(Image by Marti Mas Riera.)

Riera, then, has essentially re-landscaped the hill into a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, its complexly interconnected parts paved into the built environment as sculptural installations or infrastructural decorations. Rainfall, an obvious rarity in southern Spain and an event in itself, is further turned into a choreographed spectacle.

One can certainly imagine little kids making toy paper boats (or landscape architecture students on assignments and even us trying to recapture the halcyon days of our distant youths) and then letting them set sail from one of the canals atop the hill. Clothes soaking wet but bounding with joy, they will try to follow it on its journey, walking, running, strolling, stopping when it gets stuck to nudge it along, hurrying and slowing in syncopated rhythms, in fits of giggles and screams of delight.

In the Archives:
Programming (In)Security

After the Deluge, The Farm

(Image courtesy of Mossop+Michaels.)

For a more sober take on urban farming than Work AC's agro-fantasia, check out this project by Mossop+Michaels for a Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans. Today, it garnered a 2008 ASLA Professional Award.

Quoting the brief in part:

The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans, and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional Vietnamese way. The proposed market on the site will provide a location for the individual farmers to supplement their income as well as serve as a central meeting space for the larger Vietnamese community along the Gulf Coast. Based on the history of the markets in the area before Katrina, as many as 3,000 people are expected to come to the site for a Saturday market, perhaps more on traditional festival days. Specialty vegetables and foods used in Vietnamese cuisine will be sold at the market. Local Vietnamese restaurants will have a space to sell prepared food during market days as well.

Another goal of the project is to bring together the different generations with the local community through the shared endeavor of the farm and that the traditional skills and practices of the culture brought from Vietnam to America are passed down by the generation of elders. Thus it is also important that the farm also acts as a community center and areas for sports and playgrounds are proposed for the site. The community sees this project as the centerpiece for the rebuilding efforts in the New Orleans East.

If you're at all interested in urban agriculture, this is a good case study to review.


(Strange that no one is seen tilling the fields. Image courtesy of Mossop+Michaels.)


(Image courtesy of Mossop+Michaels.)


(Image courtesy of Mossop+Michaels.)

In the Archives:
On agro

Programming (In)Security

(Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

Winners of the ASLA 2007 Student Awards have been announced. Filtered through the jumble of thematic threads on Pruned, one remains.

It's the entry by Bret C. Wieseler, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He writes: “(In)Security explores a new design vocabulary in direct response to the climate of fear and paranoia that currently drives the program and aesthetic of much contemporary urban design. The project addresses the current and future state of security in and around the Wall Street financial district, creating viable security alternatives while simultaneously questioning our nation’s current philosophy that security = freedom.”


(It's THE TITHING, “a shallow, cor-ten steel” that's a cross between a public sculpture/vaporous fountain and a Medieval moat. Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

“Four security barricades were conceived. By creating thresholds into and throughout the district, (In)Security sets the tone for the experiences within this walled city. During the design process, archaic and contemporary methods of fortification were researched. Forms were explored as a result of the hybridization of the two. Each barricade is an investigation of both fortification and subversion; designing for the defense of each checkpoint, while simultaneously attempting to undermine it’s perceived raison d'être through a means of confrontation, provocation, or absurdism.”


(It's THE PRONGS, a “tectonic hybrid of tire spikes and medieval Abbatis castle fortifications.” Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

There are other projects that are equally great and worth mentioning here, but for those, you'll have to visit the ASLA website.

In the Archives:
Anxious Terrains

Silent Auction

(Drawings by M. Paul Friedberg. Minimum bid $200.)

Normally we're averse to this sort of things. When something is offered for a price, there is little desire here to blog about it. Of course we're not oblivious to the realities of the profession and fully recognize the financial requirements in providing resources for free. So we'd like to turn your attention to the Silent Auction at the ASLA Annual Meeting on 7-9 October 2005. The proceeds will support the development of The Cultural Landscape Foundation's free (truly a most glorious word!) film archive, Landscape Legends: Documenting Landscape Architecture in America, which will feature videotaped oral history interviews with practitioners who have played a key role in shaping the profession and the American landscape.

Some of the items are your garden variety project detritus. In a comical lapse of imagination, Michael van Valkenburgh, Peter Walker, and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander submitted items found on their office floor. (MUST KEEP SAYING: It's all for a good cause.) Fortunately, the rest are not merely beautiful, they reflect the artist's design philosophy. Laurie Olin's watercolors are phenomenal, and Peter Osler's photographs of landscape in the process of submission are truly marvelous. Richard Haag's illicit photograph of the 52nd reconstruction of the main Shinto shrine is not an Ansel Adams, but the admission of a supposed questionable provenance makes it quite personal and rather precious in a way that offering a simple project drawing does not but rather laughable. (It's all for a good cause.)

My favorites are James van Sweden's portrait of Roberto Burle Marx and Todd Eberle's portrait of Dan Kiley, rare insights into how artists see other artists. (Is there a portrait of Ian McHarg by Martha Schwartz or vice versa for bid?) They are rather engaging; we seem to be eavesdropping on their private conversation. Anyone who bids exhorbitantly on these should not feel shortchanged.

Landscape Architecture Merit Badge

After reading an article on three scouts receiving a Landscape Architecture Merit Badge [pdf], I decided to investigate the requirements. It seems that the process is quite involved, hardly casual. The first on the list is as follows:

Explain the differences between a landscape architect and a horticulturist, a landscape contractor, an architect, an urban planner, and a civil engineer. Give an example of the work each might do that is unique to that vocation. How might people in these positions work with a landscape architect?

How does one answer this without being overcomed by existential angst or mired in the politics over professional boundaries? In several states, lobbyists for civil engineering and architecture associations (and others, for sure) are always weary, if not hostile, over state licensure legislations for landscape architects, since these legislations typically list the types of activities that only licensed landscape architects may then only perform. Should road design fall under the purview of landscape architects or civil engineers? So perhaps merit badge recipients will come away with a defining landscape architectural trait: schizophrenia.

Other tasks sound like introductory assignments at any landscape architecture program.

Look at and study a place of worship or school grounds to find the place where most people arrive by bus or car. Show you can do the following:

A) Using a measuring tape, measure and draw the entry and its nearby area using a scale of 1/8 inch equal to 1 foot on an 11-by-17-inch piece of paper. Be sure to include the driveway and the wall and door where people enter the school or place of worship. Indicate any sidewalks, structures, trees, and plants within the study area. Make a copy of this plan to save the original. Do the next two items on copies.

B) On one copy, use directional arrows to indicate where the water drains across the site, where ditches occur, and where water stands for a longer period of time.

C) Decide on how you can make the place safer and more comfortable for those using it. Redesign the area on another copy
of the plan. You may want to include new walks, covered waiting areas, benches, space-defining plantings of trees and
shrubs, and drainage structures.

Would a cemetery count as a place of worship?

It is all approved by the ASLA, so perhaps a merit badge should qualify one for some college credit or substitute for an entire semester.

(Spotted at The Dirt.)