That decorative workhorse of gardens since time immemorial — the water feature, pond scum included — gets a makeover in the Algaegarden, one of the new additions at this year's International Garden Festival at Les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, Quebec.
In the installation, an art/science/landscape collaboration between Synnøve Fredericks, Brenda Parker and Heather Ring, several different species of algae course through “curtains of tubes hanging from steel frames.” For the moment, the soupy mixture of nutrients and pointillist vegetation looks rather pallid, but the collaborators hope the algae will thrive and their colors grow bolder, like any foliage chromatically mutating through the seasons: reds becoming more vibrant, greens more lush, and blues turning bathypelagic.
“The algae, often considered a nuisance in the garden pond, here become an object of secret beauty and curiosity,” the avant-gardeners explain. “The garden leads the visitor to appreciate algae both as an alternative to oil and other energy sources and a source of food and nutrition.”
It's a technolicious pergola (or is it an archetypal labyrinth? an espaliered cyborg-plant?) providing a cool respite from our post-millennial angst over peak oil and peak food.
We've posted Hal Ingberg's marvelous pavilion, Réflexions colorées, at least a couple times before, and we're doing it again to alert our readers that Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens' annual festival of avant-gardening in Quebec is well under way.
As described by the artist, this “semi-reflective equilateral triangle (20 x 20 x 20 ft) provides an intimate, courtyard-like enclosure that both frames and intensifies the perception of the forest. Within the enclosure, the colour of the glass establishes a sense of spatial definition, while its semi-reflective surface creates surprising perceptual readings that change with the conditions of light and the visitor’s position towards trees and angles at which glass corners meet. From the outside, the installation is physically understood, but its receptor quality transforms it into an enigmatic object.”
From the edge of this precipice, you can eavesdrop on the “soundtracks of the life on the other side: cows from the pampas of Argentinas, commuters rushing among transit through New York City, the maritime life of Stockholm, and layers of history so audible among the streets of Berlin. These soundtracks pique the imagination of the visitors, transferring them away from China, away from the garden,” away from Alice's rabbit hole, and to more exotic locales, real or fantamagical.
“As tradition,” explains Topotek1, “a garden is a place that transfers someone into a ‘foreign’ space: from inside to outside, from city to nature, from one culture to another. This garden is the cusp at which two worlds are colliding, a foreign world entering China, defined by the visitor's imagination.”
One wishes the hole was an actual entrance to another satellite garden. Take away the glass railing so visitors slide down into the portal, sliding non-stop through the dankness and darkness of the earth before finally popping out a little soiled, disoriented and swooning from claustrophobia into the blinding light again, perhaps into a more lush landscape. For to enter this Eden, one must first endure the Abyss.
Paige Johnson works as a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. When not inventing new ways to fabricate nanobatteries and other advanced materials, she moonlights as an independent scholar of garden history. She has published articles on the “outlandish” garden hydroengineering of Isaac de Caus and the technological motifs of Art Deco landscapes, among other topics. Additionally, she maintains two landscape-themed blogs, Garden History Girl and Playscapes, both of which have given us some great material to blog here in the past.
Her current landscape research is focused on the strange and fascinating story of atomic gardening, a post-war phenomenon in which plants were irradiated in the hopes of producing beneficial mutations. Considering recent nuclear events in Japan and the ever ongoing concern for food security, it's a topic that's sure to resonate.
As a cap (albeit a delayed one) to our AtomicWeek earlier this month, we asked Johnson to share some of her research.
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Pruned: So basically what are atomic gardens?
Paige Johnson: After WWII, there was a concerted effort to find 'peaceful' uses for atomic energy. One of the ideas was to bombard plants with radiation and produce lots of mutations, some of which, it was hoped, would lead to plants that bore more heavily or were disease or cold-resistant or just had unusual colors. The experiments were mostly conducted in giant gamma gardens on the grounds of national laboratories in the US but also in Europe and countries of the former USSR.
These efforts utimately reached far into the world outside the laboratory grounds in several ways: in plant varieties based on mutated stocks that were—and still are—grown commercially, in irradiated seeds that were sold to the public by atomic entrepreneur C.J. Speas during the 50s and 60s and through the Atomic Gardening Society, started in England by Muriel Howorth to promote the mutated varieties.
It's easy to look back at it all as some crazy, or conspiratorial, plot. But the atomic gardens weren't a secret. They've just been forgotten. And it's clear from reading the primary sources that most people involved were deeply sincere. They really thought their efforts would eradicate hunger, end famine, prevent another war.
Pruned: What made you interested in unearthing the story of these gardens, which, judging from their lack of a Wikipedia article, are indeed largely forgotten? What is the compelling angle?
Johnson: I was asked to speak at a conference about landscapes of the 1950s. I had previously done work about the appearance of technological motifs in the Art Deco landscapes of the 1920s and 1930s and anticipated doing something similar for the 1950s lecture. So I started by searching for atomic references in mid-century landscape forms, but soon came across this much deeper atomic element. I was immediately fascinated, and frankly really surprised that the history had never been examined. If we think of modern GM as taking a scalpel to the genome, mutation breeding by irradiation was a hammer. Amidst all the debate over altered crops, surely evaluating the legacy of the atomic gardens could be useful.
I'm in no way starting from the premise that all modern ills are somehow a result of these mid-century experiments. Maybe they didn't have any lasting effects at all; I don't know yet, and the goal of the research is to find that out! But I do know that this information should be readily available so that the public can access it and make up their own minds, and so that future researchers, beyond me, can engage with the primary source materials.
I think one way that science has failed the public is by not making its results accessible, often with the implicit—even explicit—excuse that non-scientists somehow aren't smart enough to understand them, which is self-serving tosh. It's interesting that public engagement was desired, and sought out, during the Atoms for Peace program of which the atomic gardens were a part. It was a time when the atomic scientists who had been sequestered during the war began to speak strongly into the public sphere about their science and its implications, to enter the cultural discussion in the way that these atomic experiments—which are still ongoing—should now.
Plus, the atomic gardens are an amazing human story—with Muriel carrying around atomic potatoes in her hand bag and C.J. irradiating seeds for science students—who wouldn't want to hear about that? Muriel and C.J. were exemplars of a nuclear enthusiasm that hasn't been nearly so examined historically as has nuclear protest. It's fun to look back and laugh, to shake our head with hindsight, but the less comfortable part of it is to examine our own enthusiasms, to ask what their unanticipated consequences might be.
I'm a bit of a contrarian thinker. So I tend to not worry so much about issues that are being debated—like, say, oil, or even GM crops—as about the debates we aren't having. I was startled that the strongest contemporary similarity to the language surrounding the atomic gardens is the grandiose predictions that are often attached to the latest 'green' technologies. Going into a future that is more influenced by science and technology every day, we have to be absolutely steely-eyed in our evaluation of what someone says will change the world for the better. Even if we want it to.
Pruned: Muriel Howorth is a major character in this story. Can you elaborate her role in this post-war phenomenon?
Johnson: Muriel is one of my favorite parts of the story and my upcoming article for the British Journal for the History of Science is all about her nuclear enthusiasm. I was able to locate her remaining family, they're lovely, and they still have a trunk of her things which they made available for my research, and her own personal geiger counter!
The atomic peanut dinner party sparked Muriel's involvement with atomic gardening, but it was in some ways a culmination of ten years of work during which she had acted as a tireless booster for all things nuclear: forming two societies to promote atomic science to the layman, publishing books and a journal with the same aim, writing the biography of a Nobel prize-winner, and even staging a “Radioactivity Jubilee” and an isotopic pantomime in which she and a dozen 'Atomic Energy Associates' danced out atomic forces.
Muriel was also the only person at the time speaking specifically to women about the new science, and encouraging them to take an active role; she had a Ladies Atomic Energy Club whose aim was expressly to bring women out of the kitchen and into the atomic age.
By her own account, Muriel originally hadn't thought beyond serving the NC4X peanuts to her guests at the dinner party. It was only afterwards, seemingly disappointed with their reaction, and wondering what to do with the leftovers, that she thought of popping some in the soil to see how they grew.
The Atomic Gardening Society was really the final chapter in what was an unusual career of atomic and self promotion. Muriel is interesting just for herself, of course, but also as an example of atomic optimism which has gone largely unexamined by historians.
It's common, now, to hear about the 'others' of history. Muriel was a woman, and a non-scientist, but her greater otherness was that she was an incredibly enthusiastic player for the losing team—the side of the nuclear discussion that was eventually discredited. We never talk about the losing team. But as a historian I'm interested in what we can learn from these kind of 'others'.
Pruned: You have an aerial picture of one of those giant gamma gardens. First of all, what accounts for its circular layout? Can you describe some of the quarantine protocols the researchers used? At first I thought it’s surrounded by hedgerows and beyond are farmlands. But I guess it’s surrounded by woodlands.
Johnson: The circular spatial form of the gamma gardens, which in aerial view uncannily resembles the radiation danger symbol, was simply based upon the need to arrange the plants in concentric circles around the radiation source which stood like a totem in the center of the field. It was basically a slug of radioactive material within a pole; when workers needed to enter the field it was lowered below ground into a lead lined chamber. There were a series of fences and alarms to keep people from entering the field when the source was above ground.
The amount of radiation received by the plants naturally varied according to how close they were to the pole. So usually a single variety would be arranged as a 'wedge' leading away from the pole, so that the effects of a range of radiation levels could be evaluated. Most of the plants close to the pole simply died. A little further away, they would be so genetically altered that they were riddled with tumors and other growth abnormalities. It was generally the rows where the plants 'looked' normal, but still had genetic alterations, that were of the most interest, that were 'just right' as far as mutation breeding was concerned!
So far, I haven't been able to find much more about the wider landscape settings of the gamma gardens; they are still within the grounds of national laboratories, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Pruned: Outside of these laboratory grounds, where did the mini atomic gardens pop up? If the public wanted to start their own, would C.J. and the Atomic Gardening Society have been their only commercial source of the irradiated seeds? As a matter of fact, how would they have known about them in the first place? You mention that they weren't exactly a secret.
Johnson: There is much less documentation of atomic gardening outside the laboratory. C.J. was the only way for the public to buy irradiated seeds. I can trace the marketing of the seeds—at garden fairs, and in the back of magazines, in grocery stores, and through high school science clubs, which sold them as fundraisers. But I don't yet know who bought them, or how many, or where.
I also don't know how many people participated, but it was enough of a cultural moment to form the plot device for Paul Zindel's Pulitzer prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma-Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1964. The main character, the child Tillie, grows irradiated seeds as her science fair project and makes a speech about her project which ends: "Some of the mutations will be good ones—wonderful things beyond our dreams—and I believe, I believe this with all my heart, THE DAY WILL COME WHEN MANKIND WILL THANK GOD FOR THE STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL ENERGY FROM THE ATOM."
Paul Zindel was a science teacher. The play is still widely performed, but most people don't know that the irradiated marigolds were real.
Pruned: I'm curious as to how C.J. irradiated the seeds. What kind of equipment are we talking about?
Johnson: C.J. obtained a license from the Atomic Energy Commission for a Cobalt-60 source, probably similar to those still used in radiotherapy. He encased it in a small cinderblock chamber, into which he slid trays of seeds. He often showed his backyard “bunker” to tourists and school groups. That's about all I know so far.
I had high hopes of traipsing through Tennessee to find the bunker, but the site was incorporated into flood plain as part of a river project, and near as I can tell no longer exists. No documents have turned up on what happened to the source.
Pruned: What were some of the mutations these gardens produced?
Johnson: While the scientific experiments are documented pretty well in the journal literature we actually don't know what mutations came from the home experiments. The Atomic Gardening Society had the lofty goal of furthering scientific research. It was really an early crowd-sourcing, citizen-scientist movement. Very ahead of its time!
But obviously there are issues around properly controlling experiments in people's backyards, and there was no avenue to 'publish' results. A really interesting part of this investigation is what unknown progeny might be out there.
Pruned: So really there might be an atomic heirloom tomato that's now growing on somebody's allotment garden. They're thinking that it's strangely misshapen and uniquely pigmented because it's an heirloom, but in fact it's a gamma-mutated variety. It's a kind of amnesia, one that's actually fairly common when it comes to the foods that we eat. Pick any vegetable or meat at Wal-Mart or the local farmer's market, and more likely than not, there's a long history there of genetic manipulation that's largely forgotten.
Johnson: The atomic plant varieties certainly fit it with your 'food amnesia' premise; it would be rare for the consumer to know anything about the genetic history of the food we consume, much less if it came out of the mid-century atomic experiments. But the path from an irradiated seed, or a gamma garden, to the table can be anything but straight. Let's look at some examples that have made it to the American table, and tummy.
Mint oil from the peppermint plant, Mentha piperita L., is ubiquitous in things like chewing gum and toothpaste. Peppermint is one of many plants susceptible to Verticillium wilt, a fungal disease that cause stunting and plant death. Hundreds of thousands of stolons were irradiated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory from about 1955 on, and planted into wilt infested fields, ultimately resulting in the release of the wilt-resistant 'Todd's Mitcham' cultivar, a product of thermal neutron irradiation, in 1971. The exact nature of the genetic changes that cause it to be wilt-resistant remain unknown. Most of the global production of mint oil is now the Todd's Mitcham' cultivar, with an estimated market value of around $930 million USD.
Another readily available atomic mutant is the 'Rio Star' grapefruit, which accounts for 75% of the grapefruit production in Texas. They were bred solely to produce flesh and juice that is more red in color than previous varieties.
That's a pretty direct route; the genetic change produced by irradiation remains in the commercially cultivated variety, as my research shows so far. So yes, it is possible that someone, planting atomic seeds in their allotment, produced a plant with a genetic mutation that was robust enough to still possess the mutated 'feature' today.
Pruned: Lastly, you are a nanotechnology researcher by day and moonlight as an independent scholar of garden history. What brought about this fascinating career combination? Also, I'm curious how one career might be informing the other and vice versa.
Johnson: I think I just have a hungry mind.
There is no obvious intersection between nanotech and my garden history, and it started out as something of an indulgence; a break from science to pursue formally a subject in which I had an avocational interest. I even told my garden history tutor that I didn't want to write about scientific/garden overlaps, that I was tired of things technical and needed a break. But as soon as I read about the mystery of the rainbow fountain I was hooked.
How my garden history informs my continuing work in science is a bit more complicated; it is more influenced by my general interest in design of space, of which garden history is a part. At a very fundamental level, many nanotechnology problems are about the creation of appropriate spaces. There are load of papers published on new whiz-bang nanostructures, which one might think of as objects or sculptures. They're pretty and all, but what we need is negative-space structures, spaces that are architectures not sculptures, spaces that can be 'inhabited', and comparatively few people are working on that. These are things my study of design helped me understand, which has led to a patent for a hollow nanostructure, and another application for one that inhabits the hollow space.
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If you are in London on 7 June 2011, Paige Johnson will be at the Garden Museum giving a talk on atomic gardening, Muriel Howorth and the Atomic Gardening Society. Her article on in British Journal for the History of Science is forthcoming this summer.
Johnson is also planning to write a book on the subject; check back on her blog and here in the coming weeks for details.
There are still two weeks left in this year's International Garden Festival at the Jardin de Métis/Reford Gardens in Quebec, but organizers have already sent out the call for proposals for next year's festival.
Since time immemorial mankind has re-imagined the idea of paradise on earth through the garden and has imagined places of great beauty. These places, by evoking our senses, have pulled us out of our everyday world to experience the sublime.
What does paradise look like today?
By reading paradise in different directions (not only the religious one), designers are invited to frame the theme by using, for example, the notion of the landscape or garden as a metaphor and framework to support a story or myth, whether religious or not. Another direction to explore would be to frame paradise within the technical or pragmatic imperative to recover the world in its primeval state prior to the destructive forces that are perceived to be undermining the environment; the notion of the lost state of “nature” as a kind of environmental and technical ideal. It would also be interesting to explore the notion of Utopia, bringing the metaphoric ideas of paradise within the realm of the real.
Building on emerging practices in landscape architecture, we ask you to imagine your garden of paradise; a creation that will speak to the history of gardening, to philosophy, to religion and to history in general, as well as to contemporary society and to your own personal history. This contemporary garden should be considered as an exploration, an experimentation and a strong expression of community. It will be a complex landscape, living and responding to the human condition, a composition of natural and artificial elements that will give meaning to everyday life. Proposed projects must demonstrate through the use of new practices the role that landscape architecture may be expected to play in our current historical and social context.
The deadline is November 6, 2009. If selected, you will be given a budget of C$25,000 to develop and construct your installation.
When we posted this garden installation, called Dymaxion Sleeps by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell, along with a few others from this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, we only had that one illustration to use. The following day, thankfully, the duo sent us a few photos of their project as built.
The name of the installation comes from Buckminister Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map, whose form is used for the shape of the garden's horizontal surface. This surface is made of nylon safety netting by Creations Filion, specialists in circus and performance safety nets. It is taut when empty and becomes hammock-like once people get inside. Should one chose to relax or sleep in one of the triangular spaces, below are beds of aromatic plants — lemon geraniums, lavenders, peppermints, catmints, etc. — to help you unwind.
It's probably one of the few gardens in the festival that's easily transferable to a modest backyard garden. If we had a garden, we'd install one.
Or above a patch of rainforest, first spiraling around thickly trunked trees and then jutting out like tendrils above the canopy. Or out in the middle of the ocean, moored to floating buoys, a respite for pirates, climate change refugees and Pacific Garbage Patch docu-cineastes. Or above just about anything.
And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury.
“This garden,” they write, “takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.”
Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss.
This installation is called Poule mouillée!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.”
As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.
But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”
Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.
As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”
Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks to hear the soundtrack.
And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.
To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie down flat on the ground, on your stomach, your ear pressed against the soil.
And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.
Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year's festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.
While the gardens look rather inventive, something you'd expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:
It's interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call “the soft pornography of the flower.” The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.
This post is decorated with photos of Ken Smith's roof garden for MoMA. It is, however, about another roof garden in Midtown Manhattan, a student project by Martha Schwartz.
Because images of the latter are nowhere to be found on the web but those of the former now readily available after the publication last week of the ASLA 2009 Professional Awards, unlike before when such hi-res photos seem to have been all niggardly veiled behind a pay-per-view firewall, accessible only to a privileged few just like the real thing; and because both gardens are similar in type and context; and because Schwartz had also built her own synthetic garden a decade or so before Smith, we thought such appropriation would at least seem reasonable.
Schwartz's roof garden was in the very first slide lecture in our very first day as landscape architecture students. Because that was also the last time we saw it, our description below may not be accurate. In fact, not a single detail may be true, including Schwartz's authorship.
As stated above, this roof garden is sited on a skyscraper somewhere in Midtown Manhattan. The building is of medium height, because the primary audience are those in the upper floors of nearby towers, presumably the headquarters of hedge funds, investment banks and Fortune 500s. The framed views out through the corner office windows of CEOs and money managers towards the garden are thus a Picturesque construction of wealth and power.
Carpeting this sky garden in a sea of glass, a hortus conclusus many-times walled off from the chaotic hordes teeming on the spit-drenched pavement below, are perennials with different flowering time. They are arranged in a very specific composition, so that when April comes, for instance, the blooms spell out a word in bold colors: GREED.
When the flowers start to die, so will the word start to fade. But later in the year, when it's time for the other plants to flower, the same privileged few will then be privy to yet another botanical graffiti: MONEY.
A couple of things:
1) It's such a delicious thing imagining taking this speculative guerrilla garden for the capitalist 80s and actualizing it a year or two before The 2008 Great Conflagration of Financial Manhattan. In this Eden, amidst a future ruin, lies our collective demise.
2) Instead of broadcasting in real-time what you're doing or thinking or what's your current mood or revealing your ideological stance with a 140-character drive-by opinion piece on Zaha Hadid's flaming opera house before it becomes stale news 24 hours later, when past this mysterious deadline it's considered rather démodé and gauche to mention it in the digitized company of your uber-wired milieu, you stencil your thoughts into the soil with seedlings. Of course, most will not be able to read it when the words become legible, so they will have to wait until others photograph it and upload the image to Flickr or blog about it or make a YouTube video of it or tweet it. There's the so-called Slow Food. This is Slow Twitter. It's good for you.
But in any case, the ultimate purpose of this post is to ask someone to verify our memory of Schwartz's unrealized rooftop garden, perhaps even to provide us with some images.
Is there such a student project by her? What in our description is completely wrong? What key details do we not know? Have we embellished it too much over the years, augmenting it with our own ideas, even our own personalities?
For us, this is an important project. We may have only encountered it once, but it became a sort of ambient manifesto that passively guided us as budding spatialists. Our early design outputs, it could be said, were but variations of some aspects of this ur-garden. On several occasions, we outright imitated its attitude, the same tone that colors so many posts in this blog. Of course, there were other gardens and other landscapes that had equal influence during our formative years. We could refer to anyone of them as our ur-landscape, the one from which all others sprang, but Schwartz's was the first of firsts.
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.
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.”
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.
Has Frank Gehry's Millennium Park pavilion somehow uprooted itself and gone nomadic? Did it creep along — like a lumbering, mechanized Ent with chunks of soil, patches of lawn, some award-winning tree cultivars and bewildered dogs and their equally dumbfounded and shrieking owners still clinging to its ribbings — through the few blocks of busy downtown Chicago towards the Sears Tower, where it is now attached, as well as to other skyscrapers nearby, its structural profile reassembled, Transformer-like?
Or are these Chicago's new vertical parks, to where anyone in the buildings, from the chief executives to the accountants in window-less cubicles to the receptionists, can escape the unrelenting woes of the global credit crisis, there contemplating whether to jump or, better yet, change career and enroll in a landscape architecture program?
Are these, then, the solution to a critical shortcoming of green roofs — what of the façades?
Or was this Daekwon Park's entry for the annual eVolo Skyscraper Competition, a proposal “to reunite the isolated city blocks and insert a multi-layer network of public space, green space and nodes for the city?”
