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Saturday, September 19, 2009
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.
The theme will be Paradise.
From the competition brief:
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.
Returning to Métis/Reford
Sonic Garden
Poule mouillée!
Dymaxion Sleeps
Monday, September 14, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
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.
Sonic Garden
Poule mouillée!
Thursday, July 2, 2009
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!!!
The Hydrological Playground
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens is Soundfield by Doug Moffat and Steve Bates.
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.
Monday, June 29, 2009
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:
And hyper-modern geomet-o-rama:
And everyday objects given post-modern cooptery for high designery:
And algorithmic computerary:
And volup-terra-ry (see this one with bouncing, infectiously joyful kids):
And green-goism (though this one isn't overtly treebuggery):
And pushing-it-with-the-project-statement:
And rhythmametry:
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.
Go see (and play).
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
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.
Let us know if you have some information.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In the midst of wars, there are gardens. Here are photographs of three and their gardeners; all were downloaded from Defiant Gardens (the website).
Above is a photo Bill Beardall during his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970. In a letter to Kenneth Helphand, author of Defiant Gardens (the book), Beardall wrote about his “oasis”:
It had a calming affect on me to come back to my ‘hootch’ where, as a Marine Helicopter Pilot, after a long day of flying missions in the I Corps area to see a little bit of green growing by my doorway. What you see in the first attachment is early in my garden’s life. The bananas grew much taller, the periwinkles as well. The watermelon actually produced fruit, although by the time they were beginning to show any size, the Marines pulled out of Vietnam.
And:
Persistent watering kept [the bananas] flourishing, much to the amusement of my squadron mates and the Vietnamese workers in our area. The Portulaca [and] periwinkle [...] were for color, easy to grow, and satisfied my artistic need for a change from the olive drab of our flight suits and aircraft. The watermelon was simply a challenge and a wish for the wet lushness of the fruit. As small as it was, it was my oasis. Many a day or late evening I would sit on my ‘patio’ drink a ‘cocktail’ and enjoy the setting of the sun in the West. I could almost block out the medevac choppers going out and the sound of the artillery in the distance. I have never forgotten much from that war and never my oasis.
Several decades later, in another conflict region, one still finds evidence of this primordial desire to cultivate.
From Kabul, Lt. Janette Arencibia wrote to Helphand:
I have been here for three weeks and have a year to go. Other soldiers (including coalition forces) have been establishing gardens in this country for the last several years.
My job as a gardener is to share my passion with the other wonderful individuals who have already made Afghanistan more beautiful.
I am attaching a few pictures from a small garden in Kabul, specifically at Camp Cobra, an Afghan National Army base. This garden was created by an officer in the Afghan National Army with a passion for flowers. I listened to him passionately tell the story of the origin of the seeds.
One country over towards the east, another garden is passionately tended to.
From Sgt. Carl J Quam, Jr.:
I came up with the idea, along with Sgt Wanzek, because we were missing home, farming, and the joy of growing something. We had a spell when supply lines were all but cut by the insurgents, and I said we might be able to grow our own vegetables, since the MREs dont have them and the supply trucks werent making it to our FOB. Friends of myself and SGT Wanzek, named Nathan and Stacy Hoehn in Valley City, ND, had the seeds donated by the Valley City Nursery. The Hoehns also sent over some garden hose and a sprinkler, the sprinker we didn’t use. We learned from the locals to irrigate with deep trenches and let the water soak into the dirt in between. [...] At the time of garden prep, planting, weeding and watering, Sgt Wanzek and myself, along with the rest of our crew, were running 4-6 combat patrols a week, in 100-140 degree weather. When we came back to our area, we had a hard time getting motivated to work and weed, but we did. Like I said, it was good therapy to relax after a day of dodging roadside bombs, RPGs and escorting semi trucks full of unexploded ordinance over the worst stretch of road in northern Iraq.
We wanted to include the gardens tended to by detainees at Camp Iguana in Guantanamo Bay — yes, even those in limbo have gardens; with seeds saved from their meals, they were able to grow small plants like watermelon, peppers, garlic, cantaloupe and even a lemon tree about two inches tall — but unfortunately, there are no photos to be found. Perhaps you have some and are willing to share?
Defiant Gardens
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
We return yet again to the surface of the sun, its radiant energy locally reflected and parabolically concentrated onto a patch of turf somewhere in California.
From what we can gather, the photo above blazed through a sizeable portion of the interweb last month. And in all the blogs and forums where it was posted, there was one common point of departure for all of the discussions: that the photo depicts the constant and often catastrophic confrontation between Landscape and Architecture, with the former clearly loosing to its “foe.”
Obviously, we will digress.
The overriding narrative here isn't “architecture gone wrong” or “landscaping gone wrong”, and it's definitely not “building architecture vs. landscape architecture”. And certainly no one is reenacting psychotically disturbed periods of their childhood, involving ants and a magnifying glass. No one, too, is attempting to infuse in the workplace a sense of domesticity, collegiality, community and patriotism by infrastructurally facilitating American-style barbecue picnics.
In actuality, both architect and landscape architect are paying homage to Ancien Régime garden design. Specifically, with their purposefully programmed failures — Landscape as a water-guzzling lawn in hydrologically-challenged California; Architecture positioned in a gas-guzzling solar orientation — the two have conspired to create dazzling arabesque parterres.
Blackened curlicues. Charcoaled guillochés. The nearly dead and the really dead resolving into patterns of rosettes and sunbursts. Grassless geometries, muddied or parched and cracking. The Tuileries gardens etched in full scale by Apollo.
Of course, we cannot really talk about parabolic façades without briefly mentioning The Temple at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign. Housed inside this campus building are the various studios, faculty offices and main offices of the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. And for three excruciating and glorious years, it was our de facto home.
Of interest here is its west side. Although not that apparent in the photos above, in person, it's noticeably parabolic. And not only is it curved, but it's curved to a more southwestern orientation. In other words, during the steamy Midwestern summer months, that part of the building—a whole side made entirely of glass—faces the sun during the hottest part of the day.
Call it a greenhouse with AC, and we won't object.
Meanwhile, we're not sure if “sustainability” had made its way into department curricula when it was built over ten years ago, but now that it has, the building must now seem to the faculty as the worst building to teach “green practices” in. Or maybe it is, since here is a perfect example to use to illustrate solar orientation and climate design, key concepts in old school regionalism, which if properly considered and taken advantage of, you can probably save a lot on heating and coolings bills before you even think about wind turbines and green roofs.
