[ Lost in the Landscape ]

piece o’ history

Here’s the lat­est addi­tion to the gar­den, a small chunk of the House of Hos­pi­tal­ity in Bal­boa Park, a small chunk of San Diego archi­tec­tural history.

In the late 1990s the city reha­bil­i­tated the build­ing, one of many his­toric struc­tures built as tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion spaces for the 1915 Panama–PacificCal­i­for­nia Expo­si­tion. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a land­marks to pass into time immemo­r­ial. But the city has grown attached to these exam­ples of Chur­rigueresque archi­tec­ture, and the build­ings are actively preserved.

(“Chur­rigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan archi­tect José Ben­ito de Chur­riguera, who devel­oped a fairly elab­o­rate Rococo style of orna­ment that was picked up in Colo­nial Mex­ico. Bertram Good­hue and Car­leton M. Winslow, the archi­tects who worked on the Expo­si­tion, stud­ied the style in Mex­ico and brought it a few miles north of the bor­der. The over-the-top plas­ter details made for dra­matic and escapist expo­si­tion build­ings, but the details are high main­te­nance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the orna­men­ta­tion was falling off the build­ings and threat­en­ing to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preser­va­tion” of the build­ing went through sev­eral phases, and even­tu­ally employed the wreck­ing ball. The old House of Hos­pi­tal­ity was demol­ished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new build­ing closely resem­bled the orig­i­nal the old orna­men­ta­tion was removed from the build­ings and casts made. The new orna­men­ta­tion is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the orig­i­nal horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than land­fill­ing the old archi­tec­tural orna­men­ta­tion, the inter­est­ing chunks were sold off to ben­e­fit the preser­va­tion efforts. And it was on a fran­tic Sat­ur­day morn­ing in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggres­sive shop­pers I’ve ever encoun­tered to pick up this piece of local his­tory. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of his­tory comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The frag­ment was really cool, but it sat in var­i­ous cor­ners of the house and my stu­dio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to lib­er­ate the piece back to the out­doors. Here’s its prob­a­bly final rest­ing place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typ­i­cally go in for lots of gar­den art or pieces of fake Roman arti­facts sprin­kled around a gar­den. But I was happy with how this rel­a­tively small chunk of Bal­boa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the gar­den presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demol­ish­ing the orig­i­nal build­ing and dis­pers­ing its sur­faces the city has man­aged an odd sort of preser­va­tion. Zoos and botan­i­cal gar­dens some­times have the sad bur­den of keep­ing alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a build­ing that exists only in a fac­sim­ile of the original.

June 27 2011 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • places | Tags: architectural extinctions • architecture • Balboa Park • garden art • House of Hospitality • preservation | 8 Comments »

a visit to the l.a. county museum

Another quick stop over the hol­i­days took the form of a visit to the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

Installed at the new main entrance is this bat­tal­ion of 202 antique street­lights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Bur­den. Street­lights like these of course were posi­tioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced reg­u­larly. Clus­ter­ing them together like this accen­tu­ates that fact, and to me makes the whole instal­la­tion seem maybe just a lit­tle bit militaristic.

Arranged behind the Bur­den piece are some palm trees, the first plant­i­ngs of what will be a large instal­la­tion of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a sep­a­rate gar­den than plant­i­ngs inte­grated into the art and architecture.

Their trunks echo the posts of the street­lights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a reg­u­lar pat­tern. Also, as with the street­lights, they’re a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is South­ern California’s light, and the species of palms have been spe­cially cho­sen to gather and reflect the inter­play of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sam­ple ], and I’ll be check­ing back on this instal­la­tion as time goes on.

The whole ver­ti­cal shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s lat­est build­ing, the newish Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum, which has red exte­rior accents, includ­ing plenty of red columns.

The land­scap­ing in this part of the museum is inter­est­ing in that it uses palms or flat plant­i­ngs. Vir­tu­ally no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban plant­ing that in part seems designed to give the home­less no place to camp.

Most hor­i­zon­tal sur­faces, using decom­posed gran­ite or this Turf­s­tone prod­uct, are designed as walk­a­ble exten­sions of the con­crete paving. Where does the land­scape end and the urban fab­ric begin?

Here’s an inter­est­ing gar­den­ing aside: The Muse­ums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a sub­stance that has pre­served bones of saber­tooth tigers and woolly mam­moths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imag­ine try­ing to gar­den where dig­ging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in con­tact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a gar­den book that even begins to dis­cuss what to do with this kind of soil prob­lem. While the park con­tain­ing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plant­i­ngs seemed free of the muck.

My main rea­son for vis­it­ing LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassem­bles many of the works that were seen in the sem­i­nal 1975 “New Topo­graph­ics” exhi­bi­tion of land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. These works in the show sig­naled a break from the more roman­tic takes on what land­scape pho­tos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human pres­ence reigned supreme.

One of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers in the show, Robert Adams, often com­bines the roman­tic sub­lime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado” from 1973 [ source ], a great exam­ple of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human land­scape often fails to live up to the stun­ning geog­ra­phy where it’s sited.

See­ing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Pho­tog­ra­phy: Essays in Defense of Tra­di­tional Val­ues. (From this photo you can see that he takes “tra­di­tional val­ues” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snip­pet gar­den­ers and land­scape design­ers might like to think about.

Not sur­pris­ingly, many pho­tog­ra­phers have loved gar­dens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of dis­il­lu­sion.” Gar­dens are in fact strik­ingly like land­scape pic­tures, sanc­tu­ar­ies not from but of truth.

–from the essay, “Truth and Land­scape” in Beauty in Photography

In part­ing, let me move from beauty in pho­tog­ra­phy to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, back­lit by the after­noon sun:

(For another exam­ple of Burden’s work, check out the instal­la­tion of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 match­sticks that the San Diego Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art exhib­ited: The Rea­son for the Neu­tron Bomb.)

January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 8 Comments »

landscaping without plants

From my desk at work it’s less than a fif­teen minute stroll to this view­point, which has got to be one of the most famous places to stand in all of mod­ern architecture.

The view is of the cen­tral plaza of the Salk Insti­tute of Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies, which archi­tect Louis Kahn designed for his client, polio vac­cine pio­neer Jonas Salk. The plaza fea­tures this sim­ple water fea­ture that pulls your eye towards the water, 400 feet below, and to the hori­zon and the sky. The mate­ri­als of the plaza are reduced down to water, traver­tine mar­ble and the angled con­crete walls of the research buildings.

No plants. When Kahn was work­ing on the design he’d had a con­ver­sa­tion with Mex­i­can archi­tect Luis Bar­ragán. Ken­neth Framp­ton recounts Barragán’s sem­i­nal response in Stud­ies in Tec­tonic Cul­ture: The Poet­ics of Con­struc­tion in Nine­teenth and Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Archi­tec­ture:

“I would not put a tree or blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a gar­den.” I [Kahn] looked at Dr. Salk and he at me and we both felt this was deeply right. Feel­ing our approval, he added joy­ously, “If you make this a plaza, you will gain a facade–a facade to the sky.”

As much as I love plants, I have to agree that this was the right deci­sion. There’s an unpho­tograph­ably joy­ous expe­ri­ence of pure space that set­tles into your mind as you stand or sit to con­tem­plate the view.

If you can pull your eyes off the horizon–not an easy thing to do–you start to notice, how­ever, that plants do fig­ure in the plaza’s final real­iza­tion. Imme­di­ately to the east are some steps, and plant­ing beds on either side of the steps. As with a lot of mod­ern plant­ing design, the planters fea­ture one kind of plant and one kind only. Con­sid­er­ing the plant­ing design was exe­cuted many years ago, prob­a­bly in the late 1960s or early 1970s, long before the cur­rent focus on edi­ble land­scap­ing, it’s sur­pris­ing that the plant of choice was orange trees, at least four dozen of them. (Maybe it has some­thing to do with the envi­ron­men­tal ethic that was devel­op­ing while the Salk was being designed, an ethic that we’re finally redis­cov­er­ing today.)

Below is a 360-degree panorama from the top of the steps. Just imag­ine walk­ing west towards the hori­zon, at dusk, on a calm evening, as the orange trees begin to flower and scent the air.

April 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • edible landscaping • Lis Barragan • Louis Kahn • Salk Institute | 15 Comments »

hanging garden

These are the last of my Chicago tourist archi­tec­ture pho­tos, all taken on the cam­pus of the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Technology.

One of the two build­ings we looked at in detail is the recently com­pleted Tri­bune Stu­dent Cen­ter, which is located directly under­neath the ele­vated rail that cuts through cam­pus. Most archi­tects would have con­sid­ered the site a dis­as­ter and likely would have shied away from the project. Rem Kool­haas, archi­tect of the Seat­tle Pub­lic Library and some other recent high-profile projects, took the loca­tion as a chal­lenge and swooped in with a solu­tion so amaz­ing it makes your head spin.

Noise and vibra­tion would be the worst part of liv­ing below the tracks. But what would hap­pen if you made a big bur­rito of the train by wrap­ping the rail over­head in steel and con­crete? And what if you put holes in the top of the tube to direct the noise up to the sky? Here’s a shot of the exte­rior show­ing the tube and one side of the stu­dent center.

Inside, the cen­ter is a busy con­cen­tra­tion of col­lid­ing lines and angles. And when a train passes over­head, you can still notice it. Only, it sounds more like a home heater turn­ing on instead of a jet tak­ing off.

One lit­tle piece of repose inside is what Kool­haas has dubbed the hang­ing gar­den. Part bridge, part green roof, this long rec­tan­gle planted with grasses brings light inside and intro­duces some nature into the dark world of indus­trial surfaces.

Green roofs are by def­i­n­i­tion on the roof, so you don’t usu­ally get to engage them as directly as you do here. Drop­ping the roof down like this was almost as bril­liant as wrap­ping the over­head rail­way in a tube. Unfor­tu­nately, this is the only part of the struc­ture that uses any­thing resem­bling a green roof.

Here you see the hang­ing gar­den hov­er­ing over the tables of the cafe­te­ria. It’s a lit­tle hard mak­ing it out in the pic­ture, but it’s also a lit­tle hard teas­ing apart all the angles when you’re there in real life. This isn’t an archi­tec­ture that’s all about clar­ity and purity and minimalism.

Although it isn’t remotely botan­i­cal, I enjoyed this other lit­tle detail. An entrance into the stu­dent cen­ter goes through this big por­trait of Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, mod­ern mas­ter of clar­ity and purity and min­i­mal­ism. To enter on this side, you approach the por­trait, the auto­matic sen­sor notices your pres­ence, Mies’s mouth opens to let you in, and then pro­ceeds to shut tight behind you to swal­low you whole. Yum yum. (I’m not sure Kool­haas thinks highly of Mies’s work…)

Here’s an over­head shot of the whole cen­ter, based on the aer­ial photo at Live Search Maps:

Return­ing to things def­i­nitely botan­i­cal, here’s a lit­tle plant­ing of birches next door to the Kool­haas build­ing, at Hel­mut Jahn’s stu­dent hous­ing struc­ture. Whether it’s a mod­ern plant­ing like this or a clus­ter in a res­i­den­tial front yard, there seems to be some­thing about birches that makes peo­ple want to plant sev­eral of them together. Why is that?

Would a sin­gle birch look totally wrong? Would it be ask­ing a sin­gle tree to stand in for an entire for­est? Is this one of our unques­tioned social con­ven­tions, or would a sin­gle birch sim­ply be too trans­par­ent to hold its own? I’ll have to pay more atten­tion next time I run across more birches…

While you’re pon­der­ing this ques­tion, check out the land­scap­ing done at Renzo Piano’s Rue de Meaux pub­lic hous­ing project in Paris which uses many oodles of birches in its court­yards. This design doesn’t clus­ter the trees by twos and threes, but it sure does use a small for­est of them. [ Image by lau­ra­knosp via Flikr ]

March 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • birch trees • Illinois Institute of Technology • Rem Koolhaas | 7 Comments »

robie house planters

On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s land­mark 1909–1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately the foun­da­tion that runs it was in the mid­dle of a major ren­o­va­tion inside. Even through we were on an archi­tec­tural tour the only way to view the inte­rior on this day was stand out­side and peer inside through the stained glass windows.

Ooh… (Look­ing inside, off the sec­ond story porch into the nearly fin­ished space…)

Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)

Once we got that out of our sys­tem we had to con­cen­trate on the exte­rior of the build­ing and the gar­dens. I could think of worse things to have to do.

A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small gar­den on the side. It was win­ter and the plant­i­ngs weren’t any too spec­tac­u­lar this time of year, but the hard­scape details were worth a close look.

The thin, wide bricks of the house and gar­den walls all fea­ture this neat lit­tle detail: The mor­tar between the courses is the typ­i­cal light mor­tar color, but the hor­i­zon­tal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mor­tar. The effect is that you notice hor­i­zon­tal bands and not the indi­vid­ual bricks. The house swoops side­ways towards the hori­zon, and the walls do the same, cel­e­brat­ing the ever-expanding hor­i­zon­tal prairie that makes up the Midwest.

Sev­eral of the cor­ners of the porches fea­ture these styl­ized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman mod­els, Wright has designed them to swoop side­ways just like the house and walls do.

And there are sev­eral of these planters that explode with color in the sum­mer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters with­out drainage–something that comes as no sur­prise from an archi­tect who was obsessed with form over func­tion and noto­ri­ous for cre­at­ing houses with leaky roofs and sus­pended ter­races that sagged under their own weight.

As I reviewed the pho­tos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still some­thing like 9000 square feet if you count the out­door ter­races. All the out­door spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMan­sion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMan­sions go…

February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »

lurie garden in february

I’m not sure what I was expect­ing out of Chicago’s Lurie Gar­den in the mid­dle of February.

The core of the gar­den is a space con­cen­trat­ing on peren­ni­als planted by Piet Oudolf, and the win­ter gar­den was defined by what peren­ni­als do in the win­ter. Even though Oudolf has selected plants that main­tain strong pro­files into the win­ter, the gar­den looks like it’s seen bet­ter days. But really, that’s the out­look that the designer brings to the gar­den: Things change. Plants grow, bloom, die back. (Oudolf’s book Design­ing with Plants, after all, even has a chap­ter called “Death.” What feel-good gar­den book would even dare to acknowl­edge such a thing?)

The path through the heart of the gar­den was off-limits—I guess they were wor­ried about peo­ple slip­ping and falling on the frozen walk­ways. Still, you can expe­ri­ence the garden’s perime­ter with the Chicago sky­line behind it. There you see the died back remains of last year’s growth: tall, dark spires of fox­glove rel­a­tives (prob­a­bly Dig­i­talis fer­rug­inea or parv­i­flora); light brown clumps of var­i­ous grasses; del­i­cate, expres­sive cur­tains of bur­net (San­guisorba offi­cianalis alba).

No gar­dener can begin to know every plant on earth, so I’m depend­ing on my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the garden’s ter­rific plant list that you can find online and on what I know from Oudolf’s books to be some of his favorite plants. (Actu­ally, the Plant Life of the Lurie Gar­den pages have not only plant lists, but pho­tos and cul­tural tips on most of the plants in the gar­den. It got to be one of the most impres­sive online guides to a garden.)

Although prob­a­bly most famous in the gar­den com­mu­nity for the peren­nial plant­i­ngs, the Lurie Gar­den was actu­ally over­seen by Kathryn Gustafson (with other mem­bers of her firm, Gustafson, Guthrie, Nicholand) with input from artist/set designer Robert Israel. Gustafson con­tributed the over­all land­scape design, while Israel is cred­ited with the “con­cep­tual review,” sig­nalling that this is a gar­den of ideas as much as it is a gar­den of plantings.

The cen­tral gar­den fea­tures two sec­tions, a “light plate” and a “dark plate,” rep­re­sent­ing tec­tonic geo­log­i­cal forces. (Kustafson’s office is in Port­land, Israel is based in Los Ange­les. Both are loca­tions where peo­ple think more about geo­log­i­cal move­ment than they do here in Chicago.) Pro­tect­ing the gar­den on two sides is this giant arma­ture that will mature into a hedge that rep­re­sents Chicago as the city of “broad shoul­ders,” as made famous in Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem, “Chicago.”

With Oudolf’s plants now retreat­ing into the ground or only defined by ghosts of them­selves, it’s Gustafson’s con­tri­bu­tion that you notice most in the mid­dle of win­ter. The curi­ous struc­ture of dark steel with dark metal cables looks like a zoo pen con­tain­ing tightly planted alter­nat­ing blocks of dif­fer­ent arborvi­tae vari­eties and decid­u­ous horn­beam and Euro­pean beech. One of the decid­u­ous trees is inter­est­ing in that it that holds on to its leaves through the win­ter. As the year pro­gresses, I can see the decid­u­ous plants leaf­ing out at dif­fer­ent times, reduc­ing the con­trast between the ever­greens and the broadleaf trees.

The effect of the caged green­ery is an odd effect, for sure. Any clipped hedge talks about the con­trol of nature, and to put nature in a cage like this, like a botan­i­cal zoo, rein­forces that almost vio­lent act. It’s not a “pretty” effect, and I’m not sure I love it. But it catches my inter­est and rein­forces this as a gar­den of ideas.

In the end I guess my reac­tion to the Lurie Gar­den in Feb­ru­ary is sim­i­lar to what I feel when I hold a dor­mant bulb. I can appre­ci­ate the thing in its cur­rent state, but it’s the hope and knowl­edge of what it can do that really keeps me inter­ested. It’s not really fair to try to give it a fair read in the mid­dle of win­ter. Too bad I won’t be back every cou­ple of months to check on its progress.

If star­ing at died-down peren­ni­als and caged shrub­bery isn’t your cup of java, all you need to do to cross the street to the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. There you’ll find all sorts of amaz­ing art­work cel­e­brat­ing warm, green land­scapes, includ­ing this lily pond by Monet…

…and this Tahit­ian land­scape by Gaughin.

Paint­ings and so much of what humans do is all about per­ma­nence and things not chang­ing. We pur­pose­fully make things that resist change, whether it’s paint that doesn’t fade or Twinkies that will prob­a­bly remain as edi­ble in three decades as they are today. The gar­den across the street cel­e­brates what does change.

Give the gar­den just a few months. The peren­ni­als will be spec­tac­u­lar once spring gets going. And the “hedge” will fill in over the next decade and read more like a hedge than a zoo exhibit.

When you’re vis­it­ing the Lurie Gar­den you’ll be just a few dozen steps from Frank Gehry’s brawny new shell for pops con­certs on a lawn cov­ered by this lat­tice trel­lis structure.

And then there’s this sculp­ture by Anish Kapoor titled “The Cloud Gate”–which the locals have dubbed “the bean.” It’s major fun to walk around its con­cave and con­vex sur­faces that give you this cool, dis­torted reflec­tion of the skyline.

With its con­vex exte­rior and con­cave inte­rior, this is art­work that will make you look fat, a fact that this self-portrait can attest to…

I’m not sure whether it was inten­tional, but the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor sculp­ture and the shoul­der hedge of the gar­den all fea­ture steel–a mate­r­ial that makes pos­si­ble the sky­line that rises around them. Chicago with­out steel? Unthinkable.

And now, Chicago with­out the Lurie Gar­den, the Gehry band­shell and the Kapoor Cloud Gate? Unthink­able, as well.

February 27 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Anish Kapoor • architecture • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago • Frank Gehry • hedges • Lurie Garden • Millennium Park • Piet Oudolf • steel | 5 Comments »

a retail landscape

Here’s a post in com­mem­o­ra­tion of today, Black Fri­day, the day after Thanks­giv­ing when the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son gets going in earnest.

When one of South­ern California’s first Ikea stores opened at the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County twen­ty­ish years ago I was excited. I’d been over­sat­u­rated with the cheap, ugly depart­ment store mer­chan­dise that was avail­able in my bud­get range at the time, and the sim­ple and ratio­nal Ikea designs wafted in like a breath of Nordic oxygen.

The build­ings of the Tustin Mar­ket­place were dif­fer­ent from any­thing I’d seen at the time. They were huge and painted in intense col­ors of the earth. Although the archi­tec­ture shared some of the color sen­si­bil­i­ties of post­mod­ern archi­tec­ture of the 1980s, it was noth­ing like what was being done in sub­ur­bia at the time. The cen­tral land­scap­ing was also dis­tinc­tive: geo­met­ric, spiky, sculp­tural. Once again, this wasn’t straight out of the rule­book for how you do land­scap­ing for a sub­ur­ban shop­ping center.

I had seen designs by the Mex­i­can archi­tect Ricardo Legor­reta in archi­tec­ture mag­a­zines, and the com­plex in Orange County reminded me a lot of his work. Lit­tle did I know until fairly recently that he actu­ally was respon­si­ble for design­ing the com­plex. On my last trip up to Los Ange­les I made a point of stop­ping by the stores on the way home. Unfor­tu­nately, the Tustin Mar­ket­place hadn’t aged gracefully.

The Ikea was long gone. One of the main roads into the com­plex dead-ended at a stark earth-red wall, eas­ily forty or fifty feet tall, that bore the ghostly remains of where a Linens ‘n’ Things store sign had been removed. I’ve never vis­ited the pyra­mids of either Egypt or Cen­tral Amer­ica, but this is how I imag­ine it would feel: over­pow­er­ing, des­o­late, scaled to some over­in­flated sense of human self-importance.

It was late on a Sun­day morn­ing and most of the remain­ing stores were just open­ing up. It’s the time of day when you’re con­fronted with the acres of blank, blank, blank asphalt that make up so many of this country’s retail land­scapes. This is land that lies bar­ren and unused for fifty weeks out of the year and only springs into use for those few and intense days of hol­i­day shopping.

But not every­thing was over­whelm­ing bleak­ness. The park­ing area next to the food court sported this dense grove of palm trees. The space made me think of the agri­cul­tural groves where dates are grown Indio, south of Palm Springs, in their sense of grace­ful geom­e­try over­head and shel­ter from the ele­ments. Pretty good for a retail park­ing lot, I thought.

A few of the geo­met­ri­cal land­scap­ing details remained from the orig­i­nal design. In the first of these, the orig­i­nal slop­ing lawn had been replaced by one of the arti­fi­cial lawn replace­ment prod­ucts out there. It looks real enough when you’re zoom­ing by in a car, but even with its hype of look­ing bet­ter than Astro­turf, it’s noth­ing I’d want to have to stare at from the win­dows of the house.

And here, in the part­ing shot of the shop­ping cen­ter, a row of white mono­liths marks the tran­si­tion from the park­ing lot to the pub­lic street beyond.

So, is the Tustin Mar­ket­place a great exam­ple of archi­tec­ture or land­scape design? I’d argue no. Even though it’s right on Inter­state 5, I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit it any­more unless you need a snack or bath­room break from the free­way. But the com­plex was dif­fer­ent in its day, and I give it points for that. Addi­tion­ally, the land­scap­ing didn’t require much water to sus­tain it.

Inter­est­ingly, Ricardo Legoretta was behind the late 1980s redesign of Per­sh­ing Square in Los Ange­les, one of the city’s his­toric open spaces and a past gath­er­ing point for a diverse mix of the pop­u­la­tion. Sev­eral years ago I attended a con­fer­ence at the Bilt­more Hotel, which is located on the square. Even at that time Legorreta’s huge slabs of con­crete that had been painted pur­ple looked hos­tile and dated. Per­sh­ing Square was another of the architect’s pub­lic spaces that hadn’t aged grace­fully. There’s now talk of replac­ing the design with some­thing else.

November 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • Black Friday • drought-tolerant landscaping • retail • Ricardo Legorreta • shopping • suburbia • Tustin Marketplace | 3 Comments »

inspired by nature: how plants grow

This is the last in this lit­tle series of posts on how nature has shaped what we do artis­ti­cally, con­tin­u­ing on the post on the book, Inspired by Nature: Plants: The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion.

The ear­lier post talked about the overt nat­ural pat­terns that archi­tects have incor­po­rated into their works. The authors of this book also talk in more con­cep­tual terms about how the way plants grow could also help us under­stand how build­ings are designed.

One of the plant growth pat­terns is that of the epi­phyte, a plant that grows on the branches of another plant. In this way the sec­ond plant can gain access to higher lev­els of light high in a for­est. Just think of the many trop­i­cal orchids and bromeli­ads that use this strat­egy, liv­ing high in the tree­tops, enjoy­ing the brighter light and pro­tec­tion that a tree­top loca­tion affords.

Find­ing a par­al­lel in the archi­tec­tural realm the authors pro­pose this project by the Dutch firm, Kor­te­knie Stuhlmacher Archi­tecten. The Las Pal­mas Par­a­site sits on top of another struc­ture in Rot­ter­dam, The Nether­lands. By using the struc­ture below, this lit­tle green addi­tion takes advan­tage of the views and sun­light avail­able dozens of feet up with­out the need to build a tall foun­da­tional under­struc­ture to get it up so high in the rooftops. Although called a “par­a­site” even by the archi­tects, the project sits fairly benignly on its host, enjoy­ing the loca­tion, but not drink­ing up its pre­cious plant juices. To prove this point, the lit­tle struc­ture was dis­man­tled a few years after it was planted here on the rooftop, prob­a­bly with min­i­mal effect on the ware­houses below. [ source ]

A true par­a­site has a more marked effect on the health of its plant host. Plants like mistle­toe and dod­der use another plant for sup­port, as do epi­phytes, but they also tap into the host’s reserves and draw nutri­tion directly from it, some­times con­tribut­ing to the death of the host.

Archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lents of this are prob­a­bly a lot more com­mon­place than that of the epiphyte–You prob­a­bly have a neigh­bor with a room addi­tion or remodel that seems to suck the life juices out of the orig­i­nal build­ing. This book pro­pose a cou­ple exam­ples of archi­tec­tural par­a­sites, one of them being this Fire and Police Sta­tion in Berlin by Sauer­bruch Hut­ton Archi­tects. Here the bright red-and-green glass struc­ture hangs onto the frame of the orig­i­nal tra­di­tional brick struc­ture. I’m not sure it’s suck­ing the host’s juices dry, but it cer­tainly is mak­ing itself felt more assertively than with the epi­phyte above.

And the last exam­ple I wanted to share was one employ­ing the plant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the for­est canopy. The trees of trop­i­cal forests grow up and up, often cre­at­ing a thin con­cen­tra­tion of green­ery high above the for­est floor, with tall naked tree trunks sup­port­ing the high-altitude garden.

An archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lent is the Sharp Cen­tre for Design in Toronto, built by Alsop Archi­tects. This oth­er­worldly build­ing hov­ers high above the build­ings below, like high tree­tops hov­er­ing high above the shade-loving plants of the under­storey far below. [ source ]

Wild, eh?

None of these projects “fit it” in any tra­di­tional sense. The new build­ings don’t rely on mim­ic­k­ing how the exist­ing archi­tec­ture looks. But to me these build­ings have the same sense of happy coex­is­tence that well-paired plants in the gar­den have. You can appre­ci­ate the indi­vid­u­als, but together they make some­thing new and interesting.

September 24 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • places | Tags: architecture • inspired by nature | 2 Comments »

inspired by nature: patterns

I picked up a book the other day, Inspired by Nature: Plants : The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion, a trans­la­tion of a Span­ish archi­tec­ture book by Ale­jan­dro Bahamón, Patri­cia Pérez and Alex Campello.

It looks at the rela­tion­ship of plants and archi­tec­ture in inter­est­ing ways, from the conceptual–relating how build­ings are designed in ways that mimic plants, to the more overt–seeing how rec­og­niz­able plant forms are incor­po­rated into struc­tures. Here are some great projects fea­tured in the book:

Erick van Egeraat Asso­ci­ated Archi­tects. Dutch Embassy, War­saw, Poland. Photo by C. Richters [ source ]

Embassies these days have to employ pro­tec­tive mea­sures. The stem-and-leaf fenc­ing on this one is ter­rific, work­ing as a part of the over­all com­po­si­tion as well as serv­ing a defen­sive purpose.

Klein Dytham Archi­tec­ture. Leaf Chapel, Kobuchizawa, Japan. [ source ]

The vine-inspired open­ings on this wed­ding chapel light up at night in an amaz­ing way. And dur­ing the day the sun­light fil­ters into the inte­rior. The pat­tern­ing reminds me of the kind of designs you find on fab­rics and every­day objects. It’s cool to see it blown up onto architecture.

René González. Cis­neros Fontanals Art Foun­da­tion, Miami, Florida. [ source ]

Ceramic tiles give a strong feel­ing of stalks of bam­boo on the walls of this build­ing, but they’re abstracted in inter­est­ing ways. You almost might not real­ize that they’re bam­boo in ori­gin if it weren’t for the stands of golden bam­boo planted nearby.

All­mann Sat­tler Wapp­ner Architek­ten. Süd­west­met­all Offices, Reut­lin­gen, Ger­many. [ source ]

Leaf designs cut from metal sheets com­bine the reg­u­lar geom­e­try of a grid with free-form nat­ural shapes that defy being ratio­nal­ized into neat squares. The pave­ment under­foot also par­tic­i­pates in this inter­ac­tion of nature and human thought.

All these projects seem a lit­tle beyond my capa­bil­i­ties to pull off at my lit­tle house. But then that project with he bam­boo tiles might be just the coolest solu­tion for the new bath­room shower…

September 22 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: Allmann Sattler Wappner Architekten • architecture • botanical designs • Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects • inspired by nature • Klein Dytham Architecture • René González | 2 Comments »

plants in high places

A few weeks ago, walk­ing on the UCSD cam­pus, I noticed an inter­est­ing bit of agri­cul­ture tak­ing place:

Why let a lack of soil and a third-floor loca­tion deter you from hav­ing a nice crop of sweet corn?


My brain, short-circuited and junk-stuffed as it is, quickly made the asso­ci­a­tion to an illus­tra­tion in an archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine I’d looked at in the 1980s. The project was the Atlantis, a con­do­minium tower by the Miami-based firm Archi­tec­ton­ica. Aside from vibrat­ing with Mem­phis–inspired early-80s col­ors, the con­do­minium com­plex fea­tured this amaz­ing archi­tec­tural ges­ture, a swim­ming pool and a sin­gle, large palm tree planted in a cube cut out of the cen­ter of the build­ing, a hun­dred feet up.

Archi­tec­ton­ica. The Atlantis, 1982. [ source ]


Pretty wild, I thought at the time. And the photo still looks cool today. How would it hold up to a petite category-1 hur­ri­cane vis­it­ing town? I won­der. But hey, this is art. Who cares if the fab­u­lous car with tri­an­gu­lar wheels can drive you to the mall?

August 03 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: Architectonica • architecture • corn • farming | No Comments »