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 | 7 Comments »
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 »
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 lauraknopf via Flikr ]
March 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • birch trees • Illinois Institute of Technology • Rem Koolhaas | 4 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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.
Tustin Marketplace: Where Linens
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.
Tustin Marketplace: The barrens
Sheltering parking lot at the Tustin Marketplace
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.
Real landscaping with fake grass
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.
Tustin-henge
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 | 2 Comments »
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 »
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 »
A few weeks ago, walking on the UCSD campus, I noticed an interesting bit of agriculture taking place:
High-rise corn
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.
Aerial palm at the atlantis, Miami
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: Architectonia • architecture • corn • farming | No Comments »
