trees

Traditionally, the mash up of plants and buildings was an exercise in poetic symbolism. To wit: At the Princeton Ivy Club the mortared walls are well rooted for posterity–literally–with clinging ivy and the shelter of trees.

In the contemporary version, there's a new urgency: Faced not only with the necessity of making the most of our diminishing space and resources, how can we create more public greenspace as our potential undeveloped lands are disappearing?

Here are some ideas for making the most of our finite leftovers.

Besides visually expanding greenspace, plantings on building walls and roofs offer other advantages. Plants act as insulation against heat and cold, absorb rainwater, create wildlife habitat, and on a larger scale help lower urban temperatures and mitigate the heat island effect (a phenomenon of hardscaped cities creating more heat than the surrounding rural space). Plus, the ability of living plants to act as carbon storage batteries in an era of global climate change may be vital.

Interiors can be green integrated too.

The potential of green building is on display in this shop of Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester in the Gangham district of Seoul. The architect was Korean architect Minsuuk Cho of the firm Mass Studies. The building features include a planted façade and a moss-lined internal stairway. For a more detailed vision of the project, see here.

Photos by Yong-Kwan Kim

This building, the brainchild of Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, has been touted for its innovative integration of plants and architecture in a location especially known for its high temperatures, heavy rain, and sometimes day-long power shortages. The plants provide privacy while allowing for ventilation and natural daylighting.

More on this house here.

Below, more Vo Trong Nghia and his work in Viet Nam.

Here, Vo Trong's Wind and Water Bar: Not exactly a construction of living material but material that is only recently departed.

This planted façade is from a mixed-use building in Odawara, Japan.

And this, a banana plantation–or the modern urban equivalent–in the middle of Paris:

The urban forest in Tokyo: Quite possibly the future everywhere.

Originally designed most likely as a way to extend the use of precious timber, pergolas—going back at least as long as the Egyptians, say 3000 years give or take—were in their earliest forms coverings with spaced slats. Over these slats were grown vines or fruit trees. These covered seating areas would used in the more temperate regions as a cool respite for the sedentary pursuit of watching the wildlife from your back porch, de rigueur for the noble class of 17th century England.

Here, paradise and cocktails under the logs:

If their design began as a practical matter we've so long ago grown enamored by their sheer object beauty of the things that their essential function hardly matters anymore. We just love to look at them. Most of the great gardens have at least one if not more.

A stone cold rush of rustic with a mixer of Mediterranean:

Wine and pyramids under the shady green:

Detached from the natural garden and incorporated into the paved one, pergolas are often used as a poolside shelter.

The word pergola, originally from the Latin, literally refered to a "covered eave." It is part of a tradition that traveled the world. Moroccan style, below:

It's been argued that it was the Italians during the Renaissance who first  incorporated the shelters as free standing elements in their formal gardens. In Italian pergola means "a close walk of boughs."

Here, a constructed forest featuring roses and waterlilies.

As interpreted by Andrea Cochran:

Cloth will work nicely, too.

A more finished rendition from architect Daniel J. Lieberman:

Small is also good.

The room without walls:

The entry is the first impression. It prepares the viewer and guides them into the experience that follows.

(Photo below by David Lauer:)

As an architectural experience the entry can also effect those who may only ever pass by. It's the most important opportunity for establishing a home's brand.

Below, trees behind the house establish a setting while two smaller ornamentals in front create the illusion of the home being in a deep forest.

An Eero Saarinen house:

A UCLA study of Los Angeles middle class home culture found that the only leisure time residents spent in their yards, especially the fronts, tended to be involved in yard work. Yards tend not to fulfill their intended purpose in the stressed working lives of many. (They also found that few people park their cars in their garage, instead they use the space for storage of items they most likely will never use.)

Proof of how important maintaining the illusion is to us.

Orange welcomes among the cacti, heat, and rocks of Palm Springs.

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

Public outdoor space is dwindling. The age that brought us the great city parks may be well behind us. But the desire for shared green space remains. What to do?

Rather than hide in their backyards, some enterprising dreamers (disguised as designers and gardeners) have come to save us.

What they do is build green worlds where none existed before. Or sometimes they just better exploit what's already there.

One of the best recent examples of how this might work is High Line.

For decades Staten Island was a place infamous for its stink: Blame Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill in their midst. Closed to dumping in 2001, plans are now underway to transform this erstwhile effluvium ejector into a lush green space three times the size of Central Park.

This, from Melbourne, Australia:

Macro urban and micro residential:

Barcelona, Spain:

New Orleans:

The size of the garden isn't nearly as important as where it is:

The famous dining plaza of the Hotel Plaza Athénée, Paris:

A concept for Spiral Garden which is to be a self-sufficient vertical public garden as well as a place where social interaction, native vegetation, and urban orchards may coexist. The plan is to build them in cities and run them as a kind of public co-op. More info here.

The proposed vertical Dochodo Island Zoo in Korea:

There's much more to this than merely aesthetics. We don't have to look hard to find more urgent incentives: According to United Nations estimates, 80% of the world's citizens will live in cities by 2050. Swedish architectural firm Plantagon has an idea: The vertical greenhouse.

The greenhouse is a regenerating food bank making food production less costly for consumers and the environment. It also attempts to counter urban sprawl with a self-sufficient alternative. Plantagon's CEO Hans Hassle says this:

Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide.

More on this here.

Not that aesthetics aren't reason enough.

As George Carlin said, it's not about saving the planet. The planet is fine. It's the people who're f**ked.

Nature will get it back in the end. We may as well give in to it now.

The Nanyang Art School in Singapore: Not overpowering or separate from its environment but assimilating, like a good guest. As other architectural trends go long past their expiration dates, this building will likely remain as fresh as the evergreen fescue that covers it. Nature does that.

Garden styles may trend but they never date.

Picture and source Inhabitat.com:
The roofs create open space, insulate the building, cool the surrounding air and harvest rainwater for landscaping irrigation. Planted grasses mix with native greenery to colonize the building and bond it to the setting.

(The title is taken from Grass (1918) by Carl Sandburg.)

For plants, humans could be just another invasive species.

Michael Pollan argues that when it comes to choosing what goes in your garden the choice may be less yours and more the plants', Darwinianly speaking. It could be that unsuspecting humans are being duped by the corn, grass, and flowers no less than the have butterfly or the bumble bee.

We're outmatched: Humans don't even have as many genes as rice. At the very least, plants are smarter than we think. Sure, we humans have consciousness, we make tools and form societies, but plants have a powerful and ancient biochemistry that may have us outgunned.

The color, shape, texture, perfumes: Humans can no more resist this than the hummingbird can.

And so, the meadow: It may the best compromise between flora and two-legged fauna.

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon

Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon
Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief

We're late, darling, we're late
The curtain descends, ev'rything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

Speak Low, lyric by Odgen Nash, music by Kurt Weill

Speak low if you speak love.
- William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 2.1

If you're an American, born anytime after 1940, of middle-class indoctrination, you most likely lived a portion of your early life in some version of the tract house.

Vernacular suburban landscaping, as I remember it, mostly didn't do layers. You had lawns, trees, and something in between on the borders. The in between acting as a moat-like barrier between the house, street, and neighbors.

The photo above is from photographer Julia Baum. See her photo essay of maturing suburban homes here.

Layers give depth, illusions of space, and levels of interest that the suburban yards of my youth were crying out for.  A challenge beyond the reach of a mere lawn and oleander border.

Layers give space a visual hierarchy, not just of height and planar discontinuity, but also guide the eye to new discoveries.

As the elevation rises, plantings help break through the linearity and offer many surprises..

The layering can be horizontal and vertical, linear and non-linear.

Brazilian landscape architect and multi-hyphenate artist, etc., Robert Burle Marx was the master of layering. Above, he also uses layers in a horizontal graphic way. Above and below, an experiment with the patterning with stones and gravel and juxtaposing different grasses.

Marx goes all flat in tile and stone on Rio de Janeiro's Avenida Atlantica.

Japanese architect Tadao Ando and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Only the squares of the structures, water, and concrete walkways are needed to complete the vision. Any other details would be superfluous.