urban meadow

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.

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.

Topiary, the art of clipping and training plants into desired shapes, has origins dating back to Roman times. The first records of topiary come from the Greeks but the word itself is from the Latin (topiarius). Romans displayed topiary in tomb paintings and there may've been some Persian influences as well. It's also likely that something similar was going on contemporaneously in China. The Japanese borrowed forms from China and started a tradition of their own.

We tend to think of topiary as plants shaped into whimsical forms, like animals and such, but this occupies only a small part of a long tradition. It was a Roman, poet Cneus Matius, who is credited with bringing topiary to the attention of Caesar Augustus. (Roman emperors have a history of having their predilections make epic impressions on world culture—think Constantine and Christianity.)

Once characteristic of the grandest European gardens, interest in topiary would wane, partly by vandalism and partly religious oppression: The great Roman gardens would be destroyed by the invading barbarian hordes in their zeal to destroy the Empire. The Dark Ages would have a profound effect on garden aesthetics, as pleasure gardens were repurposed as places to consider to contemplate God's power and not human vanities. Interest in pleasure gardens would return during the Renaissance in great part due to cultivation of herbs, flowers, and shrubs in monastery gardens throughout Europe. Geometric shapes were most prevalent, simple cubes, orbs, cones, and obelisks. The Victorian era would see another resurgence.

Traditional grandeur, above and below, at the gardens of Château-de-Villandry, France:

A hedge is a simpler, functional form of topiary intended to create boundaries, walls, or screens.

Below, hedges form an extension of the manor's heroic architecture.

Or a castle hall:

And more modern treatments:

The severe serenity of the well ordered Japanese garden:

Two view of the gardens at the Trentham estate, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire:

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

Grasses are sensual. You can smell them and hear them and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise.

John Greenlee

That sensuousness can be seen in the way grass moves in the breeze. How it blooms robust with color in the spring and goes dormant brown in the winter: As Greenlee might say, they're the essence of sex and death.

Grass is dynamic. It gives texture and balance, it can be sharp or fluffly. It's an ensemble player, a backgrounder, accompanist, or virtuoso soloist if need be. Its culturally polyglot: It's Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the American heartland. It's tropical, jungle, desert, lush, dry, sparse, and dense.

Below, the work of Washington D.C. based James Van Sweden:

Layers:

Meadows:

In contemporary gardens, it is the quintessential modern material.

More James Van Sweden:

It works in the meadow; it works in a pot:

Piet Oudolf's Trenthan Gardens:

The image of the transparent eyeball* has become a staple of nature mysticism: in the midst of wild Nature, the self becomes one with being... differentiation, alienation and struggle cease.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Below, hillocks in a field in Kyrgyzstan:

Hillock is a British term referring to small hills or knolls. This, along with hummock, are terms used more commonly to refer to bumpy terrain, such as the above which shows the effect of grazing animals on moist soil. These mounds can also form out of sediment collecting around decaying plants through water from rain, snow, tides wind, etc, as often seen in wetalands.

Soil covered ancient shell mounds in Palo Alto, California:

These, from Iceland:

Hillocks and hummocks have served as inspiration in design as well. Emerson's idea of the transparent eyeball was about absorbing nature, becoming its vessel and disappearing into its grandeur. Before nature we are nothing but spiritual antennas for the divine. Picking up that broadcast has taught us something about aesthetics too.

Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield in Mountainville New York was built over a former gravel pit which covers 240,000 sq ft and peaks at 15 ft in height.

Her work is also reminiscent of grazing lines left by cattle:

Life Mounds by architectural theorist, writer, and landscape architect Charles Jencks. This work is one of the commissioned pieces featured in the sculpture garden Jupiter Artland.

Lin's Wave Field at the University of Michigan, 1995:

A Danish landscape architect known best for his urban spaces, Stig L. Andersson admits an influence of Japanese culture. He calls it an integration of substance, space, and changeability. He goes bumpy as well.

Tufts:

The Jardim Das Ondas by Joao Gomes da Silva, Lisbon Portugal:

The legendary gardens at Marqueyssac:

*Yes, the transparent eyeball concept was inspired from a recent episode of Mad Men.

There are places and moments of such an absolute beauty that no words are needed.

And that kind of place is a garden. As opposed to going somewhere with the purpose of doing something, a garden is sanctuary. It's the ultimate nowhere.

A garden is a place for contemplation, but it's also a place for not thinking. Ideally, it's a place for feeling: To feel the wind and sun and gravel under your feet, to smell the flowers and soil and nature. And for seeing—not just with eyes, but everything.

A place to walk without a destination; A walk for walking's sake.

A meandering path a la Andrea Cochran:

"What I like doing best is Nothing," said Christopher Robin.
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's what people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, Nothing, and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh.
"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now.""Oh, I see," said Pooh again. "It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

Form The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

Nowhere is good. It's some of the best space on earth.

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.

Whatever we think is the way to a more spiritually fulfilling life—no matter our tradition, culture, or inclination—most likely it will never be found behind a glowing screen.

In guru-speak, the outdoors is where humans first met God (in whatever that means). Our ancestors were taught in the outdoors and every culture has its tales of pilgrims and heroes meeting spiritual fulfillment there. Often, it was the deeper into the wild, the deeper the experience.

Even on the micro-world of our own own gardens, it can be a space where "we can restore our emotional and spiritual balance and nourish our senses and souls, away from the noise of everyday life." The garden is a facilitator.

Early gardens paid worship to gods and the dead. Gardens in Egypt were often found near tombs of the elite. It may've been the Romans who first secularized gardens and treated them as an extension of indoor space. It could be said that gardens engage all five of the human senses in a way few experiences do.

More than anything else a garden is a portal, a passage into another world, one of your own thoughts and your own making; it is whatever you want it to be and your what you want to be.

William Longgood

Green is the fresh emblem of well-founded hopes. In blue, the spirit can wander but in green it can rest.

Mary Webb

Some of the ideas in this post were found in The Spiritual Garden: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors by Peg Streep and John Glover.

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.)