Terrace Magazine

COMMON GOOD JASON MCLENNON CHICAGO CITY FARM OUR SCHOOL AT BLAIR GROCERY

SPRING 2013

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IN THIS ISSUE

every issue

EDITOR’S NOTE

10

city in bloom

HOME GROWN

13

COMMON GOOD

17

a straightforward approach to herbal teas

washington, d.c.

FRESH

No.1 ‘13

22

easy strategies for arranging spring flowers and branches.

THE GUIDE spring fever calendar

ON THE COVER C HIC AGO CIT Y FARM chicago, IL page 37

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IN THIS ISSUE

features

30

CHICAGO FARM

37

GHOST TOWN FARM

a walk through the City Farm of Chicago, IL brings to light the sense of community surrounding the gardens

heads are turning for an unexpected goat and chicekn farm in the middle of a California residential neighborhood with a no—nonsense approach to farming

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FROM GREAT HEIGHT Senvironmentalist & architect

Jason McLennan talks about his award winning rooftop garden designs

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PATIO

a gallery of the best design solutions in patio gardening

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9 No.1 ‘13

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99 Osgood Place San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 743-9990 letters@terracemag.com

O W NER & F O U NDE R Lara Hedberg Deam PRES IDENT & PU B L IS H ER Michela O’Connor Abrams EDIT O R– IN– C H E I F Allison Arieff

O U R TE A M C R E A T I V E D I R E C T O R Claudia Bruno M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Ann Wilson Spradlin S E N I O R E D I T O R S Andrew Wagner, Sam Grawe E D I T O R – A T – L A R G E Virginia Gardiner E D I T O R Mara Holstein

AA S S O C I A T E E D I T O R Amber Bravo A S S I S T A N T M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Carleigh Bell C O P Y E D I T O R Rachel Fudge F A C T C H E C K E R S Madeline Kerr, Hon Walker,

Megan Mansell Williams

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E D I T O R I A L I N T E R N Christopher Bright

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D E S I G N P R O D U C T I O N M A N A G E R Kathryn Hansen

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EDITOR’S LETTER

city in bloom

12 No.1 ‘13

This spring, rediscover the beaty of nature in your city.

As I walk down the streets of New York, I see greenery amidst concrete skyscrapers and the juxtoposition of clean lines with organic greenery awakens a sense of renewal in the city. After months of grey this cold winter, it lightens my spirit to see the color New Yorkers embrace every March.

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Cras in sapien nec eros tristique bibendum nec quis neque.

Pellentesque vitae sem non mi rhoncus porttitor. Fusce convallis eros quis metus pharetra euismod malesuada nulla adipiscing. Praesent non orci turpis. Nunc metus massa, tempor ut rhoncus id, venenatis at orci. Nunc dui dolor, lacinia vel varius sit amet, malesuada vel massa. Mauris nec metus lectus. In eu urna ipsum.

Nunc euismod gravida urna ultricies elementum. Duis aliquam euismod tristique. Nulla scelerisque, lectus ut placerat ullamcorper, massa mauris facilisis felis, eu aliquam velit ligula sed ante. Nullam et tellus ac diam faucibus ornare. Curabitur luctus elit quis enim tincidunt condimentum.

In vulputate arcu a lorem dignissim et ullamcorper sapien eleifend. Nam lobortis augue non massa convallis bibendum. Etiam aliquam rutrum tristique. Nam eget eleifend ante. Etiam mattis felis auctor ligula suscipit a ultricies dolor pretium. Aenean in diam enim. Nam ac justo in justo pellentesque auctor vitae quis purus.

Aliquam nec leo vel urna laoreet accumsan id lobortis risus a ultricies dolor pretium.

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Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Phasellus dictum scelerisque tempor. Sed eu neque purus. Nam eleifend nisi ut quam rhoncus vitae ullamcorper sapien hendrerit. Integer placerat lacus eget leo volutpat ut ullamcorper justo auctor. Sed nulla elit, consectetur et aliquam a, dapibus nec nibh. Nullam facilisis enim sit amet elit rhoncus porttitor. Nullam dui eros, rhoncus sit amet eleifend ut, euismod eu augue. Ut imperdiet viverra libero quis adipiscing.

With love always,

Laura Deam

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HOME GROWN

HERBAL TEA Cut, hang, dry—it’s a straightforward thing to collect herbs for cooking. In a fall ritual for gardeners and cooks alike, plants are ferociously clipped at their peak to save for future cooking.

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HOME GROWN

Lemon Spiced Pear

21/2 cups cold water, preferably filtered 1 teaspoon dried lemon thyme 1 teaspoon dried lemon verbena 1 teaspoon dried lemon balm 1 tablespoon fresh ginger, thinly sliced 4 tablespoons fresh pear, finely chopped 1 teaspoon wildflower honey HEAT

cold water to a full boil. Place the lemon thyme, lemon verbena, and lemon balm into the infuser of a small teapot. Pour the boiling water over the herbs and let steep for 5 minutes while covered. Remove the infuser; reserve herbs and flowers for a second steep. Add herb-infused liquid to a pot on the stove over medium heat and bring to a boil. Add ginger and pear and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 15 minutes. Remove ginger and pear, and stir in honey.

Serve in two cups while still steaming.

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Cardamom Blossoms

2 cups cold water, preferably filtered 1 teaspoon dried mint 1 teaspoon dried lavender flowers 1 teaspoon dried chamomile flowers 1 teaspoon green cardamom pods, crushed 1/2 teaspoon orange blossom water HEAT

cold water to a full boil. Place the mint, lavender flowers, chamomile flowers, and crushed green cardamom pods and seeds into the infuser of a small teapot. Pour the boiling water over the herbs and flowers and let steep for 7 minutes while covered. Remove the infuser; reserve herbs and flowers for a second steep. Add a splash of the orange blossom water and stir. Serve in two cups while still steaming.

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COMMON GROUND

WATTLES COMMUNITY GARDEN los angeles, california written by: Gates Fisher

Owner John Wattles takes us on a tour of the community garden on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon.

Up the slope from Hollywood Boulevard, along the edge of a wide hiking path where Los Angeles residents get their daily exercise, a dense cluster of avocado trees casts a cool shadow in the hot city.

Planted in the early twentieth century by a wealthy Midwestern banker named Gurdon Wattles, who came to Southern California to build himself a winter getaway, the trees predate much of the construction on the nearby streets.

Wattles himself died in 1932, but his mansion and estate live on, now as a registered cultural monument and the property of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission. And on the 4.2 acres of land surrounding the mansion, the well-established avocado orchard represents just a portion of the edible profusion now cultivated by hundreds of neighborhood gardeners.

Wattles Farm was founded in 1975, making it the oldest community garden in Los Angeles. Entering the TERRACE

front gates feels like stepping into an enchanted, semitropical forest, where banana and papaya trees share soil with common cooking herbs and tomatoes. The perimeter fence is lined with figs, citrus, stone fruit and the occasional guava. Many of the gardeners at Wattles are Eastern European immigrants who were accustomed to growing their own food in their home countries, and who embraced a chance to cultivate a small patch of beets, dill, and other staple ingredients of their native cuisine. In the Southern California climate, the fifteen-foot-square plots teem with vegetables all year round—in many cases more than enough to feed a single person or even a small family.

Becoming a community gardener at Wattles Farm is no casual affair.

The waiting list is long, and potential members must be serious about tending their plots and respecting the common territory in between.

Regular volunteer workdays ensure that the pathways that crisscross the property stay well maintained and navigable, even during wet weather.

While gardeners roam almost all of the acreage, the avocado orchard possesses an aura of secrecy—visitors are told to keep out, and members

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While there is an abundance of fresh fruit, precautions must be made to keep visitors out of the more coveted orchards.

Up the slope from Hollywood Boulevard, along the edge of a wide hiking path where Los Angeles residents get their daily exercise, a dense cluster of avocado trees casts a cool shadow in the hot city.

Planted in the early twentieth century by a wealthy Midwestern banker named Gurdon Wattles, who came to Southern California to build himself a winter getaway, the trees predate much of the construction on the nearby streets.

Wattles himself died in 1932, but his mansion and estate live on, now as a registered cultural

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monument and the property of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission.

And on the 4.2 acres of land surrounding the mansion, the well-established avocado orchard represents just a portion of the edible profusion now cultivated by hundreds of neighborhood gardeners.

Wattles Farm was founded in 1975, making it the oldest community garden in Los Angeles. Entering the front gates feels like stepping into an enchanted, semitropical forest, where banana and papaya trees share soil with common cooking herbs and tomatoes. The perimeter fence is lined with figs, citrus, stone fruit and the occasional guava. Many of the gardeners at Wattles are Eastern European immigrants who were accustomed to growing their own food in their home countries, and who embraced a chance to cultivate a small patch of beets, dill, and other staple ingredients of their native cuisine. In the Southern California climate, the fifteen-footsquare plots teem with vegetables all year round—in many cases more than enough to feed a single person or even a small family.

Becoming a community gardener at Wattles Farm is no casual affair. The waiting list is long, and potential members must be serious about tending their plots and respecting the common territory in between.

Regular volunteer workdays ensure that the pathways that crisscross the property stay well maintained and navigable, even during wet weather. While gardeners roam almost all of the acreage, the avocado orchard possesses an aura of secrecy—visitors are told to keep out, and members abide by strict rules around taking home the coveted fruit.

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COMMON GROUND

“In Hollywood, where Wattles is situated, access to good food is not a problem for most people, but many residents still lack the space to grow vegetables at home.”

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WINDY

CITY

FARM 26

No.1 ‘13

Written by Sarah C. Rich Photography by Matthew Benson

Greenhouses keep green plants warm during the worst winter

Many urban farms, no matter how different the cities around them may be, share a common origin story.

E

Everyone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space.

Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson

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“I’d like to see all the vacant spaces being used as farms.”

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(using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy.

In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends.

This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988—all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in

CITY FARM’S GIGANTIC VEGETABLE GARDEN PROVIDES DAILY FRESH VEGETABLES FOR THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM’S CAFETERIAS. THIS PARTNERSHIP HAS ALLOWED THE FARM TO GROW TO INCLUDE A BRAND NEW GREENHOUSE AND WEEKLY FARMER’S MARKET.

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“This is my dream job.”

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traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a architects are among the most exciting. domestic character, what sort of character will it have?”

On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely The answers come from a diverse group of architects, packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain some better known than others, representing Europe, Wall House juts out on a corner like a South America, Japan, and the United States. One curibillboard for Modernism. In reversing ous aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the the fundamental order — by hanging old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the glass inside and curtains outside — the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photoarchitect explores the formal possibiligraphs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement ties offered by the traditional Japanese as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romantishoji-screen house, where translucency cized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The is valued over transparency. The glass wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, booksits in sliding panels and retracts into shelves, and other comfortable objects provided by corners of the house, and once drawn, the Furniture Co. that serve as ready-made pedestals the sailcloth curtain (besides making an for the models and that give a workmanlike quality obvious but witty allusion to non-loadto the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an bearing walls) provides shade during architect’s studio and home combined. the day and privacy at night.

On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on More in keeping with Mies’s courtview are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects yard houses, the M House by Kazuyo are committed to design whose appeal lies in its Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separatresponse to and integration of advanced technoled from its residential street by a wall of ogies and new materials. Sleekness here runs perforated metal, behind which translumore than skin deep. After years of the decoracent polycarbonate windows filter light tive pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, into a two-story central courtyard that it came as both a surprise and a relief that the is sunk, along with the dining, work, and reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies living areas, below ground level. This van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth courtyard and two other light courts House, which the architect designed some are open to the sky, so that in passing 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekthrough them, one is exposed to the end retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith weather as in a traditional Japanese Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams and down, run between the light courts painted white, the house dematerializes at in a configuration that limits privacy night (even with the draperies closed) into a within the house — although the streetcube of light. There have been many copies scape is effectively screened out. since, but the architects in the museum Now under construction in Napa show are creating radical variations on the Valley, California, the Kramlich theme, skewing the form by selecting and Residence and Media Collection, developing only certain aspects of Mies’s designed by Herzog & de Meuron, feadesign to advance new ideas about the tures an angular, flat-roofed Miesian configuration of rooms and the requireglass pavilion over a series of subments of the electronic age. terranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even CHICAGO CITY FARM STRETCHES OVER SEVEN ACRES the curved inner walls of the pavilion LOOKING TO THE SKYLINE OF DOWNTOWN CHICAGO. TERRACE

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function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a CITY FARM IS LOCATED RIGHT ON THE televised chef in the kitchen.

OUTSKIRTS OF DOWNTOWN CHICAGO Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in AND PRODUCE FRESH PRODUCE FOR A Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with FARMER’S MARKET EVERY SATURDAY. transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner indicative of the loss of privacy. But even some of the walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonhouses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House ry facade but reveals much of its interior through

by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that of boxed-off and exposed rooms recalls the vercan fit 10,000 books as well as a reading area. And there tical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, elevator platform while it moves along a three-story wall of in the top-floor architecture galleries.) bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, Whether Riley has proved his theory about but still a solitary place to think and to dream. the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more

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“We specifically looked at resources that had been overlooked.”

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Photography by Matthew Benton

A tall, hazel-eyed thirty-something whose style could be described as utilitarian-vintage, Carpenter talks about her occupation with blunt—sometimes raw—realism.

She doesn’t put a gloss of romance on her experience, though it often gets applied from the outside, as urbanites increasingly aspire to get a little dirt under their fingernails.

Carpenter calls her operation “Ghost Town Farm,” after the condition of the West Oakland neighborhood in which it sits.

W R ITT EN B Y: S a r a h C . R i c h PH O T O GR APH Y B Y: M a t t h e w B e n so n

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“If someone were to open an upscale coffee shop nearby, the couple would not come in for lattes, though they might be found out back after closing, rummaging through the dumpsters for uneaten pastries to feed their livestock or coffee grounds for their compost pile.”

When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation–most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate.

In the last 15 years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits.

“Fabrications,” an ambitious, three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture.

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CARPENTER EXPECTS A NEW SET OF GOATS EVERY SPRING.

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CARPENTER SPENDS ON AVERAGE THREE HOURS A DAY PLAYING WITH THE NEW BABY GOATS.

Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents 12 installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the 12 projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely.

But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right,

they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display?

Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display.

Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed Wexner site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Mockbee/Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends.

Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum.

The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich

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HUMMINGBIRD FEEDERS AND BEE KEEPERS ARE STRATEGICALLY PLACED AROUND THE FARM FOR FRESH HONEY AND BIRD WATCHING.

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“With crime consuming the attention of law enforcement, Carpenter’s pursuit went relatively unnoticed. At least at first.”

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Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire.

Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials.

Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural

scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel.

The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture.

Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The

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Body in Action, by Hodgetts + Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop.

Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests.

At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered

LITTLE PATHS TAKE US ALONG CARPENTER’S LOVELY BACKYARD GARDEN FARM.

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glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined.

It is the four interventionist installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office dA erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that–among the Judds and Giacomettis–it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street.

Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play.

The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves,

CARPENTER IS KNOWN AS MUCH FOR HER HONEYBEES AS HER PRIZED GOATS.

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“At the end of the day, she [Carpenter] cooks food she has raised or grown.

Carpenter is a farmer—she lives off her land.”

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Photography by Matthew Benton

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CARPENTER’S ARRAY OF OVERSIZED VEGETABLES AND VARIOUS LIVESTOCK MAKE THIS ABODE ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY.

and horizontal planes suspended from cables.

The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in museum galleries.

With The Body in Repose, Kuth/Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tatooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority–you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space–other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane.

To the extent that “Fabrications” can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, “Fabrications” promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal– and stretch–itself.

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