ART CENTER COMMUNITY GARDEN
Art Center College of Design / Pasadena, CA / 2001 - 2004
American colleges, have invested a great deal in ‘technology’ to support its curriculum. Computer labs are always a priority. Meanwhile, the principles of the natural organic cycles of our ecology that define the world we live in, and upon which we all depend, go unnoticed. They are either neglected or oversimplified and misunderstood. The designers and artists that will shape our future environment desperately need to understand the complexity of the natural world they will be affecting.
In
2001 I established Gardenlab as a program that supports ecology based initiatives
at Art Center College of Design. Students in the first Gardenlab studio designed
and created a community garden as an activist art / design intervention for
the campus. Faculty, students and staff are free to claim a plot and use it
as a laboratory for messy experimentation and observation of natural cycles.
For the past 2 years the gardens have been continually changing and evolving
into a patchwork of diverse visions of their relationship to ecological cycles.
I had a utopian fantasy when I intiated this garden. I imagined a complex, lush, productive, eclectic, crazy garden that would be viewed from Art Center’s black steel and glass modernist box that looms over it. I imagined that if the garden was established, it would attract those precious few, passionate about gardens, nature and ecology to take over a plot and devote themselves to the development of fertile soils and abundant life. The reality has been somewhat short of this, but there’s still time, I’m optomistic, it’s just getting started.
Architects and educators Alan Koche and Linda Taalman had a brief obsession with cultivating all black plants in their plot, including Schwartzkopf Aeoniums & Black Basil (Ocimum Sanctum) which I thoroughly enjoyed. Performance artist Jacki Apple received a Durfee grant to create a complex decorative garden for meditation inspired by japanese patterns. Environmental design student Shawn Littrell has laid out a minimal desert landscape in preparation for a massive wood structure that would provide bleacher seating above while hiding enclosed spaces within, all of which he would love to carpet in a living blanket of grass or moss. In terms of productive gardening, Archivist Stasia Wolfe and Librarian Sandy Wander have managed to create and sustain a year round vegetable garden, despite the busy hands of a mysterious Art Center tomato thief. For every one of these plots however, there are others that go through regular cycles of neglect. Plots that are eagerly claimed by someone with similar dreams of getting out of the oppressive white classroom and getting their hands in the dirt. They soon lose patience with the weeds or are demoralized by the quick death of everything they have planted or can’t find the time to tend to their needy plants. I do hope that over time a critical mass of energy, life & enthusiasm establishes itself in our modest spiral of dirt, and that the garden become a permanent self-sufficient place for a diverse ecosystem on a campus of lawns and a black box.
Eventually the GardenLab program will become a vehicle for students and members of the Art Center community to take their expertise out to the surrounding public schools and communities by designing and creating similar educational and public green spaces for neighborhoods in need. The ultimate goal of the GardenLab is to fundamentally shift the current self-reflexive paradigm of art and design education, where formal novelty, hermetic discourse and the latest software dominate. The GardenLab will provide a balance to these forces by provoking thought on the inter-dependant relationships that define our communities and environment. If it is agreed that we will not be able to sustain our current relationship with the environment, then it is the responsibility of our colleges and universities to lead the way by educating students that will someday create a more balanced, thoughtful and sensitive relationship with the forces that sustain us.
The Gardenlab was established with an Art Center Faculty Enrichment Grant has since been supported by grants from the Wallis Foundation and the LEF Foundation.
gardenlab
studio I
> art center
> fall 2002
> students: kelly majewski, ellie bang, matt rowan, matthew carpenter, david dohren, michel berstein, michael crispen, jinny kim
the brief:
a
place...
-to support the curriculum in all departments at art center
-for art center students to learn about our relationship with the land
-to create and design with living materials
-to watch natural and organic processes
-to study ecology and our environment
-for messy experimentation
-for art center students, faculty, staff and administration to gather outside
-that encourages patience
-that is slow
-for quiet inspiration
-to get our hands in the dirt
design teams:
1/ perennial gardens, 2/ community gardens, 3/ laboratory, 4/ open air class room, 5/ systemsresearch topics: a/ university and educational garden precedents, b/ soils, light, wind, c/ materials and technology, d/ plantings, e/ accd community, needs and desires
the program:
spaces
for people:
-open lab space
an open space that may be used for installations and experiments on a term by
term basis by any design or art studio at art center
-community garden plots
15-20 plots for individual use by selected art center students, faculty, staff
or administration.
-open air classroom
a space for classes to meet in the garden lab with seating for at least 30
-perennial gardens
permanent gardens integrating seating and meeting areas
spaces
for utility:
-toolshed - an enclosed secure place for storage of all tools and materials
required for the maintenance and workings of the gardens
-composting center - a place for the composting of organic matter from the school
cafe and campus clippings in a location with proximity to the access road
systems:
-irrigation system a system of drip lines and overhead sprinklers to irrigate
the entire gardens with separate zoning based on water needs
-fencing barriers or fencing to protect gardens from local deer access
-footpath and signage to gardens from main art center building
-access drive signage from main art center road
lecturers
& critics:
laura cooper artist, gardener, teacher "garden history"
jim folsom director, hunington gardens "plant biology"
yvonne savio manager, common ground garden program, university of cal. cooperative
extension
bibliography:
biography:
rybczynski, witold / a clearing in the distance, frederick law olmstead / 1999
design:
bradley-hole, christopoher / the minimalist garden / 1999
church, thomas d. / gardens are for people / 1995
cooper, guy / paradise transformed: the private garden for the 21st century
/ 1996
cooper, guy / gardens for the future: gestures against the wild / 2000
moore, charles / the poetics of gardens / 1993
essay:
page, russell / the education of a gardener / 1962
pollan, michael / second nature / 1991
pollan, michael / botany of desire / 2001
walker, peter / invisible gardens
guide:
brenzel, kathleen norris, editor / sunset western garden book / 2001
mathias, mildred / flowering plants in the landscape / 1992
perry, bob / landscape plants for western regions / 1992
tenenbaum, frances, editor / taylor's master guide to gardening / 1994
welsh, pat / southern california gardening / 2000
history:
adams, william howard / gardens through history: nature perfected / 1991
conan, michel, editor / perspectives on garden history / 1999
hunt, john dixon / gardens and the picturesque / 1994
hunt, john dixon / the italian garden: art design & culture / 1996
hunt, john dixon / greater perfections: the practice of garden theory / 2000
shepherd, john chiene / italian gardens of the renaisance / 1986
solomon, barbara stauffacher / green architecture & the agrarian garden
/ 1988
steenbergen, clemens / architecture and landscape: great european gardens /
1996
teyssot, georges / the history of garden design / 1991
landscape:
birksted, jan / relating architecture to landscape / 1999
spirn, anne whiston / the language of landscape / 1998
monographs:
eggener, keith l. / luis barragan, gardens of el pedregal / 2001
saunders, william / daniel urban kiley: the early gardens the gardens of russell
page / 1996
native:
francis, mark / the california landscape garden / 1999
lenz, lee / california native trees and shrubs / 1981
lowry, judith larner / gardening with a wild heart / 1999
regional:
streatfield, david c. / california gardens: creating a new eden / 1994
burton, pamela / private landscapes: modernist gardens in southern california
/ 2002
inaji, toshiro / the garden as architecture: japan, china & korea / 1998
listri, massimo / italian parks and gardens / 1996
slauson, david / secret teachings in the art of japanese gardens / 1991
periodicals:
california agriculture
the gardener's companion
garden design magazine
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