The Crack Garden? Seriously?
The Crack Garden
The American Society of Landscape Architects recently gave an award to a project by CMG called the Crack Garden. You can see the project at the ASLA site and on a lot of blogs at the moment. Someone took a jackhammer, cut slices in a concrete slab, added amendment, and planted thyme, erigeron, a couple of poppies, and some other plants. They have a long statement about the philosophy of the project:
The conceptual basis of The Crack Garden is to reveal the potential for beauty that underlies the concrete and asphalt that is the predominant ground plane material of the urban landscape.
They want to reveal the potential for beauty, rather than create something actually beautiful (the italics are theirs). Fair enough, I can see the potential. It looks all right considering how little labor and materials they used, though to me it doesn’t seem like good design. My partner would never have let me install those straight lines like that. And why didn’t they use the cracks that were already existing in the concrete?
But I have trouble getting past the title. Our DSL connection is slow, so I saw only the title for a few moments before I saw the photos, and I never quite recovered. I mean seriously, The Crack Garden? Do you maintain it with a crack hoe? I find myself hearing the voice of Dave Chappelle’s crack addict character Tyrone Biggs, asking if this is where you go for the five o’clock free crack giveaway. And I think it’s right to make fun of this, because it’s pretty insensitive and deserves to be mocked.
Because as soon as I stop laughing, I feel kind of amazed. How can a major firm like CMG name an urban space The Crack Garden and how can the ASLA give it an award? Are they being clueless or just cheeky? I don’t see any sly winks in the project statement, though CMG also has a project called Brainwash Plaza, so they seem to like cheeky names. They might have been sneaking a joke past the ASLA jury, but they’re a pretty big firm to be doing things like that. They’re the ones developing the master plan for the redevelopment of Treasure Island and I’ve been to at least one public plaza that they designed, and the ASLA is the organization for landscape architects in this country. These are the people who are designing our urban spaces, and yet they don’t seem very aware or sensitive about urban issues or urban communities. Pretty tone deaf.
plantsf.org planting
I think a much better recipient for an award for this type of project would be Plantsf.org, an organization devoted to taking out concrete and replacing it with permeable and planted space. I see more dedication to the environment and to design principles in their work than I do in the Crack Garden.
– Update 11/7 –
The recent issue of the ASLA magazine mentions that after the CMG landscape architect mastermind of the Crack Garden moved out of the building, the residents took it out and put in a more conventional garden.
Tags: asla
This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Unfortunately the inner city drug epidemic of the 1980’s has condemned the word “crack” to a pejorative double entendre, particularly when when used to describe an urban setting. The class and racial lines drawn by this epidemic continue to exist today. Either the designers at CMG didn’t realize this, or they decided the double entendre was OK. Either way, the choice reflects poorly on them and on the ASLA for applauding.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Well, Ryan, the name did make me stop a second, and it was pretty hard not to title my post that mentioned this something like “gardens addicted to crack” or something like that. You raise a lot of good points, including the big question about who ends up designing the big public spaces that will affect our lives as much as our own private spaces–if we have any private spaces at all. And who are they designing these spaces for–the people or the jurors?
June 8th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
They couldn’t even change it to “Cracked Garden.” I agree these people are dumb at best. As you said, a much better idea would be to take out concrete and show a renewal of the space. This is the problem when art and design are all about a concept that is verbal in nature.
June 8th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Really unfortunate choice of names….but besides the name….really is this a usable garden space? Not one that I care to sit in for very long….
June 9th, 2009 at 5:38 am
[...] awards program that made me think in a new way about dealing with too much concrete. Ryan over at Dry Stone Garden has some different thoughts on the project that are worth [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
HAHAHHAAA! You said Crack Hoe. I like your style and your blog. Thanks for good content.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
the asla must be on crack.
what a disgrace.
makes me feel good to know I just threw their invitation to join their club in the round file.
I should have scrunched it up into a ball, put in in a big ass spoon and lit it on fire.
June 20th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I think it’s rather unfair that in order to proselytize Plantsf.org (whose mission is very admirable for sure), you have to kick CMG’s garden down a peg or two. Plantsf.org is such a bigger entity than CMG. Clearly Plantsf.org has a bigger impact to the environment than the small family who hired CMG. Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that the efforts of individuals with their limited resources to do their part to help the environment could not be deserving of recognition? Or only when Plantsf.org win “an award for this type of project” could the little people doing their bit in their own small ways could then win the award? The Crack Garden does take into consideration its larger urban context, but it’s private and for personal use. Plantsf.org works in a much higher scale.
I thint it’s also unfair that you would lump all landscape architects (or is it just the ASLA? Or CMG?) as “people who are designing our urban spaces, and yet they [unclear as to who is "they"] don’t seem very aware or sensitive about urban issues or urban communities.” If you are talking about LAs in general, then google the earlier works of Walter Hood and all those by the East St. Louis Action Research Project for socially-engaged and yes, socially-sensitive works by LAs. I could give more, but why should I do your work for you?
Anyway, I’m glad the Crack Garden got the award. It was such a refreshing sight to see it in a category USUALLY filled with hyper-designed gardens of the rich for their McMansions in car-friendly suburbia and paid for with now toxic loans — you know, those same developments of the boom years that went bust in the Financial Apocalypse of 2008. If anything, criticize those gardens!
Stop ganging up on the Crack Garden. Or at least get past the title. Seriously.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:09 am
The ghost of Olmsted speaks! I totally agree with your third point. It was great to see a project with a small budget included.
I offered Plantsf.org merely as an example of someone doing the same type of project in the same neighborhood, but going much further with their “intervention.” They are actually the smaller organization, a small, recently-created non-profit while CMG is an international landscape architecture firm.
The ASLA and their “Jury of Leading Design Experts” present themselves as representatives and spokespeople for the larger landscape architecture community. There are of course members within the ASLA who show better awareness of urban issues than the jury. Walter Hood is a great example, I really like Splash Pad Park that he designed in Oakland, for instance. It’s a great name, and as someone using the Olmsted name must be aware, names do matter. Thanks for the dissent.