DryStoneGarden

… and back to posting about Andy Goldsworthy projects. He has a new wall at the Presidio in the Officer’s Club. He built a rammed earth wall with a half sphere of eucalyptus branches buried inside, then chipped away the wall to reveal the sphere. From a distance it has a nice graphic look, like a bas relief, and up close you can appreciate the method of construction. I haven’t seen this done before, but it’s simple and effective and seems replicable for a residential garden. It sometimes seems like a cliche to be a stoneworker and love Andy Goldsworthy’s work, but I need to just embrace the fact that he’s really good and does things exactly to my taste.

There a short video and photos of him posing by the wall here.

The Making of Wurrungwuri – Short Documentary from Brain in Hand Productions on Vimeo.

Two posts ago, I said Andy Goldsworthy (to his credit) might be over-represented in the stonework videos I find on the web and sometimes re-post here on this blog. So here’s a video of another artist who works with stone, Chris Booth from New Zealand. A lot of his work involves stone supported by a steel armature. I sometimes struggle to fully appreciate stone that is used that way — I’m more inclined towards things like his dry-stacked homage to New Zealand’s sea stacks — but I always find it intriguing. I’d need to see this sculpture, Wurrungwuri, in person to really judge it, but a great deal of intent and technical skill obviously went into its creation. There’s info about the design and the construction at the website for the project.

A little while back I took some photos of the cast shadows from a pair of pergolas we designed last year. The pergolas are made with rectangular aluminum tube, a little different from most of what I show on this blog, but it still follows the underlying aesthetic of my drystone work. The way the two pergolas overlap echoes the overlapping roof lines of the house, the house’s best feature, but it also overlaps the way stone in a drystone wall is supposed to overlap. Similarly, the rectangular concrete paving has the broken joints of a drystone construction. Even when I’m not designing with stone, I like to see things follow the drystone rules.

There is some stonework in this garden, but it’s not drystone and it’s built by another contractor, not by me. You can’t see it so well in the high-contrast mid-day lighting that was creating the shadows, but the courtyard has a limestone veneer, large thin slabs that are machine-cut and honed and installed with an adhesive instead of mortar and with a rubber crack-isolation layer (nicely explained in a patent application) between the stone and the underlying concrete slab. The stone has an interesting patterning and nice color variation; I’ll probably photograph it in softer light at some point after the planting has grown in.

For now, though, I’m happy with the way the cast shadows affected the landscape. The shadows on the door and on the courtyard steps were expected, but this raking line across the wall was a bonus.

A couple of before photos are below.

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Arches- Andy Goldsworthy (Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park) from Dog & Pony Communications on Vimeo.

Almost fifteen years after Rivers and Tides, I wouldn’t mind seeing someone other than Andy Goldsworthy starring in a video about a dry-stone project. But it’s a tribute to his work and his uniquely charismatic persona that if you see a video about interesting stonework, there’s a good chance it will feature him.

This video has some good footage of the construction of a large dry-stone arch constructed for a sculpture park in Michigan. Dry-stone arches are always compelling and this one is the biggest I’ve ever seen.

There’s video of another of his arch projects, built for a sculpture farm in New Zealand, here.

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I recently rode my bicycle around Lake Tahoe. I’ve been wanting to do that ride for years and figured I should do it now, while my legs are fit from my Portland-to-SF ride. It was great. You don’t see the lake quite as much as I thought, a fair bit goes through what I would characterize as alpine suburbia, and the best views are from the same vista points that I’ve known for years, but it’s a beautiful ride and a beautiful lake, one of California’s best. I made some quick sketches similar to my Portland-SF sketches.

‘Finally these places were for the first time designed to be used, to be participatory – NOT just to look at – they say COME IN, not stay off.’ Walter Lockley talking about the Keller Fountain

It has probably become apparent over the years on this blog that I am a big fan of Lawrence Halprin’s work. So, along with the Portland Japanese Garden, Halprin’s famous Keller Fountain was at the top of my list of things to see in Portland. I love his fountains, and this might be his best one. It’s been called called ‘one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.’

My first impression was, ‘wow, how did they let this get built?’ It seems shockingly unsafe for the city to let people wade into the pools, wander along the top edge, and generally treat it like the world’s quirkiest public pool; at one point there were two dozen people scattered throughout the pools, including kids who had showed up with swimming suits and towels. I give Halprin credit: it’s hard to imagine this was ever approved by the city’s lawyers but I’ve heard that it actually has a good safety record. Like an adventure playground, it looks so obviously dangerous that people treat it with the proper respect and avoid hurting themselves. I saw one woman absolutely traumatized by the sight of her young daughter venturing close to the edge, but, after screaming at her kid to get back, she didn’t actually make the girl get out, just stay away from the danger zone. It’s too bad that things like this are so rare in our built landscapes.

One of Halprin’s early design sketches for the project shows a granite cliff, though the design obviously evolved quite a bit beyond this starting point. Instead of a granite cliff, the forms of the fountain remind me much more of a city skyline, like a bunch of high rises pushed up against each other. They were designed, after the initial concept sketches, by an architect on his staff, Angela Danadjieva, working with clay, a key difference that shows some of the differences between concrete and stone, and maybe even drawing versus using models. Stone is typically created by an additive or subtractive process; you carve material away or add stones together. Clay is typically molded; you can push it around in ways that are impossible when with stone. And concrete is more closely aligned with clay; you pour or cast concrete in a form, much like you pour bronze in a mold after building a model. Switching from stone to clay and concrete was a key decision and paradoxically one that made this such an important evocation of nature.

Because even though I said the forms remind me of a city skyline, even though the forms feel human-built and urban, the overall effect is impressively evocative of a natural waterfall, and actually one waterfall in particular, Nevada Falls in Yosemite Valley. The two spaces don’t look anything like each other, but the experience of sitting above the Keller fountain is unmistakably like sitting above Nevada Falls. None of the surface elements are there — it’s concrete instead of granite, it’s more obviously geometric, it’s surrounded by a city — but the core experience is the same — the drifts of people, the rising mist, the roar of the water and the way it dominates the space. Pumping 13,000 gallons of water per minute will obviously go a long way towards creating the feel of a waterfall, but the effect was also created by the way people scatter themselves throughout the space, perching on the concrete walls, sitting at the edge of the water, and wading around in the pools above the cascade. I’ve heard that Nevada Falls was one of Halprin’s favorite places, and anyone who has ever been there will immediately recognize it when they see the Keller Fountain. It’s uncanny and really impressive.

In the post for the Japanese Garden, I said I sometimes felt as if I were an actor hitting my marks, feeling that all of my movements had been designed or choreographed, and the Keller Fountain has a few spots that feel like that, such as the plinth in the photo above, clearly designed as a place for people to pose in photos (a lot like the row of statues designed for visitors at Halprin’s Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC to pose as the next statue in line, a nice participatory element in that memorial). But most of the fountain felt like a ‘choose your own adventure’ kind of space, and if you look on google images, it’s amazing the way everyone is doing something different in every photo. There’s an impressive variety of poses and images for such a small urban space. It’s a living space, incredibly dynamic.

I’ve heard this can look rather brutalist on an overcast winter day with the fountain turned off, but actually it looks pretty good in photos and the bare articulation of the masses really appeals to the stone guy in me.