DryStoneGarden

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. (more…)