February 21, 2007
Robert Moses Reconsidered
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This month, Citygardenguide visited three linked exhibits about Robert Moses that opened at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Altogether, you get a terrific overview (quite literally, if you also take in the Panorama of the city at the Queens Museum) of the huge impact Moses made on the built environment of the city. And now that the city is engaged in two large-scale planning projects, in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, it is the perfect time to think about the impact he made. It is awfully hard to imagine anyone in this day and age having the kind of power and control that he wielded in New York for 34 years, from 1934 to 1968. His massive paw print can be seen everywhere.
Okay, don't roll your eyes and dismiss Moses as a bully who hated people and destroyed wholesale neighborhoods for the sake of his own vision of New York--which is pretty much the view that we have all grown up with. Instead, try imagining the city today without him. Take away the Triborough, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Throgs Neck and the Verrazano bridges for a start. Then erase the Cross Bronx, Brooklyn-Queens and Van Wyck expressways, and the Grand Central, Belt and Cross Island parkways. Do away with the good, the bad and the ugly of high-rise housing projects. And then, finally, for good measure, forget about Jones Beach and the many parks, scores of swimming pools, and literally hundreds of playgrounds that he scattered throughout the five boroughs. And now say where his legacy rests on the scale.
There is no doubt that Moses grabbed a moment--and lots of Federal dollars--and made hard, fast choices with a heavy hand and thick skin. His career included monumental successes--grand projects that opened on time and on budget. But there is also no doubt that some of his ideas and projects would have been disasters for the city. Think about what midtown Manhattan would be like if he had succeeded in building his Mid-Manhattan Expressway, or what Greenwich Village would have been like with Fifth Avenue running right through the middle of Washington Square. Think about the destruction of neighborhoods, mostly poor black neighborhoods. Think about the over-built park buildings that are impossible to maintain. Think about how much you wish he had cared as much about public transportation as he did about cars. You can argue endlessly about his mistakes, but the man clearly believed that "our big cities must be rebuilt, not abandoned" and he saw how important it was to connect the city to its surrounding region and he literally wrenched it firmly into the 20th century.
All massive building projects aside, for garden lovers the greatest Moses project of all is the Conservatory Garden, which was completed and opened in August 1937. Located on the site of greenhouses that Moses had demolished, the garden was designed by Betty Sprout and implemented by the parks department under the guidance of Gilmore Clarke. Come spring, we will all be thinking, Where would we be without it?
Accompanying the exhibits is an excellent new book about Moses's effect on the city's built environment--Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2007
Phyto Spa's "Mur Vegetal"
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Once we had fallen in love with Patrick Blanc's "Mur Vegetal" in Paris, (citygardenguide 2.5) green architecture here at home seemed especially unadventurous and drab. There was a possibility of a green wall as part of the High Line, and a mockup was built last summer, but according to the people at Field Operations (landscape architects in charge of project), they aren't going to go forward with it. It isn't that there aren't hundreds of greening projects all over the city. Green roofs are the hottest issue in New York horticulture. There are at least two major lectures coming up on the subject, one at the Horticultural Society on February 12th (hsny.org) and an all-day symposium at the New York Botanical Garden on April 13th (nybg.org). Even more to the point, there are loads of actual green roofs either just installed or in the works (some say over 100). The two new buildings at Battery Park come to mind as well as the roof of the Bronx Courthouse and the old Silvercup studio building in Queens. All these roofs are definitely 'A GOOD THING', although we do worry about the world supply of low-growing sedums, which must be under some strain. However, as city dwellers we can't get that excited about this very worthy greening method because--and this might sound a tad selfish--all the good stuff is on the roof. The pedestrian, the basic building block of New York City's urban life, doesn't get to see those roofs. Green roofs might have lots of positives from an environmental viewpoint, but they do nothing for the streetscape or for improving our experience as we walk--and so many of us do--through the city. We don't see any of those uber-green apartment dwellers inviting the public to enjoy their ecologically correct roof gardens any time soon. The beauty of green walls is that it gives the urban wanderer a garden they can see--a real garden--on the slimmest possible footprint--the wall of a building.
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We were rapturously describing the 'Mur Vegetal" to a friend who said that it sounded just like something he had seen on Lexington in Midtown. "There is nothing green on Lexington Avenue", we said confidently. But he was right. The Phyto Spa on Lexington at 58th street commissioned Patrick Blanc to create a large (9000 plants) interior Mur Vegetal. He made a vertical garden on both sides of a wall, one side forms the interior rear wall of the 3rd floor spa, and the other side forms a kind of gorgeous window display, perfectly visible from Lexington Avenue. The staff at the Phyto Spa couldn't be nicer about letting visitors see the wall close up- it's well worth a visit- it might even be worth a hair treatment!
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2007
Patrick Blanc's "Mur Vegetal"
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Citygardenguide has become obsessed with vertical gardens. We have always appreciated Robert Zion's brilliant vision of '"vertical lawns," as articulated in the iconic Paley Park, with its ivy-hung side walls, but when we saw the green-haired botanist Patrick Blanc's sublime "Mur Vegetal" at the new Musee du Quai Branly in Paris we were blown away. An entire building covered in plants. This takes the concept of "green walls" to a whole new level.
The museum, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, consists of a central structure and three satellite buildings. Blanc, with whom Nouvel had worked at the Fondation Cartier, was commissioned to create the facade of the administration building, which fronts directly on the sidewalk of the Quai Branly and buts up against an elegant row of Haussman-era apartment buildings.
The proportion and scale of the facade and the placement and size of the windows work surprisingly well with its nineteenth-century neighbors, but it is the sheer profusion of amazing plants growing out of the wall that makes this bit of contemporary architecture such a delight. The Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff describes it as "a vertical carpet of exotic plants"(New York Times 6.27.06), which shows that even the Times isn't always right. The fascinating thing about this wall is that the plants are not exotic at all; they are familiar garden favorites, things we buy at local garden centers and plant in our gardens all the time. Sedums and iris and heucheras and periwinkle and tiarella and thalictrum-we could go on and on. They just look different when grown on a wall, they look kind of--exotic. We found the Mur Vegetal a fresh and inspiring way to look at planting.
Blanc, who has finished more than 150 green wall projects over the past 15 years, works mostly in Europe and the Far East. He creates both indoor and outdoor walls. Passionate about plants from childhood, he went to Asia at 19 to study plants. There, in tropical forests, he observed that understory plants seem to cling to rocks and trunks, and live without soil. He created his first wall or "Mur Vegelal" at 25 and has developed a technique to grow plants on vertical surfaces without soil. He exploded onto the garden scene in 1994 when he made a vertical garden at the Festival at Chaumont. Since then he seems to divide his time between studying tropical plants--he is a distinguished scientist at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique)--and making his fabulous walls. He has a beautiful web site. Check it out.
Link: verticalgardenpatrickblanc
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)