Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
March 1984
Planting Plastic: Martha Schwartz Looks to Art for Inspiration
IN EXPANDING the concept of what makes a garden, the landscape architect Martha Schwartz defines it as a place that is “conducive to contemplation and understandable on a human scale.” It need not necessarily contain plants—”Certainly many fine Japanese gardens do not,” she explained. And even when gardens are “filled with plastic or other strange objects,” Schwartz said, “I think they are still real gardens.” Such a garden is the one Schwartz created several years ago at her mother's home outside Philadelphia.
Admittedly, Schwartz does not come to landscape architecture with a horticultural orientation. She is drawn instead to the fluidity of outdoor spaces and the possibilities of various other media. Her concern is the synthesis between art and landscape, a concern she shares with Peter E. Walker, formerly her professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and currently her partner in The Office of Peter Walker Martha Schwartz Landscape Architects, of San Francisco and New York. It is an approach that would not be foreign to the great landscape architects of the seventeenth century, like André Le Nôtre, who brought all the arts to bear on garden design, employing sculptors as well as gardeners. In fact, Walker sees minimalists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd as contemporary interpreters of the flat planes and systematic order of Le Nôtre's gardens. He adds another dimension with his definition of a garden as “any place out of doors one really cares about and transforms into something memorable.”
“Instead of dealing with the old clichés of garden design,” said Schwartz, “we examined the artists and their sensibilities to determine what their work reflected about today's culture that could be translated into landscape architecture.” During their explorations, Schwartz was especially influenced by the early exhibitions of Frank Stella's metal relief paintings in the late 1970s. These were wall constructions of corrugated aluminum and other materials in arabesque and linear motifs painted in Fauvist colors with a smattering of glitter. In high relief against background patterns resembling those in Matisse paintings, the crowded elements were hooked onto a metal grid, and there was just enough open space at the sides to invite the possibility of the viewer's being inside them.
“I was bowled over by these relief paintings,” she remembered, “and I was intrigued by the notion of ‘more is more.' It was an additive process that ran counter to the modernist tradition I had been trained in, of paring down to the essential idea. He was layering banal shapes with more layers of paint and glitter and building them up to the point where the whole transcended the junk to become richly beautiful. I decided then to try to make a garden like that.” The site for the Stella Garden was her mother's dreary twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot yard behind a semidetached house outside Philadelphia. Her mother's name is Stella Schwartz, so the garden was named for her as well.
Martha Schwartz began the garden by collecting junk. First she made weekly excursions to Plexiglas outlets around Boston, where she then lived, to purchase odd pieces by the pound. They came prewrapped, so she did not even know what colors she was getting. Next, she drove up to Marblehead, Massachusetts, for fishnets, then went to tropical fish stores for aquarium gravel, which comes in two-pound bags, each of a different color.
After carting the stuff to Philadelphia, she culled more objects from the assortment in her mother's garage. Once organized, she built a small study model of her ideas as a guide. The mirror-image yard next door to her mother's house provided a sufficiently verdant background for the Stella Garden, and the neighboring trees that towered above cast down dramatic shadows. Schwartz removed all the scraggly remains of a previous garden—her mother not having a notably green thumb—and laid a sheet of Visqueen plastic to prevent further growth. She then filled in the entire area with gravel.
Schwartz created a formal portal, with two tall tree trunks supporting a cloud of white chicken wire. To “dematerialize” the trunks so that the clouds might appear to float alone, she painted them white with red and green dashes, which also blended in with the visual chaos she sought for the rest of the garden. The height of the trees was balanced by a ladder placed surrealistically against a garage wall. Schwartz also repainted the house with a light lavender base to make it an effective backdrop.
The big moment arrived when she unwrapped the Plexiglas. She and her sister, Megan Reid, then a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, assessed the various sizes and colors and determined an arrangement of the slabs in a border around the garden, gradating them from clear to hot to cool colors. Standing in staggered rows, these sheets of Plexiglas served both as a visually spectacular fence between the backyards and as “flower” beds, with taller varieties in the rear, some shooting out in different directions as flowers are wont to do. The pieces were set in a trench of clay, which was pliable enough to allow ongoing adjustments even after the Plexiglas was in position. As some colors were seen through others, the palette became even richer in shades, and in early morning, the sun shining through the panels cast colored shadows across the gray gravel.
The garden also had a kind of central “water” feature. “Having water in a garden,” Martha Schwartz said, “is what brings the sky down to the ground plane.” Since she is always seeking new ways of translating elements, she introduced into the design, instead of water with its inherent maintenance problems, a four-foot-square wire-glass table on concrete block supports. Like water, the glass reflected light and the color of the sky. The table, in turn, was placed on a six-inch-high wooden plinth or platform painted green, with a grid across the surface containing aquarium gravel in a pattern of amorphous colored shapes that appeared to reflect the jewel-like tones of the Plexiglas. Finally came a canopy of dyed-pink fishnets, stretched like sails above the whole composition.
One aesthetic drawback remained. Old garbage cans stood along the access route from the garage to the garden. Schwartz replaced them with five brand-new galvanized ones, which she covered with glitter and epoxy. “I figured that if my mother had to walk past garbage cans to get to the garden, at least they were going to be beautiful garbage cans,” she says.
Though her mother had the garden for less than a year before she moved from the house, the Stella Garden was built to last, with a minimum of maintenance—primarily an occasional raking of the gravel. Over the long term, cleaning and repainting would have been required, and eventually some of the Plexiglas might have had to be replaced because of fading.
So far the Stella Garden has been unique in her oeuvre as an experiment. “It was a difficult process,” she said, “because I kept feeling I shouldn't add one more thing, but then I felt that I should, for the exercise of it—the more, the better.” The experience of the garden was like walking through the picture plane of a collage. And what it lacked in fragrance, it made up in glitz.
The Stella Garden reflected what Schwartz's partner Peter Walker describes as the historical tendency of gardens to exploit the artistic and theatrical attitudes of their age. At present, under the influence of what Walker calls “the park movement,” he feels that landscape architects generally tend to create natural landscapes; as a result, he believes, the magical, make-believe element of gardens has disappeared.
But that could not be said of the Stella Garden, where, in the black of night, the lights shining through the transparent columns of neon colors created what seemed like an imaginary city somewhere in outer space, and the isolated ladder against the garage wall, a stairway to the stars.
New York Times Magazine, September 22, 1985
Resurrection: The Built Landscapes of George Hargreaves
WALKING AND THINKING, to breathe the site. This is how the landscape architect George Hargreaves works best to achieve his mission of weaving ideas and spaces into masterful combinations, reconnecting cities with their postindustrial derelict lands. And because his designs are perceived as figurative, rather than scenic, to experience them also evokes clarity of thought and observation. The promenade or circuit becomes the tangible thread connecting people to a series of events in these sculpted landscapes that retain a sensitivity to their environments and to their previous histories. Where others see destitution, Hargreaves sees restitution.
Hargreaves