Why do we love Christo's "The Gate" -- blogged here and here -- so much, sight unseen? Check out the resonance between this shot (AP Photo) of the artist's controversial "river of light" and our own "parti" of a landscape architectural project at the Design School a few years back:
Parti. What a frilly term. How nuanced. That's what we were taught to call our conceptual models during the first year at Harvard GSD. The parti above shows a translucent Ailanthus samara -- winged fruit -- fabricated out of wire and pale yellow tracing paper curving across a cardboard model with Ailanthus trees represented by linden twigs, painted black and lit dramatically from the side.
Excerpts from our earnest rationale for "Transforming the hideaway," March 1996:
My original hideaway is a perforated vessel with a curved wall running through it. The wall is both an invitation and a guide to experienceing the space and registers the outside world through changing light effects. Programmatic elements are incorporated into the wall and the thermal envelope.
We wrote THAT?
The space is conceived as an architectural correlative of the formal line of an aerodynamic natural object, the winged fruit of the Tree of Heaven. The house is sited on the edge of a great hill to afford both protection and prospect.
Here's our favorite part:
I found a secret affinity between the hideaway and the site in theTree of Heaven -- a pampered garden subject when first brought from China by way of England in the 18th century, it is "synonymous with the city" and "a marker of vacant city lots," writes Steven Spongberg in A Reunion of Trees. The idea would be to invite Ailanthus back into the garden, creating an abstraction of the urban forest.
Not bad. Look to the plants.
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