http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...rk_real_estate
A Hedge Grows in Midtown
Chess players and other visitors to the Urban Garden Room at Bank of America Tower's street-level atrium.
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January 10, 2011
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If your landscape architect came up to you and said, "I've got a great idea. You just spent a billion dollars on this building. Why don't we make a Chia Pet its centerpiece!" you'd probably find a new landscape architect. But to the credit of the Durst Organization, developers of the Bank of America Tower on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas, they told Margie Ruddick to go for it.
The result is one of the city's newest, oddest and—judging by the number of people reading, having lunch there, and playing chess amid its towering topiary on a recent afternoon—more successful public spaces. The verdant structures, though polite company would more likely call them sculpture, even living art, and ranging from 7-foot monoliths to a 25-foot arch, were created by constructing steel cages with a built-in irrigation system. Then they were filled with soil and covered in porous fabric. Finally they were hand-planted with thousands of ferns, mosses, lichens, etc.
However, these heroic hedges—Stonehenge on the Hudson, if you will—weren't the Durst Organization's first choice. "We wanted to have park trees here," explained vice president Helena Rose Durst. "We couldn't have a true garden. The shade would kill it."
The problem was that the space reserved for the urban garden, opened in 2010, faced north and east and was in a part of Manhattan better known for towering skyscrapers than natural light and open skies. "Also," added Ms. Ruddick, "they're going to be pointing toward the sun within a couple of years," perhaps giving the impression that the garden and the entire environmentally friendly Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum-rated building was listing south. "That really wasn't an option."
Approximately three-quarters of the plants died and had to be replaced soon after they were installed. Even today they require constant vigilance, though hardier, more opportunistic plants, such as ivy, have happily filled the voids where more fragile specimens have withered. "Coming from the environment of a greenhouse," observed Ms. Durst, who grows tomatoes on the building's roof, approximately 1,000 feet in the air, "I don't think it took us completely by surprise."
"When you have a green wall you can't just walk away," Ms. Ruddick said. "This had tremendous tweaking. This is not for the faint of heart. But if you'd planted trees and ground cover you wouldn't have gotten this amount of green." Ms. Ruddick would have had her work cut out for her no matter what. New York's urban gardens and vest-pocket parks are littered with the best intentions of architects who might previously have been on a winning streak. Most have been successful—successful at making people wish they lived and worked closer to an actual park.
"One of the things that inspired me," the landscape architect said, "was Jeff Koons's 'Puppy.'" She was referring to a giant 43-foot assemblage of paws, ears and flowering plants that graced Rockefeller Center during the summer of 2000. Hopefully, Ms. Ruddick meant the scale and the fact they managed to keep the foliage alive rather than the subject matter. If you'd simply moved the pooch to the Bank of America Tower, and even added a couple of kittens (may it rest in peace, though for all I know it's lifting its leg beside some monster fire hydrant in Ukraine or Dubai, if the rest of Mr. Koons's oeuvre is any indication), it wouldn't have worked.
"The real challenge here," Ms. Ruddick confided, "was how to do this without being kitschy."
I wondered whether they had considered a water feature. I love water features. The fastest way to serve up nature in a confined space is an indoor waterfall; even a trickle of the stuff over polished stones will do. "There's occupied space below," Ms. Ruddick explained. "Everybody was like, 'We're not even going there.'
"We wanted it to be something you could walk through," she added, but when they did the maquette, the model of the arch, it looked slightly, well, dorky. "I said we really need to get a sculptor on the team."
And she knew just the right person—her own mother, Dorothy Ruddick. She had studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, designed fabrics for Knoll, and was perhaps best known for her sculptures of draped female figures reminiscent of ancient Greek statuary. Dorothy Ruddick's solution to the prosaic arch problem: add a twist, literally. Give it a bit of a bend.
"That one twist," said Ms. Ruddick, who worked with Montreal-based Mosaiculture International on the problem, "cost us three months of engineering time. "This is a sculptural one-off. This is not something you repeat."
Frankly, I don't know whether pedestrians taking a time-out from the passing tumult of city life on the couple of afternoons I dropped by appreciated the arch any more than if it had remained at right angles. They seemed almost as drawn by the chairs—the same models as across the street in Bryant Square Park, intentionally so because the Dursts wanted to reflect and perhaps piggyback off that open space's success. Indeed, the presence of the chess players suggested the Bank of America Tower atrium had become a winter months' alternative to the park.
"The language that's gone along with a lot of these buildings is a corporate minimalism," Ms. Ruddick said, referring to much of the city's lackluster recent architectural history, as she stood in the shadows, or should I say shade, of her teeming creation. "This was a little bit our push back."
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com
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