Part 2: Faking It For Real

Give yourself away and find the fake in me. - Elvis Costello

Ken Smith is the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture. A potpourri of kitsch, deep one-liners, and catchy riffs. For Smith, 185 crushed recycled rocks + 7 tons crushed glass + 4 tons rubber mulch + 560 artificial boxwoods equals MoMA's new roof garden. What a guy.

Top photo ©Laurie Lambrecht, 2005 Click here for more images

Smith's new fake (can you say "new fake" or is fake always new through its artificiality?) rooftop garden for MoMA is to open February 22, 2005. So be sure to make friends with someone who has a view onto the roof before then, as it will not be physically accessible. That alone is both head-scratching and seductive. A garden for looking at not a garden for being in. Visitors to MoMA can't go onto the roof garden; instead, it is a gift for their urban neighbors to ponder.

Smith is onto something and something big, I think. Remember Blair Witch Project and how the aura that emerged around its questionable authenticity single-handedly propelled it into the fascination of our subconscious? Remember Spinal Tap? Remember House of Leaves? Remember Claes Oldenburg? Fake is so prevalent in American culture that a new category of news has recently appeared called "fake news". Jon Stewart's recent appearance on CNN's Crossfire provided a volatile collision of real fake and fake real. Stewart reveals the oddity in the fact that "news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity."

If you are going to fake it, make it epic, make it at volume 11, make it massive. Landscape architects understand this. There is a tradition of faking it in landscape, from the garden at the Villa D'Este to Humphrey Repton's landscapes in England. But with the advent of Pop in 1960s, a new era of fake was born. Contemporary landscape architects mine the fertile territory of Warhol's Pop-riddled 1960s and the slap-dash fakery that dazzles with wit and whimsy. Smith and other landscape architects such as Martha Schwartz and West 8 are using the same amplifiers.

Looking down from the towers around MoMA at Smith's roof garden, the same potential is there. Smith's pop garden perched atop the venerable MoMA offers itself as a mirage or oasis of artificiality. Unwavering in its denial of seasonal change, and uninterested in the fact that it presents itself as hyper-real. This landscape is the perfect manicured zen lawn. (Is Smith nodding to the selection of the Japanese as the face of new MoMA?) Maybe New York is the first to truly learn from Las Vegas. The perfected art of exaggeration writ large. On MoMA's rooftop, fake is for real.

Maybe "faking it" is just the American response to the resurgence of Pop in recent European Architecture. MVRDV are most representative of this, making forays recently into a new field, pop urbanism, with RegionMaker, 3dCity, and Five Minute City. And of course there is the pop pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery 2004/2005 Pavilion. Again, faking it, right? It's not a mountain, but it sure looks like one--and a very agile one at that. Other architects are taking mirage of architectural illusions to larger projects. Will Alsop has had his hand at both pop urbanism and pop-itecture. Remember the box on toothpicks? Maybe not the best of ideas, but I am glad someone has done it.

It is as though architecture has its sense of humor again. And not too soon before the long winter. In the end; Taniguchi's MoMA: 6.5; Smith's MoMA garden: 8.9. Whimsy over restraint.




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