The Measures Taken

Land Reclamation

'A garden must have didactic qualities'

Roberto Burle Marx¹

The history of the green roof, or the more total version, the 'living façade' (where the frontage of a building is entirely overtaken with vegetation) goes back to Romanticism, and the simultaneous shock and wonder felt by the Enlightenment consciousness at the ruins of the Roman Empire. Buildings as large, as technologically advanced (if not more) than our own, were reclaimed by nature, overrun by the very thing over which mankind thought it had achieved a victory. Accordingly, this led to the phenomenon of new buildings being designed as if they had always, already been overtaken by undergrowth, fronds, weeds cracking cement and stone. John Soane, who was very influenced by Piranesi's images of Paestum and other Roman sites in a state of ruination, commissioned the draughtsman Joseph Gandy to render his new Bank of England – an institution for the nascent, advancing force of imperial capitalism – as a crumbling, overgrown relic. The images include one of the dome with bushes growing out of it, and another wherein woodland seems to have infested the trading floors.²

The aesthetics of the intersection of vegetation and architecture were given a somewhat less morbid and decidedly more positivist spin after the First World War. The grim situation of post-war Vienna – starving, beset by hyper-inflation and grossly overcrowded housing – gave rise to a proposal by Adolf Loos for blocks of flats with a terraced design, so that each tenant could tend their own garden in an already dense scheme, in order to provide themselves with the food that a collapsing economy could not. This suggestion has many outgrowths, from the gardens in the sky of Moshe Safdie's Habitat to the design of many blocks of luxury housing, such as the Barrier Point development in East London, which borrows particularly unimaginatively from Loos. A less urgent version was featured in Le Corbusier's Immeuble Villas, where gardens on balconies were flung up into skyscraping structures. The common factor with Loos and Le Corbusier's green roofs was a clear demarcation between technology and nature. Neither had any interest in simulating the natural by clothing their buildings in creepers or wooden panels, and instead heightened the contrast between on the one hand their faith in technology, and on the other their relocation of nature from outside of the city into the buildings themselves.

Another strain, however, aimed at something rather more exotic. The landscape gardener Roberto Burle Marx was regularly hired by the Modernist architects of Brazil to provide a surprisingly untamed outgrowth of nature to embellish their buildings. Burle Marx talked about this process, in which his curved, abstract gardens would be either atop or surrounding some uncompromising concrete building, as a deliberate intervention against an overly rationalist, colonial conception of the city. He specifically claimed that 'the penetration of the caatinga, the Amazonian rainforests, the mountains of Minas Gerais, into the heart of the city, even onto the skyscrapers, would help modern man to become more human, to belong to his land, to be more than a simple machine for living'.³



Meanwhile, contemporary descriptions of the effects of these skyscraper gardens had their own particularly colonial tint: contemporary descriptions of roof garden atop Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Le Corbusier et al's Rio's 1936 Ministry of Education depicts it as an incursion of the jungle into the metropolis, perhaps giving off the threat that eventually, this 'penetration' would not be so benign. This is something that is posited as specifically Latin American: one couldn't imagine vegetation growing out of Mies van der Rohe's curtain walls.

At least, not until the ever-present possibility of technological annihilation set the imagination to work. In the dystopian imaginary the ever-less 'natural', ever more rectilinear and technologically advanced form of the city becomes subject to a destruction which then becomes a renaissance of nature. While this can become a deeply reactionary fantasy of rural revenge (or morph into Albert Speer's 'Theory of Ruin Value'), it can elsewhere provide a strange and eerily beautiful perspective on the city itself. J.G Ballard's The Drowned World is perhaps exemplary here. This apocalyptic, and clearly deeply prescient 1962 novel, is set after a disaster in which melting ice caps and climate change lead to the inundation of most of the world, with mankind emigrating to the polar regions en masse.

The fascination in Ballard's novel is not the apocalyptic destruction itself, but the aftermath: a climate returning to the Triassic, in which plants and creatures not seen for millions of years return to colonise the cities, in which the atavistic creeps up upon and decisively claims the world of technological rationality. This is explicitly set in terms of exotica, of an excursion into a brashly beautiful but savage and unforgiving territory. Indeed, Victor Gollancz told Ballard he had 'stolen it all from Conrad' – news to the author, who had never read him.⁴ Yet there is also something curiously colonial about the tale, with its scientist-protagonist surveying the swamped cities from a luxury hotel. An intriguing work clearly deeply indebted to Ballard's story is the techno-pop composer John Foxx's fragmentary story 'The Quiet Man', in which the titular character walks round a completely deserted London, a landscape where ruination has infested every corner. Denuded of people, assaulted by nature, the city has a haunting beauty.

Another Green Roof

'Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines. (mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name, had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city).

He often strolled through Hyde Park then on to Victoria station where thousands of birds had nested in its cast iron structure. The ammoniac stink of their droppings was choking, and the platforms and remaining carriages were covered in a greyish foot-thick crust of excrement.

Each year the city became more verdant, and each time he walked through the streets he noticed new erosions as front walls or roofs fell, revealing sections of rooms with different patterns of peeling wallpaper and furniture, often tangled with plants that had grown from seedlings blown through shattered windows.'⁵

John Foxx, 'The Quiet Man'

'The people need houses on the ground, not greenhouses in the sky'

Alleged response of a Liverpool politician to a proposal for a 'green' high-rise

The green landscapes that a certain kind of urban design is concocting upon the seemingly far from verdant settings of the 21^st century city would seem to have little to do with either the Ballardian or romantic terrors at losing the war with nature, or for that matter with Loos and Burle Marx's belief in the potential of a tamed nature to help mankind to be less 'machine-like' and to provide for itself. However, it is a curiously under-investigated phenomenon. The accepted view is put across in a feature in A10 – New European Architecture entitled 'Flourishing Façades'.⁶



It starts with the words 'the term “explosive growth” has never been more appropriate than over the last fifteen years', immediately conflating the growths on the roofs with the brutal, tumultuous economic growth ushered in by neoliberalism, the very growth which commentators like George Monbiot argue has to end before climate change can be seriously tackled. The piece charts the development of apparently environmentally friendly urban design via the familiar green roof, or the encasing of a building seemingly underground underneath a cave-like capping of foliage; and the 'living façade', the programming into a building of its being overtaken by nature. It claims, citing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, that the greening of architecture is not just an aesthetic question, but a moral one, something necessary. Some of these proposals seem eminently sensible – no doubt, there are few better ways of insulating a building than chucking a few layers of sod onto it. Nonetheless, looked at in detail, what we have here is a rather superficial phenomenon – something which we could call, with a nod to the similarly vacuous policy of atoning for pollution by engaging in a bit of philanthropy, 'urban offsetting'.

Two of the projects covered in the A10 feature even seem to have emerged fully formed from the mind of JG Ballard – two designs for multi-storey car parks (by Bystrup Architects in Copenhagen, and Theo Termond (Architecten aan de Maas) for Helmond in the Netherlands). Both of these are, on the most basic level, straightforwardly technological, late capitalist structures – concrete decks, connected by ramps. Naturally, to actually leave it at this, or even to rely on the building's own material for expression (as in, say, the Brutalist car parks of Paul Rudolph or Rodney Gordon) is by now extremely unfashionable. We have to minimise our impact, no multi-storey blocks of weathered concrete this time. So the buildings are fenced, with climbing plants placed adjacent, ready to do their work. This quintessentially Modernist structure then becomes an unobtrusive, semi-rural place, not announcing its function. However, one has to be a particularly credulous kind of environmentalist to be even remotely convinced by the 'necessity' of this measure. Vines or no vines, this is a multi-storey car park, designed to store then spit out the very carbon-belching vehicles that create the problem in the first place. To build a 'green car park' is an oxymoron. The rationale here seems to be two-fold. One, the frisson of exotica, the threat of nature's revenge, a peek into a post-apocalyptic future when climate change has done its work; and two, a remarkably superficial covering of environmentally unfriendly function with an apparently 'living' facade. Morbidity and mendacity, with a hint of self-righteousness.

This is a remarkably common phenomenon. The very institutions which, with their intolerance for anything other than the bottom line, are the major destroyers of the 'environment', and whose oil and capital economy, based on the transportation of materials over huge distances by truck and jet, is exacerbating the catastrophe, are of course highly keen to use the 'living façade' and associated methods as a way of making their work of destruction look warmer, more in tune with nature – to make it seem like they're doing their bit. The weblog Landscape and Urbanism recently profiled a few instances of 'green branding' in street furniture. A McDonald's billboard with 'Fresh Salads' written in actual greenery. An iPod advert with plants growing out of it. A moss-covered vending machine.⁷ Elsewhere, there are instances like Sainsbury's in North Greenwich, London, where a minuscule 'nature reserve' and a couple of wind turbines attempt a minor 'offsetting' of that ridiculously unsustainable institution, the supermarket.

Versions of this can also be seen in the ubiquitous 'stunning developments', luxury flats and boxes for bankers which litter British cities. The days when buildings 'expressed' their structures are long gone. Every block is clad and dressed in pine, with little wooden accoutrements and, if especially privileged, a green roof encampment on the top. These are of course deeply exclusive, replacing the public spaces of parks, squares and gardens with privatised spaces, in which one needs authorisation to enjoy the lushness. Many of these buildings are placed in ex-industrial 'brownfield' sites, which frequently have their own, often extraordinary wildlife – the future site of London's 'Olympic Park' in London's Lea Valley is a prime example. The genuinely unique, extraordinary landscape created by the conflict between nature and industry is effaced in favour of a kind of garden international style, wherein the roofs of interminable luxury flats are decorated with the same creepers, around the same pools, the towers and blocks trimmed with the same stripped pine.

This is a remarkably transparent semiotic strategy, wherein by sticking natural materials onto a building's façade, the impression is given that it is somehow 'in tune' with nature rather than a hugely expensive, un-sustainable waste of energy and resources. It is by no means clear that renewable technology itself is so picturesque. Many of those whose houses desperately attempt to look au naturel have been implacably hostile to the genuinely important and useful technology represented by wind turbines: these pugnacious forms, sticking up out of the landscape are habitually blasted as 'eyesores' in Britain. Real 'green' technology will not necessarily be 'in keeping', will not announce itself as natural – because it isn't. Nature has no interest in our survival.

The Australian weblog Mapping Melbourne analysed an interesting example of this, the 'Council House 2' or CH2 Building, a municipal office block. They point out that the way this building has been received has been in terms of its apparent 'naturalism': 'as is the fashion with many green skyscraper projects, the Council and its cheerleaders do not promote the building in technological terms. Instead we find hippyish justifications and celebrations of the buildings being 'in tune with nature'. Who are they trying to kid? Are we expected to think that if nature were allowed to dominate the environment freely we would find neatly clipped hedges in window boxes and self-sustaining air conditioning systems? These projects are the ultimate example of man's domination of nature, the taming of it to meet our needs.'⁸ The building's artificiality is denied, its metallic forms are encased in pine. Infantile as this is, the face of green urbanism has to 'look' green, and straightforwardly technological solutions to the problems of climate change are loath to actually appear as they are, as this would shake the cosy belief that the catastrophe is somehow the fault of technology itself, of humanity getting ideas above its station, as opposed to the irrational, destructive economic system that wields it.

As it is, green urbanism reveals its true nature as a class project – a means for the metropolitan middle classes to make themselves feel better, to morally absolve themselves for the disaster they have created. As in so many cases, the best place to see this is in China. Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid', a determinedly futurist structure of interconnected neo-brutalist walkways, has at the top of its blocks the obligatory planting, the heaps of sod and the insulation that apparently offsets the costs of the structure. While an economy that once gave pride of place to the bicycle embraces the private car and the barbarities of 19^th century industrialists are repeated en masse, and several huge industrial towns spring up at lightning speed, a 'zero-carbon' city is pioneered at Dongtan. In essence, whether surveying the strange forms infesting the ruins or watching from the top of a newly built gated complex, the end result will look much the same. The teeming city will be viewed, by some, through a roof garden's screen of lush vegetation. Beneath that will be the asphalt, the exhaust smoke, and the ugly, disavowed reality.

posted by owen hatherley  # 7:02 AM