Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, © Elizabeth Felicella

Public Farm 1, 2008

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

The second of Le Corbusier’s “Five Points for a New Architecture,” outlined in 1926, called for the construction of a roof garden to recover the land lost to the building footprint. Work Architecture Company’s summer installation at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Public Farm 1 (P.F. 1), the winning entry for the ninth annual Young Architects Competition, reconfigured this modernist ideal as an urban vegetable garden. A folded ribbon of honeycombed cardboard tubes planted with tomatoes, beans, radishes, and other edibles, the structure rose above the concrete walls of P.S. 1’s courtyard and skimmed the ground along its crease, where it split to accommodate a narrow wading pool. The Museum of Modern Art’s architecture curator, Barry Bergdoll, one of the competition judges, described it as a “merger between a flying carpet and a farmer’s market.”

The farm as an urban imperative is not a novel concept. Le Corbusier’s dream of a “vertical garden city,” imagined every worker as, also, a farmer. “Agricultural labor abandons the countryside,” he wrote in 1923. “With the eight-hour shift, the worker here becomes a farmer and produces a significant portion of the things he consumes.” Artist Bonnie Sherk’s six-year project, The Farm (1974–80), recently documented at P.S. 1 as part of “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” rethought the community garden as a performance piece. As Sherk recounts, the project, which occupied six and a half acres under a San Francisco freeway interchange, required that she fulfill the roles of administrator, politician, strategist, teacher, cook, designer, and gardener.

There is a performative aspect to P.F. 1, too. Bergdoll recalls the winning husband-and-wife team, Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, who opened Work in 2002 after each spent years working at Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), as looking “like stock actors from the background of a Mozart troupe where they needed some rustic peasants.” (Wood arrived at the competition presentation wearing a green “picking skirt,” designed with large pockets for gathering produce.) While Sherk’s garden resisted artifice, P.F. 1 embraced fakery (one column emitted “farm sounds”; another directed the visitor to “look up” to a starry night of LEDs).

Deliriously tongue-in-cheek, Work’s proposal remains perhaps closer to the dissimulations of the theater than to the direct strategies of Sherk’s The Farm. The farm-as-stage-set can be traced to a very different history, that of the 18th century ferme ornée. In 1783, just six years before the march on Versailles, Marie Antoinette presided over the construction of an ersatz farm. Composed in the manner of Flemish landscape painting, the petit hameau, complete with dairy houses and rustic windmills, conjured the charming effect of a rural village where the queen, clothed in simple cotton dresses (which created a fashion sensation), would lead, rumor had it, scrubbed and perfumed sheep on lengths of ribbon.

Work, however, aligns P.F. 1 not with the regime of the oppressor (royal or otherwise), but, rather, with movements including the Third International—a cardboard “Tatlin’s Tower” housed electrical equipment— and “slow food.” Updating the May 1968 stone-throwing call, “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Under the paving stones, the beach”), the architects fashioned the slogan “Sur les pavés, la ferme” (“Over the pavement, the farm”). These convenient wordplays confirm Work’s debt to Koolhaas, whose sense of irony and interest in juxtaposition and montage defined the early work of OMA. As proper successors to the reign of Rem, perhaps Work will ultimately deploy their revolutionary euphorias according to the co-optive strategies of OMA, who have suggested, triumphantly, that shopping remains the last domain of the social and who now aim to re-create the congestion of old Manhattan as a luxury island in Dubai. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, P.F. 1 acted as something of a mercenary signifier (a rosette of tubes functions, literally, as the project’s logo), appealing equally to corporate sponsors (additional support came from MensVogue.com and American Apparel) and environmental advocates (the Gaia Institute and the Seed Fund provided resources).