Work’s cardboard tubes, both cheap and modular, evoked an apparently infinitely adaptable system that, amoeba-like, might continue to divide and grow. (Le Corbusier’s rearticulation of the garden city, too, invoked the cell, albeit at the scale of the individual housing unit.) Among the facts on the construction of P.F. 1, Work included the statement, “NYC’s 14,000 acres of unshaded rooftop could host over 400,000 P.F. 1s.” Alien to the local organizing of Sherk or the insular elitism of a queen, P.F. 1’s repetitive, cellular, and scalable logics instead recall, alternately, the grand schemes of 20th-century urban avant-gardists, and the endless variability of the global corporation.

"Gardens in the Sky" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents .