A Jewel Box for the City
By Margie Ruddick
Cooper Hewitt’s garden has always had an allure of privacy and inaccessibility. In contrast to Central Park, where anyone can flow into and through the landscape, moving seamlessly from one scene to the next, the garden at the Carnegie Mansion historically restricted its visitors to those directly involved in the mansion’s life. In the 1970s, when Central Park was bare and dangerous, stripped of its understory and any semblance of a lawn, the mansion’s garden was still green, many shrubs and the emerald rectangle of lawn intact.
Gardens that are visible from the street, but serving a private or institutional function, give something to the city that is invaluable — a borrowed landscape that can, because it is not readily accessible, be lusher, richer, more fragile than a public space. In this era when large-scale parks have finally achieved the prominence they deserve as lifelines for the city, we can underestimate the importance of the small, bounded landscape to urban life.
These gardens are often glimpsed through fences or over walls. What is so precious about them, beyond their aesthetic appeal, is how you discover them — unique jewel boxes that open up over time as one grows to know the city. Gardens like the ones at St. Luke’s in the West Village, Jefferson Market, or even Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape can be as powerful a presence to the person who passes them every day as they are to the people granted entry. The distinct world that is evoked in each one of these gardens fires the imagination.
The renovation of the Cooper Hewitt garden recognizes the landscape as a space worthy of as much attention, design thinking, and programmatic planning as the museum itself. Once the radical rethinking of the way the museum works was complete, it was time to open the back doors and join inside and outside.
What the renovation gives to the greater city is also invaluable. It continues a trend of intense attention to garden design as a high art. The most visible contemporary public space in New York, the High Line, is actually a bounded garden. The plantings by Piet Oudolf, which make the High Line what it is — a seemingly wild place secreted high up in the city — are as masterful as the plantings of esteemed landscape gardeners and architects Gertrude Jekyll (British, 1843–1932) and Beatrix Farrand (American, 1872–1959). It is a strolling garden of the highest order, so intentionally calibrated and maintained that the costs to build it and to maintain it were and are many times higher than those of the average American park. And it is a wild success, earning back for the city the expense many times over.
The Cooper Hewitt garden renovation, designed by Walter Hood, principal of Hood Design Studio (Oakland, California) and 2009 National Design Award winner for Landscape Architecture, in collaboration with RAFT Landscape Architecture and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, does several things both to buttress the garden’s singularity and to open it out to a bigger world. With the back wall becoming more porous, the garden welcomes more people, more uses, and more content. But while it shifts in scale and material to be more resilient to the many more visitors who will enjoy it, the design adheres to and even amplifies the historic Richard Schermerhorn Jr. 1901 scheme commissioned by Andrew Carnegie. Working with historians from the Smithsonian Institution and the Cultural Landscape Foundation, the designers traced the garden’s history back to its roots. From the perennial plantings to the reimagined rockery referring to the geology of Carnegie Hill and the park, the renovation creatively engages the garden’s past, and the larger landscape within which it sits. New plantings of cherry trees and rhododendron commune with Central Park’s cherry allée and Rhododendron Mile. These glorious stretches of vibrant color, which run right by the museum, to some degree jump the fence and situate the garden in the grander context of the park.
The renovation of the Cooper Hewitt garden safeguards the garden’s history while better responding both to the workings of the museum inside and to the natural realm outside the garden’s historic fence and wall. And where once the people glimpsed at play through the fence were a select and maybe rarefied crowd, now seen inside the garden is anyone who has the time or inclination to spend a couple of hours experiencing the way in which absolutely every object or place in the world is a product of conscious design. Cooper Hewitt’s investment in innovative design and the highest caliber of construction is a testament to the importance of the garden as an eloquent and layered place of discovery, as well as a green offering of respite to people who simply pass by every day.
Margie Ruddick, winner of the 2013 National Design Award for Landscape Architecture is recognized for her pioneering, environmental approach to landscape design that integrates ecology, urban planning, and culture. Ruddick’s Wild by Design will be published Fall 2016.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 Design Journal published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
