Ken Smith Installations and Gardens

WORKSHOP:KEN SMITHLANDSCAPEARCHITECT

Installations and Gardens

WORKSHOP:Ken Smith Landscape Architect

WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, P.C. is an award winning design firm with experience in a wide variety and scale of projects.

The firm practices landscape design primarily in the realm of public space. Typical design problems involve making landscape space within the context of existing, reworked or complex urban fabric. This requires a strategic approach in making the strongest conceptual landscapes within the limits and possibilities of the site’s infrastructure, context and program. This has led to pushing beyond traditional landscape typologies of plaza, street, and garden to conceptualize landscapes that are hybridized from diverse traditions and influences of the contemporary culture.

Experience and experimentation are combined with the goal of producing landscapes of the highest conceptual and artistic quality. Emphasis is placed on providing personal service and addressing landscape problems, which require special effort. Each site, program and client are dealt with individually, giving attention to developing solutions specific to the project.

WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect is based in New York City and maintains a west coast office in Southern California.

MoMA Roof Garden New York City

INSTALLATIONS AND GARDENS

MoMA Roof GardenLever House Landscape RestorationCooper Hewitt WallFlowersFirehouse Atrium Garden40 Central Park SouthPark Avenue TerraceSutton Place TerraceThe Milan Courtyard GardenSagaponack ResidenceMetis International Garden FestivalGlowing Topiary Garden

The Museum of Modern Art Roof Garden Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed an art-oriented roof garden for the new Taniguchi-designed addition to the museum. The museum was required to provide a “decorative rooftop” to ameliorate the view of the new building’s roof from the adjacent condominium residences of Museum Tower. The design of the roof garden appropriates the visual vocabulary of military camouflage to create a garden that simultaneously disguises the roof while making it highly visible. The design also provides commentary on the nature of landscape with its manipulation of scale and use of natural and simulated materials. Limited load conditions and policy direction to have no maintenance or irrigation led to a material palette of recycled rubber chips, crushed glass, crushed marble stone, artificial boulders and artificial boxwood shrubs.

Completion Date: 2005

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, clientYoshio Taniguchi and Kohn Pedersen Fox, architects

Lever House Landscape Restoration Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed the renovation of the mid-century landscape at the landmark Lever House in New York City. The landscape at the Lever House features an open ground floor plan with a plaza, garden courtyard, and a small glass-enclosed lobby. The second and third floors appear to float over the street and act as a base for the slender glass tower. Open to the street, the original garden built in 1952 was similar to model photos published in 1950. Although there were not many drawings documenting the landscape design in the SOM archives, the landscape was well-documented in a series of photographs taken by Ezra Stoller at the completion of construction and during the early years of the building’s life.

The restoration design involved restoring the landscape to its as-built 1952 condition, based largely on the Ezra Stoller photos. The original hedge plinth that went from the outside plaza to the inside lobby was restored as were the perimeter hedge and locust tree plantings at the podium level. The project also involved fabrication and installation of marble seating originally designed for the plaza by Isamu Noguchi in 1952.

Ezra Stoller photograph,1952


RFR Realty, clientSkidmore, Owings & Merrill, restoration architectsWilliam T. Georgis, interior architectRichard Marshall, art consultantGavin Keeney, historical researchIsamu Noguchi Foundation, historical research

WallFlowersCooper Hewitt National Design Museum Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed and fabricated a large-scale flower scrim for the front of the museum’s nineteenth-century building as part of the museum’s 2006 Design Triennial.

The WallFlowers project is based on a procedure that merges order and seeming randomness. WallFlowers are organized on an invisible grid with the exact flower placement and flower choice subject to a specified process but indeterminant selection. For the Triennial installation of WallFlowers, over-scaled flower shapes were fabricated from brightly colored varieties of erosion control fabrics that are typically used for landscape construction. Thousands of three-dimensional silk flowers ornament the flower cut-outs, which were attached on a scrim of safety orange construction fencing. Within the underlying grid, flowers were placed in one of nine possible positions until all positions were used. At this point, the process was reiterated until every grid space on the scrim was filled. The result was an ordered but indeterminant pattern


Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, clientGilsanze Murray Steficek,engineer

Firehouse Atrium Garden

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed a living wall garden for the 9-foot by 22-foot sky-lit atrium of an old New York City firehouse, The floor of the garden is made of shredded recycled rubber, a pervious material that is water and humidity tolerant. The walls are studded with off-the-shelf modern classic ceramic planters suspended in thin custom-designed stainless steel rings. The wall opposite the plantings wall was clad in reflective mirror to create a visual doubling of the tropical garden.


Confidential, clientMichelle Andrews, interior architect

40 Central Park South Courtyard Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed a viewing garden in the courtyard between two post-war apartment buildings facing 58th and 59th Streets in New York City. Designed for varied perspectives, the garden can be experienced from a ground floor window-lined passage and rotunda space that connects the two buildings as well as from the apartments surrounding and looking down on the garden. Experienced at ground level, the linear garden spaces offer a heightened sense of scale, depth and visual mystery. Walking from the north building into the passage, one becomes immersed in a mesh of tall aluminum-stained wood screens that seem to slide back from the passageway. The linear parterres open up, encouraging viewers to either pause at the curved seat in the alcove, surrounded by the garden on all sides, or continue on.

The strategy was to simplify the ground plane to reveal the organic structure of the existing sycamore and locust trees. Ornamental plantings of Japanese Maple, Bamboo, Magnolia and groundcovers were sited for background color and texture. Strategically sited in the garden is a collection of modern sculptures including an Isamu Noguchi torso from the late 1940s, a mid-century bronze by Chaim Gross and a recent large bronze, “Guardian II,” by Michele Oka Doner.

before

Isamu Noguchi torso, before and after.right and far right

Study model, above


Confidential, clientJim Conti, lighting design

Park Avenue Penthouse Terrace

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed a small terrace garden of planters on wheels. The Manhattan penthouse terrace negotiates site constraints with a flexible design that accommodates movement and change. Allowing for on-demand reconfiguration, every element is movable due to the building’s window washing equipment requirement that the terrace be cleared four times a year. The on-demand reconfigurations also allows for adapting to varying social uses by the client ranging from intimate family dinners to large parties.

The design is a modern interpretation of an ancient tradition of viewing and strolling garden with a collection of plants. Inspired by scholar rocks, the principle organizing program consists of five sculpted planters with multiple planted openings. The organically-shaped planters and negative spaces between them create a series of composed views within the terrace and onto the borrowed scenery of Manhattan.


Confidential, clientSeal Fiberglass, fabricator

Sutton Place Penthouse

Ken Smith Landscape Architect sited Jeff Koons’ well-known sculpture Green Diamond and installed a wall garden of synthetic flowers on this serene terrace of several hundred square feet. Working with the Koons studio, the landscape architect designed a circular white Corian base for the piece and placed it for optimal viewing from both inside and out. Originally, it had been displayed in Basel on a rectangular base, but for this New York rooftop, the base was redesigned as a circular form because it allowed for non-directional and fluid circulation around the diamond. The terrace walls around the diamond were painted white to unify the space as a volume united with the white tile floor. On the east wall, Ken Smith created a wallflower installation of synthetic purple daisies in PVC “plant-flanges” that were epoxied to the wall in a diamond pattern.


Confidential, client

The Milan Courtyard Garden

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed an interior courtyard of a high-rise residential building in Manhattan. The garden features a folded topiary wall fabricated of stainless steel frames and expanded steel mesh, which is covered with English ivy. An off-center pathway leads from the lobby of the building out to a folded metal staircase of diamond tread-plate that steps up into an elevated terrace of Bamboo. On the way, visitors pass across two aluminum stained wood steps that separate the garden into two broad paved terraces.

The folding and torqueing of the topiary panels provide both screen and separation from the neighboring houses and perspectivally create a sense of greater garden depth and size. The garden is furnished simply with classic modern Richard Schultz lounge chairs and minimalist concrete flower planters.


World Wide Properties, clientJay Valgora, V Studio, interior architect

Sagaponack Residence

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed this two-acre summer house on former potato fields. True to form for the Hamptons, this project’s oblong site is nearly flat, located on former Long Island potato fields, with conservation easements on either end of the site. The design draws on the local vernacular of flat ground planes and linear three-dimensional hedges and windrows. The landscape plan highlights the protected long views at the northeast and southwest ends of the site while screening out the neighboring houses on the sides.

Like a subtle hourglass, the entire plan is pinched at the center adjacent to the house to create a heightened sense of perspective and an expanded sense of space. This also created space for establishing taller privacy plantings of ornamental understory trees along the side lot lines.


Confidential, clientKaren L. Jacobson, architect

Glowing Topiary Garden

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed this temporary installation in Liberty Plaza adjacent to the World Trade Center in collaboration with Jim Conti, lighting designer Installed in time for the 1997 winter solstice, the Glowing Topiary Garden lasted through the brief winter holiday season, bringing mystery and pleasure to the shortest days of the year. Sixteen 16-foot tall cones were placed over the existing grid of “lollipop” mercury vapor lampposts in the plaza. For a sense of focus, one central 24-foot tall cone was placed at the center. Colored fluorescent tubes provide interior illumination to the base of the topiary cones, creating the effect of white light at the top of the cone and colored light at the ground.

The project’s large cone-shaped topiary lanterns formed a garden space located in the midst of a crowded urban setting. Together, the sculptural forms, sounds and the light environment created an ambient landscape that became a world in itself. The time of day also affected visitors’ color perceptions just as the sounds of the city affected their absorption in the project’s sound environment. With a limited material palette and minimalist geometry, a changing and immersive space of enclosure was achieved. No matter what the time of day, it brought visitors a feeling of calm and a space in the heart of the city to think and reflect.


The Alliance for Downtown New York, clientJim Conti, lighting design

A Ditch With A View

Ken Smith Landscape Architect designed a temporary garden along a drainage ditch in a forest using found and recycled materials. The garden is both an exploration of the borrowed view and the role of voyeurism into a normally unseen space. This project frames a space not ordinarily perceived as a garden by appropriating a typical engineered drainage ditch as the site and transforming one’s perception of this typical kind of utilitarian infrastructure into something of interest and perhaps even beauty.

Three window frames spanning the ditch were constructed using recycled natural and cultural materials. An armature of winter fallen Spruce tree trunks was fitted with an array of recycled window sashes that simultaneously bound the garden space and provide windowed views of the ditch and the borrowed landscape beyond.


Metis International Garden Festival, Quebec, client

Ken Smith, Principal

Ken Smith is one of the best-known of a new generation of landscape architects equally at home in the worlds of art, architecture, and urbanism. Trained in both design and the fine arts, he explores the relationship between art, contemporary culture, and landscape. His practice, Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, was established in 1992 and is based in New York City with a southern California office in Irvine.

He is committed to creating landscapes, especially parks and other public spaces, as a way of improving the quality of urban life. Much of his work pushes beyond traditional landscape typologies—plaza, street, and garden—to landscapes that draw on diverse cultural traditions and influences of the contemporary urban landscape. Smith’s approach is directed at projects of varying scales and types: temporary installations, private residential gardens, public spaces, parks, and commercial projects. With a particular emphasis on projects that explore the symbolic content and expressive power of landscape as an art form, the Workshop specializes in the investigation of new expressions in landscape design.

Ken Smith is a graduate of Iowa State University and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has taught and lectured at Harvard, the City College of New York, and other universities and institutions around the world. Smith’s work has been published widely in the popular and trade press.

Education: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Master of Landscape Architecture, 1986 Iowa State University; Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture, 1976

Professional Experience: Ken Smith WORKSHOP WEST, Irvine, California 2005-present WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY 1992-present Martha Schwartz Ken Smith David Meyer, Inc. San Francisco, CA 1990-1992 The Office of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz, Landscape Architects, Inc., 1986-1989

Registration: Landscape Architect, New York #1355 Landscape Architect, California #3761 Landscape Architect, Iowa #248 Landscape Architect, New Mexico #350

Resume

Elected Fellow, American Society of Landscape Architects, 2012 American Society of Landscape Architects National Landmark Award for Village of Yorkville, 2012

Rudy Brunner Award, Silver Medalist, Santa Fe Railyard Park, 2011

Excellence In Design Award, Public Design Commission of The City Of New York, Reconstruction of Pier 35, 2010

National Park Service, Designing the Parks Site Design Merit Award for the Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza, 2010

American Society of Landscape Architects National Merit Award for the Ken Smith Landscape Architect monograph, 2010

State of New Mexico Heritage Preservation Award for the Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza, 2010

American Society of Landscape Architects National Honor Award for The Museum of Modern Art Roof Garden, 2009

American Society of Landscape Architects National Honor Award for Observation Balloon Preview Park, Orange County Great Park, 2009

American Institute of Architects National Honor Award in Regional & Urban Design, Orange County Great Park, 2009

American Planning Association National Focused Planning Issue Award, Orange County Great Park, 2009

Excellence In Design Award, The Design Commission of The City Of New York, Croton Water Treatment Plant, 2009

American Society of Landscape Architects National Honor Award for Analysis & Planning, Orange County Great Park Master Plan, 2008

National Design Award finalist, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum 2006 and 2007

MASterworks award for 55 Water Street Plaza, Municipal Art Society, 2006

American Society of Landscape Architects Merit Award for Lever House landscape restoration, 2004

American Society of Landscape Architects Merit Award for PS 19 Queens, 2004

Presidents Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, Village of Yorkville Park, 1996

Major Awards

Principal Staff

Elizabeth Asawa, Senior Associate Education: University of Pennsylvania, Master of Landscape Architecture, 1996 University of Southern California, Bachelor of Architecture, 1993 University of California at Los Angeles, Fine Arts Major, 1986-88 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 1996-present

Hardy Stecker, Associate Education: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Master of Landscape Architecture, 2004 Trinity College, Bachelor of Arts with honors, Anthropology, 1997 Philips Andover Academy, 1993 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2004-present Landworks Studio, Salem MA, 2003 Office of Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco, CA, 2000-01

Mario Benito, Associate Education: California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Master of Landscape Architecture, 2007 Otis College of Art and Design, Bachelor of Fine Art-Environmental Design, 1997 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY 2009-present Ken Smith WORKSHOP WEST, Irvine, CA, 2007-2009 RPLA, Rancho Mirage, CA, 2005 Freelance Landscape Designer, 2003-07 Atypical, Los Angeles, CA 2001-2002 Society of Multidisciplinary Artists, Venice, CA, 1998-2000 Rios Associates, Los Angeles, CA, 1998 Studio Seireeni, Los Angeles, CA, 1997-1998

Michael Taylor, Studio Director, California Office Education: California Polytechnic State University, Pomona, 1991-1994 Professional Experience: Ken Smith WORKSHOP WEST, Irvine, CA, 2007-present Project Design Consultants, San Diego, CA 2003-2007 Studio Katz Landscape Architecture, San Diego, CA 2002-2003 Nowell and Associates, San Diego, CA 1998-2002 Burton Associates, Del Mar, CA 1996-1998 EPT Landscape Architecture, San Juan Capistrano, CA 1994-1996

Brooke Rosenthal, Project Manager Education: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Master of Landscape Architecture, 2007 Carnegie Mellon University, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design, 2003 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2007-present Hargreaves Associates, New York, NY 2006 Community Design Fellow, New Yorkers for Parks, New York, NY 2005

Nadine Soubotin, Project Manager Education: University of California at Berkeley, Master of Landscape Architecture, 2008 Cornell University, Bachelor of Science, Landscape Architecture, 2003 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2008-present Wallace Roberts and Todd Design, San Francisco, 2007 Environmental Design and Research, 2003-06

John Ridenour, Project Manager Education: Harvard Graduate School of Design, Master in Landscape Architecture, 2007 Ball State University, College of Architecture and Planning, Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, 2003 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2010-present Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, Chicago, Illinois 2007-10 Wolff Clements Landscape Architects, Chicago, Illinois 2003-05Professional Certificate: LEED AP, 2008

Svetlana Ragulina, Project Manager Education: University of Pennsylvania, Master in Landscape Architecture, 2011 Rutgers University, Bachelor of French and Art History, 2005 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2011-present Greenspace Alliance, Philadelphia, 2011 Deborah Nevins & Associates, New York, NY 2010 Balmori Associates, Neew York, 2009

Susan Hamad, Financial Manager Education: New York City Technical College, NY, Bachelor of Arts, Business Management, 1998 Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2010-present ZoomNY, New York City 2007-09 Guggenheimer Architects / Rose+Guggenheimer Studio, New York City 2005-07

Marc Thomas, Administrative Assistant Education: Brooklyn College, Master of Fine Arts, Television Production Xavier University, Bachelor of Arts, Mass Communications Professional Experience: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, New York, NY, 2011-present Doris Whol, Executive Personal Assistant 1009-11 Studio Daniel Libeskind, Executive Personal Assistant, 2005-08 Jacqui Farmer, Personal Assistant / Office Manager, 2002-05, 1998-2000 Theater for a New Audience, Subsrciptions Manager, 2000-02

Publications

The New Yorker, July 22, 2011

Landscape Architecture Magazine, July 1010

Los Angeles Times, February 9, 2006

The Architects Newsletter, February 26, 2009

The Architectural Review, December 1998

Monographs

Monicelli Press / Random House, 2009

Princeton Architectural Press, 2006

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Documents

Ken Smith Installations and Gardens