Seeing Green

The building, seen in earlier days almost as an object of virtu, was famously transformed by the modernists into a machine for living. In recent years, however, it has been reinvented yet again as something between an appliance and a Swiss Army knife, boasting a wealth of cost effective, spatially efficient, and often unrelated features.To date, perhaps the best and surely the newest example of this trend in New York is the Queens Botanical Garden’s Visitor & Administration Building, which opened to the public this weekend. There is a good chance that you had no idea that Queens even had a botanical garden. Surely it is a far smaller affair than the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and it would scarcely fill a corner of the imperious New York Botanical Garden up in the Bronx. But these 33 acres of green in Flushing, a historically disparaged part of the city, manage to generate their own enchantment, a fact all the more remarkable given that the gardens, which have been here since the 1940s, rise over what was once a dumping ground for ashes — indeed, “a valley of ashes,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald called it in “The Great Gatsby.”Designed by a local firm, BKSK Architects, the visitor’s center aspires to merge seamlessly with the landscape. This is in marked contrast to the previous visitors center, a dreary modernist affair from the 1950s, squatting near the entrance and daring you to walk around it. The new building is recessed from the entrance — a wise decision that allows visitors to pass through greenery, pavers, and water works before coming to the building itself, the largest in the gardens.That the new building complex is relatively unobtrusive and self-effacing is remarkable, given that it is a fairly energetic specimen of the Deconstructed style. Its rectilinear core is conjoined with a reddish, boomerang-shaped and zinc-shingled canopy, 27 feet high and perched upon titled pylons. There is also a lower structure, which houses the auditorium and rises modestly up to the second floor of the main building in the form of a ramp. And yet, with all of this going on, the overall effect of the complex and its twisting, angular structures is not at all inharmonious with its organic setting. How this was accomplished is something of a puzzle, especially since the architect has not been sparing in his use of raw, exposed concrete. But then, concrete as an element of landscaping, an urban intrusion seemingly irreconcilable with nature, is hardly new to the five boroughs. You see evidence of it throughout the Hudson River Park along the far West Side, the two-year-old park at 55 Water St., and various other places throughout the city.In no small measure, this reconciliation is due to the artful use of brise soleil screens in the main building, made of a reassuringly rust colored wood. This part of the complex is compounded of reddish bricks and gray metal cladding. Facing the garden, the bare, uninflected pillars along the ground floor are clearly a reference to the classic Corbusian idiom of the Villa Savoye. The general harmony also owes something to the organic, almost animate quality of the canopy, which hovers above the other parts of the complex like a benign butterfly.The inside of the main building is less successful, largely due to a denuded, institutional feeling in both its hallways and its public spaces. Aside from a few pleasant wood finishings, and the beautiful plant life it looks out on, this part of the project reads almost like an afterthought. This may have something to do with the stated goal of the Botanical Garden in building the complex, which is to make it the first building in New York to receive a “platinum LEED rating,”the nation’s highest standard for sustainability. That is saying something, since a number of buildings around the city are competing for the honor of being first, and sustainability has become a shibboleth in the architectural community.In pursuit of this goal of sustainability, the vast canopy, covered in photo-voltaic cells, generates solar energy while collecting and redirecting rainwater. This is heated and cooled by a geothermal system that descends 300 feet into the earth. The building’s gray water (wastewater from sinks, showers, and such) is purified by gravel and sand, and by such local wetland species as Soft Rush, lizard’stail and marsh grasses. As for the toilets, they are nearly waterless, removing waste matter through a foamlike decoction that, I am assured, is highly efficient.As far as the exterior of the visitor’s center goes, the architects are to be commended in accommodating all that hardware while still producing a building complex that looks stylish. Going forward, however, the great question before the architects of the present age is whether the new dictates of efficiency and sustainability will take precedence over the claims of architecture as an art form.jgardner@nysun.com

Seeing Green

Seeing Green

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