It is in architecture’s nature to appropriate. Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Rhyming and stealing rules the roost. This is a field which is all but impossible to pin down, is it any surprise that architects borrow from anywhere and everywhere? In the empire state building of appropriations that is the practice, software, language, and materials are but floors one through twelve and social issues are the antenna. It is fitting, therefore, that a medium that originating in garden design be pressed into use to comment upon its host.
For years gardeners have provoked the growth of moss in prescribed places to decorate garden walls or to add the patina of age. The use of laser cut stencils, however, widens the scope of the canvas and makes the medium potentially far richer. What better way to draw attention to new buildings which are green in name only? What better form of social protest of the act of building itself than a ‘green’ intervention?
Graffiti itself is part art, part protest, part urban blight, and all aerosol. Reinvented, the fluorocarbons are replaced with plant spores but the rest remains just as vivid, just as urgent, and just as tactile, and yet, somehow, it becomes the urban pastoral. It is urban in that it has been splashed across the side of a building in the wee hours of the night, but it’s green. It grows. The green movement couldn’t ask for a better form of protest. No more Green movements promoted with printed flyers. We will retro-bypass the paper and start with the trees. You want Green? We’ll give you green. In your face green, borrowed, of course, from the people who actually grow things. A garden of Banksian urban delights for a new wave of critics. Go forth and grow. Let the tagging begin.
Neill (nseltzer@pratt.edu)
