Parti Wall

The impact of human action on the environment has ensured that all sites are in some way marked by human presence. Given this Post-Pastoral context, the natural is contingent on its relationship to the artificial and the status of “wilderness” is recalibrated by the “urban.” Whereas wilderness suggests a precondition of the urban, contemporary suburban expansion and the permeation of the manmade into all territories, forces us to rethink the status of the “wild,” vis a vis the domesticating force of the human activity. The simultaneity of wildness and domestication—typically assumed to be in opposition—is expressed in the dual nature of PIXEL FIELD. By transforming the orientation and the patterning of the Sedum surface, PIXEL FIELD demonstrates the redeployment of the “wild” in a highly “domesticated” configuration. Rotating the field from horizontal to vertical questions the basic assumption about the groundedness of plant material. The plant matter is grown through a lightweight engineered soil medium of half inch thick felt substrate, which is cut into panels—or pixels—and suspended in front of the building facade. The transformation of the field into a pixel pattern—a format usually reserved for digital media—underscores the artifice of the “new natural.” The ability of the PIXEL FIELD to flourish despite its “unnatural” configuration demonstrates the resilience of the organic matter. The reconfigured field as pattern suggests broader and distributed applications, where the vertical landscape could occupy multiple sites throughout the city. The project recasts urban architectural interventions as the production of environments that deploy a full range of materials, mineral and vegetal, to engage a public through the physical encounter with new landscapes, in a larger debate about architecture and the environment. The prototype illustrates how blank urban surfaces could become opportunities for zero footprint public art that improves the city visually and performatively.