Fritz Haeg in his LA dome residence/headquarters
For millions of Americans and Canadians, the front lawn is a sacred place. It symbolizes home ownership quite as forcefully as the house itself does. Kept vividly green and neatly clipped throughout the summer months, the open space between front door and street expresses for all to see the pride and care of its owners. Most importantly, it advertises a dream of prosperity and stability.
But the lawn has its enemies. One of them – a gentle, thoughtful foe, indeed – is Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg, who was in Toronto yesterday to speak at the World Without Oil symposium held at the Design Exchange in conjunction with the Interior Design Show. (The trade fair continues through Sunday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.) For the past five years, Mr. Haeg has been teaming up with museums in several regions of the United States, and in London, to transfigure carefully selected front lawns into kitchen gardens. The results of this gesture have been written up admiringly in Time Magazine and The New York Times, and numerous design magazines in the United States, Europe and the Far East.
So what has captured the imagination of arts journalists around the world? I tried to find out during a telephone call last week to his home and studio in the hills outside Los Angeles.
Mr. Haeg certainly doesn't think what he's doing is all that startling. “Planting the garden takes only about three days,” he told me. “The larger part of the project is telling the story of what happens through videos, weekly visits by a local photographer, exhibitions and workshops and websites and the book.” (Mr. Haeg's documentary account of the first few gardens, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn [Metropolis Books, $16.27], appeared in 2008. A second edition will appear in April.) “I'm not doing anything new. I think it's hilarious when people write about the project as radical or crazy or new.”
But however ordinary and simple Mr. Haeg's garden venture seems on the surface, it touches a deep place in the contemporary psyche, and therein lies its appeal. Many people are worried these days about the high cost of consigning millions of arable acres to purely symbolic use. Some are concerned about suburban loneliness and alienation, and share Mr. Haeg's vision of the front yard as a new place of sociable micro-farming, a zone that could help reconnect neighbourhoods around a topic we're all interested in: food.
“There's something very American about it,” he said, “but everybody globally is already thinking about the issues – how we are living together, how we're making cities, how we are dealing with cities that already exist.... Instead of starting over with some new, grand, top-down kind of utopian plan, I am starting from the bottom up, thinking about reappropriating, reconsidering spaces that already exist.”
As things happened, the initial impulse that led to the garden scheme had nothing to do with gardens at all. It was the 2004 U.S. presidential election, which revealed painful fault lines in the American political landscape, and got Mr. Haeg thinking about what he could do to help heal the situation. That's when doing something with the lawn occurred to him.
“There's something iconic about it,” the architect reflects, “but if you dig deeper into the story of it, it's quite an insidious space, the way it pollutes and wastes water. I wanted to do a series of gardens throughout the country, each one in a different region, showing what's possible in different neighbourhoods, by different families, in different climates. Not a perfect garden, but a simple, cheap, quick, easy garden anyone can do themselves. It's about how we choose to live, and hopefully every one of these gardens creates this chain reaction of thought. You realize we have choices about how we live in these cities we've inherited.”
The first front-yard conversion was in Salina, Kan., and featured squash, tomatoes, beans, strawberries and other fruits and vegetables suitable for a harsh summer climate. Since Salina, Mr. Haeg has taken his idea (and the museum exhibition that accompanies it) to Texas, New York City, New Jersey, California and Maryland, and to a council-housing estate in London.
What inspires Mr. Haeg to keep seeking out new venues for his conversion program is his sense that we are in the midst of an environmental emergency that requires bold moves, but also very small ones, at the scale of the neighbourhood.
“I think people are realizing that the systems that we're trapped in, that we're born into, now are leading us to places that are neither pleasurable nor sustainable. Food production, transportation, energy, city-making, building construction. It's all inherently flawed and we're all looking for ways to change it. The question is: Will we be able to do it in time?”
