Green Roofs That Top a Dark Future

By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 18, 2007; Page C02

At Flashpoint, an unusual exhibition with a frothy title wraps a poetic meditation on life and death around a public service announcement for green roofs.

Organized by 29-year-old University of Virginia landscape architecture student Karl Krause and abetted by a handful of friends who contribute video and verse, "Earth on Stone on Earth Is Naturally So" roots itself in 1960s-era social activism even as it questions hippie motives. As the show's guiding spirit, Krause channels architecture and poetry: His inner architect made small-scale models of green rooftops; his inner shaman emblazoned verse on their pedestals.

Visitors entering the gallery are engulfed by musty, heavy air. The odor comes from sod that carpets the gallery floor and planters topped with mini gardens stationed here and there. The waist-high planters function like museum pedestals, except that they support succulents instead of stone. Each holds a two-foot-square green roof, complete with the layers of insulation, drainage and plants found on an architect-designed covering. Grow lights flicker on and off throughout the day to nourish the chlorophyll-packed occupants.

Under Krause's direction, we're asked to consider the philosophical implications of conservation. When architects cap buildings with plants, they intend for the building to absorb rainwater and carbon dioxide, as if bringing inert concrete and steel to life. The roof is a utopian gesture of preservation with the larger mission of staving off the planet's extinction.

Yet don't the architect's efforts simply postpone the inevitable? Won't our ecosystem fail whether we drive hybrids or Humvees?

That's the implication of this exhibition, too. For all the life that this show exudes, death resonates just as deeply. The pedestals cradling their green charges have been stationed around the room like grave markers. Brief lines of Krause's sometimes somber verse add funereal effect. The thick scent of grass soon stifles.

Such an evocation of growth and decay is hardly the first of its kind. This exhibition's precedent is a late 1970s installation still on view today, Walter de Maria's peaty "The New York Earth Room," which presents a back yard's worth of earth, bugs and plants inside a SoHo art gallery. A decade before, Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis planted gardens inside museums to suggest cycles of the ephemeral.

Back in the '60s and '70s, works like these were radical bridges of nature and culture. The immediacy -- and the incongruity -- of earth inside a gallery packed an immediate jolt.

If the bracing atmosphere of Krause's Flashpoint exhibition is any indicator, the idea still resonates today. Krause has simply updated the project with his evocation of rooftop greening.

In a series of performances held before the exhibition, poets in California and New York subjected themselves to (brief) neck-deep burials in public parks. Text detailing their reactions rings the gallery. Too many of the passages are indulgent, too few sharp, but collectively the words represent an urge to preempt death by befriending it. Their contribution is a celebration -- and lament -- of our own biodegradability.

Do green roofs simply forestall the inevitable? Absolutely. Are they worth doing anyway? Sure. Krause and company reveal the advantage -- and the paradox -- of eco-friendly architecture.

Mark Jenkins wrote about this exhibit for The Washington Post in August 2007: Anyone leaving "Earl Cunningham's America" and seeking an example of contemporary art that's too dependent on theory and text can walk a block west to Flashpoint, which is hosting an environmentally oriented show. There are no landscape paintings, but nature is addressed in photographs, videos, constructions and lots and lots of words. Even the exhibition's title is garrulous: "Earth on Stone on Earth Is Naturally So."

The show essentially consists of three sections, all grouped closely together in the small gallery. There are 10 "planted roofs," models inspired in part by the green roofs of some recent buildings; 10 photographs of artists who were buried alive (but not so completely that they couldn't breathe); and three 10-minute videos of abstract land and sea imagery. To add to the eco-ambiance, overhead lights cycle through "night" and "day" every 10 minutes, ambient music burbles and the floor is partially covered with artificial turf, leading to a fake hillock near the video screen.

The photos are typical of the show's outlook: images of people contemplating their temporary oneness with the Earth, each with the subject's commentary.

Jason Engdahl sticks out his tongue at the camera, and Timothy "Speed" Levitch (the Manhattan tour guide semi-immortalized in the 1998 documentary "The Cruise'') cracks that he's "proud to be biodegradable." Yet most of the accompanying remarks are long-winded and overblown, invoking Thoreau, Whitman and (of course) the Smiths. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- but not till you read the essay.

Conceived by Karl Krause and made by him with Evan Wells and Kelly McCoy, the miniature roofs are equally literary. The plantings augment sedum (a highly absorbent plant commonly used on green roofs) with thematic elements: pennies and shredded currency for "Human Benefit," corn, beans and herbs for "Urban Architecture." Each piece features a quotation, formula or haiku-like text, supplemented by a flier with information about environmental topics. Interesting, but again the words drown the art.

The show's most alluring entries are the videos, Wells's "Untitled (land)" and "Untitled (water)" and Colin Guthrie's "What It Feels Like to Be Buried in Old Snow." Whether representational or purely abstract, the images suggest nature's colors, forms and flux. With pixels substituting for brush strokes, the videos capture something of the evanescence that has inspired landscape painters for centuries.

It took five days to turn Flashpoint Gallery into a mini-botanic garden in the city, roll out more than 200 square feet of sod indoors, build boxes ("planted roofs") for growing plants, set up projections of even more grass and pipe in the sounds of birds chirping.

"Earth on Stone on Earth Is Naturally So," organized by artist and U-Va. landscape architecture student Karl Krause, comes off at first as quite a giggle. But it's also an exploration of humanity's connection to ecology.

As part of the exhibition, poets were buried up to their necks (performance art, folks) in New York's Prospect Park and San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreational Area. In the resulting poems, engraved on particle board alongside photos of the interred poets, they weighed in about the new experience of literally becoming one with the soil. (One poet writes, "No one has ever buried me in the Earth and asked me how it feels to be alive, until you did." He ends, "I am proud to be biodegradable."

--Lavanya Ramanathan (Aug. 16, 2007)