Green Roofs That Top a Dark Future

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.

'Useless' at Project 4

If Flashpoint offers architecture with a social conscience, Project 4 presents the discipline at its most coolly theoretical. Called "Useless," this group exhibition includes the kind of work architects produce after clients go home. Tooling around with the computer programs and machines of their real-world practice, they make things without real-world application. In other words, they make art.