fritz haeg studio projects mission the studio

select all current spaces for art domestic spaces art & conceptual interior architecture landscape, gardens & parks products, furniture & garments architecture & new construction 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1985

DESIGNING, CONSTRUCTING, PARADING, REWILDING... 2013 knitting 2013 2012 Princeton Student Colony, Princeton University 2011 Composted Constructions, Den Haag, The Netherlands 2010 Something for Everyone, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2009 Dome Colony X in the San Gabriels, New York, NY 2008 ALPHA LACMA MAJORIS, video/performance East Meets West Interchange Overpass Parade, Indianapolis, IN 2007 Bernardi Residence, Los Angeles, CA Plan B, exhibition, MASS MOCA Jones Residence, Joshua Tree, CA Altadena Residence, Altadena, ca 2006 Echo Park Residence, Los Angeles, CA Okon Jauregui Residence, Los Angeles, CA 2005 Life at Sundown, video Haffenreffer Residence, Costa Rica Hothouse Paintings, exhibition, Sydney, Australia 2004 Meeting Suite, furniture peres projects, Los Angeles, CA 2003 Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA L.A. Free Food, Los Angeles, CA 2002 L.A. River A.I.R. (artist in residence), Los Angeles, CA 2001 Sundown Gardens & Residence, Los Angeles, CA Oak Orchard Ranch, Valencia, CA Kubota Residence, Los Angeles, CA Maltman Gardens, Los Angeles, ca 2000 Mississippi River Orchard Retreat, Lake City, MN Rialto Residence, Venice, CA / ffp Safety House Houston's Restaurant, Santa Monica, CA / ffp Berlin Library, Berlin 1999 Testino Townhouse, New York, NY Globing Suite, photographs Fugitive Housing Facing Suite, photographs 1998 Manhattan Canyon Suite, photographs Alex & Esther Suite, paintings Tate Gallery / New York, NY 1997 Peter Jennings Residence, New York, NY West End Ave. Residence, New York, NY 1996 Depot Furniture Schwartz Residence, New York, NY Bridgehampton Bowl Bridgehampton Benefit Tent, Bridgehampton, NY 1995 Peter Halley Residence Wall Oval Suite, paintings 1993 Cesar Pelli Lighting Collection 1992 Urban Strip Revision / academic 1991 Facolta' di Architettura di Roma Spring Eternal / installation / academic Italy images / Venice, Italy / aca Lewis Residence / Sunfish Lake, MN 1990 Environmental Retreat Center / academic 1989 Firehouse / academic 1988 Forest Hotel / academic Tailfin Car Showroom / academic

art center community gardens

> 2002 / initiated by gardenlab

The Art Center Community Garden is a place for the students, faculty and staff to explore its relationship to the natural cycles and forces around us. It will include community gardens, a laboratory for experiments and installations, an outdoor classroom and perennial gardens. The effects of the GardenLab will then extend outside of this physical space as students and faculty bring their expertise out to the surrounding communities.

The community garden is an activist art/design intervention on the campus of Art Center. This is not a landscaping or campus beautification project. This is a laboratory for messy experimentation and observation. The GardenLab is also an agency for ecological and environmental activism both within the college and out to the surrounding communities. It will sponsor and host design studios, lectures, conferences, and student designed green spaces for local neighborhoods and schools in need. It is a unique and highly ambitious project that will become a model for other colleges and universities to integrate issues of ecology into the educational environment.

The GardenLab will include:
+ a COMMUNITY garden with plots for individual use by members of the art
+ center community -phase 1 (initiated fall 02)
+ an outdoor LABORATORY for evolving experiments and installations - phase 2
+ a PERENNIAL garden for permanent plantings that tell the story of our
+ relationship to the land - phase 3
+ an open air GATHERING space for observation of the gardens, performances,
+ events and lectures on ecological issues - phase 4

Art Center College of Design is situated on 111 wild acres in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in Pasadena. The students, faculty and staff at the school spend almost all of their time in a 1/8 mile long black steel and glass modernist box by Craig Elwood. Depending on the time of year this box is either heated or cooled. The windows do not open. Unless you are walking in the halls, or have a window office, you do not even have visual contact with the surrounding landscape. The building becomes a bridge as a ravine runs underneath it. At the bottom of this ravine is a flat clearing that is 90' in diameter. From this clearing you can see the San Gabriel Mountains to the east, and the black box of the building looming through the trees to the west. From the building you can see this clearing dramatically laid out below you.

Art Center, like most American colleges, has invested a great deal in ‘technology’ to support its curriculum. The computer labs are always a priority. Meanwhile, the principles of the natural organic cycles of our ecology that define the world we live in, and upon which we all depend, go unnoticed. They are either neglected or oversimplified and misunderstood. The photographers, product designers, graphic designers, advertisers, car designers, environmental designers and fine artists that will shape our future environment desperately need to understand the complexity of the natural world they will be affecting. Once the GardenLab is established as a physical place on campus, it will grow to become the brain-trust and clearinghouse for all environmental and ecological initiatives at Art Center. This will manifest itself within the college through ecological and environmental curricula, conferences and lectures and outside of the college with public education, outreach programs and design/build projects. The contacts, relationships, meetings and organization for these future endeavors are already well underway. Art Center’s Advancement Department will be engaged in seeking grants and outside support for these additional activities. It is an ambitious and on-going project that exists beyond the boundaries of the technologically defined classroom. It will be a continually evolving and growing place for young artists and designers to find a relationship between themselves, their work and the natural cycles of the environment.

As an extracurricular domain at Art Center, the GardenLab, once established will become a vehicle for students and members of the Art Center community to take their expertise out to the surrounding public schools and communities by designing and creating similar educational and public green spaces for neighborhoods in need. The ultimate goal of the GardenLab is to fundamentally shift the current self-reflexive paradigm of art and design education, where formal novelty, hermetic discourse and the latest software dominate. The GardenLab will provide a balance to these forces by provoking thought on the inter-dependant relationships that define our communities and environment.
If it is agreed that we will not be able to sustain our current relationship with the environment, then it is the responsibility of our colleges and universities to lead the way by educating students that will someday create a more balanced, thoughtful and sensitive relationship with the forces that sustain us.

The first part of the project, the community gardens, has been laid out. Faculty, students and staff have taken over the 30 plots to explore, experiment and demonstrate their diverse visions of our relationship with nature.
The GardenLab does not have a completion date. It will be continually changing and evolving. Unlike a conventional piece of sculpture, design or architecture, a garden is not completed when it is "finished". In fact, a garden is just beginning its life after it has been laid out and planted. Apart from the physical infrastructure and the basic design, it will be constantly changing and mutating based on the desires and needs of those that will use it. We do not know how it will change, but we do know that it will. The GardenLab will become a self-sustaining and permanent part of the campus that will ultimately expand its influence into the surrounding communities and society at large.

GardenLab is a place:
+ to ENRICH, support and nurture the art and design curriculum
+ to STUDY ecology within art and design
+ to GATHER outdoors
+ to CREATE with living materials
+ to OBSERVE natural and organic processes
+ to EXPOSE the hidden stories of our environment

for:
+ quiet INSPIRATION
+ getting hands in the DIRT
+ messy EXPERIMENTATION
+ encouraging PATIENCE
+ SLOWness 

The GardenLab project will extend its influence beyond the boudries of the college through:
+ A GardenLab sponsored initiative to design and create educational gardens in Pasadena public schools. Interdisciplinary Art Center studios will allow students to design and build these gardens on a regular basis.
+ The establishment of a yearly conference called ‘Ecovention’ that will focus on ecological issues in contemporary art and design. This will be sponsored and hosted by the GardenLab. It will be co-hosted by the Center for Land Use Interpretation with Matt Coolidge in collaboration with curator Sue Spaid, editor of the book ‘Ecoventions’. This conference will also have an exhibition component.
+ Integration of the GardenLab into the curricula of Art Center At Night (continuing education) , Saturday High (for high school students) and Art Center for Kids with David Walker, director of Art Center Public Education.
+ GardenLab sponsored initiatives for students to design and create community gardens and green spaces in neglected Los Angeles urban environments such as skidrow and the L.A. river. This will be facilitated by dedicated studios in the Art Center degree program.
+ Collaborations with the Huntington Gardens in San Marino including the creation of a landscape curriculum for continuing education that would be jointly run by the Art Center Gardenlab and the Huntington and a class for Spring 2004 in which Art Center students will create permanent installations and interventions on the Huntington grounds.
+ Collaborations with Cal Tech on environmental and ecological curricula and lectures.

The Gardenlab has been supported by:
+ Wallis Foundation Grant, 2003
+ LEF Foundation grant, 2003
+ Valley Crest Landscaping, gift-in-kind, 2002
+ Art Center Faculty Enrichment Grant, 2002