Vertical Garden

The sparkling artificiality of contemporary nature

The Vertical Garden is a collaboration between the American artist Mark Dion and GROSS. MAX. Landscape architects.  In his works Mark Dion, deconstructs cultural representations of nature as a way of challenging our relationship to the natural world today. Often, he collects ordinary objects and biological specimens and then arranges them in complex spaces designed as microcosm. The work of GROSS. MAX. celebrates and reveals the sparkling artificiality of contemporary nature and their works ranges from public parks and urban plazas to large scale urban regeneration. The Vertical Garden is our second collaborative project after a previous unrealised project for a Carboniferous Garden at the Earth Centre in Doncaster. The site is a blank end gable wall of approximately 8 by 20 metres sited of a block of six storey tenements built in the 1890’s located along a busy road leading to Tower Bridge. The three-dimensional structure of a fire escape supports the vertical garden as “mini ecosystem’. Each layer displays different vegetation attracting wildlife such as butterflies, bees, ladybugs and many others.

Whilst Mark explored the project with his characteristic red / blue pencil drawings, our own computer visualisation- which has since appeared in numerous publications and various exhibitions- we once described as: “The view from above accentuates the spatial expanse of lines, planes and shape of the red welded steel frame overgrown by lush rampant foliage of vegetation. The image draws, or better say pulls, the viewer as by vortex- down into the structure…. The angle of vision injects a sensation of vertigo.”