Vertical Sculpture Garden

Vertical sculpture garden

Status: Academic - GSAPP

Location: Manhattan, NY

Professor: Amina Blacksher

Year: 2019

While Union Square and Madison Square Park are engaged during the year, the harsh winter climate of New York makes them relatively inactive during a certain period of the year. The Vertical Sculpture Garden uses that temporality and creates an enclosed park such that the neighbourhood has a public space occupiable in the Winter as well. The vertical park is experienced through ramps that meander through the space where users contemplate the relationship between nature and sculptures. The phenomenological journey through the space spills out onto adjacent buildings appropriating their rooftops that expand the public garden to an exterior one as well.

Unlike the rigid experience of museums, a sculpture garden gives a more fluid experience of the arts. The sculpture garden creates a light filled green vertical space where visitors can meander between the arts as a journey. The journey explores a transient space time that exists between the street and the interior garden where visitors are given a period of calibration before entering a space that doesn’t feel it is in a vertically dense area.

While walking along the ramp, the journey creates an intimate relationship between the vegetation and light. The thermal delight of the space is felt along the ramp walking between the hanging gardens and the sun alternately grazing the viewers. As the visitors ascend the in their journey the density of the ramps decreases to allow natural light to filter to the bottom spaces.