Comment ADAM PURPLE'S GARDEN:  ART AND SCIENCE IN ACTION RESEARCH Robin C. Moore University of North Carolina

The Proceedings editors should be applauded for responding so positively to Adam Purple's initial submission about [The Garden of Eden], a project which symbolizes the theme of the 1985 EDRA Conference. The editor's encouragement and Purple's enthusiasm have resulted in the now published paper, destined, I suspect, to become not only a valuable piece of source material in the field of local open space development, but also a classic example of documentary case-treatment in community design. The "case" is "radical" (from the Latin radix, root; indicating thoroughness, getting to the heart of the matter, presenting a foundation for reform by exploring the essentials). I haven't met Adam Purple, but he strikes me as a true local-globalist. In the first place, he is a supreme pragmatist, a hands-in-the-dirt soil scientist concerned with the biodynamics of "brick dust" and horse manure in the resoilation of a city habitat, at the same time driven by a larger vision of the interrelatedness of things: homelessness and the New York City Planning Commission, the geometric and spiritual properties of circles, humor as a weapon, the media as promoters and defenders of the public interest....

Purple calls himself "artist," rather than scientist, yet his accomplishment demonstrates the integration of these two (supposedly) opposite poles of professional relationship to the world. Intuitively, because of his action-research, he has clear "scientific" understanding of what he is doing and why (as any child exposed to similar experiences would have), but these understandings are not systematically recorded, sifted, evaluated and externalized in a way that can contribute to scientific knowledge. Yet as a holistic demonstration of scientific principles, Purple's work surely informs scientific understanding. Professional science takes lots of painstaking, systematic record-keeping, of a kind that is impossible to do alone, while embroiled in political skirmishes, not to mention hauling horse manure 3 1/2 miles by bicycle.

Art takes the lead the moment one steps beyond the scientifically measurable, into the realm of human values, culture and politics. Art informs both the doing and the done. In Purple's case, in the softly-peddled spiritual ideas embodied in the work, in the wonderful, disarming, rightfully caustic, rueful humor, and in the sheer for-the-hell-of-it, doing-things-for-their-own-sake attitude that underlies art not patronized by church, state or rich folks.

For me, Adam Purple's work lies in the best tradition of action-research, in fact helps define that tradition of open-ended exploration-through-action, a viable way of proceeding into uncharted social/environmental territory: a self-informing sequence of doing, 'learning,' 'documenting,' 'publishing,' meshing with others' work...).

His work represents, let's say, the "left-handed" side of EDRA, a side we need to embrace, learn from, work with, and support. The challenge is for EDRA to represent itself in a way that will attract more participation from action research/environmental artists like Adam Purple. The relationship works in the other direction, too, since [The Garden of Eden] clearly offers a great opportunity for "right-handed," systematic, social impact research. The social action orientation of our field would gain much from such collaborations.

(Note: "1985-EDRA" refers to the 16th annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, 10-13 June.)

Adam Purple, Landscape sculptor certified by the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York

The submission's subject is The Garden of Eden, an existing eleven-year-old environmental sculpture in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Enclosures document The Garden's past development, suggest its future design, and outline the statement being made by its development and design. 

Documentation of The Garden's development is provided by text and photographs. Textual materials are a position paper by the designer/artist; reference to National Geographic magazine's September 1984 coverage of The Garden; the artist's "application for certification," made to New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs; excerpts from professional letters in support of The Garden. Photographic materials are from the New York Sunday News in 1976 and subsequent documentation. 

Suggestions for The Garden's future design are provided by the designer's position paper, architectural drawings (one of which was a collaborative effort), and reference to related architectural projects executed by the University of Minnesota that inspired The Garden's designer. 

Statements of intention and/or environmental design philosophy are provided by the designer's position paper, his "aapplication for certification," the letters of support, and bibliographic citations. 

O U T W I T T E D

He drew a circle that shut me out-- Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in! --by Edwin Markham (1852-1940) 

H I S T O R I C A L  O V E R V I E W 

The designer of The Garden of Eden moved to 184 Forsyth Street in New York City in February 1972. From his rear window (looking to the East) his "view" was of high-fenced back "yards," piles of garbage thrown from windows of "neighbors," and rear walls and rusting fire escapes of four six-story, walk-up tenements fronting on Eldridge Street in what is known as Block 421 of Manhattan. Children could be seen playing in rubbish in basement-level pits behing the Eldridge Street buildings. Virtually no sunlight entered this abyss of human and environmental degradation. 

In the latter half of 1973, two Eldridge Street tenements immediately to the east of the designer's apartment were razed by the City of New York to dovetail with "The Master Plan" of the City Planning Commission (see map entitled "Development Opportunities 5," dated May 1970), which oversees the systematic destruction through deliberate neglect of buildings and vacant lots to create "Major Action (Urban Renewal) Areas" for non-local real estate developers....

Suddenly, full morning sunlight flooded an abused area of bulldozed brick rubble measuring about 50 by 100 feet. 

Realizing that "the longest journey starts with a single step" (ancient folk saying), the designer began sorting the rubble into piles of whole bricks, brick "bats," and foundation and window (lintel) stones; and sifting the remaining rubble into salvaged wood (to burn for potash), gravel measuring one-half and one-quarter inches in diameter, and "brick sand" produced by repeated crushing by bulldozer tracks during demolition operations. All of these by-products of demolition (called "parent material" by National Geographic), plus sheets of galvanized iron and porcelainized "tub tops," ordinarily go to waste as "land fill" because City planners are not yet enlightened as to the real value of what appears to them to be nearly worthless debris. From Central Park's tourist carriage routes, the designer carted bags of horse manure by bicycle a distance of 3 1/2 miles to mix with the salvaged "brick sand" and potash to create virgin topsoil (Zenger, 1979)....

By the time the designer had converted the original 5,000 square feet of tenement rubble (to an average depth of about a foot) into arable land, the City demolished a tenement to the north of The Garden. About a year later the City demolished another tenement to the south of The Garden, which then received eastern and southern half-day sunlight.

Comprehensive media coverage of the resulting inner-urban Earthwork ("Nature is God's art."--Dante) began with the August 1979 publication of an article in New York magazine (Green, 1979). Because this article resulted almost immediately in the first international press reportage (Schnitt, 1979), because it contained a number of journalistic "sleepers," and because The Garden's obvious ecological orientation might be assumed to question status-quo inertia among bureaucrats, it seems appropriate to quote Green's article in New York magazine,  as follows: 

Another communique proclaims the purpose of [The Garden]: "Without waiting another 2,000 years for institutionalized Christianity or Judaism to build or rebuild theGarden of Eden (Paradise of Pleasures), we have taken psychic inspiration from General Zenlightenme(a)nt to 'plug into' organic communication from Uranus, to wit: 'Speciesurvival is more and more a race 'twixt Zenlightenme(a)nt and extinction....' (Green, 1979). [The Garden of Eden] is one aspect of Biocybernetic Fun & Games to L.E.A.R.N. (Let's Erase And Reprogram Now) for Speciesurvival bye 1984 --from the Seventh Planet, Uranus. And if you do not know where your anus is, you are definitely part of the Problem" (Green, 1979). 

The Problem, from Adam's point of view, is our civilization's gross incontinence. We're fouling ourselves. He calls the leaders of government "ignoranuses." Ignorance of the anus is a grand metaphor for the cavalier poisoning of the air, earth, and water with smoke and aerosols, radiocative refuse, deadly chemicals, and sewage. 

So Adam renounced the flush toilet "because it's counterrevolutionary to pollute the ocean." Each week he digs a hole a foot wide and a foot deep and fills it with...sifted sand, kitchen vegetable scraps, weed prunings, and Purple excrement [see Deuteronomy 23:12-13]. The Chinese have used this method of topsoil production for millennia: they call it making night soil.... 

[The Garden of Eden]...is...a mirror-image fire storm. It's cool and beneficial. And it's always expanding. The area of [The Garden] increases exponentially because the area of a circle increases with the square of its radius.

...We have this expression, "Your red-shift universe is on the psychic slips." That's a critique on the theory of a expanding universe propounded by some astronomers and cosmologists. They "see": an eternal chase of an ever more rapidly receding "carrot." The light from an expanding universe moves toward the red end of the spectrum: a red shift. 

You know what slips are. They're the slightly inclined greased runners that go under a newly built ship ready for launching. Kick out the blocks--and once that ship starts to slide there's no stopping it! Fooosh! Look out! 

Now, what if the universe were actually contracting, and the scientists didn't or couldn't know about it? The New York Times doesn't have headline type large enough for that story. The light from a contracting universe would be ultraviolet, toward the purple end of the spectrum. We call it the purple-shift unireverse. And there's more on the psychic slips than the red-shift universe, obviously!" (emphasis added, Green, 1979).

The Garden's designer was certified as an artist/environmental sculptor on 1 March 1982 by New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs and was recertified on 4 March 1985. Reference is made below to philosophical views included in his "application for certification" (Purple, 1982 & 1985). 

Since early 1982, environmental/ecological supporters of The Garden, including those quoted below, have been involved in a running battle with City officials. The City's "stonewall" position has been the "divide-and-conquer" tactic of pitting "housing" advocates against "greenspacers," as if unwilling or incapable of blending the two "opposites" together. 

A sampling of philosophical observations of professional persons about The Garden [to page 119] of Eden (as submitted in letters to theCity Planning Commission on 6 and 20 October 1982 and to the Board of Estimate on 16 December 1982) read as follows: 

For a decade Adam Purple has been working with his neighbors to create ...a space [that help(s) to keep us human] for the people in his community. But instead of help forthcoming from the City there has been harassment and, now, the threat of extinction. In a community where almost nothing else is sacred this space has been virtually vandal-free. What more proof is needed that [The Garden] and the people who tend it have gained the respect of their neighbors? What city-run park can boast such a record (Stoney, 1982)? 

Adam Purple's "Garden of Eden"...is a work of art. It should be preserved, not made a monument, in absentia, to planning stupidity.... It is an urban "earthwork," in the tradition of the great Japanese and European gardens, and all the more important because itwas done by an artist, independently, without patronage, from love of place... (Lippard, 1982). 

The first time I met Adam Purple in The Garden of Eden I had, in my care, 20 Black, Santo Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese children from the neighborhood. The children and I were thrilled: growing around us were more beautiful flowere, fruit trees, black raspberry bushes, and vegetables than we'd ever seen in one place on the Lower East Side.... I have heard claims that The Garden of Eden must be razed to make space for low-income housing.... But nobody has once explained why this housing must be here and no place else.... why must a beautiful work of art, a noble lesson in urban renewal...be destroyed Why? (Green, 1982). 

 [The Garden of Eden] is a place of magic, and, because of its uniqueness, it is a place of science.... [The Garden] is also a living laboratory of organic gardening. It is small scale unban polyculture, a burgeoning and relatively untested but promising form of agriculture. As a plant pathologist, I view [The Garden] as an experimental station.... (McPartland, 1982). 

At the same time that The Garden was appearing as a two-page photographic report in the September 1984 issue of National Geographic (pp. 384-5), the Storefront for Art and Architecture [in New York City] was showing an exhibition entitled "Adam's House in Paradise." 

The exhibition reverses tradition in the artist/architect relation by presenting architecture created to the demands of art.... Thirty internationally acclaimed and emerging architects from [the United States, Europe, and Asia] have designed two city blocks of public housing around The Garden of Eden.... Adam Purple's legendary persistence and imagination have brought international stature to this garden: a work of public art which hjas been critically compared with great French and Japanese gardens and with environmental artists like [the late] Robert Smithson. The Garden of Eden is always on view. The impetus for this exhibition comes from New York City Housing Authority's plan to construct a public housing project on the site of The Garden of Eden. The current plans call for the destruction of [The Garden] by [30 September] 1985. Rather than ignore this valuable anomaly to existing urban plans, the architects...have accepted the challenge of Purple's earthwork to create architecture of equal vision. The catalogue, published by Storefront, presents reflection upon the urban values surrounding public art, neighborhood gardens, housing and the myth of neutrality in professional architectural activities.... (Park, Weiss, 1984).

C U R R E N T  S T A T U S  R E P O R T 

The view from the designer's rear window is dramically different now from what it was in 1972: one sees blooming flowers, bearing fruit and nut trees, butterflies, and children with their parents or teachers enjoying a variety of living and growing plants, birds, and garden insects (to appreciate the truth of what Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: "One cannot have too much nature.").

The interdisciplinary processes in which The Garden of Eden is rooted are not readily obvious to a casual visitor or hurried reader/viewer of media reports of its development since it began in 1973 to metamorphose local environmental "parent material" (National Geographic 1984) into a world-recognized inner-urban Earthwork. Since its first press appearance in 1976, The Garden has attracted continued national and international journalistic reportage: Stern, Panorama, and Swissotel magazines in Europe; national TV coverage in Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States; news/feature accounts by New York City newspapers, magazines, and television/radio stations; two pages in the September 1984 issue of National Geographic, etc.

The Garden's "generalist" aspect may be seen easily in the interrelatedness of the following quotations about environment: 

Probably the first manurial technique discovered by the Andeans [of the pre-Spanish Inca Empire of South America's Western Andes] was that arising from the "Law of Return".... Human excrement was early used as manure (p. 222).... In the fertile coastal valleys...no building was ever done upon soil which might bear a crop, houses being confined to such sites as were naked rock" (Hyams, 1976, p. 225). 

 ...the pleasure gardens [of ancient India] were full of flowering trees, ponds and little pavilions.... the texts are emphatic that there were beautiful public pleasure groves and gardens provided by the rulers, where men and women resorted in the evening to enjoy all the pleasures life had to offer, including love. Literature is full of descriptions of the joyful, riotous noise that filled the air at dusk in the city parks. It was in such surroundings that the Buddha often preached" (Rawson, 1968, p. 84). 

 ...I wish the landscape to predominate--the Architecture, history, etc., to be various and subservient or mainly to enrich a very bold and richly various landscape" (Lipman & Franc, 1976, p. 70, quoting Ithiel Town, a co-partner in the leading architectural firm in New York, which pioneered in revival styles, and among the founders in 1826 of the National Academy of Design, commenting on Thomas Cole's 1840 painting, The Architect's Dream.) 

 ...The corner window [innovation] is indicative of an idea conceived early in my work, that the box is a Fascist symbol, and [that] the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So I started out to destroy the box as a building.... The corner window as a feature went round the world. But the idea... I intended never followed it. The liberation of space became merely a window instead of the release of an entire sense of structure, a radical change in the idea of a building (emphasis added, Wright, 1963, p. 29). 

It was the idea of "radical transformation" (Krishnamurti, 1963, p. 7) that inspired the following "art form description" in the designer-sculptor's "application for certification" made to the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs:

 ...a dynamic organic sculpture...described partly as a non-linear, minimum-technology, urban agricultural art project designed to demonstrate how abandoned bulldozed lots (in even the most "depressed" ghetto) can be converted into abundantly fruitful and beautiful open-space without necessitating any government or private funding....conceived as ultimately expanding through contiguous area to a "Great Circle" hemispheric sculpture...its aesthetic [to page 121] orientation continues to be as a non-verbal "teaching machine" alternative to the unwise, uncritical, unhealthy, and unchecked exploitation of the Earth's surface, etc.... even though such exploitation risks species extinction (Purple, 1982& 1985). 

If other adencies of the same New York City government can be prevented through enlightenment from obliterating or lethally "boxing-in" The Garden, its next aesthetic phase of applied Taoism/Buddhism can easily, economically, and "prophetably" show how New York City's approximately 50,000 abandoned lots can be converted into underground and/or earth-bermed de-densified housing to serve promptly all dishoused and homeless citizens in their immediate neighborhoods without the current practice of wholesale population displacement and its concomitant rending of the warp and woof of community life. 

Such a "marriage of convenience" of egalitarian housing and oxygen-producing landscape would, inevitably, also show the self-perpetuating and self-parodying absurdity of spending $70.000+ per unit to build "low-income" housing!  Such institutions as the University of Minnosota's Underground Space Center have researched and built  sane and energy-efficient solar/geothermal, etc., shelter; for a decade, virgin topsoil has been created in The Garden of Eden  from local "parent material."  In the words of architect I.C. Tinus II [Ictinus II, Ha!], "Let's get on with the wedding!" 

For graphics, see Figures 1 through 8 of this EDRA-16 (1985) paper via:
"Amanda D. Bostwick" edra1@telepath.com
or see pages 122-129 of 
LIFE with les(s) ego 
via:  http://www.geocities.com/rev-les-ego/ 
For related data, see:
http://www.eclectart.com/gardenofeden.html 
http://www.eclectart.com/newgarden.html 
http://phenomenon.org/intense/zentences/flash4.html 
To subscribe to the speciesurvivalibrary, send a BLANK email to: speciesurvivalibrary-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
 
 

R E F E R E N C E S 

Green, Norman.  The Purple People, New York  magazine, 
    27 August 1979, pp. 64-72

_______, Statement to the New York City Board of Estimate, 
    16 December 1982. 

Hyams, Edward. Soil & Civilization, New York: Harper & Row,
    1976, 312 pp. [Sadly, out of print.] 

Krishnamurti, J[iddu]. Life Ahead. Wheaton, IL: Quest Book, 
    Theosophical Publishing House, 1963, 191 pp. 

Lipman, Jean, and Franc, Helen M.  Bright Stars, American 
    Painting and Sculpture Since 1776. New York: E.P. Dutton 
    & Co., Inc., 1976, 208 pp. 

Lippard, Lucy.  Statement to New York City Planning 
    Commission, 13 October 1982. 

McPartland, John.  Statement to New York City Board of 
    Estimate, 10 December, 1982. 

National Geographic magazine.  Washington, D.C.: September 
    1984, pp. 384-85. 

Panorama magazine.  Haarlem, The Netherlands: 14 May 1982, 
    pp.42-3, 45. 

Park, Kyong, & Weiss, Glenn.  Press release from Storefront 
    for Art and Architecture,  [now, in 2002, 97 Kenmare at 
    Mulberry,]  New York, N.Y. 10012, 7 September 1984. 

Purple, Adam.  Application for Certification to Department of 
    Cultural Affairs, New York City, 1982 & 1985. 

Rawson, Philip.  Erotic Art of the East, New York: G.P.
    Putnam's Sons, 1968, 380 pp. 

Schnitt, Petra.  Gruner Traumer in den Slums (Ecological 
    Dreamer in the Slums), Stern magazine, Hamburg, 
    Germany: 6 Dezember 1979, pp. 214-16. 

Stoney, George.  Statement to New York City Planning 
    Commission, 6 October 1982. 

Sunday News, New York: 5 June 1976, p. M24. 

Swissotel magazine. Zurich, Switzerland: Undated, but 
    early 1983.  No page number. 

Wright, Frank Lloyd.  The Future of Architecture.  New York: 
    New American Library, 1963, 352 pp. 

Zenger, John Peter, II.  Rubble Reclamation, Garden magazine. 
    New York Horticultural Society: July-August 1979, New 
    York regional edition, pp. 5-8. 
 

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