Fritz Haeg Lecture

There’s something to be said for an individual who perceives compost to be the metaphor for life; in his own words, Fritz Haeg talks endearingly about “all of the junk at the bottom making its way back to the top.” The architect-turned-landscape artist has a passion for gardening and finding ways of bringing people together to further their understanding of community and each other.
Beneath this apparently very hippie façade lies something more: an interest in combining physical living spaces with notions of virtual space, constantly activated and integrated. Referring once again to his favorite metaphor, Fritz Haeg mentions his fascination with what he identifies as privileged time versus junk time, or the question of what actually enriches the lives of the people involved. Noting his series of workshops titled “Sundown Salon,” where individuals gather for organized events like knitting and gardening, Haeg points out that during the time when the people are actually in-between sessions of scheduled activities, their philosophical discussions and emotional commitments are further strengthened. Or in another project, where he brings dancers into a museum in New York, encouraging the visitors to activate the space in a manner they haven’t experienced before. For Haeg, learning happens equally outside of the classroom.
He has a profound interest in Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes, and has articulated a desire to find an intrinsically “gay architecture.” His talk repeatedly courted the question of what it means to remove the walls from a building and mesh its existence with the outdoor space. His own home in California, a geodesic dome set in a winding, lush garden, represents his struggles with finding such a space.
One of the most interesting projects he is continually involved in is something titled Edible Estates. With owner permission and involvement, Haeg redesigns suburban and urban lawns and transforms them into productive gardens. The space is both functional and attractive, puncturing the generic view of grass lawns and generating conversation about gardening and food production on an independent scale. This idea may not necessarily be that original; victory gardens during the Second World War and gardening in other parts of the world have existed for centuries, but the confrontation that happens in contemporary Americana when confronted with such modes of production is certainly an interesting one.
His urban garden in London embraces the question of culture and brings the project into the territory of international involvement. This strengthens Haeg’s outcome by introducing the collective interaction on a global scale and questions world perceptions of such practices, as opposed to rooting it all solely in the United States.
Haeg eloquently stated that for him, a good project ‘exists primarily in that moment of possibility and impossibility.” The conception and reworking of ideas seems fundamental to his work, focusing on the creation of projects before their actual construction. However one perceives the notion of conceptualization, Fritz Haeg’s projects have enough physical manifestation to withstand the argument of concept for concept’s sake.