The institution is also home to a surprisingly large collection of buildings, including a little columned and gabled house that serves the Children’s Garden; a noble McKim, Mead White palace for administration; the blocky Steinhardt Conservatory, built with a heavy hand in the late 1980s; and the elegant, arching Palm House, walled and roofed in glass, a favorite site for borough brides.
All those buildings are arranged in a line on one edge of the garden, backing up to the neighborhood of Crown Heights, at a distance from the creaking turnstiles that have long served as the only public entrances to the place. Slipping in through one of those three humble gates, you had the feeling of discovering a secret Eden; you came across buildings only after time spent on shaded paths. The architecture was a respite from the park, if you were looking for one, or an intrusion of the city that you could avoid with a quick turn of the heel.
Now a new visitor center and gateway have been built at the northeast corner of the garden, where it abuts the Beaux-Arts pile (and decidedly artless parking lot) of the Brooklyn Museum. When the center opens next Wednesday, plant lovers for the first time will contend with architecture at the garden’s threshold.
The designers of the visitor center, the New York architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, of the firm Weiss/Manfredi, are old hands at integrating buildings with nature, albeit with a certain brashness. Their Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, a landscape of close-cropped lawns and zigzagging paths on a reclaimed industrial site by the water, is all hard edges and frank use of glass and concrete: There is nothing easy or gentle about it.
Last week they were given a commission to reimagine a big chunk of the Washington Mall with an assertively contemporary design at odds with the conservative impulse that is such a strong force in planning for the nation’s capital.
The architects have not held back in Brooklyn, either. Entering the garden from Washington Avenue, you climb a few steps, pass through monumental steel gates and find yourself on a bare concrete plaza, relieved just a bit by a sunken rock garden to one side that serves as a buffer against the adjacent parking lot.
To your left is a wall of clear glass under an accordion-folded copper roof (the front half of the new building, intended for the houseplant shop). Ahead, the roof continues past the edge of the glass over a wide entryway through which you can make out the green of trees beyond. On the other side of this pedestrian slot through the building is a high wall, the same clean, white concrete of the plaza ground. The effect is distinctly urbane.
So you approach nature now through the stuff of the city. But most of the building remains out of sight, seemingly lost in nature, embedded in a grass-and-tree-covered berm. It’s a move that creates high-contrast oppositions between growing and built, and that also defends the garden against the asphalt and masonry of its neighbor.
Through the entryway, a second glass wall stretches off in a long, wavering run along the elaborate wooden fence of the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. Here it serves not as a light screen enclosing a pavilion but as a front for a section of building (bathrooms, exhibition space, rooms for gathering) that is slammed into the berm beyond, beneath a massive, planted mound of a roof: 10,000 square feet, a huge new bed to be managed by the resident botanists.
A lot can go wrong when you try to conceal a building, or even part of one. People are clever; throwing some plants on a roof is unlikely to fool us. But Weiss/Manfredi, perhaps aware of the peril, shaped its roof with care. Even now — when the grasses and flowering bulbs are just beginning to grow in — the new construction, seen from various points in the garden, succeeds in deleting itself from the composition just enough.
The glass wall, the spacing of its vertical steel mullions kept short to match the rhythm of nearby tree trunks, is left to declare gently the presence of a building. The result is not a craven, apologetic attempt to deny that what was once nature is now architecture. It’s a model of one way those two opposed systems can coexist.
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