# PATTERNS' Fake plastic trees

With a title covered from a really excellent Radiohead's song, Los Angeles based office PATTERNS created an hydroponics garden tackling the issue of "artifical nature" (I'm still calling it androïde nature). Representation is smart because program is clearly announced as a garden but there is no stain of green anywhere.

Presentation text:
Following the lineage of the Schindler house as an experiment in modern living in close relation to nature, our proposal is an attempt to investigate the formal, spatial and atmospheric potential of a vertically sustainable garden in sink with the most advanced technology for plant growth. The new hydroponic tree wall accepts the existing conditions of the site; the prevailing conflict between a historic architectural masterpiece and a new building development. Despite the irony of its title, Fake Plastic Trees [FPT] is a serious attempt to inventively negotiate conflictive boundaries by emphasizing new and multiple life forms over a single form of life. The conflict is then diffused into the intensity of new life.
The garden is composed of a branching circuitry network made of plastic PVC tubes. These tubes circulate and distribute water with a nutrient solution that nurtures aerial vegetation of different kinds. The section of the tubes diminishes as the trajectories they describe move up and away from the ground. The flow of water is induced by water pumps from several reservoirs located in the ground. Water is distributed directly to the plants base by pumping up from the reservoirs or indirectly down by dripping from the upper brunches and then moistening down. Depending on the section of tubes, their capacity to carry more or less water, different scale of plants can grow from and within them. The differential branching nature of the system is based on the varying disposition of a virtual surface of variable thickness that occupies the north wall of the Schindler House. The surface indexes the presence of conflictive zones by increasing or decreasing depth. On areas where FPT neighbors with adjacent zones of potential interaction [such as large windows of the surrounding condominium] the garden offers local flat decks that could be appropriated in different ways. Despite these local exceptions, vertical connectivity throughout the garden is dependant on body movement, weight, and ability to climb up and down. Human movement is just one of the many possible life flows that will exist in the garden.
The artificiality of plants growing directly on water, the modulation and scaling of them as they detach from the ground, the dynamism of the branching and choreographed vegetation and its likely wind induced oscillation, and the occasional forms of animal life negotiating temporary shelter within the garden, amounts to an advanced living ecosystem that both challenges and amplifies the assumed relations between the architecture of The Schindler House and its surrounding "natural" environment.