The Whitney Project


At first I did not really notice them.

It was a warm day in June 1978, my first time in New York and I was suffering from jet lag. Near my apartment, at 75th street, was a strange building, which I had to pass on my way to the subway: A monolithic block, observing the street with one big cyclopean eye. The ground floor was separated from the sidewalk by a kind of gap and only accessible via a bridge.


I was almost a block away, when I turned around again. Strange sculptures were growing up from the gap, machinery plants that were moving with a gentle whirring sound.

These appearances turned out to be some kind of robotic vegetation, plants made of steel that led into the micro-worlds of the city or generated panoramic views. They referred to the history of Native Americans, offered the possibility to interact between human and nature or showed changes in the climate.

Suddenly they seemed to be everywhere, an invasion of artificial biology, whose branches, leaves and capillaries occupied the fabric of the city.


Most of the things I knew about New York, I had read in a small book which I had borrowed from the public library and whose cover shows two skyscrapers in bed. But this building with its plants was not in the book, it rather seemed to me like a kind of mineral that contains a living organism.

Like the city itself as a man-made geological formation, a topography consisting of steel, glass and concrete, these plant sculptures were the synthetic flora of this artificial landscape. Excrescences that extended to the nearby street canyons and the roofs of the adjacent buildings.


Their starting point was a depression in the ground, a crack beside the street.

The sunken sculpture garden at the Whitney Museum.

In the streets, New York Ironweed (Vernonia Noveboracensis) in the background.

Original photo by Klaus Lehnartz via flickr.

New York Ironweed (Vernonia Noveboracensis) at the Whitney Museum, 1978.

Original photo by Hagen Stier via flickr.

Rooftop of the Seagram building with False Shamrock (Oxalis Triangularis).

Original photo by Ezra Stoller via artnet and historical, from the collection of Robert E. Jackson, photographer unknown via The Seattle Times.

Room at the top, Bleeker Street.

Original photo by Robert Otter via New York Dialogue.

Curly-leaf Pondweed (Potamogeton Crispus) at 42nd Street.

Original photo historical, from the collection of Franny Wentzel, photographer unknown via citynoise.