 Good evening, everyone. My name is Caroline Bowman. I am director of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and I am absolutely delighted to welcome all of you tonight. And funnily enough, as I look down at my notes, there's also a beautiful leaf from our garden, which is really appropriate for tonight's talk. This evening, we have a very special guest, National Design Award winner and principal of the visionary design firm Hood Design Studio, Walter Hood. When we first embarked on Cooper Hewitt's mammoth renovation, Walter was our first and only choice for the redesign of the Arthur Ross Terrace and Garden. In addition to being a supremely talented artist and designer, Walter has been a great friend to Cooper Hewitt and to all of us for many years. Having the opportunity to work together on this project and engage in Walter's unique collaborative approach to landscape design has been truly a wonderful experience for the Cooper Hewitt team, for all of us. For our garden project, Hood Design worked closely with RAFT landscape architects and Diller, Scafidio and Renfrow. And I would like to acknowledge Tim Millett Parks of Hood Design, who worked with us on a daily basis, as well as Rebecca Hill and Matt Dunham of RAFT and Anthony Sabi of DSNR for their great contributions to this project. I am truly thrilled that Walter is here with us tonight to celebrate the garden's completion and share his process with us. Just to remind all of you, we've been working on this renovation for many years now, having just conceived of the idea in 2003. So the completion of the garden represents the final sprint and the renovation is over and our hard hats can now go into storage, which we're really excited about. Walter is a professor and former chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. And he's been engaged in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations and research for over 20 years. In addition to winning Cooper Hewitt's National Design Award for Landscape Architecture in 2009, Walter is a recipient of the American Academy's Rome Prize, and President Obama recently nominated him to serve on the National Council on the Arts. Yes. From Oakland's Splash Pad Park built under a freeway to the public plaza for the Broad Museum in LA and his brand new commission for the International African Art Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, Walter creates environments that honor a local culture sometimes complex past and move beyond ordinary expectations to become truly extraordinary and rejuvenated public spaces that greatly enrich their communities. The Arthur Ross Terrison Garden was once the largest private garden in New York City. Thanks to the generosity of Arthur Ross for whom the garden was named in 1991, we have long had the ability to offer our garden to visitors for events and programming. But in keeping with this brand new vision of Cooper Hewitt and the philosophy of accessibility and being welcoming to all, the garden will now be open every day at 8 a.m. free of charge and at 10 a.m. on weekends throughout the year. So I look forward to seeing all of you for Cabecino early in the morning. Walter's stunning interpretation of a contemporary urban landscape engages the city's geology, central parks, picturesque environs, and the garden's historic origins. Our brand new entrance canopy and illuminated piers designed for us by Diller's Cafetti on Renfro signal that the garden is open to the entire city. Come spring, we'll be launching a whole slew of stimulating programming and terrific events that will take full advantage of the garden's expanded and flexible spaces. So I look forward to seeing you all there. And after Walter's talk tonight, Rebecca and Matt of RAF Landscape Architecture will join him on the stage for all of your questions. So thank you very much, and please join me in welcoming Walter Hood. Good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here at this podium, not to give a lecture, but to mark this occasion of finishing a project. And if anyone in design, landscape, or architecture, it takes time to finish a project. And to get to these moments is almost cathartic. I mean, I don't know, I'm beside myself to a certain degree. The meetings that one has to endure, the changes that happen daily. Can you try this? Can you try that? Can you try this? Can you try that? Can you make a new drawing? We must have a catalog full of just beautiful ideas and things that we go through for each project. I thought I'd spend the next 40 minutes to an hour just talking about process, but more importantly, talking about the institution's museums. For some reason, over the last decade, we have been fortunate enough to have worked on some really interesting museum projects. And I wanted to show them because for me, they reinforce a set of values and ethic that has to do with culture and place. And they have been these amazing experimental grounds where you can actually talk about the public realm. You can talk about what does it mean to... How is Los Angeles different than New York, different than San Francisco? And the museum setting is a place where not only the work inside can speak to the diaspora of cultures that have come and gone, but also to the place. And I think we're at a point now where I think the institutions in our cities more than ever need to provide that outlet for the public because we don't have these public spaces anymore that are programmed and robust like we used to have. And so we look to these institutions. I think there are five projects that I'd like to share with you. The first one is the New De Young Museum. It sits in Golden Gate Park. If anyone's been out here, Golden Gate Park is probably one of the largest urban parks in America, but it's also an artifice. This was a sand dune, and it's still a sand dune. If anyone's been out there with a can of water poured out, it will disappear. It's a landscape that was a fiction that was created to pretty much push development out to the western end of San Francisco. We were fortunate enough 15 years ago to work with Herzog and Demeron on this project. We just celebrated our 10th year anniversary. The last decade, we've broken all attendance records here. I think it averages second to third in Oklahoma here in the city for attendance. It's a landscape project very early. The architects really wanted it to be a porous museum. I have to say this facility gave two new gardens to the city of San Francisco. One we call the Garden of Enchantment, and another a sculpture garden. Before this was two museums, a museum set here, and this was a parking lot. So for the people of San Francisco, it really has been a gift. And this landscape gave us the ability to talk about the park, but also the culture of San Francisco. So the design is very simple. The museum reflects the park, and the park reflects the museum. The architects were very interested in creating this verdant skin. The building entirely is made of copper. So at some point, probably not in my lifetime, it'll be green, but it will pretty much disguise itself with the landscape. And on the other end, the landscape, we collected all the plants around the museum and I think a half a mile, and we brought them back into the museum, arranged them so that you could actually see that artifice. Things grow crazy here in Golden Gate Park. A lot of the planting that we did here very early, some things took, some things didn't, but the thing I wanted to talk about were these palm trees. These palm trees are over 110 years old. When the museum was first sort of created at the turn of the century, they were gifts. We have Chilean wine palms. They were about that big. They grew up, and Harry Parker, fortunately, as we were doing the museum, he allowed us to keep them. We shaved them, put them in storage, and brought them back. And I say this because this museum is a machine. It's a machine, really. And sitting in this verdant landscape, it was shocking to a lot of San Franciscans. And I think the flora, I just keep remembering the project manager, Debbie, every time there was like, pushback for the museum, so we need landscape. And so we'd go to a meeting and present the landscape, and everybody would be happy. We're getting gardens? Yes. Is it going to be native gardens? Yes. And through art and culture of the museum, really, this is Andy Goldworthy's crack line, drawn line. It really does embody the ecology of the place. Nothing's native. Everything has been shipped in. These are Australian tea ferns, baby tears, sword ferns. We're sitting on top of a parking lot here. And the pool of enchantment, which we restored, and now we have new frogs and turtles that have been rescued from the Chinese restaurants. We couldn't do them ourselves, so we actually created the habitat, which is great to do a drawing and put muck on it, and the contractors go, what's muck? So we basically started it, and of course within two years we had this beautiful wildlife. But again, this project really speaks to San Francisco. This is a very west coast landscape. It borrows the scenery from the greater park to create these expansive gardens that have terrails and other pieces of art scattered around. And like most of our projects, these are really about people. These places are about people. And one of the nicest things or most interesting things about making landscape is, unlike a building, and this is what we hope will happen with the garden here, that things will happen that we could never imagine. I never imagined when we designed the sculpture garden that the number one venue would be for weddings. Because the way a sculpture garden works, it's a nice circuit. The male and female can come directly out. The minister can be in the middle. The Japanese tea garden is behind and it just works perfect. And I went out one day and saw the actual curator of weddings and she had the design up next to the ginkgo tree, next to this and it just worked perfectly. And as we know seasonal display and time. And over 10 years, again, this landscape I never go back to projects. It's like I don't know what it is about returning to a project. It's an old friend, right? That just grew up on you and you don't recognize them at times and when I do go back you find these very small subtleties, like being able to see Fitzgerald Hill through the landscape next to a Jean Wong and the grasses turning their colors during the summertime. But really the museum is really about building and landscape. And here at the D'Young, again we have 10 years to look back on. I think the two have grown so intimately close together that you don't really know where one begins and the other ends. And it's really, I think the people of San Francisco has really embraced the space that really have allowed this landscape to flourish. Now one little caveat about this garden this is all taken care of by park and recreation. So there is not a private endowment for the garden. It's your local parks people. I think we have one gardener. So again, as part of the public realm and you making landscape that aspect is really huge. And again we've been able to sort of have great partners. Coming back towards the east coast we're now in Jackson, Wyoming. This is looking out over the Moraine of Jackson. If you come in from the airport you come in to the hole this way. Perched up on a shelf is the Museum of Wildlife Art. Now I go from the D'Young Museum to the Museum of Wildlife Art. It's like, wow, that's a big jump. Last week I was given a lecture and someone asked me, says, it's eclectic. And I went, oh my God eclectic. That was one of those words in architecture school you never wanted your work to be eclectic. But more and more as we work in different places the work has to be eclectic. It has to change. We're not looking for a one stop solution. So every place has their own story. So just like San Francisco and the D'Young we have a different story here in Jackson. There was an idea about putting a museum up on the side of a hill and basically riff off of a Scottish ruin. And they actually riffed on that Scottish ruin very well to the point where no one knew it was there. And so when you drive by you just saw this ruin up on the hill and no one stopped. Millions of people coming through the cut from Yellowstone to Jackson and everyone just saw this ruin. And so they said how do we get people to stop? First of all they said well let's put in more parking to get these campers coming. Secondly let's put a giant moose down here on the road so that when people are coming by they will see the moose and stop and turn and come up. And of course people driving down saw the moose park the car, took the picture kept going. So the moose was just a photo opt. We were hired to create a sculpture trail and this is my first day here and I just could not believe I'm in Jackson, Wyoming and there's 80 feet of asphalt running from one curb to the other. 350 cars on a shelf in the middle of Jackson. And so I spent two years with the new director convincing him that he could take out half the parking and during that whole time I would park my car, he'd get out with the binoculars and he'd start saying you see that blah blah blah on the hill? I didn't see anything but he had this ability to see things in the landscape. For me all of this clouded the landscape because it changed the scale. That 10 by 20 car stall made the landscape actually disappear because you focused on the scale. Once we finished the project this is what it looked like. So pretty much we created a terrace and the terrace runs a quarter mile long along a very a three foot sort of slope. All the cars are back here. So you now arrive at the museum all the cars are pushed up against the mountain and your first view is the moraine. There's not a car in sight. It took trusty meetings and it took every an act of faith to get people to figure out that they could actually walk maybe 10 steps to get into the museum. People were, well it gets cold here. What happens when it snows? Well you walk in the snow. Everyone wanted to be dropped off in the front of the museum. Once we changed that the front of the museum became an amphitheater so you can actually now have events. You could actually have shows you can actually sell art instead of having a car there. You can now commune with this large landscape and now since the car is gone this is the main road down here we push the shelf out. You can actually see most bugling, elk bugling really clear now because there's no scale change in front of you and that's art. And the employees I think like this the best. Now people actually get out of their car and they actually walk through this landscape and on the way doing this they discovered that the stone on the building came from Arizona and the stone that we were using was from Idaho and so the landscape led to the reclating of the building which made the building actually appear in the landscape which is one of those things that's just hard to get your head around. And it's enjoyed by public. They have morning yoga. They have 10k races every month from downtown back out and they have a big mass now up on the terrace. So it's become a new venue for them to actually show contemporary art where before they were only showing these small little dogs and animals right now they actually have a venue. As Caroline mentioned the Broad Museum down in Los Angeles takes us into another a different landscape. This is up top Bunker Hill. What you're looking at here is pretty much Frank Geary is here. This is DSR's new building on no landscape here. There's a tunnel here and this hill rises up. There's a tunnel coming under here. So both buildings sit on a parking garage and the landscape is actually floating in the air and most of the movies you actually see with tunnels in LA is filmed under here. Actually it's one of the major movie places. Starting out with this project very simple goal. We didn't have a landscape. The street came in. So we had to make a landscape. So we built a freeway pretty much put it between two conica housing projects. Mocha is across the street. We wanted these two to flow together. The museum sits here and pairs off with the Geary Performing Arts Center. The landscape is very simple as I said. It's a freeway turned upside down. We just used the beams underneath to hold the dirt and we floated it across. There's a new cafe on the backside and then we have a very simple tap as vert lawn and a grove of trees. This is one of the most simplest landscapes we've ever done. Here our client really wanted to create something powerful, something new, but something different. So Liz and I for hours, Liz Diller, we racked our brain to come up with something different and it ended up, we came up with something simple and something very familiar. The ground plane, we created these ruptures on the ground that allow planting to actually happen above grade. We created a new walkway, large walkway from Mocha back over to the Brogue and we found 110-year-old olive trees that we then placed in this new deck against this highly polished building that creates again another story to tell and Tim, as Tim Malay Parks and others, went out for days to find these trees. That's Zoe and Tim in the Olive Grove and then we opened two weeks ago and the olives actually create a stand right along the street. You can't miss these trees and they welcome you in and it's been again delightful to see how people, when they turn the corner, how they relate to these trees and the stumps. So it's as if the grove was there before the building. And it's not a lot of seeding, we're not trying to seed a million people but again just give us a bit along the way to the museum and it really has transformed this block. I think I said something like the gnarliness of the trees against the polishness of the building it really again talks about this geological time and a kind of a cultural time that we're able to do that really fast. There's no way we can do that. That takes hundreds of years. And then at night it has a completely surreal effect and the materials are beautiful and everything is drought tolerant. Even the lawn, the lawn is probably one of the most hyper lawns where we're literally grabbing everything that falls on that lawn, putting it into a sump pump and circulating it back up. And these are the ruptures along the road. And that brings us back to New York. When I got a call I think it was Rick who called me and said I was talked to Caroline and we think we'd like you to come on to the project. And we were working on a project another project with shop architecture on the island and we were really interested in this geology and so when we were asked to work on the project we wanted to sort of see if that carried itself all the way through the island. And sure enough the geology is pretty consistent along the scratch of the way that you have this different schist, the Manhattan Schist and the Bronx Zoo type throttle that extends itself up. And that was something that I saw in the garden very early. We were also very intrigued by the transformation of this piece of landscape along Fifth Avenue. And you can kind of see 1902 Carnegie and the present that it went through quite a transformation from the riding grounds all the way through. And again history is really important but it's also I think you have to be very careful, you know as they say what things you bring back right? I mean what do you want to bring back? And so for us we were intrigued with this idea of this small garden being here in the middle of Manhattan. You know that's public. I can't think of something this residential scale at the scale of the city and that was something that we really wanted to hold on to that we didn't want to create something swing, swing, swing you know but something that really reinforced the habitation of the site. So very early when we found the Shimmerhorn plan this is the original plan that we found that was done was a very simple idea a circuit as I talked about outside but what intrigued me was this idea of a rockery so of course I had to look it up and a rockery is a pile of rocks with some plants there right? I mean it's a rockery but here there was this beautiful kind of shape that Shimmerhorn was creating that was almost a small circuit in a large circuit. So you can imagine you know here's a move and there's a move around and we quickly overlaid the two and then I started thinking well how do we tell this larger story so we have the reservoir on one side Fifth Avenue, we have the small garden, the rockery, the terrace is there a way to bring all of this stuff together? And so this watercolor was very early where the reservoir, the trees, the lawn they all worked together as one piece and we experimented with a lot of designs of how to bring those things across and I think in the end the flora is going to win the day meaning the planting Here's a quick sort of overlap of the existing conditions Shimmerhorn's proposal and then this is our proposal and as you can see what we were able to do was give more space to congregating where this was purely scrolling because you had a terrace here and it was a single family residence it was a residence but we wanted there to be these larger sort of gathering areas and still hold on to the kind of the spatial mix and again I like to sort of turn to these sort of things within the culture of landscape and the Japanese landscape just very similar to the De Young really came to focus this idea of borrowing the landscape and how do you borrow it you can borrow it in a lot of ways taking it away or actually adding more and I think in this case we added more Also as part of this was which we love this in the studio was the tables and chair seating we've gone through a lot of various matrices of how we're actually going to be able to use this and you can kind of see we started small and we sort of got to a place where we wanted there to be ample circulation but still places for people to sort of move around and then the tent I mentioned that as well some of the rockery is meant to actually be tinted over and that's why when you're out there some of it's flat because we knew there are these ancillary sort of uses that we need for the larger thing and so what I'm trying to sort of the picture on painting is on one hand there's this really high conceptual attitude about I want to bring this thing back and then there's a real functional aspect and how do you bring these two things together and that's where designed to me really kind of finds its legs when you're able to marry the ambitions of a client and a user group with something that's physical but something that always already has a history to it because you don't want to lose that story somehow in the mix and we think when you zoom out we didn't lose the story I mean again this larger kind of view of this verdant little stamp around you're looking around for something like that it's the only thing there but then when I look across the way to engineers gate I can begin to see this patch just finding its way back across right and imagine if you're a bird right if you're a bird on the other side of the street you might go I want to go over to Cooper here right and just come back but this idea of the patch moving back and forward and I think people will actually do the same thing springtime when the cherry trees they'll be able to look at cherry blossoms cherry blossoms across the street so you have this kind of relationship the lines of the garden again are very simple picking up on the shimmer horn again the double circuit single circuit double circuit and with the addition of a little secret garden on the side along Fifth Avenue and this was one of the sort of bonuses of the project that there was just this side yard that seemed really dark closed that now has become light and airy and I think it's actually going to be one of the most popular spots because you're right next to the street next to a lot of the action and hopefully it can be programmed in a lot of different ways when you think of the section the wisteria very important to the museum and that elevation so really trying to keep this open and so we don't have big trees here we have the smaller cherry trees in between because it's really the mansion when you come through the gate it's really the mansion and it's that facade and then the rockery itself trying to form that and create these secondary spaces to the primary space and we're out there today and I think once the beach tree gets nice and limbed up you'll be able to sit back here and still be part of the party and that's good space when you can be in one space and see the party going on but you're not part of the party where I think that's where the previous garden was pretty much all circuit and not space and so what we've been able to do is actually create a couple of sub spaces within a larger space and then the planting we started out with a kind of a global sort of way of thinking about planting and then bringing in our local landscape architects raft landscape architecture allowed us to sort of build on those early ideas but again trying to keep the rockery things low things really tight some places you can walk on it really light and feathery again respecting these beautiful plumes of purple going up the building along Fifth Avenue having the ability to have the plants change along Fifth Avenue looking back in and hopefully seasonally and then coming back to the rockery one of our great sort of pieces this was that initial shape that I showed you and then coming back to here and then as we started digging actually finding all the rock here on site we had in our drawings we had these crazy kind of drawings of we want these flat rocks we want them cut then we went to the quarry we thought we were going to get them from the quarry and then as they started digging rocks just started popping up and so they laid them out and it was just really beautiful to watch Rebecca Janice everyone sort of laid these things out when I visited they were laid out they were beautiful colors and it was funny like let's put this one here no I like that one here so it was just this beautiful sort of tangle of placing rocks it was fun and then you know very early the view now this is the thing that always gets me about architectural renderings when we were doing this I kept saying the garden is really small right so it's a one point perspective when you go out there the garden is expansive but this is that subspace that I was talking about as you sort of move behind the rockery and then as it's populated by people there are these new headers that take your eye across to the park on both sides and again as the rockery builds up hopefully there's this nice space here gives you a lawn space here and then around the corner you have a different space and the terrace we went through a lot of different attempts to try to put more seating there then at the end it just became very clear that it wanted to be something floral providing the connection to the cafe and then as I said the bonus was our secret garden around the side we were actually able to maximize the space from the building wall all the way to the planters and then put it in a new ramp and actually three new trees along the way paving again from edge to edge that makes this really really flexible for seating and other things to happen and lastly I wanted to talk a little bit about the garden it's physical bones are one thing it was after one of the meetings we had I'm trying to think was it with the trustees but it was one of the meetings and I had some time left over so I decided to walk around the reservoir and there I noticed that there were these native herbaceous plantings Yoshino cherry and the Rotodendromal and it stuck with me and as we were trying to script the story to talk to the Smithsonian I started talking to Charles Waldheim about this and he goes that's brilliant Walter I'm like what's brilliant he goes well Olmstead would have never planted this stuff this is all 19th century stuff and so that's in your garden so that's a great story to talk about with the Smithsonian which will allow it to come into the future right that this was a 19th, 20th century landscape but more 20th century in relationship to the 19th century park that Olmstead look to the native landscape for his planting all of this kind of more gardening stuff came later which then gave us a stronger argument for making that connection to bring the garden sort of up to speed and so what you see then in the garden is a careful sort of placement of plant material so as you move around you have herbaceous borders here Rotodendrons along here a lot of the flowering things are happening at the terrace and so hopefully well not hopefully during the year things will change specifically as from season to season so that we have an understanding not only of the island of New York but also of the culture of the island and how that's changed over time and Rebecca and Matt can answer any one of these growy questions I call them right of the various plants but the idea again was to have the lawn be the central feature the borders are actually like providing that magic and the context and I like to just sort of end the pictures are always really pretty but construction is really messy and it's one of the things I tell my students to make a landscape is a very violent act right you think about it you go and you see these nice beautiful things but to make them is very violent you know on the west coast we got to give them water I remember doing a project for the first time and we had to run irrigation you know through the roots of an old tree you know and so when you start thinking about the aggressiveness that we have you really then understand it's cultural because out there in the ecology that change happens over a period of time we want change really fast which means we have to then make a lot of decisions about that change and every time we work on a project I'm always reminded of that and so as I then look at the detailing and how things change over time I'm reminded that these want to be part of that geological time and unlike a building you got to let the landscape go and that's why I don't like to go back and visit them to a certain degree because you have to let them go and find their way and sooner or later they're going to get used to where they are and they'll find their own way and hopefully you've given them the bones so I hope we've given this garden some great bones I'm not hopeful I know the staff here will cultivate this thing and make it really amazing and I'm sure the citizens of Manhattan are going to use it in ways you've never imagined thank you guys so much I think the way this is going to work Matt and Rebecca are going to come up and now it's open for questions okay I think the changes in the Cooper Hewitt in the museum to recognize inquiry and children's learning are astounding they're singular in the city will there be places that you can put your stylus and learn something out in the garden have you thought of putting them in or are you going to I would say that the landscape, the garden itself is something that the museum should look at as a pedagogical sort of set of exercise we just finished a project up in Buffalo where there's actually an app and the app will tell you every type of plant it will actually tell you the animals that are on the site so I'm going to share that with you guys but I would hope that that will become part of the project as the landscape fills in because it's perfect the garden is a wonderful place to learn I don't think you have to sort of build and change the types of plants the insects, all of those things the birds can become just something wonderful yeah I would add that landscape unlike architecture is dynamic it's changing daily seasonally but it's also cyclical so it's essentially an exhibition that changes everyday and so there's always something new to learn and new to show children and visitors yeah thank you for the lecture it's wonderful to see the work and it's always delightful to hear you speak about it you talked about history and the relationship to context in all the projects that you showed the wonderful deep reservoir could you say something about your process both in terms of your relationship to the research but then how you decide the priorities for which kinds of things you'll bring back which things you'll deemphasize and which things you'll highlight because it's very different in all of the projects I mean that's of course a wonderful question mark it's really hard to articulate that because it really is the relationship with the place and the people very early I mean for me I never wanted to aestheticize the history to a certain degree in a formal way right and hopefully in all the projects there's something you feel about the history at the de Young you know the girdled palm tree you know that people always go like what's wrong with that palm tree right but that to me is it or that we didn't make the paving the color of sand that we thought of sand as this multi-cultured color thing and then we said the ground should be variegated that it should be a lot of color so that people actually look down right so really just through the process of trying to articulate what you feel and again it's very hard to sort of say how that process happens and I think it happens by making a lot of work that then you reject no really and I learned this working with Herzog they make a lot of work the prolificity of making that you have these ideas and you make a lot of work and then you have to reject it because you know it's not doing what you want it to do which means you got to keep making it and then you get to a point where you go huh why don't I start there it's like the olive trees right we started with trees doing 360s we started with the tree the forest of strange behavior you know we were going to get these amputee trees you know we were trying our best to make something interesting and then at the end of the day it was like wow we couldn't think of anything more and you know with this garden you know we started out with a lot of things we started out with decks found you know a lot of things and in hindsight I'm glad it boiled down to very simple lines and plant material because in a way I think you know in hindsight now I think the site's not that big and I think for the kinds of programming you want to do here I do think the site wants to be a kind of an open canvas and so when you come here sometimes it's full and then you come here again and it's empty so I do think you know the time that you spend on the project but the prolificity I mean we made a ton of things for this project and you get to a point where it's like you know maybe we should be here um were you involved with the conservancy at all and trying to have sort of a relationship with the park in this project a way anyone well we actually started out with the again that image that I showed you we talked to the gardeners and the kinds of plants and then we had this conversation with Raft and then I think Tim talked to the botanical garden I think we got a long list of recommendations from the New York Botanical Garden and then you know the rest became what was appropriate within the concept of the herbaceous border the Rhododendrons and some of the large shade trees but I would say the largest thing that we talked about very early were the loss of the elm trees that were happening in Central Park we talked to the conservancy about the new elms they were planted here and then there was just the loss of some of the canopies around the area I'm wondering if you were you consciously designed for the vista that one gets going out the door of the museum because that's going to be so important to people arriving at the museum did you consciously consciously design what they would see the first view of the garden no again I think it had more to do with for me and I'll let these guys talk because they've been on the site a lot standing on the on the reservoir one day looking back across in winter I was blown away that I could see the garden and then of course I came in the garden and then look back across and I was really stunned by that relationship today being there I never noticed this high rise building the big brown one over there you know that all of a sudden now I can see the context that I had never noticed before because the trailers were here most of the time so for me the beautiful thing about this project is a lot of the sight lines I had never seen before until now because you were just unable to see them all of that we we were really focused on the view in the new gate and yes right yeah and composing that view and in particular the rockery and the you know landscape we're always thinking about views in motion right so it's not just the static view but the view as it unfolds as you move in and into the rockery and so Rebecca and I were walking back and forth and all around with every rock literally studying the form in three dimensions well that was not the view at the door of the museum so much as the moving view we were up on the terrace we were across the lawn we were behind the rockery yeah but it's a moving view I'd like to say thank you very much my question is what are some of the planning for seating arrangements so that visitors may be able to contemplate this lovely landscape such as would you possibly know if the Cooper Hewitt might be using some of these lovely chairs from the Heatherwick studio as examples seen outside of this lecture room here well they're out there now they have them out there now and I think over the next few weeks they will be looking at we have lots of seating charts from square tables around tables fours, twos, threes there are a lot of opportunity for the collection to actually be shown out as well as I said we do have Yves Behar Benches he's a Cooper Hewitt winner from past years who's providing the actual physical Benches so hopefully the tables and chairs are something that's part of the collection that can come out in all the different spaces and I would add we also thought about in composing the rockery setting some select boulders at appropriate seating heights for informal seating you know you're just hanging out in the landscape with the rocks with the plants that's what people do naturally they perch themselves on you know steps, stoops boulders I can't wait to see the first kid climb up on the rock so you have to send me the picture oh yes I did the first one yes ma'am any intention to bring exhibitions outside? yes I think as part of design week well I'm not even going to put it to the curatorial staff but I'm hoping that this is a completely kind of open sort of palette for them to really now think now they see the garden to see the possibilities for installations I hope more dynamic installations actually taking place within the garden one of the things we did is install an engineered soil below the lawn which allows it to take weight and be easily repaired so it can hold sculptures in a way it couldn't before in addition to holding lots of people but it's a newer technology that will allow for more flexibility and certainly more programming I was just going to add we've had exhibitions in the garden in the past but I think the garden's been closed for so long that people forget that in the footprint we're very excited about having many more installations out there exhibitions, education programs and more we are bringing back concerts we're bringing back cocktails at Cooper Hewitt and a whole load of other special events if that's it I'd like to thank you all for coming out on a weeknight and hopefully what do I keep saying hopefully you're going to enjoy this garden this is a new place for you to come to and enjoy the garden again I'd like to thank all the trustees this is Ross I hope the garden is to your liking and the other thing about garden art I think every and I think Rebecca spoke to this as you move around just look at all the different ways in which the garden is forcing you to sort of see your city it hopefully will give you a different view of the place in which you live and I know it's going to do that when it snows the first hit of spring, summertime and then the fall again to have that one little tree just shaking red and orange today for us it's just beautiful we couldn't have planned it more so thank you guys for all coming out