 The garden was named in 1991 to honor the late Arthur Ross, a founding member of Cooper Hewitt's Board of Trustees. And I am so pleased to welcome his wife, Janet Ross, who is with us this evening. Welcome, Janet. I'm sure many of you have heard stories of the legendary garden key that, for a fee of $50 a year, once gave families in the neighborhood exclusive access to the garden. I am reminded of this key almost every day. You may have even owned one of these keys. The garden's redesign, led by Walter Hood, the 2009 National Design Award winner for landscape architecture, celebrates and activates this rare enclosed green space as a public asset. Our new entrance on 90th Street, with its striking canopy designed by Diller Scaffidio and Renfrow, beckons from the street. And every morning, I watch as the garden fills with neighbors and visitors of all ages, taking advantage of the free access, including some famous ones like that middler and Conan O'Brien. Dynamic and vibrant with numerous stellar examples of design throughout the garden, it is often the visitor's very first taste of the Cooper Hewitt design experience. And it always leaves them wanting more. To illuminate the relationship of Cooper Hewitt's garden to New York City's long tradition of urban garden design, we asked the pioneering landscape designer, Margie Rudick, to deliver tonight's lecture. Winner of the 2013 National Design Award for Landscape Architecture and a champion of Cooper Hewitt, Margie has been an advocate of environmentally conscious urban landscape design for over 25 years. She began her illustrious career just across the street from Cooper Hewitt, working for the Central Park Conservancy's horticultural crew to restore the park's understory. After earning a master's degree in landscape architecture from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Margie built a practice based on sustainable principles that were once considered radical, but have now been adopted globally. Her award-winning projects include a groundbreaking design for New York City's Queens Plaza and the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China's first ecological park. In addition to her National Design Award at Cooper Hewitt, Margie has been honored with the Lewis Mumford Award from architects, designers, and planners for social responsibility, and the Rachel Carson Women in Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society. Most recently, Margie is the author of Wild by Design, Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes, which is essential reading for design enthusiasts. In fact, Margie and I recently took part in a dwell on design panel discussion together where I really could have gone on for hours talking to Margie about landscape, about design, about life. So it's a really good thing that I'm getting off stage now to welcome Margie Rudick. Thank you so much. Thank you, and I'm really delighted and very honored to be here to talk about the garden and the history of the garden, actually, I was asked to talk about. And I have to say, first, I'm not a historian, but the garden is a very, very important place for me and I think for the city and for the neighborhood. I actually grew up five blocks north of here, and I'm working on a book called Walking on the Ceiling that's about a game that my sisters and I played with mirrors where we pretend we were walking on the ceiling, what you do, living in an apartment, but it also is about living sort of out of your comfort zone. And so I was kind of pushed in giving this talk out of my comfort zone to talk about the history of the garden, and so I hope you bear with me if I get a few dates wrong. And if I seem to veer perilously off course, starting with now, but over the course of the summer, I was really trying to get away into the garden and what it is and why it's so enduring. And it wasn't until I was driving in Riverhead past the big duck that I sort of, a light bulb went off and I thought, what is it about certain landscapes that make them endure and capable of adapting many, many different incarnations and versions of this garden? And when I was a kid, this was actually a working farm stand and you could go in. It was like, you know, a fairy tale, kind of like the big shoe you can go walk into. This was the big duck that you could go in and buy chickens and eggs. And every weekend, pretty much, we would go in and it was part of a much bigger landscape of Pecanic Bay. And it was agricultural, vast farm fields and ducks actually all the way down to the bay. And it was a real working landscape. Now on the right hand side, you can see what it's become. It's a relic sitting in a park and most of the time it's closed. So it started to get me thinking, what is it that makes a landscape like the Cooper Hewitt, a kind of a working landscape, something that actually functions over many, many different generations versus a relic? The Undermire Garden is a fabulous garden in Yonkers, but it's very fixed in its own time, in place. So that being said, I wanna point out, I'm gonna do a lot of dividing the world into two, which is something that I think you do when you're starting out, trying to figure something out. So I'm just giving you this bench quotation about how kind of unpleasant that can be. So I hope over the course of the talk, as we move toward the end, you'll get the idea that I'm trying to move beyond the sort of binary thinking that there's black and white, there's this garden and that garden. And the things really are, sorry, I'm a little taller. The things really are not that clear cut, and I'm gonna look a little bit toward the end more at the grays in between the blacks and the whites. But one person who did think, I think, a lot in black and white was Robert Fincheri, and a lot of you know the big duck from his book, Learning from Las Vegas, in which he said that there are two different kinds of buildings. There are buildings that are like ducks where they signify what their use is by their shape, like a church you can tell from the steeple, and then there are decorated sheds, their boxes, they have signs that tell you what they do. And that sort of applied a little bit to my thinking about the garden, but what looking at Aldo Rossi in the architecture of the city, architects seem very good at dividing things into two. Aldo Rossi talks about propelling monuments that are monuments that really can evolve and change over time, like the Ponte Vecchio, and not only do they change in terms of program, but they have a kind of an organic relationship with their surroundings. And he contrasts that with the pathological monument, and he talks about the prison as a type that it's always gonna be a prison once the program of prison ceases to be the building will no longer be able to function, it can't really accommodate new uses. So I was thinking about the Cooper Hewitt Garden being a working landscape, and how is it that it has adapted and changed over so many generations? And I looked back at the history of kind of working landscapes, you go back all the way to the beginning of the country, of the nation, and Mount Vernon. And I found some similarities between the Cooper Hewitt Garden, surprisingly, and Mount Vernon. And Mount Vernon, you realize, we all recognize this big stark white house on the bluff, but when you go there, you don't realize until you go there that there's actually a really complex procession through different places, you see this sort of axial view, but then you're taken on this carriage rides through the wildernesses, and those are forested plantings that Washington planned very specifically to be these little idle. Then you get to the house and then you filter out into the working landscape. So in here, you can see in this view how important those wildernesses are in linking the inside to the outside and the floodplain of the Potomac. And then inside the garden, you get views. So you're always getting this inside and outside and Clive Aslet talks about the American country house and how it's grounded in the farm. But I also think it's very grounded in the regional land in very specific regional landscapes within which gardens occur. So Andrew Carnegie, I'm gonna pronounce it Carnegie because everybody was impressing on me that you can't say Carnegie when you're talking about him. He hired a very young, he was only 24 years old. He was an apprentice landscape architect named Richard Scrummerhorn from a very august family of planners and architects and engineers. And he designed the garden. He didn't go on to design a lot of gardens that you would know of. He became a park planner. It's this really important. He was a park planner and a city planner. He planned the city of Fort Lauderdale for instance. And he was a promoter of the city beautiful movement. And this quotation, he was from a very old Dutch family settled in 1630 in that really pragmatic old, old American kind of family. If the city practical is fully realized there is no doubt that the city beautiful will follow as a matter of course. The latter will require only a perfection of detail the way for which is readily paved by the former. So the form follows function is sort of met here by beauty follows program and beauty follows practicality. And I think that's part of what Carnegie was really attracted to because he was very pragmatic in a lot of ways. So when you look at the design it's really zoned like a park in a very smart and much more complex way than you. It looks so simple, but in fact he stretched he wrapped the street landscape from the front around to the perimeter with the rhythm of the street trees. And then a social space. He married very late in life in his 50s and he wanted this place to be for his family really to live. It was not a showcase. And his wife was an avid gardener and his child was very young when they moved here. And so he really wanted a place for the family to live and have friends and for it to really be a social place. And he also wanted a place for his wife Louise Carnegie to be able to garden. She was an avid gardener who really wanted a place really to work the soil, not a place just to be a showcase. So that was where those garden beds that you'll see floating around were from. And then in the east side he designed I think his version of a wilderness with the rockery but it also was planted with all different species of trees so that it would really grow up to be a little idle. So you see it all in this very small space. And then you can see in this how Carnegie wanted to a place that was big enough to have a real garden and that's why he bought this land so far north before the city had really, the development of the city had really reached this far north but you can see here that he really got a house, it feels like a house in the park. And the design of it is very much in keeping with park design of the time. This is Jackson Square in Greenwich Village. You know, the perimeter fence, wrought iron fence with stone and the sort of meander of plantings of different tree species. It's very much more park design than it was contemporary garden design of the time. And this is what 65th Street looked like around 1900 so you can see how densely developed it already was up to the 60s and 70s. But the 80s and the 90s at this time, if you went over toward the East River, this is the Jacob Aster house, there were still farms, there were still lawns and sort of a pastoral landscape grading down to the East River. And this is a picture of 92nd and 5th in 1898. So you can tell how little it had been developed. But that's not to say that this area was not developing. There was an industrial spine that was moving very quickly. The 3rd Avenue, L was bringing hundreds and hundreds of workers every day to the Rupert Brewery and workers' housing was actually stretching from that spine over east toward the East River and then west getting as far as Park Avenue. So those houses now that are, you know, like $7 million were workers' housing and many of those fireplaces were mass produced, first mass produced fireplaces. But here on 5th and on Park and on Madison, it was not developed and you can see how pastoral, it feels like an estate in a park from, this is about 1903. And this view of the garden from 1903 shows how simple it was. And the trees had just been planted and it is interesting that they're all different species. So he really did want it to feel like a little nascent forest. And then by, you know, 1912 or so, it had really grown in so that it felt like an estate. It felt very much, the house was sort of subsumed in the landscape in some ways, very different from the Frick, which was designed really as this kind of platform. And it was until the 20s that Olmsted designed that front terrace and then in the 70s, Russell Page designed a little jewel-like side garden but really the conception of it was as a city block, very impressive and not really an idea about landscape at all. This is a view, a photograph actually by Berenice Abbott from 1935. And you can see that there was just this little world growing inside the fence that was private and an enclave. Louise, Andrew Carnegie died in 1919 and Louise Carnegie died in 1946 and after that, the garden languished. The Carnegie Foundation didn't know really what to do with the building and it was leased in the 1960s to the Columbia School of Social Work at which time it became the place with the key. I have a client who last week, I told him I was working on this talk and he said, when I was a kid, that was a playground and I had a key. It's just like really, really memorable and I did not have a key and my parents didn't belong but I remember that playhouse in the middle and just longingly wishing that my parents would fork over. They said, people said it's $25 but I think some people say it's $50. Whatever, it was a nominal fee but you can see here that it was a park. It was a park playground for a long time but it was very, very well used and well loved. This is the Ennis family, some of you may know Betsy Ennis from the Guggenheim. This is 1957 and they were a young professional family could not afford the house at the beach and they spent their entire summer in the garden and afternoons. But then after the Cooper Hewitt acquired the building, the formal gardens were restored, the flower beds were restored and it became more of an event space. It was something, the garden was used for parties, for fundraisers and also for some educational events but it really was an event space and it was a little bit forlorn. Granted this is a winter shot but it kind of felt like this. There was really nobody there a lot of the time. So now that it's been reinvented and Walter Hood's really beautiful design, I think that the spirit of Carnegie has actually been revived. I think he would very much approve of the transformation and it's not just that it's been opened out but that the wilds of Central Park and of the Manhattan granite, just have been brought into the garden again. And I think that looking at how his relationship with wild landscape evolved is very useful in understanding this. He grew up in Dunfermline, Scotland, the old seat of the king in the Middle Ages and he said that when anyone who grows up in the shadow of Dunfermline Abbey is suffused with a sense of poetry and romance and it was a really formative landscape for him but this is the landscape he, the house he grew up in, his father was a weaver and people talk about the poverty that he grew up in but in fact, his father was a tradesman, very modest but they lived fine until the hand loom was superseded by the steam loom and the father had one by one had to sell off his looms and they really did hit very, very hard times. His mother took a job in a shop but his family was very cultivated. They were big readers, they were political radicals. A lot of them were very much nationalist and anti-royal and because of that, the park across the street which is Pit and Creef House and a park that was called the Glens by the Towns, people very much beloved was actually off limits to the Carnegie family because they were radicals and they were banned and the legend is that he, like I was looking at the playhouse, he was looking through the gates at this park, I don't know if it's true but that it always sort of stung that he was not allowed to go into this park. His mother was very proper and even when they were somewhat destitute she always made sure that they had white collars and were trimly suited. So I think that that's part of his kind of properness was very much instilled in him in his family and I have to apologize for generalizing about national character a little bit but people always say he's such a contradiction. He was a poor democracy and he crushed unions or he was very humble and he was wildly extravagant but I actually think that he was a Scotsman and there was something in the Scots Presbyterian upbringing that was very contradictory. The lower you went down in the Scots Presbyterian ladder the more restrictive and no smoking and no dancing for instance but they were very lenient about affairs of the heart and young people were allowed to go in the glands and court and there was not this sort of like buttoned up kind of what you would expect of parents and there's a joke. Some of you may have heard it about Scots Presbyterians. Why is it, why do Scots Presbyterians oppose sex and the answer is that it could lead to dancing. So I think that this, all of these contradictions were eerily familiar to me because I actually grew up in the household of a Scottish guy, Robert Bruce Ruddick. His father was named William Wallace Ruddick and there was always this contradiction of in our house any sentence that began, dad can I go buy X would be met with that's just too much of a good thing. That was like the, but you know, then I saw the receipts from Ellen's which was like the Cinderella of the time and they had no compunction about spending $500 on a lavish dinner party but it was all about friendship and life and enjoying culture and so when it came to actually buying things it was a very different story and I think that that's really important. Also looking at Carnegie and you know so he said he wanted a house that was plain and simple and roomy and he got a house that was 66 rooms and he was awakened every morning by a world-class organist at 7 a.m. So you know he could, right? So looking at the garden I wanted to understand what the sort of sensibility was that informed the garden and I was looking at what are the contemporary garden designers what were they doing and trying to locate Skirmerhorn sort of within those and there were kind of two strains and one was the kind of old Yankee, Beatrix Farrand not ostentatious things appropriate and fitting and the other was this is Horace Trumbauer who is the architect and designer of you know Big so the Elms and Newport the other was very much Arivist big new money wants to show itself and Carnegie I think really gravitated not just toward a style that was very understated but also toward the landscapes that's Western Massachusetts and the places that were much more low-key than the much fancier addresses like Newport and so just looking at that tradition of the kind of Western Massachusetts grounded in farm this is the Chote family house at Nomkeg in Western Massachusetts and you know there are formal gardens this is before the 1920s Fletcher steel design but there are formal gardens but it's all very much located within the Berkshires and within that really wild landscape and then also there's always a grounding with vegetable gardens and productive gardens but even at a more formal garden this was Bellefield in Hyde Park, Beatrix Farrand you can see the same zoning that you see here you see the social lawn, the planted flower beds but then she also planted this whole forest that then the whole thing is sitting in so there's this conceit that this little box of domesticated life actually exists within a wilder landscape the actual planting style that I think the original gardens probably followed although there's almost no photographs of Louis Carnegie's gardens but this sort of that Beatrix Farrand this is the Mount Edith Wharton's estate in also in Western Massachusetts the style even in very rigid laid out parterres the planting style is a little blousy kind of let out and I think that there's this offhandedness even in quite rigid boxed gardens the planting's kind of undercut the rigidity and I think it's very much in keeping with Sissinghurst and the story is that Harold Nicholson laid out all of these really rigid rooms and then Vita Sacva West went and kind of messed them up with all of this wild planting and this is I think something that gardeners do all the time it's that sort of fine line between order and chaos and it's something that I think was very felt that it also had a kind of a casualness that allows people to really live in it it's not just to look at contrast that with Horace Trumbauer's The Elms which was a European garden pretty much lifted and put into Newport and really beautiful but it's fixed it has to be clipped and maintained within an inch of its life and Ease Wharton had a thought about this kind of garden she said in Italian villas in their gardens she said but a piece of ground laid out and planted on the principles of the old garden craft will be not indeed an Italian garden in the literal sense but what is far better I think those two words were used all the time by her class what is far better a garden as well adapted to its surroundings is where the models which inspired it so it's not about just wholesale bringing in a European garden but being inspired by European forms but setting them within the larger landscape and she said at one point just putting a Roman column in a garden does not make an Italian garden but that's exactly what they were doing over at the breakers one garden I think she really would have approved of a very beautiful from the photographs garden was Winthrop Ames Italian garden this is looking at a quote Italian garden that really is an American garden a hybrid of the two you can see the Blomberty poplars and the statuaries and the water but you also see the Massachusetts Easter Massachusetts pines and the kind of meadow inspired flower bed so to me I think she would have really approved I don't know if she knew it but she would have approved of this hybrid of American and European Beatrix Farrand had a lot of devices to link you to the larger landscape she cut views and portholes and she brought the wild in Maine this is Long Island Sound on the left sort of axial views out and then brought wild plantings from the surrounding landscape this is Heather's in Maine into the controlled domesticated garden so there was this really interesting integration of wild and larger setting and regional landscape and gardening I at Reef Point she kind of reached her I think a peak of integrating these two looking at Andrew Carnegie I actually think he didn't have much use for a lot of that kind of gardening and I think I was looking at this garden and saying where does it fit in with contemporary gardens but I think looking at his other houses is really useful looking at Scebo Castle which is just this immense pile that emerges out of the Highlands he bought this in 1898 and it's in the middle of this fantastic rich estuary he and his wife though about three weeks of the summer would go to a tiny little bungalow where they were basically off the grid and that was their favorite time so he was quite unusual for a magnate to be that happy in a wild landscape with none of the amenities and then in 1917 he bought this massive shadow brook which was already built when it was built it was the biggest house in the country and was superseded only by Biltmore and this also just rises up out of the landscape and I think Orients out to Stockbridge Bowl and the way the building meets the ground is kind of raw and I think that that was sort of where his heart was in being attracted to these different places Mount Desert had a kind of a and also the Adirondacks but I'm just gonna focus on Mount Desert a little bit had a kind of a code where the landscape was supposed to be the wild coastal landscape and the buildings were just sort of rising and there was also that kind of tutor gothic architecture that was thought to be very appropriate to this it was very romantic about the big rough wild landscape and when you see this image of Atwater Kent's house and you know you start to think that these buildings really were like big architectural outcrops they were almost like natural phenomena that happened and there was a kind of a distaste for fancy gardening and I think Carnegie sort of might have shared that in the Adirondacks you know people really looked to scants if somebody really wanted to do quote gardening everything was supposed to be lodges and the natural landscape so when around the same time he was building this house up in Mount Desert this there was a cottage called big cottage of like 44 rooms called Sonagy and it burned down and the LAD family from Boston who owned it decided to rebuild and they rebuilt in this Mediterranean style and there was just a hue and a cry in Mount Desert people were just horrified and so I just wanted to look at why that was and what this more elemental kind of siting and landscape idea was all about and I was trying to divide it into two say is it about old money and new money? Well the left hand image is George Vanderbilt's house he was third generation only third generation and Mrs. LAD who was the owner of they renamed it Egonose they reversed the spelling and there were a lot of jokes about Egonose you know it's like such a reaching kind of design and but it's not about old money and new money it's about a kind of a code I was trying to think what would you call this what the more kind of natural and then the more showy and so I thought maybe they thought that the more natural landscape was kind of appropriate and fitting and just right and that the landscape of the Mediterranean more reaching style was just like too much and ostentatious but I didn't want to kind of start to get into these kinds of criticisms of certain styles and one is good and one is bad but I think it's really useful in looking at a working landscape like this to say what is it that makes it feel kind of quote natural and not so staged so is it that one is conceived as quote organic you know the landscape and the architecture kind of evolve organically together and the other one is this is the elms is so clearly staged and that's when I started to think about this binary thing and I was driving past we're back in the car driving past the duck and I thought maybe we could look at these working landscapes as more not like fairy tale ducks but like real ducks like a wood duck that actually is an organism that's part of a bigger ecosystem so it actually lives and breathes and produces waste and that kind of garden is very very different from the other kind of garden and I say well what do you call that then well the decorated shed is clear in terms of buildings but maybe the garden that is sort of sui generous and that is fixed in time maybe that's more like a decorated egg that it's more like a faberge egg and finally rot whereas the other one but then I started to look and this is where the binary thing starts to really hamstring you because then I really started to look at the pictures that I was finding and I was looking at the duck and thought this is a product of design every bit as miraculous and gorgeous as the egg and then I was looking at the egg and thinking it doesn't exist alone isolated it actually is so much about nature and so much about culture and family and is so connected to history that you can't actually say that one exists in isolation and that the other one is more connected it's just two different ways and they don't necessarily they're not necessarily exclusive so finally I wanna run through some projects that are a combination of the two that both have the larger working landscape and have the little decorated eggs in them and Beltmore being the most obvious fantastical example you know a working farm huge forest and also a fairly faithful rebuilding of a European style garden and Beltmore the procession almost had designed this as well as the George Vanderbilt I should have said house in Mount Desert and you arrive you go through these enclosures forest and then you're out again and then you get a view of the Chateau and then into the forest again and then all of a sudden you're here and it gives the Loire Valley a run for its money I mean it's magnificent and the connection to the Blue Ridge Mountains is just spectacular and you can see from this early view that the gardens weren't conceived in isolation either they're a gradation from a completely built platform for the building to these formal gardens and then the productive gardens and then the orchards and then the forest so it's just flows from one to another it also had the Beltmore's the Vanderbilt's had 125,000 acres of forest it was the first forestry school in the country this is the first couple classes of foresters and in 1914 Edith Vanderbilt sold 87,000 acres to the federal for nominal fee to the federal government to create the Pisca National Forest so they were just exemplary stewards of the land and it was a working farm with orchards and then since then it has continued to operate adding farms, adding vineyards, a creamery and now it has moved into sustainable era with the farm fields now being farmed this is Canola that actually provides biofuel for the generators and all the vehicles on the site and then a lot of the lawns have been shifted to Meadow and it's being managed as a wildlife habitat so this is as propelling a landscape as there ever has been and then when you look at this image of the decorated egg set within the working landscape of forest and farm it's so much more meaningful and rich than if you were just looking at the garden or if you were just looking at the sort of sustainability agenda so to further mess up this idea that there are two, things are black and white I also wanted to show a landscape design of Beatrice Farrand who was thought of as on the more understated where she just goes for Baroque in Dumbarton Oaks and she was working with Mildred Bliss who had lived all over the world and very much I think affected this Eurocentric garden but she, the kind of flights of fancy for instance this fall bounty in a neoclassical vessel and then you have to keep it up for drainage well so it's resting on sea turtles I mean it's almost psychedelic so but I was looking at all of these gardens now I was trying to find a garden that's just in isolation and I actually couldn't find one that is really thought of as a gray garden so this is the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller garden in also Beatrice Farrand in Maine and even in a conceit of a Chinese garden she creates these peep holes Dumbarton Oaks really is self-referential but this she creates these peep holes out to the forest and out to the wild landscape and then even the Museum of Modern Art which I think of as a jewel the original by Philip Johnson but when you look at it in the context of the modern building that he designed and also what I think he envisioned as the modern city that was gonna grow up around it it actually is quite contextual and then Tommy Church's first kidney-shaped pool for the Donnell Garden in Sonoma and we all have an image in landscape designers have an image of this as just a real jewel but then when you look at the surrounding hills and the wetlands you realize that he realized that it actually is also quite contextual and the Russell Page Garden is people don't know was designed in the 70s it's so respectful of the classical architecture so I went to Martha Schwartz thinking Martha Schwartz is famous for being quote an artist and people think that she's not contextual at all she just does her own thing but looking at Federal Plaza downtown in New York that's now gone I was so shocked that looking from the air you actually see that the entire ground is the color of the street landscape and even the details bring the street landscape into this plaza so there's actually the idea that this is sort of sui generous it really is a complete landscape that's completely opened out to the city and the city comes in so finally I just wanted to run through a couple projects of mine to say that I think a lot of people in my generation thought of as very sort of sustainability and that were sort of contextual and we were really responsive but there's a huge amount of artifice in what we do this is Steven Harris and Lucy Henry Roberts house up in Kinderhoek and that whole topography was made up it was just this ramp that went up to the house and also it has a little bit of a Tuscan thing going on so I just think that although a lot of the projects this is a project in India that I've been working on also Steven Harris for about 20 years it's very much about the built landscape and the architecture emerging out of the landscape this is a wild 2,500 acre in the western gods but the details are meant to feel very much of the place even though they can be quite modern they're the materials and the way they work is very much of the place and in a project in Baja California where there was nothing left on the site when we got there so the entire thing is made up it was very much about restoring this is one of the few places in the world where the desert meets the sea it's very much about the desert landscape and the sea landscape and even in the courtyards you always can get a sense of the desert behind you and the ocean in front of you so I was trying to look for something so I'm not that good at decorated eggs it turns out so even in a project like the urban garden room which is a really internalized project I kind of made up a context they wanted something that was quote natural and I sort of thought maybe it would be good to feel like you're in a fern canyon or you're really out in the natural world somewhere so even though this is a very rarefied place there's sort of an invented context that's much bigger than the room itself and at the Coney Island Aquarium which I think this is the most jewel like I didn't do the jewel I did the whole overall planning of bringing the dunes and bringing the tidal pools back into the aquarium I invited the architect Enrique Ruiz Jelly from Barcelona to create this very jewel like web that goes over the aquarium but when you look at it it's got a lot of attention for being such a beautiful artifact but it's very much related to the cyclone and the parachute jump and all of the big amusements and then it also is so inspired by marine life so it doesn't exist in isolation and this garden which is a water garden in Miami this view makes it feel very internalized but in fact it's all about the bay and being immersed in a much bigger landscape it does have a little jewel but that's by the artist Spencer Finch and I just made the setting so in the book that I just published while by design the idea that there's stuff that's wild and there's stuff designed that there is this sort of fissure is really challenged and I really challenged the idea that order and chaos are at opposite poles and back to this garden so this garden I think is just an incredible example of where we are right now it has been taken from what was really simple and I think designed really at a very diagrammatic level and this renovation has brought it up to a level of design that's befitting the Cooper Hewitt and it reminds me of Scrummerhorn's quotation that the latter being the city beautiful but in this the garden beautiful will require only a perfection of detail the way for which is readily paved by the former so the details really have been elevated to an intentionality that makes it a beautiful work of art in addition to being a park which it is but programming also has completely changed the park so now the people can come into the park the gardens have an intentionality they didn't have before being in this little corridor really beautifully framed and the city can come into the garden and people can actually now walk in free of charge as opposed to when there was a key and that I think is one of the biggest moves that the museum has made to really I think bring it back to what Carnegie wanted it to be which was a place that really would delight and that people would really enjoy and I think he would be very thrilled to know that it now belongs to the city and just as a post-script in 1901 the same year he was acquiring this building he actually went back to Dunfermline and purchased the house of Pittencreef and the whole park in the Glens and gave it to the town to open it as a public park and he also started just before his death in 1919 he commissioned these gates to be built and unfortunately they were dedicated after his death but named after his beloved wife, Louise Carnegie so I think that his spirit lives very much on in the opening of this garden, thank you. So we have time for a few questions if anybody has a question I'll come to you with the mic just raise your hand, any questions? Was too good? Thank you, thank you, well thank you so much. Thank you.