Areas
Between Natures
Between Natures subverts the romantic ideas of what is ‘garden,’ and re-enchants us with the idea of nature or wild, presented through a lens of ambiguity. As this studio focuses on the post-COVID Financial District of New York, the American Stock Exchange is reimagined as a contemporary garden in the modern world; a space that merges culture with nature. As a new reflection of capitalism, the project emphasises medicinal research and pharmaceutical production. These two concepts of attraction and pharmacy are hybridized as the needs of people have been altered during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project’s intervention primarily takes place in “The Pit,” a large space previously used as a trading floor, once a representation of economy and consumer culture, now holds the hermetic containers which act as both spectacle and contemporary monastic garden. The aquarium and terrarium share geometries of the existing structure and hybridize with the medicinal archives and dispensary through the use of pneumatic tubes, which are vital to the transportation of packaged prescriptions as well as material samples taken from the gardens. The project presents two contemporary monastic gardens as new ecologies; exploited for medicinal research while they perform through ambiguity as visitors never occupy their interior environments, and only experience its contents by retrieving prescribed samples.