Adam's House in Paradise was an exhibition and call for
proposals initiated by Kyong Park and Glenn Weiss of Storefront for Art and
Architecture in 1984. Garden of Eden was a rubble garden built by Adam Purple, the
urban activist, on Eldridge Street in New York City.
Adam Purple and His Garden of Eden
On September 14, the New York Times reported the passing of Adam Purple, an eccentric New York-based environmentalist and gardener, at the age 84. Early Storefront followers might know him through the 1984 exhibition Adam’s House In Paradise, a public campaign to preserve Purple’s remarkable and elaborately designed community garden, which he created in the rubble of Lower East Side abandoned lots and called the Garden of Eden. “Hope in a territory of poverty and drugs,” as Storefront’s co-founder Glenn Weiss referred to it, this 15,000 sq. ft. earthwork was featured in several publications, including National Geographic (September, 1984), London Art Monthly (October, 1984), and Lucy Lippard’s article Gardens: Some Metaphors for a Public Art in Art in America (November, 1981).
NYCHA's Plan
In January, 1986, NYCHA announced plans to demolish the garden to make way for a public housing project on the site, prompting a two-front community initiative: Storefront’s exhibition that invited architects from around the world to propose alternative designs that would integrate the garden into the Housing Authority’s approved plan, and a legal case against the development brought by the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.
Storefront also created its own site proposal which relocated two buildings from NYCHA’s plan from the Garden of Eden site to the other side of the street.
Despite these efforts, the garden was demolished as planned in 1986. However, as one of Storefront’s first exhibitions to engage the politics of city planning, it established the organization’s commitment to alternative art and architecture practices as inseparable from.
The Exhibition
More than 30 architects, including Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, Shin Takamatsu, Diller+Scofidio, Imre Makovicz, Dan Coma, BA BA ARC and others, submitted proposals to the exhibition. Spanning conceptual sketches to extensive designs, these submissions explored strategies that positioned the garden as a public amenity with the potential to improve the city’s public housing plan for the site.
Adam's House In Paradise, Submission (1984-09) by Elizabeth Diller + Ricardo ScofidioStorefront for Art and Architecture Archive
Adam's House In Paradise, Submission 2 by Lebbeus WoodsStorefront for Art and Architecture Archive
"The Cultivation of gardens within dense urban settlements helps to establish a healthy community of planetary life-forms and processes. The same is true of forests, which are an aspect of wilderness brought to the city. An urban terrain of terraced houses, constructed of reinforced concrete, with soil roofs three to eight feet in thickness will, in the proposed design, form a new forest floor. The Garden of Eden, at the center of an expanded complex of earth houses and urban forest, remains a unique preserve. As a point of origin, it serves as a reference and resource for future growth."
-Lebbeus Woods
Adam's House In Paradise, Submission 3 by Neil DenariStorefront for Art and Architecture Archive
"With the hope of preserving the GARDEN OF EDEN, my project attempts to give the personal cosmology of Adam Purple and its attendant public effect the room it needs to make New York a better city, the ultimately, the Earth a better planet. The steps I have taken to do so are as follows:
1. Provide for the future expansion of the garden by leaving its present block intact.
2. Create a dual housing structure combining row house and slab units that form a base and wall whose primary focus is the observation of and interaction with the garden and its circular geometry. The slab speaks about recent past and future housing methods while exposing its primally timeless intent: the reduction of surface coverage.
All attempts have been made to expose the reciprocates implicit in the private and public reals of urban living, a case for the collective integration of art, nature, architecture, people, and intergalactic observers."
-Neil Denari
Adam's House in Paradise, Submissions 4 (1984-09-13) by Shin TakamatsuStorefront for Art and Architecture Archive
"This planning is only based on the following romantic concepts for lack of concrete visual information or the background of political information.
1. Adam's House is a historic and physical symbol of this place.
2. The whole site is the Garden of Eden.
3. All buildings are in the Wood of Eden.
4. Public buildings are like hollies in the Garden."
-Shin Tamakatsu
"This planning is only based on the following romantic concepts for lack of concrete visual information or the background of political information.
1. Adam's House is a historic and physical symbol of this place.
2. The whole site is the Garden of Eden.
3. All buildings are in the Wood of Eden.
4. Public buildings are like hollies in the Garden."
-Shin Tamakatsu
Adam's House in Paradise, Submission 5 by Eric Owen MossStorefront for Art and Architecture Archive
"At this moment there was a terrific explosion. It was New York...
...and just as it is said that no two men can really know what wach is thinking of, what either sees when he speaks of "red" and "blue", so can no man ever know just what another means when he tells about the city that he sees...
...no man can be certain he has seen the city as it is, because in the hairbreadth of that instant recognition a whole new city is composed, made out of sense but shaped and colored and unalterable from all that he has felt and thought and dreamed about before..."
-Eric Owen Moss and Nick Seirup, with apologies to (the real) Thomas Wolfe- The Web and the Rock
“Its significance is underlined by the history of community design activism in the 1960’s, by the “green” movements, by the socio-political opposition to overscaled housing projects; and now, by the issue of gentrification in the East Village and the Lower East Side, and by the artist community which has become the inevitable staple in this process in New York City” -Richard Plunz
For more information about Adam Purple please visit:
- Adam Purple
For more information about “Adam’s House in Paradise” please visit:
- Press and other media
- Storefront for Art and Architecture
This Google Arts and Culture exhibit is curated by Chialin Chou.
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