This project traces the life cycles of enclosed landscapes, revealing how plant vitality is a powerful, if hidden, force in shaping human behavior. Designed interior landscapes are extreme interventions that demand significant resources, but they are not unusual: in the era of anthropogenic climate change, designers must confront environments of human origin and imagination that frustrate illusions of human control.

Are translators artists or technicians? Literary translators are hidden conduits of emotion, but the majority of professional translators work on more mundane material — instruction manuals, street signs, nutritional labels — that form the infrastructure of globalization. Intangible Heritage, a lavishly illustrated (and heavily annotated) volume on the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, offers an unusual hybrid of the creative and the technical: the translator as a designer.

The habits of corporate man, a creature most acutely aware of comfort in the present tense, determined the fluctuations of the Ford Foundation’s interior climate. During the workweek, the office atmosphere regulated the garden’s atmosphere—both spaces would be stable, mild, and dry—while on weekends and holidays, the interior climate was subject to significant, yet still largely unknown, variation. 

Modernist landscape architect Dan Ki­ley, renowned for designs of exacting geometry and attention to plant form, stated that the project “embodied both risk and fun. . . . Although it may not have been what the clients expected to hear, I told them frankly that the project was an experiment.”