HADDAD | DRUGAN

Optical Gardens is a block long integrated art project conceived for Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood, commissioned by Baltimore Office of Promotion and The Arts. The streetscape art plaza, adjacent to Johns Hopkins University, layers together elements of optics, water, and seasonal effects becoming a platform that gives expression to unique natural and cultural characteristics of Charles Village, including its culture and community. 

Culturally, the community is colorful, diverse, artful, and active with vividly painted houses, gardens, street life, and an environmental ethos. Johns Hopkins adds an intellectual and youthful vibrancy and ethos of research and discovery, housing the Space Telescope Science Institute among other departments.

Naturally, Charles Village is part of the Lower Jones Falls Watershed. Much effort is being made to promote infiltration and cleansing of storm water to improve the health of the watershed and Chesapeake Bay. Pioneers of the clean water movement, Abel and Reds Wolman, were prominant scientists and professors at Johns Hopkins.

The goal of Optical Gardens is to create a rich and layered environmental art installation that dramatizes the performance of nature by showcasing seasonal shifts and sustainable practices of stormwater management, and the performance of community through creating stages for the everyday performance of urban life. At night, a play of saturated colored light transforms the landscape into a theatrical alternate version of its daytime self by showcasing and enhancing processes featured in the installation.

Optical Gardens is designed around a sequence of four outdoor rooms, each distinguished by a season highlighted by plant materials and light colors. The rooms align along an axis defined by hydrological and optical effects. The optical axis is delineated by a series of ring sculptures of graduated sizes that visually link to form a conceptual telescope. The hydrological axis is a stone-lined swale for stormwater runoff, which feeds adjacent rain gardens. At the center of each of the four seasonal rooms is a stone “stage” carved with an image depicting water, ranging from the microscopic to the telescopic.

Giving further structure to the rooms, reclaimed granite benches are arranged to create a variety of social spaces for different sized groups. Each room is also framed by a simple but bold plant palette of trees and shrubs, selected to be at their most spectacular during the particular season being highlighted in that location. To reinforce the seasons, a colored spotlight will shine on the carved stone stage of each room only during the season highlighted there.  The spotlight color palette is amber in autumn, blue in winter, pink in spring, and green in summer. These colors loosely align with the seasonal colors of the tree flowers and foliage, which will be illuminated in white uplights year round.

The materials of Optical Gardens feed into its agenda of sustainability, and include recycled stone, storm water, durable stainless steel, high-efficiency LEDs, and plants. Manipulated to perform artistically, sculpturally, functionally, and conceptually, this rich palette of materials will yield compelling, thought-provoking, and delightful spaces.

The site design of Optical Gardens was a collaboration between Haddad|Drugan and Tobiah Horton of WRT. RK&K is the primary engineer.