Attack on the Front Lawn - Dwell Blog

Over the past three years, Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg has convinced a series of suburban homeowners to tear up their front lawns and replace them with vegetable gardens.

The project, known as Edible Estates, is not a landscaping venture so much as an effort to jostle our thinking about how isolated suburbanites relate to their community and surroundings. You might think of it as a subversive version of a home makeover show.

“Edible Estate gardens are meant to serve as provocations on the street,” Haeg writes in Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, an account of the project published this month. “What happens when we share the a street with one of these gardens? The front-yard gardeners become street performers for us.”

There aren’t any lawns on Madison Avenue, but Haeg will work with the closest thing when he builds a series of shelters for animals, including a beaver lodge and eagle nest, in the sunken front courtyard of the Whitney Museum in New York for the museum’s biennial, which opens March 6th. Click below to hear my conversation with Haeg.

Read all of Michael Cannell's posts

Posted by: Michael Cannell on Feb 6, 08 at 03:00 PM PST

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I would love to know more: I am creating a blog www.MyUrbanFarm.com dedicated to just such ideas! Love to read more

Posted by Anne Robert on 02/07/08 08:05AM PST