Garden in Progress

“… A lifetime
Was too little to think all this up in. But
As the garden grew with the plan
So does the plan with the garden.”
—Bertolt Brecht, “Garden in Progress,” in American Poems

Thinking an architecture without buildings could mean shifting attention from the objects to the space in between them. In a city like Tokyo, that space might be called a gap; in a city like Los Angeles, it might be called the garden. Ubiquitous space across the metropolis, the garden embeds LA’s entire population, without distinction of class or ethnicity.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the garden became a space of labour for thousands of Japanese American inhabitants-turned-gardeners, unable to own land because of the California Alien Land Law (1913). It was a predilect retreat for Bertolt Brecht while in Los Angeles as a political refugee in the 1940s, whose Santa Monica garden provided metaphorical ground for his intellectual labour.
The garden fulfilled the promise of collectivism in the experimental architecture of the Schindler House (1922) in West Hollywood. Woven into the plan, the garden functioned as an outdoor room equipped with fireplaces where Pauline and Rudolph Schindler gathered with friends of the avant-garde: salons, conversations, readings, performances, and Thanksgiving feasts. Through the spatial interlocking of interior and garden, the entire lot functioned as a living space.
The garden also operated as a living unit at the site of Tokio Florist in Silver Lake, where Yuki Sakai and her family ran their flower business from the 1960s directly from their two-story house and garden: clients were received in the front Japanese-style garden, selling took place in the driveway, and flower growing occurred in the field to the rear. The land surrounding the house allowed Tokio Florist to function for decades as a self-sufficient unit for living and working, just like a traditional machiya (Japanese townhouse).

Today, the garden lives on in flourishing community gardens created by Latino and African American communities in the food deserts south of Los Angeles, and in the carefully tended residential front yards of Chinese American households in the East. In the neighbourhood of Lincoln Heights, the front lawn—plastic or real—is nowhere to be seen. Instead, chain-link fences support makeshift structures where vegetable gardens grow, supported by wooden sticks or planted in buckets.
The garden also continues to be a site for cultural production—see artist David Horvitz’s garden with Terremoto, started on a residential plot next to his studio in Arlington Heights, where a house disappeared after a fire. Exhibitions, readings, and performances constantly take place—and where one afternoon, together with friends, we read Brecht’s garden poems aloud ¹ .

This is a personal and partial account of my six-month path across Los Angeles as an architect-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in 2023. Moving across Los Angeles through the garden opened up a different way of looking at the city—one that highlights the life of its inhabitants as they find their ground, making and transforming its urban landscape. The garden is an architecture constantly in progress—a living plan continuously edited and adapted, unfolding beside, beyond, and in place of buildings.