'Stone in Landscape Architecture: A Sensory Journey' at ABC Stone
Stories in Stone
Photo: John Hill/World-Architects
Stone in Landscape Architecture: A Sensory Journey is an exhibition at ABC Stone in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where five landscape architecture firms were tasked with creating immersive landscapes that explore the relationship between stone and the design of outdoor spaces. World-Architects visited shortly after the exhibition opened.
Less than ten miles east of the Greenpoint home of ABC Stone, a supplier of stone for landscapes, interiors, and cladding, sits Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the one-time “valley of ashes” that was reborn as a park for the 1939-40 World's Fair. There, in the shadow of the famed Trylon and Perisphere, sat Gardens on Parade, an installation of roughly fifty gardens, both outdoors and indoors, in bloom during the run of the fair. This “destination for garden lovers, plant lovers, homeowners, and professionals,” in the words of Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, provided the inspiration for ABC Stone, under creative director Lyndsey Belle Tyler, to solicit five firms—Design Workshop, LaGuardia Design Group, Oehme van Sweden (OvS), RKLA Studio, and Supermass Studio—to design 350-square-foot vignettes, each one limited to a single stone and produced in a compressed timeline. As the visual tour that follows illustrates, this doesn't mean the firms were limited in their concepts or the design skills they brought to each installation.
Stone in Landscape Architecture: A Sensory Journey opened on March 20 and is on display until June 20, 2025. It is free but by appointment only;
visit ABC Stone's website for details. In cooperation with ASLA-NY, landscape architects visiting the exhibition can earn continuing education units.
To go on the “sensory journey,” visitors follow the path in Victory Grey Smoke Granite that leads from the open-air yard off the street into the interior exhibition space beyond. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
Supermass used their installation, the first one encountered by visitors, as an opportunity to get revenge on the gods of value engineering, one could say, by replicating in Golden Sun Granite a planter from the studio's LaGuardia Airport Terminal B that was executed in GFRC. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
In addition to the design firms involved, Summerhill Landscapes was responsible for the sourcing, maintenance, and installation of live plantings throughout the exhibition space. Four of the five vignettes are inside, as seen here. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
The first vignette visitors come across inside is by Design Workshop. Their installation turns data of increasing fossil fuel emissions over the last 200 years into a sculpture, with each slab of Madras Grey Sandstone representing two years. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
The sculpture is split into two mirrored parts to raise the notion that emissions will decrease in the future, hopefully through positive human actions like choosing to build with materials with low embodied carbon. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
Like Supermass, OvS revisited one of its previous creations, specifically a garden on the east end of Long Island that was built around several sculptures, including one by Henry Moore. A quote by Moore foregrounds the artist's influence on OvS's installation design. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
Visitors can sit on chair by Oasiq, one of the exhibition's sponsors, don a pair of headphones, and watch a video about Henry Moore. (Photo: John Hill/World-Architects)
For their installation, RKLA Studio selected Vermont Danby Marble, which has been used in many iconic New York City buildings, among them the main New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
The wide variety found in the marble coming out of the Danby quarry is evident in the different surfaces and elements, from the angular paving and “rill” filled with loose stones, to the thick slab used for a bench and the slender posts that pepper the pocket park-like space. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
At the rear of the exhibition space is LaGuardia Design Group's installation, a tapered space with a bench facing video screens atop slabs of Renaissance Grey Limestone and a fountain at the far end. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
The blocks of limestone move from rough smooth across the installation, accompanied by relevant quotes from such architects as Antoni Gaudí and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe etched into the pavers. (Photo: Julie Florio, courtesy of ABC Stone)
