A BRIEF HISTORY Until 2014 huge trees were guarding the schoolyard at the Piet Zwart Institute. They got removed for security reasons during that summer and the whole yard was plastered when we came back from holiday. In preparation for a method seminar (early spring 2018) I asked Carla, who had become our new headmaster replacing beloved Dick, whether she could get me some dirt. And she did. More a mountain than a hill was then delivered in the following days. Maximum a third got used for our planting session. But what to do with the rest? Let’s follow the motto “The beach lies under the pavement”. By the partial lifting of the pavement we created framed beds in which we could deposit the remaining dirt. Not much planting happened the first spring, so when returning from summer, the beds where just overgrown with all what came with the dirt or the wind. The next generation of students got each a plant from a private garden, that they first had to draw and then to plant into the waste fields. Throughout the next season a few got engaged with it by planting besides Honey, who was a instrumental and motivational force throughout the activation of the Greens. Petter installed a thyme garden that grew with time into a small sculpture garden. Jake dropped once in a while some plants from his field trips or cuttings he got from friends. With the time beds slowly got enlarged with out pulling too much attention to it. A huge laurel, which got dumped by the owner of a down closed plant shop found a new home. It made it - even totally dried out - through the supporting watering Carla. Sculptural elements where added, sand donated by leaving students became beaches. And birds got there own feeder by Jamie putting on a metal architecture on a concrete block BA students from downstairs had left behind. The container filling of the BA class leaving the house for good pushed the garden now even more into a sculpture park than before. Central was a huge block of Styrofoam: the Piet Zwart Monument. The Dutch industrial designer and typographer whose name very seldom is mentioned in the classrooms of an institute which is named after him. A compost bin, planting buckets, ceramic sculptures, aquariums or bird pools on rusty pillars all had grown into a more or less homogenous garden of greens and trash. All got cleared up by and for the first garden exhibition early 2020 being part of the Open House that year. Since autumn 2020 the garden is under the guidance of the then new incoming artist Kate Price. A thematic project has been led by Yoeri Guepin.
