Over the weekend we paid a visit to the Southbank area of London to check out the National Theatres fly tower where artists, Ackroyd and Harvey and around 20 assistants have recently covered the north and west facing walls in a carpet of grass.
It’s not to all tastes but I’ve always been a fan of the brutalist architecture of the National Theatre and its really exciting to see this 70s concrete building given a temporary facelift and transformed into a vivid living installation. At the time though it was slightly disconcerting to see the grass being sprayed with a hosepipe, not so green after all we were thinking but having done some reading up since then, I’ve discovered that the water in use is in fact the ‘ground water’ that collects in the National’s carpark and is being pumped from the basement to the fly tower. After undergoing some testing, they discovered it was fine for watering the grass and for many other uses around the building. Previous to this, it was being piped straight to the sewers so the project has inspired the theatre to use the collected water in other areas thus saving on its annual water bill and introducing a new energy-saving feature to the building, effectively a very big water butt!
