and ideological aspects of function.
The third thematic chapter, “Effects,” examines relationships among geometry, topography, and planting, and emphasizes the importance of form making to support a variety of conditions, experiences, and uses. The examples analyzed, Louisville Waterfront Park, the University of Cincinnati, and the Clinton Presidential Center Park, all use similar strategies for their organization. I discuss how form, material, and movement are orchestrated in the work, and how their various combinations constitute moments of awareness in the landscape where particular spatial or material attributes become legible. Working the earth to mold the ground is central to the landscape medium, and Hargreaves Associates’ facility in working with topography is fundamental to the effect of the work.
GEORGE HARGREAVES RECEIVED A BACHELOR OF landscape architecture from the University of Georgia in 1977 and his master of landscape architecture from Harvard University in 1979 under Peter Walker’s tenure as chair of the department. Hargreaves spent several years working at SWA, one of the incarnations of the collaboration between Hideo Sasaki and Peter Walker, before venturing out to form his own practice in 1983, initially named Hargreaves, Allen, Sinkosky & Loomis (HASL) and reincorporated as Hargreaves Associates in 1985. Hargreaves Associates office was first stationed in San Francisco, which remained their only location until Hargreaves became chair of the department of landscape architecture at Harvard University in 1996, at which time they opened their Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. After concluding his position as chair in 2003, Hargreaves opened a third location in New York City and, as of 2008, an office in London.
While George Hargreaves remains the design lead of Hargreaves Associates, the firm depends on the talents of other individuals, many of whom have been with the office for one or two decades. Of particular note are senior associate and president Mary Margaret Jones, who joined the firm in 1984 and has been instrumental in its direction, and former associate Glenn Allen, who was one of the founding partners of HASL.
THE IMAGES IN THIS BOOK ARE DRAWN FROM various sources, including images from Hargreaves Associates, images gathered from the agencies or corporations who manage the projects, my own photographs, diagrams drawn from information provided by Hargreaves Associates, and photos from users of their landscapes who post images on websites such as Flickr.com.
INTRODUCTION
GEORGE HARGREAVES AND OTHERS WHO WERE EDUCATED IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN THE 1970S ARE SITUATED AT AN INTERESTING CROSSROADS FOR THE DISCIPLINE. CHARACTERISTIC OF THE TIME WERE IAN MCHARG’S SEMINAL MANIFESTO,
Design with Nature (1969), along with Charles Jencks’s famous declaration that modernism ended at 3:32 P.M. on July 15, 1972 (referring to the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis).1 The period was marked by a call for an end to totalizing narratives of linear advancement while simultaneously offering the earth-ecosystem as a new totality. In response to this challenge, which landscape scholar Elizabeth Meyer has aptly named the “post–earth day conundrum,” designers sought to move beyond modernist doctrines of progress in recognition of planetary limits.2 This critique went beyond environmentalism and landscape architecture to involve challenges to hegemony—singularity, authority, hierarchy—in any form. Though the critique originated from within many disciplines across the arts and humanities, they shared a common goal of undermining what had become categorical impasses within their respective fields, such as medium specificity (art), singular authorship (literature, planning), and typology (architecture). In response to the array of emerging changes that typify this period, Hargreaves helped forge an approach within landscape architecture that expressed this broader shift in sensibility taking place.3
As Hargreaves was venturing into practice in the early 1980s, critiques of modernist master planning and urban renewal were in full force. Critics such as Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961) had ushered in an era of community activism, which changed the relationship between designers and the community for whom they design, and challenged the divide between “public” and “expert.” Both grassroots environmentalism and federal regulation of pollution had taken a foothold, spurred on by publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This increased awareness eventually led to legislation pertaining to soil and water quality and thus affected the construction of landscapes, especially with regard to cleaning up the large swaths of toxic land in or adjacent to city centers and waterfronts. These sites—the so-called postindustrial landscape—still form the basis of much work that is happening in landscape architecture today and constitute the type of locales where Hargreaves Associates created its first important projects.
The 1970s–1980s was a period when the importance of history as a resource to be mined for design inspiration was reinvigorated as an idea. For some practices, history was invoked in the name of pluralism or populism, drawing on conventional icons or themes so that work could be “accessible” to a broad audience. This was especially visible in architecture, where historical references, represented in allegedly familiar signs and symbols, were celebrated (see the pleas by Charles Jencks, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown). In landscape architecture, history was invoked as a means to create specificity and uniqueness, especially on postindustrial sites, an early example being Seattle’s Gas Works Park (1971–88) by Richard Haag, where the relics of a gasification plant were preserved. By drawing on the past uses and materials of a particular place, landscape was conceptually understood as a cultural palimpsest—as one layer among many—rather than a tabula rasa, as had been the case during industrialization. Even on sites where all previous material traces (both natural and cultural) had been erased, history became a way to engage place as designers took inspiration from a site’s past (such as previous geometries or materials) to inform their designs. In this period the term “site specificity,” often used to describe Hargreaves Associates’ work, became a central concept. Rather than impose a unified or singular order, landscape architects engaged and produced complexity and variety by understanding sites in terms of processes occurring in time.
The impact of structuralism and poststructuralism infiltrated many disciplines at this moment and further expanded notions of context specificity. Structuralism, coming largely from the study of linguistics, sought to identify the underlying structures and codes that gave rise to the meaning of a work (such as how a novel is understood within a particular genre, and the history of the genre itself) in order to understand the full context of how a work signifies (rather than simply focusing on the particulars of a single work, such as the plot or narrative). Given that language itself was understood as a system apart from the physical world that it described, language was seen not as a reflection of the world, but as a construction of it. Poststructuralism furthered this argument by claiming that attempts to identify underlying structures would be no more likely to reveal the truer meaning of a work, because the means by which such structures are defined would themselves have embedded biases; therefore, there was no “deeper” understanding to be found. Rather, every work was produced, or reproduced, indefinitely, leading to the so-called decentering of knowledge. The dismantling of authoritative or truthful readings of texts brought about the “death of the author” and the birth of the “open work.”4 These developments challenged the notion that meaning is dependent on an author’s intent, arguing instead that meaning is based on the subjective interpretation of the reader, bringing to the fore questions about content (whether it can be embedded or inherent in a work), communication (what an audience can decipher about a work), and representation (who is speaking for whom).
The most direct influence of these methods on landscape architecture came by way of art criticism, in particular that of
