claimed about space, or postmodernists about surface, is to fall prey to the same fallacy—that there is a direct cause and effect between a designer’s intent and a project’s reception, eventual use, and control.45 Funding, maintenance, ownership, and restriction of uses have little to do with a particular form or aesthetic. However, designers do propose surfaces, materials, and forms that can enable or preclude particular uses.
For example, a large swath of lawn, irrespective of whether it is embedded in Olmsted’s nineteenth-century picturesque Central Park or Hargreaves Associates’ late twentieth-century Louisville Waterfront Park, provides a place for large gatherings, protests, temporary memorials, games, and so on; therefore, its use is open, but its form is precise, its material is uniform and soft, and its size is pertinent to supporting a range of activities (Central Park’s Great Lawn is fifteen acres; the lawn at Louisville Waterfront Park is twelve acres). The fact that protestors were not allowed to use Central Park’s Great Lawn for demonstrations in 2004 lest it ruin the grass is a problem of ownership and permitting, rather than of form or material.46 Had the entire site been designed as a rocky ramble of intimate, winding paths, which would have precluded large gatherings, it would have been a problem of form and material. In other words, design determines “openness” in very specific ways. The language of emergence as applied to landscape architecture risks valuing change for change’s sake. Perhaps this sentiment should not be surprising, as it is an outgrowth of concerns and critiques that began four decades ago when the slippery relationships among authorship, representation, and reception became widely problematized. However, the notion that less design, or more open-endedness, affords greater flexibility should be seen as a critique of the role of designers and planners (and the social assumptions underlying their designs) rather than an empowerment of those who would presumably take over such undesigned spaces.
The point of this introduction to Hargreaves Associates’ work is not to simply suggest replacing ecology with geology as a metaphor for design method; however, if we are to adopt a “complexity theory” for landscapes, it should not be a complexity theory of self-organizing systems (such as nature), or one that positions design as the inevitable outcome of forces beyond the designer’s control, which is already part and parcel of any built project. Hargreaves Associates’ work makes a compelling case that facility in dealing with given conditions does not equate to a conservative replication of those conditions, nor do given conditions alone suffice to define the work. They do, however, provide the foundation, as well as inspiration, for the expressive, programmatic, and aesthetic agendas layered onto a site’s given form and material.
Chapter 1
GEOGRAPHIES
Geographical “place” is today treated as an instantiation of process rather than an ontological given. This way of thinking about spatial scale immediately reintroduces matters of time and history into geography.
—DENIS COSGROVE
LOCAL SPACES ARE TIED TO REGIONAL AND GLOBAL PROCESSES. SPATIAL SHIFTS, INCLUDING THE RECENT AVAILABILITY OF LARGE SWATHS OF DERELICT LAND IN URBAN AREAS, ARE THE RESULT OF INTERSECTING ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FORCES
that influence a region’s transformation over time. The parks being made on such sites today are implicated in these larger processes in two ways: first, the space for their existence is enabled by the movement of manufacturing to other regions and countries, as well as military base closures, resulting in the so-called postindustrial landscape; second, the funding for their existence is enabled by revitalization efforts that are used to entice capital into city centers—as real estate development and tourist dollars—since parks play a major role in “urban renewal.”1 In other words, the transformation of derelict land into parks is as much a product of shifting capital as was the prior abandonment of the same land.2
Though today’s park landscapes serve similar functions to their nineteenth-century counterparts in that they are infrastructural, combining hydrology, transportation, and recreation, they are radically different in how their social and ecological functions are defined. In an era marked by increased awareness of the global environmental impact of human actions, attention to environmental justice, and mandated public processes for design implementation, the task of developing appropriate proposals for such sites is not easy, particularly because the “public” is not the unified subject or body that it was presumed (or desired) to be in the nineteenth century. Parks are no longer seen as a means to “solve” social ills or educate the “lower” classes by means of bourgeois aesthetic standards; yet parks remain culturally, socially, and ecologically significant. How can the work of landscape architects successfully represent a diverse collective of people who privilege different aspects of a site’s past events or future uses without catering to the demands of a single group or neglecting those whose interests may not be part of the client’s sanctioned agenda? How do landscape architects design for socially diverse groups in a way that can support differences without compartmentalizing public space into exclusive zones that cater to only one group or use the hegemonic approaches that characterized much modern planning? How is “place” recovered or defined in the spaces that have been stripped of their natural features and severed from their surroundings?
George Hargreaves’s response to these challenges is through explicating what he refers to as the “rich history of the ground.”3 The projects highlighted in this chapter show how this notion informs the firm’s work in various ways that allow it to engage the history of sites without sentimentalizing the past on the one hand, or simply ignoring it on the other. This chapter analyzes how Hargreaves Associates responds to the physical and cultural layers that constitute these sites, which includes identifying former uses or events that are deemed significant, and how these are recognized in the designs. Thus, the theme of “Geographies” focuses on how the firm’s design approach reintroduces “matters of time and history” into public landscapes.
REPRESENTING THE COLLECTIVE
Planners, architects, urban designers,—“urbanists” in short—all face one common problem: how to plan the construction of the next layers in the urban palimpsest in ways that match future wants and needs without doing too much violence to all that has gone before. What has gone before is important precisely because it is the locus of collective memory, of political identity, and of powerful symbolic meanings at the same time as it constitutes a bundle of resources constituting possibilities as well as barriers in the built environment for creative social change.4
—DAVID HARVEY
THE PIONEERING MODERNISTS COULD NOT foresee that the shifting location and quantity of manufacturing labor, along with legislation supporting centrifugal development, would lead to an exodus of industry and population from cities, leaving gaps and detritus that would form the sites for future landscape architects. The result of post-World War II urban disinvestment is a landscape that has been described variously as holey, dross, void, terrain vague, and so on, and, as architect Albert Pope notes, is “characterized as where people are not, where the urban collective is profoundly marked or inscribed by its absence.”5 It is well known that these gaps resulted from federal policies. Until the 1970s, numerous federal housing acts supported new construction, rather than rehabilitation, resulting in the destruction of neighbor-hoods that were deemed blighted.6 Moreover, the 1956 Federal Highway Act gave local planners the jurisdiction to cut highway routes through their cities as well as 90 percent of the funds needed for their construction, eroding the building fabric, displacing people, and isolating neighborhoods. We are familiar with the results
