the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 1989—drawing buildings and landscapes as one integrated unit—only two of their twenty-some projects have been built, the other being the recently opened Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. As in any long creative process, even unbuilt projects serve to solidify ideas and lead to new ones. Their current collaboration on the City of Culture of Galicia, above the medieval pilgrimage town of Santiago de Compostela, is a true culmination of their long partnership combining theoretical concepts once nurtured separately.
Anyone who saw the first models of the City of Culture exhibited at the Spanish Institute in New York in 2001, or heard the architects in a dialogue on “The Processes of Santiago” at the Architectural League of New York last February, understands to what degree this complex of six undulating ribbons of buildings emerging from Monte Gaiás and a mass of trees surpasses earlier projects and expresses new concepts in urbanism. Since the purpose of the City of Culture—with two libraries, an audiovisual center, a photography bank, a history museum, and an opera house—is to capitalize on the intersection of technology and information systems with art and culture, the buildings themselves on the 173-acre site are tangible proof of the possibilities that can be achieved through technology without losing the memory of the land.
Although the City of Culture appears to be a long way from Eisenman's squared-off House III (1973), which rotated one cube inside another, he has remained true to abstract Modernism destabilized by other figurative programs related to the site. Olin is also a modernist, but with a touch of Le Nôtre, the seventeenth-century landscape architect for Versailles. If Olin is known for such orderly, populous, urban sites as Manhattan's Bryant Park and the just-completed renovation of Columbus Circle (a Place de la Concorde for New York, brimming with fountains), he also adds other dimensions to his work through his eye for what Frederick Law Olmsted valued as natural scenery.
For the Galicia project, cultural and geological elements merge in a solution that combines nature and urbanity. The architects began by overlaying the site with the figure of a furrowed scallop shell, symbolic of James the Apostle, whose relics have drawn pilgrims to Santiago since the twelfth century. Then they transposed onto the site plan the medieval streets from the historic core of Santiago, warped by the computer, according to Eisenman, as if the topography of the hill were somehow pushed through them. Finally, a Cartesian grid was superimposed to create a variable tartan of unequal intersecting lines. From this three-dimensional model resulted the distorted, tilting, undulating ensemble of buildings and red sandstone walkways with a large plaza. “Instead of the ground being conceived as a backdrop against which the buildings stand out as figures [read the Acropolis], we generate a condition in which the ground can rear up to become figure, and the buildings subside into the ground,” Eisenman explains. The interiors reflect the same folding and fluid surfaces.
Cast over the site plan is a grid of cork oaks recalling agricultural plantings in social centers of Spanish towns. Local grasses and wildflowers creep up the sides of the apparently “excavated” structures of the hilltop to meet roof cladding of native granite slabs. In this northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula, these wavelike volumes are unintentionally reminiscent of the ancient robust granite storehouses for corn described by Rudofsky.
Olin likens the ensemble to the ruins of Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri, north of Rome, where the structures emerge from the landscape at different levels so that they all become one. To complete the illusion here of the mountainous landscape, the plan includes a new forest of Galicia along the steeply terraced slopes descending from the City of Culture. Though Olin has initiated plantings of oaks, birches, mountain ashes, and hawthorns placed on a grid, he knows that the percentages have to be right in order for the natural selective process to turn them eventually into a true hillside forest.
In a different approach to landform architecture, the constructed topography of Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park by Weiss/Manfredi Architects offers a means of healing a divisive rift of urban infrastructure along the derelict site of a former fuel storage and transfer station. In 1976, sculpture had already begun to encroach north of this shoreline area with Michael Heizer's massive Adjacent, Against, Upon on landfill with railroad tracks running behind it.
Clearly, the openness and abundant light on waterfronts present coastal cities as ideal locations for displaying the kind of oversize sculpture difficult to house in museums. In their design for the Olympic Sculpture Park, Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi were faced with a forty-foot drop from street level to the water's edge at a location divided by the same railroad tracks and a four-lane highway. Drawing on earlier experiences in mechanically stabilized earth, they created a wide, descending zigzag of a park that bridges seamlessly over the transportation “gorges.” The firm's design for the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, incorporates a series of berms that conceal parked cars but also purify runoff water through plantings of equisetum; eventually, the overflow of clean water discharges into Lake Cayuga. A similar technology will carry excess water from Olympic Park into Elliott Bay.
In this case, a glass pavilion with galleries at street level acts as an extension of the landscape, and a cut through the sloping roof opens to spectacular views over Puget Sound. Along the first descent, a forest of conifers and redwoods surrounds an upper-level sculpture garden; from there, the landscape unfurls along grassy paths above sheered slopes planted with fragrant wild roses and supported by concrete slabs that double as screens for video art. The architects are restoring the shoreline into a new recreational beach.
Working with local landscape architect Charles Anderson for horticultural materials, the architects have designed an intimate, aerial park that offers appropriately open settings for the museum's extensive sculpture collection, with works by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Toni Smith, and Mark di Suvero. The level changes and sloping platforms provide an opportunity for distant viewing from different angles that adds to a critical appreciation of three-dimensional objects that cannot be perceived in a flat space.
As a totally constructed environment, like the City of Culture, the Olympic Sculpture Park qualifies for Laurie Olin's definition of landform architecture as simply a set of built structures that end up being a landscape. What may have begun as a gesture to energy conservation or sustainable development has evolved into a new aesthetic that shapes inside and outside as a continuum, to use Olin's words. As the architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi has turned to landscape to devise architecture by sculpting the land with felicitous results, Eisenman, in his long collaboration and discussions with Olin, has discovered in local topography a means of merging multidimensional concepts into a veritable eruption of the land. As Olin remarks, “The history of architecture is not over; there is still more to come.” Landscape architecture is definitely in its future.
Architectural Record, October 2005. Reprinted with permission from Architectural Record © 2005 The McGraw-Hill Companies. www.architecturalrecord.com
A Feminist View of Landscapes: A Partnership with Nature
WHAT DO WOMEN who are landscape designers really want? A new landscape architecture that is ethical as well as aesthetically pleasing. That was the conclusion at a symposium, “Women, Land, Design,” sponsored by the Radcliffe Seminars to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its landscape design program. At the symposium, a feminist view emerged, not like the ponderous and theoretical gender studies that have dominated art history and literary studies in universities, but rather a lively discussion that focused on practical applications for shaping the future of the environment.
Setting the theme, Elizabeth Meyer, a landscape architect who teaches at the University of Virginia, dispelled the long-held image of landscape as merely a “soft or feminine frame” for architecture. In the traditional view of culture versus nature (which she equated with male versus female), man's relationship to the land is one of stewardship rather than partnership, she pointed out. What she called for was a new definition of landscape architecture that would foster a land ethic as well
