Landscape Urbanism: It's the future, not a contradiction

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In the forbidding mallscape of Costa Mesa, in Orange County, Calif., an unexpected grace note has emerged in the stripes of pink bougainvillea that project horizontally from a pedestrian bridge over a busy arterial. These aren’t the cute hanging baskets that festoon many a shopping venue, but are integral to the design of the bridge, appealing at auto speed below and beckoning to patrons strolling along the bridge that links two wings of the vast South Coast Plaza mall. The design is not by an architect but by a landscape designer, Kathryn Gustafson, and it is emblematic of the way that field is reinventing itself.

American landscape architecture continues to work in the familiar language of its English-garden origins -- nature tamed and aestheticized for man's use and appreciation. But a confluence of trends has created an unusually rich, creative ferment in the field these days. In fact, landscape architects have arguably been more aggressive than architects in taking on new roles and redefining what they do.

Landscapes become hardscapes

Gustafson, who has worked in France for most of her professional life, didn't hesitate to take on more than just the planting. “My peers say I'm more of a sculptor than a landscape architect,” says Gustafson. The curved and creased forms she carves in clay do possess a sculptural as well as an architectonic sensibility. “We're working more on urban sites, and a lot of the information of the site comes from architecture,” she explains. “I try to make the architecture and landscape architecture fit together as a solid piece.”

Gustafson artfully composed the soil from new highway-intersection road cuts into a sculpted and colorfully planted automotive welcome to the city of Marseilles. And with British architect Ian Ritchie, she's designed power-line pylons.

As more municipalities understand the economic-development potential of urban amenities, unique opportunities for urban landscapes are cropping up. In Rotterdam, West 8, a firm that combines urban planning expertise with landscape design, capped a parking structure, not with greenery, but with a hard-edged urban plaza, decked in wood and metal. Sounds from moving vehicles drift up from below, along with artificial steam and light effects. Giant articulated street lights move through an arc choreographed automatically or by visitors. It's a bit of punk urbanism that has become a popular gathering place.

Landscape as a cultural medium

Just as buildings inevitably reflect their times, landscape design increasingly reflects cultural currents that have been played down in the past. For example, an eight-acre park by Michael van Valkenburg, in Charleston, N.C., recognizes the racial divide that has characterized the city historically and spatially. And in Washington, D.C., landscape architect Johnpaul Jones and Navajo/Oneida ethnobotanist Donna House are collaborating on a garden for the Museum of the American Indian. It will reintroduce native plantings to the ambience of specimen trees and lawn on the Mall, and showcase Native Americans' use of plants.

Historians are also viewing designed landscapes as worthy of the same care and scholarship as landmarked buildings. The National Park Service's Cultural Landscape Initiative seeks to marry modernization with preservation in projects for the majestic Columbia River highway in Oregon, and in the restoration of Philadelphia's Beaux-Arts Benjamin Franklin Parkway. “Part of our stewardship role is to get highway people, who think only in terms of crash standards, to speak to landscape historians,” says Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, coordinator of NPS’ Historic Landscape Initiative. Part of the education function is also to help people understand that historic preservation applies to settings larger than individual buildings. Historians work with designers to interpret American industrial history as “heritage corridors” (involving landforms and architecture) and to offer interpretive context for interrelated industrial and transportation infrastructures. As a side benefit, people begin to take pride in historical artifacts that otherwise sit as symbols of economic decline. And the growing interest in industrial history and related landscapes can attract redevelopment to places bypassed by today’s economy.

The Park Service and the Cultural Landscape Foundation (a private nonprofit recently founded by Birnbaum) likewise try to get people to think in terms of artistically related landscapes. “We're learning to accept various layers in the landscape,” says Birnbaum, who cites Allegheny Commons, Pittsburgh's oldest park. As part of a plan to expand an aviary in the park, Birnbaum persuaded citizen activists to save a battered Modernist addition to the park designed by John Simon, a key figure of the 1960s. “We're trying to recognize a continuum of important design,” says Birnbaum, “from the 1860s until now.” Threatened architectural landmarks of the postwar era are often entwined with landmark-quality landscape features -- the Isamu Noguchi courtyard gardens, for example, awaiting demolition at the 1957 Connecticut General headquarters, Bloomfield, Conn., designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

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