Flowers festoon Gustafson's pedestrian bridge.
Landscape Urbanism: It's the future, not a contradiction
Architectural Record, August 2001
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A new landscape urbanism
One of the most influential recent landscape-architecture competitions, for Downsview Park, near Toronto, says a great deal about where design is going and how the roles of designers are changing. The setting was not a bucolic greenfield, but a former military base littered with abandoned buildings and runways. The competition brief called for the accommodation of a variety of new commercial and institutional uses around and on the site’s 320 acres. All five competing teams “desegregated city and park,” noted a text by Bay Brown, accompanying an exhibit of the finalists at New York's Van Alen Institute. They “dispensed with the 19th-century notion of the park as bucolic refuge,” she continued. The entries emphasized strategy and process over design and product, and blurred the lines between landscape and architecture. Indeed, the winning design, by a team including architects Rem Koolhaas of OMA in Rotterdam and Toronto-based Oleson Worland, as well as designers Bruce Mau, Toronto, and Amsterdam-based Inside/Outside, proposed not a design but a 15-year strategy. Each stage, however, is intended to make a palpable change in the landscape, inspiring greater use and greater public support so that subsequent stages will get developed.
Even though Downsview is described as a national park, the government is leery of commiting the $ 140 million (Canadian) the park is anticipated to cost, and it does not want to cover ongoing maintenance expenses. Indeed, the adjacent commercial uses are supposed to generate the cash to build and maintain the park. And Canada is not alone. Few American jurisdictions are building large, ambitious parks in the Central Park mode.
There is another reason that the design of large-scale projects has become process-oriented, rather than only design-oriented: Grand visions and master plans, however thoughtful, simply become obsolete through circumstances. That's why Philadelphia-based James Corner (another Downsview finalist) designs “interim states” -- manageable schemes that can be realized in the short term until budgets permit additional work.
Corner, with New York architect Stan Allen, is using such a strategy to avoid the pitfalls of master plans in their urban-design recommendations for 11 miles of Delaware River waterfront in Philadelphia. “You've got 6,000 acres to move,” says Corner, “and you can't do it overnight.” In the preliminary documents submitted to the city in July, Allen and Corner proposed a lot of landscape design, but not a great number of parks. “Landscape as a green park is expensive to maintain,” Corner explains, “but as an interim use that will improve the ecology of the site–that's popular.” The solution does not rely on landscape design alone, however. “I don't want to be just a consultant on a team and [Allen] doesn’t want to be just the architect,” says Corner. So they have joined forces in a new consultancy they call Field Operations. “The North Delaware project is infrastructure, architecture, landscape -- the whole gamut,'' explains Corner. They call what they do “landscape urbanism,” because they want to approach projects in a “more inclusive way than traditional disciplinary divisions would normally permit,” he adds. Among the biggest challenges is simply to change attitudes about the area: “It’s perceived by people as a line of derelict industry,” Corner explains. “It’s hard to see the river now, but once you get there, you see how spectacular it is.” The early phases of the project are intended to reacquaint citizens with their riverfront, which may spur development that no master plan, however elegant, could anticipate.
It’s easier for landscape architects to accept process as product because they are used to dealing with a living entity that will change over time no matter what. Building movement is usually conceived in fractions of an inch, but landscape designers are early inculcated with the notion that natural succession may gradually transform a lake into a meadow and a meadow into a forest. “Architects talk about buildings being alive, but that’s a metaphor,” explains Boston-based Michael van Valkenburg. “A building doesn't die if it doesn't get water or sunshine. Landscape architecture is feral -- it's about design thinking, but it's always partly wild.”
Planting toxic remediation
Landscape architects have used this grounding in regional ecology to unite a social need (cleaning up polluted industrial sites) with an environmental ethic. For almost three decades, the federal government, through its Superfund program, has sunk billions into toxic-waste cleanup, but clean soil, even when it cost millions to achieve, does not by itself assure appeal to redevelopers. It's another story when designers enter the scene.
The pioneering project that singlehandedly invented a genre was the 1978 Gasworks Park, designed by Richard Haag, which married the spectacular industrial archeology of a closed gasification plant to a stunning waterfront site in Seattle. Haag detoxified the soil using plantings, a technique now dubbed phytoremediation, which has only recently been widely deployed. (The city completed only a fraction of what Haag envisioned, has scandalously neglected what was built, and now, ironically, has embarked on a costly engineered means to further “clean” what is now a low-risk site.)
Such projects are meeting wide public applause, though they are still tentatively deployed. They have also escalated dramatically in scale. Julie Bargmann whose D.I.R.T. Studio is based in Charlottesville, Va., has collaborated for several years with artist Stacy Levy, historian Allen Comp, and hydrogeologist Robert Deason on a “regenerative park” in Vitondale, Pa., about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh. The design both interprets and aestheticizes the process of converting acid drainage from the region’s dense networks of abandoned mines into clean water. Much of the time has been spent raising funds for this 45-acre project, even though it may stand as a model for the cost-efficient reclamation of an enormous, damaged landscape. “There's something like 3,400 miles of waterway polluted by acid mine drainage,” says Bargmann. The project includes a series of settlement ponds where successive stages of treatment are visible in the color of the water, which enters tinted a heavily polluted rust red and exits clear. The process is echoed in color-matched plantings. The treated water spills into a constructed wetlands adjacent to the river that Bargman calls “the finishing rinse” (see related story in Building Science, this issue, page 127.) Part of the reclaimed landscape will be formed into conventional picnic and playground areas, but bits of the giant colliery that once occupied the site will evoke its past use, and a pedestrianized rail bridge will offer an overlook.
Bargmann specializes in projects that entwine noxious-site cleanup with civic aspiration. Her highest-profile project is a collaboration with architect William McDonough on new facilities for Ford, at its vast but heavily polluted River Rouge plant south of Detroit. It's one of the most important settings in American industrial history, because it is where, for over 16 years starting in 1918, Henry Ford built a fully integrated automaking complex, a design copied worldwide. Arriving by canals, roads, and rails, raw materials were turned into parts, which were then assembled into finished vehicles. Ford's architect was Albert Kahn, who designed several buildings at the 1,200-acre site that remain among the most elegant essays in 20th-century industrial architecture. William Clay Ford, Jr., Ford's board chairman, hopes to make Rouge again an emblem of innovation, but this time, one of “sustainable industry.” The design team has installed a large porous parking lot to reduce runoff, soil-cleansing planting, and new manufacturing facilities incorporating such sustainable-design features as a sodded roof. Clerestory lights and monitors, a trademark of Kahn's naturally ventilated buildings, will also reappear in new facilities. The team has also persuaded Ford to preserve some of the remaining fragments of the site’s engineering prowess. But Ford has not signed onto many of the team’s more ambitious goals. “What D.I.R.T. tried to bring in is the idea that you could continue to produce hundreds of Mustangs daily while regenerating the site,” says Bargmann. “But the day-to-day production folks aren’t convinced yet that these principles and technologies of ¬åindustrial ecology’ make a lot of sense.”
There is now precedent for very large-scale transformation of damaged landscapes by design. “The massive change of land use entailed by industrial sites creates a whole new park-development potential,” says Barbara Wilks, a New York City architect and landscape architect. She sees the public as more engaged in reusing urban leftovers, and points to Manhattan's High Line, a rusting, long-abandoned elevated railroad track that slices through almost two dozen blocks of rapidly gentrifying Chelsea. A few years ago, activists clamored for its removal; now a substantial constituency wants to see it saved and put to recreational use. And it seems only fitting that the aptly named Fresh Kills, a giant mound of trash looming over New York’s borough of Staten Island, is the subject of a design ideas competition.