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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 of these discriminatory procedures because the pattern was repeated throughout American urban environments. Not surprisingly, these late-modern-era clearing operations prompted much skepticism about the efficacy of planning, contributing to current theorizing about the death of the master plan. Many are doubtful of the potential for master plans to do more than kowtow to formalized and traditional notions of creating community: “It is better to suffer the void of abstraction than gratuitous representation, better to be lost than to languish in the ‘objective world’ of closed urban development.”⁷

Attempts to redress the abuses of modernism’s clearing operations—when it was presumed that the correct spatial form (ordered and clean) equated to a correct social form (ordered and clean)—have been varied. On the one hand is the return to some presumably shared past through the use of historical symbols that cater to a nostalgic idea of “community.” This is seen in much New Urbanist work and is what the above quote by Pope, as well as landscape urbanism in the United States, is positioned against.⁸ As cultural geographer David Harvey notes, community is a “mythical social entity,” which can be as much a part of the problem as a panacea (as in gated “communities,” or any exclusionary group).⁹ The other extreme, as suggested by Pope and others, is to adopt an approach of “letting it be,” where the past returns as an imagined form of unmediated nature. Some have suggested that these vacated spaces should remain as they are because their value lies in their lack of definition. Abandoned leftover spaces, where natural processes overtake cultural artifacts, are seen to offer conceptual alternatives to the colonizing forces of the marketplace. Their lack of productivity or purpose results in a “crisis of classification” and in this crisis apparently lies freedom: freedom from the capitalist forces that produced these sites in the first place.¹⁰ As noted in the introduction, Hargreaves Associates’ Candlestick Point Park shares some of these qualities of entropy and decay that some find so appealing.

The contrast between these two extremes (exclusionary planning versus lack of planning) reveals two distinct approaches to what Harvey identifies as a perpetual pendulum swing between utopianisms of spatial form and utopianisms of process. Though his example of a utopianism of process is the laissez-faire of the free market (the belief that if the market were truly free from regulation all would be right and well), the “let it be” of the terrain vague and some recent projects within landscape design are equally utopias of process, where design specificity is suppressed in favor of letting projects “naturally” evolve (as seen in OMA/Mau’s winning scheme for Downsview Park in Toronto). An alternative approach is to assume that public space remains vital and to ask not whether we should reconfigure these spaces, but how. If the move toward isolated pockets of urban disinvestment was underwritten by economic and environmental policies, the same should be true of efforts to reinhabit these urban voids. And if such development is to reflect more than gratuitous representation, it should begin with acknowledging the changed nature of design and planning today, which is a more publicly engaged process than in the era of tabula rasa modernism. As a result, the questions of representation and community are not entirely abstract ones.¹¹ In other words, the process by which public space gets made today is radically different than in the eras that preceded it. While others are right to challenge the kind of development that often happens on newly available sites, development that privatizes and limits access, leaving them isolated from the public sphere (or doing very little and presuming they will evolve into something complex) is not an alternative to addressing the open-space needs of residents. As Harvey notes, “to materialize a space is to engage with closure (however temporary) which is an authoritarian act…. The problem of closure (and the authority it presupposes) cannot endlessly be evaded. To do so is to embrace an agonistic romanticism of perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire.”¹²

What other design approaches can speak to a landscape’s regional or cultural identity without capitulating to the consumable images found in our increasingly commodified environments or, on the contrary, leaving a site as is rather than engaging in active construction, thereby sentimentalizing the deterioration that results from neglect? The following examples show various ways that Hargreaves Associates has created public landscapes that stitch together diverse aspects of their milieus while creating new identities for these places. The firm’s approach to unearthing the rich history of the ground avoids both the homogenizing grounds of modernera development and the romanticizing of ruins left in its wake.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

THE PRINCIPLE of acknowledgment is central to Hargreaves Associates’ design approach.¹³ Acknowledgment is not a tactic concerned with known symbols or typologies that relies on public engagement through a presumably shared system of signification. Although an early statement by George Hargreaves—“Pluralism is appropriate. The expression of symbolism, mysticism, and humanism will become a preoccupation”—might suggest such an approach, the way his work engages these concerns is more complex than resorting to eclecticism by pillaging and collaging symbols in an attempt to construct a seemingly congruent lineage for a place (for example themed environments such as nautical motifs along a waterfront).¹⁴ This question of how to “ground” the site is of particular concern given the conditions where landscape architects work today. Hargreaves notes that the parks of past centuries had inherent complexity given their extant physical features and that “not much more is needed to establish a great place in the hearts and minds of the public.”¹⁵ Though what is naturally occurring is not always considered desirable (it took ninety-five miles of piping to transform Central Park from marshes and bogs to lakes and meadows), today’s sites have been largely stripped of all such features; therefore, the challenge, according to Hargreaves, is how to “create [good] bones where there are none.”¹⁶

One way the firm achieves this is by acknowledging a site’s past condition in a diversity of ways: in scale, by creating forms modeled on those previously on or near the site but rescaled to different sizes; temporally, by conserving select artifacts or commemorating events; materially, by reestablishing the presence of hydrological systems, without restoring their previous forms. Using all of these approaches, Hargreaves Associates challenges the notion of landscape design as the creation of places of respite and remove. Instead, it seeks to reintegrate dilapidated sites with the dynamics of their physical surroundings by horizontal extension (physical connectivity, such as extending the existing urban grid into the park so as to create a seamless connection rather than a distinction) as well as by vertical extension (conceptual connectivity; also known as the palimpsest of the geologic approach that draws on the past as a way to build a context for the project).

This latter approach has been particularly fruitful for Hargreaves Associates; conceptual excavations help sponsor heterogeneous conditions that cannot be obtained by defining context based only on what is physically visible (as with contextualism’s nostalgia for the present). For example, the early noteworthy projects Candlestick Point Park (1985–91) and Byxbee Park (1988–91) were, respectively, a rubble heap and a sanitary landfill when the firm was commissioned to design them.¹⁷ These sites did not fit the conception of Kevin Lynch’s “imageable” or Jane Jacobs’s walkable places. Hargreaves Associates took inspiration from the accretion of layers in order to build the ground for the projects. This included not only reconfiguring physical material but also making references to a site’s condition at another time, such as the landforms inspired by Indian shell middens at Byxbee Park.¹⁸ Similarly, dune morphology motivated the creation of sheltered areas at Candlestick Point Park and, later, at Crissy Field, both of which are windswept sites that had naturally occurring dunes prior to industrialization and militarization. Fluvial inspired forms are used in Guadalupe River Park, Louisville Waterfront Park, and the University of Cincinnati. If a designed landform is motivated by a natural formation, it is unrecognizable as such because its surface is materially distinct from its source and it is scaled to the human body, rather than to its naturally occurring size. An obvious example can be seen when the abstracted topography is adjacent to its natural counterpart, such as the river channel at Guadalupe River Park. The two forms share no visible characteristics at the experiential level. And, notably, no matter what the reference or source of inspiration, none of the constructed landforms appear as natural outgrowths of the site.

Though the forms themselves are conspicuous, the various sources that inspire them are not as decipherable as Hargreaves’s early statements about the narrative nature of the firm’s work suggest.¹⁹ The references are lost in translation because of the dissimilarity between the original formal inspiration and its scaled application to the site, as seen in Guadalupe River Park. This process of transformation denies their status as mere symbolic representations (a stand-in or sign of the past), rendering them grounds without clear prescriptions for use. In other words, though the sources of these forms are likely to remain unknown to the park’s users, taking inspiration from the site’s previous layers provides the basis for new formal and spatial configurations, producing unique and peculiar experiences within each site. This is what makes the work both specific to its place (it is meaningful to those involved in making the park who understand the references) but also open because the forms are scaled to provide other spatial, experiential, and programmatic opportunities.