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Back Up New Jersey: Think Again about Tacha’s Masterwork

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design on 07/25/2012 | 1 Comment »

By name, Athena Tacha may be little known beyond the art and landscape architecture worlds, but her work is beloved by many, particularly all those who experience her 50 plus public sculptures first hand in cities across the world. In Greece, her home country, a recent 40-year retrospective brought in thousands. The High Museum in Atlanta also did a major retrospective of her work in the late 1980s. But these days, Tacha, who teaches art at a number of U.S. universities, is no longer creating her unique environmental sculptures, which are so closely related to landscape architecture, like she once did — so there’s even greater reason to save one of her masterworks in New Jersey from the wrecking ball.

Created in the mid-1980s in honor of Green Acres — New Jersey’s famed land conservation program — right in front of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection building downtown, her work, also entitled Green Acres, is 77 by 85 feet. It’s an example of “site-specific environmental sculpture,” an art form Tacha helped create. These kinds of pieces are different from land art found out in the wilderness because they are rooted in social contexts, often taking shape in city plazas and other high-trafficked areas.

Tacha out-competed many other artists to get her piece in that place. Winning a competition by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts’ % for Art program, all 1.5 percent of the state’s alloted budget for the environment department building project went to her $417,000 sculpture.

According to The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which is lobbying to save the project, “The sculpture [...] contains 46 slabs of green granite onto which photographs of state landscapes, plants and animals (many of them endangered species) have been sandblasted. Crescent shaped planters with stepped seating ring the edges and the whole design recalls Roberto Burle Marx’s biomorphic modernism.”

Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, head of TCLF, says a number of experts think the sculpture also works perfectly well with its surroundings. On three sides, there are three 7-story concrete buildings; another side is a lane of Sycamore trees, which act as a buffer to the cemetery next door. The work acts a badge for the building, offering a sense of quietude for the cemetery.

Unfortunately, Artinfo.com writes, the New Jersey government is no longer feeling it. Larry Ragonese, a representative from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, said: “It’s not that we don’t like it. The intent is just to do something different, something that would characterize what we are preaching and set an example for others.” That something different would be a rain garden designed by environmental protection department staff. (While we applaud public education on green infrastructure, isn’t there a way to accomodate both the historic sculpture and those efforts?)

In April, the New Jersey Treasury Department sent Tacha a letter saying Green Acres was to go by the end of July unless it could be removed on the artist’s own dime. Arguing that the maintenance would be too high and not available in these economic times, the New Jersey Treasury seems at odd with the state’s legislature, which recently appropriated a million for restoration of the courtyard. Seems the crucial piece is that the building’s tenants no longer want it.

Birnbaum told us: “There’s a huge irony here. Some want to tear out an environmental sculpture designed to honor the Green Acres program and send it to the trashheap. It’s a hell of a way to memorialize the program, one of the most respected environmental programs in the U.S.” How could “ripping out the work and replacing it with something new be a good example of sustainable financial practices?” To preserve the sculpture, Birnbaum said Tacha’s career could be “bracketed” so that her work can be “assessed under criteria C of the National Register of Historic Places — the work of a master.”

The New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has also stepped up the pressure, telling the state, ”We urge you to reconsider your decisions and investigate the potential to restore the paving that is in disrepair instead of completely removing the art piece.” Richard Bartolone, ASLA, the New Jersey chapter president, also argues that “relocation, one of the suggested options offered to the artist, is completely inappropriate as it is a site-specific sculpture; the etchings of New Jersey flora and fauna are uniquely related to the DEP core mission ‘to protect the air, waters, land and natural resources of the state to ensure the continued public benefit.’ The removal of the art work will result in the loss of this significant and defining work of social art.” Basically, you can’t relocate an art work designed for a special place and have it make sense; the work is also embedded into the ground plane.

Bartolone concludes: “There are so few significant, socially relevant art works in New Jersey, let alone in our state’s capital. I hope you can understand our frustration with the potential loss of this artwork.”

If you want Tacha’s work to stay, let New Jersey know. Write to: Guy C. Bocage, Deputy Director of the N.J. Department of Treasury, P.O. Box 034, Trenton, NJ 08625-0229.

Image credit: (1) Athena Tacha, (2) Richard Spear

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How Do the Parks in Your City Rank?

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Urban Revitalization on 05/31/2012 | 4 Comments »

On the heels of WalkScore and the new BikeScore, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) just launched its own park rating system: ParkScore. Covering 40 major cities in the U.S., ParkScore enables any park lover to create customized maps for each city, evaluate park access by neighborhood, and determine where parks are still most needed, writes Peter Harnik, ASLA, Director, Center for City Park Excellence at TPL. The goal of the project is to help communities lobby for more parks and better parks. “We hope that city leaders, park providers and park advocates will use the information at ParkScore as a valuable tool to help plan park improvements. Over the long run, a rising ParkScore will mean healthier people, higher property values, and more vibrant and livable communities.”

The new tool ranks the park systems of the 40 most populous U.S. cities on a scale of 0-100, with an easy rating system of 0-5 park benches. The top 10 cities:

1. San Francisco (74.0)
2. Sacramento (73.5)
3. New York (72.5)
3. Boston (72.5)
5. Washington, D.C. (71.5)
6. Portland (69.0)
7. Virginia Beach (68.5)
8. San Diego (67.5)
9. Seattle (66.5)
10. Philadelphia (66)

And the five cities at the bottom of the list:

35. San Antonio (35)
36. Indianapolis (31.0)
36. Mesa (31.0)
38. Louisville (29)
39. Charlotte (28.5)
40. Fresno (21.5)

TPL goes into some detail about their methodology. Ratings are determined by data on three factors: “park access, which measures the percentage of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park (approximately a half-mile); park size/acreage, which is based on a city’s median park size and the percentage of total city area dedicated to parks; and services and investment, which combines the number of playgrounds per 10,000 city residents and per capita park spending.”

For access, a ten-minute walk to a public park is defined as a “half-mile to a public park entrance, where that half-mile is entirely within the public road network and uninterrupted by physical barriers such as highways, train tracks, rivers, and fences.” Going through the data, TPL found that 26 percent to 97 percent of the population of a given city lives within the ten-minute range, with a median score of 57 percent.

To determine acreage, TPL weighted two measures equally: “median park size and park acres as a percentage of city area.” They say that including overall park acreage helped account for the “importance of large destination parks.” City park agencies provided the data for that metric. Median park size was determined to be nearly 5 acres. Data aggregated by TPL shows that park acres as a percentage of the whole city area range from 2.3 percent to 22.8 percent, with a median of 9.1 percent.

For the “services and investment” component, ParkScore awards points based on two equally weighted measures: playgrounds per resident and total spending per resident. “Playgrounds are a basic amenity for any city park system. They also serve as a reliable proxy for the presence of other recreational facilities. In our national sample, playgrounds per 10,000 residents ranges from 1 to 5, with a median of 1.89.” Spending, which is calculated on a three-year average to “minimize the effect of annual fluctuations,” includes federal, state, and local financing. Spending per resident, which could also in part be a proxy for maintenance, ranges from $31 to $303, with a median of $85.

While the methodology covers a lot, in future iterations, we would love to see points offered for aesthetic quality (the quality of park design and maintenance), cultural value, and even ecological value. There has been some debate over how to quantify the benefits of aesthetics and the numbers would clearly be hard to come up with. Perhaps one proxy for design quality would be the number of local, regional, or national design awards a park has won. Or points could be given for positive user survey results on the overall quality of the park’s aesthetic experience. On cultural value, points could be awarded for parks with sites of great historical, cultural, or design value. Francesco Bandarin, head of the UNESCO World Heritage Program, spoke with us about the value of cultural landscapes and the global movement to protect them. The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) does much of this work in the U.S. on identifying and preserving cultural landscapes, particularly ones threatened with the wrecking ball. Still, there has been lots of discussion, but no clear metrics on how to determine whether one park has more cultural value than another. Lastly, ParkScore could also begin to factor in ecological value. How well does a city’s parks handle stormwater runoff? How much oxygen does a city’s parks produce? What’s their contribution to biodiversity? One future proxy for this could be the number of Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES)-certified parks in a city. Or park systems could actually begin to collect data on ecosystem services.

TPL invested lots of time and resources in this ambitious, well-produced Web project. But it’s all worth it. As Harnik writes, “parks are important to communities. Close-to-home opportunities to exercise and experience nature are essential for our physical and mental well-being. Studies show that parks can encourage physical activity, reduce crime, revitalize local economies, and help bring neighborhoods together.” It’s clearly worthwhile to measure the incredible value of a city’s parks across every dimension.

Image credit: Trust for Public Land

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A Yankee Ballpark for the Locals

Posted in Active Design, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 05/16/2012 | Leave a Comment »

It’s not often that a new work of landscape architecture makes it on to the front page of The New York Times, even if it isn’t described as such. In April, that paper ran a story about the successful conclusion to a major local dispute in the Bronx, which had flared up because of the closing of the many parks surrounding the old Yankee Stadium. When the city decided to build a new ballpark on top of the bones of two old public parks and close nearby parks during the construction process, Bronx residents were rightly irate that their parkland had disappeared. The city finally made amends with an ensemble of eight new or restored parks, designed and built at a cost of more than $190 million. The new 10.8-acre Heritage Field ballpark designed by Stantec and Thomas Balsley Associates, which is found across the street from the new stadium and on the site of the old, demolished one, cost $50 million alone, but it may be the best public ballpark ever if you are a Yankees fan.

The New York Times writes: “Nearly every inch, from the pavement stones underfoot to the three natural grass ball fields, has been elaborately designed to pay homage to the Yankees and their celebrated former home. Even the sod is the same that the Yankees, professional baseball’s biggest spender, chose for their new stadium.” That was intentional. According to Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, “We felt an obligation to deliver superb parks to this community in particular because of the disruption they had to endure.”

Thomas Balsley, FASLA, the landscape architect who leads Thomas Balsley Associates, says the new public ballpark was built with ”extensive community input.” The idea was to commemorate the “history and heritage of the stadium in a vibrant space with broad appeal throughout the seasons.” Stantec’s Gary Sorge, FASLA, Practice Leader, Planning and Landscape Architecture, added: “This is sacred ground for the community and baseball fans all over the world.”

Other projects completed by the same team include Mill Pond Park along the Harlem River and Macombs Dam Park (site of the new Heritage Field), which fans out across from the new stadium. These parks bring back what was lost but also totally reconceive these spaces, making them more flexible and accomodating of multiple uses, as well as more sustainable. The cost of these projects were largely out of the hands of the designers — the numbers grew because of the clean-up challenges. According to The New York Times, the timeline was ultimately extended by a year to deal with the poor soils and left-over structures.

Thomas Balsley Associates clearly thinks the wait was worth it though. The Macombs Dam Park, an adaptive reuse of the old space, now offers ”active and passive recreation and fosters social connections and healthy lifestyles. The new park partners with Yankee stadium to bring activity and economic vibrancy to the neighborhood beyond the obvious game days.”

Heritage Field, the community ball fields, which sits where the old Yankee Stadium once stood, now features lots of commemorative design elements that cost a bundle but tie the site to its illustrious sports history. The New York Times writes: “The city splurged for $1.2 million in commemorative touches to enhance Heritage Field, including $450,000 for a 12-ton chunk of the old Yankee Stadium frieze that has been preserved like the Berlin Wall in one corner. Another stadium relic — a 130-foot-high chimney shaped like a baseball bat — cost $120,000 to refurbish, though it no longer serves a purpose other than as a local landmark. Even the old diamond and outfield have been saved, delineated with five-foot-wide swaths of blue polymer fiber stitched into the sod by a Desso Grassmaster machine that had to be shipped over from the Netherlands.”

In a non-scientific survey of local residents by the Times, many locals seemed thrilled with the new site. Oldanny Morillo, 18, who plays second base for the nearby Cardinal Hayes High School baseball team, said: “Usually when we run in the outfield, we have to watch for ditches and bird poop, and there’s none of that. Here it’s like a carpet.”

Now, many want to play in the places where Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle played so many years ago. Apparently, there’s been an explosion in applications from teams who want the “chance to swing a bat on the same site.”

Read the article.

Also, check out another landscape designer who made it into The New York Times. Melissa Potter Ix, ASLA, a principal of SiteWorks, a landscape architecture firm, is now teaching middle school students in Queens how to design the eco-playgrounds the Trust for Public Land is building in five NYC schools.

Image credits: Thomas Balsley Associates and Stantec

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Help Restore One of Farrand’s Masterpieces

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces on 04/30/2012 | Leave a Comment »

“A precious area of the city has been neglected for too long,” said Italian Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero, about Dumbarton Oaks Park, a 1920′s style “naturalistic” landscape designed by one of the foremost American woman landscape architects, Beatrix Farrand. Bisogniero said all embassies that line the 27-acre park, the northwest D.C. communities that ring it, and even greater Washington, D.C. must play a part in restoring this “jewel.”

Restoration work is already underway, in partnership with the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over this site and the surrounding Rock Creek Park. Over a year, said Tara Morrison, Superintendent, Rock Creek Park, “weed warriors have been at work.” They are working hard towards removing all invasive species (and there are a lot). Neighboring embassies are also being brought into the conversation about how to use green infrastructure to manage more stormwater outside the park so it doesn’t just flow in.

Rebecca Trafton, President, Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, has been amazing at getting volunteers involved. Larry Weaner, a landscape ecologist, and Biohabitats, a landscape restoration firm, have volunteered their expertise to come up with an ecological restoration plan. The Conservancy team is also getting support from the National Park Foundation in “strategic planning, capacity building,” which can “provide a foundation of support for our restoration work.”

An initial step is to clear the invasive plants. Next, a 2-acre piece of the park will be “restored to ecological health and historic design intent” at a cost of around $75,000. New interpretive signs will be added. Future restoration work will then be done in a piece-meal fashion. We have to have a ”sustainable, maintainable process for restoration,” said Trafton.

Ann Aldrich, Executive Director of the Conservancy, asked the audience of local officials, landscape architects, and residents to imagine “5 years from now, when there’s a restored beech grove, terrace, wildflower meadows, gardens free of weeds, and repaired dams and waterfalls with stable stream banks, and a reconstructed arbor with stone benches.”

The Conservancy team is clearly inspired by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who started the Central Park Conservancy in New York City and is now the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Rogers, who’s written many books on landscape architecture, explained how the Central Park team spent three years developing a comprehensive plan for restoring Central Park, which was critical to ensuring that “we avoided a scatter-shot approach.”

She said Central Park is the “quintessence of romantic landscape design,” and like a symphonic work has motifs but they take the form of woods, soils, and streams. Central Park also shows how landscape architects can “fuse nature and engineering into a great work of landscape art.” The great feat of engineering was separating traffic so that pedestrians could flow over carriages and now cars and trucks.

Before her conservancy got started in the early 80s, Central Park was in pretty bad shape, with 50,000 square feet of graffiti, eroded slopes, trashed ponds, shattered lights, and bombed-out buildings. The systematic survey led to an action plan with lots of different pieces that could be financed separately. She said her group made sure “not to restore anything unless we had the funds to maintain it.” So fundraising was really the other critical piece beyond having a comprehensive restoration plan and solid team.

Regardless of how well-loved the restored Central Park is now, “place is still tenuous,” meaning that if a new mayor came in who no longer valued Central Park and wanted to discontinue the public-private partnership, the park could once again fall to pieces. With a warning for all communities and their parks, Rogers said “we live in troubling times.” The beauty of a park today is no guarantee of the future.

For those in the D.C. area, learn more about how you can volunteer or help finance the restoration of Dumbarton Oaks Park.

Image credit: Dumbarton Oaks Park / The Georgetown Metropolitan

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Where Are the World Heritage Landscapes in the U.S.?

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture on 03/06/2012 | Leave a Comment »

The National Park Service (NPS) is seeking nominations for the U.S. World Heritage “tentative list,” which is then sent on to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the international organization that determines which sites go into the global list of culturally significant sites. The NPS may need help from landscape architects though, because there are so few designed landscapes and certainly none from the past hundred years in the current list of U.S. World Heritage sites or the tentative list now being considered.

Out of 936 sites worldwide, the U.S. has just 21 sites deemed crucial to global cultural heritage. Some argue this is because the U.S. has been in a fight with UNESCO since President Reagan pulled U.S. funding of the organization back in the 80s. A few years ago, funding was restored by President Bush but now it’s been pulled again given UNESCO recently gave membership to the Palestinian Authority. This means UNESCO has lost 22 percent of its annual funding and may not be up for considering U.S. sites.

Many of the 21 U.S. sites are national parks like Yellowstone National Park or Yosemite National Park. Native American sites like the Taos Pueblo and Mesa Verde are included. There are also a few historic sites like Independence Hall and Monticello and the University of Virginia campus. While UNESCO does actually include man-made landscapes of global significance, including early mining sites, none of the major designed landscapes from the past hundred years, like Central Park or Prospect Park, have even made it into the tentative list. In fact, the U.S. tenative list of 15 is loaded with eight different sites by Frank Lloyd Wright. While we’d love to see Falling Water on the list, along with the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, one of the earliest man-made landscapes (see image above), why no designed landscapes from the past hundred years? Perhaps because there hasn’t been a concerted push for including some of the seminal park or public plaza models.

American landscape architects can create a public campaign to get a designed American landscape of global cultural significance into the list. To aid in this process, here are some steps below that can be taken before March 20:

To get onto the official UNESCO nominations list, which is voted on by a committee of countries, the site must be on the U.S.’s tentative list for at least a year so send in nominations now. Check out the National Park Service’s requirements for info on how to be added, along with UNESCO’s criteria for evaluating potential World Heritage sites.

All comments the NPS receives will be summarized and provided to Interior department officials, who will also ask the advice of the Federal Interagency Panel for World Heritage before making any nominations. “The selection may include the following considerations: (i) How well the particular type of property (i.e., theme or region) is represented on the World Heritage List in both the United States and other nations; (ii) The balance between cultural and natural properties already on the List and those under consideration; (iii) Opportunities that the property affords for public visitation, interpretation, and education; (iv) Potential threats to the property’s integrity or its current state of preservation; (v) Likelihood of being able to complete a satisfactory nomination according to the timeline described above; and (vi) Other relevant factors, including the possible implications of non-payment of U.S. dues to UNESCO or the World Heritage Fund.”

Suggest your favorite cultural landscape or simply offer comments by March 20 by writing to Jonathan Putnam, Office of International Affairs, National Park Service, 1201 Eye Street NW., (0050). Washington, DC 20005 or by Email: jonathan_putnam@nps.gov. Fax 202-371-1446.

Hopefully, U.S. funding to UNESCO will be worked out so U.S. sites actually have a chance of getting in.

Image credit: Great Serpent Mound, Ohio / Red and the Peanut Blog

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The Star Maze

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces on 02/22/2012 | 1 Comment »

In northern Netherlands, the historic Groot Vijversburg park is not only expanding physically but also going contemporary with the addition of a new Star Maze, which will be designed by LOLA landscape architects, Deltavormgroep, and Piet Oudolf, plant designer for the High Line Park and last year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion.

According to Bustler, the idea is to use new works of landscape architecture to transform Groot Vijversburg park, a ”romantic public park,” from a historic site into a national destination with a more contemporary feel. Beyond the Star Maze, lots will be added like “two new park chambers, which create a link between the historical park, a post-war recreational area, and a nature reserve.”

The Star Maze is a “remix” of two historic park shapes, “the star shaped forest” and the “labyrinth.” Tall hedges will work like “room dividers for the existing meadow and create several park spaces suitable for various use.” The structure is also designed to connect visitors into other components of the park.

The design team writes: “Each ending of the Star Maze has a function, such as a landscape balcony with a view over the nature reserve, a pier for canoe travelers in the recreational area, a window with a vista to the main park villa and a shed with rubber boots, to explore the marshland.”

An additional “park chamber,” which can be flooded, will be a bit of The Sound of Music, with hills featuring perennials in a “field of pollard willows.” The hills will be accessible via a series of small dikes.

The landscape architects write that the changes to the way visitors flow through the site represent the shift from “romantic” to contemporary landscape models: “The central space gives an overview in all directions but at the same time doesn’t impose any direction. By doing so, the design goes beyond the ideals of public cultivation and public health on which the nearby romantic park and the Modern recreational landscape are based, and it gives the visitor maximum freedom to use the park however he wishes to.”

Image credits: LOLA

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Videos: The Second Wave of Modernism

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 02/17/2012 | Leave a Comment »

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) put together The Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation, a powerhouse conference held last fall at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, which featured some of the top landscape architects around. Now, TCLF has posted full videos of the entire conference online.

Above, check out the conference introduction by Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, Founder of TCLF, who explains how landscape architects must now work with complex systems, including cultural and ecological systems, when transforming early Modernist sites into more functional, people-friendly spaces that also enhance the natural environment.

While all sessions are worth watching, featured below are some of our favorite talks by landscape architects transforming Modern landscapes. Each landscape architect talks about the people who artistically influenced them, their evolution as designers, and then their own projects, which reimagine sites rich with history.

Lisa Gimmy, ASLA, Lisa Gimmy Landscape Architecture, explained how she created a new landscape for famed Modern architect Richard Neutra‘s Kun 2 house in Los Angeles.

In Miami, Raymond Jungles, FASLA, collaborated with Herzog + de Meuron on their 1111 Lincoln Road project, creating a new streetscape, plaza, and two lush interior courtyards inspired by Modern sidewalk designs.

Julie Bargmann, ASLA, Founding Principal, D.I.R.T. Studio, made a powerful case for the derelict “urban voids” that are a “byproduct of urbanization but are vital to contemporary culture.” She said these “left-over places,” the space abandoned near waterfronts and highways in cities, which are so often featured in Jim Jarmusch films, “can’t be designed with a capital D.”

Read a three-part series covering the sessions or delve into all the videos.

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Interview with Robert Hammond, Co-Founder of the High Line

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Real Estate Development, Sustainable Materials, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 02/08/2012 | 1 Comment »

Robert Hammond is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Friends of the High Line, the non-profit conservancy that manages the High Line, a public park built atop an abandoned, elevated rail line on the west side of Manhattan. Hammond was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism.

In the beginning of your and Joshua David’s personal story about transforming the abandoned High Line rail line into the most applauded park of recent years, The High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, you say that early on, living in Chelsea you’d seen parts of the High Line, “but never realized all the bits and pieces connected.” What did the High Line mean in your community? When did you first understand the space in its entirety?

I lived in the neighborhood so I had always seen it when walking around, but I didn’t think it was all connected. I really didn’t think that much about it until I read an article in The New York Times in the summer of ’99 that said it was threatened with demolition, and it included a map. The article showed that it was a mile and a half long running through the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, all the way up to Hell’s Kitchen near the Javits Convention Center. That’s when I first realized the whole extent of it.

I assumed someone would be working to preserve it. I called around and thought the American Institute of Architects or the Municipal Arts Society would be working on this. So many things in New York have preservation groups attached to them. But pretty quickly I found no one was doing anything for the High Line and that it was actually going to be demolished. I heard the proposed demolition was on the agenda for a community board meeting in my neighborhood so I went to my first community board meeting ever and sat next to Joshua, who I didn’t know at the time. By the end of the meeting we realized everyone in the room was in favor of demolition except for us. So we exchanged business cards and we said, “Well why don’t we start something together?”

Early on, you and Joshua had a multi-faceted strategy to keep the dream alive, to prevent the Guiliani administration from tearing down the High Line. You focused on building community support, visually documenting the site, creating design visions of what could be, while finding powerful advocates in the city government and also filing lawsuits. Which aspects of the strategy, in retrospect, proved to be most critical to moving the High Line forward in those early days?

Josh and I get a lot of credit for this great strategy. I think the most important thing we did was start the project, and it allowed other people to come along and help us get it done. In some ways, it was an asset that neither Josh nor I was an architect, landscape architect, or city planner. It forced us to basically go to other people for help. Talking to people who are interested in starting their own kind of project, that’s always the point I try to make: The most important thing that they can do is just start something. That enables other people to come along and help them get it done.

People always ask, “What was the one most critical time or event?” There wasn’t. The project had so many different pieces — the political, the economic, real estate — that there wasn’t one specific thing that made a difference. There were a whole bunch of different things. One of the things that I think is very interesting and that really connected the landscape and the ultimate design of the High Line were the photographs by Joel Sternfeld.

When Josh and I went up there, we realized what was right there in the middle of Manhattan. I first fell in love with the High Line from the street. I loved the structure, the rivets, but then when I walked up there, there was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the city. That’s what I really fell in love with: the combination of this wild landscape on top of this industrial structure in the middle of the city. We knew most people were never going to see it like this so we took our snapshots which just didn’t look that great. They didn’t really capture the impact of it. So I got a photographer named Joel Sternfeld to go up there and over the next year, between 2000 to 2001, he took a few pictures in all four seasons. He ultimately published a book called, Walking the High Line, back in 2002. Josh and I think of him as the third co-founder because those photographs of the wild landscape are what really helped galvanize people. I realized the most effective way to bring people on board was to show them the photographs, talking less and taking more time for people to experience the High Line through the photographs. Joel’s images really made the case for the project.

In the beginning, we didn’t know what the High Line should ultimately look like. We didn’t know exactly what the design should be. We always thought the community and the city should decide what it should be. Over time, people coalesced around Joel’s photo and when you asked them, “What do you want the High Line to be?” they’d point to Joel’s photos and they’d say, “I want it to be like that.” In some ways, that was the biggest inspiration behind the design, Joel’s photos of the landscape.

Getting the Bloomberg administration behind the effort meant coming up with a solid economic feasibility study, which you had to raise lots of funds to do. The study came up with the idea of transferring developers’ air rights and rezoning the area for commercial development. As the High Line developed, it has helped spur literally billions of dollars of new property development with a number of buildings by many marquee architects going in. Was that part of the original plan?

It was. We knew that the High Line had to make economic sense in the long-run, so we realized that for some people pretty pictures weren’t enough. We also needed an economic impact study, which is a really powerful tool for people working on parks projects because landscape, park, and public space projects can have a tremendous economic impact. Too often people just rely on what it looks like to make the case.

Of the design teams you invited to participate in the competition you said, “If I could do it over again, I’d require a landscape architect to be in the lead.” Why?

I think it’s really important. In the beginning I didn’t feel that way. I thought it would make sense for an architect to be a lead, but this is truly a landscape project. There are some architectural problems, but one of my favorite quotes is from one of our architects, Ric Scofidio, who said his job was to save the High Line from architecture. We were lucky to have that kind of architect. But going back, it’s really a landscape issue. When I talked to architects about their concept it was all additives, about adding things to the High Line. Landscape architects are better at dealing with existing conditions. Landscape architects almost always have some existing conditions, whereas architects are used to beginning from scratch. The existing condition was so important to us and had such a deep connection with the history and what people fell in love with, and James Corner recognized that.

I can’t emphasize it enough: too many times, I’ve seen people doing public spaces mesmerized by architects. For better or worse, architects have a higher profile. Architects are the name brands in public spaces. How many landscape architects can the average person name? It’d be zero that are alive. But they know architects. However, I think that’s changing. James Corner, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Hargreaves. It’s starting to change, but I think it’s just so critical for people not to be mesmerized by the famous names of the architects. What is really needed is experience working with existing stuff.

You say that a line from the book, The Leopard, sums up really your design philosophy for the High Line. “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” You had wanted to preserve the wild plants that had taken root on the abandoned tracks, but Piet Oudolf, a key part of the winning James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro team convinced you that you could create something as beautiful as the High Line in its natural state. How did the winning team change the High Line but keep it the same, preserving the idea of its natural state?

From the very beginning, they were arguing among themselves about this challenge of how do you keep what’s magic but at the same time create something new? What I liked is that they knew you couldn’t just preserve it exactly as is. That would be a mistake. If you just tried to keep it exactly as is, you would create some kind of Disney World version. It’s coming back to that quote: you need to create something new to preserve that magical feeling.

Going up there by yourself where you had private garden was magical but what the design team was able to create was an experience that is really better with people in it. It looks better with people in it. Now when I see pictures of just the High Line without any people, I realize it wasn’t as good. It’s really beautiful when you have people interacting with the new landscape of the High Line. Also, the High Line has this unique ability to make people look better. People just look better on the High Line. I think that the landscape enhances that, too. The plants are able to do that in a way I think it’s hard for buildings to do.

During the design competition you found James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro to be “avant-garde,” but dealing with details like bench width and comfort, they showed a “real practicality.” How did the landscape architects, architects, and garden designer work with you and Joshua to realize your vision for the details of the park?

One of the reasons that sometimes things would come back more expensive is that the contractors had never done the things the designers were looking to do. Like the stairways, they came back and it was incredibly expensive. The designers calculated that it would be just as cheap to crush Mercedes-Benz and have them be the stairs as what the contractors did. The contractors were offering these high estimates just because they hadn’t seen this before. It wasn’t what they normally saw. For example, our paving wasn’t normal. But at the end of the day it wasn’t that complicated. Our paving system is really pre-cast concrete planks, so it’s just fancy parking curbs done in an array of different forms. Our design team would work with the contractor to help them understand how it was not that complicated or different from things they’d done in the past.

A number of cities now seem ready to jump on the High Line bandwagon. However, some landscape architects and planners caution that given the High Line was community-driven, it can’t really be replicated. Any copies may succeed as an economic development engine, but these projects may not get any true buy-in from communities. Do you think the High Line’s success can be replicated?

There are certain projects I really like, which have their own integrity. A lot of them are generated by communities. There’s the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, which was originally based in the community and came from a few people who lived in the area. The Atlanta Beltline, which is a much bigger ambitious project, started as one student’s thesis. The Jersey Embankment right across the river is definitely a community-based project. A project has to have that spirit from below. I think the best ones are not trying to copy the High Line; they’re trying to be something new altogether. This is the test to determine success: whether they try to create something original just like the High Line did or not.

I have my personal goals for the High Line: one is that it’s a well-loved park by New Yorkers; two is that it gets better after Josh and I leave; and three (and most importantly) is that it inspires other people to start these kind of things — not just elevated rail lines, but any kind of project. You don’t have to have experience, you don’t have to have all the money, you don’t have to have the plans all set. We developed all those things over time. That’s what stymies a lot of people. They think, “Oh, I don’t have the experience,” or, “I don’t have the money.” Those things can come.

Well, you’ve just kind of answered the last question, but I’ll just throw it out there in case you have anything else to add. What advice would you have for other community groups trying to save and perhaps transform their local infrastructure and cultural assets, whatever they may be? What advice would you have for the landscape architects partnering with them?

There’s no perfect way to do it. The most important advice is just start it and experiment. Just try things. There’s no one specific path. There are multiple ways to get started. Now a great way to do these things and galvanize a project is Facebook. Start a Kickstarter account — I’ve seen that working a lot now. One of the really important things is to raise money. It also helps start building the community. Whether someone gives five dollars, five thousand, or five million dollars, when they give money they become more invested in the project. It’s literally skin in the game. It’s an important part of building an organization or a whole movement.

We had a lot of people donate their time and energy to this project before it got off the ground. By finding community groups that need help, landscape architects and architects can, in effect, create more clients for themselves. Landscape architects can donate their services, get involved in local spaces, or just create their own.

Interview conducted by Jared Green.

Image credits: (1) Robert Hammond / Image credit: Annie Schlechter, (2) A Railroad Artifact, 30th Street, May 2000 / Joel Sternfeld © 2000, (3) Looking East on 30th Street on a Morning in May, 2000 / Joel Sternfeld © 2000, (4) 23rd Street Lawn, the northern end of the 4,900-square-foot lawn peels up over West 23rd Street, looking West, toward the Hudson River. ©Iwan Baan, 2011, (5) A meandering pathway passes by old and new architecture in West Chelsea, between West 24th and West 25th Streets, looking South. ©Iwan Baan, 2011

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Who Protects Your Historic Landscape?

Posted in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Opportunities, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 01/25/2012 | 1 Comment »

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) is looking for nominations for its ongoing Landslide program, an annual list of “threatened and at-risk landscapes.” This year, Landslide’s theme will focus on the “visionary patrons and/or organizations and the sites they helped create,” with the goal of honoring their accomplishments yet also inspiring new philanthropists to take action. Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF Founder and President, said: ”In 2012 we spotlight patrons and the places they helped create because patronage is intrinsic to the creation and stewardship of great designed landscapes.”

The Landslide program, which began in 2003, has highlighted more than 150 significant at-risk parks, gardens, horticultural features, and working landscapes. These are the “places that embody our shared landscape heritage.” For details on the landscapes that made it into last year’s compendium of sites, check out The Landscapes I Love. Also inspiring is to see the many landscapes TCLF have helped save with their public awareness and advocacy work. Unfortunately, for all landscape architects and their patrons, the list of “at-risk” landscapes is still far too long.

Submit your nominations by May 31.

In other news, the U.S. pavilion in the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale is focusing on the theme “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good.” For the pavilion, which is expected to be seen by more than 170,000 visitors in fall 2012, the U.S. team is seeking projects actually initiated by landscape architects or a local non-profit or community group that are publicly accessible, participatory, and help solve a challenging urban problem. It has to be a real project. Submit your ideas by February 6.

Image credit: Weequahic Park, Newark, New Jersey / The Landscapes I Love, 2011 Landslide®

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Rethinking Urban Renewal

Posted in Ecosystem Restoration, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture, Public Spaces, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Water Management on 11/23/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Landscape architects were implicated in misguided urban renewal schemes, said Thaisa Way, PhD, ASLA, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington at The Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation, a day-long conference organized by the Cultural Landscape Foundation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Before Jane Jacobs and the many urban activists she inspired put a stop to the most egregious errors, habitats and landscape were destroyed, leading to the mass alienation of urban residents. Renewal was a horror, but then again, “people love the view of the Coloseum” in Rome (which really was one of the original urban renewal projects). Way said in some cases we still may have to refrain from harsh judgements on big urban renewal projects because “rarely are these projects all good or all bad.”

Now, with a broad public process, communities are renewing their cities, but this time remaking the urban image in their own form. “There are now broad, complex narratives.” One new approach is to “renew, not replace works of modernism” that still pervade most cities. Old urban renewal projects are now being re-intepreted by today’s dynamic, sustainability-minded landscape architects, creating very different projects in the process.

Raymond Jungles and Herzog + de Meuron Renew Miami

Raymond Jungles, FASLA, said he was “born as a Jungles in Nebraska.” As a kid, he was deeply inspired by nature. Trips to a Sequoia forest “made a huge impact.” Later, he discovered Luis Barragan in an architecture magazine in a doctor’s office. He was so enamoured with the work, he stole the magazine. Attending the landscape architecture program at the University of Florida, he was then awed by Roberto Burle Marx, who would later become his friend and mentor up until that great Brazilian landscape architect’s death.

Jungles relayed a set of inspirational ideas that have guided him: “Study nature, stay close to nature, it will never fail you” (Frank Lloyd Wright). “Always do what you say you are going to do” (his mother). Also, “do right, fear not.” For him, another inspiration is nature in Florida. Even in his urban, man-made projects, he tries to project this view of nature, adding that “gardens are for man, they are not natural, but should be complimentary to nature.”

In Miami, Jungles collaborated with Herzog + de Meuron on their 1111 Lincoln Road project, creating a new streetscape, plaza, and two lush interior courtyards inspired by Modern sidewalk designs planned but unrealized in Miami (see image at top and below). For his new streetscape, Jungles created combined platforms that serve as benches, house bioinfiltration and silva cell system to keep the islands of rich vegetation healthy, and feature plants from the Everglades, bringing native Floridian landscape back to the city.

He called the project “bringing back the mangroves.” He added that “kids love it” and he’s really happy about that.

Charles Renfro on the Role of Glass in Contemporary Urban Renewal

Charles Renfro, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, largely veered away from Modern landscape architecture, instead talking about glass. He said it’s a material that has “transformed cities,” creating a “new level of engagement,” so perhaps we need to “rethink what glass is about.” He said glass can be used to frame a new relationship with the city, just as James Corner Field Operations and his firm have done to great effect in segments of the High Line park.

“Glass performs best when you least understand its presence,” said Renfro. In the case of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the absence of structural elements – just walls of glass – bring nature right into the house.

Unfortunately, he added, with post-modernism, “glass, minimalism, functionalism had fallen off the map.” Post-modernism grew up because many architects thought “architecture had lost its meaning.” Modern buildings were no longer embodied with meaning but dull and characterless.

Rem Koolhaas then brought a focus on “seeing,” making the process of seeing “layered and complex.” One of his preoccupations then became “looking at looking.” For Renfro, glass could become about “manipulation, turning things on its head.” As an example, in the High Line, glass holes in the girders provide views. The 10th avenue overlook turns the city into a theatre. Glass helps accomplish this.

In their revamp of Lincoln Center, Diller Scofidio + Renfro also used glass to try to “undo much of the damage” of that massive urban renewal project. In that case, “a thriving neighborhood was turned into a stark, unfriendly place.” The great modern architects who worked on Lincoln Center didn’t see the dense brownstone-filled streets as a neighborhood, merely a slum ready for a new concept. To remedy their errors, his firm “stripped the base from the buildings” of Alice Tully Hall, creating a new sense of “inside/outside” urban appeal. By blurring inside and out, he hopes they helped “correct urban wrongs.” One important piece of the project was the Illumination Lawn, a new slanted public green roof park on top of one of the area’s most pricey restaurants.

In contrast with the rave reviews of the new Alice Tully Hall and their work on the High Line park, The New York Times didn’t give the firm’s landscape work in Lincoln Center a positive review, arguing that famed Modern landscape architect Dan Kiley had done a better job with some of the original, challenging plaza spaces.

In addition, in a rare public rebuke from a conference organizer, Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, President and Founder, The Cultural Landscape Foundation, found Renfro’s reference to the Lincoln Center lawns, which he said “were for all you landscape architects,” “offensive.” Birnbaum clearly wanted Renfro to focus on how architects and landscape architects work together on urban projects, and said “we need to stop playing the game” that pits different design fields against each other.

Elizabeth Meyer and Michael Van Valkenburgh Use Nature to Renew the Arch Grounds in St. Louis

Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia, and Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, Principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, teamed up to discuss the St. Louis Arch grounds restoration and redesign project now underway. Van Valkenburgh beat out many firms to win that competition (see earlier interview).

Meyer said the public focus has always been on Eero Saarinen‘s great arch, with little attention paid to the important work of his key partner, Modern landscape architect Dan Kiley, who designed the grounds. Perhaps this is because the grounds took so long to complete: While the design for the grounds were completed in 1965, the design wasn’t fully implemented until 1981.

Stepping back for a moment, Meyer said many urban renewal projects were “biophysical wastelands,” featuring compacted soils, low oxygen levels, heavy runoff, and other complex ecological problems. “Parks and gardens were grafted onto guilty urban renewal sites” but little there was little thought to the biotic health of the systems. She said the sustainable re-design effort is a challenge, because “remaking some of these original elements makes no sense.” Since the park was designed, concepts of environmental sustainability have dramatically changed. “Sustainable design would remove key aspects like lawns.” On the other side, there are those who argue for the preservation of all materials to ensure the integrity of the design.

As for the design, Kiley’s “matrix of abstracted woods” and allees, boscs, and groves were set within Saarinen’s curved forms and planes. Guided by Kiley’s design, Meyer (who is a consultant to Van Valkenburgh on this project) found that there were different spatial and natural types that could be defined. These in turn can be used to create “landscape maintenance zones.” She said this will help Van Valkenburgh and the team’s environmental consultants work in zones now, which is “easier than dealing with materiality.” The lessons from her research: the site has a “complex landscape matrix,” there can be a ”working urban ecosystem,” and the project was a “historical collaboration” between a great architect and landscape architect.

Van Valkenburgh said it’s an “extremely complicated project.” His team focused on the theme of nature, naturalism, and the woods. Exploring the site, they found that “the further you go from the Arch, the less the design follows Saarinen and Kiley’s original ideas.” So they focused in on the edges and how to “hotwire this Modern masterpiece into the city.” For Van Valkenburgh, it’s critical that visitors “experience the city as part of the grounds.”

The team will remove parking lots and create “at grade” connections to make pedestrian access a lot easier. New entry ways will deepen the connection between the city and park. While nothing can be done about the train tracks framing one edge of the site (which Saarinen failed to get the railroad companies to divert), walkable pathways cut underneath the train lines will move visitors into the park. Dishing “large meadows of land,” which were the “biomorphic preoccupations of the era,” will, of course, be preserved given how central they are to the overall design. Furthermore, the park will now meet “contemporary disabilities standards.”

The landscape, which will be remade with sustainable design best practices, will put and end to the “mow, blow, and go” approach used so often. The National Park Service is eager to apply more sustainable landscape maintenance approaches, asking for new ecological management approaches for the lawns and woods. To get rid of the algae, which is due to excessive runoff, Van Valkenburgh will separate the pond from the lawns, building in intermediary wetland systems and changing the chemical balance of the water bodies.

For Van Valkenburgh and many other landscape architects during the conference, many of these projects represent literal re-makings of their idols’ works. Early on, Van Valkenburgh was inspired by Kiley’s gardens, including the Miller Garden. He said Kiley represents a “controlling idea of nature, which is very different from how we dance with nature now.” When asked what happens when one of the trees in his carefully set grids die, Kiley responded that “that’s when the bosc gets good, when chance comes in, it becomes better.” Nowadays, as a result, Van Valkenburgh said, “we are more comfortable with things we can’t control.”

Read the next post in this series on the conference: The Next Wave of Modernism: Healing Urban Landscapes.

Image credits: (1-3) 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, Florida / Raymond Jungles, (4) 10th Avenue Overlook, The High Line, NYC / Broccoli Designs, (5-6) St. Louis Arch Grounds Redesign / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates

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