Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., designed by Beatrix Farrand / Jane Padelford, ASLA
Meet the Unsung Heroine of the Nation’s Most Celebrated Gardens — 03/29/22, Fast Company Design
“During a five-decade career based in deep horticultural knowledge and a style-agnostic approach guided by detailed interaction with her clients, Beatrix Farrand came to be one of the most famous landscape designers in the world. It’s an unlikely tale told in the biography Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect, by Judith B. Tankard, out today from Monacelli Press. If some consider Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted the father of American landscape architecture, Farrand could easily be called the mother.”
Turning Cities Into Sponges to Save Lives and Property — 03/29/22, The New York Times
“Around the world officials are moving away from the traditional, hard infrastructure of flood barriers, concrete walls, culverts and sewer systems, and toward solutions that mimic nature. They are building green roofs and parks; restoring wetlands, swales and rivers; digging storage ponds; and more. Such projects — called by various names, including sponge cities, porous cities or blue-green infrastructure — also improve city dwellers’ quality of life.”
A Rogue Leader’s Plan for the Heart of Budapest — 03/26/22, Bloomberg CityLab
“The project is a way for Orban to put his mark on Hungary’s imposing capital, a city that since the end of communist rule in 1989 has grown into a confident, more cosmopolitan mix of foreign students, cuisine from around the world and yet with strong Hungarian identity rooted in its 19th century architecture. But, as ever with such urban revamps, there’s controversy, and in Hungary it’s political as well as historical and financial.”
Report: Over Half of U.S. Waters Are Too Polluted to Swim or Fish — 03/24/22, High Country News
“Back in 1972, U.S. legislators passed the Clean Water Act with a 10-year goal: Make it safe for people to fish and swim in the nation’s waters. Fifty years later, around half of all lakes and rivers across the country that have been studied fail to meet that standard, according to a recent report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a D.C. watchdog and advocacy nonprofit.”
Gary Hilderbrand Is the New Chair of Harvard GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture — 03/23/22, The Architect’s Newspaper
“‘Gary’s sensibilities as a teacher and as a practitioner are one and the same—his unyielding efforts to reconcile imminent, often intractable forces of urbanization with ecological sustainability, cultural history, vegetative regimes, and thoughtful kindness are central to his pedagogy and practice both,’ said Sarah M. Whiting, dean of the Harvard GSD.”
Father Figure: Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted Celebrated as Originator of U.S. Public Parks System — 03/19/22, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“April 26 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and Olmsted 200 is a movement celebrating his vision — a vision that included public parks for all people. He believed that parks are an important part of any community. Not only do they provide a gathering place for family and friends, but they improve air and water quality, protect the groundwater and provide a home for birds and animals.”
New Book on Megaregions Provides a Framework for Large-Scale Public Investment — 03/17/22, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
“Written by planning scholars Robert D. Yaro, Ming Zhang, and Frederick R. Steiner, Megaregions and America’s Future explains the concept of megaregions, provides updated economic, demographic, and environmental data, draws lessons from Europe and Asia, and shows how megaregions are an essential framework for governing the world’s largest economy.”
Olmsted Brothers-designed Memorial Park in Maplewood, New Jersey. / Bill Benzon, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via The Architect’s Newspaper
Landslide 2022 Brings Under-threat Olmsted Landscapes into Focus — 02/15/22, The Architect’s Newspaper
“Today, more than 200 Olmsted-designed landscapes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and many are designated as National Historic Landmarks. And although the Olmsted name brings with it a high level of prestige and recognition it does not, as noted by TCLF president and CEO Charles A. Birnbaum, guarantee any sort of invincibility.”
As Landscape Architects, Two Oregon Women Laid the Groundwork for Many of the Northwest’s Enduring Gardens — 02/11/22, The Oregonian
“In all, [Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver] designed more than 200 public and private landscapes and gardens between 1929 and 1969. They introduced many rose cultivars and once-uncommon shrubs such as English boxwood to the region, and they persuaded local growers to propagate other plants that have become garden mainstays.”
Olmsted’s Legacy, Bringing People Together Through Landscape Architecture — 02/11/22, The Pilot
“‘Olmsted saw the capability of landscape design to have beneficial impacts, whether it is physical health or mental health. He viewed landscape design as a way to bring people together,’ said Dede Petri, president and CEO of the National Association for Olmsted Parks.”
The Untold Story of Super Bowl LVI Stadium in Los Angeles— 02/07/22, Architectural Digest
“The landscape design will allow residents year-round access to the areas outside the stadium itself, introducing new shared spaces in a city that lacks equitable access to public space. ‘This is a destination for the community,’ says [Mia] Lehrer, [founder of Studio-MLA]. ‘It’s not just a place to see a football game or to go shopping; it’s an environment for people to come and be with community.'”
NYC’s Park Avenue Medians Are Getting a Face-Lift— 02/07/22, Bloomberg CityLab
“New York City’s Department of Transportation plans to hire a landscape architect to reinvent the malls that divide Park Avenue along the 11 blocks from Grand Central to East 57th Street. Councilmember Keith Powers, who represents the area, says he expects the request for proposals to be sent out in the coming months. The renovations will proceed in stages and likely won’t be completed for at least 20 years.”
Palm Springs’ Downtown Park Looks Beyond the Desert City’s Midcentury Heyday — 02/02/22, The Architect’s Newspaper
“To that end, the $7.6 million park’s design notably eschews riffing off midcentury design. ‘We made a conscious decision to try to tap into this intrinsic landscape, something more eternal and timeless about Palm Springs,’ said [Nate] Cormier [of RIOS].”
Mary Margaret Jones, FASLA, is President and CEO of HargreavesJones and leads the firm’s offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Cambridge. HargreavesJones has been recognized with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and the Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize.
Interview conducted at the ASLA 2021 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Nashville.
Across Tennessee, HargreavesJones has transformed inaccessible, polluted industrial riverfronts into rich, multifaceted parks. What has investment in the revitalization of Tennessee’s riverfronts meant to you? What trends are you seeing in Tennessee with public space more broadly?
It’s not just Nashville and Tennessee. We have found mid-tier cities are not just thinking about their post-industrial riverfronts, but also their place in the market and their ability to draw businesses and people. They’re more open to transformation, so that’s how we ended up doing major riverfront projects in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky; Chattanooga and Nashville, Tennessee; and Davenport, Iowa.
The steel industry left the riverfront in Nashville in a post-industrial state. The community embraced the idea of truly making something completely different out of their riverfront because they had nothing. It’s harder to come into cities like Los Angeles, New York City, or San Francisco with such sweeping transformations. In Nashville, Chattanooga, and Louisville, landscape architects can design signature waterfront experiences, address the dynamics of rivers, and restore ecosystems that can be a healthy part of a river system.
In Nashville, your firm designed the 6.5-acre Cumberland Park as part of a broader riverfront revitalization plan. The park is a model of sustainability and resilience, reuses a bridge structure, sources geothermal, preserves the flood plain, captures and reuses a million gallons of stormwater, remediates toxic soils, and improves biodiversity. How did you make all these pieces fit together?
It was so evident; the opportunities were there. Just focusing on stormwater for a minute: there were walls beneath the gantry structure, so the first thing we said was, “don’t take this gantry structure down, it’s beautiful. Not only will we build a bridge to it and let it become an overlook, we’ll also leave the heavy-duty concrete retaining walls below it. Let’s use the space to create an outlet for stormwater from the site and from the two bridges into a cistern.” We created a cistern that has an open air top so it’s actually quite beautiful to look down on, like a reflecting pool. You kind of want to jump in. Then there’s the river, so in flood times, it spills over to the river.
Cumberland Park, Nashville, Tennessee. HargreavesJones / Charles Mayer
Bio-remediation is just dealing with the soil, which is the case on almost every project we do. We have to either bake or bury and cap soils, depending on the toxic substances and conditions. Geothermal became part of the building, an existing piece of infrastructure from the steel industry, which was then retrofitted by architects on our team to become the stair tower, concessions booth, and park office building. Even the toilets are mindfully designed for low water usage. With science, there are all these opportunities.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, your firm also designed a 23.5-acre Renaissance Park, which transformed a former industrial site into a wetland park, and the 21st Century Waterfront Park, which reconnects the city to its riverfront and has led to $1 billion in new residential and retail development. How do you design for multiple needs at once — social life, economic development, equitable access, and environmental restoration? How do you prioritize?
As landscape architects, that’s our job. That is the beauty of landscape architecture. We are not just doing the science; it’s not just a matrix of solving problems. We also create places people will love. The result of that will be economic investment and stewardship. If we don’t make places people love, they won’t be taken care of.
We create social and economic change around these projects, but at the same time we’re providing something to the neighborhood around these projects. We’re revitalizing these neighborhoods.
We don’t think we can just restore nature. We can’t just make form, design, and feel good about that. We have to do both those things and think about what is fiscally responsible because that’s what is ultimately going to give a project its long life.
Renaissance Park in Chattanooga, Tennessee. HargreavesJones / Charles Mayer
Another significant new riverfront park in the South HargreavesJones designed is Crescent Park along the Mississippi River in New Orleans. By reusing surplus wharfs and derelict railroad sites a new public space was formed that celebrates the city’s infrastructural legacy instead of wiping it. What is the best way to tell landscape stories using the past? What are the other benefits of adapting and reusing legacy infrastructure?
Sometimes adaptive reuse — reinventing and reinterpreting remnants — makes your budget spread farther. An early groundbreaking project in this regard was Richard Haag’s Gas Works Park in Seattle. He left the old structures as is and created a green space around them.
But we’re taking it further now. There are remnants, but we interpret them in new ways. We aren’t just saving the rail tracks, we’re making gardens that follow the path of those rail tracks. We’re not strictly preserving, we’re amplifying through reinterpretation and twisting things that makes you see the infrastructure in a new way.
Crescent Park, New Orleans, Louisiana. HargreavesJones / Timothy Hursley
The transformation of Oklahoma City has been accelerated by the 70-acre Scissortail Park, the grand new central park that will connect the city to its waterfront and realize its core to shore plan. How did your firm’s design for the park advance the plan?
We were really interested in the transition from urban to river and making that legible in the park design. Rather than thinking of the park as one piece, we thought of it as a gradation of landscape types, so it progresses quite a lot as you move toward the river in terms of its design, landscape, and materials. Of course, there are some consistencies. The promenade and the lighting of the promenade go all the way from core to shore, but the landscapes and the planting around it evolve quite a bit, as do some of the uses.
We wanted to accentuate that experience of moving toward the river, so that as a visitor, you become aware you’re entering a landscape that gets wilder and wetter. There’s an upper park and lower park, and they’re linked by the fabulous Skydance Bridge designed by Hans Butzer, who was part of our team. Before, visitors couldn’t see the river because of the levy along the river, so we created a high point at the southern terminus of the project, closest to the river.
We also designed the park to respond to climate change. That area of the city floods, so the design of the park accommodates floodwater with a big lake. The lake is also a holding basin for irrigation.
Scissortail Park, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. HargreavesJones / Timothy HursleyScissortail Park, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. HargreavesJones / Timothy Hursley
During construction, we had 60 straight days of rain, and the whole lake filled, unfortunately, before it was fully shaped, so that really delayed construction. Then, we were forced to plant trees in August, because the Mayor had promised the citizens a concert on opening day. So we planted trees at 4 a.m., because it was too hot any later in the day. We did everything to keep the trees alive. Once the project was built, they had a freak ice storm in early fall when all the leaves were still on all the trees. The city lost hundreds and hundreds of trees, which is very tragic. And do you remember that cold spell that hit that part of the country later that winter, when it was below 10 degrees for 10 straight days? All the plants got hit. So climate change is impacting us. That’s where large parks are important because they can have a built-in resilience and robustness. They’re large enough to recover their systems.
A few years ago, HargreavesJones with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro designed a new “National Park” for Russia, the 35-acre Zaryadye Park in Moscow, next to St. Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square, and the Kremlin. The largest new public space in the city in 50 years, the park is based on the principle of wild urbanism, which is meant to complement Moscow’s historically symmetrical public spaces. You have stated the park “samples Russia’s distinct regional landscapes, tundra, steppe, forest, and wetland forest.” What is wild urbanism and how did you realize it through regional inspirations?
Our proposal was part of an international competition, and we were the only American team. We didn’t think we would win, especially since our scheme was based on openness and being welcoming, a very democratic idea of porosity and inclusion. We wanted to contrast the traditional parks of Moscow that are very rigid — their pathways have edges and there’s 500 tulips all the same color, and then the next row, a different color. Very, very formal. We wanted to create an informality.
In Moscow, the landscapes were formal and rigid in the city, but outside the city was nature. The Russians love their forests. Forests are a part of their fairy tales, music, ballets, their lore. We thought why not bring the forest into the city and make a place of the city but not of the city where you could move through it and at times completely lose the city and then come out of it to the steppe landscape, which is a big meadow on a big hill. And then suddenly, you’re in the heart of these UNESCO World Heritage sites. All the new architecture in the park is tucked into the folds of the new topography. The site slopes considerably from high to low toward the river, so we were able to then interpret topographically from tundra to lowland.
Zaryadye Park, Moscow, Russia. HargreavesJones / HargreavesJones
Substantial buildings were created as part of this park, but they’re all below your feet, folded into these topographic waves that cascade from high to low. The paving is pixelated across the site so there are no edges. The landscape morphs from all paving to a blend of paving and landscape to all landscape in ways that allow you to move through the site fairly freely without very prescribed routes. The landscape eats into the paved surfaces and then selection of plants added to the informality.
We had to work really hard with the locals to understand we did not mean annuals. We did not mean 500 tulips. We really did mean perennials that are less controlled, still quite beautiful, and pollinator heaven. We created a kind of wildness that people love.
I think the project is extremely important because it is so public and open and gives people a sense of freedom, to some of the authorities, maybe a little too much. They discovered early on that people were making out in the forest — and we kind of love that, but there are so many security cameras that it’s not a real issue.
Zaryadye Park, Moscow, Russia. HargreavesJones / Iwan Baan
People love in it and love it because they feel it’s unique. The idea was to create a new perspective on a place you think you’re familiar with, that you think you know, and kind of rattle you out of that. Of course, there are the features that are fantastic, like the flyover bridge that takes you out over the river and boomerangs you back. At first, they said, “why would anybody want to go out there? You can’t cross the river; you just go out and come back.” People now line up to go out and come back. There are yoga studios at the end of it. You’re out there and suddenly you’re looking back at the city. You have a perspective of the river and the city you don’t have any other way.
Zaryadye Park, Moscow, Russia. HargreavesJones / Iwan Baan
This year is the 20th anniversary of your firm’s design of a now iconic park: Crissy Field in San Francisco. In the past two decades, the park has welcomed millions of visitors and become beloved by both locals and tourists. What is the primary legacy of this project? What has it meant for the field of landscape architecture?
When I go back to San Francisco, I almost always go to Crissy Field, not just as a designer observing one’s own work but just because I love to be there. It was a groundbreaking project for the National Park Service. They had never done a project that was so sustainable. All the material was kept on site — there was stuff below grade we dealt with it on site instead of carting it off.
The project was also unique for the National Park Service, because we were working with both their natural resource and cultural resource staff, and they had very different, in some ways opposing goals. They could have found themselves in a position of doing nothing because they couldn’t see how to fully realize the restoration of both cultural resources and natural resources. We convinced them that Crissy Field could do both, become a palimpsest and layer together.
There is a stormwater wetland and a tidal marsh. It may not have the highest habitat value you could possibly have, but that can be accomplished 20 miles away. Here in the city, create a marsh with a bridge across it. There was a big battle about the bridge.
The tidal marsh is not as big as they might have liked it, but that’s because there is a grassy airfield that is a historic landmark and needed to be restored. So the marsh creeps around that grassy airfield, and the airfield becomes a kind of plinth, or almost a pier into the marsh. We blended them, overlaid them in a way.
Crissy Field, San Francisco, California. HargreavesJones / HargreavesJones
We moved a hundred thousand cubic yards of dirt but it was not high budget. When we started, many people told us: “Don’t mess it up. What’s out there has a kind of awesome rawness we love.” Well, it was mostly asphalt and chain-link fence but still it had a quality that people loved.
As you’re walking down the promenade and come upon the airfield, the airfield is quite a bit above your head, because we made the airfield almost a flat plane. As you walk west along the gently sloping promenade adjacent to the grassy airfield, you get to the tip of it — and it’s at your feet, so you’ve made eight feet of grade change in that walk along this planar landscape. So there are big moves, and that’s what makes it last.
There’s nothing fussy at Crissy Field, because that would not last. As you stated, millions of people visit it to run, bike, picnic, play with their kids and dogs. It’s one of the top windsurfing spots in the world. And the mouth of the marsh continues to move. It’s a dynamic landscape.
Dequindre Cut, Detroit / The High Line Network, SmithGroup
Decades of redlining and urban renewal, rooted in racist planning and design policies, created the conditions for gentrification to occur in American cities. But the primary concern with gentrification today is displacement, which primarily impacts marginalized communities shaped by a history of being denied access to mortgages. At the ASLA 2021 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Nashville, Matthew Williams, ASLA, with the City of Detroit’s planning department, said in his city there are concerns that new green spaces will increase the market value of homes and “price out marginalized communities.” But investment in green space doesn’t necessarily need to lead to displacement. If these projects are led by marginalized communties, they can be embraced.
For example, efforts to enhance the Dequindre Cut in Detroit by transforming it into a 2-mile-long greenway were rooted in community needs and therefore have been supported. While the planning and design work by SmithGroup on the greenway corridor has led to positive economic impact, including growing nearby entrepreneurship and visitor engagement, it also expanded open space, expanded community development, and lifted up local graffiti artists. “We allowed the graffiti to stay and created canvases for more to come. It’s an avant-garde form of historic preservation, and a way to activate a latent, forgotten place.”
Dequindre Cut, Detroit / SmithGroupDequindre Cut, Detroit / SmithGroup
Another project is Ella Fitzgerald Park, in the Fitzgerald community, one of 10 key neighborhoods where the planning department has focused housing, park, and economic development investment. Given the neighborhood is experiencing high levels of bankruptcies and foreclosures, many remaining homeowners in the neighborhood can’t sell their homes. Instead of seeing a new community park and greenway designed by landscape architecture firm Spackman, Mossop, and Michaels and built by the city as a gentrifying force, it was welcomed as a safe place for children to play. “It was a needed change,” Williams said.
Ella Fitzgerald Park, Detroit / Earthscapeplay.comElla Fitzgerald Park and Greenway / Spackman, Mossop, and Michaels
The Joe Louis Greenway, named after the famous athlete, spans 27.5-miles from downtown Detroit to Dearborn, once a segregated Black city. A “vision of inclusive design, the project is a form of green reparation,” Williams argued. The city has overlaid where redlining had the most destructive impact in Detroit and surrounding communities and has used green amenities to undo part of the damage. “We can focus on those red areas on the redlining maps, transforming them into productive, innovative, and ecological areas.” Planning and design efforts with SmithGroup included significant community engagement. Strategic green spaces, rooted in community desires, are one of “our best tools to address the mistakes of the past.”
Joe Louis Greenway, Detroit / SmithGroupJoe Louis Greenway community planning meeting, Detroit / SmithGroup
Diane Jones Allen, FASLA, director and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and current fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, received a 2020 research prize from the SOM Foundation for her work, Reclaiming Black Settlements: A Design Playbook for Historic Communities in the Shadow of Sprawl. Her research has involved mapping Black Freedmen’s communities across Texas and included seven research projects in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area. Along the Trinity River, Allen has been immersing herself in “the bottom lands, the industrial lands” where many Black communities made their home. Despite the long-term environmental justice issues, these communities are still facing displacement pressures. “Riverfronts are hot right now, the place to be,” she said.
The existing community isn’t reacting negatively to Harold Simmons Park, a park planned on the Trinity River by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates because it would create “healthy social spaces along the river.” To ensure housing prices in Black communities near the park don’t go up, a development corporation linked with a local church is “getting ahead of the curve and stabilizing and renovating homes.”
Harold Simmons Park, Dallas, Texas / Michael Van Valkenburgh AssociatesHarold Simmons Park, Dallas, Texas / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
Another community down river, the Garden of Eden, founded by a Black family in 1881, has been impacted by concrete companies that dug industrial gravel pits along the river. Once leases on the land ended, the companies were supposed to fill in those gravel pits but never did. So the community is “reclaiming those pits through green infrastructure, creating recreational spaces.”
And at the last of the seven sites studied along the river, Joppa, a historic Freedmen’s town, there is the Joppee Lakes project, the site of a railroad and concrete plant which is being re-imagined as a stormwater solution for downtown Dallas. The Army Corps of Engineers turned the site over to the City of Dallas, which is in turn working with Black community there to revamp the Honey Springs Branch Park surrounding the lake as a community hub with green infrastructure that can handle both sewage treatment and provide recreation.
To avoid green gentrification, Allen said it’s key to “understand the history of each place. Design has to be grounded, and history is really powerful.” Black Freedmen’s communities along the Trinity River have created a community roundtable and are “envisioning the future together.” They are sharing “funding and grant sources, and talking about the issues.” Freedmen’s town groups are also “linking green spaces, creating a trail that will connect them all.” They are “very smart about the politics and policy and the air quality issues around transportation and cement plants.” Landscape architects can work with communities like these to help them “articulate the issues” and “promote and enhance connections with each other.”
Joppee Lakes, Texas / DesignJones LLC
Boston has invested $5 million to re-imagine Frederick Law Olmsted’s Franklin Park in Boston’s Dorchester, Jamaica Plains, and Roxbury neighborhoods. A team led by landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand is spearheading the action plan effort and includes MASS Design Group, which is focusing on the “city edge’s and neighborhood connections,” and Agency Landscape + Planning, which is focusing on public engagement, planning, and programming. According to Sierra Bainbridge, ASLA, a landscape architect and senior principal with MASS Design Group, her organization is seeking to answer questions like: “Can we connect present and future generations to the park? Can the surrounding neighborhoods benefit from the procurement process for a redesigned park?”
Franklin Park Action Plan / AgencyFranklin Park Action Plan / MASS Design Group
Bainbridge argued that park’s ill-conceived boundaries are keeping many people out. The edges, which are “prohibiting access,” include 3-4 lane streets with no lighting for crosswalks. There are also no local businesses along the park, so if food trucks aren’t there, visitors need to bring in their own food and drink. “There is a huge opportunity to increase connections between the park and local community, particularly through large events.”
Franklin Park Action Plan, Boston, Massachusetts / Agency, MASS Design Group, Reed Hilderbrand
While planning and zoning changes need to happen to grow local business presence around the park, Bainbridge said procurement is also a powerful tool for increasing community engagement with the revamped Olmsted park. Looking to MASS Design Group’s work in Rwanda as a model, she said training and hiring local artists, masons, and workers was key to creating a sense of ownership around the organization’s community healthcare projects. “The question for many was ‘who is this project for?; we showed them that it is for them.” As a result, community members who worked on the project began to trust in the mission and started going to the care center and hospitals.
In the same vein, Franklin Park can create opportunities for local artists and workers. There is some flexibility in Boston’s procurement procedures if the amounts are under $10,000. “There is potentially a way to also phase larger projects in smaller amounts” to give more local businesses and artists chances to bid. As part of the project, the team is also training small minority- and women-owned businesses to take advantage of these opportunities. “Training costs less than 10 percent of the project, but the impact is multiplied throughout the community. Training is embedded in the plan.”
ASLA 2021 Landmark Award. Portland Open Space Sequence, Portland, Oregon. PLACE.
ASLA announces the 2021 Professional Award winners. The 40 winning projects exemplify the highest level of achievement in the profession, and the professionals themselves will be honored at ASLA’s Conference on Landscape Architecture, Nov. 20 in Nashville, TN.
Winners each year are chosen by a jury panel representing a broad cross-section of the profession, from the public and private sectors, as well as academia. The 40 winners were chosen from 486 submissions from around the world. Award categories include: General Design, Urban Design, Residential Design, Analysis & Planning, Communications, and Research. In addition, one Landmark Award is also selected each year.
“This year’s winners demonstrate how landscape architects are increasingly leading the planning and design of healthy and resilient communities for all,” said Torey Carter- Conneen, CEO of ASLA. “Landscape architects are advancing communities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in significant ways.”
Professional Award recipients, their clients, and advisors will be honored in-person at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA 2021 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Nashville, TN on Saturday, November 20th, at 6pm ET.
ASLA 2021 Student General Design Honor Award. The Interaction Between Masks And Desertification: A Paradigm of Family Sand Control by Mongolian Herdsmen. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Xi Zhao; Xue Li; Xinyu Yang; Qiong Wang, Student International ASLA, Beijing Forestry University
ASLA announces the 2021 Student Award winners. The 35 winning projects exemplify the highest level of achievement by future landscape architect professionals. The students themselves will be honored at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture, Nov. 20 in Nashville, TN.
Winners each year are chosen by a jury panel representing a broad cross-section of the profession, from the public and private sectors, as well as academia. The 35 winners were chosen from 440 submissions of projects from around the world. Awards categories include: General Design, Urban Design, Residential Design, Analysis & Planning, Communications, Research, Student Collaboration, and Community Service.
“This program not only honors the tremendous creativity and passion of these future landscape architect leaders, it also highlights the extraordinary contributions they will make to communities upon graduation,” said Torey Carter- Conneen, CEO of ASLA.
Student Award recipients will be honored in-person at the awards presentation ceremony during the ASLA 2021 Conference on Landscape Architecture in Nashville, TN on Saturday, November 20th, at 6pm ET.
ASLA 2020 Professional General Design Honor Award. Deep Form of Designed Nature: Sanya Mangrove Park, Sanya City, Hainan Province, China. Turenscape
To Curb Urban Flooding, China Is Building ‘Sponge Cities.’ Do They Work? — 07/29/21, The Christian Science Monitor
“Yu Kongjian, a professor of landscape architecture at Peking University, is credited as the main architect of the sponge city concept. In a 2019 video for the World Economic Forum, he described the previous approach to flood prevention as ‘totally wrong.'”
National ‘Vision Zero’ Resolution Introduced — 07/28/21, Streetsblog
“After months of intense campaigning from advocates, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced a bi-cameral resolution Tuesday expressing the desire of the legislature to ‘reduce traffic fatalities to zero by 2050.'”
As China Boomed, It Didn’t Take Climate Change Into Account. Now It Must. — 07/26/21, The New York Times
“Yu Kongjian, the dean of the School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, is credited with popularizing the idea in China. He said in a telephone interview that in its rapid development since the 1980s, China had turned to designs from the West that were ill-suited for the extremes that the country’s climate was already experiencing. Cities were covered in cement, ‘colonized,’ as he put it, by ‘gray infrastructure.'”
The Architectural League Celebrates 2021 President’s Medal Recipient Walter Hood— 07/22/21, The Architect’s Newspaper
“As noted by the League, Hood, as an artist and designer dedicated to ‘creating beauty in everyday environments, revealing hidden histories, renewing connections, guiding the way to co-existence in all our multiplicity and difference,’ was a ‘fitting person to honor at the moment of our re-engagement of public life.'”
How to Give a Modernist Icon a Makeover — 07/22/21, Bloomberg CityLab “Hiroshi Sugimoto’s renovation of the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden will bring the Japanese designer’s touch to a space long acclaimed as a modernist landmark.”
In Order to Achieve Tree Equity, the U.S. Must Plant 522 Million Trees in Urban Areas — 07/20/22, The Urbanist
“In order to make up for discrepancies between levels of tree coverage in neighborhoods lacking resources and more affluent, often White majority neighborhoods, the United States must commit to planting 522 million trees in urban areas.”
Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
After a free-wheeling three-hour review, the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) in Washington, D.C. approved the latest design of the Hirshhorn sculpture garden from a team led by Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese artist, architect, and landscape designer. The contentious revamp of the garden, which has gone through two years of review and refinement, features reconfigured outdoor sculpture galleries, a diverse and rich tree and planting design, a new central pool — and the most controversial element, stacked stone walls. The landscape design brings a contemporary Japanese sense of space and materials to the National Mall and will be only the second Asian-inspired design after the Moongate Garden found next to the National Museum of Asian Art. The new design further diversifies the multicultural experience of the National Mall, which now includes the National Museum of African American History and Culture that incorporates African design motifs.
As ASLA and the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) have recently highlighted, the CFA is currently without a landscape architect for only the second time in its 112-year history. Just a few years ago, three landscape architects, academics, and designers — Mia Lehrer, FASLA, Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, and Liza Gilbert, ASLA — were among the commissioners. But with the new set of four commissioners appointed by the Biden-Harris administration, the CFA is also one of the most diverse in its history, with three commissioners of color, including the first woman and Asian American chair, architect Billie Tsien. The lack of representation of landscape architects on the CFA is a source of concern as the CFA frequently reviews proposals that impact historic landscapes.
Melissa Chiu, the Chinese Australian executive director of the Hirshhorn, introduced the presentation by the design team, which is led by Sugimoto and includes Felix Ade, an architect from YUN Architecture; Faye Harwell, FASLA, a landscape architect and founder of the D.C.-based firm Rhodeside & Harwell; and Alyson Steele, an architect with the D.C.-based architecture firm Quinn Evans.
Chiu argued that the design by Sugimoto and team is a “natural evolution” of the current garden, because Gordon Bunshaft, the original Hirshhorn museum and garden architect, was deeply influenced by Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi and traveled to Japan, where he appreciated stacked stone walls.
Bunshaft’s Brutalist design for the sculpture garden, which opened in 1974, was without trees so became a “hot micro-climate” in the punishing Washington, D.C. summer. In 1981, landscape architect Lester Collins, also a “student of Asian design,” completed a redesign of the garden, creating smaller rooms; adding ample maples, pines, and plants; and a wheelchair-accessible ramp at the National Mall entrance to the park, an advance in accessibility years before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed. Prior to Collins’ redesign, the central underground pathway leading from the sunken sculpture garden to the museum was closed. The passageway was viewed as dark and perhaps unsafe and was reconfigured as an educational center.
Lester Collins’ 1981 redesign of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden / Hirshhorn Museum
The new design includes three outdoor gallery experiences that will provide greater curatorial flexibility for the Hirshhorn, Chiu argued.
A new central gallery is a flexible garden space designed for performance art. Responding to feedback from consulting parties as part of seven Section 106 reviews, the Hirshhorn has kept the form of Bunschaft’s original rectangular pool, which mirrors a window above in the Hirshhorn facade. An additional pool has gone through many revisions.
Central Gallery at Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
The design team ultimately landed on a U-shaped pool immediately to the south of the original rectangular pool, separated by a new five-foot-wide central walkway and stage. The pool can drain for events, providing tiers of seating. Harwell argued that it will be a much-needed respite in D.C.’ s brutal summers, helping to cool the space.
Central Gallery at Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
A west gallery will provide space for newly commissioned, large-scale sculpture, with a lawn. The area can be used for “site-specific works, film festivals, and school groups,” Chiu said.
West Gallery at Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
A new east gallery will create smaller rooms filled with trees that offer more intimate spaces for the Rodin and Henry Moore sculptures now found in the garden.
East Gallery at Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
Responding to feedback from the CFA’s first review in 2019 that approved the general concepts, there is now a more fleshed-out landscape design. Harwell explained that the new design preserves much of Collins’ work by protecting the large elms that ring the garden and continuing to feature the pines and maples he planted. But to combat the “sameness” of the current landscape, Harwell is adding nine tree and 40 ground cover species, 70 percent of which will be native. Plants were selected for texture, and colors include whites and cremes, with hints of red. The landscape is designed for seasonal change and to create a sense of “stylized naturalism.”
New broad stone pavers, which are being evaluated in a test area of the garden, will replace the current brown squares. New handrails will be bronze, as they are now. Throughout the landscape, stormwater will be managed on-site, with the help of two underground cisterns that will capture water for irrigation.
New paver design at right, with existing brown square pavers at bottom left / Jared Green
At the south end of the garden, the passageway linking the museum with the garden will be re-opened and sheathed in mirror-like panels that bring light to the tunnel. Commissioners were universally positive about the feature, with Commissioner James McCrery calling it “brilliant.”
View of the new staircase leading to the Museum at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
At the north end, where the garden meets the National Mall, the width of Bunshaft’s original entrance — 60-feet — is restored in the new design. The concrete wall that visitors now see when they enter will also be replaced by a much shorter 42-inch-high stacked stone wall. The accessible ramps at the north entrance will be moved to the west side of the garden, and a new entrance will be created on the east side.
North entrance at Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn MuseumView from north entrance at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
Commissioner Justin Garrett Moore argued that ramps on just the west side of the garden don’t go far enough to create a universally accessible experience for all wheelchair users at various access points. All commissioners agreed that an additional custom-designed elevator was required and needed further study.
New access points, with accessible ramp at left, at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden redesign / Hiroshi Sugimoto, YUN Architecture, Rhodeside & Harwell, Quinn Evans, courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum
The perimeter concrete walls, which are now “inherently unstable,” will be rebuilt, but within the space, new stone stacked inner partition walls will change the character of the space, softening its Brutalism with a more naturalistic feel. The design team has been testing prototypes of the wall within the garden.
Prototype stacked stone wall at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden / Jared Green
According to Ade and Steele, the new stacked stone walls, which will be comprised of stones sourced from a quarry in Pennsylvania, will offer better acoustics, as the walls will be rough, have open joints, and be subtly angled towards the sky, bouncing sound upwards. Chiu said the walls will be critical to supporting performance artists’ work. Ade and Steele confirmed that extensive acoustic studies were conducted to confirm they create a better sound environment than the current concrete walls, which apparently reflect sound directly back to its source.
In a video, Sugimoto said Bunshaft was inspired by Japanese Zen gardens and his goal is to simply “restructure Bunshaft’s design in spirit.” Throughout the review process, Sugimoto has vehemently defended the stacked stone walls as central to his overall design, arguing that they bring an “ancient spirit to a modern garden.” He said “the pre-modern stone stacked walls will make the modern sculpture stand out,” and through contrast will highlight their modernity.
In a break from tradition during the pandemic, organizations submitting comments on the proposals weren’t allowed to speak directly to commissioners; instead Thomas Luebke, secretary of the CFA, read summaries of feedback.
Since the sculpture garden concept design was reviewed two years ago, there have been vocal opposition to many design elements, including the walls and pool and the general shift in the character of the design away from the Brutalist landscape that is in unison with the building. One over-arching concern is the lack of consideration of Lester Collins’ 1981 redesign of the garden, which has recently been deemed eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places; two years ago, when the CFA first reviewed the proposed re-design, it hadn’t been.
TCLF, Committee of 100, and Docomomo have all raised concerns throughout the Section 106 review process. In a comprehensive set of comments and questions sent to the Commission, TCLF stated: “We are supportive of the revitalization efforts but have serious concerns about two design interventions that would fundamentally alter Gordon Bunshaft’s artistic vision, which was respected by landscape architect Lester Collins.” Those interventions are the new pool and stacked stone walls.
They also raised concerns about how the Smithsonian will maintain the new, more complex pool; whether enough research has been done on the acoustic benefits of the proposed walls; and why a reconfigured central galley is even needed, given the expanded western gallery.
Furthermore, Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and former vice chairwoman of the CFA, sent a clarification regarding her past statements, arguing that they have been used by the Hirshhorn “without context, leading to the impression that I endorse the current designs. I do not.” She outlined that the “period of significance” in the National Register of Historic Places nomination shifted to 1981 in February 2020, after the CFA last reviewed the conceptual designs, and this should trigger an important reconsideration of the changes to Collins’ designs.
But there are also supporters. Laurie Olin, FASLA, founder of the landscape architecture OLIN, offered his opinions in an extensive memo that concludes “the project as currently proposed by Sugimoto, Harwell, et al, is far superior to what has existed adjacent to the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Mall until now, and if implemented will add a worthy layer to those that will inevitably remain embedded in the situation. The sculpture garden will become a sequential and combined work of Bunshaft, Collins, and Sugimoto, created through time, one far more interesting than any of them could have done alone.”
Perhaps only Olin’s comments were decisive in influencing the Commission, as the commissioners expressed an openness to what Sugimoto’s team proposed and didn’t call for sending the design back to the drawing board to reconsider Collins’ contributions to improving the original landscape.
Instead, the focus of the Commission was on how to rethink the accessibility, safety, and security of the sculpture garden and National Mall buildings and landscapes for the 21st century. And it seemed more than an hour of the conversation returned to these topics, as the commissioners repeatedly questioned what the experience would be like for a wheelchair user.
New Biden-appointed Commissioner Justin Garrett Moore, a transdisciplinary designer, urbanist, and program officer for the Humanities for Places program at the Andrew Mellon W. Foundation, who initiated the focus on accessibility, said the project was an “opportunity to explore what public landscapes should be and mean” for a contemporary Washington, D.C. We can expect to see a greater focus on moving universal design forward with this Commission.
Rio Piedras watershed / Edmundo “Mundy” Colón Izquierdo
The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)‘s most recent class of innovation and leadership fellows spent the past year “unearthing assumptions and trying to find a path forward” through the “disorienting dilemmas” facing the world, explained Cindy Sanders, FASLA, CEO of OLIN, in the kick-off off LAF’s now annual symposium. Each fellow seeks to generate “ethically-motivated societal change,” which in the process required “personal transformation.” Over two days, this year’s six fellows delved into the results of their independent research and leadership building efforts, which were each supported by a $25,000 grant from LAF.
Edmundo “Mundy” Colón Izquierdo: Taking on the Army Corps of Engineers in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is an island of 3.2 million Americans. An unincorporated U.S. territory, it has a population larger than 20 U.S. states. The San Juan Estuary faces many challenges, including flooding, explained Edmundo “Mundy” Colón Izquierdo, Principal, ECo. Efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to channelize the Rio Piedras, which spreads south from San Juan into the heart of the island, have brought up a complex set of issues related to “politics, economics, and flood conveyance.” Along its course, the river is both “polluted and biodiverse, near and inaccessible, beautiful and dangerous.” As a response to extreme flooding from Hurricane Maria, the Army Corps has allocated $1.5 billion to transform 9.5 miles of a “soft, natural river into a concrete, high-velocity channel” and insert five new bridges into the river landscape. “This shows a total disregard for climate change and environmental science” and also for the Army Corps own new nature-based engineering approach, Colón Izquierdo argued.
Rio Piedras / Edmundo “Mundy” Colón Izquierdo
To better advocate for a nature-based approach that can make Puerto Rico more resilient to flooding, Colón Izquierdo has joined with scientists, advocates, and scholars who created Alianza Por La Cuenca del Rio Piedras, guided by the message “el rio esta vivo,” or “the river is alive.” While taking on the Army Corps, a complex bureaucracy, is analogous to “David attempting to defeat Goliath,” Colón Izquierdo believes the effort is critical because the design is “many decades behind in its conception.” In fact, the design is from 1992 and environmental impact statement from 1993; the project was resuscitated after Hurricane Maria decimated the island and exposed the vulnerability of so many living in Puerto Rico’s floodplains. By organizing design charettes and educating the public about nature-based options to improving the safety and health of the river, Colón Izquierdo seeks to build capacity, find leverage, and “get a seat at the table” — and perhaps save other rivers in Puerto Rico from the same fate.
Rio Piedras design charrette / Edmundo “Mundy” Colón Izquierdo
Andrea Johnson: Imagining New Forms of Community-owned Renewable Energy
Sunset Park, Brooklyn / Andrea Johnson
Bounded at one side by the Bronx-Queens Expressway, the neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn includes a jail, mechanic shops, warehouses, and vacant land, explained Andrea Johnson, a visiting assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. A maritime hub, the community is home to the Brooklyn Terminal, a massive industrial and commercial building that is now covered in a solar array cooperatively managed. This array got Johnson thinking about the hidden energy systems that comprise the community that can be re-imagined to provide “collective social value.”
When electricity demand in NYC increases, gas-driven peakers in Sunset Park start up, which contributes to the noxious air quality in the neighborhood, which includes mostly people of color. UPROSE, a community group, and other local organizations, have been trying to get the New York Power Authority to permanently close the peakers in favor of renewable energy, but the authority has only put them on stand by. Johnson said “decommissioning the peakers and replacing with publicly-owned renewable energy would lead to a more just and equitable energy system.” If decarbonization occurs through community-run renewable energy, then people in Sunset Park could benefit from electricity surges.
“There is a role for landscape architects here that needs to be seized. We can get ahead of the policy and innovate from how energy is perceived, stored, and used.” She analyzed and discovered 75 megawatts of energy could be generated on public rooftops in the community. “Back-up storage sources could then be spread across the public sphere.” Johnson and her students at CUNY have been imagining other new solutions that involve wind turbines, micro-grids, utility-scale batteries, a “gravity park” in which heavy blocks are raised to create kinetic energy that can be stored, and other systems that can both generate and store energy and serve as cleaner, more just forms of peakers.
Sunset Park renewable energy and storage concept / Andrea JohnsonGravity Park concept / Andrea Johnson
Diego Bermúdez: A Comprehensive Plan for Protecting Bogotá’s Cultural Landscapes
The savanna of Bogotá / Diego Bermúdez
Bogotá, Colombia, is a city of 9 million people and continues to expand rapidly at its periphery. This sprawl threatens the historic Bogotá savanna, an important high-altitude wetland landscape. Diego Bermúdez, principal and partner, Bermúdez Arquitectos, in Bogotá, explained that 2,500 years ago, the area formed the vast floodplains of the Bogotá River and its many tributaries. Pre-Hispanic settlers, the indigenous Muisca people, who lived in small villages, built canals and berms to create flood-proof zones for growing food. “They lived amid 100,000 acres of wetlands and were amphibious people.”
When the Spanish arrived in the 17th century, they removed the Muisca and subdivided the land to scale up industrial food production. Farms were organized into grids, with protective canals, to increase yields. By the 1920s, the government created a water management district that was meant to preserve the irrigation systems. Those layers of water management history are now threatened by rampant sprawl and development into the savanna region. Bermúdez said the city’s population is expected to increase to 10.5 million in 2035 and reach upwards of 14 million by 2050.
Expected urban expansion into agricultural areas of Bogotá / Diego Bermúdez
To protect the savanna landscape, which grows 40 percent of the city’s food, Bermúdez proposes a strategy that first protects the historic canals, which are also hubs for biodiversity, including 200 species of birds. “Water management can be a tool for reimagining the future.” As he spent a year traveling to these agricultural communities and also meeting the developers who are urbanizing the area, he found “new hope,” because “people want to protect the water management system for flooding, biodiversity, and recreation.” Bermúdez has been working to connect the disparate players and layers of plans into a regional plan that can guide development away from the savanna, create protective zones for the historic agricultural landscapes, and further densify the core of Bogotá.
A new layered regional plan for Bogotá / Diego Bermúdez
Map from the 1862 edition of Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom by Frederick Law Olmsted. / Courtesy of the PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography at Cornell University
In the final decades of the 19th century, the new art of landscape architecture was born, in large part due to the efforts of Frederick Law Olmsted. This new profession offered “very specific responses” to the social, political, and environmental challenges of the time, argued Charles Waldheim, Hon. ASLA, the John E. Irving professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in a panel discussion organized as part of the year-long Olmsted 200 program. “Landscape architecture was radical during his time — a whole new field focused on social progress and reform.”
Before founding the profession of landscape architecture, Olmsted had been a reporter and superintendent of Central Park in New York City, a commission he had won with a design created with Calvert Vaux. Waldheim argued that the 1857 economic shock was a “hinge point” that created demand for a “whole new set of practices, focused on social justice, equity, and public reform.” Economic change created the conditions for landscape architecture.
According to John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard, Olmsted was long interested in social reform, particularly in the South, where he traveled as a reporter for The New York Daily Times, which later became The New York Times. His reporting formed the basis of three books, which were later packaged in a single, more staunchly abolitionist book on the eve of the Civil War: The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton And Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861. “As a writer focused on slavery, he illuminated the South for the North,” Stauffer said. And his writings has enormous political impact: “Olmsted’s books convinced England to not recognize the Confederacy.”
Other than the first-person narratives by slaves in the South, Olmsted’s writings are the most “detailed and accurate slave narratives” available, Stauffer contends. While Olmsted wasn’t an abolitionist at least at first, he “gradually become anti-slavery.”
His early focus was on “improving the land, self, and society — and he championed restoration and regeneration.” He believed American regeneration required infrastructure, which in turn required broad public support and engagement with communities. He wanted to see the South and the rest of the country build public and democratically accessible canals, roads, town squares, parks, schools, and libraries.
While town squares and parks “partially existed in the South,” he found through his travels there were “very few roads and schools, and no restaurants or libraries.” The South had no public realm; it was all private land in the form of massive plantations. Through his depictions in his articles and books, he subtly spoke out about life on southern plantations and slavery.
He painted a portrait of plantations as “primitives places” where everyone working there was “mostly illiterate.” He saw plantations as small universes upon themselves, feudal societies, where the plantation owner was “judge and executioner.” He was horrified by the southern criminal system in which no slave was allowed to testify. His time living on plantations drove him to call for “public infrastructure for a democratic community.”
In the South, capital was invested in private land and human bodies and little in anything else. “Olmsted saw frontier conditions everywhere, dilapidation and carelessness.” While Southern romantic visions of an immaculate white house in a plantation were widespread, he found the reality was “less than 1 percent of the population were wealthy white planters; the rest lived in rude dwellings.” No aesthetic improvements were made for the non-elites, which created a “sense of backwardness” in the whole society.
Olmsted was anti-slavery, but he also wrote statements that are understood to be racist. While in his reporting he sought to be balanced — reporting both the perspective of the white landowner and the slave — he made comments such as “some slaves prefer being slaves.” But in his writings, he was also sympathetic to Black yeoman and subsistence farmers, Stauffer said.
Olmsted was a reformer in political, aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, and material senses. “His reform vision took an aesthetic form” in the design of a system of public parks and boulevards in so many cities. “Central Park is how he would have liked to improve the South, with all classes mixing.” However, it’s important to recognize that the creation of Central Park involved the displacement of Seneca Village, a Black middle class community, by the New York City government.
According to Sara Zewde, assistant professor in the practice of landscape architecture at Harvard University and founder of Studio Zewde, Olmsted forged the new field of landscape architecture as a way to “triangulate between his interests in farming, law, and politics.” There was no existing profession that brought all his interests together. And while the prevailing narrative about Olmsted is that he was first a journalist and then pivoted to become landscape architect, Zewde sees a “linearity in these interests.”
At the start of the Civil War, Olmsted was working on the same social reform and anti-slavery causes through his writings, advocacy, and design projects. “If we look chronologically at his works, he went back and forth between travel, advocacy, and landscape architecture practice. They were all very much part of the same project.”
For Zewde, a landscape architect, educator, and “Black woman raised in the South,” this is perhaps Olmsted’s most important legacy to the field of landscape architecture — he demonstrated its potential to work at multiple scales and in multiple formats, through writing, advocacy, and design.
With the beginning of the Civil War, he thought the institution of slavery was “corrosive” on southern society. “People who owned slaves had lost the ability to investment in themselves or their society. The health of soils, the landscape, and economy were all skewed. There was no innovation or culture, art, or civic ground.” Leaving Central Park while it’s still being constructed to re-write his articles for Cotton Kingdom is the “clearest articulation of how singular his interests are,” Zewde argued.
He also produced a spatial analysis of the Cotton Kingdom, mapping the concentration of enslaved people and the health of each southern state economy in order to show the “inverse relationship between ecological health and the distribution of resources and slavery.”
In 2013, Zewde followed the path of Olmsted’s journeys through the South to better understand his contribution to landscape-scale thinking. Retracing his steps, Zewde reached the conclusion that the socio-economic conditions Olmsted witnessed remain persistent 165 years later, but the physical conditions have changed. The landscapes of slavery have been “recast, obscured, and erased.”
Retracing Olmsted’s steps in the South / Sara ZewdeRetracing Olmsted’s steps in the South / Sara ZewdeRetracing Olmsted’s steps in the South / Sara ZewdeRetracing Olmsted’s steps in the South / Sara ZewdeRetracing Olmsted’s steps in the South / Sara Zewde
Zewde wondered what Olmsted would think of landscape architecture being “used as a tool or weapon to untell stories.” For example, visiting Whole Field Square in Savannah, Georgia, Olmsted “took great care in transcribing the names on headstones in an African burial ground. He was very descriptive and expository.” But while visiting the site, Zewde found “no sign or marker of the existence of what he found.” Landscape architecture had recast the story of the place. Talking to visitors, “everyone had no idea what Olmsted witnessed or that were Black bodies buried there. The headstones had been removed to another part of the city, the ‘other side of the tracks.'”
Whole Field Square, Savannah, Georgia / Sara Zewde
Olmsted advocated for how the profession should be used — in the same tradition as his vision for reform. “Olmsted offered a methodological proposition — a multi-scalar approach looking at macro-ecologies and economies, down to the level of social interaction.” Following his model, landscape architecture is as focused on the “national state of democracy as what that means for a path in the park.”
In the Q&A, Waldheim noted that the idea of site design and politics as somehow in opposition is false. For Olmsted, “they were one in the same.”
For example, Stauffer noted that Olmsted was deeply suspicious of “privatized things,” like he found everywhere in the South. “He criticized that he couldn’t find a hotel room or restaurant anywhere on his travels.” For him, to improve a “community aesthetically and culturally was also political.”
While he isn’t sure Olmsted read Frederick Douglass’ writings on aesthetics and reform, he believed Olmsted, like Douglass, thought that “true art breaks down racial barriers because it highlights the essential equality of all people. Douglass’ aesthetic vision was: within unity, there is diversity, and within diversity, there is unity.” The poet Walt Whitman had a similar sentiment with “every blade of grass. Out of many one. Every human being is different, but equal despite differences.”
Zewde said in his personal letters Olmsted was much more “forthcoming and explicit” about his objections to slavery, but in his public writings was “more subversive in order to not lose his southern audience.”
His writings would describe the aesthetic qualities of the land, such as the light at dusk, which was then “paired with a shocking description of torture of a slave.” His writings were also “peppered with compelling conversations with enslaved people,” asking them what is most important to them. He relayed their “striving for life” amid details of the landscape. The “proposition is quite profound” — life and freedom are also about aesthetics. “The cultural and aesthetic framing of life makes it worth living.”
Speaking to one enslaved person, Olmsted asks them what they hope for if they became free. They said they wish to “have a home, plot of land, and a wife, to work the land.” Zewde believes this was a notable moment for Olmsted, who then carried these ideas back to New York and his future work creating public spaces.
The entire hour-long session posted by Olmsted 200 can also be watched below:
This Olmsted 200 program was co-sponsored and co-organized by ASLA and the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA).
