from New York Times
From Ruin and Artifice, Landscapes Reborn
By ANNE RAVER
Published: February 24, 2005
THE name Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who built Central Park when Fifth Avenue was no more than a dirt road, is often on the lips of landscape architects these days.
Trained as a civil engineer, Olmsted had no qualms about moving tons of rock and soil to build the artificial hills and streams in the fake wilderness that he knew urban dwellers would hunger for, long after the real forest was cut down.
Now his heirs stand on rooftops, parking garages and old dumps recalling not his pastoral landscapes, but his vision: that a great park will bring development and economic prosperity. And that it takes time.
"Fresh Kills will be three times as big as Central Park," James Corner, a landscape architect, said last week, standing on one of the highly engineered mounds of capped garbage at that former landfill, which sprawls over 2,200 acres on Staten Island. Mr. Corner's firm, Field Operations, is designing and building the park.
It took 53 years to build these mountains of garbage. It will take at least 30 years to build up the thin soil that covers them, enrich its sparse habitats and create the amenities - from meandering trails to ball fields and restaurants - to draw visitors.
"Cities are clamoring for distinctive open space projects," Mr. Corner said. "Politicians are beginning to see that grand public projects, while they may have a high price tag, can yield real dividends in terms of a city's competitive edge."
Fresh Kills is one of 23 landscapes featured in "Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape," which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, organized by Peter Reed, a curator in the department of architecture and design, documents a sea change in landscape architecture.
No longer the handmaidens of architects, landscape architects are building huge parks, some on a 19th-century scale, on polluted industrial spaces like Duisburg-Nord, the former Thyssen Steelworks in the Ruhr district of Germany. Here, Peter Latz, a German designer, has embraced the old blast furnaces as monumental memories of the past. Rock climbers scale the ore bunkers, scuba divers swim in the old cooling pools, gardens and wild weeds bloom.
In the exhibition catalog Mr. Reed acknowledges Gas Works Park, in Seattle, designed in the 1970's by Richard Haag, as the precedent for Duisburg-Nord and others. Seattle had hired Mr. Haag to draw up a master plan for the 20-acre park, assuming that the leftover gas plant would be razed. "The ground was very polluted," Mr. Haag recalled. "The buildings were boarded up, the place was fenced off. It was a desperate, desolate place."
But he was attracted to it. He camped out among the ruins, and he pored over the old records. He searched for the power of the place.
"I'm always looking for the most sacred thing on the site," Mr. Haag recalled. "But there was no forest or a brook. I thought, 'I'm going to save those two towers, whatever I do.' "
He spent the next 30 years trying to convince city officials and the Environmental Protection Agency that over time, aerating the soil and growing plants would clean waste from the soil. That was long before phytoremediation - using plants to do just that - had filtered into universities and public works departments.
For more than 30 years a heavy wire fence has kept people from wandering among the towers. Now, thanks to the lobbying of local parks advocates, the award-winning park has been designated a landmark by the city and state.
And last year Seattle's City Council voted to fix the towers and take down the fence.
"We hope it can be done by the Fourth of July," Mr. Haag said.
Groundswell also examines the extraordinary plazas that are transforming small, derelict spaces in cities. In Rotterdam, for instance, Adriaan Geuze, the director of West 8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, has turned the roof of a parking garage into a lively, uncluttered space.
"Rotterdam had been bombed during the war, so every building is new and has a lack of identity," Mr. Geuze said, speaking from his office in Rotterdam. He looked to the city's port for a vital sense of self.
"We thought the new square could be a recollection of the port, so we created the mosaic floor using old material from boats and pontoons and decks," he said. There are oversize, comfortable benches waiting for the readers, the lovers, the spectators.
"We created a public space as a void," Mr. Geuze said, knowing that people would fill it: actors, musicians, peddlers, soccer players. There are no trees here either. The world has way too many "shallow landscapes, with every square meter filled with benches and beautiful plants," Mr. Geuze said.
Groundswell also takes a look at Weiss/Manfredi's design for the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, to be completed next year. Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, who are based in New York, sought to connect Seattle back to its waterfront through the construction of a zigzagging land bridge that spans a highway and railroad and joins three separate pieces of land.
The eight-and-half-acre site, built on an old gas storage and transfer station, descends 40 feet to the water, where the old sea wall is to be removed to allow salmon to spawn on submerged, algae-covered terraces. Works by artists like Alexander Calder and Richard Serra will be as much a part of the landscape as the Western cedars and aspen, planted to evoke the Northwest forest. And the design makes no attempt to hide the infrastructure.
These new parks sit comfortably among the traffic jams and city lights.
Up on the grassy mound at Fresh Kills, Mr. Corner looked down on the surprisingly clear creek. He could see the rush hour traffic crawling soundlessly south on the West Shore Expressway; the Bayonne Bridge arching westward to New Jersey, the Manhattan skyline to the north, Long Island stretching east into the hazy Atlantic.
Mr. Corner wants to put scrims around the towers of the flare station, which collects methane gas from the capped mounds. "We would light them at night," he said. "You would see them like lanterns in the black void."
Just as Mr. Haag planted clover at Gas Works Park, Mr. Corner will plant cover crops like mustard, rapeseed and kale, which not only help clean pollutants from the soil but actually build organic material.
"Over three or four years we could add four to six inches to the soil," Mr. Corner said.
That's the beginning of what he means by "growing" a landscape. And just as poplar and red oak move into old fields, these mustard fields will evolve into a far more diverse habitat of plants and countless other species.
Mr. Corner's team will build a memorial to the thousands of workers who cleared the remains of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. He pointed to the highest mound, where two earthworks, the height and width of the towers, will be laid on the ground.
"You will walk up one at a 6 percent incline, then turn and walk up the other," Mr. Corner said. "It's an anti-monument, in the sense that the real experience comes through walking."
It will take the average person 15 minutes, walking through wildflower meadows and under a big sky and a horizon as far as the eye can see.
"When you get to the top, the highest point on the site, you'll be on axis to Manhattan," Mr. Corner said.
The towers are still shockingly absent from that skyline. But here, on top of the old dump, where landscape architects are helping nature reclaim the site, it's a good place for healing and reflection.
Groundswell casts a wide net, from Staten Island to Beirut, to remind people of another ancient role of public places, as sacred sites. But the rowdy, joyful public square is back too - on Rollerblades, on the wastelands.
"Groundswell" runs through May 16 at the Museum of Modern Art: (212) 708-9400. |
