When we spoke to landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh in December 2009 about Brooklyn Bridge Park, just before the first phase of the project opened to the public, he spoke about what it means to design something that continues to live and grow, and how this particular site offered an opportunity to completely reimagine what parks should be in today’s cities. Next week, on Tuesday, November 22, at 7pm, Van Valkenburgh will elaborate on his ideas about design, ecology and landscape across a variety of scales and locations, in “Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens.” The talk, organized by the Architectural League and co-sponsored by the Cooper Union, will be followed by a conversation with Kate Orff, partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and Vice President for Landscape at the League. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Read on for more information (check archleague.org for the latest about the event):

Current Work
Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
“Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens”
Introduced and moderated by Kate Orff
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
7:00pm
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
1.5 CEUs

Michael Van Valkenburgh will present the recent work of his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Based in Brooklyn and Cambridge, MVVA is a landscape architecture firm, which works on projects in scale from the city to the campus to the garden. MVVA’s commissions have sought to achieve an “ecological urbanism,” with projects such as the Master Plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Wellesley College, and built work like Mill Race Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park.

The office, led by its three principals, Laura Solano, Matthew Urbanski, and Michael Van Valkenburgh with a staff of 65, works closely with urban planners, architects, engineers, and ecologists. The firm’s projects have received numerous honors, including the ASLA Design Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects; the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York City; Progressive Architecture Awards; and awards from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada. MVVA has also won multiple high-profile design competitions including Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto, and The City + The Arch + The River competition for St. Louis and East St. Louis. Van Valkenburgh received the 2003 National Design Award in Environmental Design from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and was the 2010 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Van Valkenburgh earned a B.S. in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, and a M.F.A. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Van Valkenburgh teaches landscape design as well as the use of plants as design material. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Landscape Architects.

Kate Orff is a partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and is the Vice President for Landscape of the Architectural League of New York.

Tickets 
Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Member tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program. Non-members may purchase tickets here.

Organized by the Architectural League of New York. Co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

Video from the September 2010 Urban Omnibus feature Park as Process: Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Philip Nobel in Metropolis mourns the loss of the unplanned, unexpected and improvised memorial that was visitors’ and tourists’ ritualistic walk around the perimeter of the site: “A search for meaning enacted as a circular walk around a forbidden center, a quest with high expectations ending in futility, was an excellent, instructive, fitting (if accidental, unscripted) mechanism to aid in processing an event, like all fresh violence, that has no inherent message or palliative truth.”

Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post stops short of declaring success, instead waiting to see how New Yorkers incorporate the site into the fabric of the city. Kennicott also visits the memorial to Flight 93 at Shanksville, calling it elegant and evocative, but voicing concerns over how it will be affected by the future construction of a visitors center. Also for the Washington Post, Manuel Roig-Franzia visits the Pentagon memorial, which opened in 2008, and deems it “one of the most compelling in a city packed with memorials.”

The September issue of Architectural Record, dedicated to the transformation of New York in the past decade (which we looked at in more depth earlier this week), includes a critical look at the development and current state of the World Trade Center site by Michael Sorkin. Lamenting the lack of architectural ambition, the “melding of memory and profit,” and unfortunate accommodations to security demands, Sorkin expects the site to be “one very strange and unpleasant place, overscaled and aggressively bereft of humane meaning.”

Architizer looks back at the history of the site’s design in “The Remaking of the World Trade Center,” a slideshow that walks us through Libeskind’s original selected design, a number of competing proposals and Larry Silverstein’s commissions of SOM, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki.

Gizmodo asks and answers the question of “How New York City Built a Massive $3.8 Billion Underground transit Station in the WTC’s Footprints.” From the slurry walls of “the bathtub” to the construction of the transportation hub, above and below ground, this installment of the “Monster Machines” series looks at how this huge transportation center is becoming a reality.

REFLECTIONS
The New York Times‘ “The Reckoning: A Special Report on the Costs and Consequences of 9/11” offers an extensive look at the effects, physical, emotional, political and social, of the events of 9/11, broken down into nine substantial chapters. ”The Decade” reflects on coping, expectations and individual meaning; “the hour of human decency” amidst grief and war; the rise, the life and the fall of the towers in photos; and what lessons New Yorkers have learned. ”That Day” presents selections from the September 11, 2001 Oral History Project, which compiled over 600 interviews with city residents describing their experiences, and asks readers to contribute where they were and how they felt when they first heard the news. ”The War Abroad” focuses on “scenes from an unfinished history” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the men and women who enlisted just after 9/11, fear and the perception of the threat of Al Qaeda, and the lingering questions of whether or not it was a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq. ”The War at Home” tallies up the $3.3 trillion of estimated cost to the US in physical damage, war funding, homeland security and economic impact; looks at the unanticipated costs of our (over?)reaction to the 9/11 attacks; and reflects on civil liberties, law enforcement, immigration policies and priorities, and the physical manifestations of our heightened security measures post-9/11. ”Remembrance” focuses on how individuals have dealt with grief and memory, from the tokens they kept to the messages they sent, also visiting neighborhoods that were hit hard and talking to some of the 3,000 children who lost a parent that day.

Sky Cowboys | Photo by Damon Winter/New York Times

“Rebuilding” looks at the mechanics of the new memorial plaza, above and underground; presents a portrait gallery of the workers at the World Trade Center site; and presents a three-part look at the ”Sky Cowboys,” the bold, agile and highly-skilled ironworkers who are building the new towers while perched a thousand feet above the city. “Muslims Now” looks at the complex challenges faced by young American Muslims who came of age in the past decade; how the Arab Spring uprisings have redefined the image of the Arab world; and what some small communities are doing to combat Islamophobia. ”9/11 State of Mind” offers a look at the lexicon of 9/11, how schoolchildren around the world are learning about the day and its aftermath and, in “Outdone by Reality,” an argument that art and culture were not significantly altered by 9/11, in part due to the enormity of the tragedy. To conclude this special report, the Times team revisits “Portraits of Grief,” a interview project started in 2001 to gather stories about those who died on 9/11. In “Portraits Redrawn,” the team revisits some of the families they first interviewed ten years ago, and Mark S. Getzfred, the brother of a Navy captain killed at the Pentagon, shares his family’s story.

TIME Magazine has launched “Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience,” an archive of 40 interviews with “the people who were most directly affected — and the ones who most directly affected us,” all conducted between June 1 and August 26 and each accompanied by a portrait by photographer Marco Grob. The first question posed to each person interviewed — first responders, survivors, politicians, servicemen and women, journalists — was the same: “Where were you on September 11, 2001?” Also included in TIME‘s coverage is an essay by Kurt Anderson, and a look back at the photos that define the event in our historical memory, selected by photo editors, photographers and writers, as well as a series of previously-unpublished photographs of the day from James Nachtwey.

Boatlift, a short documentary on the evacuation of Lower Manhattan by water, has been produced by The Road to Resilience, a project dedicated to advancing ideas in emergency management and crisis planning. With subways shut down and tunnels out of Manhattan closed, people turned to the Harbor to escape the catastrophe. When the US Coast Guard made the call to all available boats willing and able to help, tugboats, ferries, private boats, vessels large and small, gathered at Governors Island to assist a makeshift effort to move nearly 500,000 people out of Lower Manhattan in less than 9 hours, the largest sea evacuation in history. (via The Infrastructurist) For more on the maritime story of 9/11, from evacuation to supply delivery to rubble removal, check out Portside New York’s exhibition Mariners’ Response to 9/11.

New York Magazine has compiled an “Encyclopedia of 9/11,” with 92 entries spanning names, places, phrases and events. From “Abbottabad” to “Zazi, Najibullah,” the editors look back at the significant moments and gradual changes of the past ten years. Despite the name, the editors acknowledge that the issue is not comprehensive: “It’s neither a first draft of history nor a verdict — just a set of impressions from some point in between.”

WNYC, WQXR and the Jerome L. Greene Space have produced Decade 9/11, a series of on air, online and live content relevant to the tenth anniversary of the attacks. The Brian Lehrer Show has launched “10 Conversations About the 10th Anniversary,” with thinkers, leaders and “regular New Yorkers.” Radio Rookies gathers the stories of six young people “who are part of the last generation of young people who remember 9/11 as a lived experience, rather than a historic event.” Studio360 interviews illustrator and writer Maira Kalman about Fireboat, her children’s book that incorporates the day into its story. For the many stories, features and discussions from Decade 9/11, click here.

Tribute in Light 2011, photographed from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, by Michal Jaszewski

EVENTS
To commemorate the anniversary of 9/11, a slew of events, performances, remembrances and exhibitions have been scheduled. A few highlights are below, but you can also head over to WNYC for a far more thorough list.

• Remembrances: Tribute in Light, one of the most well-recognized memorials of 9/11, will be on view (perhaps for the last time?). On Saturday, September 10, at 8:46am, Hand in Hand invites thousands to come to Lower Manhattan to join hands and create a human chain, representing unity and resilience. Dispersed Memorial is a project that will distribute thousands of glass plates with inscribed messages around the city, to wherever the towers would have been visible, as a collective dedication to the victims, paired with an online memorial that allows a more lasting record of the ephemeral installation.
• Exhibitions: The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Museum of Chinese in America are presenting Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?, an installation by Xu Bing utilizing dust collected from Lower Manhattan in the days following the attack. A group exhibition at MoMA PS1 explores the resonance of the attacks, while the New York Historical Society presents photographs, both amateur and professional, documenting the immediate aftermath. The Brooklyn Arts Council is “Rethinking Memorial” with a series of ten interactive “memorial stations” installed throughout the city.
• Screenings: The Museum of the Moving Image is presenting a special screening of Man on Wire, the captivating documentary about Phillipe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. The Museum of the City of New York will screen In Memoriam, a documentary produced by HBO in 2002. Ten Years of Terror, a film reflecting on violence and the terror it produces, will be on view at the Guggenheim.
• Concerts: Commemorative concerts and dance performances are being held by Symphony Space, Avery Fisher Hall, and the Joyce Theater with LMCC.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Late last year, Michael Van Valkenburgh, principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), showed us around the massive construction site that stretched along Brooklyn’s waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Avenue. It was a cold day in early December and the hum of hydraulic excavators and tractors evoked the site’s industrial past more than its recreational future. But even so, with the undulating topography of Pier 1 in place and almost ready to open to the public, Van Valkenburgh conjured an image of just how much use he expected the park to see in its first open summer. The six months since Pier 1 and the four months since Pier 6 opened have certainly borne out Van Valkenburgh’s prediction that Brooklyn Bridge Park will give “Brooklyners a park that they desperately need.” Listen to more of what Van Valkenburgh has to say about the twelve year (and counting) planning and design process in the video below. The word “process” is key, especially for a landscape of this complexity. Construction continues on the remaining phases of the project, scheduled to open over the next two to three years. But even after construction is complete, the park’s role in the public life of the city will only have just begun to emerge.

Like any new urban park, particularly in a place like New York where the supply of available land is so constricted, this park is about more than open space. It’s about infrastructure, industry, environment, government and (of course) real estate. According to Gullivar Shepard, an architect at MVVA who has been with the project from its initial planning stages through the design and construction, the site is “a bundle of amazing complexity: years and years of leftover right-of-ways, infrastructure claims on the site, pieces of actual working infrastructure that have to be maintained. So we can’t just change the program of the land to accommodate park users, [the park] has to… hold up the functioning of the city.” In The New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff writes that “Much as Central Park embodied Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of American democracy on the eve of the Civil War, Brooklyn Bridge Park… is an attempt to come to terms with the best and worst of our era: on the one hand, concern for the environment and an appreciation for the beauty of urban life and infrastructure; on the other, the relentless encroachment of private interests on the public realm.”

As for the former — the mutual reinforcing of environmentalism and urbanism — the design of Brooklyn Bridge Park demonstrates what Andrew Blum has described as a ”a concern for ecological processes that is not merely illustrative, treating nature as if it were a museum exhibit, but rather that is necessarily rooted in a holistic understanding of site ecology.” For Blum, this approach “suggest[s] that nature could be legible as an integrated part of urban experience — a perspective crucial to reimagining cities as the keystone of a more sustainable way of life.” Sustainability, it seems, encompasses more than materials or environmental performance, it becomes a way to reorient the public perception of the city and how it works. That said, plenty in this park takes a literal understanding of sustainability to a new level: the park benches are made from wood salvaged from demolished shipping terminal buildings on the site; the “Granite Prospect” is made of stones recycled from the Roosevelt Island Bridge; stormwater-based micro-environments support diverse ecosystems.

As for the latter — the increasing reliance on private monies to provide public goods — the planning of Brooklyn Bridge Park explicitly acknowledges that the maintenance costs over time will far outweigh the construction costs. The proposed solution — up to 20% of the park land can be developed to generate revenue — led to fierce debate (and a court case that argued a violation of the public trust doctrine). In 2002, four years after the masterplanning process began, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki signed an agreement to provide the land and to create the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation (BBPDC) as a subsidiary of Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). As the park’s developer (and MVVA’s client) the BBPDC would also develop commercial properties to fund maintenance and operational needs. Twelve days before Pier 1 opened, the nature of this city-state partnership changed dramatically. Governor Paterson relinquished the State’s stake in the project, effectively handing control of the process to the City. Reporting in the Architect’s Newspaper, Matt Chaban refers to this event, rather than the park’s opening, as the “real occasion for celebration.” The announcement of the new deal re-affirms the need for the park to be financially self-sustaining and requires looking for alternative revenue sources beyond the site’s residential developments.

Parks are designed to evolve, to change and grow over time. In this case, that evolution will be marked by the growth of trees and plants, by the increase in New Yorkers’ awareness of their relationship to the water and our city’s industrial past, and, perhaps, by the shifting demands of the market. Most commentators, including Blum and Ourousoff, invoke Frederic Law Olmsted and Central Park when they talk about Brooklyn Bridge Park. We’ve had 143 years to watch that park evolve and respond to the changing circumstances of the city that has alternately celebrated and neglected it. But yet when it comes to new parks, we still tend to talk about them primarily on opening day. In an effort to keep the critical conversation about public space active, Urban Omnibus likes to check in on projects at different stages in their life spans, when the buzz has quieted, when the beauty and richness of experience has begin to inscribe itself into public consciousness, and when questions still remain. -C.S.

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All images courtesy of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

The American Society of Landscape Architects held their Annual Meeting & Expo this month in Washington, D.C. This year is the 100th anniversary of Landscape Architecture magazine and the District’s famous Heights of Buildings Act, which, incidentally, limits heights based on street width, not the Washington Monument.

The Meeting theme, “Earth Air Water Fire DESIGN,” was chosen to acknowledge landscape architecture’s unique position as a profession in which designers are trained to work in harmony with the natural elements. The title did not ultimately serve as much of an organizing principle, but there were several relevant threads that emerged across panels and sessions: integration of data with landscape, water management and design, urban agriculture, green/complete streets, public parks, and a down economy.

Dr. Richard Jackson | Courtesy American Society of Landscape Architects

Landscape Architecture and Public Health
Every profession likes to see itself at the center of, and therefore a logical connector among, the otherwise siloed activities of related disciplines. And while the Meeting’s sessions often kept to that reasoning, the panelists were galvanized by civic and environmental responsibility rather than egotism. Dr. Richard Jackson, one of the weekend’s headliners, argued that landscape architects are responsible for our designed environment and by extension, our behavior, health, and national economy. A medical doctor and former head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he argued that the obesity epidemic is a result of having “engineered exercise out of our lives. We have medicalized the troubles that people are having in adapting [to our auto-centered] environment,” rather than recognizing our declining health as an indicator of poor design. Though his talk offered few design revelations, the message successfully energized the crowd in the continuation of bike- and pedestrian-friendly work. New York City’s “Active Design Guidelines,” for example, offer evidence of the increasing attention paid to this problem.

Renewable Energy: Scenery Management, Social Barriers and the Landscape Architect
A panel on the policies of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), titled “Renewable Energy: Scenery Management, Social Barriers and the Landscape Architect,” might interest those engaged in the debate about the 1,200-foot Vornado Tower that would block the view of the Empire State Building from Chelsea and New Jersey. During the panel, Kate Schwarzler of multidisciplinary Otak explained the BLM’s visual resource inventory, which covers some 50 million acres of land and is based on a specific set of scenic quality characteristics. Any new energy project is now judged by these characteristics and by a less precise political-sensitivity scale. It made me wonder whether opposition to the midtown project, granted a height increase because of its proximity to Penn Station, would have been stiffer if the Empire State Building were blocked from downtown. The saddest part of the presentation was the camouflaging paint palette developed to make power lines disappear, lest Westerners have their perception of wilderness spoiled by visual awareness of electricity infrastructure. Are New Yorkers better off having our infrastructure buried? Should developers be forced to submit building renderings based on proscribed street-level viewsheds and climatic conditions to balance the twilight images so carefully designed to mollify the public?

Herbert Dreiseitl | Courtesy American Society of Landscape Architects

The Promise of Water
There were a lot of sessions that fulfilled the more technical aspects of continuing education, but Herbert Dreiseitl’s talk “The Promise of Water” was, on the contrary, practically metaphysical. He demonstrated how water poured against a flat panel starts out straight and then develops kinks and new directions. Somehow this exercise felt sublime. He proselytized us on how the structures of water repeated at all scales. It was an hour and a half retrospective starting with small sculptures in city parks that captured light or reflected sound just so and moved to restorations of whole rivers that changed the public’s interaction with the ecosystem.  Like all good promoters, his book Recent Waterscapes: Planning, Building and Designing with Water was for sale, for $99.00.

Fresh Kills Park | Courtesy of James Corner Field Operations

Fresh Kills Park: An Extraordinary 21st Century Urban Landscape
One of the most fascinating panels – I took six pages of notes – was the discussion of Fresh Kills park by Tatiana Coulika and Ellen Neises of James Corner Field Operations titled “Work in Process.” (Click here to read about and listen to James Corner presenting his work as part of the Architectural League’s annual Current Work lecture series.) Change over time is one of the compelling lenses of landscape architecture and appropriate to Fresh Kills given that Field Operations started work on the site nearly a decade ago and that construction won’t be complete for another thirty years.

“The site that we meet is a process landscape,” says Neises. “The whole site is a series of experiments over time from 1948 [when the landfill opened]. They started with one set of technologies using clays, then plastic liners, retrofitted as environmental laws changed.  [It’s a] patchwork of experiments.” These industrial process experiments will continue into the future as well.  Only three of six landfill mounds are closed and capped. Methane captured from the site continues to power 2,500 homes for heating and cooking while waste transfer and compost facilities will remain open. Any landfill in New York State is considered active and monitored by regulators for thirty years after it closes.

Even where the processes have stopped, the site is significantly altered. “The steepness and closeness of six landfill mounds grading down to a network of creeks is something that you’d never have in nature,” says Neises. “The moisture regime is so structured and unnatural that each little microhydrology zone” has to be dealt with individually. Field Operations found a natural equivalent to the thin cap of soils on top of the mounds in the morainal soil conditions to which formed coastal New York. But even as they meticulously work with biologists to collect seeds from intact native plant communities across Staten Island, they eschew the tone of return to a static past restoration usually implies. Nor does the restoration framework have an answer for dealing with soil on top of a landfill that is hot from the anaerobic activity inside the cap.

Rendering of Fresh Kills Park | Courtesy of James Corner Field Operations

Instead, Field Operations is planning a number of procedures to address and integrate the industrial processes of the site into ecologically beneficial and visible transformations that are ongoing. They are using a machine called an imprinter “to create micro-topography to stimulate the hooves of ungulates to create grooves for seedlings.” To create soils (regulators wanted two feet of high-grade organic soil everywhere) and propagate plants, they are looking to industrial agriculture models. While the use of machines is practical for working a 3.4 square mile site, early large-scale land works are framed as choreography to attract visitors. This design intention and the duration of the project make real the often-hollow language of public as collaborators. Coulika describes the process as “an open-ended landscape where immediate consumption and fixed control becomes temporal, ephemeral. [Instead we] promote opportunism over time.” (This notion was undermined a bit by images of the colossal mining equipment remaining on site as static, sculptural elements after the work was finished. One clever but facile idea was to hang a huge sign from an excavator, turning it into a highway billboard.)

Another process that will unfold over the next thirty years and will particularly impact the low-lying site is climate change. When I asked about it, Neises said that they were particularly attuned to affects like sea level rise, but that environmental regulators were more concerned with establishing wetlands now than preparing plant communities for future conditions.

As sophisticated as Neises and Coulika were at discussing the environmental and theoretical constraints of the site, they were equally adept at recognizing the political ecology of the project as a park for New York City on the edge of state lines and in a secluded residential area. They forwent technically advanced materials like bio solids because “keeping the tenuous coalition together is more important than pioneering with smart techniques.” They significantly rearranged the original circulation patterns to favor surrounding Staten Island communities who “hated the idea of non-New Yorkers coming in and using their facilities.” The idea of creating a duel-state agency like the Port Authority? “Doesn’t make sense because New Jersey is broker than New York.”

Ultimately, party affiliation among officials, money allocated, and even the tenure of Field Operations as lead firm were more lessons about viewing a site as an evolving composite of interactions. In a piece published on Urban Omnibus last year called “In Praise of Slowness,” Andrew Blum writes that such “evolutionary slowness of the city” is hidden by the tendency to cover architecture as “event rather than as ongoing presence.” Reorienting our understanding of the built environment away from event and toward process is critical, Blum writes, because the first lens cannot effectively focus on the challenges, both in terms of climate change and in terms of geopolitics, facing 21st century cities.

While certainly Fresh Kills will have installation events and ribbon-cutting milestones, Field Operations visions it as a locus of continued intersection among different species, physical conditions, and cultural structures; a landscape process that the public not only witnesses and shapes, but through which the public learns about agency and the process itself. At risk of being heavy handed, those are good lessons to understand moving forward.

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Zach Youngerman is a designer who works broadly on integrating cities and ecology. He’s enjoying freelance writing. He grew up in Riverdale, in the Bronx. He spent four years in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of the Federal levees doing recovery planning and green stormwater management. His goal is to help citizens understand, enjoy, evaluate and manage urban structures and their associated natural environments.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The term landscape might suggest images of shaded glens, rolling plains, sublime mountains, or manicured lawns. This descriptive vocabulary is primarily aesthetic or emotional. Yet the great surveyed grids of the West, the patterns of farming, transportation, housing, and industry indicate that the choices that underlie the form of the American landscape have a lot to do with function; the “American landscape” is a much less pictorially or scenically formed landscape than the ways we often choose to describe it. This interest in the functional qualities of the American landscape – and their patterns and sometimes beautiful manifestations – frames how James Corner of the New York firm Field Operations presented his work as part of the Architectural League’s annual Current Work series, a lecture now available as a podcast on the League website. With this introduction, he explicated two local projects: the development of the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the rehabilitation of the High Line.

I will let Corner explain the specific design intentions and challenges of each project. Both Fresh Kills and the High Line are sites with highly functional pasts; their landscapes were formed to work. Yet their transformations into parks will provoke many to judge them with an aesthetic vocabulary.

Corner balances this tension by emphasizing the inherent beauty and form of the productive landscapes of the High Line and Fresh Kills, whether in recalling their pasts or in illustrating their new programmatic uses. For example, registers of grasses along the knolls of Fresh Kills are not only aesthetically attractive – formed bans of striking color– but also, in their role as agents of creating topsoil (ploughed under, grown again, and repeated until forming a rich soil), perform the active process of dump to park. Or the High Line’s versatile slab pavers manage both the pedestrian flows of the park and recall its railroad bed past, allowing the grasses and plantings to interact with the pathway in the wild manner the abandoned track once did. By celebrating the working nature of these now repurposed spaces for recreation, Corner connects the past and future with a refreshing directness, allowing the expression of an aesthetic vocabulary, while acknowledging these sites’ complicated histories.

The honesty in addressing the change in use at both parks strikes me as perhaps the most sensible way to preserve our history, while keeping our cities as vital, active spaces. In a time of diminishing resources and the constricted availability of new space, the reinvention of our formerly grand industrial cities must be a priority. The development of these parks, using their histories as functional, productive landscapes, shows an efficient, economically and environmentally sensible, and, perhaps most of all, honest approach to reinvention.

Nick Anderson is Program Associate at the Architectural League of New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The value of conceiving criticism in this way, it seems to me, is that it allows for and acknowledges that certain buildings and projects may be perfectly elegant or beautiful solutions to perfectly trivial questions (think Meier’s tower on Grand Army Plaza) and, conversely, that there may be difficult or unsuccessful designs which nevertheless engage questions that have much greater relevance or significance to the values the critic prizes. Because criticism is perforce a statement of values; it is in that sense that criticism is at root a utopian venture and a bully pulpit. If we weren’t interested in remaking the world it wouldn’t matter much what we said about it.

In this vein, it is also important, from time to time, to write about bad buildings and failed projects, to use them as counter-exemplars and to explicate what it is in their design and realization that makes them a negative standard. This is difficult for a profession bred on the false politesse of ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything’. We need to understand what makes bad buildings bad, and what the steady accretion of poorly conceived, boring, venal and badly built projects does to our cities and our souls. We need to name names. Or else, give up altogether.

There is also an element of time in all this; Henry A. Millon, one of the best critical historians of his generation, used to say that history could not be written before 50 years had passed, the implication being that the circumstances which frame a project’s gestation could not themselves be looked at historically until a certain contemporaneous reverberation had dissipated. The prerequisite of history is distance and a consequent lack of immediate familiarity; context must become strange again, or more precisely, we must become estranged from it, for the methods of historical analysis to be deployed. By this standard we are only just able to begin to analyze the projects of the 1960’s, to look seriously at Saarinen’s TWA terminal for example. And, in fact, this is exactly what is happening, the Museum of the City of New York’s revisionist Saarinen exhibition and the current reappraisals of Rudolph and Stone following by a few years the welter of texts and exhibitions that had us look afresh at the icons of the previous decade, Lever House and the Seagram Building, etc. (to look only within the limits of Manhattan for examples).

Criticism of course is but the first draft of history, not the thing itself. It is journalistic in the original Latin/Francophone sense of the word — ‘of today.’ Its historical aspirations, such as they are, can only be to serve as the raw material of some future, more dispassionate, analysis. But in exchange criticism can — must — make full claim to passion, to the convictions, enthusiasms and biases that animate discussion today, now, in full understanding that once our passions are spent they too will become the subject of more broadly contextual and quieter historical methods. Deprived of any pretense to history, criticism has nothing left but bias: without bias criticism is worthless.

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This is the sixth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections.  An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

The first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout from Modernism. In his seminal essay “Whatever happened to Urbanism?” Koolhaas gave voice to an unsettling feeling that had been haunting practitioners since it became apparent that modernist architecture was not the panacea it claimed and not as important as it supposed. Forced to confront superfluity in a single generation, the critical discourse within the profession took up defensive positions to weather the storm.

The second issue is more ingrained; the mystification and resultant inaccessibility of the intellectual aspect of the landscape/architecture professions. Design pedagogy is defined according to processes of exclusivity: design methods and forms are understood as too sophisticated to be either fully comprehended, funded, or implemented by its constituents. And academic discourse is presented as too complex and profound to be undertaken or appreciated by the plebeians. For this reason, the majority of practitioners have abdicated their responsibility to contribute to the contemporary discourse within the professions. It is currently dominated by writers and theoreticians with no foundation in praxis.

As a result, the critical discourse has become a series of self-catalyzing memes and hyperbolic metaphors characterized by a forced focus on concept and cult of personality. Only projects deemed exemplary according to a conservative set of values (standards of beauty, economic viability, social popularity) are discussed and then largely in a laudatory tone. This is not healthy criticism.

The landscape does not need an apologist. The implicit meanings do not need to be spelled out and given voice, and we do not need to know if the design decisions meet the approval criteria of the author. In recent decades, a generation of design practitioners and writers have taken to conceptualizing a site, wrapping it up tightly in a metaphor (or series of them), and then narrating the argument to us. Marc Treib argues the impotence of this stance was argued persuasively in an essay titled “Must Landscapes Mean?”*

Meaning accrues over time; like respect, it is earned, not granted. While the designer yearns to establish a landscape that will acquire significance, it is not possible to use pat symbols alone as a means to transmute syntax into semantics, that is, tectonics into meanings… differences in culture, in education, in life experience, in our experience of nature will all modify our perception of the work of landscape architecture… We cannot make that place mean, but we can, I hope, instigate reactions to the place that fall within the desired confines of happiness, gloom, joy, contemplation, or delight.

After addressing these two issues, the question becomes what should contemporary criticism focus on? If the purpose of professional criticism is not to explain a project but to make the work better, then there are four areas of focus of contemporary criticism: political process, cultural context, a focus on criticism through time, and polemics.

First, the political process; instead of remaining enamored with the cult of personality, the designer’s thoughts and views should always be presented within the larger context of all of the players in a project. Without exception the significant designers of our time are experts at negotiating the political intrigues inherent in public agencies, affluent clients, vocal constituents, and marginalized communities. This dynamic will always influence a project and the criticism should acknowledge and examine this.

Second, the cultural context – historical, scientific, technological, social and popular – should be present in criticism. This can be implied or explicit but it should be present. It is this perspective that will help to frame the discussion around sustainability, changing it from a tactic that is essentially a marketing tool for designers, developers, politicians, and manufacturers, to a logical argument and thoughtful discussion. If the intellectual context surrounding the implementation of an initiative were more thorough and critical the project could be examined more honestly for effectiveness and appropriateness.

Third, criticism for a project should take place through time. How a place changes over the course of a day, through the seasons, and across a number of years should be considered. The conventional approach is largely the fault of shortsighted editors placing a focus on narrow definitions of timely and relevant in order to drum up readership for their publication. Criticism of a project should absolutely not be limited to opening day, a date set by political and economic agendas. Andrew Blum stated this sentiment in his essay “In Praise of Slowness” and Elizabeth Meyer’s essay “Slow Landscapes”* is a good example of a more thoughtful type of criticism.

Fourth, all landscape/architecture criticism should be polemical. The High Line is an exceptional project — extremely expensive, complicated, and high profile. That it has gotten a free pass from the critics, Jacky Bowring’s critique notwithstanding, is a huge disservice to the professional community. Every project, at various stages and according to metrics deemed appropriate by different editors, should be examined and questioned. As a profession, we gain nothing by constantly patting the same people (and by extension, ourselves) on the back for a job well done. Designers know that no project is perfect. Self-righteous celebration is not the job of criticism within the profession. There is a place for that, and it is with the lobbyists, apologists and at times the popular media.

Ultimately, criticism exists to make the work better, always better. If the discourse can include more voices — practitioners, writers, and academics — all questioning and examining thoughtfully and professionally, we can get at the interesting aspects, stories, intrigues, and facts. If we can get past our fixation on metaphor, concept and style, landscape/architectural criticism will function as a feedback loop with the design process to better the work of designing the built environment.

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This is the fifth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

* “Must Landscapes Mean?” by Marc Treib Landscape Journal. 14(1):46-62 (1995)

** “Slow Landscapes: A New Erotics of Sustainability,” by Elizabeth K. Meyer, Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10, p. 22-31.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

How do you reclaim the city’s streets for pedestrian use in a way that is flexible, inexpensive and contextually appropriate to the site in question? We at Balmori Associates have been been wrestling with these issues since being asked, by the Meatpacking District Initiative, to create a temporary solution for the public space of Gansevoort Plaza in the Meatpacking District (MPD), just steps away from our office.

The NYC Dept of Transportation continues to reimagine traffic throughout the city and employ a system of bike paths, street closings and new traffic alignments in order to both create public space and make traffic more efficient and safer. While this strategy is citywide, the ways in which space is reclaimed must rely on neighborhood-specific solutions that enhance the existing use of space and enable new uses. On 9th Avenue between Gansevoort and 13th Street, DOT’s preliminary system of bollards and planters [profiled here on Streetsblog -ed.] left us wondering how best to imagine the public spaces created by the new traffic alignments and how to design a language of street furniture and planting that helps define the space. Before beginning to develop our design principles, however, we first had to ask: what should a public place be?

We wanted to engage a wide audience in answering this question. 40 Dutch urban design students and their professors, landscape architect Erik de Jong and planner Arnold van der Valk, happened to be in town and were eager to discuss urban public space in the American context. We invited these young designers to join Balmori Associates staff, our client – represented by Annie Washburn of the Meatpacking District Initiative – and some colleagues at our office. We extended the conversation to a worldwide public through live video and Twitter. The discussion touched on topics including ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic. In the Twitter forum, the discussion focused on sharable space, urban decorum, and contextual appropriateness (read my summary of the topics discussed in the Twitter forum here). These topics helped us to develop our design principles.

For this project, given the brief, the principles we developed are:

+ Re-use materials
design to avoid waste
create rough, industrial aesthetics

+ Keep it simple
low tech and inexpensive construction and maintenance

+ Anticipate changing requirements
plan for easy reconfiguration

The video below chronicles some of the ways we turned this community engagement exercise into a preliminary design scheme where one simple and inexpensive piece of furniture with interchangeable components – a pole and hollow pole base, canopy and rubber mats – can perform the functions of planter, shading, space partition, seating, lighting… even a birdhouse.

In other words, starting from the themes that emerged in the Twitter forum, we set about identifying the components that would help us to build an urban living room. Here’s how it works:

The flexibility of this solution allows for a variety of layout options, from grouped seating at right angles or in triangles, to weekend market activities or event space. But even when that is attempted and sometimes achieved, questions remain about stewardship and maintenance going forward. This scheme provides a starting point for a discussion. We need to move beyond reclamation of the street for pedestrian uses as an end in itself. The way in which it is reclaimed requires reconfigurable and inexpensive solutions that are both contextually appropriate and experimental.

Balmori Associates main design team:
Mark Thomann, Julia Siedle & Angela C. Soong

Forum hosted by Diana Balmori + Balmori Associates + Erik de Jong
With Guests: Architect Joel Sanders, Arnold Van del Valk and Annie Washburn
Forum Organization and Production: Monica Hernandez, Noemie Lafaurie-Debany & Sangmok Kim
Photography: Jeffrey Debany
Video: Nicoleta Coman

Diana Balmori, founding principal of Balmori Associates, brings a breadth of experience in architecture, urban design, landscape
architecture, ecology, architectural history and sustainability to her New York-based landscape urban design office. She is recognized internationally for her innovative work in the field of landscape and urban design.  She teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has recently been appointed a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.  She serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.