Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
Trenton, New Jersey, it is elegantly simple and practical. Hargreaves's crisp little pavilion has a translucent roof for natural light, thereby eliminating the need for electricity, while the gap between the roof and cedar walls provides ventilation.
A few miles south in San Jose, Hargreaves engineered an entire series of parks around the Guadalupe River that have transformed and rejuvenated the city. The river, a valuable water source, has also been an instrument of vast destruction during periodic flooding. But Hargreaves brought to the assignment an understanding of both natural and man-made landforms that provided the solution to the hydrological challenge. In a sense, he has designed a string of city parks as a vast controlled water garden. Few landscape architects since Olmsted have had the opportunity to work on such a grand scale in one urban location.
Downstream from the city, the river flows innocently through its narrow bed, but on the embankment of Guadalupe River Park the braided network of alluvial berms resembles in accentuated form the buildup of striated sediment in a river delta. Intermittent channels contain the periodic overflow before redirecting it to the riverbed. In dry periods, the graceful undulating landscape along serpentine paths with plantations of oaks and bay trees belies the technological precision of the engineered landforms that are narrowed on the upstream ends to reverse the torrents. The woody plant habitat on the riverbanks—cottonwood trees, scrub willow, snowberry, and gooseberry—possesses the wildness that Hargreaves believes brings richness to the landscape and also guarantees low maintenance.
In San Jose itself, where the Guadalupe River meets Los Gatos Creek, Hargreaves designed Confluence Park as a meeting place for crowds converging on the San Jose Arena for sports events. Stately rows of poplar trees along the green are like those seen in the French countryside. The sloped Arena Green amphitheater is configured with pyramidal landforms and pocket spaces for picnicking within groves of trees. It recalls the green amphitheater at Claremont Garden in Surrey, designed by Charles Bridgeman. The park crosses the creek via a pedestrian bridge to Confluence Point, a cool, wet naturalistic woodland on a spit of land formed by the two rivers. The handsome Cor-Ten steel bridge has all the stately elegance of the Palladian Bridge at Stowe.
In downtown San Jose, with its combination of old Spanish-style and contemporary office buildings, the threat of the Guadalupe River was even more dangerous, as it flowed through the heart of the city. Hargreaves secured the riverbanks with a wall of terraced gabions that have filled up with enough soil and pioneer plants to sprout a genuine riparian plant community. (Gabions—metal cages filled with rocks used in roadway fortifications—have become one of the most attractive and useful industrial products available to landscape architects.) These terraces combined with long serpentine steps along the riverbank, allowing the water to rise step by step, both control and speed up the river as it travels through the city. A new corporate headquarters constructed by the Silicon Valley giant Adobe on the riverbanks is proof of renewed confidence.
Hargreaves's Plaza Park is San Jose's main square, crisscrossed daily by pedestrians on angled paths typical of town commons. Its central promenade retraces the historic Camino Real, the route that led to the California missions. Here, water has been captured and tamed in the first fountain the landscape architect designed. Its spouts, at intersecting points of a grid of glass blocks, are flush with the ground. They produce mist in early morning, provide playful geysers for children at midday, and at night, illuminated through the glass blocks, glow in a magical terrain. A grid of jacaranda trees recalls the satisfying beauty and regularity of orchards that once dotted the region; mature redwoods, live oaks, and sycamores shade pathways lined with park benches. Hargreaves also leaves his mark with the angled green walls of an informal amphitheater.
While accommodating every aspect of outdoor enjoyment, Crissy Field, now a national park in San Francisco, redefines the process of a public landscape. George Hargreaves and his associates, particularly his longtime collaborator Mary Margaret Jones, peeled back layers of the site's natural and man-made history to discover a configuration of elements that overlap in time. Hargreaves often speaks of the poetry of landscape, which suggests a compression of language and forms that reveal ideas without overelaboration. Urban parks are never natural landscapes, but they may be designed to enhance appreciation of nature. Waterfront parks, like Crissy Field on San Francisco Bay, have the added advantage of facing the beauty and unpredictability of the sea.
Located at the bottom of the Presidio, the old Spanish garrison turned U.S. military post, Crissy Field was originally a tidal marsh where the Ohlone Indians harvested shellfish. In 1912 it was filled in as an automobile racetrack for the upcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915; in 1921, as a grassy meadow, it became an airfield for biplanes named after the aviation pioneer Major Dana A. Crissy. The airfield was paved over in 1935 and remained in use by the military until 1974. Since then, the beach has become a haven for windsurfers who appear even today to fly through the waves on glinting Mylar sails like a flock of low-flying seabirds.
Crissy Field extends one hundred acres from east to west, from a stand of cypress trees just beyond Marina Green to the Golden Gate Bridge. The major elements of the park are a vast tidal marsh, a lagoon fed with seawater, and, overlooking it, a lush kidney-shaped grassy meadow of an airfield. Running the entire length of the park along the sandy beach and boulder-strewn shore is a 1.3-mile windy esplanade, wide enough never to appear crowded even on a holiday. The airfield itself is a giant berm of red fescue grass that rises several feet above the promenade at one end and slants down to ground level at the other. The parking area at the eastern end, for windsurfers and visitors, fades into a meadow with finger-splayed mounds and a grid of trees. At the far end, red-roofed structures with weatherboard siding in groves of palm trees preserve a bit of Army vernacular but also serve as a refreshment area. Complex swirls of berms protect picnic areas and challenge children more than most conventional playgrounds do. In general, though, the flatness of the landscape makes richer all the fine details: the wisps of color of thousands of native plants growing in the dune gardens or the boardwalk leading to a standing grove of Monterey cypress on the beach.
But what is public may also be private. While the flow of people proceeds along the esplanade, anyone can walk out on the bridge crossing the lagoon and quietly watch the birds settle in the twilight as the rosy clouds of sunset gather over the Golden Gate Bridge. Hargreaves has no doubt been walking and thinking there himself to breathe in the site, motivated to re-create in other people's lives the sensation of his existential experience at Flattop Mountain, “to make moments and places more than what they are in a redefined picturesque for the twenty-first century.”
In every era, individuals emerge with a singular creativity—part genius, part opportunity—that takes their art or science to a new level of realization, but without departing entirely from the cultural past. Stowe, Courances, Central Park, and countless other sources have played a role in Hargreaves's education.
In architecture, spectacular results are achieved by variations of form and function combined with new materials and advancements in engineering. The challenge has always been greater, though, in landscape architecture, where the substance of design remains the same: earth, water, stone, plant life, and sky as a source of light and shadow. Add to this list time, memory, people, and the natural history of a site. And more often than not, today these sites represent cultural wastelands depleted of both character and characteristics, abandoned brownfields at the edges of cities. George Hargreaves's goal is resurrection.
The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and AmericanArt, exhibition catalogue, Iris & Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, University of California Press, 2003
A Twinkling Terrace that Reaches for the Stars: Kathryn Gustafson in New York and France
PARIS—ZOOMING UP the Champs-Elysées in her Saab, Kathryn Gustafson, an American landscape architect, stopped to admire bouquets of roses tightly arrayed in the rear window of a florist's truck. “That's a garden, too,” she said, and she drove on.
New Yorkers had better prepare themselves for such judgments. Gustafson, forty-seven, has been handed her first American project, the Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History, scheduled to open in the spring of 2000.
Her new, nearly one-acre urban garden will be just outside