Unearthed. Karen M'Closkey
Allen, Sinkosky & Loomis (HASL) and reincorporated as Hargreaves Associates in 1985. Hargreaves Associates office was first stationed in San Francisco, which remained their only location until Hargreaves became chair of the department of landscape architecture at Harvard University in 1996, at which time they opened their Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. After concluding his position as chair in 2003, Hargreaves opened a third location in New York City and, as of 2008, an office in London.
While George Hargreaves remains the design lead of Hargreaves Associates, the firm depends on the talents of other individuals, many of whom have been with the office for one or two decades. Of particular note are senior associate and president Mary Margaret Jones, who joined the firm in 1984 and has been instrumental in its direction, and former associate Glenn Allen, who was one of the founding partners of HASL.
THE IMAGES IN THIS BOOK ARE DRAWN FROM various sources, including images from Hargreaves Associates, images gathered from the agencies or corporations who manage the projects, my own photographs, diagrams drawn from information provided by Hargreaves Associates, and photos from users of their landscapes who post images on websites such as Flickr.com.
INTRODUCTION
GEORGE HARGREAVES AND OTHERS WHO WERE EDUCATED IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN THE 1970S ARE SITUATED AT AN INTERESTING CROSSROADS FOR THE DISCIPLINE. CHARACTERISTIC OF THE TIME WERE IAN MCHARG’S SEMINAL MANIFESTO,
Design with Nature (1969), along with Charles Jencks’s famous declaration that modernism ended at 3:32 P.M. on July 15, 1972 (referring to the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis).1 The period was marked by a call for an end to totalizing narratives of linear advancement while simultaneously offering the earth-ecosystem as a new totality. In response to this challenge, which landscape scholar Elizabeth Meyer has aptly named the “post–earth day conundrum,” designers sought to move beyond modernist doctrines of progress in recognition of planetary limits.2 This critique went beyond environmentalism and landscape architecture to involve challenges to hegemony—singularity, authority, hierarchy—in any form. Though the critique originated from within many disciplines across the arts and humanities, they shared a common goal of undermining what had become categorical impasses within their respective fields, such as medium specificity (art), singular authorship (literature, planning), and typology (architecture). In response to the array of emerging changes that typify this period, Hargreaves helped forge an approach within landscape architecture that expressed this broader shift in sensibility taking place.3
As Hargreaves was venturing into practice in the early 1980s, critiques of modernist master planning and urban renewal were in full force. Critics such as Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961) had ushered in an era of community activism, which changed the relationship between designers and the community for whom they design, and challenged the divide between “public” and “expert.” Both grassroots environmentalism and federal regulation of pollution had taken a foothold, spurred on by publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This increased awareness eventually led to legislation pertaining to soil and water quality and thus affected the construction of landscapes, especially with regard to cleaning up the large swaths of toxic land in or adjacent to city centers and waterfronts. These sites—the so-called postindustrial landscape—still form the basis of much work that is happening in landscape architecture today and constitute the type of locales where Hargreaves Associates created its first important projects.
The 1970s–1980s was a period when the importance of history as a resource to be mined for design inspiration was reinvigorated as an idea. For some practices, history was invoked in the name of pluralism or populism, drawing on conventional icons or themes so that work could be “accessible” to a broad audience. This was especially visible in architecture, where historical references, represented in allegedly familiar signs and symbols, were celebrated (see the pleas by Charles Jencks, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown). In landscape architecture, history was invoked as a means to create specificity and uniqueness, especially on postindustrial sites, an early example being Seattle’s Gas Works Park (1971–88) by Richard Haag, where the relics of a gasification plant were preserved. By drawing on the past uses and materials of a particular place, landscape was conceptually understood as a cultural palimpsest—as one layer among many—rather than a tabula rasa, as had been the case during industrialization. Even on sites where all previous material traces (both natural and cultural) had been erased, history became a way to engage place as designers took inspiration from a site’s past (such as previous geometries or materials) to inform their designs. In this period the term “site specificity,” often used to describe Hargreaves Associates’ work, became a central concept. Rather than impose a unified or singular order, landscape architects engaged and produced complexity and variety by understanding sites in terms of processes occurring in time.
The impact of structuralism and poststructuralism infiltrated many disciplines at this moment and further expanded notions of context specificity. Structuralism, coming largely from the study of linguistics, sought to identify the underlying structures and codes that gave rise to the meaning of a work (such as how a novel is understood within a particular genre, and the history of the genre itself) in order to understand the full context of how a work signifies (rather than simply focusing on the particulars of a single work, such as the plot or narrative). Given that language itself was understood as a system apart from the physical world that it described, language was seen not as a reflection of the world, but as a construction of it. Poststructuralism furthered this argument by claiming that attempts to identify underlying structures would be no more likely to reveal the truer meaning of a work, because the means by which such structures are defined would themselves have embedded biases; therefore, there was no “deeper” understanding to be found. Rather, every work was produced, or reproduced, indefinitely, leading to the so-called decentering of knowledge. The dismantling of authoritative or truthful readings of texts brought about the “death of the author” and the birth of the “open work.”4 These developments challenged the notion that meaning is dependent on an author’s intent, arguing instead that meaning is based on the subjective interpretation of the reader, bringing to the fore questions about content (whether it can be embedded or inherent in a work), communication (what an audience can decipher about a work), and representation (who is speaking for whom).
The most direct influence of these methods on landscape architecture came by way of art criticism, in particular that of Rosalind Krauss. Krauss’s method of criticism opened up new ways of reading works, challenging what had been presumed to be key traits for understanding a work of art (originality, biography, genre, medium specificity, and so on). Her essay explicating the “expanded field” of sculpture utilized the work of many “earthworks” artists, and was structured around a set of terms that included “landscape” and “architecture.”5 This essay, as well as the artists she cited, was extremely influential in reinvigorating the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the idea of “landscape”—the terms, methods, and representations around which site is constructed. As Hargreaves notes, the work of these artists appeared to him as “beacons on the parched field of designed landscapes,” influencing both his thinking and his formal language.6 All of this is to say that the redefinition and expansion of what constitutes context—cultural, historical, material, and disciplinary—became central in the production and evaluation of work.
Last, ecology began to be understood in an expansive, multipronged way. No longer referring only to the large-scale goals of resource conservation and regional planning, ecology was appealed to as a holistic theory of the environment, an enterprise that included human experience. Some critics and practitioners who sought to expand beyond the limits of positivist (McHargian) thinking placed emphasis on how an inclusive understanding of ecology could give rise to a new aesthetic for landscape and urban form. Many of these critics drew on the burgeoning field of environmental aesthetics and the work of social scientists