Unearthed. Karen M'Closkey
Berleant.7 At this point in time (the late 1970s to the mid-1990s), questions of how new understandings of ecology could give rise to new landscapes were inseparable from questions of experience and aesthetics.
It is from within this rich constellation of ideas—transforming notions of public, site, context, and ecology—that Hargreaves ventured into practice. Hargreaves Associates’ early work, among that of several other practices at this time, marks an important moment in landscape architecture: one that bridged the divide that had dominated the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, when the emphasis on large-scale planning led to a disregard for the qualitative and experiential aspects of landscape’s material and form.8
So it is disappointing that we should again find ourselves with a recent but dominant trend focused on the pragmatic and operational aspects of landscape and dismissive of, or at least skeptical about, the more subjective and perceptual aspects of landscape. This trend has gained traction as systems theory (a way of looking at the web of interactions that constitute any organization, which cannot be understood by looking at the behavior of any one of its parts) and its associated terminology (self-organization, emergence, and complexity) has become a pervasive theoretical umbrella for design. One of the chief theorists of systems thinking, Fritjof Capra, argues that the theory of self-organizing systems is the broadest scientific formulation of the ecological paradigm.9 He describes the systems approach through five key shifts, which hold for natural and social sciences and the humanities: the shift from part to whole, from structure to process, from objective to “epistemic” science, from “building” to “network” as a metaphor for knowledge, and from truth to approximate descriptions. Though systems theory has been widespread in philosophy and science since the middle of the twentieth century, the paradigm shift from viewing ecosystems as closed systems (balance, stasis) to understanding them as open to constant fluctuation (emergence, disturbance) did not occur until the 1980s, further contributing to our understanding of ecology as a metaphor for the mutability of all things, and marking a philosophical shift from being to becoming.
The ecological turn has influenced design in a multitude of ways, making it difficult to untangle the divergent ideologies at play when one evokes design in the name of “ecology.” For some, ecology maintains its conventional meaning and is used in design to refer to ecosystem health; its applicability is to planning large sites for habitat creation and protection. For others, it is used to generate novel form.10 The latter, often abetted by digital technology and software, has led to wide-ranging expressions, such as biomorphology (formal resemblance between human-made structures and natural structures), topology (spatial continuity achieved using parametric software), emergent form (using algorithmic software to “grow” formal variations out of fixed parameters), and emergent material (also known as ecological succession, where changes in the composition of the landscape occur in somewhat predictable ways; an approach most prominent in landscape architecture). In all cases, the ecological influence in design can be broadly viewed through the lens of process, where processes are the forces that shape form.
An emphasis on process (formation) over product (form) was already broadly espoused in art practices in the 1970s and was issued as a challenge to the autonomy of the art object and conventional pictorial codes. Because Hargreaves took inspiration from “process” artists, such as Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, his work has been described as process driven and, as a result, could be seen as an antecedent to the widespread interest in emergence outlined above. This is no doubt because Hargreaves himself said that he was approaching “landscape as more open-ended, allowing the natural processes to somehow complete the project.”11 Since he made this statement two decades ago, there has been a further conflation of landscape and process, along with references to the emancipating or liberating effects of landscape as a metaphor for change. As already noted, emergence not only pertains to our understanding of ecosystems but includes the notion that social systems and places, like natural systems, evolve in unforeseen ways and consequently thwart our ability to plan them with any definitive ends in mind. In this view, ecology (nature) is the preeminent open work.
The fact that sites and systems are fundamentally open to change—their uses, meanings, and materials continually evolving—has led to a deemphasis on form (seen as too fixed) and experience (seen as too subjective) and, in some cases, resulted in dubious correlations among nature, landscape, and liberty.12 The presumption is that landscapes will naturally evolve to be more complex and more diverse, both physically and culturally, than at their inception. The systems view and its affiliated terminology of self-organization and emergence has been interpreted in such a way as to equate lack of “product” with open-endedness, the belief being that “by avoiding intricate compositional designs and precise planting arrangements [projects can] respond to future programmatic and political changes.”13 This notion has become increasingly widespread and has even been used in reference to Hargreaves Associates’ work. For example, landscape architect Martha Schwartz describes process-driven landscape design as catering to a “new naturalism,” and uses a project by Hargreaves Associates to illustrate this point.14 While she is right to criticize this sentiment, Hargreaves Associates’ work does not fit this description. Though Hargreaves may have inadvertently ushered in the emphasis on process over “product,” it was to inspire new formal, spatial, and experiential effects, not to eschew them.
Accordingly, this introduction seeks to distance Hargreaves Associates’ work from characterizations that equate process with lack of specificity in order to place questions of form and intent within the design of public space itself, rather than to displace them as the inevitable outcome of ongoing cultural and natural transformation, which is inherent in any project. In contrast to Hargreaves’s early statement that emphasized process, he has more recently said that he is “more interested in the geologic than the biologic,” since the organic is reminiscent of conventional ideas about nature.15 This recalls a sentiment expressed by Robert Smithson: “I do have a stronger tendency towards the inorganic than to the organic. The organic is closer to the idea of nature: I’m more interested in denaturalization or in artifice than I am in any kind of naturalism.”16 This distinction between the geologic and the biologic-ecologic provides a useful framework for discussing Hargreaves Associates’ work. This is not meant to neglect the importance of the health of natural systems (what we can learn from the science of ecology), but rather to consider the ways in which different scientific analogues, such as emergence and complexity, influence design methodology and expression. As part of such consideration, the characterization of Hargreaves Associates’ work outlined below interprets the firm’s work through a geological analogue in order to emphasize several things. First, the site in a geologic approach foregrounds the subsurface in terms of history, traces, and excavation. Second, the material of this approach emphasizes striation, as opposed to smoothness. In other words, the work is heterogeneous, characterized by distinct adjacencies or fissures between and among various forms and materials rather than subtle, even, or gradual transitions. And third, the form of a geologic approach utilizes prominent earthwork as a fundamental characteristic.
GEOLOGIC UNDERPINNINGS
HARGREAVES WAS NOT ALONE IN ADVANCING a geological approach. Lawrence Halprin has been noted as a key predecessor to Hargreaves.17 Halprin’s interest in geomorphologic processes inspired some of his best known urban plazas, where water spilling over faceted slabs of concrete into pools evokes waterfalls and cliff faces. This approach can be seen in Hargreaves Associates’ small plazas, such as Charleston Place and Prospect Green, where stone and water appear to be undergoing a transfomation or erupting with force out of the ground. Other practitioners literally excavate the ground to create a spatial sequence moving from surface to subsurface; examples include Alexandre Chemetoff’s Bamboo Garden in Parc de la Villette (1986–89), which is cut below the surface of the park, exposing remnant concrete pipes and creating an immersive microclimate—damp, confined, and packed full of bamboo—as a foil to the flat expanse of the park’s surface. Or Carme Pinós and Enric Miralles’s Igualada Cemetery (1986–90), made primarily of rock and concrete; its burial chambers are incised into the ground, and