Unearthed. Karen M'Closkey
described as the art of maintenance.
The widespread emphasis on process that was prevalent after Hargreaves Associates finished these first projects acknowledges that sites are inevitably open to change, but using this knowledge requires understanding the existing conditions that are likely to enable particular changes to occur, changes that also imply particular forms of maintenance. The next chapter (regarding Crissy Field) further addresses this topic, as does Chapter 2, “Techniques.” The topic brings to the fore the often conflicting notions of sustainability: the acknowledgment that landscapes are inherently open to change, coupled with the desire to “sustain” a particular type of landscape in response to specific social and programmatic demands.
CONCLUSION
RECENT DISCUSSIONS in landscape architecture have tended to emphasize two dominant, yet contradictory, aspects of landscape: its changing and unpredictable nature and its known and “performative” functions (“performative” is a term often used to describe what a project “does”—the effects that it sets in motion—rather than what it “is”—its physical form, materials, appearance). The fact that these are at odds remains unacknowledged, for example, when successional models of growth are used to show how biodiversity builds over time. Even though disturbances, such as floods and fires, are recognized, projects are still presumed to move toward a more complex state ecologically. Likewise, the social equivalent to emergence presumes that if we design less, it automatically leaves more room for users to change or appropriate a space. How does Hargreaves Associates’ work fit these two characterizations?
FIGURES 12. Byxbee Park in Palo Alto, California, showing the seasonal color “swap” of the marsh and park grasses.
FIGURES 13. Byxbee Park in Palo Alto, California, showing the seasonal color “swap” of the marsh and park grasses.
The dynamism of natural processes’ effects on design intentions is most visible in a project like Candlestick Point Park described above; however, the lack of initial funding and minimal design did not allow it to “evolve” into a more complex landscape. Now, with plans to demolish the 49ers stadium and the area slated for large development, a larger and more generic park, designed by AE-COM, will replace Hargreaves Associates’ design. Other projects will not share its fate anytime soon, as the nature of the projects Hargreaves Associates has undertaken has changed.41 Rather than having construction budgets of one dollar per square foot, projects such as Louisville Waterfront Park or Chattanooga Waterfront Park are investing twenty to twenty-five times that amount per acre of park development, with construction phased anywhere from five to twenty years, and per-acre maintenance budgets exceeding that of New York’s Central Park.42 Hargreaves Associates is involved not only with the planning of the landscape but also with the plans that financially underwrite the landscape development, including helping clients create the 501c organizations that will help fund and maintain their projects. These projects require immense investments from both public and private sources, and the “open space” commonly associated with the public realm is reciprocally tied to the funding mechanism for private development. In several of Hargreaves Associates’ projects, the private investment catalyzed by the park development was from two to four and a half times greater than the funds for the initial public infrastructure.43 So there is no question that these projects “perform” economically by enticing development and raising property values.
FIGURE 14. The twelve-acre Discovery Green in Houston, Texas, is an example of a densely programmed site, funded largely with private money for its land, construction, and maintenance. Previously a sparsely populated site comprising mainly parking and lawn, it has become a destination that has enlivened the downtown area and attracted new development.
In addition to the event-based programs, such as concerts, that these landscapes support, many comprise complex infrastructures. Their projects are designed such that flood control and stormwater treatment systems are interwoven with cultural and recreational events. The environmental criteria are measured, whereas the firm’s multifunctional design tactic enables other program elements—terraces, large event spaces, theatrical displays of water, or small seating areas—to exist in tandem with the more utilitarian ones. In this sense, combining the measurable function of landscape, such as water control, with recreation is a strategic way to make public space because more total funds are allocated to the project and more area is made publicly accessible. Many projects are funded not only through a city’s open-space allocations, or the eventual return from private development and tourist taxes, but through state and federal funding.44
FIGURE 15. Louisville Waterfront Park during a large event, April 21, 2007. image courtesy of Michael Schnuerle.
Finally, the public process by which land is transformed into public space is often where the debate over site use and management happens because many people need to buy into these projects, emotionally, intellectually, and financially. One tactic is to leave the design so open that it will be created by committee or by managers, such as at Downsview Park. Fortunately, Hargreaves does not confuse lack of specificity with flexibility. To claim that formal or material indeterminacy is any more liberating or communal than what modernists claimed about space, or postmodernists about surface, is to fall prey to the same fallacy—that there is a direct cause and effect between a designer’s intent and a project’s reception, eventual use, and control.45 Funding, maintenance, ownership, and restriction of uses have little to do with a particular form or aesthetic. However, designers do propose surfaces, materials, and forms that can enable or preclude particular uses.
For example, a large swath of lawn, irrespective of whether it is embedded in Olmsted’s nineteenth-century picturesque Central Park or Hargreaves Associates’ late twentieth-century Louisville Waterfront Park, provides a place for large gatherings, protests, temporary memorials, games, and so on; therefore, its use is open, but its form is precise, its material is uniform and soft, and its size is pertinent to supporting a range of activities (Central Park’s Great Lawn is fifteen acres; the lawn at Louisville Waterfront Park is twelve acres). The fact that protestors were not allowed to use Central Park’s Great Lawn for demonstrations in 2004 lest it ruin the grass is a problem of ownership and permitting, rather than of form or material.46 Had the entire site been designed as a rocky ramble of intimate, winding paths, which would have precluded large gatherings, it would have been a problem of form and material. In other words, design determines “openness” in very specific ways. The language of emergence as applied to landscape architecture risks valuing change for change’s sake. Perhaps this sentiment should not be surprising, as it is an outgrowth of concerns and critiques that began four decades ago when the slippery relationships among authorship, representation, and reception became widely problematized. However, the notion that less design, or more open-endedness, affords greater flexibility should be seen as a critique of the role of designers and planners (and the social assumptions underlying their designs) rather than an empowerment of those who would presumably take over such undesigned spaces.
The point of this introduction to Hargreaves Associates’ work is not to simply suggest replacing ecology with geology as a metaphor for design method; however, if we are to adopt a “complexity theory” for landscapes, it should not be a complexity theory of self-organizing systems (such as nature), or one that positions design as the inevitable outcome of forces beyond the designer’s control, which is already part and parcel of any built project. Hargreaves Associates’ work makes a compelling case that facility in dealing with given conditions does not equate to a conservative replication of those conditions, nor do given conditions alone suffice to define the work. They do, however,