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Once refreshingly down-to-earth, landscape architects have become infected
with the same pretentiousness as the rest of architecture.
By Philip Nobel
March 2002
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Detail of rePark: RIOS Associates' plan for Fresh Kills.
Illustration: Courtesy RIOS Associates
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Make enough stuff and throw it out and you get the Fresh Kills Landfill:
a rolling 2,200-acre steppe spread along the far west flank of Staten
Island. As its name so morbidly suggests, Fresh Kills is a kind of dual
monument--to the dissipation of a disposable culture and the ingenuity required
to maintain profligacy in a world that imposes physical limits. The
dump is a blight and probably a danger to public health. It is also an ideal
setting for an examination of trash-talk in design.
Last year, bending to his most loyal supporters, Mayor Giuliani announced
that Fresh Kills would close; the final barge-loads of garbage made
their way there in March. At the same time, an international competition
was arranged by the Municipal Art Society and a handful of city agencies
to commission a master plan for the greening of the site. The task was to
provide baseball diamonds for sporting Staten Islanders while interpreting
the history of the place, which now includes the temporary use of its highest
hill as a triage station for sorting World Trade Center debris.
At the last minute, as the six finalists were preparing boards for
a show at a local museum, each of them dropped in a memorial on that spot.
Surprisingly, these are the least objectionable aspects of the plans; given
the rare opportunity to design on the fly, all the teams sketched in
unpretentious ideas. Where they had more time to muse, they got into trouble.
Visiting the display at the Staten Island Institute of Arts & Sciences--a
workaday place halfway up a hill overlooking the harbor--it was at first
amusing and then alarming to think of the inevitable public reaction to
this spectacle. Here, as the exhibition text had it, were ideas from "the
finest professionals in the fields of design, engineering, ecology,
art, and planning," and the whole was indistinguishable from an end-of-year
student show at a trendy architecture school. The gee-whiz graphics (thank
you, Form*Z), the mannered language (what happens on an "event surface"?),
the flippant design features (endless useless skyways), the faux-branded
concept gimmicks ("rePark: recycle, recollect, recreate")--it
was all there, and all strangely naked outside of the citadel of the academy.
After the layers of enrobing words were removed, it was another case of
the architects' new clothes.
This show will be remembered as a watershed moment in the history of landscape
architecture. Elite or star architects--some are now calling them "progressive,"
but I like the term "fancy"--have long borrowed from the worlds
of art and fashion to amp up their output with glamour and shock. Now once-sober
landscape architects are looking to these same noisome tactics. The trend
is exemplified by the winning team, Field Operations, a partnership
of stalwart architecture theorist Stan Allen and James Corner, the bad boy
of the new landscape design. They produced "Lifescape," a remote
fantasia that trades in obfuscatory "threads," "islands,"
and "mats."
I hope these architects and their fellow travelers are enjoying life on
the margins, because that is where they are going to stay. Answering a call
from the NYC Department of City Planning with "depositional edges,"
"networks of transects," and a five-kilometer picnic table
made from recycled detergent bottles is not the way to prove you can handle
the heavy work of imagining and implementing the future shape of the city
at a time of plunging tax receipts. This is an old song--it was a staple
of the American Institute of Architects 60 years ago--and the second verse
goes like this: Bureaucracies need the creativity that only architects can
provide. I'm not sure that's still true; in the breach, lots of people can
inspire change in public space. Cede the high ground that even a modicum
of well-timed seriousness can preserve and others less dependent on folly
will fill the gap. What architects have--still, by tradition or inertia--are
its dual beachheads in the world of artful possibility and in the world
of the world. That ground is too precious to give up for the flash
and racket of art alone. Making real things is not what architects have
to do, it's what architects get to do. That privilege is as revocable
as any other, and it's in the arena of the real that architects will win
or lose it. Clowning around, they risk getting thrown out of the big game.
To be fair, individual designers are not the problem; chicanery is in the
air. For decades the magazines, curators, schools, and leading theorists
(here Rem might now take a special bow) have privileged deep-thought "investigation"
and miscellaneous froufrou over creative design that works responsibly within
the useful limits of the shared world. Look around: it's pretty interesting
out there. So why is it not cool to "keep it real"? The effects
of this hot-air pollution are always easiest to see in the work of striving
professionals and the students that ape them, but they are everywhere, and
everywhere corrosive, falling like acid rain. So let our green architects
cure sick buildings and make the brownfields bloom. It's time for the
rest of us to face this other environmental crisis in design.
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