The Machine in the Garden
As Peter Latz turns German industrial sites into twenty-first-century parks,
Pittsburg struggles to find similar ways to meld nature and artifice, history
and the future.
By Matt Steinglass
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If
you're looking for picture-postcard Germany--dark, moody forests,
Gothic castles on craggy bluffs--then the Ruhr River Valley is not
the place for you. The Ruhr,
 which
stretches some 140 miles through the state of North Rhine-Westphalia,
is a heavy-industry corridor, where the smokestacks loom larger
than the church towers. At its height in the middle of the last
century, the region was a giant integrated-metal-processing machine,
dominated by coal mines as well as coke, iron, and steel plants,
and the railroads and autobahns that linked them together.
In the 1970s,
Germany's steel and coal industries, like those in the American
rust belt, went into steep decline. Plants were shut down, leaving
their hulking silhouettes towering over local towns, gloomy emblems
of failure and obsolescence. By the Eighties, unemployment in the
Ruhr had shot up to more than 30 percent in some areas. Governments
found themselves paralyzed by rising social costs and falling tax
revenue, unable to attract new businesses to a region widely viewed
as moribund.
But catastrophes,
as that great landscape enthusiast Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, are
wings
and means, and for the German urban planner and
landscape architect Peter Latz, the misfortunes of the Ruhr Valley
provided an unexpected opportunity. In 1989, the Westphalian government
chartered an organization called the IBA, a flexible, independent
planning corporation, to transform the Ruhr's image with innovative
architectural and cultural projects. The IBA's first major initiative
was a park on the grounds of an old steel mill in the northern part
of the city of Duisburg. Peter Latz won the design competition,
and over the next 10 years, the park he and his colleagues created
would become a seminal piece in the history of modern landscape
architecture.
Landscape Park
Duisburg Nord was created out of several miles of blast furnaces,
railroad tracks, and slag heaps along the canalized remains of the
Emscher River. Latz didn't tear down the blast furnaces; he built
walkways through them. He didn't sod over the slag heaps;
he let them grow wild with acacia and ailanthus
trees. The park, with its formal gardens in ore pits and its lily
ponds in cooling tanks, blurs and twists concepts like "natural,"
"artificial," "open space," and "conservation"--everything that underpins
the traditional understanding of what a park is. That traditional
understanding has been looking threadbare lately, particularly in
ex-factory towns facing brownfield redevelopment, i.e., the reclamation
and reuse of contaminated and abandoned in-dustrial sites. In our
increasingly post-industrial landscape, with genetic engineering,
global climate change, green cities, and RuPaul thoroughly scrambling
our ill-defined sense of the natural, Latz's project is a first
stab at what the park of the next century might look like--and not
just in Duisburg. In fact, it's already inspiring imitators from
Paris to Pittsburgh.
I met Peter
Latz and his landscape-architect wife and business partner,
Anneliese, in Paris in late May, at a Cafe next to the ultramodern
Grande Arche of La Défense.
The Latzes had come to Paris for a one-day conference
celebrating the achievements of the IBA. The connotations of the
phrase "German post-industrial" had led me to expect Peter Latz
to look like a member of the band Einstürzende Neubauten. But Latz,
60, is an unostentatious dresser with tan skin and fuzzy, light-brown
hair. He looks more like a composting-and-solar-energy kind of guy--which,
in fact, is how he started out.
"Long before
Duisburg Nord, I was concerned with getting rid of the separation
between nature and culture," he says. "But in the Seventies, I never
imagined it would be in a post-industrial landscape. I was thinking
in terms of energy-autonomous houses and green communities--recycling
and so on."
The shift toward
post-industrial work came in 1985, when Peter won a contract to
rehabilitate
the old coal-shipping port in the city of Saar-brucken.
The Latzes's firm, Latz + Partner, turned it into an overgrown Roman
ruin, with a central pool anchoring wildflower-strewn walks through
the debris. "Saarbrucken was a pilot project for the Landscape Park
Duis-burg Nord," says Anne-liese. It was here that Peter forged
his signature aesthetic: the fusion of ecological thinking with
an enthusiasm for technological decay.
"The important
idea is the identity of nature and culture," says Peter. "At Duisburg
Nord, for in-stance, you have ecological, natural systems, like
the canal." (The Em-scher River, which had become a stagnant sewage
ditch, was rehabilitated into a reed-lined, ecologically self-sustaining
canal.) "But it's a technological work. The most natural system
in the sense of the ecology is at the same time the most important
managed technical system. And that's the idea of this post-industrial
landscape."
It was not
the easiest idea to sell. The other competitors in the 1990 contest
to design the park had much flashier plans. "Cass Associates wanted
to make a big lake," says Anneliese.
"That was a
Disneyland idea," says her husband. "Though not in a bad sense."
"Bernard Lassus
also had a very symbolic approach."
"Yes, but it
was impossible on this scale. He wanted to build a giant iceberg.
It was interesting, but..."
Latz's
approach, though conceptually more challenging,
was less visually impressive. So beginning with the second phase
of the proposal, he stopped doing drawings. Instead, he told stories.
"We imagined an old grandpa showing his grandchild where he had
worked in the steel plant, and then we imagined hawks on the furnace
towers," he recalls. "The amazing thing is, now there really are
hawks nesting in those towers."
"But you also
told a story about the Emperor Barbarossa sitting in the furnace,
and the ravens circling," prompts Anneliese.
"There's an
archetypal story of a chief sitting in a mountain cave, and he cannot
die as long as the ravens are circling the mountain," explains Peter.
"He asks his servant every 50 years, eAre the ravens still circling?'
When you start looking at the blast furnace as a mountain, all these
archetypes start coming up. The furnace is not just a blast furnace,
it's a mountain. And, at the same time, it's like a dragon."
But you don't
have to be thinking along mytho-symbolic lines to appreciate the
568-acre Landscape Park Duisburg Nord. Realized by Latz + Partner
with on-site supervision by
 Anneliese's
other firm, Latz-Riehl, architecture by G. Lip-kowsky, and a vegetation
concept by J. Dettmar, the park works on a number of levels. The
central area, containing the blast furnace, gas tank (or "gasometer"),
and other infrastructure, can be enjoyed simply as a giant jungle
gym. Walkways bring you up to the summit of the blast furnace, through
channels where liquid metal once flowed and forests of ominous tubes
that look like fire-spitting pipe organs. From the peak, you look
out across the Ruhr Valley at woods and houses punctuated by huge
factories spaced miles apart. At your feet, the train tracks that
once carried ore and molten steel are now bicycle paths; just past
them lies the canal of the reclaimed Emscher. On the far side of
the canal stands a hundred-foot-high multicolored windmill.
The windmill
is the most obvious clue to the park's ecological
aspect. Sticking out of its side is a 30-foot-long Archimedes' screw,
an ancient system for lifting water out of a well. The windmill
turns the screw, which pulls water up out of the canal and pours
it into a system of drains and ditches, which thread through a series
of gardens before dropping back into the canal. This is the canal's
oxygenation system.
"For a year,
we argued about whether to use an electric pump or a windmill,"
Latz recalls. "Obviously using an electric pump would be simpler.
But the windmill is symbolic: Nature depends on technology; technology
depends on nature." The park's entire water system is a planned
ecology: All of the water in the canal comes from a system of rainwater
collectors and aqueducts that snake over and through the plant's
vast array of buildings.
When you've
climbed down from the blast furnace, a neatly planted arbor takes
you to an
underpass beneath the railway trestle. On the far
side, the factory's immense concrete foundations have been transformed
with carefully placed toeholds and outcroppings. Most days, you
can find a few members of Duisburg's rock-climbing club out here,
belaying and rappelling away. "The alpine club was very quick to
start using the park," Peter says. "And the scuba divers' club.
The divers came to us and said, eYou have these canals, can we try
them out?' They came back again and again and used this cavern under
the bunkers. They were very excited."
"They helped
clean up the basins and caves," adds Anneliese. "Now they have their
training center in the gasometer."
To get into
the wilder reaches of the park, you need to follow the paths along
the old train tracks, out to the northeast. "One of the most important
things in designing the park was the pathmaking," says Christine
Rupp-Stoppel, an associate with Latz + Partner, who showed me around
the Landscape Park Duisburg Nord.
"It was important to allow people to discover these
places where you couldn't go before because they were closed off.
The landscape was chopped up, and the people who lived here were
squeezed into narrow channels between the plants. We wanted to open
this space up again. So here, as you walk along the paths, it's
as if you are the train going into the plant, which is a way to
see the plant that no one could have before." The experience is
a crystallized, officially sanctioned version of breaking into an
abandoned building. In a way, it's a different version of the reverence
that nineteenth-century nature enthusiasts had for the untouched
wild: Walking along the railway dikes, or through the smelting troughs,
one is conscious of being in a place that was not intended for humans.
Of course,
there are also much more traditional garden-like sections in the
park. The railway dikes are covered in wild rose and sambuca. The
ore pits under the train trestles,
 a
huge grid of 33-foot-deep bunkers, have been lovingly planted in
formal designs, accessible through doors cut in the concrete walls.
There's a gorgeous rose garden with a small maze, and a spiral of
ferns bordered by logs. But as Rupp-Stoppel points out, "We had
to cart in soil to make these gardens, because the soil that was
here was too contaminated. So these gardens are artificial. The
slag is natural."
By all accounts,
the landscape park has contributed immeasurably to the cultural
welfare of Duisburg. The park draws outdoor classical-music concerts
and auto trade fairs, and it hosts the local Turkish community's
annual festival. And, as the speakers at the conference in Paris
pointed out, Duisburg Nord is just one of dozens of similar projects
sponsored by the IBA: sculpture parks on slag heaps; factories converted
into industry museums; land-art projects in wheat fields. The Ruhr's
defunct factories were once regarded as gargantuan eyesores; now,
lit up to advantage at night by fashionable theater-lighting designers,
they're seen as spectacular monumental architecture. "We took something
that no one wanted, that everyone said was useless," says the IBA's
former director Karl Ganser, "and turned it into something magnificent,
into a tourist attraction." The French architects and urban planners
attending the conference were generous in their praise. "We [in
France] must learn to adopt this sort of attitude," said architect
Bernard Reichen. "By not doing so, we are burying a history--and
burying a population with it."
But one of
the French audience members raised a pointed question. The spirit
of these projects, she noted, "is intimately bound up with the German
aesthetic of the ruin," which has deep roots in the history of German
Romanticism. Most of those in the audience disputed her point, but
it was clear that she had struck a nerve. What if the Landscape
Park Duisburg Nord is too specifically German, too dependent on
the twilight of the gods, on visions of dragons and Barbarossa in
his cave? Can it really serve as a model for elegant, impeccably
planned France? And what about America?
In 1959,
when Roy Smith punched his first time card at the Jones & Laughlin
steel plant in Pittsburgh, there were between 10,000 and 15,000
other guys working there, and it was just one of a half-dozen similar-sized
plants lining the banks of the Monongahela River along the 10 miles
from Pittsburgh to Clairton. When the J&L plant was at its wartime
production high, churning out steel for tanks, prefab army housing,
and landing-ship transports, it was responsible for 15 percent of
all the steel produced in the United States. Railroad cars ran between
J&L's steel- and ironworks in teams of two, every 12 minutes, 24
hours a day.
Smith worked
on steel buildings all over the country, and by 1965 he had crossed
over into J&L management. He's retired now, but he's still a company
man, eager to tell you about how he saved J&L $200,000 by finding
a better crane for lifting the lid off a blast furnace. Or the time
he had to figure out how to fix a broken ladle car without interrupting
production. "We poured a heat [a load of molten iron] every 12 minutes,"
he says. "So I had to get a crane in, hoist the fourth car up, pull
the third car out of the chain, and put it back together, in under
12 minutes." He grins. "And I did it."
The glory days
of Pittsburgh steel wound down in the 1970s, and in 1984 the mills
of the J&L plant, by then owned by the LTV corporation, closed.
LTV put Smith in charge of taking the plant apart and turning it
into land that could be redeveloped. His job was to wipe off the
face of the earth the plant where three generations of his family
had worked--and to make as much money as possible doing it. And he
did it well. Still, something about the job rankled. "I didn't care
so much for that last job," he says. "I mean, I took the building
where I used to bring my grandfather his lunch every day, and I
took that building down. That makes you feel funny. You take pride
in the things you built--in saying you worked on the Empire State
Building, the battleship Missouri. Steelworkers were proud people."
So as he dismantled
the J&L plant, blowing up the coke ovens, selling off the equipment,
cleaning out the oil pits, Smith found him-self occasionally calling
up the Pittsburgh Historical Preservation Society to try to save
the odd piece of history. In the late Eighties, he wound up sitting
in on the first meetings of something called the Steel Industry
Heritage Corporation (SIHC), an organization that was trying to
do for southwestern Pennsylvania what the IBA was doing for the
Ruhr Valley.
"We had this
idea that cultural heritage would be important to communities in
developing a sense of self-worth," says Ted Muller, now chairman
of the board of the SIHC. Muller, a historian and urban geographer,
recognized that as the plants shut down, local communities were
losing a lot more than jobs--they were losing their character and
social cohesion. "When you have major corporations shut their doors
and leave town, you start to get people asking, eWhat good are we?'
These communities had been told that they were worth nothing."
The SIHC wanted
to create a regional redevelopment plan based on issues like cultural
heritage and industrial history. They wanted to keep some of the
mills, redevelop them without tearing them down, to preserve regional
character. But they found the idea very difficult to sell to local
politicians. "We just couldn't get our message across to civic leaders
throughout the state," says Muller. In the dire economic straits
of the 1980s, local leaders were desperate for new businesses to
replace the mills; the SIHC's cultural initiatives seemed beside
the point. "They just saw it as fluff. The pressure was to get jobs
onto those riverfronts, and for us to do something cultural was
nutty."
The SIHC's efforts
were made more difficult by the attitudes of developers. "You get
your typical redevelopment plan, it's just, eLet's tear it down
and build a Motel 6,'" says August Carlino, the SIHC's CEO. Riverfront
revitalization along the lines of Baltimore's Inner Harbor was out
of the question; the damaged area was too modern to seem historic
in any gentrifiable way, and the rivers were too polluted. U.S.
environmental law proved another obstacle. "Up until a handful of
years ago, you had to return a site to pristine conditions before
redevelopment could occur," says Muller. That ruled out attempts
to save steel mills. "Nobody would touch them. There were liability
issues. Banks wouldn't lend you money."
It took a long
time, but gradually the SIHC won friends in Congress and began to
get its message across. The key was the prospect of tourism jobs.
In 1996, Congress created the Rivers of Steel National Heritage
Area. The SIHC has since won funding to preserve such historical
sites as the headquarters of the 1892 Homestead strike. It runs
grant programs for education and cultural conservation, and it has
been instrumental in area greenway efforts. It also runs a series
of steel-heritage riverboat tours, which, while they do a good job
of chronicling steel's role in creating Pittsburgh, also serve as
a pretty stunning inventory of its crippling departure.
Riding down
the Monongahela, or the Mon, as locals call it, in quest of the
steel industry today is basically an archaeological exercise. The
banks of the river are still dominated by concrete piers, loading
docks, and barge tie-ups. But the plants that poured the steel for
the Empire State Building, the St. Louis Arch, and the Golden Gate
Bridge have simply vanished into thin air. What was once a 10-mile-long
swath of colossal infrastructure belching forth smoke, flames, and
molten metal is now a sleepy stretch of empty flatland. Some of
the land boasts new development: a supermarket, a water-slide park,
a Loew's multiplex.
It's not all
gone, or not yet. There's one integrated steel works still operating
in Braddock, the updated, ultramodern Edgar Thompson plant. (Thanks
to a $300 million renovation, it can turn out as much steel with
2,000 employees as the 12,000-man J&L plant could in 1980.) And
there are two historic blast furnaces left: U.S. Steel's Carrie
furnaces Nos. 6 and 7, which stand abandoned on the north shore
of the Mon. The SIHC is fighting to preserve one of them. "We negotiated
with the county for years to purchase it," says Muller. "And we
had the money! But they didn't think we had the capacity to develop
it." If the folks at the SIHC can get their hands on that Carrie
furnace, they'd like to develop it along the lines of Landscape
Park Duisburg Nord, which Muller, Carlino, and the rest of the SIHC
visited last year.
"When I saw
Duisburg Nord," says Muller, "I almost cried."
Muller feels
that the SIHC wanted from the beginning to do what the IBA did,
but the group was hamstrung by American attitudes at the time. "The
IBA has been able to accomplish what we could only dream about,"
he says. "They decided to do the esoft' things first, then worry
about economic development next. Whereas our approach, at least
in Pennsylvania, is to worry about economic development first, then
deal with soft things--environment, cultural heritage--second." The
irony is that the SIHC was forced to justify its expenditures as
efforts to attract tourist dollars, yet the IBA, which discovered
tourism only as an afterthought, has wound up attracting vastly
more of it than Pittsburgh has, according to Muller.
Both Muller
and Carlino seem to think that American attitudes have turned a
corner. "It's not like it was in the Eighties," Muller says. "Then
jobs were what it was all about. But things are changing. People
see quality of life as a crucial issue for the new economy."
Muller and
Carlino still view the IBA as a role model. "We've got a few sites
that are still technically raw," says Carlino. "And we've been taking
this around to community economic-development groups and talking
to them about what Germany did. We're trying to convince them that
brown-fields don't have to have just anything put on them. A lot
of times in America our attitude is, eWe'll take anything, as long
as it's jobs.' And there may be a few hundred jobs, but there's
no sustainability to the redevelopment plan. We think Germany has
been much better in terms of sustainable development."
In the mid-nineteenth
century, when Frederick Law Olmsted created the style of landscape
architecture that would come to define the American urban park,
the purpose of a park was to allow the urban denizen to profit from
the beneficent effects of pastoral landscapes. There was no room,
in this vision, for a steel mill; there was scarcely room for any
human activity at all. Olmsted and the other great naturalists of
nineteenth-century America--Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and their kindred
spirits--left a tremendous legacy of urban parks and wilderness preserves;
they invented conservationism. But that aesthetic is no longer adequate
in today's Pittsburgh or today's Duisburg, or today's Central Park
for that matter. As landscape architects like Peter Latz define
how we will see the urban environment in the coming century, categories
such as nature and industry are increasingly coming to seem like
two different kinds of ecologies. The aesthetics born out of this
fusion are an aesthetics of system-building, reuse, recycling, and
awareness of process--an aesthetics of sustainability.
You might not
think that an old steelworker like Roy Smith would have much to
contribute to this conversation, but you would be wrong. Smith is
now a guide on Rivers of Steel tours, and he talks about the coke-refinement
process the way an Apache might talk about a buffalo: "It takes
17 tons of coal to make 14 tons of coke. Guess where that other
three tons of coal goes? About half a ton of it gets turned into
all kinds of useful polymers, like nylon, and the rest turns into
tar. And at J&L, we burned the tar to fuel our iron plant. We used
every bit of that coal. Andrew Carnegie taught us well." It's a
standpoint that Peter Latz could only applaud.
Matt Steinglass
is a writer and Web designer who recently moved to Togo. |
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