In the age of ecology and sustainability, landscape architecture, like other design professions, is in the process of finding new areas of exploration, new types of work, and a more diverse group of clients that require renewed research and learning. Gary Hilderbrand’s erudite and accessible essay, in a new book on his firm, is an inspiring guide through a modernist’s commitment to rationality and abstraction while it shows a deep understanding of and respect for the immense variety and unpredictability of the profession’s pre-eminent material, Nature. Combining skill with hope, the firm has created and is in the process of creating, some of our most memorable, yet sometimes invisible landscapes, thus the name of the book, Visible/Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand, newly published by Metropolis Books. In addition to Gary’s enlightened view of his profession, we hear from such notable figures as Peter Walker and the photographer, Millicent Harvey, among others. But it’s Hilderbrand’s own words that make us want to see, examine, marvel at, and appreciate what his firm is doing. “The landscape is bigger than we are,” he writes. “We alter its substance and its processes, and it grows back at us with force. We can’t see exactly how, but we know it will. We come to embrace a certain image. Is it right?” —SSS

In the early morning light of a photograph taken by Alan Ward in the summer of 2010, a canopy of cedar elms hovers over a pavilion, a swimming pool, and gently graded lawn terraces. The image was made on the bank of Upper Bachman Creek in Dallas, Texas, on a 6-acre property where Philip Johnson designed a house in 1964 for Henry S. and Patricia Beck. When Doug Reed and I first visited this site in 2003, the spatial power of these trees was barely visible. Fully engulfed in a tangle of two species of Ligustrum—one shrublike, growing up to 12 feet in height, the other with 3-inch trunks reaching nearly 20 feet—the land was virtually impenetrable. For perhaps two decades, an aging Mrs. Beck had neglected portions of her property east of the creek and benignly allowed nature to run its course. More than a hundred volunteer cedar elms and a handful of other trees, including several Texas live oaks and a single giant cottonwood, had formed a canopy that merged with comparably overgrown woodlands on either side of the parcel. We saw a degraded, illegible landscape.

Mrs. Beck sold the property in 2002 to a young Dallas family of four, and the new owners committed to a massive project to rescue and reinhabit Johnson’s house and to recover health and functionality for the landscape. Over a seven-year period, we transformed this patch of emergent forest through a set of operations and practices whose evidence is sometimes visible but often obscured. Recapturing a space for family life and for the display of sculpture necessitated significant disturbance and successive rehabilitation efforts: removing dozens of the poorest trees and preserving the most viable; opening up the canopy to improve light and air; eliminating invasive plant species; correcting drainage and soil structure; reinforcing and replanting the stream bank; and establishing several kinds of grassland and prairie and groundcover crops. Read more…

Portrait of Neil McEachern, photo by Vasco Roma

“There are many, many really cool things about the house,” said Neil McEachern, retired Detroit public school principal, who has lived in Lafayette Park for 20 years. He is describing life at Lafayette Park, and how the residents there have turned this modern blank slate housing into their much-loved homes. “Lafayette Park was built on land that once was a densely settled, working-class, African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Classified as a ’slum’ by the city of Detroit in the 1940s, Black Bottom was razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s, when a citizens’ group led by labor activist Walther Reuther succeeded in attracting Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald to the project. Greenwald brought in Mies van der Rohe to serve as architect, and Mies in turn brought his colleagues urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell on board. Hilberseimer’s plan for the area called for rerouting or blocking off some of the streets to create a superblock, on which would be built housing, a large park, an elementary school, playgrounds and space for retail. By the early 1960s many elements of this plan had been completed,” notes the introduction to the recently released Metropolis Book, Thanks for the view, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. There are hundreds of stories that create the human texture of this special place. Here, excerpted from the book, is the story of one long time resident, Neil Mceachern.

We have been trying to get a sense of how this neighborhood came about and what was here before. It’s unusual to have an urban renewal project like this, where a large area of land in the middle of a city was cleared and an entirely new neighborhood was established. I always like to recognize the people who came before us in this area of Detroit now known as Lafayette Park. Before 1701 it was the home of the Huron, Ottowa and Potawatomi Indians. Then, after the arrival of Cadillac, this land east of the fort was divided into ribbon farms — narrow strips that started at the river and continued far inland. [1] Many of the streets still retain the names of those early farm families: Rivard, Chene, St. Aubin, Joseph Campau and so on. Then, as the city expanded, the farms were broken up and the area became home to many German families. Many of the old German churches still line the Gratiot corridor — Trinity Lutheran, St. John’s/St. Luke’s, St. Joseph’s, for example. Many of the side streets along Gratiot have German names because they were built out during this period. Then we get to post–World War II and the beginnings of what is Lafayette Park. Generally, “urban renewal” in this country meant tearing down big areas where poor people lived and building new housing. That’s basically what happened here. Black Bottom was home to a large part of Detroit’s black community at the time and also to the city’s emerging Syrian community. It was a very poor area. Mostly it was rentals — little wood houses. It was torn down as part of a plan to keep middle-class people living in downtown Detroit.

Was this area always considered part of downtown Detroit? By the time Lafayette Park was built it was on the edge of downtown. If you stand outside when there aren’t any leaves on the trees you can see the big buildings of downtown. You can see the Renaissance Center from my living room. We’re within walking distance of the Central Business District.

So was this on the west edge of Black Bottom? I don’t really know that Black Bottom had an actual defined boundary. Hastings Street was where the Chrysler Freeway is now, and that was the commercial street where the bars and restaurants and barbershops and stores were.

Top, a nighttime view of artwork hanging inside Neil McEachern’s unit, photo by Vasco Roma; above, a wall with prints at his house, photo by Daniel Aubert

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“Wave Signal”                                                                                          Photo:  Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Sweeping ocean vistas display their obvious beauty but waves speak an arcane language all their own. Frederic Raichlen, professor emeritus at Caltech and an expert on coastal engineering and wave mechanics, has a new book Waves (MIT Press). He is a kind of wave whisperer.

A colleague once claimed that MIT Press could take any subject and make it boring. They failed here since this little pocket book, the latest in their “Essential Knowledge” series, is fascinating.

Raichlen presents a specific formula, then suggests measuring wave intervals with a stop watch, “it’s like taking the pulse of the ocean.” The book may not be for the math phobic. But you can still glean a more scientific appreciation of ocean wave phenomena and coastal transformation that will only increase your awe of 50 foot high tsunamis, 80 foot high rogue waves…and tiny ripples lifted by a gentle breeze across a pond.

Raichlen then converts your bathtub into a handy testing tank for wave generation, pushing down and lifting water with the palm of the hand making homemade tsunamis…at scale.

He discusses strategies and limitations of coastal breakwaters, seawalls and the like. His analysis of water and rock erosion by conceptual diagrams is intriguing. Additionally, as the best teachers do, he deftly applies analogy, illustrating an earthquake’s effects by way of a piano keyboard.

Waves gave me a more substantial understanding of the coastal impact of global warming. Surprisingly, though, I don’t think there was a single mention of the term in the entire book.

Photo: Han Singels. Uiterwaarden bij Graaf, 2005 colour print, collection artist

Sweet & Salt, an elegant tome by Tracy Metz & Maartje van den Heuvel, provides further illumination as they outline the history of Dutch attempts to tame the ocean. This is combined with a broad survey of the arts and water, inspiring creative use of landscape design and water. As pioneers and masters of water control and containment, the Dutch have “been there, done that” but are now moving towards a more zen-like philosophy of accommodation.

The cost to render invincible some 3,600 miles of U.S. eastern coastline in the face of impending oceanic doom is beyond both possibility and calculation. A recent, invaluable, short article (for the New Yorker) by Eric Klinenberg, “Adaptation,” provides other perspectives on the problem that may not make for dramatic headlines but is profound, nevertheless.

Social scientists have documented how relative social cohesion of one neighborhood allows its residents to survive natural disasters (like heat waves) as compared to adjacent populations of the same economic status, same demographic makeup facing the same forces of destruction – a prescriptive microcosm for a critically interdependent society.

As Klinenberg’s article indicates, even if the causes of climate change were halted today we’ve already bought decades of rising sea levels and fearsome atmospheric aberrations that will have to be faced.

Across the world, new strategies are cropping up including floating pavilions, smart power grids, wetland restoration, farming new oyster beds, retreating to higher ground, and so on. Debate rages over whether or not to build massively expensive “hard” solutions, that take too long to build and are only temporary defenses against surges, not rising sea levels. A growing “architecture of accommodation” is what Klinenberg anticipates. A more subtle point is that these responses should represent a duality of purpose, enhancing ordinary city life not just thwarting disaster.

Neptune, God of the Sea, just called. And he’s upset. His eternal rhythms are increasingly contorted by strange influences from man-made atmospheres. Those who have camped their civilization at water’s edge now face Neptune’s revenge.

Creativity has to answer his call with optimism across all borders technical, social, and political. Essentially, affirming interdependence, a gift we’ve been blessed with since, at least, the Stone Age.

“Neptune’s Reach”                                                                                    Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Joseph G. Brin is an architect, fine artist, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA.

I picked up the phone one morning and heard a man say in Hungarian, “Korab Boldizsar vagyok,” I’m Balthazar Korab. He needn’t have followed up by adding, “I’m a photographer.” I had known that for some time. As a young design magazine editor I was drawn to his crisp, moody, beautifully framed black and white images of the built environment, including the best of modernism. But I did not know, until that morning, that we shared a homeland and were both shaped by the cold war.

His story, like mine, began in Hungary. He came to the US in 1955. I arrived here in 1956. We were both refugees from post-WWII Eastern Europe. He left Hungary in 1949 when the Iron Curtain closed around the Soviet Union’s newly claimed satellites. Eight years later my parents whisked my sister and me out of Hungary, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the revolution.

After I heard Korab’s voice and I learned of our shared beginnings, I redoubled my interest in his work. His color photos taught me to appreciate the modernist innovators who built a small mid-western town, long before I visited there (Columbus, Indiana: An American Landmark, 1989). Then I found out that his intense images of Eero Saarinen’s work also revealed the story of the architect’s design process. In 1955 when he arrived in Michigan, Korab was hired by Saarinen to document the design development on buildings that were destined to gain iconic status. It’s not hard to make the connection between the initial fame and historic legacy of buildings like Dulles Airport in Virginia and the photographer’s eye.

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Phaidon Carrying Case

The largest book I own is the 20^th Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas.  It’s 13.5 by 22 inches. Amazon indicates that its shipping weight is 18.2 pounds. The cardboard carrying case with handles helps. So yes, that’s a lot of architecture. “The most outstanding works of architecture built between 1900 ad 1999” means 757 buildings to the publisher, though some of your favorite buildings may be missing. But you get the distinct sense that if Phaidon had produced a more comprehensive volume the world may have run out of paper.  Those on offer are, of course, excellent.

Any comment about the selections is simply going to layer my cherry picking on top of that of the “expert industry panel with input from over 150 specialist advisors from every geographic region” that determined the book’s contents. So before getting to that part of the orchard, an overview. One interesting conceit is that all of the buildings in the book are still extant (find your Imperial Hotel in some other book) and even accompanied by coordinates of longitude and latitude, which might be practically useful if you happen to have a GPS and a native porter for carrying the book.

The buildings within are organized by regional groupings whose representation plays out around the way that these things normally do: about half of them are European, although more-frequently-unnoticed architectural continents aren’t quite glossed over. There are 72 pages on South America and 52 in Africa. The atlas doesn’t stop at that. Each subsection includes a breakdown of projects by local as opposed to foreign architects, which largely displays the ebbing of European global design hegemony. Additional early charts illustrate the movements of architects: There’s of course an influx to the US and the UK in the 1930s and 40s, but otherwise a riot of lines of intriguing origin and destination.

It’s difficult to detect a curatorial bias in terms of styles or years. Europe’s strongest decade was the 1930s. North America and Africa boast the largest relative number of buildings from the 1950s and 1960s.  Asia shows the greatest comparative strength in the 1980s. Aalto, Breuer, Le Corbusier, Mendelsohn, Van Der Rohe, and Wright lead the pack in individual selections represented; no surprise there.  Some entries stretch beyond the linear “building”. New Delhi and Brasilia are represented along with a few master plans that seem worthy of recognition even if their constituent structures had varied designers, such as Potsdamner Platz in Berlin or EUR in Rome.  It’s difficult to argue with these grand inclusions on any categorical ground.

Bank of Guatamela

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Mies Van Der Rohe’s 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (c/o Wayne Andrews/Esto)

The subtitle of Matthew Gordon Lasner’s High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century might suggest a story of determined residential heterodoxy. Could this book be about the rare, defiantly urban souls opting for the sleek new high-rise as the rest of the old neighborhood packs up for the suburbs? Indeed, for a time that was true, but the real story is nowhere near as simple, and a good deal more interesting.

Co-operative housing’s (we don’t get to the actual term “condominium” for a while yet) pattern of growth roughly paralleled that of the schedule one controlled substance; pioneered by the rich, it soon caught on among the urban poor, and finally grew ubiquitous across income scales. It was considerably unusual for some time in the U.S., to be found mainly in pockets around New York and a preserve of the Edith Wharton-like gentry, and later of politically minded, often Jewish working classes. But long before the time, say, American Psycho came along to emblazon the cultural image of the condo, co-ops of some sort or another were just as likely to be found in Miami or in the San Fernando Valley as on the Upper East Side, and just as likely to be occupied by retirees or families as by necrophiliac yuppies.

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It’s all too easy, for both designers and their clients, to get lost in an over-abundance of facts, while presenting a design brief. We feel we have come up with a better way. Our way, we think, is more rewarding, for everyone involved in the process.

Writing a design brief is an essential part of the design process. But writing a good brief seems an elusive goal to most. Traditional briefs make dry reading. These voluminous reports usually bristle with tables, texts, and bullet points concerning square meters, temperature levels, and so on. Surely, all this information is vital. But it’s not enough. A good brief needs to instruct the design team as well as inspire them, giving them an in-depth understanding of the client’s needs. Unfortunately, these intangibles often drown in the overload of specifications, or they dissolve into meaningless verbiage like  “user friendly,” “efficient,”  “optimal, “ and so on.

We believe that this problem can be solved, by making use of story telling. These narratives can be short descriptions of the daily lives of users, anecdotes, metaphors, mood boards, quotes from interviews, scenarios for future use, and other “telling” formats. Using such narrative formats is a powerful means of communication. Better than voluminous reports or excel sheets, stories can get people interested and explain a vision.

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Stripes: Design Between the Lines
By Linda O’Keefe
The Monacelli Press, 224 pages, $50.00
Image courtesy of The Monacelli Press

Stripes, with their smooth and clean flow, may be the most straightforward of all decorative markings. Yet, for all their simplicity, stripes continuously create drama, both aesthetically and in societal terms.

Dramatically illustrated with photographs of the fashion, art, architecture, and furnishings that stripes have adorned over the centuries, Linda O’Keefe’s book tells a story that began thousands of years ago in ancient caves. The social context of stripes can be found as far back as biblical times when Matthew speaks of the privileged children of great men who “oft had their garments striped with divers colors.” Since then the markings have never ceased to cause controversy.

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The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation
Edited by Mathieu Lommen
Thames & Hudson, 464 pages, $65.00
Image courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Matthieu Lommen, curator at the Special Collections department of the Amsterdam University Library has compiled an excellent collection of books, illustrating more than 500 years of Western book design. Starting with Nicolas Jenson’s 1471 edition of Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae Linguae Latinae the collection ends with Irma Boom’s 2010 James, Jennifer, Georgina are the Butlers—-a 1,198-page sculptural book that traces the history of one family.

The Book of Books is a massive survey, weighing in at 6½ pounds, and is rich with examples. Short essays are devoted to such topics as the invention and spread of printing, nineteenth-century graphic techniques, the avant-garde and New Typography, and design in the Postmodern era. References to the great printers and engravers of the past—Aldus Manutius, Albert Durer, and Christoffel Plantin—are all included as well as to the designers of modern times (with shout outs to avant-guardians like El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, and Stefan Sagmeister).

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Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography
By John Comazzi
Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, $40.00
Image courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press

Balthazar Korab always wanted to be known as “an architect who makes pictures rather than a photographer who is knowledgeable about architecture,” John Comazzi tells his readers. Korab’s career can hardly be summoned up so easily.

The story of the celebrated architecture photographer begins in 1920s and 30s Hungary where he was raised in an upper-middle-class family, studying art, music, and poetry, even as his country was rocked with economic and social instability. With the aftermath of World War II he was forced to flee Hungary and landed in Paris where he studied architecture at École des Beaux-Arts. In between his formal studies he traveled through Europe, documenting the relationships between architecture, culture, and public life. It wasn’t, however, until he moved to Michigan and began working as a staff photographer for Eero Saarinen, that Korab established himself to be the man who documented midcentury modernism.

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