Urban Triage

It’s nice to think that MoMA, an institution that spent much of the twentieth century prescribing Euro-Modernism to the American public, is venturing beyond utopia in its twenty-first-century incarnation. Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape, curated by Peter Reed, suggests a new paradigm for our future cities—not the scorched-earth prescriptions of visionaries but a more lyrical (and yes, humble) retrofit that combines landscape, infrastructure, and renewal in a way that might be called “urban triage.”

Most of the 23 projects surveyed in this thoughtful and timely exhibition appear to be rooted in the gritty reality of our times, acknowledging that Love Canal and Al-Qaeda provide as many lessons as the Plan Voisin or Broadacre. While there is nothing specifically about Manhattan’s Ground Zero in Groundswell, it hovers throughout the installation as a kind of offstage presence. Terrorism begets new visions of unity and healing much the way that carpet bombing allowed those sweeping visions of urban renewal to be realized post-World War II. In the confusing and deadly complexities of so-called globalization, the landscapist now arrives on the scene as medico and therapist.

The first example in the show sets forth an underriding theme. In 1996 a massive IRA bombing destroyed more than one million square feet of commercial and retail space in the heart of Manchester, England. This devastating event became the catalyst for a rebuilding of the city’s traditional center with pedestrian-friendly parks and new traffic patterns. (The master plan was designed by EDAW of London.)

The city of Beirut suffered far worse destruction than Manchester, and the Hadiqat As-Samah (“Garden of Forgiveness”) is arising in an area that was raked and ruined by 16 years of civil war. The 5.7-acre site lies near the historic city center and is surrounded by several important religious buildings, including three mosques and three Christian cathe-drals of different denominations. Bomb-blasted buildings were razed, and archaeologists have excavated the site down to old street foundations that date back to the Romans.

The designers, Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter, of Gustafson Porter Ltd. (London), worked from this overlay of archaeology and modernity to create metaphors of unity and reconciliation. The ancient ruins have been integrated into terraced patterns of flower and herb beds, shade trees, trellised walkways, a pergola with climbing roses, fountains, and a long reflecting pool. All of this has been depicted in a scale model. One is reminded of the Moorish terraces of the Alhambra, but in this updated pleasure garden there is a sense of past and future mingling as the Garden of Forgiveness celebrates the diversity that was an underlying cause of Lebanese fraction but also gave Beirut its identity as an international crossroads.

Landscape design often seems ephemeral and artificial when exhibited. You want to go outside and have a firsthand experience of the place—feel the wind, sniff the grass—not be peering into a Plexiglas vitrine in an otherwise windowless environment. But through a combination of enlargements, large-scale models, and video projections, Reed has managed to breathe life into the presentations by conveying both a human scale and a sense of plausibility. Unlike many design exhibitions, Groundswell has not been inflated with empty theory. Many of the projects have already been completed, while the rest are in the process of being realized. Having said that, there is a sense of spatial disconnection in the gallery spaces of MoMA’s sixth floor—an excess of oddly banal spaces that bring to mind the regional headquarters of an insurance company. To be fair, this has more to do with the architecture of the museum’s recent renovation than with the installation design or the content of the exhibition.

Yet some of the projects in Groundswell fit into a fairly predictable tradition of landscape design—Yoji Sasaki and Peter Walker’s design for Keyaki Plaza, for instance, hovers prettily above a complex of commercial buildings in Saitama City, Japan. A few even verge on a sort of corporate-campus sensibility that was prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, when reflecting pools and carpets of pristine lawn were used to complement the glass-and-steel structures of trophy Modernism.

Gustafson’s design for the Shell Petroleum Headquarters, in Rueil-Malmaison, France, gives a new twist to this tradition as it mediates between built form, nature, and accountability. Here landscape becomes a kind of rolling mea culpa that descends toward a reflecting pool filled with sparkling water. It’s ironic how much Gustafson’s scheme resembles an industrial reclamation project, when in fact the undulating berms and limestone slabs conceal only an underground parking garage. They appear to be covering something more noxious. Whether intended or not, it becomes a sobering metaphor for the cost of excavating fossil fuel (one can’t help but recall the Shell pipeline explosion in Nigeria and the devastation—and corporate denial—that followed).

But by far the most compelling moments in the show are those that deal with ravaged, polluted, or otherwise discarded urban sites suggesting not just pleasant patterns of reuse but wholesale identity change. The Bordeaux Botanical Garden, designed by Catherine Mosbach, transforms a malodorous industrial area into a study center for biodiversity, including an area called the “Environment Gallery,” in which 11 different landscapes from sand dunes to limestone hills have been represented.

Perhaps the most romantic recycling project is the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, in the industrialized Ruhr district of western Germany. In among the rusting hulks of a former steelworks, Peter Latz, of Latz + Partner, has created a 570-acre park with wild flowers planted in among the crumbling foundations of the old blast furnaces. Former sewage channels and retention pools have been submerged, sealed, and reconstituted as water courses and reflecting pools.

The final piece in the show, the Fresh Kills “Lifescape” project on Staten Island, is in many ways the most ambitious and optimistic of all because it takes on the most noxious site in New York and proposes to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The four-phase 30-year plan by James Corner, of Field Operations, will rehabilitate the 2,200-acre site and provide recreational parkland as well as safe habitat for wildlife. This is a plan that goes way beyond the aesthetics of landscape design since it offers sustainable real-time solutions to a whole range of urban dilemmas. The mountainous accumulation of 53 years of dumping includes wreckage from the World Trade Center, and one of the components of the plan is a monumental earthwork that will commemorate the events of September 11, 2001.

The garden has been seen as a place of reflection, love, and healing since ancient times. The best of the Groundswell projects perpetuate that tradition, not just by stimulating the civic imagination with metaphors for unity and growth but by providing a new set of tools. Maybe it’s naive to think that landscape can do all that. Will a fragrant herb garden in Beirut help keep Hezbollah at bay? Will deep-rooted plants absorb mercury poisoning on Staten Island? It may sound improbable, but it might be possible. We’ve come a long way from the Garden of Eden.