Earth in the BalanceBy Jane Holtz Kay Anonymous was a landscape architect. Not for these placemakers, the recognition given to their peers in building. Planners may stand side by side with mayors boasting of some "grande project." Architects may see "designed by" signatures on their structures. But those who fashion rolling greenswards, transform wasted landscapes into common ground or turn sordid waterfronts into shared edges are unsung if not unknown.
"Our contribution to the undertaking is that of the framing of the scheme rather than the disposition of flower beds," Frederick Law Olmsted, the least anonymous of these landshapers observed. The profession's patron saint (and Nation co-founder), Olmsted invented the name if not the calling of "landscape architecture" in 19th century America. A generation later, as the century turned, his stepson, John and namesake son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., joined a small assembly to form the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). The centennial celebration of that event in the year now ended called forth a reassessment of the landscape architect's role within the field--and in a larger universe in need of the profession's conserving and redeeming powers. Prepared by training and ancestry to tackle the everlasting and the ephemeral, to map natural systems and push politicians, plant trees and tend to the civic good, landscape architects are endowed with the skills to supervise our shopworn environs. Their dossiers are replete with work for "public improvement" as well as private pleasure, for shaping cities and chaining vast regions in tune to the genius loci. And yet, today, these lead designers remain bit players compared to their colleagues in architecture and planning. "Landscape architecture has remained environmentally responsible, undervalued as an art form, and desperately needed as part of humanity's survival kit in the face of an impending apocalypse," James Wines, environmental designer and incoming director of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture observed on the eve of the organization's centennial conference in Boston in the fall. So "undervalued" is this venerable profession, in fact, that its members turned giddy with the news that the post office which blithely honors the likes of Elvis and Mickey Mouse had also allotted an anniversary stamp to Olmsted, the bearded sage nestled amidst a collage of blooms and bridge. Thus inspired, celebrations were staged, panels were held, chronologies written, books published, and introspective landscape architects turned inward and outward to analyze their status in this epoch of environmental challenge. In this era of affluence and environmentalism, that status does appear somewhat elevated, the potential for their vision growing. The profession of 13,000 members (plus, more or less, the same number in unregistered ones) does coordinate many parcels into places, restoring parks and brownfields, managing ecological projects and community planning. For all their work in adorning America's sprawling multi-million dollar McMansions, planting lawns on the nation's starter castles and decorating multi-digit corporate rooftops--or greenwashing destructive projects--some have returned to the social and political ideals of their ancestors. The broader preachings of Ian McHarg's 1969 classic to Design with Nature --- to repair the "raddled landscape to create new public values," to survey the bioregion, to argue for nature in the city and advance the ecological transformation of larger systems-have currency. Environmental regulations slowly come to insist on their presence at the proverbial table. And, yet, notwithstanding this recent recognition, the slights endure. Find a massive public undertaking and you are more likely to find a civil engineer or Corps of Engineer member bred on hardtop and hard, straight edges than a landscape architect engaged in civic urbanity and guided by the aesthetics of nature. Notice the high-profile rejection of landscape architects in the project of the decade: the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum's 8 million dollar construction project, the Central Garden, was diverted from the profession of landscape architecture to the misconstrued labors of artist, Robert Irwin. Meanwhile, the name of The Olin Partnership, the landscape architecture firm handling the siting of the complex atop a lofty peak, was invisible in the stellar glow accorded architect Richard Meier. All this overture to the 100th anniversary, stands in marked to the profession's founding at the turn-of-the century. When the landscape architect brothers, John C. and F.L. Olmsted Jr. came to town, the newspapers banner headlined the planmakers' entrance. Taking the lead in the creation of the American Planning Association in 1909, FLO Jr. and his peers spread their influence in the major works of the day. Landscape architects designed the sweeping parks and parkways, the residential communities and vast social, ecological and aesthetic undertakings that defined the nation. This alliance dominated the early decades of the 20th century, creating the better -perhaps best -- part of America's parks, parkways, and communities. The 1920s place and parkmakers, their roots and skills happily blurred, remain planning heroes today. John Nolen, idol of the so-called New Urbanism; the Regional Planning Association spirited by Lewis Mumford, its scribe, and shaped by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright at Sunnyside, Radburn and even communities; Benton MacKaye, shaping the Appalachian Trail, command respect and imitation. "By making nature urban, we naturalize the city," Lewis Mumford observed their idyll. Together, such masterminds of the landscape wrote their signature across an all too brief period. By the next decade, the Depression dominated offering some projects and parkways on the public landscape. Yet these marked a last flourishing. As the landscape profession became a gentlemanly one, given to adorning the estates of the wealthy, the planners --leaning towards engineering of the hour - would overwhelm the built environment. Landscape architects would follow their hardscape highway and lose touch with the context and ecology of earlier design-conscious priorities. Challenged by modernism, by engineering, deprived of public project funds and powered by a growing enchantment to embellish the burgeoning corporate estates and residences in the suburbs, landscape architects saw their role in public service evaporate, their supremacy and public presence slide still further in the post-war years.
The loss of that public prominence and civic consciousness is the nation's loss. For, at no time, have these potential stewards and planners faced a nation in more desperate need of environmentally and aesthetically oriented guidance than today. "We are today living in a machine age," landscape architect Jens Jensen observed in 1959 the year of the profession's sixtieth anniversary. "What is to follow no one knows, but there is one thing sure," he went on. "Nature will survive." Survive indeed, we wonder, in this era of vanishing greenness, in this year of the slipping seasons. As "second nature," "toxic nature," and "threatened nature" slip off the tongue, the certainty of nature's resilience diminishes. Observing the erosion of our last chance landscape, watching the rapacious geography of sprawl, losing habitat and species , citizens routinely indulge in what Harvard professor Lawrence Buell labels "toxic discourse." More than indulge or natter in their coffee cups, they act. In an age, contemplating sea walls to secure New York from the rising tides of global warming, trashing Monsanto's "terminator" seeds to protect butterflies and landmarking habitats for birds and bees, Americans are uneasy and vocally so. As nature modified by humankind spits back floods and disasters from climate change, and the planet's population of six billion stresses urban and wilderness habitats, the constituency grows. Witness the environmental demonstrations in Seattle late last year, not to mention the 1999 elections where 72 percent of those voting favored some 240 local referenda to retain open space. What "open" (vs. designed and organized space) meant was unclear. And yet, though those hankering for greener space do not understand that landscape architects are space and placemakers, the literature of place is very much with us. "I have a dozen books with the word 'place,' on my shelf," Grady Clay, editor emeritus of Landscape Architecture magazine and word-taxonomist, remarks. Clay praises the new consciousness of his peers. He notes the visibility of broader interests at the 100th anniversary annual meeting and the growth in the field. Landscape architect, Peter Walker, founder of Spacemaker Press, describes the profession's posture as fortunate, lodged between two issues at the center of the nation's concerns-- "preservation of agricultural and natural primordial land." The rush to develop America's outback has indeed raised consciousness about farm land and wilderness into the wider issues of land use and land design that are the profession's mandate. Much as Olmsted (with Calvert Vaux) inspired the park movement at Central Park in 1857; much as Olmsted (with others) shaped the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that inaugurated the City Beautiful movement's far-reaching planning; and much as his disciple, Charles Eliot expanded metropolitan considerations around the natural region, landscape architects should and could grow take on this mantle. They should and could grow beyond their constricted ambitions and modest reputations to replicate their ancestors' far-reaching land-consciousness for all of us. Why is it that the link between the ecological consciousness of the environmentalist and the graceful execution of the landscape architect is only barely becoming visible on wider fronts? Why do the words-de-jour---"sustainability," "livability," "smart growth," "open space" -issue from those who do exactly the opposite: the profit-minded builders whose enclosed space, dumb growth, unlivable and unsustainable ecologies have, by and large, excluded any mindful handling of the earth? Can it simply be that landscape architects' lesser numbers--13,000, compared to the architects' 67,000 and the planners' 30,000-undermines their work? Is it their stars or their search for the stardom of their architect peers makes them become lawn arrangers for the private affluents more than lone rangers for a shrinking habitat and piecemeal planning, high riders on the fame circuit rather than advocates? Perhaps their secondary place in the public discourse comes from a diversity of work beyond that of their other building peers. Join the ?4000-plus attendees at the centennial conference in Boston and you see a range of landscape architects with projects that go all over the map in place and content, from Disney's worlds to Canada's capital; from designing cemeteries to plotting solar plans, flood control to college campuses, resorts to therapeutic gardens-far enough to give anyone an identity problem. A profession of theoretical artists and land pragmatists, of "specialists and generalists, " some irrigate their resumes with high flown, high art; others struggle to supplant the engineers' irrigation projects. There are creators of historic restorations and ecologically-minded remediations as well as those who indulge in frivolous showboating designs or put a green tone on unsound and invasive projects. "Today, much of our work deals with shopping centers, golf courses, corporate headquarters, large private gardens, and the edges of highways," Lawrence Halprin criticizes his colleagues in 100 Years of Landscape Architecture: Some Patterns of a Century (Spacemaker) in the ASLA's hefty institutional history by Melanie Simo. "Drainage guys and parking lot guys," one landscape historian dismisses them. Starseekers and fashionmongers, others insist. For every do-gooder, there is at least one artiste-in-excess fantasizing about shaping topiaries touting Nike sneaks, pools modeled after George Soros' profile or developer-driven dictates no matter their aesthetic and environmental cost. Scan the issue of the lively and informative ASLA magazine, Landscape Architecture, published the month before the 100th anniversary assembly. The title page of the first article shows a hard-surfaced terrace fronting a gridded, black glass building. The image is softened by a few quivering aspens with white clouds drifting across a blue sky. But all is not blue-sky pie. Two-thirds of the picture consists of the boxy structure and its "corporate plaza" covering a parking garage that seems to have dictated the look of the barren surroundings. The landscape architect has planted those feathery trees above the garage to serve as "a metaphor for the native landscape of Colorado," says the article. "Tree-wash," says the reader. A second article shows a new project and the 1982 design it displaced i.e. leveled. The original plaza, a black and white checkerboard done with modernist pizzazz was the work of landscape architect George Hargreaves. "It winks and talks tough," his fellow landscape architect, Laurie Olin, observed at its origins. For all the winking, it couldn't resist the owner's wish for a makeover. Looking for lunchgoers, the company decided to uproot the design, dig in a few feel-good plantings and eradicate the space in its adolescence. (Ephemeral is also a landscape architect.) "What then are landscape architects to make of the circumstance that rooftops-even more than brownfields-are increasingly the locale of their creation?" asks the magazine Land Forum, a sumptuous, quirkily intellectual and in-bred if promising new publication from Spacemaker. What do you make of the fact that this searing question is never answered by the author who skips ahead to the project design without probing the deeper question: Why are there so many more requests to fix up private, pricey space than space in the public realm of the street? And so few to care to notice this posture? "A profession in peril?" asked an ASLA panel. Why not call us "land architects," not landscape ones, one observer suggested a broader role.
Whatever the name of the profession, some of its members do seek some large scale environmental research or planning to do so. Buck Abbey 's Greenlaws, a volume of codes to zone for nature, shows promise in empowering landscape architects by creating "an environmental law that looks out for nature in the city," in his words. Abbey's survey of 500 communities showed how zoning and other land alteration ordinances, enable communities to guarantee greenery and ecological siting, to stop erosion, improve drainage, protect or renew wetlands to heal communities. And in pockets like California and Florida, they do. In other ways as well, the profession is returning to its social and political origins. As recently as two years ago, the organization's annual awards singled out the work of two vanguard designers, Peter Walker and George Hargreaves for the bulk of their prizes. The criticism of this monopoly of highstyle, high-star strutting surely accounts for this year's multiple winners lauded under the banner heading "Year of Water." "The presence of this life-giving element in the landscape" apparently sank the celebrity prizes in favor of lauding a wetland project, the plan for a watershed and research on stream restoration. Superlative projects may be the least visible, a landscape photographer suggests, their subtle contouring of the landscape suggesting nature's beauties and the healthy ecology, not an obvious designer's hand. A "jerky progress toward a greater ecological emphasis," the prizegivers commented in Landscape Architecture magazine, itself now leaning more towards public and environmentally-attuned articles. To be sure, ecologists as well as everyday citizens are equally at fault in ignoring those trained to treat their surroundings "holistically." Those charting the fate of earth largely ignore the professionals equipped to design their scenic corridors and greenways, to restore their habitats and toxic brownfields. Environmentalists celebrated their own anniversary this year. Fifty years ago Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac became the Bible of the ecology movement spelling out the iconic land ethic of ecology: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." And yet, as the century turned, Sierra magazine's issue on "The Green Millennium," summoning ecologists to offer their planetary visions, skimped on nature in the city or greening settled areas. They and others recording such events singled out engineers, attorneys, and environmentalists to exposit their views, with nary a mention of this profession trained to fuse, not to mention "beautify," their wishes. If the fault lies both with our landscape architects' predilection for corporate cocoons and self-indulgent designs--and ourselves for not calling forth their public face and services-- centennial notetakers managed to look ahead to a new frontier of larger landscapes, parks, university campuses, and more public tasks. Learning to love the unloved places, many are retrieving once-filled swamps in New Jersey, cleaning debris-laden lands and restoring indigenous plantings to revive smelly tidal bogs. Landscape architects list new de-paving designs, brownfield reclamations and regional projects a la McHarg, himself finally be-medalled by his profession this year. Finally, and still more hopefully, the anniversary year marked a looking backwards to their heritage. "Go with the FLO"--Frederick Law Olmsted--buttons sprinkled lapels at the Boston conference. Treading the catwalk to tomorrow by turning to this tradition, landscape architects and activists could cite repairs to historic landscapes and rally to fight threats to Beatrix Jones Farrand's 1921 milestone landscape at Dumbarton Oaks n Washington, D.C., menaced by alterations to house a new underground library. The Cultural Landscape Foundation has reminded a broader audience that both old and not-so-old designs by the likes of landscape architect Paul Friedberg need to be recognized and preserved. The survey of 349 windswept plazas in New York by Gerald Kayden, sponsored and published by the city's Municipal Art Society, is a first step to the notion that even these weary residues of the tower-in-the-park and the asphalting of urban America might be invigorated-and bespeaks an urban greening. Celebrations can be self-congratulatory and perfunctory. But this probing of a brilliant past should provide the model to reclaim America-and turn landscape architects from lackeys to custodians of the larger environment and public responsibility in their tradition. "The soul of the future depends both on informing and inspiring, and the best landscape architects are the ones who speak from an informed debate," Charles Birnbaum, landscape architect with the National Park Service, Preservation Assistance Division, observes. Their volume of Pioneers of Landscape Design, due from McGraw Hill this spring, joins with the reissued biography of Charles Eliot (University of Massachusetts), to add names and faces heretofore unknown to the landscape architects' prototypes of public work. Olmsted is the exemplar of these designers and his work forms the literary and historic core of this commemorative season as well, from the new paperback edition of Charles Beveridge and Paul Rochelle's Frederick Law Olmsted, Designing the American Landscape, (Universe Publishing); to the readable biography by Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in a Distance (Scribner's). Olmsted's Writings on Public Parks, Parkways and Park Systems (Johns Hopkins) is the seventh and recently published volume in the invaluable 13-volume series of the premier landscape architect's projects. The series is not only a historic accounting but a futurist primer to carry on and replicate the work of the parkmaker and planner who used his aesthetic and political tools to build Emerald Necklace accoutrements for America. The greener tint recorded today stems from this enlightened recall. A profession ready to recollect this proud past promises more in the future to renew an environment on the wane. "Nostalgia runs all through this society--fortunately, for it may be our hope of salvation," historian Donald Worster puts it in his perceptive essay on nature's decline in Unmanaged Landscapes, Voices for Untamed Nature."(Island Press). "We are moving at long last, even on this uniquely favored continent, toward an awareness of universal resource scarcity and limits," he notes. Saving that nature is no act of God, landscape architects know. And, as they celebrate their 100th anniversary, they are beginning to ask the right questions. Can their knowledge of hydrology, biology, topography and climate and their capacity to monitor technology turn Leopold's 20th century call-to-wildness to the service of the 2lst century's wastelands? Today, the mediators and remediators are rising. Can landscape architects blend Leopold's "Thinking Like A Mountain" with the urban notion of "Thinking like a sidewalk," or the environmental one of "Thinking Like A Greenbelt?" Can we? It is no easy task to tilt the war between eco-systems and private property. Can landscape architects shape a "movement to make our whole country a park," as Warren Manning, another landscape architect from their memorable past put it. Can we craft a revived landscape on their tradition of harmonizing and humanizing the built and natural environment? "Fertile soil washes and blows away before our eyes. Biodiversity plummets, stream corridors are bathed with nutrients from adjacent lands. Food and wood production provides less and less to rural families. Houses sprout on the best agricultural soils. And humanity is increasingly divorced from nature," writes ecologist Richard T.T. Forman. Yet, as this scholar of natural systems observed. "Nothing is immutable and little is irreversible." No unlivable places, only ones in need of remediation. What better slogan to employ as a means to salvage and enhance these unreclaimed places through a profession concerned with the future and a citizenry crusading for its last chance landscape? The most celebratory thought may be that we still possess the opportunity to do so. Hopefully, this next century of landscape architecture will mark the end of anonymity and the beginning of visibility for the profession's diminished urban art and ecology; hopefully, too, an enlightened public will recognize that the landscape-shaping, earth-tending profession is the best hope to restore the health and beauty of this exhausted earth. Published as an architecture column in The Nation, February 14, 2000.
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