Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates

Afterword

197 AFTERWORD tween human-made forms and natural processes, especially in the context of “sustainability,” which is itself formless), to effects (how working the ground by means of varied topography is an essential craft for transforming leveled sites into dynamic, public spaces). Hargreaves not only responded to the greater shifts in sensibility of the post–Earth Day era but continues to define how these shifts are manifest in landscapes in compelling ways. With a practice spanning three decades, Hargreaves Associates ’ work offers a window into this dramatic transformation of site, and makes evident that the significant and expressive aspects of landscape should not be discounted as more and more practical demands are placed on landscapes. To the three E’s of sustainability (equity, environment , and economics) has been added a fourth: energy. With global warming, rising tides, dependence on non-renewable energy sources, and growing concerns over food security—all systemic issues —landscapes in general, and parks in particular , are increasingly seen as productive grounds to For mid-twentieth-century modernists, landscape design was largely rooted in the rise of corporate America, the postwar housing boom, and the creation of urban plazas. Today, landscape architects again find themselves with large, public commissions , but operating within radically different socioeconomic contexts and site conditions. Elizabeth Meyer has noted the importance of geology for those of Olmsted’s day; the sites they dealt with had “sectional form, structure, depth and content.”1 Today, the traces of deep time in remnant sites are rarely visible and the physical armature in support of a site’s structure and depth—soil, topography— must be manufactured to an even greater degree than in the past. This book has described the various ways that Hargreaves Associates has approached this challenge of fabricating ground, ways that foreground the relationship between form and process at different scales, from geographies (how to recover sites in the spaces that economic processes have literally and figuratively leveled) to techniques (how the tectonics of landscape express an affiliation beTHE EXTENSIVE PARK AND PARKWAY BUILDING THAT TOOK PLACE IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES HAPPENED DURING MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS IN INDUSTRY, ECONOMY, AND ATTENDANT URBANIZATION. 198 afterword specifically address these issues. This will surely lead to changes in how such landscapes look and function . In design competitions and landscape architecture schools, there is nary an image that is not teeming with wildlife, solar panels, windmills, constructed wetlands, and urban farms. Park competition briefs, such as those for Downsview Park Toronto and Orange County Great Park, request that projects promote energy-saving technologies and produce their own energy on site. The various Olympic venues, beginning with Sydney in 2000 and including London in 2012, whose major public spaces are also designed by Hargreaves Associates , have been making progress toward these goals.2 The 2012 Olympics is a colossal undertaking involving huge teams of consultants to oversee major redevelopment, rebuilding of transit infrastructure , and a massive effort to cleanse toxins and recycle most materials on site. The planning of the landscape includes a biodiversity action plan and the site is designed to provide over one hundred acres of habitat comprised of woodlands, constructed wetlands, reedbeds, and meadows. Specialists working on the project included researchers (horticulturalists and ecologists) who developed special seed mixtures for creating the meadows. The massive sculpted landforms designed by Hargreaves Associates are made from on-site soil that was decontaminated using sorting and washing machines, and microorganisms that neutralize the pollutants. The technologies and techniques tested here—and Figure 152. The Byxbee Park field of poles was assumed to shift over time, an index of the settling trash below. Image courtesy of Jitze Couperus. Unearthed_FINAL.indd 198 4/12/13 11:30 AM Afterword 199 Unearthed_FINAL.indd 199 4/12/13 11:30 AM 200 afterword used on such a large scale—will likely become common practice for future developments. Notwithstanding the fact that selling the green games cannot be separated from the corporatization of the Olympics (and notwithstanding the irony that “sustainability partners” include BP and Dow Chemical), the establishment of the transit and public space infrastructure will far outlast the Games and will likely become as integral to the fabric and life of the city as have London’s historic parks.3 As important, the particular forms, materials , and the privileging of certain types of habitat determine the character of the place and indicate which...