This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. This is the second part.
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Covering about 7.5 acres under Interstate 5 in Seattle, Washington, is the I-5 Colonnade Park. Weaving through this concrete forest are trails, pedestrian crossings connecting two neighborhoods, an off-leash dog park and a couple of picnic areas. A major portion of the park is a series of mountain bike skills trails constructed by the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and its volunteers.
This park, together with Burnside Skatepark, pictured above, is an instructive contrast to the super-designery landscapes in the first part of this quickie survey. It suggests a way to rehabilitate these forgotten, dark urban spaces without eradicating heterogeneity and fostering exclusion, which often accompany so many regeneration projects. This park is “dirty,” not Dutch, but thrives nonetheless.
A short documentary about the mountain bike park can be viewed here.
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Raumlabor's Spacesbuter is a mobile pavilion made of “an inflatable bubble-like dome that emerges from its self-contained compressor housing. The dome expands and organically adjusts to its surroundings, be it in a field, a wooded park, or below a highway overpass. The material is a sturdy, specially-designed translucent plastic, allowing the varying events taking place inside of the shelter — dance parties, lecture series, or dinner buffets — to be entirely visible from the outside and likewise the exterior environments become the events’ backdrops.
“When inflated, the dome has proportions of 65.5 feet deep, 33 feet wide and 21 feet high. The space is highly adaptable and will morph depending on the surrounding environment. It merges with its surroundings: enveloping lampposts and trees while yielding to building facades or nearby vehicles.”
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Looking like a den for muggers awaiting lost pedestrians retracing one desire line after another in the hopes of finding an escape route is West 8's Carrascoplein. Located underneath railway tracks on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the park (perhaps landscaped boulevard is a more apt term), as described by Ian Bourdain, is “made up what initially appears to be little more than an artificial wooded landscape: grass and asphalt surfaces littered with cast-iron tree stumps lit up from within. At night, the latter glow and cast shadows over the concrete columns and undersides of the overhead bridges. The effect is at once calm and unsettling, at times empty and eminently ignorable (especially during the day), and at others (particularly after nightfall), ambient, moody and almost unsettling in the way that light, shadows and colour flicker across the site.”
The park may look inhospitable and barren in photographs, but Bourdain assures us that the park “has been welcomed by local pedestrians, many of whom now feel much more willing to traverse the space, as well as by those seeking an alternative urban experience – in this case, a dance of light and shadows. The risk of doing something quite strange in an out-of-the-way location has been repaid by improvements in the quality of the place and its attractiveness to people living elsewhere in Amsterdam.”
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Battle i Roig's Parc Nus de la Trinitat (1993) is located in one of the most important road networks in Barcelona. With public open spaces at a premium, the designers planned out a very dense program arranged within two semicircular bands around a central circular green space. Squeezed inside include a water channel, two tennis courts, urban farm gardens, a volleyball court, a basketball court, a mini-football pitch and picnic areas. The layout no doubt echos the presence of the ring roads; nevertheless, through grade changes, landform construction and strategic plantings, the roundabout and its traffic are visually and aurally screened out. In some areas, you would hardly think that you were in the middle of “the largest system of ring roads in the city.”
(Or actually, according to this post [in Catalan; thanks, Louis Carrogis, for the translation] and the photos contained within, the park is hardly a peaceful respite. In fact, it's in a very dilapidated state. The entrance to the park, says the author, looks like an industrial zone or a big parking lot that's far from inviting. The pool is without water, and the bathrooms and courts badly need maintenance. The landscape is unsightly. Must be the recession, drought — i.e., climate change — and opportunistic squatters marginalized from other public spaces.)
A former pick, and a favorite, is the BioSteel™ Goat, a breed of Angora goat whose genes have been augmented by the Nexia Corporation to produce spider silk in its milk — that is, its milk contains spider silk protein. This “silk milk” is purified, dried and then transformed into microfibers for use in making bullet-proof vests.
Silk spiders are too anti-social to farm successfully, but these genetically modified goats provide a way to manufacture the biomaterial on a commercial scale. There were 40 BioSteel™ Goats produced, according to Pell. Some were sold to the U.S. Defense Department, and these ones “are currently housed in former ammunition bunkers on the now decommissioned Plattsburgh Air Force Base in Plattsburgh, NY. The Nexia Corporation has since been liquidated and purchased by an oil and gas venture. The status of the remaining goats is unknown.”
Could they now be happily grazing on some pastoral meadow (sun-dappled but under a total genomic eclipse), mating with nearby flocks and still more further afield unbeknownst to their owners? Perhaps one should try to track them down, even procure the help of Trevor Paglen to map these biogeographical black spots.
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. This is the first part.
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Built in what used to be blighted industrial landscape severed from the urban fabric by rail lines and an elevated highway, Hargreaves Associates' WaterfrontPark in Louisville, Kentucky is now a premier public open space. Once inaccessible, an absence and an abscess in the civic life of the city, the area now teems with activity. The centerpiece of the whole park, the 12-acre Great Lawn, runs under an 8-lane segment of Interstate 64 and then slopes gently down towards the river, providing that once missing link between the downtown area and the Ohio River. The Great Lawn also provides expansive views of the waters and the city, and unsurprisingly, it gets completely overtaken by crowds during major events. More tranquil areas can be found in the rest of the park, all of which are intimately tucked within meandering landforms that either mimic the flow of the adjacent river or the flow of traffic hovering above or both. Another major piece of the park will be an abandoned railroad bridge adapted to provide a bicycle and pedestrian crossing to the other side of the river. Rather than tearing it down, this infrastructural remnant will be treated as a sort of monumental public sculpture, a reminder of the city's industrial past.
Developed in part through an open and interactive public design process overseen by NL Architects, A8ernA “provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”
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Designed by the SWA Group, the Buffalo Bayou Promenade “connected Houston's downtown core to the river park to the west under and through a neglected and near impossible mess of freeways and bridges, adding 23 acres of parkland to Houston's inner city. The landscape architect's early visioning and then implementation converted a trash-soaked eyesore — intimidating to pedestrians and detrimental to flood control efforts — into 3,000 linear feet of urban park that provides a prominent gateway to downtown Houston.”
Spatial detritus, infrastructure, urban parks, theatrical lighting, floods and flood control, hydrologically responsive public open spaces — combine all of them together and you've got awesome.
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The McCormick Tribune Student Center on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, is Rem Koolhaas's contrapuntal infill in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's “immaculately modern desert.” The one-story building holds aloft an oval tube which encircles an elevated tracks. Not only does it muffle the noise from passing trains, it absorbs a disturbance, one which has for decades split campus life, separating student residences on one side from classrooms on the other side.
Continuing an occasional series on our formative design influences, this is Elevated Wetlands, a public art project in Toronto, Canada, by landLAB's principal landscape architect Neil Hadley and artist Noel Harding. Long time readers no doubt have noticed our obsession with constructed wetlands. This is the root cause, the epidemiological vector.
Installed more than a decade ago, the project consists of six large polystyrene containers that are filled with recycled plastics acting as large hydroponics planters for native plantings from the Don River Valley. Water from the polluted Don River is pumped via solar photovoltaic pumps into the sculpture, and is filtered through the planted containers, and then cascades into large ground level wetlands, returning to the river cleansed.
While the water that re-enters the river is significantly purified, the impact of these elevated wetlands in improving environmental quality is negligible at best. The water they process is too small. However, as a teaching tool on ecological and design issues, their impact may be far greater. In our case, it was profound.
Elevated Wetlands taught us the remediating properties of wetlands and that these natural processes can be artificially recreated. Wetlands are the kidneys of the environment, we learned with further investigation, and like in some eco-utopian fantasia, these organs can be cloned without bodies — a modular cyborg landscape.
Prominently sited as they are next to a major traffic artery into downtown Toronto, it was one of our very first lessons in context, something drilled into us during the heady days of Year One and forever after. And it was also an early introduction to the concepts of “revelatory landscapes” (i.e., making the invisible visible) and “working landscapes” (as opposed to landscapes of leisure and meditation).
And this project even taught us that there needn't be a conflict between ecology and aesthetics, that in trying to reclaim degraded landscapes, the science and the technology that do all the heavy lifting can be incorporated into a work of art that isn't superficial but one that can actually be provocative.
Now, a decade later, or post-High Line, how about finding disused elevated train tracks and converting them into linear wetland to treat urban stormwater and wastewater?
A ribbony infrastructure coiling and recoiling around the city, spiraling around tower blocks and zigzagging down skyscrapers; an eco-progeny of Brutalist skyways, skybridges and skywalks.
While desperately trying to organize our archives, we discovered an entry to an old ideas competition (whose website has since dissipated into the digital ether) for the transformation of Quito's international airport after its planned closing. It was designed by a trans-university team of professors and students from Arizona State University, the University of Illinois and Cal Poly. In the interest of disseminating ideas, especially good ones, we're reproducing their images below.
They're quite gorgeous, luscious even. A closer look reveals that some of the scale figures look as though they've been drawn by a deviant medieval monk dreamt up by Umberto Eco. There are fishermen with haloed cat heads, sheep-headed urban farmers also with halos, a goat-headed flâneur with a parasol; it's a menagerie of cryptids catalogued by Charles Avery during an altermodern journey to a magical realist landscape.
The designers weren't being silly, of course, because this graphic style was meant to convey a central concept. Ken McCown, one of the team members wrote, “We saw Ecuador as this country the UN recognizes with Megadiversity. With this megadiversity concept, we wanted to show that the people were intertwined with the landscape systems, and we linked this into the Catholic narrative of the saints into the pictures. So you have people that are part-human, part-animal performing the narratives of the saints while interacting with landscape processes. Religion/Humanities and Science together?”
Quoting the project statement:
This design for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador celebrates the rebirth of Latin American culture as the last vestiges of colonialism wane in the early 21st century. It capitalizes on local conditions to grow a design suited to the needs of the city while celebrating Ecuador's status as a country of megadiversity. The Ecuadorian flag is the inspiration that organizes the design and provides a symbol for the capitol city. Three bands compose the reuse of the airport lands for a new urban park: agriculture, water, and market. These bands correspond to the colors of the flag, the yellow zone is agriculture and park use, the blue is water and the market area is the red zone.
We won't try to summarize the rest of it and instead will copy-paste it in full in the comments. For those that revel in project statements, it's a good read, recommended to our student readers. The entire proposal is quite pragmatic, not overly stylized or indulgently complicated. Their considered approach to restitch Quito's urban fabric is convincing. If the competition wasn't merely an ideas competition but actually was looking for something to build, it might have had a good chance at garnering the top prize and a commission.
