The future of landscape architecture

In September I went to Chicago, the city by the lake, which I found to be a place of modern architecture and monumentally engaging public art.

The reason for the visit was because it was the location for the annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects. This year’s focus for the ASLA was sustainability and regeneration in the landscape. Chicago has numerous examples of both of these concepts, yet interestingly, I learned almost as much about New York while there.

Streetscapes improve mood and quality of life

In several tours around the city, whether looking at architecture, urban planning or landscape architecture, the emphasis on an improved streetscape made a strong first impression on me. During the conference, my colleagues and I visited several private gardens in upscale neighborhoods.

One of the biggest differences we saw were the inviting streetscapes for residential properties. Unlike the Hamptons, there is no hedging for privacy, but instead there is an invitation to enjoy the view of the area’s beautiful homes and surrounding landscapes.

One modern glass home was built in a way which allowed the landscape to flow out into the street. A seasonally changing garden at the entrance was open and bronze fencing—made of slats turned in a way to allow views into the garden but not into the house—followed the sidewalk along the rest of the property.

The area between the street and the sidewalk contained raised bronze planters as an extension of the interior garden. This well-designed garden, instead of being hidden away by privet, became part of the streetscape. As a result, the garden flowed out from the house, and then through the fence out into the street, creating a neighborhood attraction while maintaining privacy for a home with glass walls.

At this particular house, the space between the road and the sidewalk also took the place of the foundation planting. The view (through geometric bronze fencing past a birch grove to a colorful garden) took the eye back alongside another new home. This design created a greater sense of neighborhood wherein the property owners are using fencing that creates a physical, but not a visual, barrier.

The effect was that one’s gaze was invited in while keeping one’s feet out of the gardens. Such an elegant and inviting entrance is obviously a visual asset to the street.

At another garden, the owners of a newly restored Victorian did not want anything obscuring the view from the street of their recently restored home and how it sits in the garden. The homeowners, proud of their home and garden, said they wanted to maintain a visual openness to the street as they do not like the idea of being closed or walled off. Simply, they said that they enjoy being a part of the neighborhood.

At another remodeled Victorian, a reading ring was created at the end of a colorfully planted formal entrance garden creating a space to read, to relax and to enjoy the garden while watching the passersby. The flamboyant plant palette chosen to complement the architecture was eye-catching from the sidewalk. Only a 3-foot wrought iron “lace” fence suggested a boundary line.

Even Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers had the concept of the streetscape built into them. The small sidewalk strip planters and large, raised planters within entry courtyards extended the open space at street level and matched the plantings in the park across the street.

Bringing it closer to home, examples of street parks as part of a new development can be seen in Manhattan too. The new Goldman Sachs building, planned for West Street, will have a linear tree-lined park full of perennials. The streetscape was designed by Piet Oudolf for Ken Smith’s overall landscape plan, which includes a corner park as well. Common public areas will also soften the visual impact of the building at street level.

And here in Southampton, we have many examples of this type of street display. Residentially speaking, curved hedge allows neighbors a peek-a-boo view of a garden on a quiet street in the village that changes constantly from spring to fall.

Commercially, an alleyway from Main Street to the Rogers Museum on Meeting House Lane (which was recently redone by the village), is another example of an improved and inviting streetscape. Although Sant Ambroeus uses this space as a night café during the summer season, it is open to public passage. Betsey Yastrzemski was contracted to plant the alleyway with flowers and foliage that complements the other pots by the restaurant’s Main Street entrance creating an elegant, lively and inviting passageway that enhances the village’s appearance.

Underground parking a wise use of space

In Chicago, the roof of the parking garage adjacent to the award-winning Millennium Park and world-renowned architect Renzo Piano’s modern addition to the Art Institute of Chicago is now the award-winning Lurie Garden. This large park space, with paths through a mixture of perennials and grasses reminiscent of the prairies, boasts a nighttime symphony of crickets and a daytime marauder in the form of a rabbit. The wondrous garden connects two of the areas of the city most visited by tourists.

One presentation at the ALSA conference by James Burnett, a landscape architect from Dallas, illustrated that the parking field on a corporate campus was a waste of space. Once parking was placed underground, the aboveground space became a more engaging landscape—one that allowed the employees to enjoy their surroundings a great deal more, while still connecting one area of building to another.

What if Southampton put its large, centrally-located parking lot underground and created a park above it? It could be a central meeting place for visitors, a pleasant home for the newly-created farmers market, a way to integrate and connect the entire business district and also be an extension of the activities in Agawam Park.

Minimizing landfill while converting industrial sites

Transformation of sites and materials was a key topic at the conference. Creating a beautiful, well-integrated environment is not enough to fulfill the concepts of either regeneration or sustainability.

On many of the projects in the Chicago neighborhoods that we visited, old materials were used in new designs. Old stone work was not replaced, but rather pulled up and reset and iron fences were rebuilt instead of being replaced.

Additionally, water being retained on site is a continuing high priority on all projects, as the city is situated on Lake Michigan, which is its source of drinking water.

The idea of reusing materials and renovating or repurposing industrial sites came to the forefront in the ASLA presentations of projects from around the world. Currently, old granite from the Roosevelt Island (formerly known as Welfare Island) bridge renovations in New York is being used in the construction of the new Brooklyn Piers Park project. The piers have become obsolete as a shipping port so they are being converted into a park.

The material for park benches will be 100-year-old yellow pine from the warehouses on the piers instead of ordering new ones from a catalogue, and all the milling for this is being done on site.

In California, concrete from 600 acres of runway from a decommissioned air force base in Orange County will be ground up and used as a base for new pathways and grade changes in a park that is now planned for the site. Large, broken pieces of concrete will be part of stone revetments that reinforce other grade changes.

The focus for the park is on leaving the existing materials on site and trucking away as little debris as possible. In the future, this may very well become part of zoning regulations in order to minimize the impact of trucking on local roads and the amount of material being put into landfills.

Water, water everywhere

Water, more than anything else, is of the greatest concern to many landscape architects and urban planners. Many urban rivers are polluted and residents have uneasy feelings about being in proximity to them (think East River and Hudson River back in the day) but there are many landscape architecture and urban planning projects which are working hard to change people’s fears.

After 30 years of legal wrangling, the dredging of the upper Hudson will remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that contaminated the water decades ago, heightening people’s aversion to the water. But now parks ring the island of Manhattan and the edges of the river in the Brooklyn Piers Park project are being opened up so that people can access the water to kayak or observe life in a tide pool.

On the Brooklyn Piers project, cisterns will account for 70 percent of water use. And bioswales—landscape elements designed to remove silt and pollution from surface runoff water—or inland vernal marshes will catch the runoff from entering the river.

One of the most ambitious projects highlighted during the ASLA annual meeting was the cleaning up of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The Atelier Dreiseitl firm in Asia worked with the local government to take a concrete runoff channel that had once been a flowing river and turned time back in some ways by re-creating a natural environment. Now frogs, fish and birds stalk the marshy edges and people can actually splash around in cleaner water at the river’s edge.

A similar project is on the boards for the Los Angeles River, another concrete runoff channel. Because of the pollution problem, once it rains in LA, people are discouraged from going in the ocean for three days afterward.

But this is not just an issue in big, sprawling urban areas. Unfortunately, here on the East End we already have signs that say keep out of the water when Old Town Pond drains are open to the sea. So containing runoff is of paramount importance.

Southampton Village is working on a plan to keep runoff out of its two ponds with a number of street drainage projects and community initiatives.

“Daylighting”—uncovering buried streams and rivers—and separating out runoff, sewage and effluent from rivers lakes, ponds streams and the ocean is one of the highest priorities of our time, as we need to keep pollution from entering our surface waters.

Clean water for drinking is becoming increasingly important all over the United States, particularly because of the high demand in the southwest. Water rights are now being legislated and contested throughout America.

While in office, President George W. Bush protected the Great Lakes and the water they hold from being diverted to the southwest for irrigation or development. Just in time, if you ask me. Currently, Arizona is suing Nevada over rights to the water in the Colorado River and Mexico is suing the United States for similar reasons as population booms continue to increase demands for potable water.

In conclusion

The overwhelming impression that I had from my Chicago experience is that all communities are experiencing the same problems, whether a large city like Chicago or a summer resort like Southampton.

Landscape architects are idealists who want to change the world through good design. Planning to make our environment more attractive, and hence more relaxing, less costly in terms of waste, and more economical in energy use, resource demands and maintenance—and always with an eye to rebuilding wildlife habitat, conservation and clean water is the clarion call of the landscape architect.

A constant emphasis on sustainability and regeneration is now the trend. And not only of areas that once were neglected, abandoned or obsolete but also in renovating existing housing or building new structures in areas such as ours.

April Gonzales, an affiliated member of the ASLA, has worked with both landscape architects and property owners in designing, installing and maintaining landscapes on the Eastern End of Long Island for over 20 years.