the latest issue of penn's alumni magazine (the pennsylvania
gazette) has a fascinating cover story on laurie olin,
penn's renowned landscape architect, and the field of
landscape architecture -- its place in the public sphere.
olin's projects over the years include the barcelona olympic
village, los angeles' getty center, penn's college green,
manhattan's bryant park, and philly's independence mall. his
latest project, his most ambitious and in partnership with
frank gehry, is to transform 22 acres in brooklyn into a
mixed use development called atlantic yards, a controversial
project that would make it 'twice as dense as the most
crowded census tract in the country' and which is strongly
opposed by 'half the leading lights in brooklyn' who see it
as a 'creeping corporate usurpation of the public realm.'
the article goes on to describe the increasingly
sociological approach to landscape architecture, and how
that entails growing tensions between the needs of the
public and the vision of the designer, between elected
municipalities and corporations, between process and outcomes...
and then I read this passage, which I thought captured what
so many of us have been talking about wrt ucd, ucd's nid,
clark park, the vision of the anointed, citizenship as
consumerism, etc.:
[Olin:] "Part of our social obligation is to make places that are
safe and supportive of human activity, and in many cases
are background for other things. Sometimes the people
should be the flowers."
There is no better example of this essentially
sociological approach to design than the renewal of
Bryant Park. Situated in midtown Manhattan behind the New
York Public Library, the four-block courtyard had by 1980
become a crime-ridden vortex of urban abandonment
popularly known as Needle Park.
"It was dangerous," Olin remembers. "It was run-down.
People weren't putting money into it. People were afraid
to go into it. It was deteriorating. People were killed
there."
It is not often that society turns to a landscape
architect in hopes of preventing the murder of its
citizens, but Hanna/Olin's final design helped to turn
one of the city's most frightening places into one of the
safest and most popular. Their approach struck some as
paradoxical. By stripping away the barriers that
protected the park from the bustle of traffic on its
edges, they aimed to turn what had been conceived as a
peaceful respite from urban life into a busy focal point
of it. Forsaking grand gestures and concentrating instead
on tiny details like balustrades and folding chairs, they
refashioned Bryant Park stitch by stitch.
"At first glance, the park looks almost the same, just a
cleaner, fresher version of the old," architecture critic
Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times. "But the
cumulative effect of small changes is to render it a
dramatically different place, vastly more open than
before, more tied to the street and the city around it."
Here there was another level of paradox, for Hanna/Olin's
success in restoring the urban qualities of Bryant Park
stemmed from the partial commercialization of what had
previously been purely public space. The redevelopment
had been underwritten by the privately funded Bryant Park
Restoration Corporation, one of the first examples of
what are now commonly known as Business Improvement
Districts. By effectively taking over the municipal
government's responsibility for managing the park, the
BPRC won the privilege to use it as a venue for
entertainment programming, restaurant concessions, and
the like. Hanna/Olin's disciplined design was a critical
piece of this new vision.
"In a sense, it tells you that it's controlled, that it's
not 'true public,'" says George Thomas. "It's sort of
like a mall, or the mall as a public space but under
private control. And as a result, people are expected to
behave in a certain way. You could almost make the case
that Bryant Park is a highly corporatized landscape, and
in its lack of freedom it tells you what it expects of
you.
..................
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