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Landscape Throwdown?
Last night, Jim Corner, George Hargreaves and Michael Van Valkenburgh met to discuss the "21st Century Park and the Contemporary City". Hosted by The Forum for Urban Design, held at MoMa and moderated by Ken Greenberg, it promised to be a good discussion. I was able to score a ticket - though many I knew were booted off of the wait list after they had RSVP to make room for members. The auditorium was small, though a handful of the persistent who showed up without tickets were able to get a seat.
So, it was no throwdown, with each landscape architect largely reinforcing the positions of the other through their ten minute presentations. The big themes of the evening were the ecological/environmental, the social and the economic aspects of parks. In short, contemporary parks are on brownfields sites and so serve to clean up polluted land, and then provide habitat and recreation, and parks are efficient economic drivers of urban development. Parks are expensive to build and maintain, and so new forms of public/private collaborations are emerging that purchase the lands for parks, build them and maintain them. New parks are productive, in terms of ecology, energy, food production and other traditional forms of economic revenue. Identity was another theme of the evening. On brownfields sites that are razed and flat, how do you create "bones" as Hargreaves called them. Corner sited the new appearance of parks as one way, with distinctive furniture and contmporary design elements. A really captivating photo of the Highline under construction behind him made his point clear.
While Michael Van Valkenburgh did, as he suggested, manage to offend everyone as he introduced his talk with something like - well there in James Corner you have the most intelligent landscape architect and in George Hargreaves the best looking - it wasn't until the Q&A that substantial diverse opinions emerged from the participants. While Corner imagined cities where open space crafts architecture, Hargreaves offered a more pragmatic view that most developing cities are not the major cities of the workd - New York, LA, Toronto, etc, but the mid-tier cities, where the operations that are more likely to emerge are taking underused buildings and parking lots and converting them to open space, so, urban form and architecture still crafts landscape.
All in all a good discussion that, like most of these events, was just getting started as the event was forced to end. Part 2 is tonight with a panel for civic leaders - those that commision and build parks.