The Unexpected Joys of Quarrying

One of the pleasures of landscape history is the often surprising places where information can be found. Trainspotters’ model drawings,  last wills and testaments, records from a convent, romantic novels, legal opinions, photographs on Facebook – all have in their time helped me understand and interpret historical landscapes. And this month I was shown another unexpected example.

A couple of years ago, I published a book on Fresh Pond, a historically rich landscape in Massachusetts, now the main source of the water supply for the city of Cambridge. No central archive exists on the landscape, and so I had spent several years digging around in obscure places for information and images. The task was made harder because in the late 1800s, to protect the purity of the water, the city had rapidly cleared the land of all its historical buildings, and quarried the surrounding glacial hills for gravel to make the shoreline more regular. This left steep, raw wounds over much of the landscape, ugly gashes of exposed rock and sand, much criticised by the Olmsted firm of landscape architects which was subsequently brought in to ‘beautify the borders’ of a new park planned on the shores.

The quarrying left the landscape unattractive and unloved. Virtually no photographs seemed to exist from this period, and my book had to rely largely on descriptions and occasional 2D plans. Then last week a colleague in Cambridge sent me a link to a cache of rediscovered photographs put on line by Harvard University, 23 of them of Fresh Pond, all from the winter of 1887/88. It turns out that the exposed gravel and sand had appealed to a new group of visitors: the Harvard geology department had sent professional photographers to capture images of contorted glacial gravels, shored kames, faulted sands, and upturned and overfolded shore-strips of ice at Fresh Pond. The man-made structures caught by the lens were of no interest to the geologists, and were left unlabelled and unremarked, but for many of the historical buildings at Fresh Pond these long-forgotten images serve as the only known photographs. Within five years all such structures had been swept away by the city.

I spent a couple of very enjoyable hours matching the dwellings, icehouses and bridges suddenly brought alive in the photographs to the plans so familiar to me from years of research. And I thought again of the unexpected reasons why people document and photograph the land, and how we landscape historians need to seek out and relish every example.

An 1888 map of Fresh Pond, showing the ice houses and dwelling owned by the Fresh Pond Ice Company. Image from the Massachusetts Archives.

A newly rediscovered image from 1887/88 of the Fresh Pond Ice Company’s properties on the shoreline, from the George Augustus Gardner collection of photographs, Cabot Science Special Collections, Harvard University.

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Wildlife and gardens

Having lived on three continents, I am increasingly struck by the similarities and connections between gardens in seemingly very disparate countries. What confirms my location is not the plants or the layout or the use people make of the landscape – but the wildlife.

In Massachusetts, it was raccoons trotting along the tops of fences, the mongoose on the doorstep, and the occasional skunk lurking in the shrubbery that told me I was no longer in England. [One eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that native Bostonians would have been equally amazed by the mongoose; it was probably in fact an opossum.] A friend who lived only two hours north of Boston could entertain me for hours with tales of the moose and bears in her cornfield. It was as if she was on personal terms with space aliens. When we were in Paris, I was struck by the complete absence of grey squirrels in any park or garden, even though we were under three hours by train from the squirrel-laden London parks. Now in India, it’s the monkeys who confirm I am indeed a long way from home.

Last week I spent some time up on the northern ridge, researching the impact of the British on the Indian capital. The ridge is an ancient geological feature that runs diagonally across the city and was home to various grand colonial figures in the nineteenth century, and site of much of the action during the 1857 Uprising. Originally scrubland, it has for a hundred years been managed as forest. It is neatly planted, with park benches, wide paths, fences and litter bins. In the softer light of the Indian autumn, you could almost imagine you were in the UK (although the bougainvillaea slightly gives the game away).

It’s the bundi monkeys everywhere who are the real signal. To locals they may be nuisances who rip up gardens and carry TB, but to me they are an otherworldly joy, frolicking and leaping and just gathering in big social groups, in the same way that the jaunty raccoons never failed to delight in the States, even while locals muttered about vermin and rabies.

Fellow blogger Jack at Sequoia Gardens writes about the baboons who occasionally wreak havoc in his South African garden, and I find myself relishing the unfamiliarity of his homeland in a way that descriptions of similarly native species like phygelius or crocosmia would just not achieve.

So I am grateful to our little urban monkeys, desperately displaced as they are from their native habitat by human encroachment, for reminding me daily that, despite the clipped shrubs and English-style lawn that cover so much of Delhi, this really is a different country.

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American modernism in Delhi

The US architect Joseph Allen Stein (1912 – 2001) spent the last forty years of his professional life in India. A man driven by humanitarian and environmental passions, he worked on cooperative and low-cost social housing in California and then, troubled by McCarthyism, he took up work in Calcutta and later Delhi, exhilarating in the idealism and socialist enthusiasm of India as it emerged from almost a century of colonial British rule.

Inspired by the work of modernist architect Richard Neutra and others, Stein has been described as “building in the garden” – using the wider natural landscape to inspire appropriate structures made from local materials. He characterised his approach as “modern regionalism” and it can perhaps be seen as a precursor of today’s achingly trendy landscape urbanism movement.

Yesterday we visited one of Stein’s major buildings, the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Designed in the late 1980s, this is a place that provides office, conference and exhibition space for organisations working on habitat- and environment-related issues.

The design reminded me forcibly of London’s Barbican. It is monumental in scale, with concrete structures arranged in vast horizontal and vertical slabs, laid out around large airy courtyards, linked together by stairs and walkways. Given the heat of the Indian summer, many of the exterior spaces are shaded by delicate blue patio covers, casting intricate shadows and further blurring the distinction between inside and out. The courtyards are planted with a pleasing array of greenery – large pots and beds of evergreen shrubs and tall trees, providing a more human feel and scale amongst the concrete monumentality. Although rarely credited, Stein’s wife Margaret was responsible for much of the interior and planting design in his work, and the successful combination of their two styles is well illustrated at the Habitat Centre.

It was Stein who brought Garrett Eckbo to Delhi to work on Lodi Gardens (about which I blogged below), and who also designed the splendid American Embassy school attended by my daughter. Joe and Margaret Stein are a couple whose work I intend to research further.

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More tell-tale signs

A recent post looked at the vagaries of park signage in Paris. Since then, I have been keeping an eye out for good examples. And last week, on a trip to the US, I found some. The City of Philadelphia has, in my opinion, got it right.

So, what makes these signs work? It is nothing extraordinary or magical. They are simply located in places where people congregate. There is an appealing balance of colourful images and scant text. With eye-catching titles, they tell the reader one or two digestible pieces of information, and they relate clearly and explicitly to their location. That’s it.

And what’s the evidence that they work well? Simply that I have never seen signs so frequently consulted and discussed.

Post script: If you’re interested in signage, you might like to visit my gallery of other wonderful and woeful examples.

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Springtime in Paris

Next week I’m off to Philadelphia for a few days.  I’ll be speaking at a symposium at the UPenn School of Design, called Foreign Trends on American Soil. It promises to be a fascinating look at the many influences on landscape design in the US. My paper will compare Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris with its American interpretation at Mount Auburn in Massachusetts.  And I’m looking forward to attending a related lecture by Blanche Linden at UPenn on preservation problems in historic rural cemeteries, and to visiting the gardens of fellow blogger and shade plant specialist Carolyn Walker.

Sadly I’ll just miss the Philadelphia Flower Show, which is happening this week. Its theme this year is “Springtime in Paris.” Philadelphia is a city with strong historical, political and cultural links to the French capital; it would have been fascinating to see how exhibitors are interpreting the topic.

Instead, I shall console myself with a few photos taken this morning in parc Monceau of, well, springtime in Paris.

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Dan Kiley and New York Fashion Week

Damrosch Park at the Lincoln Center was designed in the 1960s by master landscape architect Dan Kiley. Much diminished through neglect and misuse, the park is about to host New York Fashion Week, which is moving from its old home in Bryant Park.

I am a huge fan of Kiley (see my previous posts on his designs in Brussels and Paris) and was lucky enough to discuss his work at the Lincoln Center with him, and to review his files on the project (since sadly destroyed in a fire).

Early plan of Lincoln Center, showing Webel's design for the park (left). Image from Lincoln Center Inc.

He was commissioned in 1959 to design a courtyard to the north of the Metropolitan Opera House. The firm of Darling, Innocenti and Webel was to design Damrosch Park, to the south. As the early plan reproduced here shows, Richard Webel worked up plans for a traditional park with a lawn and some trees. But Center President John D. Rockefeller and his team of architects were so enthusiastic about Kiley’s design for the North Court that, as Kiley later explained, Webel “was directed to incorporate precepts of my plan to assure site continuity.” The final design for Damrosch Park bears Kiley’s unique imprint. The resulting relationship between the two plazas brought a sense of spatial continuity and cohesion to the whole site. Damrosch Park had the same distinctive quartets of plane trees, set in planters with an understorey of azaleas. They enclosed a seating area that was surrounded by a bosque of forty or so purple-leafed maple trees. The bandshell at the far end of the Park was also framed by plane trees, with a perimeter planting of Sargent crab apples.

A model of Lincoln Center, with Damrosch Park to the left. Image from http://www.rowan.edu

In 1990, the Center infamously ripped out all the plane trees in the North Court and replaced them with forlorn little ornamental pears. Soon the Center started to remove trees from Damrosch Park as well. One complete row of plane trees was taken out, apparently because the shade they cast was causing moss to grow on the side of the Metropolitan Opera House. All the crab apples disappeared too, possibly because they were obstructing the guy wires for the Big Apple Circus that pitches its tent in the Park for several months each winter. The crab apples were replaced with small ornamental plantings of geraniums and dwarf conifers, as well as what one observer called “inexcusable installations of amateurish lava rock landscaping.” Eight or so of the purple leafed maples also disappeared, at least one having been damaged by circus vehicles. Other plane trees were removed when they became infected with cankerstain. Staff at the Center, unaware of who had designed both plazas, argued that the plane trees had been “bunched too closely together” and might all need to be replaced with single specimens of zelkova or sophora trees.

It looked as if none of the original plantings in Damrosch Park would be left. But interventions by landscape architects Robert Stern and Ken Smith saved at least some of Kiley’s design. In 1996 the Center replaced all the purple leafed maples that had been removed (although ironically, Kiley noted in his project files: “If I had known, I would have suggested the Schwedler maple – the purple leaf ‘bugs’ me.”). Kiley was invited to advise Lincoln Center staff on how to maintain and restore the remaining plane trees, which were apparently also showing signs of disease. He told me he was dismayed at the suggestion that the problems arose because the trees were placed too closely together, arguing that trees will thrive in denser plantings and with less soil in the wild. He also expressed surprise that no-one at the Center had previously contacted him for advice when the trees began to struggle, when he was as expert as anyone in the country on urban tree planting. The Center subsequently restored all the missing plane trees, retaining the tight spacing of four in each planting box. For many years, ironically, they provided the best illustration on the site of Kiley’s original plans for the landscape, even though he had not originally been commissioned to design Damrosch Park at all.

The plans to rework Kiley's North Court (now largely implemented). Image from Diller, Scofidio + Renfro.

The North Court has sadly now been dismantled as part of the massive, one billion dollar redevelopment of the Lincoln Center led by architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. Lead architect Liz Diller told me recently that she has tried to retain something of the “spirit” of Kiley’s design, with a geometric planting of plane trees, but to me the plaza now feels more like a corridor than a gathering space, and is overwhelmed by a new fancy-dancy sloping roofed restaurant.

Plans for Damrosch Park under the redevelopment are not yet clear, but many of the plane trees have recently been cut down, and the arrival of Fashion Week suggests that the Center management is more interested in holding high-profile outdoor events at the Park than in conserving what remains of Kiley’s work.

The park last month, the plane tree planters now empty. Image from ny.racked.com

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Dan Kiley in Brussels

I recently wrote a piece for the Historic Gardens Review on a courtyard garden designed by American master landscape architect Dan Kiley in Brussels.

In 1989 AG Group (a financial company which became part of the troubled Fortis group) began redeveloping a run-down city block on rue du Pont-Neuf, near the Grand-Place. The project was to create the Group’s new HQ within a mix of housing, office and commercial space, designed on a human scale and laid out in a style sympathetic to local architecture. Chosen through competition, a group of European architects took on the project, which gained the enthusiastic support of HRH the Prince of Wales. At the heart of the redevelopment was to be a large, enclosed garden of some 3,000 square metres (three-quarters of an acre). Dan Kiley, internationally known for his work on urban plazas, was commissioned as the landscape architect.

He described his design as a ‘corporate cloister’ of three interrelated spaces, each displaying elements of his distinctive style. The first portion was an open plaza, with a simple fountain at its centre, designed as a gathering space. Flowing from that was a smaller, more private area, shaded by a grove of forty-eight honey locusts (gleditsia triacanthos) arranged in a tightly-spaced grid, and underplanted with periwinkle (vinca). Gleditsia was one of Kiley’s favourite trees, used for its structural qualities and delicate foliage. The third and smallest part of the garden featured a wooden pavilion housing a bubbler fountain with, on one side, seating amongst clipped yew hedging and, on the other, a small grove of serviceberry trees (amelanchier canadensis). The end of the garden was marked by an allée of ginkgo biloba, another Kiley favourite, for its urban toughness and ancient history. Kiley thus created a landscape of varied sensory experiences and of contrasts (openness and enclosure, structure and wildness, simplicity and complexity, an abstraction of nature and an extension of the surrounding architecture).

The design was subsequently featured in the book Dan Kiley in His Own Words: America’s Master Landscape Architect. Planted eighteen years ago, the garden has matured well and, unlike many of Kiley’s urban courtyards, has been carefully maintained. The yew and periwinkle are regularly clipped, and the honey locusts and ginkgos have recently been heavily pruned, to encourage dense lower branching.

While views of the garden are enjoyed from the surrounding offices and apartments, it has sadly proved too costly in maintenance terms to allow office staff access on a daily basis, and so Kiley’s design intent – to provide the changing, dynamic feeling of a walk in nature or a visit to a large park – has arguably lost some of its relevance for the site.

For a while the garden seemed under threat. Its owner Fortis was stricken by the credit crunch. A government-led rescue plan, which included effective nationalisation and subsequent sale of much of the company to the French bank BNP Paribas, was put on hold when a Brussels appeal court froze the controversial sale. The Belgian government resigned over the row. The building that includes Kiley’s design was one of several flagship offices that Fortis had put up for sale in a desperate effort to raise capital.

But, at least for now, Kiley’s garden appears to be safe. Fortis has been rebranded as AG Insurance, apparently successfully, and the building is no longer on the market. The garden is, however, not open to the public and has not featured in the city’s Jardins En Fête open garden scheme since 2008.

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Dan Kiley at La Défense

This week I went to see Dan Kiley‘s landcape design at La Défense, the business district to the west of Paris.

Kiley is one of my favourite landscape architects. I spent a morning with him in his Vermont home not long before he died, to learn more about his work at the Lincoln Center in New York (now sadly dismantled).

In 1978 he was commissioned to design the vast pedestrian concourse at La Défense, which runs above the vehicular circulation and railway line. It extended the city’s historic axis from the Louvre along the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, bringing it across the Seine to the Grande Arche de la Défense. (Kiley used the term la Dalle Centrale – the main platform – to describe the half-mile long concourse, although today it is usually known as l’Esplanade du Général de Gaulle.)

His work at La Défense is always included in lists of Kiley’s projects, but the design has actually been little discussed or celebrated. The only description I have been able to find of any substance about the project is from Kiley’s own book, The Complete Works of America’s Master Landscape Architect, which gives a great sense of his design intentions and includes some photographs from the 1990s. For him the project was “a progressive mix of art, nature and commerce as urban infrastructure.”

My visit earlier this week started from the metro station Esplanade de la Défense, where the promenade begins beside a large pool decorated with jolly metal poles (a 1988 installation by Takis), and wonderful views over Neuilly and down the Avenue de la Grande Armée to the Arc de Triomphe.

This view of the city persists throughout Kiley’s promenade.

I strolled west towards the Grande Arche. The central walkway was exposed and deserted in the 30ºC heat but on either side are characteristic long, linear groves of pollarded trees, providing leafy, dappled shade. The trees are nearly all London planes (platanus x acerifolia), which Kiley loved for their form and beautiful patterned bark. The specimens here are well-maintained: regularly and expertly pollarded, and clearly replaced as necessary. The extensive use of a single species draws the disparate architecture together to form a unified space, just as Kiley intended, while the choice of London plane trees is a deliberate link with the same trees on many Parisian promenades, including the Champs Elysées. Other elements are kept simple as well, such as the single design of wooden bench found throughout the esplanade, and the limited palette of paving materials.

The cotoneaster ground cover beneath the trees is thriving and beautiful; elsewhere ivy and vinca are struggling a little.

The gentle slope up towards the Grande Arche is marked by simple, vast terraces and low flights of steps, now with ugly temporary ramps; apparently in the near future there will be permanent (and no doubt less visually intrusive) disabled access.

As I walked along, the concourse felt majestic, green, and completely right in scale. Perhaps, perversely, that is why Kiley’s work at La Défense features nowhere in the online history of the site, or in the lists of its many works of art: somehow the promenade feels an intrinsic part of the site, something so appropriate that no-one thinks of it as designed and installed.

At the end of the promenade, the modern fountains by kinetic artist Yaacov Agam are splendid, with their orchestrated jets and tiled surface suggesting constant movement. Kiley was a great fan of the work, calling it “a brilliant centerpiece,” and himself proposed the waterfall at its western edge that links the roads below with the pedestrian esplanade. During my visit, scores of people were dabbling their feet in the cool water; some children were swimming. Beyond Agam’s work is the open, treeless parvis that leads to the Arche, a stark contrast with the leafy, shaded space that Kiley created.

I have not seen ‘as built’ plans for Kiley’s work at La Défense, but it feels to me like a site that has been generally well conserved. There are, however, two additions which jar:

The first is the 1982 installation in the place basse, part way along the esplanade, of Shelomo Selinger’s sculpture “La Danse,” a series of sculpted planting boxes in pinkish concrete. Whatever their artistic merit, these seem to me too small and detailed for this vast corporate space. Until recently little globular holm oaks (quercus ilex) and groundcover ivy filled the boxes, but this Spring they were replaced with individual specimens of pink-flowered crape myrtle (lagerstroemia indica), a tree which ironically Kiley himself used, but in a more intimate space.

Photo from http://www.ladefense.fr

The second unfortunate change is the insertion in the early 1990s of small flowering cherries (prunus ‘Accolade’) among the London planes. They are largely masked by the plane trees at this time of year; but in winter their low, twiggy form must detract from the sculpted architectural shapes of the leafless plane trees. In Spring, as the cherries flower, the contrast (to my eyes at least) is odd and inappropriate. It is — as landscape architect Ken Smith noted about the introduction of forlorn little ornamental pears into Kiley’s previously architectural Lincoln Center courtyard — the triumph of a “post-modern aesthetic”: the desire for flowers rather than form in a landscape.

Despite these criticisms, I thought that the esplanade at La Défense felt pleasingly like a mature and well-managed Kiley design. It was a joy to be there.

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Round, like a Circle in a Spiral

Is it an earthwork, a seascape, an icon of landscape design, a pilgrimage destination, perhaps even a joke at the art world’s expense? In a recent article for the Historic Gardens Review, I explored the meaning of Robert Smithson’s best-known work, Spiral Jetty, a strange, inaccessible mass of boulders, salt and mud, constructed in 1970 on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Some saw it as a heroic gesture in the landscape, a modern version of Stonehenge or the pyramids. Remote, unseen except in photographs and film, its size and location meant that it was almost an appeal to the cosmos, a grand gesture best viewed from the heavens. Others interpreted it as essentially bleak, its location threatening and contaminated, its seemingly heroic nature Smithson’s cruel irony: despite its name, the Jetty served no maritime purpose and was artificial, functionless, a hollow legend generating vast amounts of empty metaphor. It was a monument to nothing but the futility of man’s intervention on the land.

In my opinion, Smithson’s purpose was deliberately ambiguous and playful. Known for his sense of humour, he even wrote about laughter as the fourth dimension, and described ways of creating laughter in art, equating different kinds of laughs (guffaws, giggles, etc) to different shapes and structures, unfortunately none of them spirals. The shape of the Jetty could be seen as an elaborate question mark, gently teasing the viewer to try to work out what it meant. The location was neither glorious nor threatening, but a sly joke at the expense of Manhattan gallery owners, who considered themselves the centre of the art world. Now the wilds of Utah were the location of the real artwork and New York became a provincial outpost with access only via photographs and films. Certainly Smithson’s film “Spiral Jetty” was playful: part of its purpose was to allow people to see the sculpture without having to travel to a remote area of Utah, but nevertheless several minutes of the film were taken up with images of a car travelling along the dirt road to the shoreline. The film also made the point that once the viewer finally reached the artwork and walked to the centre of the Jetty, there was nothing there; there was no choice but simply to turn around and go back.

Image courtesy of Ray Boren

Whatever meanings Smithson intended for the Spiral Jetty, its subsequent history has given it an extraordinary iconic status. Within three years of its completion, its creator, still a young man, was dead. Even before then, the water level of the lake had risen to engulf the sculpture completely. It barely emerged for thirty years. Only visible in old films and photographs, but still present under the surface of the lake, the Spiral Jetty became a mythical, almost legendary, work of art.

Image courtesy of Ray Boren

By the turn of the twenty-first century, a prolonged drought meant that the water in the lake dropped to its 1970 levels. For the last few years, the Spiral Jetty has again become visible above the water, at least during the drier summer months. Its formerly black rocks emerged from the lake dazzlingly white and salt-encrusted. The media frenzy that has greeted its re-emergence is everywhere on the web, and the Jetty continues to provoke fascinating questions about the nature of aesthetic appeal, the role of landscape art, and the complexities of conservation in a world where change is inevitable and unavoidable.

For more of Ray Boren’s wonderful photographs of the Jetty since its reemergence, see the Utah Hands website.

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In the US Ambassador’s garden…

To mark Memorial Day, we spent this morning in the garden of the US Ambassador’s Residence in Paris. There were performances by two platoons of the US Marines: the Drum and Bugle Corps, all red jackets and shiny tubas, and then the Silent Drill Platoon, tossing around their 10lb rifles and bayonets as if they were cheerleaders’ batons.

The Ambassador’s garden must be one of the largest in central Paris, with an extensive lawn, a glimpse of the Grand Palais through carefully-clipped mature trees, and a mass of lush peonies and scented roses in box beds near the nineteenth century residence. There was even a little vegetable garden, growing kale and herbs.

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