Parks and Cities: Climate, Experience, and Frugality as Design Engines
GSD 1402, Fall 2004

The site of the studio is one of the last building sites in New York City's Battery Park City, a small city block between the Irish Hunger Memorial and my office's Teardrop Park, now completed just to the north of the studio site. This studio requires three design solutions of the same site, each with different programs: The first assumes no buildings on the entire site; for the second (and working with a guest architect as studio faculty), students solve the site as an urban design/architecture/landscape, designing both the massing of the architecture from the actual program on the site that includes a mixed use of residential in towers, but with diverse first floor programming of a branch of the New York Public Library and a new center for Poet's House, a New York institution with the largest holding of books of poetry in the United States. The third project is the Polshek office's actual architectural design for the site, but with this studio solving the park component. Emphasis is placed on the links between natural sunlight, shade, wind, urban soils, and how to make these engines of design with a concern for new forms that landscape might take in cities, with concern for veering away from the emptiness of post-minimalism. Visiting faculty include David Norris and James Carpenter on natural sunlight, heliostats and measuring ambient light levels in cities; Ethan Carr lecturing on the history of parks; an urban wind expert; several visitors from the Battery Park City staff who lecture and review student work; Gullivar Shepard from MVVA who guides the architecture project part of the studio; Matt Urbanski and Laura Solano as consulting visitors, and others.

Gardens and Parks
GSD 1400, Fall 2002

The studio is cotaught by Michael Van Valkenburgh, the Charles Eliot
Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Matthew Urbanski, who is a Lecturer
in Landscape Architecture. The studio investigates simultaneously two
projects: one at a larger public scale—a park in Manhattan—and a garden.

Master Plan and Site Design: The Rural Life Museum and Windrush Gardens
GSD 1310-10, Spring 2000

Jamie Phillips MLA '01 & Clare Robinson MArch '01 Master Plan: Rural Life Museum and Windrush Gardens

The Rural Life Museum and Windrush Gardens is a site of approximately one hundred acres located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sixty miles north of New Orleans. Windrush was the home of the landscape architect Steele Burden, who set up a foundation to manage the museum and site after his death. In addition to Burden’s own remarkable built landscapes and designed gardens at Windrush, the Rural Life Museum includes a significant collection of mid-nineteenth-century slave dwellings and associated buildings. The studio developed a master plan for the entire site. Students, working individually or in teams of two, addressed the property. The program required that students design roads, site parking, and a new arrival area and arrival garden, plus develop a strategy and plan for configuring the museum’s architectural artifacts. The program included complex physical and sociological challenges. This studio was funded by the Steele Burden Foundation and Louisiana State University. A sponsored field trip to visit the site, New Orleans, and the region took place in February.

Hypernature
GSD 1310-13, Spring 1999

Nature is an artifact of human intervention. The tentacles of technology—particularly those related to the pernicious expansion of the automobile and fossil fuels—and the attendant consequences of cities expanding horizontally rather than vertically, have created a circumstance where having more nature, or not, is the result of design decision-making. In the history of landscape architecture, nature has always been a constant against which the interventions of architecture and landscape were registered. No longer. Nature—as observed and experienced by the romantic poets of the eighteenth century (whose work gave rise to the work of Humphry Repton and Capability Brown), and later in the nineteenth century by Thoreau and others (which contributed to the aesthetic of Olmsted and Eliot)—no longer exists. If we try hard enough we can find a fragment of nature past that allows us, perhaps, to comfort ourselves with the false belief that nature is alive and well. It is not. Not as a substitute, but as an alternative, landscape architects have the choice of creating a replacement condition that might be called hypernature. The process of landscape-making and interventions in the hydrologic and vegetative systems of a site afford design opportunities to make hypernatural conditions. Today the act of making a landscape does not play against the powerful and reassuring opportunities to combine the active, dynamic processes of nature and to make conditions of nature part of our built landscapes. This studio afforded students the opportunity to conduct an investigation of hypernature; what it means, what it looks like, what is the relationship between the science of nature and the design of design, and how to apply these ideas within smaller-and medium-sized designed landscapes.

Students worked independently on projects and sites that were self-selected. Each student produced three pieces of work during the term: (1) a research paper on an aspect of the built, natural world that they believed could serve as an engine to make a hypernatural condition as part of landscape design: (2) a non-verbal book or video that explored the content of the subject of the research paper; (3) a design for a park, plaza, or garden the used the findings of the research to explore the meaning of the research findings.

Wellesley College Modern Art Garden
GSD 1300, Spring 1998

The premise of this studio was that the distinction between garden and landscape is that with a garden the ideological foundations of the garden and the physical manifestation of these ideas in the form of the garden itself--whatever they might be--provide its defining experiential qualities. The distinction then, between landscape and garden, is the legibility of the intentions in the creation of the garden as an artifact. Critical to the understanding of this point of view is that all landscapes--whether gardens or natural--are living and dynamic natural systems. To reset in motion the processes of nature, without being accountable for making legible the intentions of the design of the landscape, is equal to deciding to not design at all. And although the idea of restarting or renewing natural processes without any legible marks of the designer’s hand is certainly interesting and maybe even important, it was not the subject of this studio.

The core of our work was to design the transformation of the Service Parking Lot at Wellesley into a garden and a landscape for the collection of sculpture of Ray and Patsy Nasher. Although the project itself is hypothetical, the collection is very real--destined for a new urban sculpture garden in Dallas. The site, of course, is also real, though it is not at all likely that the land as designated will be developed as a sculpture garden.

Cleveland's Ninth Street Corridor and Terminus at Lake Erie:
The Interface of Landscape Architecture and Public Art
GSD 1300, Fall 1996

The studio investigated landscape architecture, urban design, and the role of public art in open space design in the contemporary American city. The studio was sponsored by the Committee of Public Art, and the project site was the Ninth Street corridor connecting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Jacobs Field, a new in-town ball park. Ninth Street is an important but struggling main artery of the city adjacent to City Hall which terminates at the edge of majestic Lake Erie where the new open space was planned.  This open space was one of the main concerns of the studio.

Students studied the history of civic design in Cleveland, the history of public art in America, and the history of rock and roll and baseball as emblem and icons. Two trips to Cleveland were required; costs were covered by the studio sponsor. One trip was in the first week in October, the other was in mid-December to present design proposals to the city.