it's a great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague Michael Van Valkenburg Michael is

among the world's most important practicing landscape architects and his practice more so
than any practice that I'm aware of completely embodies and embraces the depth and breadth
of the medium of landscape from the range of the garden with plant material its horticultural
and botanical origins all the way through the scale of the urban over the course of the last
three decades he and his firm have produced some
00:37
astonishingly powerful pieces of work beginning with his early experiments in ice sculpture
and the phenomenology of season working through some early projects like milrays Park in
Columbus Indiana his firm and he and his colleagues have produced an array of work that is
now canonical internationally over the course of the last several years as many of his peers
have been scrambling to maintain themselves he has gone on an extraordinary array of
competition wins with projects such as the lower Don River in Toronto Brooklyn Bridge Park
01:11
the Jefferson Memorial Site in st. Louis and and more to come over the course of that period
of time I think it's clear that Michael has consolidated his position as dean of American
landscape architects and I'm very very pleased that he agreed to join us here this evening in
addition to his work as a practicing landscape architect Michael has been an educator over
those course of three decades he is the Charles Elliot professor in practice of landscape
architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he
01:40
served as chair in a period that I think has now been well received and is regarded generally
as among the most fecund in terms of its intellectual and practical impact on the field I mean
Michael I have great empathy for him generally but in my own day job I now see the impact
and the lasting impact he's had on the field through the faculty that he's recruited and
promoted there I would also recognize the impact he's had in the building of his own firm he's
built an extraordinarily talented
02:06
team many of whom I'm happy to see will be able to join us in the collaboration here at the
Gardner Museum please welcome Michael Van Valkenburg okay so I'm going to try to make
this a one-hour thing starting now it it's a great honor to be here really and in the fall when
and when Ann was talking to me about the garden we came to this room and I somewhat
facetiously said it's so great it almost makes me want to move back to Boston but I might do
that someday it's if this is amazing this is this is
03:04
so extraordinary and I had I really had no idea that that we would that I would be here tonight
so I think it's better to think of this as a talk and not a lecture and if you've ever talked with
me you know a talk is a ramble but I I don't give a lot of lectures anymore really and but this
one of course I was very happy to accept but I've I've limited the subject to three really three
projects and you know two of them I'm sure really well but I thought it would might be
interesting for you to
03:47
hear me talk about them in a reflective way before the before I start I also want to say that
when I moved to Boston in 1973 when I was 22 I was studying photography in the evening
program at the Museum school and which I did for like a year and a half and it was crazy
time in photography at the Museum school then like but ta and my class was Nan Goldin it
was really was although I you know I just didn't know what to think of her and she had no
interest in my banal pictures of anyway but I wanted to say
04:36
that every time I came over I drove by the gardener and what used to be this amazing pair of
festivities on each side of the front door which was this incredible I mean you just knew from
that pair of trees what the museum was which would it was so residential that this house had
these columnar trees and they were they probably outlived their life I'm sure they were taken
down because of decline so oh and before I start I want to recognize people from my office
including Laura Solano in the row there and the audience Barbara my wife
05:18
Caroline Barbara Krakow one of my favorite people in Boston who tried to talk me into
buying a certain felt suit you had several of them I think the price was seven hundred and
fifty dollars and I think I would be a very wealthy man if I had bought that suit boys suit and
also Judith tankard who I authored a book with on gqo and she got to witness me throwing a
cup of coffee at somebody in Berkeley but that's if I still drank and I would tell you about that
afterwards but we'll get started I don't do that anymore I hardly drink
05:58
coffee I'm really a total bore so I I've collected I've collected some things that that I thought
would be fun for you to know about me I'm showing you some pictures of some things I
make with paint that aren't really paintings but they're sort of experiments with recording
things in landscape and I want to tell you how I came to be a landscape architect so like
probably a lot of you who went to public high school there was sort of one teacher who didn't
think I was a complete idiot and he was a
06:36
history teacher and I loved history and I was really good in it but mostly because you know I
were farmers and really smart people but didn't go to college and so you know when you've
kind of that split and you sort of gonna be a person who goes to college I want to be like my
history teacher so I went off to a state university and they put me in my freshman year in a
seminar it was enough in the Dark Ages that enrollment was by seniority and you got to take
the classes as a freshman that nobody else
07:14
wanted to take so it was a the decade prior to the French Revolution I was 17 years old this
was not this was not good but I also had to take a class in a word I never heard ecology and
the professor whose name I sometimes remember but he was not other than helped other than
introducing me to landscape architecture he was not memorable as a teacher except that about
every two weeks or so he would say I sure wish I didn't waste my life being a professor of
ecology I wish I had been a landscape architect so
08:00
we were in my ecology class given this book to read and you all know about Ian McHarg and
his impact on the field so I went to Cornell and quickly learned through this book which
came out a couple years later that there was this I thought and think ironic divide in the field
between people who were interested in the in landscape as an ecological condition and people
who were interested in it as a design condition and I guess my take-home point about that is
that you don't have to try to save the world every day the way you feel after you
08:56
read in my cards book but at the same time there is it like like a work of art that you that you
don't like personally but which is profoundly moving he probably shaped who I became as a
landscape architect as much or more so than the designers that I was sort of Norman was a
professor at Harvard but his protege was my teacher at Cornell and so I have always felt that
my work was trying to be have some resonance or reflection of the influence of these two
people in the early part of my career I really I really am somebody who loves
09:42
landscape like the reason that my antenna went up when he said landscape architect was that I
essentially knew I already was one I was the kid in a farm family who took care of the yard
and grew the vegetables and I went and got the cows I didn't milk them had older brothers
who did that and then by the time I got old my parents smelled smelled the coffee and and
sold the cows and I grew up on a farm that was just a former functioning car farm so anyway
I'm really taken with materiality and a big theme of the
10:30
lecture and I think you'll see in the work is material so that's sort of the Uniting theme we all
are familiar with that amazing well this is just part of an amazing life of work that
Rauschenberg created but as my career has unfolded materiality I have I have been able to
find my way in the design of landscapes by the kind of intuitive resonance of materials and
how they make people feel as a defining layer of of what we do in our office complete with I
am a plant geek I love plants I recently discovered this plant
11:21
in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden I don't live too far from there and now it shows up in all of
our projects including a recent redesign and in process Cambridge office garden which I will
show you some very quick pictures of because it's like a little baby that you haven't patted the
moisture off of yet so it's still at a kind of squawky squealy state but I also wanted to share
with you that I have spent much of my life learning about landscape through art I don't really
think of what I do is really art
11:58
per se but I use drawing and and also painting as a way of exploring landscape and my work
recently is significantly involved with chance which to me is a big part of what you should
invite into your work if you're a landscape architect like you know it's no coincidence that the
note and others in the formal and the great formal style often were involved in creating the
natural areas that were adjacent to the rigid formality because they knew that the play of one
against the other the registration of the controlled landscape
12:39
against something that was uncontrolled is one of the most powerful things that we all know
so and the and and the other part of all of this a love of material with respect the landscape is
reflected in this quote by Tom Stoppard about the intersection of the things that are given and
and unpredictable together and I I our work with plants in particular but other things as well
is very much focused on setting up conditions that then ferment and collide and change over
time and so that means we work really closely with our clients garde
13:24
or the maintenance people who take care of things after they're over if I throw in us since we
are all I don't know about what happened up here but we we only had one of these and it was
the second week in October in New York so but I think you can see what Stoppard was
talking about so so I do this these things now where I record colors that I've seen has single
layers they're paying up on wood and they're tiny they're like nine by ten but they're a series
of colors that I've experienced
14:00
in the landscape and sometimes there are two colors like if I see two colors and they just layer
up and then at some point in time after they're really dry I sand through them so there's like
two layers of chance that are involved in them and this is sort of what I've been working on
the last couple of years it's kind of really wrong to show them big on a wall because the funny
thing about them is they actually look like the way that large abstract paintings look in art
history books when they're reduced
14:35
so anyway if I knew Barbara was gonna be here I don't think I would have shown them but so
that's a lindara glauca by the way in the fall in the old cambridge garden and we've recently
undertaken changing it and it's not so much that I'm putting it's for very particular reasons
that I'm not going into that the design is the way it is but the bigger point is that as a practice
we've never stopped doing things at a small scale and I I didn't call the talk laboratories of
design because I mean
15:13
gardens are sketchbooks of things we do at a bigger scale but they are that sometimes for sure
but this is just hey you know you know I'm showing some stuff and I thought you'd be
interested just to see the process the kinds of processes that we go to the garden is oh this is
actually the prior garden overlaid with the new garden trying to test out this floating raft idea
and you you never know where ideas are going to come from is my belief and like Ann said
the other day you know gee I'd love to have you over
15:55
to the museum would you mind if I show you some things from the Gardner collection and
I'm like oh yeah I would mind it like zero like I would so love to have somebody like pour
new stuff into my head so I'll tell you how this happened one of the staff in the office I I said
you know what what books do you know whose work do you like what do you look at it he
said I really like Michelle Devine and I like this book and there's is intervenes projects these
floating like the thing I really liked the Devine had were these floating wood
16:28
panels but it coincided at a time where but when Caroline and I are on the vineyard we swim
in a pond that has a floating raft in it so I suddenly realized that the beauty of the Devine
platforms is that they're like rafts in the water so that was the idea of where we started but
then the planting evolved into total madness that's been finished sort of recently and it's kind
of insane I'll show it to you quickly in a minute but then we're also really celebrating of the
notion of the frame because we to
17:08
be blunt the office is in a neighborhood with some really crappy houses nearby I hope
nobody's in the audience but I don't who owns those houses so they don't like looking at our
mess either I'm told so so this is just sort of showing how we go from a formative idea to a
sketch about planting and this is just a bunch of things I love the only idea I have about the
gardener is that I want to think about stew Ardea so that's been a you'll see that and there's a
there's the new planting and there's of
17:43
course the lindara glow okay in the foreground so so I want to talk a little faster because that
took a long time but so like all landscape architects who graduated I think ever including
probably the ones this spring I didn't want anything to do with homestead of course that
would be about as smart as an art student today saying they don't want anything to do with
Caravaggio which maybe they don't but it's hard for me to imagine that they wouldn't be
curious I wasn't curious about Olmstead until really I mean I was
18:23
moved by what Smithson Road and I was moved by you know the great treatise on Central
Park that he wrote in art forum the dialectical landscape but I came to Smithson more after I
started teaching at Harvard and colleagues sherry closing and others who were aware of what
he was saying and it seemed to me the entree into what I was missing about understanding
materials which was you really have to understand the Lance Committee really landscape is
something that is a contradictory condition like barbara has this garden where there are
19:12
lines of peonies that come down really is like an Agnes Martin but the fact of the matter is
that six months of the year there are no lines there there's just like a crappy little mulch line
and you know she is sophisticated enough to you know enjoy the memory of the idea of the
peonies there a lot of other clients would say you have any other ideas but I love I love what
Smithson started in my in the development of my deeper thinking about landscape as a
medium and then and I'm sure he didn't do drugs by the way
19:56
just sure like that is one of his great pieces but so so you have to understand all of this work is
going on when I've left history and in fact when my parents took me to Cornell to transfer to
the Cornell to check it out there was an exhibition in the Museum of Smith's ins work that
was completely alarming I mean you know my parents sent me to college so that like most
kids today I wasn't going to move home and live in a basement like you know I was going to
be able to make a living and so we're in
20:36
the art museum and they're like piles of dirt on the floor my father you know it's just it's
priceless you know a guy that milk cows by hand did not know what to make of dirt in the
middle of the floor and by the way neither did his son but it was the beginning of a great
journey of discovery so anyway just remembering some of that Smiths and stuff so teardrop
Park I know you've all heard about its many of you I'm sure have seen it but I thought it
might be fun to say a little bit more about it
21:09
including that's when we're all getting ready to move to New York except Laura who stayed
here and I think you won't mind me saying man the Cambridge office so but but teardrop is a
project that we all started together in Cambridge Laura Matt and me and you can see Paul oh
they although he looks 18 and he probably was 23 or something in that photograph and Matt
Urbanski and and that I don't know what I'm doing I do not urinate in park so I just want you
well I do in bathroom but that's not what was going on there
21:50
but we had this crazy thing happened which is a client with we were hired to design this park
and the guy that runs Battery Park City said to us the site's 1.8 acres you have to understand
he said you know I grew up upstate and I live in the city now and I think it would be great to
make a place that captures the wildness of upstate New York and you know trying not to like
gasp and and say well you know there's a park north of here 900 acres where somebody did
that really well a hundred and fifty years
22:30
ago but you know I'm not gonna I might have said that when I was 40 or 49 but I wouldn't
have said it when I was 50 so we just were like you know wow like it's great that he trusts us
to do something like that maybe since we are all gonna move to New York next year or the
group that's here moved to New York maybe we ought to figure out who this Olmstead guy is
and go over there and look around and I don't know it was like an artist who didn't go in the
room where Caravaggio was and you're like like you
23:06
dumb bastard like why did you not go look at this sooner you know it's like this guy actually
has something going for himself and the other thing that's where the sight of tear drop is and
of course that's pre 9/11 and at that earlier like ten years earlier Susan child and Mary Miss
and and working with Susan was Doug Reed of Reed Hildebrandt created a project that I
couldn't stop thinking about like I thought it was I thought it was wrong I thought my brought
all these rocks in and they laid
23:54
them around and and but it moved me like it was like it was like shut up shut up shut up like
there's something that I really like that's going on here so I also want to say that tear drop is
as much I guess homage is the wrong word but we see it as a first cousin of something that
that group of people started and and what was it that I liked about it it it's enigmatika me and
it doesn't ever make you think that it thought that it was creating a natural landscape but it
was not embarrassed to interpret that
24:42
and abstract it and to bring some of the power in an artful way into an urban context so and so
I so I think it's a really unsung project and I think Susan is also under-recognized in terms of
what what her her body of work was so this is the site it's a fil site in the East River I mean in
a Hudson River a lot of the material was dug out when they did the excavation for the trade
towers and the subways and so this was before environmental regulation as we know it today
so they made a place to make some money in New
25:25
York City called Battery Park City and we were involved in the project before any of the
buildings this is this is this is a Murray Street here I mean sorry this is Warren Street and this
is Murray and North End Avenue and so so it was just a big open area and when we were
designing these buildings were not constructed so it's very interesting opportunity and part of
the early education of the firm of a sort of a different role for the landscape architect of not
just designing parks and gardens and I don't mean to make
26:01
that sound diminished but I should say also being enlarged involved in the conception of the
larger urban condition which is a lot which is a what a lot of the work has gone on to be so
that's the build-out that's ground zero and we were actually under construction when 9/11
happened this is now the goldman sachs building so there's an enormous building here right
now and so we're deep inside of these buildings and that's looking down inside this was a real
fork in the road for our office in terms of the involvement of
26:47
technology in our work on a number of levels john swallow I meant to also recognize John
for this soil scientist John swallow who I don't think you worked on this one but you've
worked on so many this one too I guess we had a few people work on this one in that
department actually but John has been a huge hand in in the manufacturing of soils in our
project so a couple of things microclimate became a defining condition here and Battery Park
City has the if you know Tessa Huxley and T Fleischer you'll appreciate me using the word
27:32
rabid a rabid approach to sustainability like they and and Battery Park City had the the people
who were going to maintain the landscape involved and at the design table from absolutely
the first time we met and they did not like us at first so you know I had to get the farm boy
story out and talk about my degree from the Cornell AG school and you know get that stuff
going but we have become just immeasurably good friends but they said to us you can't there
will be no pesticides fungicides herbicides or or non organic for
28:15
Eliza's and there are practically no fertilizers at all and if you want to have a long law in
which the design people had you have to show us that you have to measure how much
sunlight will be in there when there is the build out of the surrounding buildings and you have
to have three and a half hours of sunlight on the equinox or we're not going to have let you
have a lawn there blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so it was an
incredible uphill battle lawn is such an incredibly important condition in cities because of
28:51
the intensity of use that we're subject to so this really interesting thing happened we started
working with Jamie carpenter and David Norris who are have a company that do illumination
studies for museums and we hire them to do an illumination study of an outdoor space and it
was interesting that as this building was designed this building got taller and took out a
critical hour of sunlight at the equinox and if you counted up one two three you can see that
with losing this we were perilously close to a condition where there was not
29:34
enough light in the space to have turf so Laura who has a love of sub consultants and other
things as well hired not one turf consultant but another one what was his name that like what
was his name can you knit was it knit Andy so this guy makes a living figuring out the lawn
where those stadiums open and close you know like so sometimes these lawns are so he's
really researching very state-of-the-art grasses that can live there hybridizing they're getting
you know plants and and and and really creating technologically grass species
30:19
that can that can live in that condition I'm only going to show one side of this but that also led
us to a later space that we designed to the South called teardrop south where we also
incorporated for the first time in outdoor spaces on the East Coast reflective heliostats which
track the Sun with a simple computer program and throw sunlight into dark dark spaces so
these guys are working on their tan actually this is Nikolaus Pevsner who works in our office
and i don't know who that is with them but they look like
30:58
they're having fun so here you can see the basic idea of teardrop towards us is so you can see
where the old Sun diagram was and then the Sun is coming to the north end of the space
because the Sun is to the south and then everything to the south which is largely in shadow is
where we put all the play areas for kids because kids overheat and Suns not that great for kids
so that's the major divide but the other dividing factor is that the site of course had to be
completely ad a compliant meaning that
31:40
wheelchairs and and our interpretation of that was that a person in a wheelchair could get to
every part of the park without using obviously an elevator but not having to use any areas
where there are handrails and you know this condition where if you're in a wheelchair you
basically have metal railings at your side so that's a 5 percent slope which is one in 20 and
what the wall what what am i I'm thinking about Stu Ardea questions in tear drop was that I
want to make a big wall of blue stone because if there's
32:19
one thing that I think Upstate is about and that President Kerry would want that kids of New
York City to experience is a big wall of blue stone so it's just kind of like vaguely selfish idea
honestly so I was always like trying to force that wall to the project and what Matt and Laura
and others others realized was that this actually gave us a chance to create a promontory and
a turnaround for wheelchairs in other words if you went up from the other side to a hill that
was here and and had to get down to the
32:52
other side the entire thing would be one experience as a landscape so we made half of a hill
and we cut it in half with the wall so everybody walks up turns around and comes back or
navigates and other navigates in other ways so it wasn't a good look but I thought I'd share it
with you we were I we're always interested in scale and we this is actually below the
photograph at the beginning this is the same area but we were really interested in making a
tunnel we where we went in the response to the design challenge by the client
33:38
was to say you have to somehow believably encapsulate and miniaturize pieces of the larger
New York State landscape but how do you how do you make the segues between the
transitions something more than like one of those salad bars where you're grabbing carrots
and meatballs you know so we have this idea of actually cutting through the stone wall but
well first of all these guys had already done the stone wall so well that we decided to execute
it out of concrete but it is definitely has a reciprocity to to what's going on in
34:28
Central Park so Barbara I did not know you were going to be here but this project on the top
on the left is actually a temporary ice installation that I made for Barbara and Alvin at the
house on the vineyard and this was on the right was something that I did at Radcliffe back in
the 80s so the other thing that I wanted to jam down the throat of this project was ice just one
of the blue stone wall and I wanted ice god damn it I'm going to have back so like the staff
are like you know rolling their eyes and you know I guess
35:08
we're going to have to do this kind of thing but I grew up in the Catskills and everyplace a
highway cuts through stone the groundwater is expressed and there are these ice formations
so we that's actually really near my grandparents house so we decided to build that in to that
grade change but the the thing about it is that the the wall and the topography also houses the
place behind it where all the green equipment is located like we have water that we use from
the nearby buildings and our our play area water is captured and treated
35:53
and recirculated so it's very it's a long time ago now we started the design of this in 1999 so
you know with project was completed in 2006 or something but we've been tinkering with it
sort of all the way through and then the other thing I want to talk about is and I guess this
comes out of the fact that you know the guy on the top could could be my dad it could not be
me that's me with my hands in my pocket but we have developed in our practice and it comes
out of my trust of materials a way of working with
36:32
people that use landscape materials that's much more like a collaboration so even though we
had a great deal to do with the actual description of the wall the making of the wall here is
actually happening in a quarry with the quarry owner and his son making a huge number of
decisions along the way like we did not for example describe specifically that piece of stone
there were limits you know minimum and maximum and parameters but then it was all
completely negotiated and working you know working with as as opposed to
37:18
working for terms of our relationship with with craftsmen because you know I think the thing
that made landscapes so awkward in the 20th century is that people wanted landscape
architecture to conform to the kind of art the kind of aesthetic guidelines of contemporary
architecture well landscape is you know that's like a gorilla in a tuxedo you know it's sort of
like it's nice I like a lot of modern landscape architecture but to me it's not the power of
landscape to see it contained that way so this also by the
37:58
way was a way of subverting the unions in New York City because if we had made the wall
on site then they would have been the one like this guy Bruce basically has been putting stone
together for 65 years so all of that beautiful decision about joint lines and color happened and
then the Union put the stone up so anyway just showing you some images of that we also
worked with she passed away but we work with Betsey Hayden and Betsy Ann Hayden Hills
Grove and they were actually hired by our clients to be there every day
38:46
that worked with this stone was going on so these were also not drawings that we created
although some combination of Laura Matt myself Paul and others picked and tagged all the
stone in the quarry but the composition of this area was actually something that we negotiated
all three of us interchangeably with Betsy when she was on the site this by the way is a soft
fall surface so we these are hard but hearthstone but we're we conform to all of the guidelines
for safety surfaces and it's a just an incredibly
39:24
popular little play area we just decided if we were going to have a slide it had to be a really
good one and trust me this one is so I said a little bit about this position I have about the
about ecology the one thing I want to say that is across my life watching the time here across
my life the definition of ecology has changed extremely dramatically and when I was a
student in school not when I took the first psychology class which I really didn't listen to
anything except Landscape Architecture because he
40:06
was such a downer because he hated ecology so much the second ecology class at Cornell we
never talked about human beings as a ecology was something that landscape that the human
beings observed 40 years ago like we were observers of the interaction of the biotic and
abiotic environment that was you know a required definition so we have now completely
folded ourselves into the idea of what of what ecology is and this is a segue to me actually
talking about Princeton but I thought it would be very bad form to not say something nice
about
40:48
Harvard and to show some of our work there but why why the segue from ecology well the
Olmstead brothers created a monoculture of Elms in Harvard Yard after what happened is
that when they built the subway around Harvard Yard in the early part of the 20th century
they lower the water table because it was a very slow process to build the subway and there
were very drought droughty conditions and I understand the trees were already in decline but
nearly all of the trees died in the yard and they replanted them and mass as elm-trees
41:27
this is from the middle of the century by the way they planted mint or trees I don't mean this
big I mean this big with bare roots that were like the size of this you can see them on trailers
they lie to have root balls then they just dug up trees in the winter so they took the entire root
system and they could move like enormous trees so my replanting of Harvard Yard has been
to change of irresponsible though beautiful monoculture of Elms into a poly culture of about
30 different species we followed the same design lines that the
42:03
Olmstead is created you can see vaguely that there are these lines there are these lines of trees
that follow the long grain of the yard and then the trees are irregularly on those lines so when
you walk or perpendicular to the line they look like they're a natural order and then of course
the introduction of the furniture much to Caroline's chagrin she does not like that these things
happen so I'm going to talk really quickly about Princeton because I want to end on Brooklyn
Bridge Park but so a quick thing about
42:39
Princeton the main building of Princeton was actually a public building and I believe it's the
reason that the Princeton campus has a more public feel about it than the Harvard campus has
I don't know how well you know Princeton but the buildings don't create courtyards they are
all they're all the corners are all open and the landscape sort of dissolves through and I think
it starts from the decision to to invite the public into the into a green the way this building sits
back from the street
43:14
that's I don't know whether historians would agree but the campus over time has grown 400
percent larger than it was like by the by the 1930s the campus has just grown exponentially
what we observed about the campus was that Princeton always sat on a hill looking against
agrarian landscape with natural landscape beyond this was sort of the idea of Princeton really
different from Cambridge I mean they're really different campuses and although the buildings
grew east to west which meant that they had the best solar
43:54
exposure so they were across the prow of a hill east to west and then all the buildings had this
great solar aspect the great Sun so it's very environmentally correct so when we started
working at Princeton and all of these areas this is a whole photograph now but there's a
building here by manao and a building here by Hopkins and many many buildings that are
you know many hundreds of times bigger than the historic buildings on the campus we
observed this remnant of this powerful natural landscape that was along what is
44:34
lick like Carnegie at the bottom of the hill so on the right you see these pieces of the campus
that are pushing into the campus and so we thought that since extending the feeling of the
historic campus was out of scale with the size of the new buildings that they're creating that
are so much taller and by the way the landscape spaces between the new buildings in
footprint are roughly the same size spaces as around the small historic building so these
buildings are getting bigger there's no way that the same kind of
45:11
landscape would be powerful plus if you just keep replicating one kind of landscape over and
over again no matter how good it is it kind of loses its value I was going to say to Rothko's
are not as good as one Rothko but I actually don't think that's probably true we're not talking
about Rothko here so our idea one of our master planning ideas was to reinvent pieces of the
natural landscape that push back much deeper into the campus than the old the Old Party was
not this the old idea was this
45:51
campus agrarian landscape and natural landscape so this is actually kind of a radical idea in a
way that we're taking this natural landscape and we're reasserting it to create contrast in the
lower reaches of the expanding campus this is kind of like the equivalent of Harvard's all step
campus when that finally gets itself organized and happens where the large research buildings
are occurring so I'm going to talk quickly about two of those one is a chemistry building and
the other thing that so this is the site
46:28
that we started with and it's enormous eight or nine storey building by Hopkins and our land
this is our rendering of the landscape our land so this is an example of a piece of that
landscape pushing back into the campus so instead of the kind of conventional turf and and
and Bosque setting of the of the historic campus this building is is greeted with a very
different kind of landscape at its edges but it's also an engine of our need to do this is
stormwater management which is driving all projects that landscape architects
47:06
are doing so this is actually an area where we're containing roof runoff and that's that same
area of last summer it's just just completed as a project and then the Stryker bridge designed
by Ted Zoli from HNTB as the way that they're dealing with creating safe pedestrian access
over the highway going in and so this is the early stages of that landscape this so in the in the
more at the core of the campus recently what we rebuilt Butler college with Harry Cobb the
architect and I just want to show you a few of the
47:50
things we do so as we draw ourselves closer to the core of the campus we do things that are
more contextually responsive so for this is an alley of Katsura trees that we created and I
wanted to talk about a an amphitheater that we created we this was an intern who became a
ski instructor I think but we we're very involved in mocking things up at full scale in our
practice so that you because I think the corollary of being interested in materiality is
understanding understanding the impact of scale on the
48:39
delivery of the experience of materials so this is our notion of combining transition of levels
for a DA access with a place for students to have performances and just to hang out and do
stuff so Harry has this strong datum of limestone and we're doing something else on the
ground kind of I never did acid but this is slightly something like that I don't know I just
couldn't life was every day was acid for me so just one more project at Princeton and then a
quick look at tear drop and I will be almost on schedule and I I'm showing
49:30
this because a lot of the work I'm showing this project because a lot of the work that we do
now is involved in conditions of maximization where we're working on projects where our
clients and their programs are reaching the boundaries and it's caught it's a very it's in some
ways it's a very restrictive kind of work to do but at the same time we feel like it offers a lot
of demand for innovation so this is a project that I'm working on with MBTA is the landscape
architect for the
50:06
entire Princeton campus Kant Princeton has made a decision across its history to have one
Landscape Architect it was Beatrix Farrand it was Robert Sian I think it was henry arnold for
a while that was quenelle and Rothschild and so we actually currently work on every project
on the campus which is great in a variety of obvious ways but it also gives you a chance to
get deeply under the skin of what a place is like and to have work that's that's informed by a
deeper understanding than you might have the first time you came to a campus so
50:43
so this is a chance to talk about my geeky side about plants also because a great deal of what
we do in a context that is largely completed and we're reworking with architects is to change
the planted language of the campus so I'm just going to go through this quickly and it's I hope
I'm not making more out of it than it is but I thought it might be fun for you to see so the
Princeton has because of being on these long organization of east to west on these flat
terraces of land coming down the hill the campus is organized with
51:25
really long walks really unlike the Harvard campus like these really connective elegant
simple easy wayfinding kind of paths so what Robert Zion did I'm sure some of you he's a
designer of Halley Park and was a kind of wonderful mid 20th century Landscape Architect
Zion knew the Elms were going to die and he came in to them and he knew from ecology that
American beech is one of the few trees that could actually live in the shadow of existing trees
and turn into a memorable tree and shade so he came in and planted all of these
52:08
which is very unusual to plant American beech trees and to cut off the lower branches and
turn them into canopy trees so this is me picking those out in that photograph over there and
it's pretty easy to see like that's in a young American beech right there right so he made this
wonderful melange of Elms and beech and then the Elms didn't die just like they haven't I
mean a lot of them died in Harvard Yard but then they figured out how to have them not die
so that by spending money on these dinosaurs we've extended
52:42
when I started replanting Harvard Yard for Neil Rubenstein in 1991 if you told me that many
Elms would still be there 22 years later I never would have believed it so now we have this
unintentional the pre-determined with the unpredictable of the beach and the Elms together
and then next to it is this yamasaki Plaza with this incredible allay of signature plants by
Robert Zion of Sue Ann Gianna so that's in Scudder Plaza here and that's so what I'm doing is
I'm drawing you away from the core
53:18
campus to this place where the Todd Williams and Billie Tsien building is at the periphery of
the campus and outside of anything that feels normatively like the rest of the campus so you
so if we were walking along you here would be the beaches and the Elms and then here we
are in Scudder Plaza and the magnolias are there then you're going down Shapiro walk which
is a new landscape of ours which is defined by the introduction of an irregular a lay of
parodia trees spelled with an a don't look too closely
53:50
so the idea that we came up with is is to take all of the trees that are segregated into kind of
monocultures along the way or nearly monocultures beech and elm forget the Elm magnolias
parodia and when you get to the end of the campus where you have to turn a corner go left
and then go right to find the building by Todd and bility Billy that we would replant olden
Street with a mix of the trees that are on the context that precedes you so so what will happen
when you get to the end of this onthe LOD of spaces is you'll come to a wall which is
54:35
all the species that were experienced prior to getting there and then of course the flip is the is
the opposite of that when you leave and Lenore you'll go through this collection of plants and
then they will present themselves as a series of straight pieces anyway so the the Todd and
Billy Todd Williams and Billie Tsien idea is a real inversion of the tradition of the campus it's
an extremely dense building and rather than make it high they decided to make it a very small
building and to put a lot of it below grade so
55:10
what they did is they created all of these courtyards some at the level of the street and many
of them sunk in to bring natural light and sky and planting down into the lower areas of the
campus of the anling or campus so it's first of all organized with a macaque Shapiro's like
walkway that goes through it this is Tod and Billie taking that line which we're seeing here
and pushing it through their building and then what we're doing is introducing a series of
intense gardens with a very different focus than
55:50
the rest of the campus which is a park-like setting to create landscapes that work in a much
more introverted way but to experientially give something that hopefully has a more
boundlessness about it in other words instead of being knotted up in geometry they're highly
irregular and are like a scaling down and so in this way it's very similar to what we did in
teardrop we're working with really large trees in the beginning because each of the gardens
have very small amount of plantings in them sort
56:25
of planting really big trees and then I thought I'm just interesting for you to see us studying
the phenomenology of plants changing with the season so that structuring gingko tree that I
showed you a minute ago is this tree here and playing it against the palette of the other plants
that we're thinking of using and how the seasonal qualities of the palette of plants so this is
what a landscape architect does he or she has to actually kind of take the whole season and
have all of these things that are going on I have to
57:02
admit these drawings made my clients very upset and I never show them drawings like this I
only use them in lectures now because I love them it they made them crazy they were like too
busy and they didn't understand them so anyway they I think they laugh if they heard me say
that but so anyway I just thought it might be fun for you to see how we puzzle out using that
as a medium and I think you can see a little bit how this relates to the paintings that I showed
you in the beginning so anyway just walking you through because they
57:36
want to leave time for Brooklyn just showing you how that works and how this is the store
dia and then I think I don't know if we'll use it but I'll try to get you to use it so this is a stew
area that's not grown very much is called stew artyom an Adele fuh and one of the things that
that I've done is like like if it was me in my last class saying I wish I hadn't been a landscape
architect which by the way I would never say because I love my life i might have said though
I would have liked to own a
58:10
nursery so people who own nurseries are some of my best friends and I get them to grow
plants that I I talked them into growing them so I found the Pali Hill Arboretum has seedlings
of stew Ardea and I have my friends and nurseries growing them and some might be ready
for us I don't know we'll see I'm gonna make her scared if I keep talking about it so anyway
as we get as we change microclimates the palette changes and these are obviously plants the
great thing about this Duarte is it blooms has
58:47
these wonderful flowers in the middle of summer but things that like shade in the sunken
gardens where there's low shade and how the fall color looks okay so I know a lot of you
know Brooklyn I'm just going to go through it really quickly and to say a few things about it
but this is a project that we also started working on before anybody in the office in
Cambridge who moved to Brooklyn had done so in other words we worked on the master
planning when we were all here in Cambridge starting in 1998 and we're
59:20
still working on the project and we will be working on it at least another six years if we are
good boys and girls but our and our client is still happy with us but we hope they will be so
it's like a 20-year project for us you don't get to do too many of those especially when you
know already sixty years old so you have to understand one thing about the Brooklyn site
which is that this became available for parkland because of industrial obsolescence and it's a
really interesting story so so the Port
59:56
Authority got this very clever idea and they said let's build these great big piers in Brooklyn
five acres which is the size of Bryant Park in New York City that's really big but each pier is
like five acres this one nine acres over here and instead of unloading stuff off of ships and
putting it on rail cars and taking it to a warehouse let's just build warehouses right on the
waterfront so they built these gigantic piers and most of the coffee in the Northeast by the
way was stored in piles in these
1:00:35
warehouses in the like the you know the 50s and the 60s and so on well we all know what
happened containers it's the same idea but it's a smarter idea put the stuff in a box that nobody
ever touches again in China or Hungary put it on a boat and then put the container on the
back of a truck or on a train and go away with it what happened those boats were so deep and
the infrastructure to support that kind of shipping wouldn't work in Brooklyn so they had
built these piers in the 50s and by the 80s this is
1:01:14
just at the end of the working of these years before they were shut in 35 years they had no use
for the piers so they rented them out for a while but basically the Port Authority wanted to get
rid of this and they started talking about housing in this area well this is a neighborhood the
people who live in this neighborhood Brooklyn Heights have some clout like they're the
people that got Robert Moses to not knock half of their neighborhood down but to actually
create the highway as a stacked thing and make one of New York's treasures
1:01:50
which is the Brooklyn Heights promenade so these are powerful people in the neighborhood
and they organized and hired a consultant that we were sub consultants to and make came up
with the idea of Brooklyn Bridge Park the piers were all torn down except for Pier to Mary
Ann Thompson designed a rec facility that keeps the roof as a shading device it's not
constructed yet this is a course during Elias ins water walls project so this is the before and
after and what it is is a total of 85 acres of new parkland on the New York
1:02:33
Harbor Governors Island here and Ken Smith's Eastside Park that he did with shop is right
here and so over a very short period of time this entire Park was green 'less part of Brooklyn
is in lower Manhattan has been completely transformed just a closer look at how the BQE
works because it's sort of miraculous but it was designed because of concerns about noise
with a curved section so that the sound from these vehicles would hit this and would be
bounced over the shipping site so that became a very big issue for us in terms
1:03:14
of noise levels so working with a COO stations we are contouring the land to lengthen the
travel time of the sound which is how you diminish sound acoustic you just its energy and
you just make it go further and it loses energy and it loses volume so that's the reason for this
somewhat severe landscape but the other is that Moses separated the heights from the
waterfront when he cut the section through and built the BQE and experientially what this
does to everybody in the park is that the one side of the landscape rolls a topography
1:04:02
up it blocks the sound it blocks seeing two two-thirds of the traffic and it connects the bottom
of the bluff with what's up above the process that we go through of working with neighbors
and finding out about their aspirations is complicated and not always a playful experience I
think most of the people in Brooklyn moved from Cambridge myself we did I mean we did
and you know my wife was is a powerful force and that's sort of the way everybody in
Brooklyn turns out to be so this was quite a learning
1:04:46
experience one newspaper heading was park planner blows top that was me I was a redhead
once upon a time so this is me on Halloween with a fake mustache but our public process you
can see you can see how believing they all are like that's that's I don't like he's a phony I want
to grow up and be a landscape architect but I I want to say something this was us like 15
years ago building like proper models like architects make because you know I went to
Cornell which has great architecture school and I
1:05:33
really wanted to be like an architect when I was 22 that's something that's no longer true but
so our models are now much more touch me move me than this is like this looks like this isn't
how any of this is by the way that's like it's such an old design but it looks like it's a model of
something that exists and our models have evolved is much more playful touchable and and
people like that and it's not just a tool of manipulation it says we have a lot to learn from you
and it's not in this
1:06:09
meeting but in the first public meeting a woman went up to the microphone and she said you
know I'm an old lady I'm old and I'm retired and I'm on a fixed income and I can't go to the
country and the one thing that I want to do in Brooklyn Bridge Park is go down to the water
at night and put my toes in the water and see the reflection of the moon and I swear to god
that's what she said it's like you know it's like because I'm a bit of a SAP you know but it was
a tipping point for the whole idea of
1:06:42
Brooklyn Bridge Park because the project is all about connecting you experientially to the
water the promenade which is like all you people up there is like the classic landscape
relationship to view you're in a pergola you're on a hill the landscapes beyond this is a very
different experience that that we've tried to create the other thing that we had to fight against
was the tyranny of the datum on the site flat there was no topography and so there are all of
these subways under construction in New York and we had
1:07:17
access to fill and it was brought to our site so much of what we've done in Brooklyn is
environmentally responsible in terms of recycling I just want to say one thing about the
design which you can see here which is there are a thousand things well maybe not a
thousand there are a myriad of things that we did to make you feel connected to the water and
you can see a few of them here one of them is that we designed our own code compliant but
extremely transparent railing so that you don't feel like you're in a
1:07:56
cage when you're near the landscape and you can sit in benches and actually look through the
railings the other thing that we did is we held there is no perimeter lighting all of the lighting
is behind you and so what people do in the summer and I live like ten minutes from here so
I'm I'm there all the time I could I mean I could actually go down there to use it as a park I'll
tell you a funny story I was there with my granddaughter once and she's she's very proud of
me and I'm very proud of her
1:08:28
and she said poppy did they do people here know who you are when you walk through the
park and I said no and she said well I'm gonna tell them there's no please don't do that but the
idea here is that all the lighting is held back so and these are cut-offs and you don't see the
light but all the what the light washes behind you so when you're standing there at night and
looking at the water you don't have light fixtures between you which you have on it's what
you have in Hudson River Park you have this sublime almost
1:09:04
invisible edge and and you really feel connected to the water on the promenade so I'll just go
through some of these quickly because we're running out of time but we we also contour the
land not for effect but to create a range of microclimatic types and so we're on a promontory
here and it dips way down and it's really I mean you know you guys have wind in Boston you
know wind the wind is really horrible at New York Harbor and there are times when you're
down there that you need the protection of land form but the other
1:09:40
thing is that we all like to be nestled most of us I would say like I don't know Charles I would
guess even you like you go into a restaurant you don't sit in the table in the middle of the
room you want to sit at the edge right so this is a great a great you know all it's a contained
space you can see what goes on and believe it or not people get married here they don't have
receptions they actually have the marriage ceremony in this space so I think that says
something so that space is to the side
1:10:09
but it's also about the other part of it is wanting that majestic view of the sunset so this is a
Overlook made of recycled granite we're very everything is about containing water and water
collection so there's a huge water storage and collection system underneath the park and we
use that to create a recirculating wetland garden on the so that view to them to the river and
the harbor is on the other side and this is that land folding down in another direction another
kind of intimacy not a kind of bold landscape but one where
1:10:49
you're kind of burrowing through and Basilan derek waka right there by the way there is a
theme to the talk it may not be discernible so here's that water landscape making a completely
different habitat and quite not maintenance-free but quite self-sustaining pickerel in the
foreground and like last the first year was done there were four different species of ducks that
were nesting and you know crazy things so a little bit more about recycling the warehouses
that we had to take down had they had very
1:11:26
low floor to ceiling ratios they could not be converted to housing because it was cold storage
so they were they were shallow rooms for putting a lot of ice and hopefully you know lasting
into the into the into the summer in the nineteenth century they were made with incredible
longleaf southern yellow pine and we discovered that through a guy we do a lot of
woodworking with Hector du chí and we actually carefully took the buildings down and
resaw the wood and used it for our benches and so we have no we have no we have no South
American
1:12:07
hardwoods in our park everything is recycled so has to be a resilient has to be tough has to
have 7,000 drunk Brooklyn errs watching The Big Lebowski I mean look at her like what
would her parents be proud what do we do different in the 21st century than what we did in
the 19th century in parks other than run around with virtually no clothes on we exercise in
public in a way that people did not do in the 19th century and that was what we learned from
the public process as well so the park has gotten a huge amount of active recreation in
1:12:56
Brooklyn you know it's one of the densest cities in the in North America and there has not
been a major new park since Prospect Park some time ago so we anyway they're robbing
more and they'll de work with us there's some very innovative playgrounds we're kind of out
of time I'm just going to click through these this is called swing valley and man if you don't
think Brooklyn is a melting pot come here there's practically no English spoken and no
conversation outside of a family
1:13:30
is using the same language this is where this is where everybody that is average lives in
Brooklyn we so you can see lessons from tear drop being brought over here this is called the
water lab I really had little to do with this this is really mats mat Urbanski this playground he
did most work on this with some other MBTA staffers and nature and discovery and giving
kids in the city that kind of tactile experience of being in landscaping you know I mean this is
not Des Moines this is Brooklyn last year and like people are not doing anything
1:14:17
there we have no vandalism in this like I saw a piece of graffiti after three years and it was
you know I loved you know Jill or something you know it was like that big and it was written
with like a pencil or something but knock on wood but people have incredible respect for the
park in their landscape and just a couple of things a lot of recycled materials and a lot of
remaking working with ecologist to remake pieces of the prior existing natural landscape this
is a this is a real functioning salt marsh it doesn't have huge performative Lee it
1:14:53
doesn't have huge value but as a real habitat it's incredible what because of all the other
estuaries in the New York area the bird life is there they see a food source or an ecology that
they know and they stop and that's where the Ducks come from and a blue heron almost
landed there once and then it realized that the marsh was about as big as he was and so he
kept going when he got down there but this is the response to that woman wanting to put her
feet in the water to create these get downs into the water and that
1:15:37
idea really came from her so that was the beginning of thinking about this park in a
completely different way that's another one and then weird things happen on these get downs
this is a sturgeon which is a freshwater fish and clearly like something happened upstate and
it floated down the river and then it ended up in our part but you know this would not happen
without a get down so anyway that's Pier one from the air and I just want to pause with a stop
with a quote that to me is about a consideration of the dimension of time
1:16:26
in our lives this notion of whether something that you experience or the memory of having of
of hearing it after it's over is more powerful and I think that one of the things that really
changed landscape for people for landscape architects is the way we started thinking about
landscape in the dimension of time and you think of photographers who started doing f-stops
that that captured movement if you think of go Gann making those paintings of free
decomposing or this poem which is meditating on the idea of the dimension
1:17:07
of time I think those are all the dimension of landscape and it is kind of the thing that gave us
our emancipation as a discipline anyway thank you very much that's questions it was that
boring no I mean I interviewed for it and they didn't hire me so I'm jaundiced you know what
can I say that would be it'll get it's a great idea and it will get better it will get better they
didn't have enough money it's not they ran out of money they used all the money on tunnels
and they did
1:18:13
they it'll it's it's a great idea it will get better well they're they're limited by the aspirations of
their time is the way I feel about it I think you know I like many people in the audience like
remember when Julia Child and James Beard were freaks I mean we were all taken with them
but they were real cultural freaks I mean I have staff who were 22 who take food vacations
and they don't make a lot of money like and I think the same thing has happened to landscape
we've rediscovered cities
1:19:00
we've rediscovered what makes quality in life and people have higher demands for
landscapes in cities than they had 20 or 30 years ago believe me I can tell you I was working
in offices and I even had my own office and people come to me and say incredible things like
this is I mean this would not have been said to me 20 years ago so I started a new project at
the University of Chicago a couple months ago and he's a scientist but scientists are cool
some of them you know so no seriously he's a scientist
1:19:37
and he he said to us in the first meeting you know what they say about the University of
Chicago it's where fun goes to die and and your job is to make sure that people will see this
and know that fun has not died I mean no the guy is a cosmologists he's a genius but nobody
would have said that to a landscape architect thirty years ago like they would ask you to make
fun died in their landscape like give me something like Boston City Hall plaza I wanted to
look like fun came here to die you know there
1:20:18
was a hand up over here okay so everything around Brooklyn Bridge Park is heroic in scale
in a good way in a bad way 900 acres of water I'm it's the best view of lower Manhattan but
my god I mean it's enormous lower Manhattan the bridge the BQE so there is in our project
first of all an obvious effort to make something that is experientially not like any of that like
you know Witold Rybczynski was there and he likes the park he's written nice things about it
but he's like you know he said to me
1:21:13
in the cab when we were leaving so where are your edgy straight lines Michael you know in
other words I mean in terms of the idiom of our time one could have looked at this project
and wanted to do something of that language but we knew that with all of the heroic and
linearity of things around it that what you wanted with something that was contrasting and so
I mean yeah I mean it's if it's is it Olmstead Ian that it's like Roli and curvy well I don't know
maybe if if that's if that's a bad
1:21:50
thing I can't feel it when I'm there you know so it so the response to the bridge was to do
something that was complementary bike contrast the other thing I would say is it has a very
gritty texture as a place and all of the decisions don't try at all to be maritime like but we try
to have an aesthetic about all the design decisions that is not unlike the simplicity of shipping
waterfront landscapes but done in a contemporary way so it it's a similar idea but a different
execution I don't know is that
1:22:32
helpful okay thank you very much it was nice to be