Project Featured in Maine Home+Design

The site of Winslow Homer's iconic paintings is the setting for a modern Maine summer house. Photo by Thomas Rainer

One of my favorite projects I worked on is featured in this month's Maine Home + Design magazine.  The August 2010 issue features the residential garden located on the rocky coast of southern Maine.  The house is perched atop the craggy cliffs of Prout's Neck, a sleepy penisula that juts into Casco Bay.  It was one of the most stunning sites I've ever worked on.  A ferny hemlock and birch forest opens into a perfectly flat lawn that overlooks dramatic black cliffs that plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.  Indeed, the coastline is so dramatic that Winslow Homer painted some of his most iconic watercolors on this exact site.

Deschampsia caespitosa frames the oceanside lawn.  Photo by Francois Gagne.

The project began five years ago while I was with Oehme, van Sweden & Associates.  Principal Eric Groft set the tone for the project by insisting the garden not be overly fussy.   The house is a Maine summer house, after all, and the garden is meant to capture the spirit of a midsummer retreat.  The local zoning code excluded any impervious surfaces on the ocean side of the property, so that became the place for a small lawn.  Since the lawn borders the dramatic wind-shearn cliffs, we wanted to keep it natural and relaxed, so native grasses such as Panicum and Deschampsia mix with Monarda and Rudbeckias.  The lawn became the obvious place for the client's children to play raquetball or other summer sports. 

A timber frame pergola anchors the wild garden in the front of the house. Pot by Maine based Lunaform.  Photo by Francois Gagne.

Since the ocean side was so simple, the front of the house is where we added a bit of intricacy.  Eric suggested we look at the Beatrix Farrand's palette at Reef Point.  This became the inspiration for the wild garden in the front.  A low stone wall frames the entry garden.  Outside of the wall, we planted blueberry sod purchased from a nearby Maine farmer who was converting part of his fields into pasture.  The sod blends into a riot of deciduous ferns and bunchberry that spreads from a nearby stand of woods.  Inside of the entry garden, a blue and chartreuse themed wild garden teems with delphiniums, iris, goatsbeard, and globe flowers.  A large, timber frame pergola anchors the south side of the garden.  Learning how to design and construct this pergola was a real education for me in the ancient craft of timber-frame construction.  The entire structure is held together without a single nail.   

The entry garden is framed by a low stone wall that holds a Maine style cottage garden. Photo by Thomas Rainer.

The path to the ocean side passes panicle hydrangeas and native Clethra 'Hummingbird'.  Photo by Thomas Rainer.

The other joy of this project was working with local Maine craftsman to adorn the garden.  Maine based Lunaform supplied the large hand-crafted planters that animate the entry garden.  Their collection of rugged but perfectly proportioned pots were ideal for this site.  Maine firm Weatherend supplied one of the curved settee benches, while New Mexico artist Benjamin Forgey created the other bench out of driftwood he collected. 

A gently curving lawn is bordered by native cedars, switchgrass, and black eyed susans.  Photo by Thomas Rainer

It was indeed a rare privilege to work on a site with so much character and to work with such skilled craftsmen.  Designing the details of this project and managing its installation was a great learning experience for me.  Eric Groft's intuitive and gestural approach to designing landscapes--what you feel a site should be--is something that has stayed with me until today.  It's hard for a young designer to learn to trust your gut, to hold on to those first impressions you had when you walked onto the site.  It's especially hard once you throw in all the demands of a project: the client's wishlist, the regulatory constraints, the horticultural requirements . . . all those things start to cloud that original vision.  But the best designers know how to listen to their instincts and simplify.  When I look at photos of the garden, I remember the first quick lines Eric drew on the survey.  Those first gestures were preserved through the design and installation, and it is those lines--those gut-level responses to a powerful site--that hold the garden together today. 

All You Need to Know

 

Gardeners: throw away those glossy coffee table books. Everything you need to learn is in the black and white planting plans of the great designers.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been preparing to teach a planting design class for the George Washington University professional studies program. It is a program that teaches aspiring garden designers the basics of contemporary garden design. As a part of that preparation, I’ve gone through my garden books, project photographs, old magazines, and my personal image collection in search for the raw material to teach planting design.

In that process, what’s become clear to me is the utter uselessness of glossy photographs. If you’ve ever taken a great photo of your garden, you know that a beautiful photo has as much to do with the time of day, the quality of light and the tight cropping of the photo than it does the skill or composition of the gardener. I’m not saying one can take good garden photos without a good garden. But let’s face it: photos tell only part of the story. They speak of one corner of the garden during a single moment in time. Scroll through the myriad of garden blogs out there on the internet. The vast majority are tight close-ups on a single flower or group of flowers. Rarely do they show you the entire garden, or even a large part of the garden.

The garden publishing industry only makes it worse. The tyranny of the glossy photo dominates the medium. We consume books full of sugary garden moments, but have lost our appetite for meaty garden writing or design discourse.

But there is an alternative. Seek and collect planting plans of great designers. These inglorious black and white diagrams filled with obscure Latin names tell the real story of the design. Like a piece of sheet music, these diagrams communicate the structure, rhythm, detail, and score of the original design. From these plans, one learns the scale of the massings, the plant combinations, and the balance of the composition.

For example, I recently came across Piet Oudolf’s plan for the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millenium Park. I printed out this plan and have spent hours studying it. It’s fascinating in that it demystifies much of Oudolf’s technique. The most photographed part of the design is his massive river of salvias that runs through the middle of the field, a moment of striking clarity in the midst of an otherwise intricate design. From his plan, I’ve learned that the river is composed of at least four different cultivars of salvia, adding slight color variation (giving the river depth) and extending the season of bloom. I also noticed that he interplants the grasses Panicum virgatum and Sporobolus heterolepsis through one section of the river, allowing it to disappear later in summer when the grasses emerge.

The southern section of Piet Oudolf's plan for the Lurie Garden

Or take a look at the southern section of the plan. This is the most fascinating part to me. Whereas most of the design has a single plant located in a single spot (not dissimilar from a Gertrude Jekyll plan), the southern section is more complex. The plan indicates a field of Molinia caerulea ‘Moorflamme’ that has four or five perennials that emerge out of this matrix. It’s almost as if there’s two melodies going on at once, the sweeping score of the grasses and the counterpoint of the Silphium, Echinacea, and Eryngiums. This style of designing is subtle, yet revolutionary. It’s the first real step toward garden design based on ecological succession. For me, this is why native plants arranged in traditional border arrangements are so dissatisfying. These plants have evolved to grow within a matrix of other species. Oudolf’s arrangement preserves the beauty of these relationships.

Gertrude Jekyll's Impressionistic plan; Roberto Burle Marx's cubist inspired planting plan.

Other planting plans are equally revealing. Compare Gertrude Jekyll’s impressionist-styled planting plans with Roberto Burle Marx’s cubist-styled planting plans. The plans become a key to understanding the most elusive aspect of planting design: style.

But why study a two-dimensional plan when a garden is an ephemeral, three-dimensional medium? Doesn’t this bias the initial act of creation over the garden over its lifetime? Yes, it’s true, gardens often outlive the initial act of creation, and it’s the acts of maintenance and gardening that ultimately determine the way a garden looks. So get out there and visit gardens in person. No plan can substitute for firsthand experience. I would encourage gardeners to take plans with them when they see a garden in person. Your experience will be so much fuller.

Groundbreakers: The Garden Heard Round the World

It was the garden heard round the world. Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex, England, is perhaps the single most influential garden of the last century. The rather modest gardener with a unique flair for underappreciated plants stirred the waters of British gardening, and as a result, sent ripples throughout the world. Begun in 1960 on a farm property that was a wasteland of "starved gravel and soggy bog,” Beth Chatto transformed the site by creating a string of contrasting yet complementary gardens. Chatto embraced the site’s difficult features and matched plants to fit the inhospitable terrain.

Beth Chatto is the grand dame of English gardeners, the reigning heir of William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and painter-gardener Sir Cedris Morris. Though not the first naturalistic gardener, Chatto nonetheless is the pioneer—the first garden structuralist—who blazed the way for brilliant plantsmen like Dan Pearson and Piet Oudolf. “Success depends on knowledge of plant provenance and on an understanding of natural plant associations,” writes Chatto in her book The Dry Garden. Chatto credits her late husband, horticulturist, and farmer for creating an interest in natural plant associations. Andrew spent his life studying where garden plants originated. Her husband’s passion for ecological patterns stirred a curiosity in Beth that would fuel her most daring garden experiment.

Her most famous and influential garden is the Gravel Garden. Begun in 1991 as a horticultural experiment, the Gravel Garden was converted from a former parking lot. Chatto was inspired by hikes she and her good friend, the legendary Great Dixter gardener Christopher Lloyd, took through various countries. During these walks, Chatto would notice how native plants would miraculously thrive in the harshest conditions, from salt-crusted sand dunes to wind-battered alpine rockeries. Inspired by the “miracle of growing plants,” Chatto set home determined to prevail with her experiment. The site was a heavily compacted parking area that consisted mostly of yellow gravel that went twenty feet deep. Chatto carefully prepared the soil (including subsoiling and several homemade blends of compost), cut in beds by using a hose to lay them out, and selected plants to fit the harsh conditions.

The most revolutionary part of the Gravel Garden is that it has never once been artificially watered. This is especially remarkable when you consider how ornamental and colorful the garden is year-round. The Gravel Garden is not a dry meadow or succulent garden, but a richly-layered perennial garden. This feat is doubly impressive considering that Essex is perhaps the driest corner in all of England.

Of course, Chatto’s concept garden would not have been a success had it not been stunningly beautiful. Chatto began her career arranging flowers, and it is her flair for arranging boldly structural plants in strikingly original combinations that accounts for her critical acclaim. As a founding member of the Colchester Flower Club, Chatto’s experience arranging plants in vases shows itself in her gardens. Chatto structures the garden with tall vertical plants like verbascum, acanthus, and foxgloves (“church spires in my village”); then artfully creates mass with textural filler plants like eryngium, euphorbia, or santolina; finally, she punches through the texture with moments of startling contrast—a luminous Stipa pulcherrima—resolving the tension between the architectural lines and the soft mass.

Chatto’s international fame came as a result of winning medals at the Superbowl of British gardening, the Chelsea Flower Show. Chatto won her first medal in 1976 and went on to win ten more gold medals during subsequent years. The show attracts thousands of visitors a year, and her unusual yet seductive combinations launched Chatto as an international garden figure. Her ability to mix traditional garden flowers like delphiniums and roses with weedy thistles, grasses, and structural seedheads gave her designs an edge and freshness that few could match. Chatto went on to publish several books, including The Dry Garden and The Damp Garden, that became instant garden classics.

Beth Chatto is widely celebrated for being one of the first ecological gardeners. But she describes her philosophy of pairing the right plants to the right habitat as nothing more than common sense. While her Gravel Garden rightfully deserves the attention it has received for its sustainable approach, it is her artistry in plant combination and natural association that makes her a Groundbreaker. Chatto orchestrates an international ensemble of plants into combinations that have the same resonance and harmony of a native palette. Like no one else before, Chatto understands form, color, and texture not as abstract design principles, but as an extension of a particular place.

For Chatto, all of the acclaim and attention her garden has received is missing the point. "Our time is so ephemeral, and no one can say how long any garden will last,” says Chatto, now 87 years old. “It is being part of that continuous chain, passing on plants and the love of plants from generation to generation, that matters."

Sources:

The Dry Garden, Beth Chatto and Steven Wooster 2001.

“Beth Chatto Exhibition: A Revoutionary Revisited.” Telegraph. 13 November 2008.

All photos by Steven Wooster.

Groundbreakers: The New Traditionalists

The first of the Groundbreakers honorees goes to the inheritors of the European formal garden tradition. The family firm of Wirtz International, led by father Jacques Wirtz with sons Peter and Martin, has revolutionized traditional garden design. The Belgian landscape architecture firm has redefined the formality of the Italian Renaissance and French classical gardens by imbuing those traditions with a modern understanding of space crafted through sculptural whimsy.

Jacques Wirtz started his practice in 1950 designing and maintaining small gardens. Wirtz studied horticulture and landscape architecture, but it was his years in the field maintaining local gardens that gave him his virtuoso skill as a craftsman. At 79, Wirtz has the characteristic humility and reticence of a master craftsman. Son Peter Wirtz explains, ''My father is such a natural talent that he doesn't always articulate what makes him do things.'' British garden writer and biographer Patrick Taylor adds: ''He's not a 'good quote' person. He's more interested in the eternal verities.''

Perhaps it is this meekness that attracts such an elusive clientele. His clients include celebrities like Valentino and Catherine Deneuve, the Belgian royal family, and former French president Francois Mitterrand. Even his books are discreet, numbering gardens rather than referring to them by name. The firm now works at an international scale. In addition to Europe, Wirtz International has designed gardens in California, New Jersey, and Florida, as well as Japan.

The most iconic aspect of the Wirtz style is his unconventional and sculptural use of clipped hedges. When Wirtz moved into his current house, he inherited a row of overgrown boxwoods that lined a walk. Too spindly to be trimmed into a rectilinear form, Wirtz followed the natural contours of the branching, creating a pillowy, cloud-like effect. It is this attention to natural form that gives Wirtz’s work its creative edge.

''We love structure,” said Peter Wirtz, “we love to feel firmness.'' Perhaps it’s the firmness of their work that challenges me as a designer and a gardener. Each time I look at their work, I have the same thought: my garden efforts are too small and too timid. But I’m invigorated by the clarity of these gardens. There is no ambiguity about control, no illusions of naturalism. Every effort by the designer is not intended to blur their interventions—like Olmsted in Central Park or Capability Brown at Blenheim—but to declare them. It adds an authenticity to their designs.

For me these gardens are about control. There is nothing subtle in the Wirtzes’ manipulation of earth and plants. The gardens flaunt control. They bend and shape plants like metal. They flatten the earth. They cut deep lines into the ground. The pageantry of power shown in these gardens both horrifies and delights me. For the Wirtzes, control and geometry are not about a display of power and wealth, but an expression of modern space. The strength of their forms creates beautiful volumes that hold light and air. This architectural touch to garden-making gives him “a great power to evoke space,” says Spanish landscape architect Fernando Caruncho. The Wirtzes are masters of using space to produce mystery. One room unfolds into the next; the result is surprising and whimsical.

The real story of these gardens is not the heroic moment of creation, but their perseverance over time. The Wirtz gardens require so much clipping, trimming, edging, and mowing. In these gardens, maintenance shares equal weight with the initial act of creation. Though I’ve never seen their gardens at initial installation, I would imagine they are a bit messy: small unshaped shrubs tightly packed together, lumpy forms waiting to take their shape. Their gardens emerge through time. The gardeners with the hand clippers are as much the hero as the designer with the pen. It is a reminder to me that gardens are never a single act of creation, but a constant act of recreation and renewal through the acts (vita activa) of gardening.

Last photo by Wirtz International.  Some of the information from this article was sourced from The New York Times article "The Constant Gardener" by Pilar Viladas

PREVIEW: Groundbreaker--Brilliant Planting Design

I am dedicating a handful of upcoming blogs to highlighting some of the world’s most outstanding planting designers in a series entitled Groundbreakers. I want to focus on great planting design, not because I think it should be a separate discipline from landscape architecture or garden design, but because so little critical attention is given to this aspect of environmental design. Planting design is a subject that unites the separate but related fields of landscape architecture and garden design, a fertile ground for conceptual exploration.

I have chosen these designers because their work elevates design beyond the conceptual confines of traditional vs. modern and geometry vs. naturalism. For centuries, design style has swung between these two pendulums, fed by an impulse that is often more reactionary than critical. The designers featured in Groundbreakers pay homage to the past while freshly expressing a modern consciousness.

A critical discourse about what constitutes great planting design is needed more than ever. For too long, great planting design has been relegated to oversized coffee table books and interior design magazines. It is time to get beyond the domination of the glossy photo. Whether you are a professional designer, or an amateur gardener, we need to better understand why we arrange plants in the ways we do. These designers challenge our assumptions about how, what, and why we plant.

I've selected five designers whose work are stylistically different, yet each reveals an inspiring direction for the future of design.  Be sure to stop by in the next few weeks!

Modern Naturalism: Artifice in the Natural Garden

For several weeks now, I have been extolling wildness and naturalism as a virtue in the design of landscapes. My claim is that man-made landscapes need to embrace “nature” in a more intentional and expressive way. In making those claims, I have been perhaps too dismissive of the importance of artifice in designed landscapes. A few thoughts about that here.
First, any designer that calls his or her work “naturalistic,” “sustainable,” or “ecological” cites nature as an authority to justify their designs. Obviously, many landscapes claim to be natural that are entirely different from each other. What is abundantly clear in the age of greenwashing is that terms like “natural,” “sustainable,” and “green” are human constructs, loose signifiers that can be applied to almost anything--particularly anything in a landscape. Ideas about nature ultimately reveal more about us than it does about the landscapes they describe.

“Nature is an abstraction,” writes Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture at MIT, “a set of ideas for which many cultures have no one name, ‘a singular name for the real multiplicity of things and living processes.’” In landscape design today, naturalism is a science (ecology), a moral calling, and an aesthetic. Designers sling these terms around without much thought or discussion about what they mean.

So in all my eager advocacy for naturalism, I too have been a bit loose with the terms. Anne Whiston Spirn writes that “nature is both given and constructed.” I believe in both of those realities: nature as outside of me and nature that is inside of me. The line between those two is a fuzzy one. This is not reason to despair; instead, we should celebrate this fuzziness.

For me, the myriad of meanings for what is natural is no reason to reject naturalistic design. Instead, it is an invitation to explore this conceptually fertile ground. The medium of our art is living, ever-changing elements of plants, water, light, and soil. Designers get the rare privilege of working with an ephemeral palette, of asserting our control and then losing it. Lately, I’ve gotten much more joy out of losing it.

That is why I am drawn to designed landscapes that celebrate the evanescent with bold artifice. Trying to erase the evidence of human intervention feels inauthentic to me, as flat and unconvincing as a trompe l’oeil. All true naturalism must first be a humanism. The landscapes that captivate me both intellectually and spiritually are those that blur the lines between natural and cultivated, between nature as other and nature as me. Artifice is not only acceptable in naturalistic designs, but necessary. It prevents plagiarism by forcing the designer to show her hand. The benefit of artifice is that is grants the designer sweet catharsis: it reveals to the world that this design, like all good landscape design, is a blessed forgery.

China Sweeps American Landscape Architecture Awards

Rising Star Yu Kongjian’s Radical Vision

Design firm Turenscape in concert with Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture virtually swept this year’s ASLA awards, winning an unprecedented three of the twelve design awards, including the prestigious Award of Excellence and two Honor Awards. The group beat out the hugely popular Highline, New York’s elevated rail park, anticipated by many to win this year’s top award.

All three of the winning projects were large scale, regenerative landscapes that transformed formerly degraded sites into lush, public parks. “This is very powerful,” wrote the Awards jury for the Shanghai Houtain Park, built on a former brownfield. “It’s full of the right messages of our profession. The scope is exquisite. The presentation is excellence. Shanghai never has a blue sky, and recognizing this kind of sustainable project in that context is important.”

Lead designer and professor of landscape architecture Yu Kongjian has long worked to bring attention to China’s impending environmental crisis. Yu views landscape architecture as “the art of survival, not an art of entertaining and gardening.” Awarded ASLA awards eight times since 2002, Yu is a rising star in the world of landscape architecture. In 2007, Yu won an Honor Award for The Red Ribbon in Tanghe River Park, a project that Conde Nast Traveler named as one of the seven modern architectural wonders in the world.

A Different Kind of Park

Yu has long advocated for a different kind of public park: “Why can’t we use agricultural plants, crops, wild grasses, and fruit trees to decorate cities and parks? They are equally beautiful but yield fruits and demand little attention."  Yu's love for wildness is balanced by an appreciation for the agricultural and industrial heritage of a site.  The winning projects frequently use the concept of agricultural terraces and rice fields to create ecologically productive landscapes.


Shanghai’s Houtan Park uses wild grasses and crops as a water-filtering machine, cleaning 2,400 cubic meters of water a day. “There is a beauty in wild grasses,” says Yu. “We don’t see it because we have a twisted aesthetic, taking natural things to be lower class. We are addicted to city beautification: uprooting agricultural crops and trees on the land, building cities, and importing expensive and fruitless garden plants.”

Yu goes on to make an analogy: “It’s kind of ludicrous and harmful feudalistic aristocratic aesthetic. Like when we bound women’s feet and still viewed it as beautiful and elegant. We now are binding the feet of nature.”

To view more about the winning projects click the links below:

Shanghai Houtan Park: Landscape as a Living System

The Qinhuangdao Beach Restoration: An Ecological Surgery

Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park: The Adaptation Palettes

Botanicals for the Green Revolution: The Prints of Angie Lewin

Angie Lewin is the artist for the green revolution.  Not since William Morris has an artist combined patterned abstraction with horticultural specificity.  Her hand-made prints show seed pods and grasses, clouds and moonlight, islands and cliffs.  Her linocuts and wood engravings are both specific and universal, a quality that has made her one of the most demanded printmakers in England.

Angie was not always strongly connected to the natural world.  For years Angie lived in north London as an illustrator.  When she and her husband decided to buy a holiday cottage on the coast road in Norfolk, everything changed.  The clifftops and saltmarshes of the North Norfolk coast inspired Angie to return to print making, a discipline she had studied in graduate school.  Angie had previously studied garden design in her thirties, but found it took the joy out of gardening.  But it did open her eyes to plants.  "I became fascinated by the structure of plants," says Angie, "especially those that were about to flower or had flowered already."

Her style is recognizable: the colors are a retro palette, and the arrangement is a mix of arts and crafts and mid-century modern.  But her eye for horticultural detail elevates her designs.  In her prints, you can feel the connection between plant and place, and its this element that makes her work strikingly original.  You get a sense from her work that if you see the plant well enough, you will know the larger landscape.  Though nature is abstracted, the ecology is still present. "I like looking at the landscape through the plants," Angie says.   

Goatsbeard, dandelions, cow parsley, fennel, and sea lavender--Angie is able to turn gardener's weeds into expansive landscapes.   The process is laborious and time-consuming.  For each print, Angie begins by sketching.  The sketches become detailed sketches, which then get cut into the wood.  Each color necessitates a separate block, each of which takes up to a week to cut.  If she makes a mistake while cutting, she has to start from the beginning.  The final piece is printed on delicate Japanese paper, one block at a time.  Since everything is done by hand, Angie only runs small prints.  "I have so many sketches that I'm always keen to move on to the next print."

The end results have attracted attention.   Angie's prints have donned the cover of garden writer Noel Kingsbury new book, Natural Garden Style.  Kingsubry has long trumpeted the value of the structure of plant, not just its bloom or color, so her art was a good philosphic fit.  In addition, Angie has completed covers for Leslie Geddes-Brown's Garden Wisdom and Jeremy Page's Salt.  Author Leslie Geddes Brown explains, "The whole book was, in its turn, inspired by the art of Angie Levin, who brings her own vision of the natural world to her work." 

To learn more about Angie Lewin's work, you can visit her website.

Abstract Expressionism and Planting Design: A Visual Analogy

I have always been drawn to abstract expressionism, both artistically and philosophically.  Art critic Harold Rosenburg described the genre in terms of its action, "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."  In the same way, I am drawn to planting design which is muscular and gestural.  It speaks to the viewer at an emotional and spiritual level, and arranges plants in an ecologically sympathetic geometry.  Here, I've set Joan Mitchell's After April is set next to a Piet Oudolf composition:

And it is not just the bold use of color that makes this analogy; it is the philosophic stance of the artists that resonates with me.  Painter Barnett Newman described the drive to paint, "What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man's fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men." Likewise, if the design of landscapes is not fundamentally a humanistic endeavor, then it fails.  Naturalistic design is not about imitating nature, it is an interpretation of nature that expresses the human condition.  Both the painter and the architect create space for dwelling.  Here Newman's painting declares space in the same way the birch grove does:

What was liberating about this style of painting was that in communicating a pure emotion, in expressing space, or in holding a void, the painting was liberated from the canvas.  Great planting design likewise liberates a space from the confines of the site or property line. It gives the site a feeling of expansiveness by recalling a larger moment of nature.  Or better yet, it arouses a longing for nature that is embedded in each of us.

Helen Frankenthaler once said, "A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute."

So in looking at the paintings I love, it becomes increasingly clear: the only planting worth doing is big, bold, and gestural.  Strive for expansive, moody, luminous design.  And remember that best naturalist design is first humanist. 

The Most Important Urban Square You’ve Never Heard Of

Why Rotterdam’s Theater Square Represents a Turning Point for Urban Design


Art history rarely recognizes a masterpiece in its time. And neither does urban design and landscape architecture. So it’s time to pay homage to a groundbreaking urban square that changed the way designers approach urban sites.

Situated in the heart of Rotterdam, Schouwburgplein, or Theater Square was built in what was formerly a large blank space without character. Surrounded by nondescript lowrise towers that were built after the Nazi destruction, Schouwburgplein is built on top of underground parking. Designed by the landscape architecture firm West 8, the square is an interactive urban space, flexible and adaptive to the user’s needs.

In the tradition of Italy’s medieval squares, the design for Schouwburgplein emphasizes the importance of void, creating a panorama which opens to the skyline. The entire concept of the design revolves around the idea of adaptability. Lead designer Adriaan Geuze prefers the “emptiness” to overprogrammed urban spaces and argues that urban dwellers are capable of creating their own meaning in environments.

While traditional European squares are a representation of civic and religious power, Schouwburgplein empowers the public to determine their uses. Though the square is mostly flat and open, the secret to its effectiveness is the design of the urban surface. To emphasize the square as a stage, the entire surface is raised above the surrounding streets. In addition, the square’s mosaic of surface materials encourage different uses. The west side of the square is a poured epoxy floor containing silver leaves. The east side (with more sunlight) has a wooden bench over the entire length and warm materials including rubber and timber decking on the ground plane. The change in materials inspire different uses: children play a game on one surface, while skateboarders ride on another.

The surface of the square is embedded with connections for electricity and water, as well as facilities to build tents and fencing for temporary events. As a result, the surface is active and dynamic, a living field that allows the square to change day by day, hour by hour. This idea of urban surface as a living agricultural field is a departure from the philosophies of both classical and modern design. The urban surface is no longer a realm of fixed objects, but a living connective tissue capable of supporting indeterminate uses.

Like all good stage design, lighting is everything. The crane lighting designed for this project may be the most iconic element of the design. Coin-operated handles allow users to determine the height and placement of the lights. During the day, the shadow of the four crane lights move across the square like a clock, perhaps a reference to the Campo in Siena. At night, the dramatic lighting narrows the scale of the space as it casts a playful and theatric mood across the square.

Good design has alway prompted contempt from institutions dedicated to neo-traditional. The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces has added Schouwburgplein to its Hall of Shame, claiming that “this is a perfect example of how a design statement cannot be a great square.” The site goes on to say the square is often underused during certain times of day, a clear indication of its failure. PPS unfairly blames the design of the square for problems of the fragmented and under-utilized urban context. Of course, the PPS has always been a bit critical of anything built after the Victorian era.

History remembers projects that mark a turning point. The design of Theater Square represents a shift from the square as fixed object to the square as dynamic field; from a site of representation and power to a site of democracy and openness; from overprogrammed public space to an enabling territory. The shift in thinking represented in this design is already percolating through universities and cutting edge design firms. 

Governor's Island Park will be Developed by New York City.

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Governor David A. Paterson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and State Senator Daniel L. Squadron today announced an agreement on the long-term development, funding and governance of Governors Island in which New York City will have primary responsibility to develop and operate the island.

As a part of the announcement the City and the State together released the Governors Island Park and Public Space Master Plan, a comprehensive design for 87 acres of open green space, rejuvenating existing landscapes in the National Historic District, transforming the southern half of the island and creating a 2.2 mile Great Promenade along the waterfront."

See the design by landscape architecture firm, West 8 in this great interactive website:

http://www.govislandpark.com/

All images by (Rendering by West 8 / Rogers Marvel Architects / Diller Scofidio + Renfro / Mathews Nielsen / Urban Design +)