Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

West 8 and du Toit Allsopp Hillier (DTAH), Toronto Central Waterfront,
Toronto, Canada, 2005
Reconditioning the waterfront. The Toronto scheme transforms the old industrial
harbour front into an elegant, tree-lined boulevard with bicycle lanes while
preserving its streetcars and extending park platforms on piers into the lake.
It also successfully breaks apart the highway that separates the downtown
from the waterfront, creating new parklands, streets, blocks and building sites
that connect back inland. The inset shows the section of the planned methane
plant that will process gas from the brownfield waterfront sites.
new landscaped streets in Battery Park City (1978) drew on the
New York tradition of Olmsted and Vaux’s picturesque Central
Park and Brooklyn’s Esplanade. In Battery Park, landscape
architect Lawrence Olin created a new, Retro-Modern street
hybrid: his pedestrianised esplanade was a huge commercial
success and set in motion the recoding of the New York
industrial waterfront.
Historic America downtowns now represent tiny patches
within a much larger regional landscape, with many, such as
Detroit, struggling to survive as a result of disinvestment in
their centres and vast, automobile-based, peripheral expansion
beyond their city limits. But there have been some spectacular
landscaped comebacks, as in downtown Los Angeles, given up
for dead by Reyner Banham in 1971. Here, the Pei, Cobb, Fried
Library Tower (1990) looms over Halprin’s cascading Bunker
Hill (Spanish) Steps (1990) that follow a curving waterfall
descending from the reconditioned LA public library gardens.
The steps lead down to the South Hope Street armature of the
‘New Downtown’ (originally to be landscaped by Halprin).
Nearby, on Bunker Hill, at the Civic Center, where the
surrounding empty office towers have been converted to
residential use, Melinda Taylor and Lawrence Reed Moline will
design both the widened sidewalks of the tree-lined Grand
Avenue in front of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall (2003) and also
the western garden terraces behind, overlooking the Pacific.
On the East Coast in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a
similar landscaped transformation is taking place. The city
uncovered the previously buried Woonasquatucket River to
create an attractive canyon of landscaped terraces going down
to the riverside, WaterPlace (1994), which hosts the WaterFire
festival (a free public arts event with torches and riverboats
held several times a month between May and October). This
public re-imaging of the activities of the city centre as a
‘festival place’ led to further investment, as industrial lofts
and office blocks changed to artists’ and then residential uses,
making the downtown area appear safe and attractive for the
enormous Providence Place Mall (1999) beside the river, the
AmTrak station and the I-90 East Coast highway.
Recombinant Landscapes in the Postindustrial Machine City
Many American cities are reconstructing their historic
business-district enclaves to cater for new residential uses,
adding new paths through complex three-dimensional
patches of landscaped amenities as commuters rebel against
long commutes and high oil prices. In the 1990s, inner-city
armatures of secondary centres, like North Michigan Avenue,
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