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

Patricia Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas, Texas, 1981
This once environmentally degraded lagoon became a functioning ecosystem when the artist created new concrete
edges and bridges shaped like native plants. She planted bulrushes, wild rice and tall grasses that root in shallow
water along the shoreline to provide shelter and food for small animals and birds and, further out, added water lilies
and irises surrounded by a causeway shaped like the tip of the fern. Paths for people are based on the twisted roots of
the delta duck-potato; thinner stems rise out of the water to provide perches for birds. Leaf-like elements towards the
centre of the lagoon form safe islands for animals; other ‘leaves’ along the shore create step seating and overlooks.
turned into “community gardens” were initiated by artists
as a kind of guerilla act.’
Patricia Johanson’s land and water sculptures, such as the
Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas (1981), were particularly prescient
since they restored the ecological balance while transforming
watery edges into usable places shaped like the flora and
fauna around them. Johanson, who proposed sculptural
solutions to environmental problems as early as 1969, is an
artist with a degree in architecture (earned in order to help
get her projects built). But there were other landscape
architects at that time, such as Lawrence Halprin in San
Francisco and Richard Haag in Seattle, who also did lively,
usable, transformative urban projects that foreshadow those
being done today. Haag converted a brownfield site long
before the term was in popular usage.
Today, abandoned industrial sites are the most likely
places for public works of landscape architecture, and they
take a bizarre variety of forms from waterfronts and railroad
beds to mines and factories. In New York City, the 2.4-
kilometre (1 1 / 2 -mile) elevated High Line railroad track which
stopped carrying freight 26 years ago, and the 898-hectare
(2,220-acre) Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island – a massive
pile of garbage that rises to 69 metres (225 feet) at some
points and is visible from the moon – are both being
transformed by James Corner’s Field Operations.
The Fresh Kills site – an intertidal marsh into which 150
million tons of refuse, mostly household waste, was dumped for
over half a century – managed to grow forests, create a nesting
area for herons, and host migrating birds anyway, though it
often emitted foul odours. In 2001, plans for its conversion to a
park had been made, a competition held, and closing begun,
when events on 11 September forced it to reopen to
accommodate debris from the World Trade Center tragedy,
giving new ironic meaning to its name, which had actually
come from the Fresh Kills Estuary. Finally, however, design
development has begun, construction will start next year, and
the first $150 million phase of the project will open in 2008.
Service roads will be turned into public thoroughfares,
easing traffic congestion on Staten Island and making the
park accessible by car. A gateway flanked by wind turbines
will lead to four landfill mounds, each capped and
transformed into a different landscape. The one on the north
will have a rounded peak with meadows, but there will also be
woods, secluded island nesting areas, marshes with an
interpretive centre, and a memorial garden to those whose
remains lie within the land. There will be ball fields, boating
and fishing, picnic spots, horse trails and a great lawn for
events. The Point will have a dock for a ferry from
Manhattan’s Battery Park with a promenade of restaurants,
art installations and outdoor markets at the water’s edge.
Corner calls the whole place a ‘Lifescape’ that will transform
suburban Staten Island from ‘a backyard bypass in a larger
and more vital metropolis’ into ‘a nature-lifestyle island, a big
spread of lush vegetation, open space, birds, mammals and
amphibians – an expansive network of greenways,
recreational areas and restored habitat reserves.’
The High Line’s less charged history will be more visibly
preserved when it is turned into an open-air walkway two
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