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

Margie Ruddick/WRT landscape architects, Marpillero Pollack Architects (MPA) and Leni Schwendinger, Queens
Plaza, Queens, New York, due for completion 2009
Opposite and above: This project will reorganise a confusing fragmented site where several elevated trains, subways
and roadways collide with residential neighbourhoods and commercial services by adding new seating, lighting
shelters, pathways, hydrology and plantings that will create a sense of place
architects is working with Marpillero Pollack Architects (MPA)
and lighting artist Leni Schwendinger. They are adding new
lighting, seating, shelter, paths, water and plants to tie
everything together and create a sense of place. MPA is also
doing a number of small urban interventions, such as
landscapes around libraries and recreation areas at housing
projects. And Diana Balmori has formed a partnership with
her Yale teaching colleague, architect Joel Sanders, to do
projects that cross traditional interdisciplinary lines.
Balmori believes that landscape now has better tools to
communicate with the public at large than was the case in the
past. She thinks models, which can represent buildings
effectively, are poor tools for landscape, especially the kind
she wants to create. ‘It is really space at a bigger scale than
architecture. We are using dot matrix so that we can dissolve
the objects more in order to talk about space. I want to
dissolve the landscape so that it becomes what is contained,
not the container.’ She also likes to use animation because
‘whatever you do in the landscape is changing constantly’.
The system of floating islands Balmori has designed for the
St Louis waterfront, near Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch will
change not only with the seasons but with the movement of
the river itself. The project is intended to extend the park
where the arch is located up and down the river, connect it
with the land across the Mississippi River in Illinois, and
create places for gatherings and active recreation, such as a
skating rink, restaurant and excursion boats, as well as
pedestrian access to the river. It also resurrects history, if
unwittingly. After proposing the floating islands, which
resemble some of Johanson’s works, Balmori saw some of the
drawings Saarinen had submitted to win the competition over
half a century ago that her colleagues had resurrected at Yale,
and in one of those unpublished, unknown drawings there
were walkways and islands like those she had envisioned.
History plays a different role in landscape architecture than
in building or even urban design. As Smith notes, it is a longterm
enterprise: ‘When a piece of architecture is completed, it
begins its decline. When a piece of landscape architecture is
done, it is just beginning. It takes time to grow a landscape.’ 4
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 36-7 & 40 © Balmori
Associates; p 38 © Patricia Johanson; p 39(t&c) © Field Operations; p 39(b)
© Joel Sternfeld 2000; pp 41 & 44-5 © Ken Smith Landscape Architect; pp
42(t) & 43(t&c) © Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates; p 42(b) © Michael Van
Valkenburgh Associates, photo Paul Whar; p 43(b) © Michael Van
Valkenburgh Associates, photo Stan Ries; pp 46-7 © City of New York
Department of City Planning and New York City Economic Development
Corporation. All rights reserved
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