As I have grown and experienced more of my life through the lens of a camera, I see more clearly than ever the profound relationship between who we are and where we live. I like to think of the magnificence of this land as a vision of the land we see all around us, and a vision of our imagining, of considering the greater possibilities in our lives. Looking out across the landscape of our communities in this state, one sees an impressive gathering of people, ideas and achievements of global significance.
Washington is the spawning ground for innovation and success in the realms of aviation, high-tech, agriculture, international trade, scientific research and the arts, to name a few.
Harvard Design Magazine: A Word for Landscape Architecture
I believe that people, individually and collectively, seldom venture far from the reach of their vision. As I look around this state, I see the vitality and richness of this land expressed in the lives of its people.
The images in this book represent my best work in the past 10 years from many journeys across the landscape on both sides of the Cascade Divide. Some places you might recognize; others might be a delightful revelation. The beauty of our state is all around us, out our back door, at our feet.
Consequently, I went to no extraordinary lengths to photograph the vast majority of these images. In fact, most were taken standing on or alongside a road, or a short walk from it. These photographs are quite literally: This is an exciting time to live in Washington, to participate in the unfolding and still-developing vision that we hold for our state. I hope that you might find in these images a collective vision we can all share — one that holds the promise of prosperity and inspires us to nurture and protect the health of this land as we would nurture and protect our own well-being.
For in the very truest sense, they are one and the same. Light, distance, texture, the bones of the Earth, the bounty of flora, lush, sparse, barren, palettes of hues, the ever-changing drama of sky, where does the sky end and the Earth begin? Photography, among all of its noble characteristics, is perhaps first, and foremost, about relationships … between ideas, themes, colors, shapes, textures, metaphors … I find the visual and metaphorical relationship between Earth and sky the most powerful and inspiring of all subjects in nature.
Preparing for and capturing such an image never fails to illicit the deepest of primal instincts and emotions within me … beautiful and deeply moving, yet always the profound and poignant realization of the vastness of life and the universe and my very small but meaningful place in it. This is my greatest joy. The blue Earth from space, almost all water … clouds, ice, snow, rain, frost … our own being … the blood of the Earth body, the circulation system … metaphor of our emotions, our spirit … never can set foot in the same river twice, sometimes violent, placid, serene, trickling in winter, rushing in spring … reflecting light back to the sky and reverberating back to water once again, and again … illuminating everything before you.
It comes in so many forms, shapes, textures, colors and moods, and those forms are ever-changing, infinite. It delights in being a lens, a projector of sorts, like a dynamic and playful conjoiner for all things above and below … never a dull moment in its presence. Forests, meadows, marshes, ponds, flowers … wind breathing through the trees … giving its song a voice … deep, dark, foggy, cool, refreshing, comforting, spooky, shaft of light and spirit … faint essence of moss, cedar, pine … photograph a portrait from the roadside.
In recent years it has been at war within itself, diverse factions pitting ecology against art—as if the two could not coexist. And so far it has failed to attain the public profile of architecture or the fine arts: Much in the history of the discipline substantiates this large claim: Rose, and Lawrence Halprin; and the embrace of ecology in recent years as a moral compass for the profession.
Combining elements of architecture and sculpture with knowledge from the natural sciences, landscape architecture today is struggling to meet profound environmental, social, technological, and artistic challenges. Landscape architecture aims to do more than to produce places for safe, healthful, and pleasant use; it has become a forum for the articulation and enactment of individual and societal attitudes toward nature.
Complexity alone cannot engender consequential works of art.
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Significant cultural expressions often result from the convergence of a compelling artistic language with an urgent external stimulus. The rise of Cubism, for instance, can be viewed as a register of the radical social and technological transformations of early 20th-century modernization, just as the emergence of Surrealism can be seen as an expression of the influence of Freudian theory.
The consequences of such convergences are discernable in design as well as in art. Urgent external stimuli have lately been much in evidence in landscape architecture. Demands for the restoration of derelict and often toxic industrial sites pose artistic, social, and technical difficulties; so does the need to reuse abandoned sites in declining urban centers.
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Intensifying suburban and exurban sprawl requires new strategies for landscape management and open space preservation. Continued population growth, especially in the Third World, is heightening the need to develop minimum standards for the provision of urban green space, while increased leisure time in the developed world is placing unprecedented burdens on parks and other natural places of recreation. Landscape practitioners today are grappling as well with the dilemma of designing at radically different scales—from that of the small urban space to that of the entire ecosystem.
These phenomena raise an important question. Are these urgent social and environmental demands being met by the development of a compelling design language—a language particular to landscape architecture? Landscape architect Diana Balmori has articulated widespread anxieties within the profession that landscape architecture has yet to find a contemporary idiom. The center has not been defined and held. In my view, the situation is not nearly so dire.
I would argue that external pressures and contemporary expressive means are indeed working together in recent landscape architecture. I would argue too that this convergence is providing the profession with compelling narratives that might restore the sense of a vital center and help it achieve the visibility so lacking in recent decades. One such narrative is sustainability—an idea that increasingly informs the design of buildings and landscapes. This ambitious scheme features rooftop gardens that capture and filter rainwater, which is then directed to cisterns and used in the building.
The cisterns also feed a large lagoon, where reeds provide physical and bio-chemical cleansing; mechanical filters furnish backup purification. The benefits of this scheme are not only technical but also aesthetic, even educational; not simply an element of infrastructure, the lagoon is an attractive public amenity that offers lessons in and demonstrations of urban hydrology. More generally, such collaborations suggest that the knowledge provided by landscape architects is increasingly essential to the responsible practice of architecture.
‘Washington: The Art of the Landscape’ captures the state of our being
Landscape remediation is another narrative resulting from the convergence of contemporary subject and idiom. The facility, abandoned by Thyssen Steel in , included blast furnaces, ore bunkers, and a sintering plant; it was criss-crossed by roads, rail lines, and a canal. The soil of the site was contaminated with heavy metals, the canal polluted. The design of the reclamation was guided by existing infrastructure: A sewer line and treatment plant were built to clean the old canal; a new storm water collection system filled the former cooling and settling tanks—once contaminated with arsenic—with fresh water.
At the heart of the project are the preserved blast furnaces. Like other relics of heavy industry, these structures seem at once terrible and awe-inspiring. There is a precedent for such industrial archaeology—I am thinking chiefly of Gasworks Park in Seattle. Near the blast furnaces are the remains of ore bunkers that have been transformed into enclosed gardens. Deep within thick concrete walls, these gardens produce a kind of uncanny juxtaposition: Several remediation techniques have been employed at Duisburg, depending on site conditions. The most toxic remnants, including the old sintering plant, were dynamited and buried.
Elsewhere contaminated materials were left in place. Several large slag heaps with low-level hydrocarbon pollution, already in stable condition and colonized by plants, were left undisturbed. They are available for limited access and use while they are gradually decontaminated through bioremediation.
Retaining the piles has two advantages: Just as important, although less obvious, Landscape Park Duisburg North is an example of social as well as environmental restoration. A place that no longer had any real value to society and that otherwise would have been an eyesore has been given an entirely new life, one that few might have imagined it could have. In a region with little open space, the park offers significant and unusual opportunities for recreation: At a more speculative level, the park offers a lesson in the environmental costs of modern industrial policies and an occasion to wonder about future appropriate choices.
Disharmony produces a different statement, a different harmony, a different reconciliation…. The seemingly chance results of human interference, which are generally judged to be negative, also have immensely exciting, positive aspects.
In such circumstances the role of the designer is to decide what to retain, what to transform, and what to replace. Not only does this project articulate the commanding narratives that undergird recent practice, such as remediation and sustainability, it also addresses the challenges of urbanization in one of the most populous cities in the developing world, providing both open space for recreation and productive land for economic development.
And it does all this on multiple scales, from the circulation in a flower market to the workings of an extensive ecosystem. Even more than Landscape Park Duisburg North, Xochimilco suggests the large role that landscape architecture can now play in social and environmental remediation. Dating to the 10th century, this landscape of canals and rectangular islands was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in ; the designation prompted a large-scale environmental restoration project undertaken by Mexico City and the borough of Xochimilco.
The site presented extraordinary challenges. Many of the islands were sinking due to the many wells that fed upon aquifers. Urban development was increasing storm water runoff and subjecting the area to increased flooding. Surface water was contaminated; canals were choked with aquatic plants. Those islands deep in the canal system were hard to reach and thus unavailable for agriculture; those nearer the edges of the site were being encroached on by unauthorized residential buildings. The design was guided by hydraulic strategies: Eroded islands were recreated using meshes of logs filled with dredge and stabilized by salix trees.
More than 1 million trees were planted on the site. A tree nursery was also located on the site; every year it produces 30 million trees that are then planted throughout Mexico City. Canals were cleared of harmful vegetation and rehabilitated for recreation as well as agriculture. Today, pole barges ply the canals of Xochimilco, especially on weekends; gondolas and gondoliers are available for hire at embarcaderos built along the edge of the site. Out in the canals, you can collect sustenance for body and soul: At one edge of the chinampas landscape is a hectare park, whose different zones emphasize natural, recreational, and interpretive areas.
Water again provides the basis for design: A visitor center completes the complex. From the entry, a meter pergola leads to an embarcadero, past an arboretum and flowerbeds representing the productive activities dispersed across the chinampas.