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3.0 out of 5 stars
Novel Series, August 10, 2006
This review is from: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Allegheny Riverfront Park (Source Books in Landscape Architecture) (Paperback)
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
Allegheny Riverfront Park
Source Books in Landscape architecture 1.
Jane Amidon, Series Editor.
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
ISBN 1-56898-504-5
The two main models of design publication that we are used to: the collection of projects or the corporate monograph are both neatly avoided in this, the first in a series of booklets from Princeton Architectural Press. The series is a really nice, unpretentious idea - one that has already been successful for Princeton Press in regard to architecture and one the series editor, Jane Amidon describes as a response to the `hunger for transparency'. Amidon promises that the series will take us backstage and give us an unvarnished view of the design process.
The idea is this. Each booklet is a synthesis of a seminar series held within the Knowlton School of Architecture. The seminars bring students, critics and one eminent or as they say, `emerging' designer together in the spirit of open and `critical inquiry'. Each consequent booklet then contains a mix of (very) short solicited essays, crisp interviews with the designer(s) and illustrations that divulge the process of the project's realization. The students who apparently bring the information for the booklet together have of course vanished by this stage.
Each issue is soft back, squared off, printed on nice paper and can be read from start to finish in about an hour or so. Each includes project time-lines the odd technical detail and a bit of site history. They are neat little educational documents - catalogues to be precise and one looks forward to further installments and being able to buy the box set after all is said and done.
Despite being 160 pages this particular volume feels like half that. It is very light on text and there is an excess of meaningless photography soaking up space which in my view should have stayed on theme and shown us more of things backstage. There is, for example virtually no documentation of the creative process of designing this park. There is the proverbial shot of people on site in hard hats and other ones of people in the office staring down at models but the content of the book doesn't quite meet the series mandate.
Even though I prefer the idea of focusing on a particular project and getting in to one designer's head than what has been a recent spate of global collections, I'm not convinced that the Allegheny Riverside Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates (MVVA) really needed a book(let) all of its own. As such this booklet goes very close to worshiping the banal. Having said that, the Allegheny Riverfront Park is a brilliantly controlled piece of work, one with three important sub-texts.
First, even if its hard to really see it as a park in the grand democratic tradition that he places it, Valkenburgh has made a functional, generous and simply beautiful sliver of public space out of what seemed like an impossible site. Valkenburgh fattens up the river edge with a clear infrastructural intervention and breathes a naturalistic, yet urbane poetic in to what was otherwise Pittsburgh's lifeless edge.
Second, whereas collaborations with artists have become something of a cliché, in this project it is genuine and the book accounts for why. The art is not a spilled souvenir shelf, rather, it is embedded and the resultant details are subtle. As art however it could be criticized for its limited representational scope, but landscape architects like art that is based on what they call `nature'.
Third, through the interview format Valkenburgh muses on his design philosophy. In what is a thinly veiled swipe at emerging `landscape urbanism' in some prominent north American schools, Valkenburgh expresses skepticism about programmatic open-endedness. He advises that landscape architects assert their traditional design skills and return to their core skills and know their essential materials--not least of all plants. His use of plants, and for that matter his attention to materials in general, manifests beautifully in the project at hand. Apparently an artist as well as a landscape architect, Valkenburgh likens his current direction to that of the mid-century abstract expressionists who rejected representational content and returned art to its essence.
The critics, who have the last say, are unanimously enamored by the warm glow of authenticity that Valkenburgh exudes. Gary Hilderbrand writes a lovely endorsement, although I think he struggles a bit to place the work historically. Another (so called) critic, Ethan Carr thinks the project gets to the quintessence of its location (the holy grail of landscape architecture) and Erik de Jong concludes that the project is the embodiment of beauty; not just beauty as we know it, but as the Greeks did. Unfortunately she is cut off before she can flesh out this vast claim.
I don't think this booklet has really described the messiness and the struggle of design processes and nor has it completey avoided the style of the corporate monograph or advertorial. Still, the series is a good idea and the landscape profession and discipline will be better for it. Perhaps the singularly most successful thing in this booklet and no doubt from those to come in the series, is that the gap between theory and praxis is compressed.
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