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THE ONCE AND FUTURE PARK SYMPOSIUM

In more than a century, little the urban park has undergone a radical transformation, from urban amenity to municipal liability. What began as a green oasis for overworked, overcrowded and diseaseplagued city dwellers in the mid-19th century has, in many American cities, become containment sites for the overflow of societal breakdown-drugs, violence, prostitution, and homelessness. And parks are besieged by complaints from other quarters as well. Some charge that the picturesque model---copses of trees that dot a pastoral landscape of rolling greens and ponds--expresses an outmoded relationship to nature at a time when we desperately need models that do not pit culture against nature and parks that actively contribute to a healthy ecosystem. And still others claim that the picturesque model, based on the aristocratic English country estate, is too elitist and confining for the growing diversity within the American population. Add to these issues dwindling government funds for maintenance and security and clearly the evolution of American parks is far from complete. On April 24 and 25 Walker Art Center in Minneapolis invited designers and cultural critics to discuss these issues in "The Once and Future Park Symposium." Organized by Deborah Karasov, the center’s assistant director of adult education, the symposium included presentations by Herbert Muschamp, Sam Bass Warner, Patricia Phillips, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Diana Balmori, and Edward Ball, who later were joined in a concluding panel discussion by local designers and design theorists. Nearby, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, a related exhibition (reviewed on page 95 of this Landscape Journal) featured collaborative park designs by teams of artists and designers. Karasov’s challenge--to gauge the future park against changes in our relationship to nature; in social, political and public life; in funding and land-use control--probed beyond theory and sparked a spirited discussion about practical alternatives to parks new and old. The presentations not only outlined directives for the park of the future, but also gave examples of what it should avoid. Phillips prepared an intriguing presentation on the world’s newest megapark--the Floriade outside of the Hague in Holland. A oncein-a-decade horticultural extravaganza, the Floriade showcases flora and fauna from around the world in gardens, displays, and demonstrations. Ironically located this year in Holland, where land is claimed from the sea through heroic feats of engineering, the Floriade is no less ambitious, Phillips observes. The exposition is "almost a willful pursuit of artificiality," she says. Scribed by three dominant axes that radiate from a large common public area, the park’s skeletal structure celebrates obsessive dominance over the land, a hypermanagement that is carried through into the design’s details. In one exhibition, according to Phillips, a larger-than-life-sized globe fashioned of plant materials is surrounded by vitrines housing, like preserved museum specimens, examples of ecosystems from around the world. The antithesis of "letting nature take its course," the Floriade, she says, presents a nature that "is engineered, poked, prodded, sliced and diced, perhaps even quietly tortured, in the service of a much larger philosophical idea of an ecological consciousness based on aggressive intervention and compulsive control." Though promoted as a "landscape of and for the future," the Floriade "speaks of our age. I hope it doesn’t speak of the future. A park can no longer be seen as a thing in itself but rather as a process of ongoing relationships existing within a physical region," Phillips concludes. The floriade is an example of what keynote speaker Muschamp termed "the hegemony of visual culture, the dominance of visual images over other kinds of content," particularly information about the site’s ecology. This hegemony, he says, needs to be challenged, especially in the design of new parks. "We need to know not only how parks look, but how they work," he advocates. Muschamp talked of his own controversial decision to hire an ecologist on the faculty of the Parsons School of Design, where he directs the graduate program in architecture and design criticism. He decried the fact that ecologists are routinely omitted from park design teams, citing a "flawed hierarchical structure that treats artists like enlightened gurus and environmentalists like town complainers." As an example of the primacy of the visual image at work, Muschamp described his recent experience as an adviser to the team designing Riverside Park, a 21-acre park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A Native American artist was selected to create a work along the shoreline to "remind visitors of the sacred pact that once existed between the river and the Indians who lived along the shore." But Muschamp questioned why we allow ecological awareness to rest on mere symbols rather than asking the design to actively tap and incorporate existing knowledge of tidal salt marsh ecosystems, for example, to "express or realize a new contract between the city and the river today." Other speakers noted the practical benefits to be gained from recognizing a park’s function within a larger ecosystem. Balmori put forth the notion of parks as "working" environmental landscapes that pay for themselves by assuming new roles in environmental restoration or resource reclamation. She pointed to Seattle’s Westpoint Treatment Plant Park, a 20-acre park whose trails cut through wetlands, forested hillsides, and restored beaches. Created to offset the effects of an expanded sewagetreatment plant, the park was subsidized by a state cigarette tax and increases in local sewer rates. Similarly, she discussed a site in Brooklyn that is well situated to host both a park and an aquifer cleansing facility. As another example of a work-