“This volume presents projects from throughout the 25-year history of the firm and highlights the firm’s role in advancing the reoccupation of postindustrial sites, including the reclamation of waterfronts within the United States, Europe, and Australia. The book also shows how the firm works with cultural landscape, urban parks, smaller plazas, and gardens. Included are details on Hargreaves’ innovative entries in recent landscape architectural competitions, including its stunning design of a 270-acre Victorian-style pleasure garden for the 2012 London Olympics.”

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Hargreaves Associates has been on the forefront of landscape architectural practice since its founding in 1983, creating a narrative approach to place making that layers history, ecology, and environmental phenomena. The built work of Hargreaves Associates creates meaning through dynamic, interactive and exultant landscape. Whether reductive or rich, highly programmed or passive, culturally interpretive or teeming with the phenomena of nature’s own systems, the built landscapes of Hargreaves Associates seek the power of connections to our day-to-day lives. Landscape Alchemy presents projects from throughout the 25 year history of the firm, showing the development of work from early days in practice to its current direction crafting new visions for public space. This body of work is introduced by George Hargreaves and explored through critical essays by Anita Berrizbeitia, Julia Czerniak, and Liz Campbell Kelly.

I am very pleased to introduce this monograph of the work of Hargreaves Associates. It contains a selection of projects representing the firm’s work over the last two decades, including built and unbuilt work at varying scales and encompassing a range of landscape typologies. The book looks to the past, to the current moment, and to the future, tracing the trajectory of the firm from its early days through to recently completed major commissions and competition submittals. Organized into chapters around six themes, photographs and drawings of the projects are presented with accompanying text that gives context and describes the major design strategies for each. The monograph operates in the first pictorially, representing the works with images. For those who wish to dive deeper, this visual presentation is supported through the textual information and three essays that take a closer look at the firm’s work and larger role. The first, by Anita Berrizbeitia, discusses key concepts that give insight into the work of the firm. She brackets her discussion of our evolving design philosophy with two essays – one is an early essay I authored in the first years of the firm and the second is my recent chapter in the book Large Parks, co-edited with Julia Czerniak. These two essays act as markers to give context to the consistent themes of the work of the firm and as their relationship to the recent history of landscape architecture practice. In the second essay, Czerniak uses our public projects as a fulcrum to discuss parks as active agents of transformation and revitalization of the city. In this essay she posits the quality of design as a direct cause of the economic and social success of the park. The last essay is by Liz Campbell Kelly, a relative newcomer to landscape criticism, whose concluding remarks look to the evolution of the firm’s design philosophy over time into her description as a “maximal practice.” I would like to thank all three writers for their time and continuing insight.

This firm has never seen a greenfield or “natural” site for its work. Our sites are brownfields, often flat, devoid of any significant vegetation or other natural features, yet close to city centers. These late 20th and early 21st century sites differ greatly from the majority of the sites for the great parks realized from the 17th to early 20th centuries. The earlier park sites had much more obvious character, a latent structure of topography, geology, ecology, or the traces of past uses accrued over time. The ancient forests of Bois de Bologne, the serpentine at Hyde Park, and Central and Prospect Park in New York, with glacial terrain and remnant countryside, all provided underlying conditions, what I like to call “good bones,” for the mature parks they would become. For Hargreaves Associates, the history of our design strategies can be seen as a continuing search for the way to conceptually enter the site and create bones where there are none.

Initially we looked to environmental phenomena as a way to breathe life into dead and discarded sites. On smaller and mid-sized projects, site histories formed narratives that created the projects’ foundations. As the intricacy, scale and consequences of projects increased, we began to use a design strategy of measurement, though many people call this “program.” Measurement works over distance and over time. When faced with a three-mile river that required flood control, as in Guadalupe River Park, measuring the volume and speed of flows of water led to a comprehensive and holistic system that acts across the board with a catalog of design solutions for specific circumstances employed wherever necessary. Time is another aspect of measurement. The events of our culture are often gauged through their own version of metes and bounds: recreation, festivals, concerts, performances, and gardens, to name a few, have a cyclical character that marks our lives. In the firm’s work we use these events as active agents of design, permeating our parks with these displays of culture, Further, we juxtapose the adjacencies of a highly programmed use with natural systems – sculpture garden next to concert lawn next to wetlands. This strategy heightens the experience of the park and gives visibility to the connections between natural systems and culture. Within smaller urban parks, given the task of revitalizing the urban district and creating dynamic life, a richly laid tapestry of these measurements creates a robust urban form without an overwhelming multiplicity of landscape typologies.

Sustainability is basic to our projects and is permeated throughout them, but does not form the underlying driving design strategy. For the firm, sustainability functions at the same level as grading, planting, and drainage. The larger strategies create structure and the concept of the project, and the materiality of the site, including sustainability, supports the larger concepts and structure. None of these strategies – phenomena and process, site histories, adjacencies and overlays – operate singularly. Most often, these strategies interact on the same site as we strive to put bones in our projects that will give them life for decades or even centuries to come.

I came to an appreciation of the history of landscape architecture later than I should have. After practicing for several years I became intrigued with the longevity of public spaces. What made them a significant part of the community? What made them a valuable resource that led the public or a private entity to fund for their care and upkeep? If I could sum it up in one word I would choose identity, or if given two words, singular identity. The great public spaces of history were engendered by an active relationship with the mind of a city or region, creating a unique place particular to local conditions of all kinds. The public landscape (often the park) occupies a distinct place in the urban environment, belonging to its community and no other. I believe this singularity comes about through several means. Legibility is a key ingredient. The visitor to the park must be able to decipher how the landscape reads within its context, and how it is special and different from other landscapes. For the firm this has always led us to a site specific or site generated response to a site, which acts to ground the site in the local. Durability is another main ingredient. The public landscape must be able to withstand use and the manner in which this is achieved becomes a key ingredient to the design process. Hargreaves Associates has found it critical to synchronize the design, management, and maintenance of any public space in order to achieve lasting durability. As the practice has evolved, strategies for durability become embedded into our conceptual thinking of the project. This can be manifested in flexible phasing, which ensures that the management of the place must be responsive to changing needs, as well as strategies for economic sustainability, which also require active management on a site that changes over time. Another ingredient is longevity. Can the park or other landscape type function from one generation to the next, and can it perform in one moment at different levels for diverse age groups and ethnic backgrounds? This concept argues for creating varying, diverse landscape spaces, types, and experiences within one public space. The park is special to the individual in their experience of the moment and at the same time it is part of a collective consciousness. To consider the landscape of a success, everyone must know it, yet it will be used for many purposes at any time. As we look forward as a firm we hope to create public spaces with singular identity, to make extraordinarily significant contributions to our culture, the holistic environment we live in, and the day-to-day life of each person.

The projects depicted and describe here are a team effort. Without the many employees, present and past, our work would not be of the quality I believe it to have achieved, or as wide-ranging and encompassing in terms of project types and scales. In particular, on behalf of myself and Senior Principal Mary Margaret Jones, we would like to thank the principals of the firm who lead each project. Without their hard work and unflagging efforts this monograph would not be possible. Finally, we would like to thank our clients who dreamed with us.

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