Memorial Fort by David Wilson. Wildcat Canyon, CA.

About a year and a half ago a stranger, who is now my friend, created a sculpture in the woods.

As a memorial to his father, David Wilson began collecting sticks from all over Wildcat Canyon and assembled them in a sweeping vortex in the understory of a particularly spectacular stand of Coast Live Oaks.

A place that was already special became even more uniquely so.  It's reminiscent of the work of Patrick Dougherty, but willfully more spastic and messy.  Additionally, the sticks that comprise the work are from the forest itself, and thus the imported quality of material I find questionable of Dougherty's work is absent.  

I have visited this place three times since it's creation, and it's aging splendidly- I actually prefer it looser and it wears wrinkles well.  As entropy sets in, it looks more like a freak natural accident, perhaps the result of some unfathomable storm or bizarre set of events.  But what I appreciate most about it is how anonymous it is.  Though I wasn't present, there was some sort of initial show/debut of the work, but since that time it's been largely left alone.  I imagine days and weeks go by where it doesn't have a single visitor.  One sign still remains as an indicator of its purpose, but it doesn't really explain anything.  The oak grove it lives in is off the beaten path and one would only come across it if they were hiking intentionally off trail.  This I like- it's a secret spectacle.

STAND OF TREES OR GIANT MUSTACHE?

You decide.

The Absence of Overkill: Guadalupe River Park, San Jose CA

Does everyone else love the work of Hargreaves in the 80s and 90s as much as I do?  George was just killing it in those years!  Ammiright?

Guadalupe River Park is a flood control project executed to prevent ongoing flood damage, which San Jose was experiencing every few years.  San Jose is relatively dry, but typical of Mediterranean climates, winter is rainy and sometimes destructive, because it's hard to plan for rain when it rains so infrequently.

Like Byxbee, the elements introduced are small in quantity but executed with repetition, fluidity and grace.  Gabions, berms, seatwalls and stairs undulate and ebb.  The park is tremendously long and best navigated with a bicycle.  Away from the downtown city core, the park is wild- the riparian corridor is truly riparian, slightly overgrown and chaotic.  But as you navigate the park from the outskirts into downtown, Hargreaves designed an incredible metamorphosis- the upswelling of the architecture is mimicked by the grandeur of the landscape.  When you finally arrive in the center of the city, freeways spring up around the park, entombing it with a grandeur like that of a cathedral- the gabions sway and flow and direct, the river now enters a more constructed urban channel.  It is a landscape as layered as it is long.

The greatest merit of the park, like Byxbee, is the restraint.  The absence of overkill.  This landscape was designed to change both with seasonal fluctuation and through the decades, and as the edges have blurred and vegetation filled in, its original understated effects disappear and nature is just doing its thang.  There was room left for surprises- note the two banks of reddish grass surrounding the river- and these unplanned spurts coalesce elegantly with the constructed elements.  I appreciate simplicity, and these design gestures, though bold and large, are devoid of pettiness.

And here is a short video I shot of the river with the roar of the freeway.  Interesting how pastoral it still seems.

Shoreline Park. Oakland, California.

Designing and constructing a public park is an enormously complex undertaking.  Shoreline Park in Oakland, California, is one type of fruit that falls from these trees of bureaucratic messiness.

The backstory: This park was paid for by the Port of Oakland, initially operated by the East Bay Municipal and Utility Department, but at the end of 2010 the maintenance was turned back over to the Port of Oakland for financial reasons.  And now that I've acknowledged these design destroying entanglements,  I will now proceed to judge the crap out of it.

There are aspects of this park that are deftly executed and thoughtful, and others that "hurt me."  

Incorporating the history of a site into its future design is oftentimes totally ugh, and this site is no exception, as it spews historical significance.  Native peoples once hunted here (check), a train ran through here (check), people worked here (check), boats came here (check), wetlands were destroyed here (check) and so on and so forth.

It is situated in one of the most breathtaking notches in the San Francisco bay coastline.  Port cranes border it on one side, it backs up to a container yard, and it peers into the guts of the Bay Bridge.  Despite all this present-day bodaciousness, the park's designers curiously decided to embrace the past rather than the infrastructural magnificence that now surrounds it.  The views and location were simply freebies.  But the design of the park dwells on its history as a WWII supply depot and the fact it was once the end of the cross continental railroad- and does so through tired and trivial landscape features.  Old ship bollards serve as points along a path, a structural vestige (which as an object, is magnificent) of previous buildings are now the site for picnics, etc.  

This landscape fundamentally disappoints at levels macro and micro.  Macro: there is just way too much fucking grass, which is curious, because besides the grass, most of the plant material selection was  thoughtful, coastal, and native.  These disparate ideologies are self-contradicting and upset me.  Pick a side, and stick with it.  The salt in the wound is that all of this grass is now completely covered in excrement from Canadian Geese, so even if someone wanted to partake in a sportingly activity, they wouldn't, because they'd get poopy shoes.  In trying to appease the ability of the park to be both ecologically sensitive and a place for sports, the design lost its identity and its ability to actually communicate with the user.  

Micro: the construction details just aren't there.  The benches are store bought and look exactly so.  Though I'm sure a whipping coastal wind is an issue here, it wasn't considered with enough diligence and entire tree rows are crooked in the same direction.  On planted berms some species have thrived and others have perished completely, leaving bald patches scattered throughout.  And the informational  kiosks are completely empty, a free metaphor that I'll grab on and use as a symbol of this park's deep down emptiness.  There is nothing new to learn here.

Sigh.

Where the park succeeds and pleases is in the wetlands, which appear from the few times I've visited, to be thriving.  They melt with the sunset as only wetlands can do, and appear to be home to countless bird species from my pedestrian birding eyes.  And the scale, the size of land given to make the park- whoever fought for this deserves a hearty slap on the back.  Its bigness and extreme horizontality provide a formidable plateau upon which to gaze out.  A horizon line this wide in the East Bay is few and far between, and it is simply delicious. 

"What about the port?" you cry, dear reader?  I know, I know, it's a shame.  The plan literally turns its back to it- the one vehicular road in the park bisects the connection between the park and the container yard, severing it like an untrained surgeon.  To observe the container ships arrive and watch the cranes unload them is truly a grand spectacle, undoubtedly impressive to adults and children alike.  The simple and profound pleasure of observation is an afterthought in the design.  If only this park had layered the ecological and shipping infrastructures as it could have, it might have become the sublime hallucination of a landscape that it only hints at as it stands now.

Albany Hill Park

Albany Hill Park is an interesting foil to the Albany Bulb.  Unlike the Bulb, which is an emergent, non-defined space that exists because people have never really dictated what it is or isn't,  Albany Hill Park exists because everyone, plus their mothers, seems to have an opinion about it.  It is perpetually stuck in a mindless bureaucratic purgatory, it has both a Yelp and Wikipedia page, and it is completely covered with fucking eucalyptus.

When driving in the East Bay the park is a striking point of visual relief.  Out of nowhere a hulking green hill protrudes from suburbia, dominating the skyline.

The interior is mildly spooky.  The Eucalyptus creak and sigh like old floorboards.  I have been twice and it has been virtually empty both visits, despite the fact that it is surrounded by a residential area.
Besides a few benches and a renegade swing, it is non-designed and non-maintained.  Paths are desire lines and informal.

It turns out that everyone has plans for this land, build more apartments, build a better park, tear out the Eucalyptus, make money- change it, improve it.  And that's the precise reason why it hasn't changed in years nor likely will in the future.  Too many meetings, too many approvals, people screaming "Nimby," etcetera.  And so it stays just like it is, a giant green mascot of the shortcomings of bureaucracy.  If Kafka were alive, this is where he would hang out.

Landscapes Change

Time makes landscape, and landscape makes time. Trees grow, water moves, rocks roll, program changes, and on and on and on. In landscape architecture, time is a permanent consideration and the great equalizer. To work outside its shadow is to labor under a misapprehension.

In the United States it is quite rare to find an older designed landscape with the original vision still intact. This is tragedy and truth- our maintenance skills are poor, our tastes or notions of a successful landscape are fickle and we too often prefer to bulldoze and build something completely new rather than to take on the challenge of refurbishing or improving an existing landscape.

It is for all these reasons that Alvarado Park, in Richmond, California, completely blows me away. First laid out it in the 1940s, it has aged with both grace and scrapiness. It contains both a sense of adventure and humor (the Egyptian theme), and provides a lovely level of danger that children have undoubtedly reveled in for decades. From it's inception to the present day it was never over-programmed, rather, it is simply a quirky, magical-real place that allows its users to choose how they want to use the park rather than impose that upon them.

Alvarado Park was designed with growth and nature in mind, and the simple fact that it has persevered for all these years is symbolic of the fact that such considerations have served it well.