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.
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