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.
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