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.

The Albany Bulb

The Albany Bulb is a former landfill and a park.  It is near my house, and over the past several years I have gone there many times, largely because it is a compelling, gorgeous, and troublesome landscape, and a charming place for a walk with a dog or a friend.

One of the more interesting conundrums that landscape architecture is forced to reckon with is the simple fact that quite often, non-designed landscapes are often more beautiful and functional their constructed brethren.  The Albany Bulb is a stalwart example of this phenomenon.  It functions as a park, a landfill, a home for the homeless, a wetland, and as a place where plants, both native and non, spar and thrive happily.

The Bulb is as close to an anarchist landscape as I have every come.  It is self-policed, non-maintained, self-perpetuating, and visually and ecologically post-apocalyptic.  It is a hyphen.

It is a landscape that tests what you expect of a park and questions the essence of both beauty and recreation. By bringing together elements that are normally not, it challenges you, psychologically, but also physically, because there are about a million ways you could injure yourself here.

When the tide is low enough, you can just barely navigate across a mostly submerged jetty of rocks.  HOW FUN!

Burner art, flowering meadows, rebar, riprap, the roar of the ocean, and a whipping coastal breeze.  Bring your bong.

Red Rock Island.

Red Rock Island is an island in the San Francisco Bay which made me salivate and my palms sweaty every time I saw it driving over the Richmond Bridge.  One day fate intervened, and a good friend bought me a canoe. Canoes = Cowabunga.  If you ever get a canoe, I highly recommend not planning your paddles, not thinking things through, not having life jackets, and bringing only Kombucha.  All this adds greatly to the rush.

Anyways, one day my good friend Nathan and I made exhaustively unresearched plans to try and get to Red Rock Island.  Through internet searches we found that it is: 5.8 acres, the only privately owned island in the SF Bay, the guy who owns it is a "gem dealer in Thailand" (awesome job, I want it), and that there were once plans to build a casino on it.  

It would be a pretty sweet place for a casino.  Admit it, liar.

Land Ahoy!  When on a canoe and in the bay, you feel very, very small. Paddling under the bridge was terrifying and also very excellent.  Later, I found out that the island is surrounded by the deepest water in all of the bay.  Which was not an issue for Nathan and I, because we are very macho, so it was like totally not a big deal.  We didn't even bring it up or anything. Because we're men, and men don't express emotions like fear to each other, obviously.

After circumnavigating the island, my friend Nathan and I realized the only way in which to ascend the mighty peak was by trusting in a yellow rope that earlier, more experienced explorers than us had put in.  I don't want to make a big deal about it or anything, but I'm pretty sure it was Magellan.  Using the rope, we hoisted ourselves to the top.  

And at the top we discovered something marvelous- an earlier visitor, at some point in time, had put in a single row of an unidentifiable type of lily that encircled a dying Monterey Cypress, the most significant tree on the island.  Tasteful and well executed.  Land Art, I have since decided, only becomes more powerful when executed anonymously and in extremely inaccessible locations.  Doing something incredible and not telling anyone about it is fantastic. Just like this blog, wait what?