Architecture: Walk on the Wild Side

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Five years ago, the city of Duisburg, Germany, vastly upped the ante when it completed its huge Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, a 570-acre site occupied by massive relics of the former Thyssen Steelworks. Blast furnaces, rail lines, gas tanks--corroded ruins of the industrial age--were reborn as archaeological monuments among newly planted groves and grasslands. And the designer, Peter Latz, didn't hesitate to directly invade the factory precincts with trees and smaller plantings, playgrounds and rock-climbing walls. By that means the derelict factory was woven back into the world of the living. The past, instead of operating as a burden--something the Germans know all about--becomes the very opposite, a plaything for the present. If history starts looking like a cage, who says you can't use it for monkey bars?

The story of landscape design has been a centuries-long argument between the "natural" and the "man-made." It's important to remember that these are just two different ways of saying man-made, with the difference being that the would-be natural parks try hard to disguise how man-made they are. To put the argument in familiar and somewhat simplified historical terms, on one side are the supremely rational (and unashamedly artificial) boulevards of André Le Nôtre's design for the Gardens of Versailles, with their long Baroque vistas and knife-edge perpendiculars. On the other side are the parks and estates of Lancelot (Capability) Brown, the 18th century English landscape designer whose gently (and shrewdly) idealized version of nature, with its faux-pastoral scenic effects, all those rolling mounds and little groves, was an important inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City.

We live in a Le Nôtre moment, when the most intrepid designers give us parks that are plainly man-made arrangements. And in the same spirit these places make no pretense to timelessness, a tempting fantasy when we think about nature but a hopeless ambition in landscape design, which is always a product of its time. So the Weiss/Manfredi design for the Seattle park, with its pulsing tectonics and dynamic lines, is clearly a product of late 20th--early 21st century thinking, the era of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind and their thunderbolt architecture.

Keep in mind too that for some time one of the key words in design has been palimpsest. It originally referred to a manuscript or parchment that has been written on more than once, so that the earlier writing has been scraped away but still sometimes remains faintly visible. Translated into design terms, palimpsest stands for the idea that, given a chance, the history of a place can and will rise from its grave. It's the notion, for instance, behind a persistent argument in Berlin, where architects, city planners and ordinary citizens periodically squabble over how much of the footprint of the Berlin Wall should be remembered along the streets of the quickly redeveloping united city. And it's an idea fundamental to the High Line park being developed in New York City.