A Central, Revitalized Role for Landscape Architects

Strolling along Hope Street in downtown’s desolate South Park district, landscape architect Emmet Wemple envisions a tree-lined avenue populated with a host of urban strollers.

Further down the road, where Hope meets 9th Street, construction crews are excavating holes for the foundations of the new Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Oblivious to the activity and dust, Wemple leaps again to the future--a day when people will be able to sit at shady, bench-lined corners and watch the passing parade of students, residents and office workers hurrying about their business.

“The meanderers need sheltered enclaves out of the way of scurrying feet,” Wemple explained. “On the other hand, the busy ones need clear and direct pathways free of obstruction.”

Wemple’s role as landscape architect in South Park’s planned revitalization is critical. Other designers and a host of city officials--including architects, city planners, transportation engineers and members of the Community Redevelopment Agency--assemble the buildings, zoning regulations, roadway systems and financial incentives they hope will spur South Park’s rise from blight. But Wemple’s concern is how the area’s future residents and visitors will feel about living and working in this Central City district.

“Landscape architects give life to the city,” he said. “We’re interested in the total effect, the way all the bits and pieces of architecture and planning fit together to make a coherent social and physical environment that’s humane and lively. We provide the vital glue that binds all the elements together to make a livable metropolis.”

For decades the poor relation among the environmental design professions, landscape architecture is finally coming into its own. Increasingly, it is being viewed as a crucial element of imaginative exterior design, one that marries the “hardscape” of buildings and streets with the “softscape” of people and their social patterns.

“We try to create a sense of place through an accumulation of small details--paving, walls, fountains, sculptures, murals, plants and trees,” Wemple said. “Above all, we are concerned with expressing the complex character of urban life.”

Sound is another “feeling tone” the landscape architect may use to orchestrate the urban environment.

A Water Organ

The downtown Library Square project’s grand “Spanish Steps” stairway--which links the expanded Central Library with the top of Bunker Hill--will have water tumbling down the middle, “to create the sound-play of a water organ,” designer Lawrence Halprin explained. “Grottoes will invite strollers to cool their ears with the intimate and soothing rustle of fountains.”

Halprin, a national leader in the integration of landscape architecture in city planning, describes his concepts as “urban choreography.” The city is “a complex dance of many rhythms,” he said. “The challenge is to choreograph these tempos into sense experiences expressed in all the elements available to the civic designer.”

The notion that landscape designers are more than merely a superior sort of garden expert is not new. Charles Eliot, a 19th-Century U.S. landscape architect, said: “Landscape (architecture) does not consist in arranging trees, shrubs, borders, lawns, ponds, bridges, fountains, paths or any other thing so as to produce a picturesque effect. It is rather the fitting of the landscape to human use and enjoyment.”

In recent years, landscape architects have become “tougher about the things we believe in,” Wemple said. “We refuse to be fobbed off with a menial after-the-fact role of humanizing an anti-human city created by architects, planners and developers. Landscape architects are demanding their old place in the sun.”

While designing the new Santa Monica Pier Carrousel Park, for example, landscape architects Douglas and Regula Campbell delved deeply into local historical records and held community workshops where residents could express their feelings and wishes about the city’s oceanfront. The Campbells listened intently while Santa Monicans argued among themselves.

“We wanted to surface the shared social memories, values and images people have about their city,” Douglas Campbell explained. “A viable urban scene must include people’s sense of past time and their hopes for the future as well as the present amenities.”

In the Pier Park these images, values and social memories are expressed in a playful array of steam-breathing concrete dragons and curlicued steel gazebos. The transition between the “softness” of the sea, of the pier amusements and the people who enjoy them and the “hardness” of Santa Monica’s busy streets is managed by a skillful manipulation of ramps, railings, paving and planting.

It is ironic, the Campbells say, that in the last 60 years landscape architecture has become so divorced from other urban-planning professions.

Frederick Law Olmsted of Brookline, Mass., was simultaneously the father of U.S. landscape architecture and one of the founders of modern American civic design. It was Olmsted who first adopted the new designation of landscape architect in 1863, and who laid out Manhattan’s Central Park in the 1850s with partner Calvert Vaux.

Olmsted’s influence in California also was considerable. His ideas influenced the City Beautiful movement, which inspired many turn-of-the-century garden suburbs such as Pasadena. He was involved in the early planning of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and helped establish the state park system in the 1860s. In the 1920s, his sons, Frederick Law Jr. and John, designed the master plan for Palos Verdes Peninsula, including Malaga Cove.

Separate Disciplines

It was during the ‘20s that city planning and landscape architecture became separate disciplines in the United States. The mid-century trend, reinforced by the massive urban renewal programs that transformed most post-World War II cities, was toward an abstract concept of city design obsessed with zoning laws and transportation corridors. The concerns of landscape architecture--integrating natural and man-made environments--was seen as sentimental by many city planners.

Today, with an eye to creating a more humane kind of urban design, many progressive city planners increasingly feel the need to reunite planning and landscape architecture.

“We need the sensibility of the landscape designer to give color and coherence to our cities,” said planner Jean Gath, a partner in the Los Angeles-based SWA Group. “Their contribution is so much more than cosmetic, it’s crucial to the creation of urban environments we can come to love. And if we can’t come to love our cities, they will never love us.”