Comfort Counts, but Landscape Architects Seek Enlightenment : Environment: UCI audience hears that there’s more to sculpture and public spaces than water and stone. The forms are supposed to create ‘an experience that leads to knowledge,’ a designer says.

The mayor of San Jose told landscape architect George Hargreaves about the fellow in the three-piece suit who happened to pass by the fountain in the center of Plaza Park, near City Hall.

The man stopped and looked to see whether anyone was watching. Then he dropped his briefcase and ran through the water with the abandon of a child.

Hargreaves, whose San Francisco-based firm designed the park, related the anecdote approvingly at his Wednesday night lecture in Beckman Center at UC Irvine. People are meant to walk through the fountain--which sprays a fog-like vapor, followed by high and low jets of water--and enjoy themselves.

But the main objective of his work, he said, is “an experience that leads to knowledge, (which is) more than making people comfortable.”

Moving swiftly through a decade’s worth of Hargreaves Associates projects, he emphasized the need to make connections with “the larger environment,” an increasingly difficult thing to do these days. (“I’m not sure my children have ever seen a whole chicken,” he mused in slight traces of a Georgia drawl. “They think it comes in plastic.”)

The firm’s best-known completed project is Harlequin Plaza in Englewood, Colo. It is a parking garage the size of a football field, situated between two offices and studded with bulky mechanical elements that could not be moved. The task was to turn it into a festival ground that would be used after the 8-to-5 tenants had driven their cars home.

The architects concentrated on the features of the site: “We laid out a big picnic cloth at the foot of the Rocky Mountains,” he said, so the area is now patterned in black-and-white diamond shapes skewed to draw the eye toward the majestic landscape in the background. Even the tops of the mechanical elements were carved to suggest the outlines of Rockies.

“The key is not inventing new forms,” Hargreaves said. He prefers “non-composition or open composition--using forms that have no mystery to them.”

For Lakewood Hills, a housing development in a former hayfield north of Santa Rosa, his firm created a starkly simple water element that he described as “a line of sky in the ground.” The design is attractive in its simplicity and the way it accommodates the natural water cycles of area, he said.

Simple forms can yield great symbolic value. For a geotechnical firm in Englewood that mines the western slopes of the Rockies, Hargreaves created a plaza divided into two areas by a fountain. The kinetic energy of water springing from the rock is a metaphor for the storing of energy in compressed layers of shale that eventually produce oil. The fountain abstracts “a billion years in one nanosecond,” he said.

“The question always comes up, ‘Well, what if they (the client) don’t get it?’ ” he added. “But there were 2,000 geologists working in the building, and they all knew (the fountain) related to the geologic formations.” Some of them even saw complex parallels between the movement of the water and movement within the shale.

Other tantalizing projects he whisked past his listeners included a spiral landscape alongside a highway--also in Englewood--that “responds to physical forces” by allowing people to “participate in the whirling dervish of the cars.” Zapu, a private residence in the Napa Valley, was landscaped with two kinds of grasses, planted in wavy alternating strips. Each is allowed to recede every other year, in the fashion of crop rotation.

“Think about the landscape from the ground up rather than the top down,” Hargreaves said, in one of several succinct, Zen koan-like pronouncements, gentled by his comfortable, down-home delivery.

When he worked with artists Doug Hollis and architect Mark Mack on Candlestick Point State Recreation Area in San Francisco, it was a real collaboration. Nobody made drawings. They spent hours on the site, feeling the force of the wind and the looking at the bay. Rather than spend time making expensive models they might “fall in love with,” they made their mock-ups in a big sandbox that accommodated a constant stream of new ideas.