Preserving the unnatural wonder

Nearly 40 years after it first appeared in print, Robert Smithson’s essay “The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” an ambivalent travelogue on the strange beauty of that city’s rusting industrial landmarks, seems as relevant as ever. It continues to inspire not only the artists who followed Smithson’s lead but architects and landscape designers who’ve seen in its deadpan lyricism a fresh, oddly hopeful way of looking at natural settings compromised by industry and development.

Peter Reed, a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design department, says the 1967 essay stuck with him over the last several years as he was putting together the Modern’s ambitious survey of contemporary landscape architecture, “Groundswell, Constructing the Contemporary Landscape,” which is running through May 16. But it’s not Smithson’s description of Passaic’s difficult charms, for which the essay is best known, that frames Reed’s treatment of landscape architecture. Instead, it’s the stubborn dilemma suggested in a metaphor Smithson lays out near the end of the essay.

“Picture in your mind’s eye [a] sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other,” Smithson writes. “We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn gray; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of grayness.”

A good number of the 23 projects in Groundswell feature sites like Smithson’s sandbox after the child stops running: messy, worn and often relentlessly gray. Damaged by aggressive mining, terrorist attacks or simply misguided urban renewal projects, they’re not just postindustrial but, perhaps more to the point, post-Edenic.

The designers hired to deal with sites like those face two very different choices. They can hide the scars under flowerbeds and rolling hills -- sorting the sand, as it were, back into neat white and black piles. Or they can deal openly with the damage, trying to create vital spaces precisely by acknowledging the difficulty of stuffing the genie back into the bottle. Groundswell celebrates the work of firms that regularly take the second route.

Like Smithson’s essay, that approach has been around a while. Firms such as Richard Haag Associates, whose Gas Works Park in Seattle features a waterfront landscape anchored by a frighteningly beautiful old gasification plant, were beginning to explore it in the 1970s. But the seeds planted in projects like Gas Works, the show argues, are now flowering around the world, in landscape design that mixes elements of art, architecture, urbanism and ecology, and often takes several decades to round into final shape.

Perhaps Groundswell’s most extreme example of the challenges landscape firms confront these days is a proposal by the New York firm Field Operations, led by James Corner, for the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. For more than five decades, the site was a dumping ground for New York City’s garbage, which rose in piles as high as 225 feet. The city approved plans by Corner’s firm to turn it into a park with playing fields, bike paths, restored wetlands and a densely planted corridor to give refuge to various kinds of wildlife. The landfill was shut down in March 2001.

After Sept. 11 of that year, however, the plan gained a new level of complexity. The city began shipping the rubble of the World Trade Center on barges to Fresh Kills. Because that rubble included the remains of nearly 3,000 victims, of course, the process of sorting it was particularly fraught. Field Operations found itself not only trying to turn the dump into a park but also dealing with the remains, literal and psychological, of 9/11. Its plan now includes an earthwork monument in the shape of the Twin Towers laid on their sides.

More typical of the work on view here is the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park by Peter Latz, on the site of a former steelworks in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Latz’s design is revolved around a huge blast furnace; throughout the park, new natural elements including rows of cherry trees are juxtaposed with the hard-edged remnants of the original facility. In one area, a section of a former ore bunker has been turned into a pair of rock-climbing walls.

Reed admits he worked hard to pick projects that, in his view, succeed at balancing polemical and aesthetic priorities. That may be one reason the exhibition, despite its impressive scope and variety of multimedia displays, feels a bit muted, rarely matching the energy or verve of its most ambitious projects. (The show was designed in-house at MoMA by Jerome Neuner and Kate Johnson.) And it may also explain Groundswell’s most conspicuous omission: Julie Bargmann, who runs a firm based in Virginia called DIRT Studio and is among the most prominent American landscape designers specializing in postindustrial sites. She has criticized the work of her more traditional colleagues in memorable language, calling their efforts to prettify damaged sites nothing more than “putting lipstick on a pig.” (Other well-known designers left out include Michael Van Valkenburgh and Oakland-based Walter Hood.)

In lieu of Bargmann’s designs, which like her critiques can border on the strident, Groundswell displays the more graceful, if occasionally less gripping, work of Kathryn Gustafson, who divides her time between Seattle and Paris. Three of Gustafson’s projects -- a park in Beirut, gardens at the Millennium Park in Chicago, and a Shell Petroleum complex in France -- are included in the exhibition. Her memorial for Princess Diana in London’s Hyde Park, which was forced to close last summer after two adults and a child slipped and were injured there, is discreetly not mentioned.

Groundswell includes a few unreconstructed minimalists and Modernists, including Peter Walker, who is working with Michael Arad on the memorial at ground zero. His entry here, Keyaki Plaza in Saitama City, Japan, is a spare, grid-like composition for a tree-filled urban square that reflects Walker’s long-standing interest in the work of such artists as Carl Andre and Donald Judd.

In general, though, the projects in the show, most notably a plan by Will Alsop that calls for knocking down some of the uglier 1950s office buildings in Bradford, England, share a very different view: that Modernism, like sectarian violence and environmental degradation, is something to be recovered from, not celebrated or revived.

This is a potent theme, especially at a time when American cities from Boston to San Francisco have begun to dismantle their elevated highways and other failed urban additions from the postwar era. But it also raises a question about the limits of the approach that Reed favors. In San Francisco, for example, the Embarcadero Freeway along the water has been completely removed, much to the delight of most residents. Would it have made more sense, or been somehow more honest, to leave behind some appropriately depressing relic of the concrete mass that once cut off residents from the Bay? Or would that sort of gesture been nothing more than symbolic, putting edginess over views and usability?

Indeed, this question of when an effort to acknowledge a site’s history becomes more contrived than admirably forthright is a tricky one. And it has implications beyond landscape design. It has become a crucial issue to confront when trying to gauge the work of many of today’s leading architects.

Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind -- as well as Southern California’s Thom Mayne, winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize -- all tend to favor designs for buildings that make explicit, rather than smooth over, the fissures and conflicts in society.

Many of their prominent colleagues on the landscape side, as Groundswell makes clear, share precisely that philosophical approach -- that sense that tidy surfaces and calming spaces are immediately suspect, if not automatically dishonest. But their situation is different in one key respect: The marks of violence or environmental damage on the sites where Groundswell’s landscape designers work are physical, tangible and intransigent, not symbolically clashing or tortured forms invented from scratch. For them, whether they choose to conceal those marks or make them plain, Smithson’s dilemma is entirely real.