Book Review 3: Large Parks

Erica Huddleston

A “large park” as defined in Large Parks as 500 acres or greater, sited in an urban environment. The assonant title has no subheading, but rather flings open debate for the seven essays within to converse among themselves. Each essay included by editors Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves in Large Parks elaborates ideas first voiced at a Harvard Graduate School of Design conference in 2003. To read through the book is an engrossing dissection of large-scale landscape architecture’s current theories. 

A defining assumption among the authors is that the designed landscape as park is not static, but a complex dynamic process. As Elizabeth K. Meyer writes in her essay, “there has been a shift from spatial to temporal preoccupation in landscape architecture theory and practice since the late 1980s.” In his foreword, James Corner of Field Operations and the University of Pennsylvania writes that “the designer of large parks can only ever set out a highly specified physical base from which more open-ended processes and formations take root; . . . the trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and give to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time.” Corner conceptualizes parks as frameworks and systems, with emphasis on the practice of more extensive site analysis than existed in the past to develop landscape designs. He writes that a site is best inscribed with design when it is considered as a vast swirling flow of epoch processes acting on one another with ingrained flexibility for future change. He challenges designers to design with this construct in mind while not allowing the built to be dehumanized out of people scale—or even worse, diluted by politics, programming, and cost when large parks are planned. Using the theme of parks as systems, Nina-Marie Lister discusses new ties of ecology and landscape, Anita Berrizbeitia writes on strategies of creating park design, George Hargreaves titles his essay “A Designer’s Perspective,” Linda Pollak discusses the matrix as tool for park analysis, and John Beardsley writes of large-scale park management and funding practices. The distinct ideas layer and overlap with each other in interesting ways, spurring the reader to think of new threads and connections.

The dialogue among essays also is a wonderful study of aging urban infrastructures and the choices made when cleaning them up. Large parks in the twenty-first century will be formed increasingly from “disturbed” sites within cities—industrial landfills, brownfields, old airports, and decommissioned military bases—and the authors believe that new large parks will continue to be created because every U.S. city has a piece of disturbed land in its limits that can be redeveloped. Three parks on reclaimed sites—Downsview Park in Toronto, Ontario; Fresh Kills in New York City; and Landschaftspark in Duisburg, Germany—are mentioned repeatedly throughout the essays as examples of recent international design competitions that encouraged interdisciplinary teams and exemplify process flexibility in their winning designs. Graphics from the finalist team entries to these competitions are included and are extraordinary examples of design representation. Students will gain many ideas from Corner’s Field Operations’ winning entry renderings for Fresh Kills.

Large Parks encompasses old, new, far, and near urban parks that are “large.” The editors based this parameter on Andrew Jackson Downing’s suggestion in nineteenth-century New York that “five hundred acres is the smallest area that should be reserved for the future wants of a city.” With this land acreage as its starting point (as defended in Julia Czerniak’s “Speculating on Size” essay), the book provides access to the recent reflections of famous design critics, historians, and fi eld practitioners. It would be helpful if an index were included for research, since the authors reference the same parks scattered throughout while making different points. Also, it would be thought-provoking if there were one essay in Large

Parks applying the tenants expressed for these grand-scale parks to small parks. How do the concepts of flexibility and process apply to the small park? Are they exclusive to the needs of large swaths of land? As a theory manual, Large Parks gives nuanced thoughts of how large parks are conceptualized, designed, built, and then managed. Any architect, planner, geographer, or landscape architect will benefit from thinking about the reuse of aged land for parkland and the rhetoric of “process = park” embodied theatrically in a large park.

ERIKA HUDDLESTON is completing her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture.  She received a BA in Art History from Vanderbilt University and a Certificate in Interior Design from Parsons School of Design.  She has worked in textile design in New York and for the Trinity River Waterfront Project in Dallas with Wallace, Roberts, and Todd Landscape Architects.  She is interested in grottos and rocaille in landscape and the history of landscape architecture education.