May 31, 2005

Kathryn Gustafson, ASLA: Variations on a Theme
In a wide-ranging lecture, Gustafson discusses how site influences design.

Kathryn Gustafson, ASLA, (Right) speaks with National Building Museum patrons prior to her lecture.

Kathryn Gustafson, ASLA, had concluded her lecture and was taking questions from the audience of over 150 that had gathered at the National Building Museum to hear her speak when she crystallized the theme of her wide-ranging talk. “We look at everything in a site,” she said, “from the pre-history, to the historic uses of the site, through the modern day. We also do a large amount of weather analysis, we see how the light falls, what happens when it rains. Many designers like to sit in an office, but I like to be on the site, at least at the beginning of the process. A good design comes from the site; it doesn’t get put on a site.”

Gustafson’s dedication to this last sentiment—that the design comes from the site—was evident last Thursday as she detailed landscape after landscape where she was able to identify an over-arching theme that came directly from the site and used it to create an organic design that reflected the existing landscape. Here’s an overview of the major works from the lecture:

The “Garden of the Imagination”
The first landscape Gustafson presented was a garden for a small town in France that was being overlooked by tourists passing through the region. The town’s mayor believed that a show garden would attract visitors to the town and originally proposed a theme centered on “gardens of the world,” an idea that Gustafson found to be too “Disney-esque.” Instead, her team proposed creating a landscape that would try to explain the history of gardens—a direct reflection of the history found in the town, and exemplified by the sixteenth-century church that stood in the town square. The garden, entitled “Garden of the Imagination,” presents a timeline of the history of gardens, with a contemporary twist. Each element of the garden included native plants, along with the hybrids that gardeners have developed from them, showing how people have manipulated the plants for their own purpose. For instance, the larger work’s rose garden symbolizes the hanging gardens of Babylon but also shows how gardens have evolved from agrarian pursuits to objects of pleasure, while at the same time moving from barriers that helped protect humans from nature to spaces that bring people closer to the elements.

Gustafson's Millennium Park garden frames Frank Gehry's amphitheater. Photo courtesy of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

Chicago’s Millennium Park
For Chicago’s Millennium Park, Gustafson was commissioned to create a garden, which, she said, “was one very small corner of this very big operation.” The theme for the garden came not only from Chicago but from the Midwest as a whole, with its rolling geography, agricultural history, and history of transit. In fact, the garden contains sculptural elements that reflect the railroad tracks that go through Chicago and the rest of the Midwest to bring goods to the rest of the country. The garden also has a leafy marsh area that represents the land that Chicago was built on. Gustafson incorporated a water feature and a boardwalk that mimic the lapping of waves of Lake Michigan along the city shores. This “creates the sense that the lake has come up into the garden,” Gustafson said of the water feature.

Because the Millennium Park garden was part of a much larger work, it was important that it consider the larger context of the site, Gustafson said. To that end, the garden acts as a set of “shoulders” to frame the “head” of the Frank Gehry-designed amphitheater that sits behind it. Gustafson also created large hedges to direct visitors from the amphitheater to the parking lots to help cut down on traffic through the garden itself. Finally, the garden is tilted slightly so that visitors to a proposed extension of the Chicago Art Institute will be able to view it more clearly. “The garden acts as a painting that angles up to the balcony for viewing,” Gustafson said.

Expanded night view looking east shows the fiber optic lighting of Orion and uplighting of meteor trails and moonlighting of the Ginkgos. (Photo by: D. Finnin/AMNH)

The Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History
Gustafson discussed her design for the Arthur Ross Terrace of the Rose and Priest Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, which received a Design Merit Award from ASLA in 2003. For this, she said, the building, which the terrace was built for, was so striking that it had to be addressed. “The plaza had to be about the planetarium,” she said. To that end, she created a plaza with three entrances to the planetarium, which flank a large open area that is covered by a thin scrim of water that reflects the image of the planetarium and that includes a fiber-optic rendering of the constellation Orion. The center of the plaza can also be drained to create an open space for public gatherings and parties. The plaza is lined with oversized benches, which Gustafson called “teaching tables” where schoolchildren can gather for classes and lectures.

Westergasfabriek Park, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Gustafson Porter, Ltd. Rendering: Gustafson Porter, Ltd. Photo courtesy of the National Building Museum

Westergasfabriek Park
In Amsterdam, Gustafson created a park in an area that had previously been a gas works. The park needed to satisfy several needs, including maintaining rail transportation through the city to Antwerp, housing for several artists who were living in the area, open space for farming, and bicycle routes—a major mode of transportation in the Netherlands. In addition, the park had to address several issues dealing with the water table, as do almost all projects in the Netherlands. For the design, Gustafson said she wanted to demonstrate the changing relationship between man and nature and show how parks have moved from places that are primarily programmed with athletic fields, what Gustafson referred to as “efficient use,” to places where people are ‘trying to find a balance between man and nature.” To do this she created a linear park that moves from programmed areas and a performance space to a housing area that includes an urban beach and then into unprogrammed gardens and natural areas that include a wet garden.

In addition to these projects, Gustafson discussed several projects in her native Seattle, including the new Civic Center, which incorporates native slate and the ever-present water that surrounds the city. She also discussed he Garden of Forgiveness, which was built in Beirut, Lebanon, as well the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, in London, and a proposed park in Washington, D.C. All of these projects reflect their sites in some way, either through the culture, geography, or political climate, demonstrating that “a good design comes from the site; it doesn’t get put on a site.”

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