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Talk about the machine in the garden. Thoreau once famously complained that even in the woodland isolation of Walden Pond, there was no place he could escape the sound of the train whistle. Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, who designed the Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum, have made their peace with that. "We thought the trains were amazing," says Weiss. "We wanted the park's pathways to slalom down and capture the energy of those trains." So the Z-shaped pathway that Weiss and Manfredi came up with is intended to praise the forces that shape Seattle...
This is the direction that some of the most interesting new parks in the world are taking. In their search for usable parkland, densely developed cities in the U.S. and Europe are combing through their brownfields, disused and sometimes contaminated industrial sites. The Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance, is located on the former site of a fuel-storage and -transfer facility, which is why nearly all the original soil had to be dug out and carted away. And the City of New York is planning a huge and inventive new park atop Fresh Kills, the massive landfill--meaning garbage dump...
These are pretty challenging sites, but architects and landscape designers are treating them as opportunities to rethink what a park should look like and what it can say. Seattle was already a pioneer in this area by 1975, when the city opened its 20-acre Gas Works Park on the site of an abandoned plant that had once extracted gas from coal. Instead of tearing down the industrial buildings, the city refurbished and repurposed them as play barns and picnic sheds. But while the Gas Works Park includes a big rusted factory, the surrounding greenery doesn't much engage...
Five years ago, the city of Duisburg, Germany, vastly upped the ante when it completed its huge Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, a 570-acre site occupied by massive relics of the former Thyssen Steelworks. Blast furnaces, rail lines, gas tanks--corroded ruins of the industrial age--were reborn as archaeological monuments among newly planted groves and grasslands. And the designer, Peter Latz, didn't hesitate to directly invade the factory precincts with trees and smaller plantings, playgrounds and rock-climbing walls. By that means the derelict factory was woven back into the world of the living. The past, instead...
...story of landscape design has been a centuries-long argument between the "natural" and the "man-made." It's important to remember that these are just two different ways of saying man-made, with the difference being that the would-be natural parks try hard to disguise how man-made they are. To put the argument in familiar and somewhat simplified historical terms, on one side are the supremely rational (and unashamedly artificial) boulevards of André Le Nôtre's design for the Gardens of Versailles, with their long Baroque vistas and knife-edge perpendiculars. On the other side...