The brief for this event talks about inequity and equality suggests that there’s this normative, good thing that some people have more of, and that the problem is our distribution of that good or normative thing. I takes imagination to actually question or to truly redefine what it is that people need or want. It’s not really just about distribution. We can’t just assume what’s good for some people is good for all. This research and inquiry into what’s important to people and to a place is really about starting to fundamentally redefine and re-imagine, particularly with the lack of diverse precedents in our canon as landscape architects. How do we start to craft a new vision, new imagination, new modes of thinking?

    As I mentioned, I’m currently at Dumbarton Oaks and I’m looking into Frederick law Olmsted’s travels into the South. Who here is familiar with the fact that Frederick law Olmsted was a journalist before he practiced landscape architecture? Half the room, okay. Who was familiar with his travels through the South documenting the conditions of slavery? Oh, great. that’s great. That’s probably the highest percentage of people I’ve gotten when I ask that question.

    In 1852, the New York Daily Times, today known as the New York Times, commissioned a 30 year-old Olmsted to conduct an immersive research journey through the Southern slave states. The country, it seemed, was headed for a civil war and the paper thought to dispatch young Frederick Law Olmsted for his unique ability to reveal the cultural and environmental qualities of landscape in a narrative voice. Olmsted’s writings would be published contemporaneously as he traveled the South from 1852 to 1854. With a captive global audience in 1861, with the possibility of succession looming, Olmsted rushed to repackage his writings into a single volume and his book, The Cotton Kingdom, would be published within weeks of the Civil War’s first shots fired at Fort Sumter.

    While publishing his reflections on the poorest, most rural regions of the country, Olmsted entered a competition to design one of the highest value urban landscapes in the world. Central Park, a foundational project for the profession of landscape architecture. The simultaneity of these two endeavors suggests that Olmsted’s career as a landscape architect was informed by his Southern travels. However, those connections are, I would say, underrepresented in the profession’s collective understanding of Olmsted’s legacy. So in my research, I’m revisiting Olmsted’s writings and retracing his journeys to the South to investigate the relevance for the discipline today. The goal of this work is essentially to bring Olmsted’s Southern journeys into a more central understanding of the roots of the profession, and to shape the way that landscape architects perceive the potential of our practice in the contemporary moment.

    Olmsted’s published travel writings alone, not including his personal papers, total more than 1700 pages According to the late historian David Donald, Olmsted’s writings on the South are officially the most frequently cited sources for historians of the old South and slavery. Olmsted’s picture of the South has been accepted by historians broadly, and it’s shaped history’s view of the South as a region shaped by slavery. His writing is prolific. it’s generously cited by historians, yet its presence in landscape architecture discourse, I would say is underrepresented.       Here’s how we generally understand Olmsted’s biographies: born in Connecticut, he’s a farmer. He travels to England, he writes Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, is journalist, and following, during that career, he’s writing Cotton Kingdom. Part of what I’ve been doing is historiography, looking at landscape architecture literature and understanding how we historicize this period of Olmsted. Here’s an example from a book called The History of Landscape Architecture. “Olmsted was at times the journalists to publish our student of social attitudes, including a definitive work on social and economic conditions of the antebellum South. For two years during the Civil War, Olmsted served as secretary of the U S Sanitary Commission, a predecessor of the American Red Cross. However, what proved to be the most important career of his life and the one which had vital impact on American life began almost by accident. Olmsted’s practice of a new profession he called ‘landscape architecture’ began during the era that saw occur most of the historic events that revolutionize his world. This was the great era of the railroad.”

  So you know what’s not being said here is that he was committed to writing about the conditions of slavery and saw that actually as a plague on American society, and was committed to making a change through the practice in landscape architecture. Of course, slavery is not mentioned here. And then we have the history of the profession which largely does center around Central Park. In 1848, the advocacy starts for a larger park at the center of Manhattan. We see Olmsted appointed as superintendent and then subsequently submitting a competition entry with Calvert Vaux, wins the competition and goes on to oversee the construction and start a firm and practice across the country until he retires in 1895.
     The reality is, these are not two distinct endeavors. Rather, they’re actually very much informing one another. You’ll see in 1861, he actually submits a resignation to the Central Park Commission and comes back to writing Cotton Kingdom because he sees the looming Civil War. And so I’ve been going through his personal letters and archives and really understanding the relationship and articulation that he has of these connections. And you know, throughout his letters, he’s referencing a number of historic moments in U.S. history that very much shaped his understanding of what he might be able to do with a new profession called ‘Landscape Architecture.’ So these are the kinds of things that I’ve been spending my days looking at: his little doodles. This is ongoing work so I’ll just give you a taste of what my days look like.

    So 1846, he’s 24 years old. It’s a very formative year for him. He started at Yale, he starts fainting and ends up having to leave school. And because he left school, he started writing letters with his friends. So this is a photograph of Olmsted and his friends. This is him being goofy in the middle. So in order to keep in touch and feel like he’s still engaged in university, he’s writing letters, so we have a lot of information about what he’s thinking during this period. He’s really struggling with his views on slavery so that over time there’s a shift in his thinking. And of course, certainly through his travels he becomes less and less apologetic and more and more staunchly abolitionist. So here is a snippet of one of his letters: (He writes to Charles Loring Brace, who’s the guy on the left).
    “I want to make myself useful in the world. To make happy, to help advance the condition of society and hasten the preparation for the millennium as well as other things, too numerous to mention. How shall I prepare myself to exercise the greatest and best influence in the situation of life I’m likely to be placed in?” So he’s writing, he’s thinking through all of these events, these historic moments in our society. He’s also asking himself of what are the tools, what can I do in this context? And that’s really the context of how landscape architecture is formed. You might think slavery during this period as a Southern problem. In 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act, which Olmsted writes a lot about to his friends, you start seeing signs like this in the North.

    This is a map: he went on two trips. This is his first one. He starts in DC, where I currently am, and ends in East Texas where my parents are.So I’m just going to drive home to follow his route. This is his second trip. A little bit more wandering.But when you put the two together, you really see the kind of breadth and depth of an experience that he had through the South and why he is one of the most respected witnesses of 19th century history in the U.S.

    George Shepherd says, “We can see within the framework of Olmsted’s journalistic project regarding slavery, the germ of his public parks idea of both growing out of the same reformist soil” and Charles Beveridge says, “Although Olmsted changed in five years from a farmer to a writer and publisher and then to park designer and administrator, the single problem of slavery dominated his thinking and gave unity to his various activities.”

    So that is really the history of the formation of our discipline.

    I’m going to give you a couple samples of projects. In light of that chart that I shared, the diagram of everything feeding everything, this is a project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s by myself and two other people. We’re small, but I think that the small firm is also important in the context of the kind of work that we’re talking about. We’re agile, we’re not as stressed financially yet, we’re more flexible and we’re testing. It’s a testing ground.Philadelphia, Fairmount Park. 2000 acres, a large park of the park system. You see here our site. Actually when you look at the canopy of the park, you understand a little bit of what we’re working with here.

    The parks department was white, the rec center was black. And the rec center generally managed the edges of the park. And to this day, this is how people refer to the park, that this is our space, this is their space. So you see here the collection of facilities that the rec center has developed over time and how spatially it kind of reinforces that political reality. So the two departments have come together as one but largely still kind of reflect those demographics. You see the condition of the canopy here as well. And there was a master plan that was done recently and what you see here is that the master plan actually focused its energy and its investments on the lower part, right?

    So this street–Reservoir Drive–was really what people in Strawberry Mansion perceived to be their park, but the master plan really emphasized the other part. And so we walked into a little bit of a complicated situation because another landscape architecture firm was hired to do this work. And the community basically kind of rose up and said, this is not reflective of our experience at this park, that the place we love, the places that are central to our lives, the place that represents refuge for us from everyday life is all right here. So we walked into that situation and the client basically said, can we craft an engagement and design process that, in this environment of warranted distrust and anger, how could we move forward? So this is what the site looks like today. If you didn’t talk to anyone, you would think as a designer that perhaps the physical conditions are nothing.

    We found this Jet Magazine from 1952 on black Supermen and one of the black supermen is Joseph Mander. So it had a page in it about Joseph Mander (Mander is the name of the Rec Center), who was a black man in the neighborhood who died in 1952 saving a seven year old white boy in the river, which at the time was a very notable story. They both ended up dying actually. And there’s this poem that the community kept referencing, by Sara Wright, written about Joseph Mander. This is an exerpt:

Now I have seen monuments:
Great geometric heaps of stone,
Lifeless towers raised to keep alive the dead;
But I ask,
Cannot a monument that breathes be built?
A grateful people are bigger than all the tall piled stones
In our wide and waiting world;
A grateful people are wise
When their living grows into a growing monument.
And I ask,
Will not a monument breathe for Mander?

    People kept referencing this beautiful poem. And so it stayed with us. It wasn’t clear how this is going to be made relevant at the time, but it ended up shaping the process.

    So, I love the way that everybody’s been talking about engagement. First of all, we held ourselves to three things. One, we don’t have committee meetings, we have community events. Two, we don’t do post-it notes and three, we never ask what people want because there’s no way that we could just make a laundry list and do those things. We can’t give it to them. But we do try to shape conversations and then design around those things. So what we did when we started to realize the kind of memory that’s really embedded in this place, we held a block party.

    We had a DJ, we had rappers from the neighborhood talking about the place, we had barbecue. I mean, if you didn’t know better, it was just a block party on a regular day. There is this tradition of block parties there. We had opportunities for people to talk about their memories and the things that they love about this place. The idea was to come in and celebrate the way it is now. What do you love about this place now? And so we had, “I love Mander” tee shirt making. Which was a big hit. Before we start talking about change, let’s just love on it for a second. It was great, we got to see in a concentrated way how people use the space.

    Then we sat at the tables. After the food, we had aerials and images, magazines for people to cut out and make collages about what they love and remember about this place. What are the activities that they remember doing here? Each table had to present back and that put them in the position of articulating, presenting what they love and what they would do here. We did some very “scientific” analyses and tried to essentially summarize spatially. Not saying like, ‘Oh, they put a bike rack here or a tree here’, but ‘what are the bigger spatial patterns that we’re seeing about memory here?’

 

    And so we came back to the community and said, you know, we think it boils down to three things that we’re seeing as patterns in these collages.

    One is about activating the street edge, particularly to the North side where there’s even more poverty and less of a feeling of ownership of the park. Second is bringing people into the campus. Not all the way to the park, but at least off the street edge and allowing people a sense of ownership of what they’re calling Mander campus. Third was this legacy of walking that people want to come here and feel like this is the place that they can walk. And so some sort of legibility about tracks.

    So those three things really did shape our site plan and the tree canopy ended up reinforcing those spaces. So we came back to the community, we were able to clearly articulate where memory was inscribed in these places and how it actually shaped a vision plan, by amplifying and giving legibility to things that are already there. Even in a more regional context, we’re acknowledging the fact that people really see the heart of this space here and want the park to speak back to the neighborhood, but at the same time offering connections into the park.

    John Coltrane used to live in the neighborhood and he actually lived right here and he made this drawing of the mathematics of jazz and people were really proud of the fact that John Coltrane lived here. And we essentially applied that to the site and use that as a paving pattern in what we called Mander Plaza. And used that as a place for inscriptions about people, places, markers of the distance of walking.

    This place again is already a place to see and be seen and we’re just giving form to that. So actually Meek Mill also grew up in the neighborhood, there he is. A garden walk reaching to that North side and a water feature overlooking this bowl form of the athletic fields. The athletic fields being again, that sort of center of the community in place where kids go and stay out of trouble and have visits, a sense of community. So the topography is really reflecting that. We also inscribed the poem in here, you know, this whole approach to using the memory that’s inscribed in the space as a driver for the design was really inspired by that poem. It’s a growing, it’s a living monument every day.

    I’ll talk about one more project. This is Africa Town, Seattle. This is a community where in the 1970s was over 70% black. And today it’s 14% black. And so this is a project that the people in their late thirties, early forties, who witnessed the dismantling of their neighborhood essentially decided they were going to form a land trust, buy property, and basically write a chapter after gentrification.

    This is the short version of a long story. So we were engaged in a number of engagement activities and design activities with them. This is a sign that you see all over the neighborhood nowadays. You see a Porsche, you see joggers, you got people that don’t look like the people who have been living there for a long time. So we made our own signs. We worked in the community to come up with these sort of Afro futuristic images of the neighborhood. Obviously, this image is corresponding to the site behind it.

  And speaking to the idea that the people here still see the place, again, kind of like the Philly project, embedded in their memory and that the memory is not just in their past, but it’s also in the future.

    So we did this all over the neighborhood. And these are huge 8’ by 4’ signs that are professionally commissioned. We actually found out who the parks department uses to make their signs and we hired the same people. And I was hanging around them a lot and people would come up and just be like, ‘Oh my God, is this going to happen?’ I’m like, ‘it looks like it.’

    It was a team of friends. One of my friends who was working on this, she’s a graphic designer. So the logos on these all change, on each sign and they are these made up organizations that suggest the kinds of institutions and companies that you would require to build this Africa Town future. So she had a lot of fun making all these logos. And then you go to the website that’s listed on the sign and the fiction continues. So we had a social media presence. The only place where you can pierce through the matrix is the events panel on the website, which will take you to the actual community engagement events that we were having. So you could be portaled into this event, for example.

  This is a property that they purchased at what was the ground zero of gentrification–that’s what the newspapers call it–and the community land trust purchased this property, but wasn’t building anything yet. So the idea was do a temporary activation prototype. This is the before image. We did a few design ciphers where we came up with this idea: low cost paint, 30,000 sqare feet. Like what can we do with 30,000 square feet? Basically only paint it.

    They did say, “but we want concrete somewhere.” You know, that’s not usually a community based material or a temporary material. But they wanted concrete they want their presence here to be concrete. And so we honored that and designed this outdoor living room. We hired formerly incarcerated men, a couple of them homeless, from the neighborhood, who’d never worked with concrete to build this concrete living room.

    We had 300 people from the neighborhood come out and help paint. It still had a function as a parking lot. I think this is the most beautiful post office parking lot I’ve ever seen, I don’t know about y’all. This is in progress: you’ve got some plants in there, got the mayor to do a little ribbon cutting. So this is before, this is after.

    This is the first day that it was open. We just had a big potluck. This is before, this is after the coffee table has old images from the neighborhood epoxied onto the top.
So now it’s grown into, having its own set of programs and activities that we’re not necessarily affiliated with, but we love coming back and seeing it. Okay. Thank you.