In Conversation with Charles Waldheim
This transcript is an informal conversation between Shizheng Geng (MAUD '21), Sam and Charles Waldheim on October 16, 2019.
SG:
Is Landscape Urbanism more an alternative trajectory of Landscape Architecture or of urbanism disciplines like Urban Design or Urban Planning?
CW:
Landscape urbanism emerged about 20 years ago to fill a void within the design disciplines. It was initially meant to be worked as an alternative to, or a critique of urban design and urban planning and the way that they've been developed in the United States. In that regard, landscape urbanism brought together two things that historically had not been brought together, which were a kind of advanced design culture on the one hand, and ecological literacy on the other.
If in the beginning of the 1990s you were building a part of your city, more often than not, you would want to have a progressive position on environment or ecology, but you also needed people who could operate physical and spatial material design. Neither urban design nor urban planning was prepared to step into that kind of role because of their own histories. Landscape urbanism began really as a kind of alternative practice to New Urbanism; and then was adopted by landscape architecture.
SG:
So, is [the] landscape architect the most ideal occupation to commit the concept of landscape as urbanism? And if not, which occupation is the most ideal one?
CW:
Myself and my colleagues mobilized landscape urbanism as a movement, at a point in time where there were academic programs and offices being built around the concept. We asked ourselves: should we try to become a discipline or a profession? And, we decided collectively that we were best as a theoretical project, and a set of practices; because we could have more impact that way. 20 years ago many of the protagonists around landscape urbanism came from landscape, but they really represented a of hybridization of both being design-based, and having landscape knowledge. Right now the state of play is such that landscape urbanism speaks for itself: it's a body of practice, it's a set of tools and theoretical frameworks, and it can be applicable across a range of different disciplines. Landscape urbanism first emerged because of a void in practice. It was practitioners, mostly landscape architects to begin with. But now, urban designers and architects as well.
SN:
That leads nicely into the next question which is about scale. In the US the disciplines of planning, architecture, and landscape are much more limited in scope than they previously sought to tackle. In one sense, this can make our projects more engaged and tactical, but it also misses the goals of regional thinking, both ecologically and economically. How can we move forward to think beyond the brownfield or as a patchwork of salves?
CW:
I think it is very much the case that landscape urbanism has basically [taken] the intellectual and practical frameworks of regional ecological knowledge, but applied it at the scale of projects that we were building; which is at the scale of the brownfield site and in the urban project. I think there are two vectors that your question brings up, so one of them is the broader political economy. In the United States, especially in North America where we've essentially allowed the city to be the byproduct of a series of power relationships, which are mostly through capital. And therefore, most of our cities, you know, aren't really the byproduct of anything you would call spatial planning. They're much more a kind of natural process. The other vector within your question has been the relationship between the disciplines in our fields. On the one hand, it used to be in schools like ours that architecture and urban design and urban planning and landscape were seen to be complementary parts. They were seen to be bringing different knowledge to bear on complementary problems, and I'm not sure that's the case anymore. Or maybe to put another way, the idea that they should operate at different scales I think is under a bit of scrutiny right now. It used to be the idea that one was an architect by virtue of crafting buildings, and one was a landscape architect by crafting landscape materials. And I think that model has given way in favor of a kind of more semantic model, where the architect is less and less concerned with craft and more concerned with signs and symbols. Similarly landscape urbanism has played a part in this disruption, but I think broadly speaking, each of the disciplines are now in a way kind of competing for market share of ideas in practice, and there's less of a sense of the appropriate scale at which we all work together.
SN:
Do you think it's that the architect or landscape architect has drawn away from the scale or materiality, or is it that the field has been bifurcated and stratified such that we have arrived at peak specialization today?
CW:
I tend to be, on these matters, an economic determinist. I believe in an economic base and a cultural superstructure, and so, by and large, I believe that changes in our fields are most often explained elegantly by changes in the political economy that our work is responding to. So, in that sense, in the academy, we're a little bit insulated from those conditions, but in practice what you see is that mutations are happening faster. The scale and speed of practice [is faster] because as you're meeting payrolls and you're working in the world, you're responding almost immediately, quarter by quarter, to changes that are happening. Those changes eventually ripple through the academy; they come into the schools and we either resist them or we flow with them.
It used to be the case of urban work that you would hire firms based on professional identities. You would start with an urban designer and planner, you would hire an architect, people were defined, and you would hire a company that had the name of the principal, comma, architects, or the name of the principal, comma, urban designer. Increasingly in the 1980s and 90s there wasn't a kind of rush to grow multidisciplinary firms, so firms understood that if they became internally organized to have all of those disciplines, the capacity to deliver a suite of design services was much more efficient. Recently in the last 10 or 15 years my friends tell me that firms are less concerned with that, now they're more and more concerned with the delivery of complete built environments. It's not just delivering multidisciplinary kind of synthetic services. It's also delivering environments.
Right now we have this moment when landscape architecture, for the past 20 years, has never been more visible, and it's never been more profitable. It's growing at a rate that's unprecedented in the history of the field globally. We can't produce them fast enough, and they make better money than architects or designers. We have a generation of landscape architects who are now international brands; if you think about that list of the Peter Walkers and the George Hargreaves’s, and the Michael Van Valkenburgh’s, and the James Corner’s and a number of other European firms. They are at a moment when their firms are stable and growing, and they've contributed to the ascendancy of landscape and to landscape urbanism. And they're working at a scale that's both stable, but also kind of mature, and you would also then expect to see well, where is disruption or innovation going to come from?
SG:
We wanted to ask about the global impact of landscape urbanism, as your writing has been published and translated internationally. However, in your class, I have found that these theories are derived from a distinctly western background and American context. How do you think about this exportation of a theory? And should Eastern countries like China develop their own theories and foundation for landscape urbanism?
CW:
It's interesting because there is no single clear answer. It's important to acknowledge that the things we now describe as landscape urbanism emerged first in practice, and it was my role and the role of others to identify what was happening. What we saw happening in the 1990s to me and to half a dozen other people that were also looking at the same conditions was clear. We were happy of course to play a role in describing what was happening, but it would have happened without us, and was going to happen for the same structural reasons that we've already mentioned.
It's also true that we used to train landscape architects regionally, and maybe we used to train architects regionally as well; and maybe in certain places we still do. There was a moment in time when an architect could say: we're only going to practice in this culture. At a moment when Kenneth Frampton was writing about critical regionalism there was this idea that one could be a part of a modern global project, but be specific to a particular culture or region. I think that project has reached a point where both growth of urbanization, but also the demand for design at a high level, got well out ahead of the ability for local cultures to produce themselves.
So again, returning to China, its opening to partial capitalism and economic development also implicated a kind of knowledge transfer. I believe that knowledge transfer from west to east or from east to west is an ongoing project. It happens to be that we now see a generation or two of East Asian architects and landscape architects, some of them educated in the West, others not, producing their own culture-making through their work, and I find that as interesting as anything else right now.
Specific to my own project, I've been very pleased to see that the work I've been doing has been found relevant and useful to people, but my job has always been in the public sector or university: producing knowledge for other people. You never necessarily know where it's going to be useful for people, but you try. I've been pleased to see that my projects and books on landscape urbanism have been translated into Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin. For me, it's not a coincidence anymore, there seems to be an affinity there, and I've been working hard to make that material available, while acknowledging that the experience of working in those cultures is very different than my own. Also acknowledging that landscape brings with it a kind of baggage, baggage that is in some ways useful, but at the same moment, we must acknowledge that it's not organic to a particular place.
SN:
How do you manage the baggage that comes with your theories in a different political context, not just cultural or economic?
CW:
The Harvard GSD is a global institution, and we have an obligation to serve, but also to be available globally. That comes with an ethic and moral imperative, first of all to be available, but it also comes with the understanding that we're not always going to agree. As a global school, we have to acknowledge that we will have people coming here, faculty and students, from around the world; from different cultures, backgrounds, and with very different expectations. I do believe the Enlightenment project can benefit from knowing each other. There's nothing more edifying in education than understanding different cultures. Studying in another culture, seeing your classmate’s be from other parts of the world, it’s a fundamental part of what we do.
I'm committed to the idea of working in the public realm. I've committed my entire career to the non-for-profit and educational world, and I've been very careful about who I partner and collaborate with. Ultimately, most of our sponsors and most of the people that we engage with are governments: cities, provinces, or federal governments. Often, it's NGOs like the World Bank and occasionally it’s private foundations who have a public interest mission. Occasionally we will work in the context of private companies, but in this context one must consistently make sound ethical judgments on a project. I'm hopeful that we're modeling and teaching our students a sense of the same ethic.
For me, among the most interesting question you can ask a designer is: to take the job or not? Philip Johnson's aphorism was that the three most important things for an architect would be: get the job, get the job, get the job. I would add to that the three most important ethical questions: should I take this job? should I take this job? should I take this job? There are very few cases where it's immediately self-evident yes or no. The interesting ethical questions are mostly in the gray area. In that gray area, I'm talking about East Asia, and talking about China in particular. It's important to acknowledge that our partners and friends in China have a different political economy, cultural context, and very different ideas about intellectual freedoms, ideas on freedom of speech, environmental conditions, and conditions around rule of law. I believe, if we make sound ethical judgments, and if we apply our best knowledge, we can contribute even modestly to improving the conditions for people in the world.
SN:
I am interested in how you view our programs here at the GSD as they relate to the interface between landscape and architecture? Where are the gaps, and where are the strengths?
CW:
I think we've gotten quite good and adept on both sides of the house, but certainly on our side of the house [landscape] of looking at the relationship between urban form and landscape processes. Interestingly, this is anecdotal, but in the 10 years since I've arrived there was a student in MLA thesis last year who did a survey of the kinds of keywords in options studio descriptions over the last 10 years, and she found the overwhelming ascendancy of the term “garden,” overwhelmingly in studios led by architects. I don't know where to put that in relationship to these questions, but for whatever reason, in the market share of ideas, as the GSD and Harvard bought into the landscape urbanism in a big way, and made appointments and doubled the scale, and hired me, and hired Chris Reed and hired Pierre Bélanger, and a range of other people in making that choice, the urban form/landscape processing has been embedded in our core. UPD in a way responded a little bit to that, but architects have found the garden available again as a territory. And maybe in part because we ceded that ground.
So with respect to your question about gaps. On the one hand, we work in fields that, in part, derive their autonomy or their significance or their meaning from engagement in the world. It's that dialectic between engagement in the world and self organizing autonomy. It's the tension that's the issue, then you're not going to solve it, or if you solve it, you're going to be out of a job. If we refuse to respond to sea level rise or a storm event or Zika viruses or political events or border wars, if we refuse to engage in those things as a set of fields we will very rapidly become old news -- we will become disciplines of withdrawing, we will tend to atrophy. On the other hand, you don't want to rename your school every time there's a new hurricane, right? And so, in that, the question is, what events and transformations deserve to be brought in and dealt with? How do we describe them to ourselves, and then how does that lead to a reorganization? I think if you view the GSD in that regard, there's a pretty easy schema in which some of our programs have been more nimble to reorganize themselves in relationship to those externalities [MDes] we can retool, and we can reorganize ourselves. I tend to think about the departments less in terms of gaps and more on a spectrum. MDes and thesis is out there changing every Tuesday. On the other end the core of architecture has decided that it’s going to be over here, and in that debate, Scott Cohen has said that it is his job is to protect architecture from me, and it is my job is to drag the urban project out into the world.
Once a year we do admissions, and we see it in very clear metrics, people vote with their feet. So, if you look at it from that point of view as a business, our faculty are in great demand. Every member of our faculty has other options that don't have to be here, and we're in a very competitive free agency based culture. If, for whatever reason, we stop keeping pace, and if this place stops being the most interesting place for people to be, they're very able to move on. I think in that regard, the metaphor of a kind of marketplace of ideas is a very real thing, and I think that the school is doing a pretty good job of making itself available and transparent about what's happening; it's very rare that somebody comes in and is misled or confused about what's going on.
It's also true that it's very expensive, however we return 40 cents on the dollar, and what that means is that the majority of our students don't pay full frame. However, of course it's still true that we're producing the graduate students on campus that have the highest debt to lifetime earnings. Another big gap right now is, I believe we have a generational challenge to make sure it is clear that our work through design is relevant to societal issues and critiques of capital/political change, so that we don't lose a generation who will rehearse the 60s again and go off to planning or government or law.
Obviously the questions about loan forgiveness are embedded in a broader political economy in which we've decided, I think for the worse, to make health care and education luxury goods as opposed to rights. I would much prefer for our political economy be based on the idea that education and health care are fundamental human rights. In that regard I support those that have been calling for the role of design in relationship to a Green New Deal. In the original New Deal, designers were implicated, but most of that was a work project in relationship to the economy of the Great Depression. The question I'm focused on right now is how can we organize ourselves to advocate for a Green New Deal in advance of the economic catastrophe that would necessitate it?
I don't believe that by identifying solely as designers we will necessarily be at the vanguard of that political change, but I'm medium-term optimistic that designers can contribute to that project.