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GENESIS
THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: Acid mine drainage (the outflow of acidic water from metal or coal mines), as seen at a site in southwestern Pennsylvania. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann created the passive treatment system shown in this four-part tableau depicting acidic water’s transformation from toxic orange to biorich green. OPPOSITE: Julie Bargmann, the first winner of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.
THE CLEANUP CRUSADER
Fascinated by industrial areas since childhood, landscape architect Julie Bargmann has spent her career advocating for safer, smarter, and more environmentally conscious ways to repurpose toxic sites for community use.
By Rachel Gallaher
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT JULIE BARGMANN HAS NEVER BEEN AFRAID TO GET A LITTLE DIRTY. An educator, environmental justice advocate, and thought leader for more than 30 years, the New Jersey native can trace her interest in industrial and toxic waste sites back to childhood. At an age when most children were solely focused on friends and recreational activities, Bargmann was developing an enthusiasm for the landscapes she saw as her family drove along the New Jersey Turnpike.
“I was still busy with ballet and doing all of the normal things other kids did,” Bargmann says with a laugh, “but somehow, I was really attracted to these sites. We used to bomb into the city in our station wagon and along the way, we’d see all these refineries and factories and it was a sublime landscape with billowing smoke and flames. I developed a fascination with that, wanting to know how it all worked.” She was also taken with the men and women who kept the fires burning. “I remember seeing the workers’ housing in the background of the factories and feeling compelled; feeling empathy toward these landscapes—both as landscapes in and of themselves, and the human landscape that was this incredible sea of humanity hard at work.”
These childhood impressions would drive Bargmann’s passion for her practice—she founded her landscape architecture firm, D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) studio, in 1992—and lead her to become one of the country’s leading advocates for renewing and repurposing contaminated, neglected, and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites. Working against complicated, often nonsensical, legislation and miles of red tape, she has spent the past three decades introducing new approaches (often rooted in »
ABOVE: Detroit’s Core City Park is located on the site of a former fire station. The buildings were decommissioned and demolished in 1976, and the plot became an asphalt parking lot. The new corner park designed by Bargmann holds 85 trees in just 8,000 square feet of land, as well as places for people to gather.
ABOVE: Bargmann designed the headquarters for fashion retailer Urban Outfitters at the 1,200-acre redeveloped Philadelphia Navy Yard. Railroad tracks on the site became walking paths.
regenerative design and ecologically focused research) to reclaiming these sites and turning them into productive parks, nature preserves, and remediation fields without the pressure of economic redevelopment as the only option. “I like to be the champion of the ugly ducklings,” Bargmann says. “They are actually extremely beautiful.”
Bargmann enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1976; there, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture and became enchanted with the city and its industrial past. “I just loved it,” she says, “even though the smell of the steel mills would give me a headache. I went through my black hole period there. I didn’t know what to do with myself, my sculpture had been falling flat, and I was experiencing dismay about the confines of galleries. I think it was something similar to what participants in the Land Art movement experienced when they started to move their work outside of galleries. Then I heard about landscape architecture. It combined all my interests: the social aspect, the public aspect, art, and science. It was a time when landscape architecture was getting its design chops.”
After Carnegie Mellon, Bargmann attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, earning a Master of Landscape Architecture degree; two years after graduating, she became a Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. One of her professors at Harvard, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, would prove an influential figure in her career (she started working for his fledgling firm while still in graduate school), encouraging her innovative thinking and passion for ecological justice.
“Michael cultivated that intuitive way that I wanted to work,” Bargmann says. “It was an intense time, but it was great. I felt like I was shot out of a cannon by the time I graduated. I worked for Michael for a while, and there were little inklings of being interested in former industrial sites. The office was working on a project, Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, and there was an old tannery on the site. It was quiet, but something was stirring in me, saying, ‘Oh, I like these sites, the ones that are not easy and not clean.’”
In 1992, Bargmann accepted a teaching position at the University of Minnesota. The school gave her
a research grant, and she used the money to develop PROJECT D.I.R.T. (Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain), the academic precursor to her landscape design studio. “I was like, I don’t know how to do research, I barely read!” Bargmann says. “But I knew that I wanted to do a road trip—a giant circle around the United States to do field-based research looking at mining sites.” She started taking her students around the country with her, teaching them the importance of doing research, understanding the technologies and engineering behind current and former manufacturing and refining processes, and having empathy and curiosity when approaching the vast environmental, political, and social networks entangled with each site. »
—JULIE BARGMANN, D.I.R.T. STUDIO
“I studied and sometimes literally crawled through mining and manufacturing sites, many of them defunct,” Bargmann notes in an article on the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s website. “I wanted to see how they were being treated, and in most cases, I disagreed with what I witnessed. Restrictive reclamation policies, uninspired remediation practices, and shallow readings of former working sites—I became openly critical of all these things, but I was also inspired by them. They instilled in me the desire to offer design alternatives and led me to create experimental studios. That’s when I started to be angry about how the mines and the people who work there, past and present, were being treated.”
Years of on-site research and interaction with individuals at every level (from miners to real estate developers to the Environmental Protection Agency) have led Bargmann to see her work as collaborative—she often works with former students who have gone on to careers in the field and is open to listening to anyone with a relationship to the sites she works on.
Between 1996 and 1998, Bargmann designed a passive water treatment system at an abandoned 40-acre floodplain covered with mining refuse, in western Pennsylvania’s coal country. Called Vintondale Reclamation Park, it picks up the discharge of acid mine drainage before it dumps into the Blackslick Creek and channels it into six pools where limestone, engineered soils, and plants filter and clean the water. The project, which was spotlighted in the New York Times, put her work in the public eye.
In addition to numerous parks (Turtle Creek Water Works in Dallas, Phil Hardberger Park Conservatory in San Antonio, and Core City Park in Detroit, among others), Bargmann has worked on housing projects (Caterpillar Forest in Detroit and community housing at the Holy Cross neighborhood in New Orleans), urban regeneration, and what is likely her most known project, the headquarters of contemporary fashion retailer Urban Outfitters, which is based at the 1,200-acre redeveloped Philadelphia Navy Yard.
In October 2021, Bargmann received the first Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. Presented by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, the award is meant to “elevate the art and profession of landscape architecture” and serve as a recognition similar to the Pritzker Prize, the Praemium Imperiale, and other international prizes for architects and artists.
For Bargmann, the prize is an honor and an incentive to keep working to change the way we view and interact with the environments around us. She currently teaches at the University of Virginia (a role she has held since 1995) and is consulting on a number of projects, including several parks and revitalization efforts in Detroit in collaboration with the young developer Philip Kafka of Prince Concepts. “He has this mindset that landscape should come first, and he understands the idea of using landscape as the glue for a community,” Bargmann says. It’s the same kind of awareness she sees in many of the students who come through her classroom. Bargmann feels a sense of hope for, and because of, today’s young adults—a cohort that is not only alarmed by the current state of the environment, but is taking steps to combat the damages created by past generations. “I am very proud to have contaminated so many minds,” Bargmann says. “The biggest things I’ve learned in my career are to care and to look carefully—I hope I’ve been able to pass that along.” h
©CHARLES A. BIRNBAUM, COURTESY THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE FOUNDATION ABOVE AND OPPOSITE: At Turtle Creek Water Works in Dallas, Bargmann transformed a site that formerly held a water-supply pumping station into an exploratory garden.
