THINKING ABOUT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France
Figure 5.26 Garden at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France.
The art gallery of the Musée de l’Orangerie, located in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, exhibits Impressionist and post-Impressionist artists, and is also home to the water lilies paintings of Claude Monet. The gardens, detail of one outside the museum is shown in Figure 5.26, may have been inspired by the art inside the museum. Certainly the colors and the very painterly manner in which plants have been arranged suggest the influence of the Impressionist art inside the museum. Try squinting your eyes while looking at the photograph in Figure 5.26, then the image takes on an Impressionistic quality.
Work of Practicality The next works designed by landscape architects were the result of commissions to fix something, to improve water quality, to reduce flooding, to increase habitat and therefore biodiversity, or restore a river as a strategy of rebuilding a community from an abandoned industrial neighborhood. Restoration, improving water quality, mitigating hazards from natural disasters, rebuilding dysfunctional landscapes, and attendant improvements such as trail and park installations have become a significant source of work for landscape architects. Baltimore Harbor, Maryland, was cut off from the rest of the city when the port, shipping yards, warehouses, and manufacturing were built along the water edge. As these once profitable economic uses fell upon hard times and were abandoned or underused, the city saw the revitalization of the harbor into a tourist and recreation destination as part of a larger strategy of transforming the harbor and downtown Baltimore from a derelict collection of abandoned buildings into a vital cultural and tourism center on the American East Coast. The previously derelict site of the London 2102 Olympics has a similar story to Baltimore’s. Other examples of landscape transformations are described in this section, all examples of the type of projects landscape architects have become increasingly involved with; some in a collaborative role with others or as the primary designer.
Buffalo Bayou, Houston, Texas It may be hard to imagine but the water feature in Figure 5.27 was a concrete-lined drainage channel a matter of only ten years ago. Buffalo Bayou was in a bad state, like so many rivers and water features in cities all over the world, that were not appreciated for their recreational, environmental, or aesthetic value and were either covered over, filled in, or cut off from the urban fabric. The city of San Antonio had a river that ran through the downtown that was once the source of flooding in the business district and was used as the service entrance to business lining the San Antonio River. The river is now a tourist attraction, contributing to the economic life of the 104
