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REMEMBRANCE A Few Choruses Low Down, but Not So Blue for Ian By Laurie Olin THE PUBLICATION OF Design with Nature forever plan for Bainbridge Island. He was an astute changed the field of landscape architecture. The critic and generous to Grant and me. A year later, I book, its ecological point of view, its rational went off to Europe to work on a landscape history method, and its author also had a significant and of southern England and to study the sociology of positive effect on my own life and career. I first the public realm of Rome. heard of Ian McHarg when architecture class- By happy coincidence, I joined the Penn mates from Seattle stayed at my apartment in faculty in 1974, at a time when the Department of New York City in 1966. They were traveling to and Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from the Delmarva Peninsula for a landscape had a bumper crop of natural and social scien- architecture studio at Harvard, where Ian was tists in addition to landscape architects, archi- teaching while on sabbatical from the University tects, and planners on its faculty. The curriculum of Pennsylvania. I was somewhat taken aback was ambitious, wide ranging, and exhausting, but that they were making a plan for an entire exciting and remarkably productive in its peninsula that encompassed large portions of research, teaching, and production of future two states. educators and practitioners who departed to all I first heard McHarg speak in Seattle and met parts of the globe, spreading the message of him in March 1971 while teaching with Grant Design with Nature. Since then, ecological Jones at the University of Washington. He had analysis—the integration of data by overlay come to give the John Danz lectures, which techniques, and an interactive matrix-based consisted largely of excerpts from Design with method for planning and design at a range of Nature.1 The three lectures were titled: “Man, scales as advocated by Ian and in our curricu- Planetary Disease”; “An Ecological Metaphysic”; lum—has seeped into the working methods of and “Design with Nature.” He was spellbinding. design practices, teaching curricula in academic His presentation of the problems arising from our institutions, and public agencies around the ideology, politics, and habits of practice was country and the world. persuasive. Like many others, I got it. Ian was at Ian was twenty in 1940, and World War II had loose ends during the day between his evening begun. His youth was put on hold while he blew lectures and social events, so he came over to up bridges as a commando behind enemy lines. the school and hung out in our studio. Up close Afterward, he was part of a generation that he was charming, warm, and kind to the stu- wanted to fix things, to not make the mistakes dents, who were preparing a landscape master of previous generations. 10 LAND LINES Marxist and Freudian thought, which had Hanna, Carol Franklin, other design practitioners, been influential in intellectual endeavors for and I were something of a design antidote to the several decades before the war, were displaced so-called method. In fact, with Ian’s support and by a new perspective: structuralism, which conviction we were trying to demonstrate that provided meaning and methods in disciplines science and ecology were not antithetical to ranging from linguistics and literature to philoso- design, but underpinned it when well done—that phy and ecology, even economics and design, we were actually part of the follow-through. through the 1950s and 1960s. The intellectual, He sought to clarify this in a book extending academic, and professional world of the postwar his ideas to human ecology, but the planned years was imbued with instrumental systems “Design for Man” volume never happened, in part thinking and a belief that reason and rational because of the intractable difficulties inherent in methods must be applied regardless of topic and social science. In the final analysis, landscape field. McHarg used his graduate study at Harvard architecture is not a science. Like architecture, it to give himself a crash course in science, is a useful art, one that employs the findings and sociology, and urban planning theory. He was knowledge of science along with knowledge of determined to develop a landscape planning art, craft, design, and construction to address method and practice that was objective, not human needs in social environments. We knew subjective; that was as rational and replicable as that, and we discussed ad nauseam how our the hard sciences, not intuitive and willful— students at a certain point had to strap all of “not like the design of ladies’ hats,” as he would their analysis to their backs like a parachute and bellow. Step by step he developed the curriculum jump, hoping for a soft landing, not a crash. It at Penn with the aid of research money that informed their choices as ethical professionals, allowed him and his colleagues to consider the regarding costs, safety, health, and environmen- problem of human habitation and the most tal outcomes. McHarg’s ideas were for guidance fundamental issues of community planning and and to be used as a checklist for responsibility, design at a scale from neighborhood to physio- not a set of rules to limit imagination, and as a graphic region. constraint on foolishness and ignorance, not In concert with a number of natural scientists on creation. who had become public figures, McHarg used Interestingly, I found that the overlay method national television to advocate for environmental of examination, comparison, and interaction planning. There is no question that his rhetoric, between various factors and topics—natural, performance, and publications had considerable social, historical, theoretical—could be as influence on the creation and early years of the stimulating and useful in building up and Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean creating a scheme through additive considera- Water and Clean Air Acts of the Lyndon Johnson tions as it was in digging through history and and Richard Nixon administrations in the United natural factors to produce suitability matrices. States. The problems he raised and attempted In over two dozen projects with Peter Eisenman, to address—issues related to health, safety, I explored using overlays of information in a settlement, resources, ecology, and resilience— forward-projecting manner in an effort to find are still the most important problems we face, alternative design structures, formal and artistic and seem even clearer and more desperate today solutions to complex planning and design than when he was at his most strident. problems. Examples of my built and unbuilt work Occasionally people ask me what the range from the Wexner Center at The Ohio State department was like, or suggest to me that they University and Rebstock Park in Frankfurt, think McHarg was unsympathetic to design. It is Germany, to the City of Culture at Santiago de simply not true. Others have speculated that Bob Compostela in Spain. After many somewhat JULY 2019 11 experimental projects, I also came to find shown that he was working on the wrong natural processes and ecology to be powerful problems, or that those problems are not still metaphors that have been enormously helpful vitally important. As well, his critics have and inspirational in my work. Several of my underestimated Ian’s responsibility for creating most recent projects have derived from careful the professional context in which landscape considerations and analysis of ecological history architects and planners now operate; today’s to produce both an understanding of a place and practitioners are focused on similar concerns situation and complex and responsive physical and are using the technology that he promoted designs. The recently completed University of and encouraged. Washington north campus residential community Ian was a force who changed our perspective in Seattle, Apple Park in Cupertino, California, forever, but also a deeply human and contradic- and OLIN’s current and ongoing Los Angeles tory person. Difficult as he could be at times, he River Master Plan and its pilot projects exemplify was extremely loyal and devoted to friends and this approach. family and fiercely proud and protective of his In the past two decades a number of faculty, quarreling and making up with them critiques have been leveled at McHarg and socially and privately, in reviews and in faculty Design with Nature that are misplaced and often meetings—all in an endless effort to improve our as ill-informed as the denigration of Frederick work, our lives, and the planet. One of my fondest Law Olmsted and his parks by a recent genera- memories is of him standing atop a log, backlit in tion of professionals. Most of the criticism of the blazing sun, wearing pajama bottoms and McHarg, however, has focused on the means, holding a cigarette in one hand and a hose in the methods, and data in the work, arguing that they other, watering the giant kitchen garden on his are outdated and simplistic. There is some truth farm in Marshallton, Chester County, Pennsylva- in this, for structural systems of thought are nia. Sheep, pigs, and Highland cattle wandered inherently political and moralistic; they inevita- about in the background as he drenched the bly raise ethical issues, whether in science, the rank and jumbled masses of plants and hummed humanities, or the professions. Debates within a favorite Coleman Hawkins tune. Ian always the department and in his own office over understood that humans were part of nature, planning and design often centered on social and that only through ecological understanding rather than biological issues, particularly fears and constructive action could we save ourselves of determinism derived from particular methods and have a good life.

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