Financial sustainability is key, says Hargreaves

The end of municipal maintenance will pose a serious challenge for the profession, according to George Hargreaves, who gave the inaugural Jellicoe lecture last week...

George Hargreaves 1

George Hargreaves speaking at the first Jellicoe lecture Click on image to view gallery

At the hugely popular event at the TUC’s Congress House in London, the design director of the 2012 London Olympic Park used the concepts of site, sustainability and memorability to explore a diverse selection of projects that his firm Hargreaves Associates (HA) has worked on.

These included Amsterdam Bos Park, Bois de Boulogne, South Pointe Park in Miami Beach, Golden Gate Park and Byxbee Park in San Francisco and the Sydney Olympic Park.

To illustrate the growing importance of a landscape’s financial sustainability, Hargreaves singled out Discovery Green in Houston – a compact, city centre park that incorporates a packed programme of night-time activities and a buried car park to finance its maintenance.

With its municipal maintenance now axed, the park represents a model that is likely to pertain on many future landscape projects, he argued.

Developing this theme, he talked about HA’s work at the University of Cincinnati and how the look of a campus really attracts students, as it strengthens the experience of place and memory.

He described how, by appreciating the importance of memory, the university had made a direct appeal to its alumni, which resulted in the landscape work being privately funded.

In a striking graphic, he illustrated the income streams of several major US parks and showed how Central Park now only receives 15 per cent of its funding from Government while its community of Friends provides 50 per cent. For the High Line, Friends provide 72 per cent.

Not surprisingly, he chose to dedicate a considerable part of his lecture to the London 2012 Olympic Park, exploring it particularly in terms of “site”. In doing so, he dwelt on the challenges of making it as biodiverse as possible; incorporating North-South circulation during the Games and East-West in the Legacy phase; and how the Park needed to be “stitched” into the surrounding neighbourhoods.

However, it was when taking the example of Crissy Field, that he came closest to outlining his overriding philosophy.

Describing how this former US airbase was restored to a natural landscape of wetlands and dune fields, he talked illuminatingly about “installing a landscape and then letting it go” – becoming what he called “a landscape in motion”

 

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