From then on Hargreaves traveled in a straight line. After completing his bachelor of landscape architecture at the University of Georgia School of Environmental Design, he earned his master's degree at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1986 and now chairs the Department of Landscape Architecture. During graduate school came a second revelation. He discovered earthworks of the 1970s like Robert Smith-son's Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake and Amarillo Ramp in Texas. While artists like Smithson and Michael Heizer, whose Double Negative cut trenches on a Nevada mesa, saw their works purely as sculptural objects in the landscape, Hargreaves explored them as new elements exposed to the shaping effects of water, wind, and gravity. He further developed these concepts in workshops devoted to landforms—spheres, cones, pyramids—that would serve as space makers the way other designers would insert walkways or plantations. In his 1996 entry to the Festival International des Jardins at Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, he compressed these ideas into something akin to poetry. On a small site, he constructed a spiral mound alongside serpentine beds of grasses and perennials, suggesting agricultural furrows, and an abstract forest of fiberglass rods. The arrangement invited a promenade to the top of the mound for an uplifting view of the Loire River.
While traveling abroad as a young professional, he embarked on another formative experience, that of appreciating the complexity of history and culture that marks places like Stowe Landscape Gardens in England and Courances in France. Stowe provides the most evocative long walk in England through a vast property that was shaped in succession in the eighteenth century by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who became head gardener in 1741. On the circuit around fields and lakes and across bridges and into small temples and monuments, there is a moment at Stowe when suddenly the majestic scheme, though based on disparate influences, comes together. The enchanting seventeenth-century park at the Château de Courances, said to have been designed by André Le Nôtre and repaired in the late nineteenth century by Achille Duchêne, is planned on a more domestic scale than Le Nôtre's grander designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles. It is fed by ten natural springs that establish such diverse water features as a moat, a horseshoe fountain, a mirror lake, a stepped canal, and—the culmination—the striking image of a long, somber canal lined navelike with black poplar trees. The fact that the landscapes of both Courances and Stowe have survived the centuries in a composite, readable form indicates a respect for their individual parts.
Cumulative history rather than complex theory is what most affected Hargreaves's view of landscape design. And yet, looking closer at work by “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton during his travels in Britain, he found that their smooth approaches to grading and tame clumps of trees sanitized rather than invigorated the surrounding nature. Instead, Hargreaves preferred the richness of the wilder approach in New York's Central Park, where Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux unleashed nature by scattering plants and trees and by creating a geological basis with rocky outcrops. Many landscape architects, Hargreaves believes, “lift” the substance of Olmsted without truly understanding his style. (Like many of Hargreaves's own projects, the idealized landscape of Central Park itself was constructed on vacant swampland, as was its inspiration, Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, the oldest free-entry municipal park in Britain, designed by Joseph Paxton.)
Hargreaves followed the forcefulness of nature one step further as he witnessed the destructive powers of a hurricane destroy a beach in Hawaii. He saw in this disorder a beauty that countered the static norms of American landscapes and recognized the greater possibilities of kinetic potential in a human rapport with the land.
Since 1983 Hargreaves Associates of San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have traveled the world with their original concepts of engagement and narrative in rediscovering the underlying essence of landscapes. The plaza for the Sydney Olympics 2000, a waterfront park on landfill for Lisbon's Expo ‘98, and landforms tying Japan Science World to Tokyo Bay are only a few of their international commissions. But for Hargreaves, northern California was like the Land of Oz, a magical but somewhat bizarre, windswept country where anything was possible. Following his professional path in the Bay Area, where he lives, reveals not only the historical evolution of the land itself but also the continuity and fluidity of a practice that has developed, as he says, into three different stages. He describes early work, like Byxbee Park in Palo Alto, as abstract and bare, pushing beyond the limits of normal ideas about landscape and relying for materials on dirt and the remaining detritus on the site. The middle period, represented by Guadalupe River Park in San Jose, brought a dramatic turnaround to fringe or marginalized areas closer to populous downtowns and demonstrates a full command of the requisite supporting technologies. And the third and most recent stage addresses locations at the very heart of a culture, requiring ever more complex solutions, like Crissy Field in San Francisco. At the interface of land and water, all of these remnant sites were also the edges inhabited by Native American tribes whose spirits can be reimagined as people once more promenade along these shores.
Byxbee Park was a garbage mound before it became a park in 1991. Now, paths of crushed oyster shells weave through a series of landforms that blend with adjacent baylands and encourage the return of wildlife. A walk there is similar to hikes in the English Lake District, where the natural hills form an immediate horizon that dissolves when one approaches the next rise. This perceived increase in space and distance through valleys and elevations is something that Olmsted understood when he created the illusion of deep perspectives with undulating paths leading toward a near horizon crested with trees. There are no trees, though, in the thirty-five acres of Byxbee Park, for fear that the roots would disturb the one-foot-thick impenetrable clay cap sealing the landfill under two feet of soil.
In collaboration with two environmental artists, Hargreaves has made a powerful combination of elements that integrate the reclaimed site with its history and location. Waves of nonirrigated native purple stipa grass give the landscape a velvety appearance, changing from green in early spring to a rich golden hue by May. Surrounded on two sides by water, the Mayfield Slough and the Mayfield Marsh, the park may be isolated on a peninsula, but it also meshes visually with the larger landscape beyond.
Striking out across the northern slope, the visitor climbs along a series of eight massive chevrons, formed by concrete highway barriers embedded at right angles as a directional motif for airplanes heading to the nearby municipal airport. From there the path proceeds through a narrow pass between two landforms that open into the park's protected area. Here clusters of hillocks (reminders of Ohlone Indian shell heaps) planted with lupines and other wildflowers offer both shelter from the wind and a lookout over the long vistas.
On the descending slope, five berms of compacted soil and rock infill, set in ever larger arcs for erosion control, give the impression of rippling water. A sculpture installed at the head of this procession, called Wind Wave Piece, echoes the rippling motion—a square arc with hanging ropes that wave in the afternoon northwest wind. The path proceeds along the slough and passes the flare needed for burning off methane gas from the underlying garbage. The thick hedgerows lining the banks of Mayfield Slough are interspersed with triangular, cedar-plank viewing platforms for birdwatching over the wetlands.
As the walk continues around the point, a conceptual forest comes into view, a dramatic grid of weathered green cedar posts. These create an exciting visual rhythm as the grid shifts and finally disperses into randomness as one turns the corner. The patterns recall the experience of passing telephone poles on a drive in the country and reflect as well the processional aspect of power pylons across the slough. The pole field, as it is called, is sliced off at the top in a slanted plane gesturing down to the marsh.
Hargreaves's design for Byxbee Park includes a small gem of architecture: the triangular restroom at the parking lot entrance. An unmistakable reference to Louis Kahn's famous 1950s Bath House for the Jewish