James Stewart Polshek, architect of the planetarium, said Gustafson won the competition to design the terrace because “she understood that the design must be metaphorically linked to the planetarium.”
Ellen V. Futter, the museum's president, said she found Gustafson's spare design for the terrace “elegant yet simple, harmonizing both with nature on earth and with the universe beyond, in a physical context.” She expects that crowds will be drawn to the pristine quality of this public space, and to Gustafson's fantasy of fiber-optic starlight that will sparkle at night.
Gustafson is always in tune with the sights, sounds, and smells of her environment, especially in France, where, until 1997, she lived and worked. Now she is back in her native Washington, on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, but she still commutes to Paris and London for work. Her studio offers the tranquility to create the plaster models that are the basis for the sweeping landscapes and vast movements of land that have become her signature style. Her projects remain best known in Europe, and it is necessary to understand what she has done abroad in order to comprehend her vocabulary for the museum terrace, which is only beginning to take shape.
Having left the fleeting world of fashion, she completed her landscape architecture degree at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage at Versailles and opened an office in Paris. She sees herself as part of a historical movement in transition from agriculture to pleasure gardens, and from the architectural garden rooms of the Renaissance to the picturesque. Although she seeks to mix and unify these traditions, her aesthetic veers toward abstract and minimalist forms and was shaped in France by her mentors there. These included the well-known landscape architect Jacques Sgard (“I never drew a curve before I worked with him”), the sculptor Igor Mitoraj (“He gave me the tools to sculpt my clay models”), and Peter Rice, structural engineer of the Pompidou Center. Walks among the systematic beds and the glasshouses of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris influenced her planting designs.
What has evolved is a vision of landscape as an immense canvas to shape and manipulate. Gustafson takes into consideration the movement of people through these spaces and the environment beyond: not only buildings, but also shifting sunlight and shadows throughout the day or, at night, landscapes made vivid by her lighting designs.
Since 1980, she has been involved in three dozen important public projects: town squares, corporate landscapes, and city parks. The Parc de la Villette, in Paris, is on her roster, as are a number of projects for corporations and governments, clients she feels are more accepting of her bold approaches to nature.
In the summer of 1997, when the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, invited landscape architects to enhance its narrow streets and broad esplanades for an International Festival of Urban Gardens, Gustafson redesigned the Esplanade de Montbenon, an undefined expanse of lawn overlooking Lake Geneva. By placing swathes of silvery leafed plants next to long blue beds, she linked this plaza visually with the gray-blue waters and the Alps rising beyond. Then, with the composer François Paris, she suspended glass chimes and gongs from metal arches along the adjacent walkways. Their soft tinkling sounds in the wind were reminiscent of the clock chimes that add a pervasive music to Swiss townscapes.
A few months ago, Gustafson was in the London offices of Sir Norman Foster, the architect of the Great Glass House for Britain's newest botanic garden, the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Llanarthne. It will open next year. The elliptical structure, 330 feet long, will be the largest single-span glasshouse in the world. Gustafson is designing the interior, best described as the Grand Canyon under a glass sky. With deep, sharply cut stone chasms and crevices, a sixteen-foot waterfall, and a flood plain at the bottom, the landscape, to be planted with Mediterranean flora from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, will be a milestone in botanic garden design.
In presenting the model, Gustafson held high a light on a long wire and moved it in orbit like the sun to demonstrate how in the course of a day deep shadows will be cast by the sheer walls of the gorge. The landscape in real stone will be softened by the grays, yellows, and greens of the planting palette. “The atmosphere will be permeated with the fragrance of damp earth and crushed thyme and the crackling sound of real pebbles on the paths,” she forecasts.
But France has been her stronghold, especially the town of Rueil-Malmaison on the Seine, eight miles west of Paris, where several corporations have built new homes nestled among the quiet residential streets lined with linden trees. Those corporations wanted to add to, not detract from, suburban neighborhoods already filled with gardens. Gustafson gave Shell Petroleum rolling green lawns that are bermed up against the headquarters building. One can understand why she says, “I'd love to design a golf course.” The lush lawns, separated by sharp-cornered limestone walls, are like a green lava flow.
Her complex designs for corporations are comparable in scope to gardens designed around palaces and chateaus in the seventeenth century, though her work is closer to that of contemporary land artists like Michael Heizer or James Turrell. Behind Shell's buildings, Gustafson switched from a bold to an intimate, almost domestic, scale. A canal-cum-water garden separates the two main buildings, which are joined by a series of glass-enclosed bridges. Along the water, plantings of dogwood, magnolia, azalea, and rhododendron are arrayed in color patterns from white to purple. Along the canal, a low boardwalk with steel handrails barely skims the water.
In a simpler but no less elegant vein, Gustafson laid out a series of rills in marble troughs in front of the Esso headquarters just blocks away. The troughs stretch like ribbons of water between rolling lawns and a grove of willow trees. From each side, these channels empty into a shallow cascade that flows gently toward the Seine. On the banks of the Seine, in view of the railroad bridge at Chatou, a favorite subject of the Impressionists, she fashioned an overlook with modern steel benches and ample space for skateboarding.
Her ideas about history, culture, and memory are summed up in her park for the medieval town of Terrasson in the Dordogne. It redefines the meaning of gardens. On a steep hillside next to a fifteenth-century fortified abbey, Gustafson created what she describes as “history fragments of gardens,” or what the town calls “Imaginary Gardens.” One mysterious feature of the park is how streams, fountains, and cascades rush into the open—and just as quickly disappear. It is possible to walk through her forest of fountains there and, on a still day, not get wet. And when asked about the undulating trellises of steel bars over the rose garden, Gustafson described the configuration by flipping an imaginary sheet in the air.
Gustafson is also in tune with Paris, and with what makes it the City of Light. Driving by the Place de la Concorde one night, she pointed out how the numerous lampposts are placed at different heights. “If you squint your eyes,” she said, “it is like driving through a galaxy of stars.”
New York Times, January 7, 1999
Landform Future: Laurie Olin and the Integration of Architecture and Landscape
IN 1964, when Bernard Rudofsky wrote of “the challenge of topography” in his seminal work Architecture Without Architects, little did he imagine the import that topography as an organizing principle would exert on twenty-first-century architecture. In a recent book Landscrapers: Building with the Land (Thames and Hudson), Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, has heralded the joint engineering of the land and structure as a “utopian form of architecture.” In what appears to be a movement, architects, given the opportunity of a spacious site, have an increased awareness of the importance of melding their design with the existing environment. And gone are the days when landscape architects were viewed only as enhancers of surrounding settings.
Now architects and landscape architects are collaborating in designing buildings that are essentially landform structures in and of themselves. In describing his long collaboration with architect Peter Eisenman, landscape architect Laurie Olin speaks of “the relationship between buildings and site—and our exploration of ways that the two might be considered as aspects of the same thing.”