Interview: Douglas Reed and Gary Hilderbrand, Reed Hilderbrand

Douglas Reed is partner and co-founder of Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture, and an American Society of Landscape Architects Fellow. In 2011 he was recognized as a Resident of the American Academy in Rome. He lectures widely and participates as a critic on reviews for design schools nationwide. As a founding board member of The Cultural Landscape Foundation and as Board Co-Chair for 13 years, he has consistently shaped a platform that delivers knowledge about design heritage and how it matters in people's everyday lives.

Professor Gary Hilderbrand is partner and co-founder of Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture and Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1990. His honors include Harvard University's Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, the Architectural League's Emerging Voices Award with Douglas Reed, and the 2013 ASLA Firm of the Year award. Professor Hilderbrand’s essays have been featured in Landscape Architecture, Topos, Harvard Design Magazine, Architecture Boston, Clark Art Journal, Arnoldia, New England Journal of Garden History, and Land Forum.

Why is (or isn’t) sensitivity an important quality for environmental design and landscape architecture?

We value human attributes of sensitivity in most things. But sensitivity to landscape on its own does not necessarily help generate coherent and meaningful design. We read sites through empathetic responses, astute observation, and an objective knowledge of the systems that define character. Out of this we define foundational values for conceptualizing a project, rooted in environmental and cultural significances. Our landscape architecture strives to make those values visible.
 
What conditions or factors do you think help to cultivate landscape sensitivity?
a. Do you think interaction and communing with nature engenders landscape sensitivity?
b. If so, should we be concerned by a lack of opportunities in many urban regions across the globe and in places where ‘nature’ has largely been destroyed?
 
We often assert, as Lewis Mumford did in his writings about urbanization, that “nature” is a human construct. It’s as possible to engage deeply with nature in the city as it is in the country. Nature can be destroyed; it can also be rebuilt. Our project for Long Dock Park in Beacon, New York (see Chapter 9), a prominent site on the Hudson River, had always served an industrial purpose. We rebuilt the site as a popular open space and working landscape. It now embraces and responds to the hardship of destructive ice floes and debris at this point in the Hudson. Where ‘nature’ is absent or apparently destroyed, we see an opportunity to imagine a new future.
 
To be sure, though, the experience of nature and its living systems is crucial to human wellbeing and understanding one’s place in the world. This was brought home to us powerfully in our early project for the Institute for Child and Adolescent Development (see Chapter 7), a garden designed to help in the diagnosis and treatment of emotional trauma. It coincided with the startling evidence of the deficit in authentic interaction with nature among today’s children.

Is there a difference between cultural and environmental sensitivity? For example, in your ‘Half-Mile Line’ project (in this Chapter), do you see any conflict between the negatives of allowing access as opposed to the positive relationships and stewardship that this can create?

Our clients for Half-Mile Line knew their property possessed an extensive and vital wetland network. But they had little understanding of the potential spatial experience of this resource. Our project revealed this to them—a source of ongoing discovery for them. Accessibility to the wetland reinforces their commitment to stewardship. So environmental and cultural sensitivity can be complementary. The tension—not conflict—you observe originates in regulation and regulatory conventions. There are areas of the country where protections are too lax. There are also areas where any human contact with habitats of high ecological value is prohibited. Reed Hilderbrand and many of our peers seek to set examples of innovation in responsible and appropriate ways that also protect resources and precious species.
 
Notwithstanding that each site is unique, are there certain qualities or attributes that you prioritize, seek to reveal, or highlight? I.e, what are your values or ethics? What qualities are you seeking to emphasize and what responses do you aim to evoke?

We love this question, and it gets to the heart of the matter about building a body of work with consistent values and a recognizable identity. Values of history, culture, ecology, program and philosophy are present on every site. We work as editors, calling some forward, obscuring or suppressing others. It is inherently discretionary—the judgment we exercise underlies the art of what we do. The way we see it, landscape architecture succeeds when it expands the human stories of a place while also strengthening its ecologies, its biophysical exchange. It must also cohere and appeal to human perception—we aspire to beauty and performance.
 
In the face of complex experiential, historic, technical and environmental factors, what is your approach to achieving legible design outcomes?

We always seek to weave a site’s heritage, its new uses, and highly technical demands into a total experience. We find that a site’s legibility requires clarity of intent, and in the process of our work we invest in the rigor it takes to attain that clarity. A project like The Clark Art Institute (in this Chapter), a museum that traditionally focused on pastoral traditions of landscape painting, now engages the visitor in a comprehensive and coherent narrative about the historical and ecological development of the property. This transformation amplifies the mission of the museum, deepening the Clark’s stake in its own place and its public.
 
What techniques and approaches do you employ to mediate your design aims with the practicalities and challenges of maintenance and the ability of both construction and maintenance staff to understand, respect and seek ongoing realization of your vision and intent?

Your question is a reminder that our discipline’s defining feature might be its temporal dimension—we work with a dynamic, living medium. For a designed landscape to endure as originally conceived requires extraordinary commitment from stewards and designers alike. In one sense, the design itself must inspire that commitment. It must also meet realities of skilled labor and budgets. We try to stay involved well after the project is “substantially complete,” and when that happens, we can manage the transition well with its owners and caretakers. Each year we visit our project at Central Wharf Plaza (see Chapter 4) on the Boston waterfront to review the condition of a grove of mixed oak species supported by a precise and particular infrastructure of soils, stormwater management, and irrigation. We have continued to attend to the site and the trees have flourished, growing into one of our city’s iconic landscapes.
 
Is part of environmental sensitivity understanding that adaptive approaches are ultimately more effective than controlling approaches, or is control an inevitable part of human habitation?

We favor both. As designers, we want to control everything, but we recognize that the work must be adaptive and resilient. So this tension is where the work gets interesting:

We create specific spatial forms and aim for certain effects in a landscape. But systems of nature that we work with are cyclical, entropic, spontaneous, and thus inherently unpredictable. Out of this, though, come the many phenomena that surprise and delight us in a landscape. At the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center (see Chapter 2), catastrophic loss of the tree canopy from drought and the impact of hurricanes has required a pervasive restarting of the ecology by employing historic eco-zones endemic to the region. Our plan largely encourages adaptation while our maintenance/management regime is precise and rigorous over many years. Even where our plan is prescriptive, we expect continuous adaptation.
 
Is sensitivity paradoxical to the need for widespread change for environmental sustainability? Do you think landscape architects need to be more forthright or assertive?

Once again, it’s both. Awareness and sensitivity are about education and knowledge. Landscape architects do have a responsibility to lead their clients and the public, to advance an agenda that expands environmental sustainability. Rather than pursue activism on paraprofessional issues, our contribution on this front comes through excellence in built works. As we have described in our individual projects, we are committed to long-term progress achieved incrementally, involving everything we do.