Cherishing Landscapes as Living Art
IF a landscape is invisible to people, they won't notice when it changes. They may not even register the fact that the glade of tall elegant sycamores in  front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center has been replaced by big  fat stranded-looking pear trees.
Or that a playground in Central Park at West 67th Street, with its wooden "Egyptian" pyramid and undulating Noguchi-like forms, has lost much of its original spirit and only narrowly escaped demolition. Few people can remember when the tunnels through its cobblestone mounds were closed because parents were worried about homeless people sleeping there or syringes left around.
A playground at Public School 166, on 89th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, was once shared by the community and the school. Designed by M. Paul Friedberg in 1967 with $195,000 from the Vincent Astor Foundation, its varied terrain featured stone pyramids with slides, craters covered with geodesic domes, tree houses and water jets spilling down an amphitheater to a wading pool like some kind of mini-Villa d'Este.
But it was closed to the neighborhood several years later -- because the Department of Parks and Recreation said it wasn't used enough to justify paying  for an attendant there. The water was turned off. The giant spider web -- vinyl  cables suspended from posts -- was taken out.  And now, it's scheduled to be flattened by early next year -- and replaced with modular play equipment that meets Federal guidelines for safety and accessibility to the handicapped.
The trees at Lincoln Center, and the neglect of these two 60's "adventure" playgrounds, are only a few examples of modern American landscapes that have fallen into disrepair because they have never been maintained in the spirit in which they were built. Many of their designers have been forgotten, because institutions don't have memories. And landscape architecture, unlike buildings,  is poorly documented.
These invisible landscapes are being taken up by a growing number of landscape architects around the country, who are organizing to protect their work, both as works of art and as vessels of cultural history.
The reasons for their neglect vary from budget cuts and fear of lawsuits over injuries to changes in esthetics, childhood-development theories, social problems, even to what kinds of trees should be planted. Not to mention the rules of modern architecture itself.
Modernist architects like Le Corbusier thought of buildings as objects, floating in a vast sea of space. "The minute you do that, landscapes become negative space, the thing the objects are sitting on," said Peter Walker, a landscape architect in Berkeley, Calif., who has helped build about 200 landscapes around the world. "That's why no one pays any attention to these spaces."
The landscapes created after World War II were not only abstract and minimalist in their design, but also reflected an optimism about solving the world's problems.
"We had the idea that there was some connection between modern art and design and social uplift, that you could transform a society," Mr. Walker said. "Everybody was very hopeful after the war. We were going to save the world."
It was an era of urban renewal, and concern for public spaces -- plazas, vest-pocket parks and playgrounds where people of all classes could escape their cramped apartments and congregate.
But many of those ideas foundered on the social problems that new surroundings couldn't fix.
"Maybe 1 percent of my projects are still usable and recognizable," Mr. Walker said.
And the glade of sycamores at Lincoln Center -- designed in the early 60's by the eminent landscape architect Dan Kiley -- sculptured the air in a spatial pattern that echoed the strong horizontal and vertical planes of the surrounding architecture. The trees were densely planted, 4 to a 20-foot-square marble planter, in 3 feet of soil. They are atop a parking garage and offices, and Mr.  Kiley gave strict instructions for their maintenance.
"You have to feed the roots to sustain the trees under those conditions," said Mr. Kiley, who practices in Vermont. "And root-prune to keep the roots from damaging the roof. And I also wanted them clipped on top every year, which makes an architectural shape out of it, and goes beautifully with the buildings."
The trees were fertilized, and branches were pruned sporadically or when they were about to fall on people. But Mr. Kiley's instructions were never followed.  And in the late 1980's, when the trees became diseased and their roots damaged the membrane of the roof, no one at Lincoln Center remembered him.
"It didn't occur to us to talk to the designer," said Andre Mirabelli, the senior vice president of Lincoln Center, who has been there for 24 years.
Jerry A. Hastings, the director of operations, said, "His name doesn't even show up in the archives."
Mr. Kiley said the 1989 sparse installation of pear trees -- only one to a planter -- "devastated the design."
"I was trying to get a sense of the relationship of this architectural grove  of trees with the building itself," he said. "And to give a wonderful kind of shady retreat. With one little tree in there, it just looks kind of silly."
But few people protested. At least not until two years ago, when Armand LeGardeur, a young landscape architect in Robert A. M. Stern's architecture firm, walked by and realized that Mr. Kiley's design was being erased.
His observation resulted in a letter from Mr. Stern to Lincoln Center, a lobbying effort taken up by the local chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and finally, an invitation from Mr. Mirabelli to Mr. Kiley to come down and advise his staff on what to do about the sycamores that are failing in Damrosch Park, south of the Metropolitan Opera House.
But it would be too costly to replace the ornamental pears, Mr. Mirabelli said.
Mr. Stern voiced his outrage in an interview this week: "It looks like a bunch of lollipops on sticks. It's ruined. I think it's a great loss. It's also  shocking that Kiley, who is not dead, but very much active, was not consulted."
But that's what happens when a landscape is invisible.
"The Kiley design was changed inadvertently because it wasn't seen as something," said Mr. Walker, who has written a book with Melanie Simo called "Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape" (M.I.T.  Press, 1994). "Therefore, you could change it. Because it wasn't anything."
The playgrounds of the 1960's went hand in hand in the world's love affair with abstract art -- as well as new ideas in how children learn. Built of curving concrete (the material of the day), mounded stone and wood, they suggested shapes like pyramids and volcanos. Children crawled through tunnels and climbed ladders to "explode" through at the top and zip down a metal slide into a soft bed of sand. There were sand to dig in, amphitheaters for storytelling, and water fountains that flowed into channels, where children could sail sticks and homemade boats.
"They were sanitized versions of the adventure playgrounds that were built in Denmark and England during the war," said Michael Gotkin, a landscape architect  and historian for the Central Park Conservancy.
He likes to show pictures of an English boy standing triumphantly atop a scrap-wood tower (approved as safe by a play supervisor), of other boys leaping  over a bonfire, of children building shacks out of old crates and rubber tires and getting dirty in the mud, doing, in other words, what children will do in a  vacant lot full of junk.
Some, like the playground in Central Park, at 67th Street, which was designed by Richard Dattner and finished in 1966 with $85,000 from the Lauder Foundation, even had a paid play leader, who supervised activities.
"But sometime in the 70's they stopped being able to pay for that person," Mr. Dattner said. About the same time, the tunnels were blocked off.
"Parents hate them," said Patricia McCobb, the senior landscape architect for the Central Park Conservancy. "They hate the idea of a child getting lost and not being able to see them. Or of finding some rodent in there. Or getting dirty." And parents are more eager to sue these days, she said.
So the tunnels won't be reopened. And much of the sand will be replaced with  soft safety surfacing. And the wooden pyramid, a key element in the Dattner design, may be replaced with a boat.
The reason for that sounds like one of those sticky donor issues.
"The Central Park Conservancy felt the pyramid was too steep in its present form," Mr. Dattner said. "So I suggested making it lower, but they wanted something new. They have a donor, and he wants to make a new statement."
But the Friedberg playground at P.S. 166, without prominent defenders, is scheduled for demolition.
And even though a school official, Judy Rohn, said there hadn't been a serious injury in 30 years, Community Board No. 7 has asked for a playground with regulation equipment for younger children, paid for by the city. The price  tag: $615,000.
Mr. Friedberg, says that he would have been glad to alter the playground but  that he was never seriously consulted.
He added: "I think we are heading into a very conservative period that is almost reductivist in design, and politically. People are obsessed, rather than  concerned, about safety."
"Should we close Central Park?" he asked. "Should we flatten our environment  so we can see in all directions?"
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