Artistic landscape architecture brings a sense of belonging

When five of the nation's leading landscape architects gathered before their peers last weekend in Berkeley, the projects they discussed were located in Massachusetts and Minnesota, China and Spain.

But if there was no overt Bay Area hook, no matter: The issues and ambitions on display can be applied to any 21st century metropolitan region like ours, where the most challenging frontiers for growth lie in struggling with issues of growth and change; where the land in question is high-profile and politically charged.

"The art of landscape architecture can mean making our cities into places where everyone has a sense that they belong," said Kathryn Gustafson, whose past work includes a portion of Chicago's Millennium Park. "If you build really beautiful parks, people go to them. They have fun; they use their cars less. That's part of sustainability, too."

The afternoon of presentations was organized by Berkeley's Peter Walker, who was hosting a multiday gathering of executives from America's larger landscape architecture firms. To conclude it with a twist, he arranged for five practitioners to each present a current project that illustrated what they saw as today's design issues.

Gustafson selected the retooling of a rail yard in Valencia, Spain, into a grand crossroads where six neighborhoods will converge, drawn by paths and waterways into a hub with cultural buildings and a high-speed rail station nearby.

The Bay Area connection was indirect but palpable, given the similarity of the site to what San Francisco's Mission Bay once was - a 300-acre rail yard - or the leftover industrial nature of Pier 70 on the central waterfront.

Mission Bay has been criticized for unimaginative design that fits into restrictive planning rules from the early 1990s, while Pier 70's still-evolving design could be scaled back if voters next month approve Proposition B, which locks into place height limits for property owned by the Port of San Francisco.

Those spaces are shaped by politicians and interest groups as much as designers. Architecture and planning can take a backseat to community demands, with developers then whittling back the quality of buildings and parks to ensure a profit.

But the designers on hand Saturday kept returning to another element of city-building, a word rarely heard in today's public forums.

Beauty.

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Artistic landscape architecture brings a sense of belonging