Lawnfire of the Vanities

I appreciated James Andrew Billingsley’s recent takedown (“Shore Things,” #43/44) of the cynical-yet-vibeless vanity project that is Little Island. Little Island’s warm reception by the East Coast design press has baffled me for years. On its opening, one coworker suggested backhandedly that Little Island’s prominence could at least prompt a new cultural and professional recognition of landscape architecture. Like a Marvel movie or a Business Improvement District, Little Island seems to function primarily as a billboard for itself, desperately petitioning New Yorkers and future clients for recognition without offering much substance or even much occupiable public space. I let out a bitter, Krabappelian “ha!” when the Cultural Landscape Foundation used an image of Little Island to advertise a 2021 symposium titled “Courageous by Design.” With courage like this, who needs cowardice?

Teardrop Park, an equally cynical project with a more dignified presentation, seems to get a free pass in Billingsley’s otherwise lucid report on the state of new-build public parks. Billingsley cites a Project for Public Spaces “Hall of Shame” entry critical of the park’s sightlines, limited both by its central artificial rockface and by MVVA’s trademark dense shrub layer. Billingsley takes the Shamer at his word in suggesting that the feeling of unsafety in the park opens it to transgressive uses in a way that Little Island’s panoptic bowl and guardrailed, line–at–Six Flags pathways never will. I’m not convinced. First of all, I don’t believe that a park surrounded by glassy residential towers populated by yuppies and staffed with doormen and private security is significantly less surveilled than a precast concrete bowl plopped into the Hudson. But second, and more importantly, I’m not convinced by the equation Billingsley draws between noncoercive park design and political liberation. To the extent that urban parks offer their visitors freedom, Billingsley argues, it is a freedom always constrained by the park form. He suggests that a less coercive park design may offer “something genuinely liberatory: a public landscape that trusts occupants to derive their own values and desires … free from the ideology of the people who paid for it.” Formalizing liberal humanism in this way may be a noble goal, but I want to suggest that it doesn’t describe any park that currently exists in the United States, precisely because the United States does not and never has distributed its legal and political rights evenly across its domestic public. My ability to experience a park as safe, liberatory, or (titillatingly) dangerous is always contingent on my relationship to the social structures beyond it: state surveillance, policing, and real estate and its recurring processes of displacement and replacement. Let’s be honest: We can’t place-make our way out of those. The minor coercions that a park form exerts—paths bounded by guardrails, signage dictating the dos and don’ts of appearing in public—will remain minor as long as the threat of state violence that enforces them remains in place. The good news is that that enforcement, like Barry Diller’s maintenance trust, can have an end date. Imagining a noncoercive park form must go much, much further than reforming moralizing signage or introducing a shrub layer that lends temporary cover to social transgressions like public sex. Until landscape architects can reimagine the public as something other than a political body defined by its relationship to the state—and public space as something other than an abstract volume governed by the threat of state violence—any park that puts transgression on fashionable display will act primarily as a trap.

All that said, I congratulate Billingsley on a great piece of landscape criticism. In the face of landscape architectural writing that overwhelmingly chooses boosterism over productive skepticism, he’s chosen to tell the truth. It’s a bold move that benefits us all. We’ve acknowledged that the emperor has no clothes; the next and harder step is to dismantle the empire. James, I’ll meet you in twenty years at the ruins of Little Island.