Tracey Miller

To restore the entire park to one period, to the period of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr's original design, has its arguments. There is in fact only one Emerald Necklace and this was arguably among Olmsted's most significant projects. It is a project that has significantly shaped the character and layout of a huge territory in Boston. Period restorations can be extremely beneficial when applied to the appropriate context (as we have seen with Dumbarton Oaks), but a period restoration to the Back Bay Fens may not be appropriate in that it is potentially too limiting an approach for a site as complicated as ours. A period restoration on this site would seem to disregard the interwoven texture of the site's history and reduce its rich and intricate character which has developed over time, to one moment and one aesthetic. As Gary Hilderbrand so pertinently states in "Architecture and the New Public Sphere," (Modulus 24, The Architectural Review at the University of Virginia) "this integration of description of place with the recording of time is complicated. It is not simply to argue for a preservation ethic: for saving things because they are old, or because they have convenient historical, stylistic, or chronological identities." George Hargreaves has paved the direction for an alternative to period restoration by revealing history through the use of abstraction. As Reuben Rainey points out in "Physicality and Narrative: the Urban Parks of Hargreaves Associates," (Process Architecture, Jan 1996, no. 128), abstracting historic meaning can offer interpretation to a complex culture, of multiple heritages.
But again the question of appropriateness arises. Pure abstraction applied to a site as complicated as ours also has its shortcomings and misses opportunities to use existing materials on site toward revealing the site's historic narrative. As Gary Hilderbrand also states in "Architecture and the New Public Sphere," "I would argue for the site to convey a narrative of specific aspects of place and time: here is the edge of land, and where natural ground used to be; there is made land, once made this way now annexed and remade another way; here is one layer of industrial ground, overlaid and adjusted for this condition; there is the edge between wetland and water; here that edge is changing." Fortunately there is no formula for appropriateness and each specific site calls upon designers to use their best judgement when applying and combining techniques. This project will build on Hargreaves' precedent as well as the precedents of artists such as Barbara Kruger and Mary Miss to explore ways in which both abstract references and period restorations can be combined to reveal site history.
The intervention, explores dredging as an opportunity to abstract references to the site's glaciated history while separating silt from storm water runoff. It also looks at excavation and the use of words as artworks that reference social history on the site.