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Tracey Miller •
Project Tour
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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. |
