Boston Globe / Boston, MA / February 24, 2002

A Sense of Place
Modernist landscapes just don't get any respect  
– or protection
By Anthony Flint, Globe Staff

With its clean lines of compact plazas and terraced steps, its textured groundcover and low wall full of openings to the street, the Hilles Library landscape at Radcliffe off Garden Street in Cambridge is the kind of place that gets taken for granted.

Arleyn Levee, an independent landscape historian, remembers gazing out the windows of the library during long hours tending to her studies. ''It's a very interesting landscape for such an urban setting, and very woodsy,'' she said, and all the more distinctive around the 1966 Harrison and Abramovitz building that departs from the red-brick norm of Harvard Square.

But for the most part, people walk by without thinking that the landscape was as much a work of art as the building. Designed by Zion & Breen, creators of Paley Park in Manhattan, the landscape doesn't grab passersby the way a Frank Gehry building might. So it has become invisible.

And that is what is happening all over the country, said Charles Birnbaum, coordinator of the Historic Landscape Initiative for the National Park Service. Modernist landscapes, created from roughly 1945 to 1970, get no respect. They are ignored, roped off, left to deteriorate, then redesigned and ripped up, Birnbaum said.

Modernist landscapes such as Hilles Library, Lincoln Center, and Copley Plaza, sculpted by the likes of Dan Kiley, Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Hideo Sasaki, inspire none of the awe that buildings do, Birnbaum said. ''And they don't have the clout of an Olmsted landscape,'' he said. ''No one comes and says, `We have to save this.'''

The Hilles Library landscape is facing no immediate threat, though Harvard is sprucing up all of the Radcliffe campus, and a reconfiguration is not out of the question. But the Sasaki-designed Christopher Columbus Park, next to the Marriott Long Wharf in Boston's North End, has been deemed a failure and is being redesigned by Craig Halvorson, who did the work on Post Office Square.

Sasaki's original rationale for the space, Birnbaum and others say, is being shunted aside for neighborhood-friendly features.

'I call it the `just add water' park,'' Birnbaum said. ''There's a lot of talk about how spaces perform these days. Everything is done based on a checklist rather than the spirit of a place.''

By essentially saying that a dinner at Radius is being replaced by a burger and fries, or that a Picasso is being switched for a velvet Elvis, the defenders of these spaces open themselves to charges of elitism. But the designers of the spaces in many cases don't have their work recorded in any formal or systematic way, let alone get considered for the National Register of Historic Places.

That seems unjust, when amusement parks and diners are getting recognition.

Not every landscape needs to be preserved, said Ellen Shillinglaw, director of the Landslide project at the nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation. But people should at least be aware of other parts of the American cultural heritage beyond buildings and Olmsted parks, she said.

The Landslide project Web site lists the 10 most endangered modernist landscapes in the country, including Christopher Columbus Park. Birnbaum's National Park Service initiative site is www2.cr.nps.gov/hli; he has planned a conference in New York on this subject in early April.

And the next time you walk by Hilles Library, take a moment to check out the grounds. Look at the mosaic of the ground cover, with the trees like sculpture, perfectly spaced from steps and benches. There's lots of architecture there, and a piece of history as well.

Got a place in mind? Anthony Flint can be reached by e-mail at flint@globe.com

This article was reprinted with the permission of the author.