The Puzzles of Preserving Historic Landscape Architecture

Frank Edgerton Martin

 In our work at Jeffrey L. Bruce on projects integrating historic landscape preservation with sustainble design, we often find that there are no simple or easy answers to such questions as:

What is the actual “period of significance” for an historic campus or estate landscape?

When is something just “out of date” and needing replacement and when has a landscape become “historic”?

In the last several years, the Cultural Landscape Foundation has led the fight to document and preserve many of the most threatened historic modern works of landscape architecture across the country. Designed by M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis is one of them.

This essay is an updated version of an original article that I wrote for Architecture Minnesota magazine in 2008. The future of Peavey Plaza is still uncertain.

For current updates, visit the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota who have  joined in legal action to preserve Friedberg’s design and the integrity of public review in a much-needed rehabilitation.

 Peavey Plaza: Riding out the Storm

 How do we know when to save a building or landscape that is currently out of fashion? Where’s the tipping point between rehabilitating a tired place and redoing it beyond recognition?

By Frank Edgerton Martin

 The cycles of fashion and the churning of time add to the perceived value of buildings and landscapes. The problem is that Americans don’t wait around for places to become “historic” and “in-style” again. We tear-down or redo civic landmarks (think of Ralph Rapson’s Guthrie or Lawrence Halprin’s Nicollet Mall) when they’re in their awkward “tween years”—old enough to be a bit dysfunctional and worn, but too young to be widely valued as seasoned and wise, as contributing members to society. Imagine if we did this to our children.

The 1976 film of the novel Logan’s Run poses a simple answer to this aging problem: willing execution at age 30. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing for a long time in Minneapolis to make more room for novelty. The problem is that our downtown looks increasingly like a shopping mall (albeit, a failing one) and a sterile office park with block-scale projects.

 The much beloved and mourned Metropolitan Building was doomed because it was in the wrong style and in the wrong place. In the 1960s, this mixed-use skyscraper (which now sounds pretty innovative) by architect Townsend Mix was the wrong style for the Space Age, and for the Gateway renewal project, and for prospective investors in coveted nearby projects like the Sheraton-Ritz Hotel (also recently torn down, age 30). Had the Metropolitan survived just another ten or fifteen years into the Victorian return to fashion in the 1970s, it would be our Brown Palace Hotel, our Wainwright Building, our Monadnock Building. This is not news.

What should be news is that we are still ripping out our landmarks during their awkward teen years. Today’s topic: Why are we even discussing a possible re-construction of Peavey Plaza, once (and surely 40 years from now) a nationally-recognized landmark of urban design by New York landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg? The answer is that we are stuck in the conundrum of not knowing how to recognize superb design from the recent past. What makes a nationally-significant work of modernism different from a drive-thru bank? What were the national an international influences of the time and how well were they interpreted at Peavey?

As to potential rehabs for Peavey, we face the second conundrum of not knowing how much “updating” this modern landscape can take before it becomes a different landscape. Because it is currently out-of-fashion and rundown, promoters of a total re-build see no hope in bringing humanity back to the place as it is. Perhaps they want a new Bryant Park with more grass, more visibility from the street, wrought iron gates. Perhaps, a jumbo flat video screen and stage jutting out from Orchestra Hall. Now, that’s pretty hip. So why bother trying to save Peavey’s concrete steps and staggered tree canopy, its “character-defining features?” They’re ugly and Brutalist (a pejorative term these days) anyhow. But, if you took any group of Orchestral Association Board members and city officials back to around 1980 when Peavey was new and sparkling and bursting with activities, they might see the quality of design that landscape architects and historians like myself see underneath the cheap recent landscape timbers and tar patches.

The challenge for preservationists is—through images and historic narrative that explains Peavey Plaza in the context of its era—to show how well-designed and innovative it was for its time and basically remains today. The bones of the cast concrete and the immersive sounds of falling water and sunken, quiet space are still there, though less inviting and actively used than it its youthful prime.

Somehow we have to make the annoying adolescent seem like that charming five-year old again; and we have to show how, with the right rehabilitation and guidance, we can help Peavey Plaza turn into a wonderful and multi-functional adult. This will not be easy because, as with many historic parks, Peavey suffers from deeply misguided (but fortunately reversible) city maintenance. Neighbors and city officials who see it as cold and uninviting have a firmly-established gestalt in their minds of concrete and hard surfaces. People like myself who remember what Peavey was and know a little bit about its history, see the architectural photos that appeared in this magazine thirty years ago.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said of people who speak in different languages, citizens who have different pictures of Peavey Plaza in their minds “live in different worlds.” That gulf in perception, as also happened in debates over the former Guthrie Theater and Lutheran Brotherhood Building, makes communication difficult between our two camps. But, not impossible.

The response should be a conversation in which contending parties don’t just throw out abstractions from their own language worlds such as (from preservationists), “historic, nationally-significant, and exceptional” and (from reconstructionists) “ugly, cold sterile, dangerous.” We should instead seek to bridge our cultural outlooks through visiting Peavey Plaza (and this is true for other contested sites) together. Rather than repeating assumptions, we should physically point to what we mean to explain our stands. The more specific—this stained pipe, this hiding place for crime, that sound of fountain water, this bland wall—the better. Sharing and pointing to such “ostensive” definitions is often the way that children communicate what they want before they know the words for things. 

Secondly, much has been learned since the 1960s and 1970s about plant materials, lighting and sustainability. We have more choices now to preserve Peavey’s essential character that preservationists defend while creating new color, activities and seasonal character. With a pending renovation of Orchestra Hall’s lobby and facility, the Minnesota Orchestral Association is, as seems appropriate, thinking of their downtown block as a whole. Indeed, that is the way the block was originally conceived in the early 1970s: an urban oasis for musical performance that could draw people from throughout the region.

Peavey Plaza’s early sketches and completion photographs show a place that is cared for, occupied, and programmed throughout the year. If a design team is hired to work with Peavey Plaza, either for the City (that owns it) or another client, they should be fully-versed in this history and The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties and the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes. These guidelines, if interpreted wisely, offer a great range of flexibility in materials and technologies while protecting the spatial patterns, views and sunken volumes that will one day make Peavey eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. As of this writing, the City of Minneapolis is considering local historic designation to protect Peavey Plaza from radical change.

In the Spring of this year, the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota announced its most “Endangered” list in a press conference right at Peavey Plaza. Peavey was included because of its poor maintenance and the swirl of rumors concerning its potential re-design. In a recent MinnPost.com article reporting the Endangered list: Bonnie McDonald, the Alliance’s executive director, argued that the preservationist’s task is to create a clear vision and guidelines for how to soften and improve Peavey without losing its essence. "Our challenge is to try to bring forth a vision of what that could look like. What would a renovation of that space look like that would be sensitive to the original design?"

No easy question. But it must be asked if Peavey Plaza is going to make it into adulthood and achieve the eventual consensus it deserves on its historic value. Landscape preservation is especially rich in puzzles. But, with the right balance of design and historical expertise, along with a mutually-respectful and specific conversation among all constituencies, Peavey Plaza may yet grow old, grow better, and richer in the temporal layers of its character.

 
Further Reading:
For further background on Peavey Plaza and its dilemmas, click here to see Frank Edgerton Martin’s article from the Spring 2008 issue of  _SCAPE: