Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History

 Gaps in park master planning frameworks

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Two | Utilizing Academic Research as Guidance"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Three | Planning for Climate Change/Environment"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Four | Planning for Seasonality and Activation"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Six | Art(s) in the Park(s) as a comprehensive program "
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History" 
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Civic Engagement"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework" 

This topic was one of the first that struck me as a significant gap in parks planning. 

While park master plans tend to not reference built environment and landscape architectural history, the reality is that architectural historians do this kind of evaluation all the time, publish books and reports, etc. about parks and designers like Olmsted.

For example, the Library of American Landscape History  specializies in this field.  One of their most recent books is Boston's Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City.  According to the publisher:

This book is the first full historical treatment of Franklin Park, providing the analysis that confirms its place as one of the great works of nineteenth-century American art. Illuminating the history of the park and its popularity in the early twentieth century, Ethan Carr also describes its decline and the new plans for its renewal, as the City of Boston, working with the surrounding neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, commits funding and expertise to assure that Franklin Park continues to improve the lives of the people it was created for.

But within the parks profession, the idea of applying the architectural history lens to master planning hasn't been taken up.

Park architecture and design. At Sugar House Park, we are replacing pavilions as part of addressing $20+ million in unfunded state of good repair projects, plus trying to incorporate some new ideas into rebuilding old facilities.  

The originally proposed new structure is stark, severe and decidedly modern.  It doesn't fit the park's architectural history or landscape.  But I needed a narrative to explain why and to be able to convince a majority of board members to move in a different direction.

What it made me realize is that at the local and state level, there isn't a good understanding, codification, and application of park architectural planning history to current parks master planning ("I discovered a massive omission in local parks master planning: it fails to discuss architecture and design in an overt way"). 

It never occurred to me before, when reading park master plans, that architecture is never mentioned as an element, although of course it makes up the bulk of discussion in specific plans for buildings. 

Railroad park tourism as an architectural movement.  The approach to park architecture in the US was shaped by how passenger railroads promoted tourism to Western national parks.  

These parks were created before the formal creation of the National Park Service.  (Note that the railroads were a driving force in the creation of the National Park Service, because of how important parks-related tourism was to their business.)

To promote tourism-based ridership, railroads focused  attention on developing national parks as destinations by  constructing lodges and other buildings using a rustic style of wood and stone, using building materials from the regions of particular parks, and then using those facilities to drive visitation.

As visitorship increased, the park rustic architectural style influenced people's perceptions of how a park's facilities were supposed to look.  

It is likely that park officials and stakeholders from around the country visited these national parks, experienced the structures and the way they were integrated into the landscape, took these lessons and ideas back home, and aimed to implement a form of park rustic style appropriate in their local situation and context.

NPS architectural style: rustic style/parkitecture. 

When the National Park Service was created in 1916, it kept the same approach to park building architecture that had been developed by the railroads.

The style, called NPS rustic and/or parkitecture, features natural materials primarily stone and wood, with a focus on the use of regionally significant materials like flagstone or river rocks, cedar wood, red rock, etc.  

The same approach to architectural style of buildings and structures was adopted by other federal land agencies like the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Park rustic style pavilion at Jordan Park, Salt Lake.  Note the fireplace made of stone.  Because of vandalism and other issues, parks these days tend to not build fireplaces.

The basic thrust is to snugly fit buildings into nature and the landscape, rather than for the buildings to stick out.  

-- Park and Recreation Structures, NPS

-- Shelters and Recreation Facilities, NPS

-- Camp Stoves and Fireplaces, US Forest Service

Adoption of park rustic throughout the country. Park rustic ended up being "imported" to other communities, because after visiting parks out west, professionals and other visitors took their cues on park design from those parks.

State and local park adoption of the park rustic style spurred by the New Deal.  This was accelerated by the New Deal.  State and local parks construction projects used the same design manuals ("The Best Kind of Building" The New Deal Landscape of the Northern Plains, 1993-42 Northern Plains, 1993-42 ," Great Plains Quarterly, "Indiana's First State Park: A New Deal Delight," Living New Deal).

Chapter 5: Resorting to the Woods: State Parks and Recreation Demonstration Areas

EVEN MORE THAN PARKWAYS, playgrounds, and metropolitan parks, state parks were a product of the Depression. During the New Deal these recreation landscapes developed to a level of crude finish and beauty unequaled before or since. The Recreation Demonstration Areas, which were a kind of training ground for the state park, began, flourished, and died with the New Deal. 

-- Public Landscape of the New Deal

Parkitecture prioritizes “architecture that is of and respectful of the natural landscape.” The first statement of policy for NPS called for “harmonizing improvements such as roads, trails, and buildings with nature" ("Parkitecture: past and present," Whole Trees).

Craig Thomas Discovery and Vistor Center, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

Postwar park building architecture has been updated, called Park Modernism, still using natural and regionally relevant building materials/

Complemented by glass, concrete, steel and other modern materials, with modern design touches.  

It references, complements, and updates the Park Rustic style.

While rare, some parks in the 1960s and since have adopted a truly modernist architectural approach that isn't based on wood, stone, and regionally relevant materials based on the park rustic/park modernism approach.

Value engineering and modular construction.  To save money, today many park structures are purchased from vendors using stock designs.  The designs include rustic, modern, and "not very good."

In local park systems, many buildings are now constructed from cheap materials like concrete block, but augmented with techniques like coloring the block and variegating the shape of the block, to acknowledge the characteristics of the types of original, natural, regionally sourced buildings materials used historically, without the cost of using original, high quality materials.  

The angles of the roof of this pavilion, as well as the design of the pavilion are out of sorts compared to park rustic structures constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.

Not having an understanding of park architectural history, decisions on new facilities may end up diminishing the value of historic park architecture, because it isn't considered a basic element of parks master planning and architectural styles and materials aren't considered as part of the decision making process.

The wall to the left of the Administration Building is shown as constructed of red stone, the Administration Building is red brick.  In the foreground is Parley's Creek.

Sugar House Park architectural history.

In the residential neighborhood, brick is the dominant material for housing and a lot of the historic building stock in the neighborhood and throughout Salt Lake.  Rather than red, typical of the east, a wide variety of brick colors were used.

In the neighborhood and the city, some new commercial and institutional buildings respect the heritage of brick as a building material including incorporation of design patterns, although the color of brick used tends to not reference the styles used during the historic period.

Sugar House Park had been a prison, and the walls were constructed out of the red rock common to Utah.  A bit of the rock remains on site, used in other structures.  

If we can trust the illustration and "fading" of one of the rare color images of the Prison, based on the architectural history of the site we should have settled on red rock, red brick, and wood as the dominant materials.  

This Utah freeway abutment uses red rock as a material for the abutment

and red colored concrete for the beam

Some red rock from the prison has been incorporated into structures in the park, like this memorial, bridges over the creek, and in terraces.

But people didn't understand the argument that red rock should be considered a distinctive and highly relevant building material for the park's structures.  

Sadly, a more recently constructed monument in the park uses white rock.  We should have specified red rock.  But at the time I wasn't clued into the issue.

A perfect example is the choice of exterior building materials for the restrooms at Sugar House Park.  

The brick type and masonry style has zero relevance to either the Park--where buildings were constructed of traditional red brick--or the neighborhood, where buildings are constructed with a wide variety of colorful brick but none like the bricks used in the restroom.  (I will create a brick chart for the Sugar House neighborhood at some point.)

The result is the presentation of a pastiche of architectural styles and materials that is no longer coherent within the continuum of US park architectural history the built environment in parks.

Sugar House neighborhood residential architectural style is Prairie-Craftsman, constructed in a wide variety of different colored brick.  Unlike its use in the Prison Administration Building, standard red brick is quite rare for the neighborhood and for historic buildings in Salt Lake more generally.

It is used today in some new construction, although its use is limited by cost. 

Use of types of bricks common throughout the neighborhood would be inappropriate for the park site because it was represented by the traditional red brick style, which is actually uncommon within the City of Salt Lake today.

Pattern books are models for how to illustrate the palette of appropriate building materials in the local parks master plan.

Image from ""The Art of Pattern is the Legacy of our Grandparents": Koen Mulder on the Brick Bond as a Composition Tool," ArchDaily

Based on a review of historic images, it's likely that adobe and/or stucco (parging) were common materials used on the prison buildings.

How to better define park architecture for  local parks master planning

First is to identify the predominate architectural style of the built environment, recognizing that at the scale of the system there can be differences within districts.  

It's most likely to be park rustic, but could be park modernism, depending on the time period in which the community was built, especially in postwar suburban settings.

The second is to specify in the plan the types of materials that are locally appropriate to the  architectural style and history of the park system and where necessary, individual parks. For example, Salt Lake County parks has farms, more traditional parks, historic buildings, and the type of appropriate building material will vary.

Another color postcard of the prison, showing the Administration building in red brick, but not the walls.

It is on this point where I wasn't as successful as I'd like to have been in convincing board members on adopting architectural design elements and building materials specific to Sugar House Park.  

But at the time my dealing with this was ad hoc and I hadn't thought through or analyzed the history of the built environment of the park site and the neighborhood.  

The Garden Center fireplace uses the "Forest Service style" (Camp Stoves and Fireplaces).

In the initial discussions of the new pavilion and what would be an appropriate design, I did write a long memo about park architectural history more generally.

Now I would say, based on the architectural style of the original pavilions and the interior of the Garden Center which uses wood in the ceiling and has a marvelous stone fireplace (the Garden Center uses cheap concrete block for its exterior), that park rustic is the dominant architectural style for the park.

And that the historically appropriate materials are wood timbers, red brick, and red rock. 

This determination should be included in the discussion of the park's master plan, and extension, in park system master plans.

The third is to address parks and the park system master planning in terms of landscape design and the cultural landscape.  The cultural landscape approach is discussed in this entry, "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework."

Cultural Landscapes

A cultural landscape is a place with many layers of history that evolves through design and use over time. A cultural landscape embodies the associations and uses that evoke a sense of history for a specific place. 

Physical features of cultural landscapes can include trees, buildings, pathways, site furnishings, water bodies – basically any element that expresses cultural values and the history of a site. 

Cultural landscapes also include intangible elements such as land uses and associations of people that influenced the development of a landscape. Cultural landscapes include neighborhoods, parks and open spaces, farms and ranches, sacred places, etc.

-- Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties
-- Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes, Preservation Brief 36
-- How to Evaluate and Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes, National Register Bulletin 18
-- Guide to Cultural Landscape Reports: Contents, Process and Techniques

-- The Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation
-- The Cultural Landscape Foundation