She is among the world's finest landscape architects, her more extreme designs allow people to work from the beach instead of the office, and is currently working on a new public square in Dublin's docklands. On a recent visit to Belfast, Martha Schwartz talked to Deirdre Black
Grand Canal Square in Dublin's docklands is the latest part of the world to undergo the Martha Schwartz treatment. The square is also where the Daniel Libeskind-designed Performing Arts Centre, due for completion in 2008, is to be located. Schwartz, a landscape architect and artist, is a lead player in the global theatre of modern city-building. Her approach is determined by a belief that landscape design solutions can be raised to the level of fine art, and she describes her creations as "site-specific installation".
As the principal of Martha Schwartz Inc, with offices in Massachusetts and London, a Professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the recipient of more design awards than is polite to mention, she has the kind of international career enjoyed by only the starriest starchitects.
Schwartz can be seen as a direct descendant of the land artists of the 1960s and 1970s - American artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Alan Sonfist and James Turrell. These sculptors worked on monumental scales, using the landscape itself as material, constructing works of art in wild or degraded landscapes as a creative reaction against the commercial gallery system. Schwartz, however, sees her work as being made of the stuff cities are made of. "I would say that my work is land art, except it is land art brought into the city, where instead of bulldozing rocks and earth we are trying to manipulate the stuff that we produce in the city, man-made stuff, our manufactured environments."
While the original land artists relied on wealthy patrons and private foundations to fund their work, Schwartz plays an active part in the processes of city development, land reclamation and master planning. Artists may take inspiration from a place, or may create a piece of public art in a particular place, but Schwartz actually gets to create entirely new urban landscapes, within developments as diverse as Japanese apartment blocks, Atlanta shopping centres, a New York plaza and Dublin's own Grand Canal Square.
How does one get to a stage where the potential of landscaping is recognised? "You have to be really clever about how you get sites to make your site-specific art. One way is you make maquettes and you put them in a gallery until bigger and bigger opportunities come by, except that is horribly slow, and is very unsatisfying if you don't want to build maquettes all your life. Another way is to get direct commissions from cities. What I choose to do is to call myself a landscape architect, because people are not really threatened by that, whereas artists are by their very nature subversive."
The pace of modern society deems that a sense of place is created all at once, rather than emerging slowly over time, and allowing for the gradual adaptation of the landscape to its required function. Landscape architects work alongside a range of professions in the frenzy to create and re-create urban places. In the face of often conflicting public, political and financial requirements - as the song goes - there can be a lot of "compromisin' on the road to our horizon".
Schwartz, however, is known for sticking to her guns, and for defending her designs in the face of the harshest of critics and bureaucratic wranglings. She is clear in her personal design approach. "The intent is to exercise one's vision, one's will, one's sensibility and to make something that somehow is whole."
Schwartz is critical of the imbalance between the design professions that resulted from some of the ideals of early modernism. "In the modernist tradition the landscape played, I wouldn't say an insignificant role, but certainly a passive role, in the whole story. The landscape supported the 'architecture as sculpture'." In Schwartz's eyes, the landscape itself has an aesthetic and functional role. "If you only read the designed landscape as a passive re-creation of a natural landscape . . . how far can you go with that?"
Suspicious of relying on languages of landscape design that are outmoded, Schwartz believes in the predictive nature of art and the role it can play in the development of quality public spaces. "Our job as artists is to talk about the time we're in and to invent the future - to invent what's coming. Landscape design cannot just be rooted in the past; it has to draw through osmosis what a place is about, and then express this in a way that is almost a new language for that place. In order to cut a creative path, you have to create the future. Artists are feared and loathed because people don't want change to happen; people are by nature fearful of change. Well, most people, thank God not everyone."
Schwartz has been commissioned to design a new open space here at a time when the city is busy inventing its future. Her proposals for Grand Canal Square are a dramatic and dynamic interplay with the jagged geometry of the Daniel Libeskind-designed Performing Arts Centre.
It is envisaged that work on the square will begin this year and construction will roll out in phases in line with the completion of the surrounding buildings. The last phase will coincide with the delivery of the theatre in 2010.
She praises the Dublin Dockland Development Authority for being "an incredible client, someone who wanted something special and then made it happen. Without the client you don't have anything. Working in the public realm you're working with public money. The client has to be brave enough to do something special and have the emotional constitution to be able to take the heat if people don't like it. You don't get those kind of clients very often."
This landmark project, and others such as Eyre Square in Galway (which, despite reservations, is in this writer's view a success), the forthcoming Fr Collins Park in Donaghmede and Royal Canal Linear Park in Spencer Dock, demonstrate a revived application of artistry to the built environment in Ireland. The hope is that such totem projects will raise public expectations of open space and landscape design in general.
Schwartz demonstrated her approach to designing landscapes that function in the context of "how people actually live" in recent proposals for East Darling Harbour in Sydney. Schwartz's office came second an the international design competition, but nonetheless, the process allowed her to explore the opportunities for developing public space that functions in accordance with modern ways of living.
"We had worked very closely with Arups, the engineers, to come up with a system whereby we would be able to create a collage of different environments. We were going to create a big beach. We were going to plant big trees in the rocks and then recycle all the grey water from the development portion of the project and use that to grow the trees, because without the trees as canopy, people can't use the beach.
"It was a conflation of best ecological practice, but also an environment that people could use. We had the trees all wired up so that people could actually work with their computers and send their work to a station on the beach to print the work out. You could actually work on the beach; what people today might want to do. We're figuring out how people want to use space today, not how they used to use space."
Grand Canal Square
The square, at 10,000sq m, will be one of the largest public paved spaces in Dublin city. The central concept of the space is a "red carpet" of resin-glass paving, which will extend from a Daniel Libeskind-designed theatre into the historic waters of Grand Canal Dock. It is anticipated that the €8 million scheme will form a key part of the network of high-class public spaces planned for the docklands area. The Square's open design and connection with the new theatre will make it ideal for street theatre, outdoor performances and festivals.
Structured plantings of marsh vegetation - a respectful nod to the original wetland nature of the site - will contrast with the resin glass and granite paving. At night, angled light sticks designed by Schwartz, in collaboration with Edinburgh-based Spiers and Major Associates, will theatrically illuminate the square. There will be shops, restaurants and cafes at ground level.
Construction of Grand Canal Square is due to begin in late 2007, and it will be completed in phased tandem with the surrounding buildings. The final phase will coincide with the delivery of the new theatre in 2010.