LSA 220- Reflection I

September 2014
Rafael Lopez Pegoraro
Reflection: The Lurie Park
As designers we always have to choose between what we think is good and what we think is
bad. This ability only comes with experience because our ideas of good and bad design decisions are
built upon the work of others designers decisions. As a consequence of that the search for the
characteristics of a good landscape is constant, and if a city falls in love with a garden ten years past its
inauguration it means that certainly a few of these characteristics are hidden there somewhere.
Therefore, the success of Lurie Park in Chicago as presented in the article wrote by Thaisa Way to the
Landscape Architecture Magazine, could be a consequence of three main characteristics.
The First characteristic is the strong relationship between the garden and its place of insertion.
The project, as Way says, refers to the local landscape of Midwest marsh lands and prairies (LAM,
September 2014). It also has a careful insertion that was thought across scales, so it reinforces its
importance as an urban garden in a big city but also mediates the access to other elements of the
Millennium Park, the immediate scale where it is contained, such as works of Frank Gehry and Renzo
Piano. The second characteristic is the historic relationship of the park with that specific place. This
relationship starts with an elegant reference to the past of the city through what Way defined as an
interpretative use of industrial materials (LAM, September 2014). But this historical relationship goes
further to the notion of changing history and its landscape. This project epitomizes a sequence of
changes to improve our built environment because it transformed several floors of parking, tunnels and
tracks (LAM, September 2104) in a garden that is the oppose of what that hostile space used to be.
Finally, the last characteristic is that the park does not sub estimate the user. This consideration
happens in the level of the meanings because the way the garden communicates is not intended to be
direct and didactic; it is rather indirect as a hidden text to be discovered by the user through the use of
abstraction and articulation of references. And in the programmatic level, what causes changes over
time that responds to different uses of the park, such as the pavement of the garden path that was
changed due its overuse or lightening changes.
From all above it can be seen that the respect to place insertion, the articulation with the history
of the place and the consideration of the user are components of a successful project as Laurie Garden.
These characteristics certainly can be used to set guidelines for new projects and help designers to make
good choices.