Gary Hilderbrand has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1990 and is currently the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a leading landscape architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm was established in the late ‘90s and has since produced a portfolio of complex works that deal with challenging urban conditions, empower ecological systems, community life, campuses, or operate within delicate heritage situations.

Hilderbrand’s works and writings reflect a high susceptibility to the poetics and character of space on one side and systemic, future-oriented, trans-scale thinking on the other. His scholarly contributions include numerous essays and monographs, such as Making a Landscape of Continuity, 1997; The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism​, 1999; and Visible | Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand, 2013.

He has received several accolades, including the 2017 ASLA Design Medal and the Rome Prize. He is outstandingly knowledgeable, with whatever topic you scratch the surface, you can get a sense of how deep the rabbit hole goes. Every response from him could easily spin off into a full-fledged article or another insightful and focused interview.

His grasp of American and also European landscape architecture is impressive, leaving us with countless more questions we hope to explore with him in the future. We caught Gary in his natural habitat at the GSD, asked him some big questions and got even bigger answers, topped with a structured lecture on the key moments in the development of American landscape architecture throughout the past couple of decades.

But let’s start lightly.

Zaš Brezar: What does your work look like on a day-to-day basis?

Gary Hilderbrand: I have always enjoyed teaching, and I really loved practicing. I never thought too hard about one over the other. I would say that I teach from practice, and I practice from teaching. Practice is repeated, it’s iterative. You practice so that you get better at it. And I really like that aspect of the work.

Doug Reed and I started our firm in the late 90s. We were small, it was five people, then for about three years, we were 14. Nobody left, nobody came. It was quite stable, and we started getting wonderful commissions. We were learning how to build carefully. At that time, we hired a group of people who are still with us now, 25 years later, as our partners. So, that practice forms the basis for my teaching.

Conversation between Doug Reed and Gary Hilderbrand in the Leventritt Shrub & Vine Garden at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, 2022.

But I also hang around in school with people who teach history, theory, science, environment etc. This way, I’ve become conversant in many fields with many subfields, and I bring that back to the office with me.

Until two years ago, I was teaching part-time at GSD, where I typically worked with twelve students per year, focusing on one semester at a time. There were periods when I taught both semesters—studio in the fall and a seminar in the spring—but as my practice became more demanding, I reduced my teaching to one semester. This allowed me to engage deeply with twelve students each year. During that period, I maintained a routine of working five days a week at my office and spending two half-days at GSD. This pattern continued for many, many years.

When I became the chair of the department in 2022, it flipped, and now I spend 25% of the time in the office and 75% teaching. Although the job in the chairmanship is bottomless, I feel I am in a tremendous place. It is also a fantastic time to be a chair of landscape architecture because there is such great demand for the field. And, because we have such amazing teachers here, we’re producing great students who are also becoming teachers all over the US and beyond. It’s a gift to be a chair in this department.

How would you describe the critical shifts in practice and teaching from your perspective throughout the past 40 years?

When I was a graduate student, you had a strong emergence of an interest in history. And there’s an unfortunate aspect of this, which, in design, became known as postmodernism. The architecture field kind of acquired the label and a very thin way of thinking about references to history. That is not what I’m referring to. Postmodernism is about contingencies. It’s about doubt and about not being as sure as the modernists were that they knew how to remake the world after crises.

And so we were questioning. This was happening while I was a graduate student. We were acquiring things like the Cornell Journal for Architecture under Colin Rowe and then Fred Koetter, mapping cities the way they were. We were just getting our hands on these maps and learning how to do figure-ground, learn about the Nolli map, and so on.

We were learning about garden history for the first time. I didn’t read that as an undergraduate because it kind of didn’t exist. But by the time I was a graduate student, Dumbarton Oaks at Harvard was producing important scholarship every year, largely on European gardens. That was a place to start. As a student, I witnessed the scholarly discipline of landscape and garden history emerge.

Dumbarton Oaks had a huge influence, and John Dixon Hunt at Penn just as well; they were growing a field. Architecture had this 100 years before. It was incredible to see it. I remember one of many conversations with Pete Walker when he’d said something like “we had no books“.

We now have a million books. It’s remarkable to me, thanks in part to people like yourself and others; Robert Schäfer, Gordon Goff, people in journalism and in scholarship and publishing, pushing and meeting demand. Because the demand was created, we watched it be made and so we could greatly deepen interest in history.

When I finished my graduate degree, I took a part-time job researching for a historian on a park system. It happened to be an Olmsted Park system in Boston. That’s how interested in history I was. It was also a way for me to continue what I felt like when I was beginning as a graduate student. I had fantastic history teachers, particularly John Stilgoe and Albert Fein, and I certainly wanted to be a designer. I never, never, never didn’t want to be a designer. But I saw how history could help me be a designer.

Then, we saw the emergence of the culture around cultural landscapes. Just a decade later, you have a wing in the National Park Service here in the United States that’s figuring out the methodologies for managing change in a cultural landscape.

And then you have The Cultural Landscape Foundation, of which my partner, Doug, was a founding board member. We were participating directly in this phenomenon. But there’s another important thing about my time at GSD – while we were deeply interested in history and that period of the early and mid-80s, the class that graduated two years after me, which included Anita Berrizbeitia, now my faculty colleague and predecessor as Chair, also Julie Bargmann, Stephen Stimson and others, were suddenly interested in the post-industrial landscape. It came out of the blue to me. It was not a subject for me in 1985, and it became dominant in 1987. At the time, we were heavily influenced by Peter Walker, who was all about practice and figuration and an interest in history. Laurie Olin had a deeper interest in the history of a different kind and also learned how to make what you might call a highly designed public realm in the city. The Bryant Park project comes out of that period, 1985, and reasserts the history of Bryant Park. That alone is a kind of tactic which we hadn’t really seen a decade earlier. So we went from environmentalism to history to the post-industrial landscape in a very short time.

And that was an exciting time to become a landscape architect, without any doubt. That’s before Topos Magazine and way before Landezine. LAM – Landscape Architecture Magazine was grabbing a hold of it. It wasn’t what it is today, but it was helping. That shift allowed us to have a bigger embrace of both, the expressive, potential of the post-industrial landscape, the urban potential of that and with a deeper interest in history. I think we were beginning to be well-equipped to work in the city in a way that the 19th-century landscape architects were.

I firmly believe that Frederick Law Olmsted’s, let’s call it “branch” of landscape architecture, emerged as a reform movement in the American city. He saw the need in the same way that he saw the need for managing natural resources at Yosemite and Niagara Falls. He saw the need to provision the battlefields and clean them up. During the Civil War, when he worked for the United States Sanitation Commission, he saw the need to either preserve or rebuild natural systems in the city as a site for recuperation for citizens. It’s a public health concern. That’s what happened in the 19th century. And it begins to happen again in the late 20th century.

Then you have development: Developers build the city. I’ll take a little detour here: Doug and I resisted working for developers. We had great luck with institutions, especially art museums, colleges, and universities. That was our mainstay. Developer work was interesting, but we were cautious. And then little by little, we worked with good developers, such as Tishman Speyer or Strategic Property Partnership. They’re truly committed to building a great public realm; you can just build the city where everybody’s welcomed: the sidewalk, the city street, the square, the park, the alley. We began to really love that, and the projects got bigger and bigger, and we were able to build a lot of public realm at that point.

By the early 90s we had honed our persistent interest in the depth of the study of history of sites. Theory is emerging in landscape architecture. We have the post-industrial and the renewal of vast areas of the city that have been fallow after the removal of industry … You have the phenomenon of somebody like George Hargreaves who borrows from land art and sees the opportunity for design expression in all those things. And he was very persuasive about it. I think he created a body of work that we all look upon now as being vital in the portfolio of urban landscape architecture because it truly did give expression to characteristics of sites, and it rebuilt ecosystems. Whether it was in the Sydney Olympics or in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London later, in some of the work in San Jose in California … Then, the rivers in Chattanooga and the waterfronts in Louisville- these projects gave new life to cities. And they were kind of beautifully expressive of a way of thinking about or figuring, getting figuration to the land, making people see it. Amazing campus work at the University of Cincinnati, which Karen M’Closkey and others have commented on with real diligence, I think, really took root.

I’d have to talk about Michael van Valkenburgh at the same time. Michael was, I would say, as much as anyone, picking up on those impulses that I was describing: the interest in history, the interest in materiality, especially in the post-industrial, and always with deep knowledge and love of plants and their expressive potential. Then, you just see the progression towards greater complexity in the Don River Valley in Toronto or Brooklyn Bridge Park.

And then there’s the digital revolution. My first design studio project at Harvard in 1983 was on the Charles River. I had a six-foot-long desk and a six-foot-long piece of vellum or mylar. I had to draw a river by hand. It took days, and I got a decent project out of it today. Today, you and I could draw the river in half an hour. What’s happened is that we went from a place where the representation of the landscape was a challenging thing by hand, and it often didn’t look convincing, to a place where you can carry the river in your phone, in your pocket, and where we have geo-indexed data sets to produce massive amounts of information. But when we were trying to draw systems by hand, it was very difficult.

Do you encourage your students to be more manual and analogue occasionally, or does the digital realm prevail in teaching at GSD?

We teach both. You won’t succeed in the professional degree program here without acquiring superior digital skills. Our curriculum is set up to require that. You can do manual, analogue drawing in the Master of Design Studies. However, for the professional degree, we are preparing people for leadership, and we have to use the very best tools we have. That means everyone acquires these digital skills and they work through the telescopic scales of the geographic, the far reaches, and the detail systems that work in the city.

You have to be able to draw all of that and there’s an endless amount of information. Just like a 16th-century cartographer, one must know how to distill what one wants to draw. What’s the world we’re representing? The map is not the place. The map is our construction of the place. And that’s also true with our digital constructions. But the possibilities are now so riveting and endless that we can be in command of the information and lead the work. This is the massive change that came along with those different focus areas of interest that I was describing before.

You mentioned ‘expressiveness’. How do you see the expressiveness, the ’emplacement of spirit’ in the light of ecological aesthetics and inherent mimicry of Nature that is today widely present in the global profession? Will expressiveness be at a loss due to the necessary greening of urban fabric and unnecessary mimesis of Nature? It’s probably an endless question, but what would be your main coordinates for thinking about these dichotomies?

Another series of occurrences during my professional life was witnessing the change in how ecology works with landscape architecture. In my early career, if there was an ecologist in the room, it was probably for the evaluation of the project, and more than likely weighing in against the project, because we weren’t knowledgeable enough about ecological function. We should have been, but we weren’t. And they would have been telling us, “You’re doing harm to the systems here“.

The change occurred in the 90s when you had the emergence of disturbance ecology, urban ecology. And quite suddenly, at the end of that decade, with the Toronto Airport Downsview competition and the Staten Island Fresh Kills competition, every team suddenly had an ecologist on board. They went from one side of the table to the other. Today, you would never go anywhere without an ecologist. This is possibly one of the most significant changes in the last two and a half decades. We must take into account the systems on a site, whether they’re degraded or healthy.

Then I do think that the best work that we see incorporates all of the expressive characteristics that you and I were speaking about, combined with those measures that improve ecological health. So you have to know what ecological functions need to be brought up and foregrounded, and then you want to know how that matter, that material, those cycles can become expressive.

And that would have started in the 90s, what you would call “Eco-Revelatory Projects”. You want to be revealing the systems or let’s say, your concerns. Someone would say you want to exaggerate even the natural function so that we can see it. We can exploit it in a way that makes it healthier. We also make it available for experience.

You mentioned “telescopic scales” earlier. Can you elaborate on the term?

I will credit Pierre Bélanger with the word. He used the word in reviewing the work of students in my class who were thinking at the scale of a paver and the scale of the neighbourhood at the same time, and we were giving visual form and we were re-coding the language of traffic control and pedestrian safety in the street. Pierre mentioned this way of thinking telescopically – from the paving unit to the neighbourhood.

I also think about the same term concerning something I believe is truly existential for the field, which is that in landscape architecture, we have a tradition built on geography and planning, but that of working at the regional scale. At the territorial scale, you would say in Europe. And so how do we manage to have a grasp on the territory?

In our department, the third semester is the one which we call the territorial scale. Students are working to understand transportation, rivers, and drainage at the territorial scale. They’re still asked to design at the local scale. And that is, again, being telescopic – You may not be intervening in a river upstream, but you need to know what’s coming downstream.

The climate is changing, and we need to plant and invite more living species into the urban fabric. So cities will change and native vegetation will change due to non-native climate. Is there any relevance left to the word ‘native’ and will we finally become more prone to harnessing strangeness?

There will be more unknowns and more likely surprises. I have no faith in the term nativity. Native doesn’t really exist. We have known this for a long time, and we like to think about adaptability right now. The word adaptability is something that I came upon as a graduate student. My professor, Carl Steinitz, had us read Kevin Lynch’s theories on adaptability from around 1960 at MIT.

Kevin Lynch is known for being concerned about how we describe the city as a visual environment, as a sensible environment. He was, in planning terms, all interested in systems that could be adaptable for a different future. And that seemed a bit nebulous to me at the time. Now, I understand it very well because the curves on temperature are going up so fast. We’re past 1.5 degrees change in Celsius. We’re considering what it would be like at plus three degrees or even plus four degrees. So there’s a lot of unknowns. As a designer, this excites me because we have to think of adapting ourselves and our palette. We’ve got problems ahead. But it means we’ll have to work harder to imagine a future that can survive this. That’s what we’re working on here at Harvard.

I mentioned before that the work of the 19th century in the city was adapting the city to get back to a place where natural systems could be recuperated. We’ve always done adaptation. We have to do it now, but we have to do it much more urgently.

When you teach, how relevant are, still, typologies?

I taught plants for many years and I taught them basically through spatial typologies. Whether it be the hedge, the grove, Bosco, or the orchard. We did that for a long time here. It was a way of building a kind of language for design thinking, and meanwhile, you would teach a palette of plants along with that. So the typology was convenient in a sense because it was recognizable, it was graphic. You could draw it, you could put it in a model form and so on.

I was influenced by Rafael Moneo in this because he writes beautifully about typology, saying that the type is a received, concrete knowledge of tested forms that are there for us to break. They’re there for us to move on from, to transform, to translate. I like that as it gives me room to keep typologies around, but as a form of knowledge that we move on from and that we translate into something else.

Your portfolio with Reed Hilderbrand exudes a sense of timelessness and seems refreshingly resistant to the lure of flashy images and fleeting trends, which I mean in the best way possible. There’s a powerful presence of originality and a deep connection to the uniqueness of each place you design. Do you consciously steer away from designing overhyped landscapes filled with features and shapes, or is this an approach that comes naturally without much thought?

It’s a very cogent observation. You’ve uncovered something of an intention. We’ve competed for work that required a tremendous amount of busyness, physical activity and draws of entertainment. Let’s say we don’t do well in those contests. Even with clients that we’ve worked with for a while, when they begin to ask us about the entertainment side of things, we wouldn’t go so well. I think what we’re really interested in is a quieter expression and you’ve picked up on it. I think the world is too cacophonous, and I think it’s in our power to calm a place. We don’t want to build distractions, so you don’t see a lot of showiness.

What advice would you give to young landscape architects?

It’s such an amazing time for landscape architecture because the work we do is central to the twin crises of climate and justice. Most of the money on climate research is going to mitigation. But what we do is adaptation. We have to participate in mitigation. If we don’t solve mitigation, we won’t be here for very long. But in the meantime, if we don’t do coastal adaptation, a lot of people are in harm’s way. I think that gap between the need for adaptation and the quest for altering the climate or doing massive carbon drawdown to the degree that we remove greenhouse gases from the sky… That gap is the one that I worry about. That’s the one where we’re trying to get more visible. That’s why we had a conference called ‘Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All?‘ at the GSD. The forest has a great deal to do with storing carbon, but only if we manage it well. That is the opportunity that we have in front of us.

I think our students are truly excited about that. They come in a bit radicalized around issues of climate and environment and justice, but we give them the tools they need to act with, so, in a way, we are building an army of climate and justice warriors.

Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? | Opening Remarks by Gary Hilderbrand

Concerning ecology and the climate crisis, we can’t be so overcome with grief that we become incapacitated. We have to believe that we can make a difference. And I believe our students leave here believing that—for the most part, they really get drilled on climate here. Every student in our curriculum is required to take the Climate by Design course. We’re trying to prepare students for an activist practice. Regarding activism: We have 50 student groups in a building of 900 students. It is an activist population. We’re trying to get them to be refined and prepared for the unexpected, with an open mind but with conviction around the need for adaptation. In our core studios, they are completely oriented towards the climate crisis. And what we all do about it. So I do think that there’s optimism in this, and I think they seem ready to go to work.

Published on September 14, 2024

Projects involving Reed Hilderbrand