Ian
McHarg sits on a shaded campus bench and motions for the photographer
to give him a minute. The walk here from the elevator at the University
of Pennsylvania’s
Meyerson Hall is not far—not even 100 yards—but his almost 80-year-old
lung (he has only one), scarred from tuberculosis, six decades of
smoking, and a recent bout of pneumonia, has not recovered from
the modest effort. Still tall, still immaculately attired and groomed,
he maintains the carriage, if not the form, of a powerful, virile,
vital man. People passing by on Locust Walk, through the campus
he and a few former students helped redesign, pause and try to identify
him. Unable to do so, they move quietly on. Now McHarg’s breathing
begins to slow and deepen. His opaque blue eyes, eyes that still
sparkle when he speaks of Lewis Mumford or Margaret Mead or Charles
Eliot, are calm, betraying only an unmistakable shade of annoyance
that it has come, after all this time, to this.
“Right now
I
see him as very sad,” says Niall Kirkwood, a landscape
architect and fellow Scot who studied with McHarg in the 1980s and
who, like so many of McHarg’s former students, acknowledges a huge
debt to his former mentor. Today Kirkwood teaches at the Design
School at Harvard. He still has his notes from his days at Penn
and often refers to them for direction and inspiration. “I think
he wishes he had more strength, more influence, and more disciples,”
Kirkwood adds. “Most of all, I think he wishes he had more time.”
“There’s
a wonderful story about Capability Brown, bloody marvelous landscape
architect in England,” says Ian McHarg. His blue woolen suit, a
bit faded, is crisply pressed. His striped tie is pulled tight,
pressing against a weathered neck.
He still enjoys telling stories, which he does with
a studied, military cadence, perhaps acquired from his seven years
of service as a paratroop officer and saboteur during World War
II, a tour of duty that brought him to action in North Africa, Italy,
France, and Greece. “The story tells that he was met by an English
lady who said she had a large estate in the south of Ireland. ‘Mr.
Brown,’ she says, ‘would you come down there and do a plan for me?’
‘No, Madam, I can’t,’ he says. ‘I haven’t finished England yet.’”
It is a Tuesday
morning in early April. McHarg, professor emeritus at Penn since
he was invited to resign in 1985, is back behind his office desk
after our stroll outside. Although he no longer teaches, he still
shows up as often as he can. One week ago he returned
from Tokyo, where he received the 2000 Japan Prize. He pauses to
munch a doughnut and sip his coffee, removing from beneath his nose
the plastic tube that connects him to an oxygen tank. His office
sits in overgrown, loosely organized clutter, like the eighteenth-century
gardens that McHarg so dearly loves. The tapes from his 1960s TV
series The House We Live In—which McHarg ransomed from the Library
of Congress for $1,000, saving them from destruction—sit stacked
on overburdened bookshelves alongside titles like The No Growth
Society, The Urban Condition, and Chinese Classical Gardens of Suzhou.
“I haven’t finished England yet,” McHarg repeats, his body, swelling
in contained laughter. “Jesus Christ. That’s wonderful.”
There was a
time, a very long time, when every-one on the Penn campus—and much
of the rest of the world—knew Ian McHarg. He was a char-ismatic
professor, the chairman of the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania’s department
of landscape architecture, a national television personality, and
a leader of the environmental movement. Above all, he was the author
of Design with Nature,
the 1969 volume that exhorted designers to conform
to, rather than compete with, nature. Handsome and eccentric, with
a force of personality barely contained in his solid, Scottish,
six-foot-two frame, McHarg had the temerity to tell an assembly
of Fortune 500 corporate executives that the time had come for American
industry to be “toilet trained.” In a 1970 letter, he suggested
that the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers and all his staff
consider committing hara-kiri as atonement for their environmental
excesses. With his formidable character, booming voice, almost impenetrable
Scottish accent, and evangelical engagement with the natural world,
McHarg enjoyed a worldwide reputation as an inspiring, eclectic,
and at times irascible teacher and leader.
“The most exciting
thing about Ian is that he’s completely fresh in his thinking,”
says Leslie Sauer, who studied with McHarg at Penn and also worked
with him at the firm Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd in the 1970s.
Sauer works as a landscape designer at Andropogon in Philadelphia,
a firm founded by four Mc-Hargians and named after Andropogon virginicus,
a field grass that is often among the first flora to colonize damaged
landscapes and begin environmental healing. She still considers
herself “a daughter of Design with Nature.”
“Ian didn’t
start with old models,” she says. “His is truly a new way of looking
at things. What is remarkable is just how ferocious he can be about
ecological issues. But the reality of what he did as a designer
was to listen—listen to the site, listen to the cultural information—and
assume that what he heard was much more important than anything
his ego or internal creative process could come up with.”
McHarg’s students
and colleagues still speak of him with unbounded respect and affection.
And they do so in the present tense. Apart from his health, McHarg
and his habits are little changed. He still meanders in his anecdotes,
asking friends, and occasionally interviewers, to prod his memory
just as he once asked his students to do. He still enjoys peppering
his lectures with dirty jokes. The profession that he almost single-handedly
refashioned—molded in his own, eco-conscious image—continues to
cherish his theories and teaching. But it seems to have outgrown
its need for his benign but intractable ministry. “Ian’s contribution
to de-sign and to ecology has been enormous,” says Laurie Olin,
a Philadelphia–based landscape architect who taught with McHarg
at Penn in the 1980s and still teaches there today. “He got much
of the world to view the earth through ecological glasses. A lot
of current environmental legislation and methodology is a direct
result of Ian’s work. But there has been an evolution in the profession
since the 1970s. We don’t map things with the same numbing regularity
as we once did, because much of the data is implicit. And we don’t
believe, as some of Ian’s early students did, that a design or formal
expression necessarily needs to look like nature.”
In a career
that spans five decades, McHarg has participated in more than 150
landscape-design projects, many of them exemplary. The Wallace,
McHarg, Roberts, and Todd 1965 report to the I-95 planning commission
helped divine an ecologically and economically viable route for
that highway’s path between New Jersey’s Delaware and Raritan rivers.
McHarg’s 1974 design for the northwestern Houston suburb of Woodlands—today
a community of 50,000 nestled in a forest of indigenous trees and
plants—stands as an impeccable prototype of environmental analysis
and visionary watershed management.
Yet McHarg has
earned prominence for his method, rather than for any single project.
The McHarg method dictates that a broad selection of environmental
and human factors be charted on a series of overlay maps, and that
an attentive analysis of these interdependent systems will reveal
whether a site is suitable for development, and what form that development
should take. It is like taking the vital signs of the earth, an
earth of which man is part, but not master. His method, achieved
with mylar transparencies and magic markers, anticipated computer-based
geographic information systems (GIS), perhaps the single most important
tool in urban planning today.
McHarg was
also respected—and in some cases revered—for the tenacity with which
he disseminated his method through his teaching. “Once Ian gets
you into his clutches, your entire world view changes,” says Edmund
Hollander, a Manhattan–based landscape architect who studied at
Penn with McHarg and later taught there with him in the 1980s. “He
is this wild Scottish genius who has a vision about how the earth
should be ordered, and who can’t be bothered by day-to-day practical
affairs. If a student would ask him an apparently simple question
about how to get from point A to point B in a project, Ian would
launch off into a 10-minute existential answer that seemed to have
nothing to do with the question asked. But if you listened very
closely, you realized that while Ian wasn’t giving you the answer,
he was giving you the process, the map by which you could find your
way: how to design things that complement the earth and are not
a blot upon it.”
In 1959, in
his fourth year as department head at the newly created department
of landscape architecture at Penn, McHarg created a course entitled
“Man and Environment.” The premise of the course was beguilingly
simple: examine the evolution of matter, life, and man. Towards
this end, McHarg enlisted geologists, hydrologists, botanists, wildlife
specialists, climatologists, physiologists, anthropologists, and
theologists to speak to his students. McHarg gave the opening and
closing lectures. For the rest of the semester, he served as interlocutor
and interpreter for his experts.
“Man and Environment”
was not only a big draw on campus. In 1960, one year into the course,
McHarg was approached by a producer from a local CBS affiliate,
who proposed that McHarg’s multidisciplinary eco-salon be transformed
into a television series. The result was The House We Live In. McHarg,
elegant and irrepressible, was host and interviewer, smoking and
sniffing as he prodded his guests—including biologist Sir Julian
Huxley, astronomer Harlow Shapley, psychologist Erich Fromm, and
anthropologist Margaret Mead—toward ever-greater insights. The show
enjoyed two 12-episode seasons with CBS and was later syndicated
through PBS. In the late 1960s, with the twin currents of antiwar
and ecological activism in-undating American university campuses,
McHarg became a radical yet uncommonly elegant spokesperson, a sui
generis, cigarette-smoking, self-appointed paladin of the natural
world. He used his well-earned prestige—and well-cultivated idiosyncrasies—as
a bully pulpit from which he excoriated the “scabrous, syphilitic
bastards” who were “defiling the earth.” Students, environmentalists,
and the media were in awe of him.
McHarg’s genius
has always lain more in theory and observation than in design technique.
He has always been a big-picture person, but one gifted with an
almost divine focus. Today, his health failing, his vision is even
broader but far less defined. He has taken to writing books of poetry
for children and adults, coddling readers of all ages in his love
of the earth. He likes to reminisce, about his own career, about
the evolution of his profession toward a stewardship of the earth—a
turn for which he takes credit. “It’s a little bit like taking credit
for discovering the obvious,” he says. “But in my lifetime we have
certainly gone from oblivion to awareness. Even obdurate architectural
magazines are now talking about buildings being naturally lit, naturally
cooled, naturally heated, producing some of their own energies.
This is the very antithesis of modern architecture.”
When he speaks
about the future, it is usually in overarching and spiritually ecological
terms. He delivers stern environmental homilies now, in place of
lectures. “It’s very presumptuous to think that man can improve
on nature,” he says. “Why don’t we just settle for maintaining that
which is good? We should take care about those areas that fix carbon,”
he says, referring to organisms and ecosystems that remove carbon
dioxide from the environment and store it. “The rain forest, the
coral reefs—they’re limestone, for God’s sake—estuaries with clams
and mussels, lovely things that fix carbon in their shells and bodies.
The most useful human role here would be just to put up a bloody
fence and prevent their destruction.”
Last October,
51 years after he finished his master’s in landscape architecture
at Harvard—a place where he complains he “didn’t have a single bloody
course in the natural sciences”—the Harvard School of Design invited
McHarg to deliver the third annual Charles Eliot lecture. The lecture
was supposed to be about Eliot, a prodigy of landscape design who
died in 1897 at age 38, and a man whom McHarg recognizes as his
practical and spiritual forebear. McHarg began the lecture as he
has al-ways done, comparing the hall to a Presbyterian church, complaining
that it was more fit for a sermon than a lecture, and that there
was no place on the lectern to rest his glass of Char-donnay. He
tried to read from notes, losing his place each time he drifted
off into anecdote. He put on and removed his eyeglasses at least
once a minute. It wasn’t age or senility; he’d done this at Penn
in the Seventies and Eighties. Still, many in the auditorium, especially
the students who’d heard of McHarg but weren’t certain until now
whether he was still alive, grew impatient. But halfway through,
McHarg put aside his notes, stepped away from the podium, stopped
lecturing and began performing the role that he had perfected in
almost half a century of teaching: irascible, boisterous, irreverent,
overreaching, overpreaching Ian McHarg. For a moment, the crowd
loved him.
McHarg has
a wife and two sons aged 12 and 17. He’d like to see them finish
college. He’d like to see genetic research create a new lung to
replace the one damaged by the tuberculosis he caught at Harvard
in 1950. He’d like to stick around to witness a new age of design—as
if he were putting off contemplating what he might do with the heavens
because he, in the spirit of Capability Brown, hasn’t finished earth
yet. “At the moment I am an optimist,” he avers. “I survived seven
years of my life as a soldier, when I never expected to see the
next morning. I survived tuberculosis. A few years ago I survived
an aortic aneurysm. Who would have expected that some little boy
out of Clydebank, Scotland, would become the winner of the Japan
Prize? It’s unbelievable, by all measures of magic.
“Wouldn’t it
be wonderful if we could look back at the earth from space and see
nothing but bent backs?” he says, wistfully, his voice thinning,
just slightly, in inevitable fatigue. “An incredible sight. Populations
all over the world, planting trees, planting plants—the greening
of the earth. To bend the back and bring forth fruit.” He pauses
again, his eyes glowing from within as he draws a deep breath. For
a moment, McHarg is transported back to his youth, to the Presbyterian
church where he worshipped, and to its minister, John M. Graham,
who taught him that the word “enthusiasm” meant “filled with the
spirit of God.” “Mankind is a magical species,” McHarg says. “If
only we could get him to behave.”
Ken Shulman
contributes the New York Times, Artnews, and
National Public Radio. .
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