A hill is a valuable resource in the flatlands of Yolo County, even if it's a mountain of trash. And a 720-acre landfill with 25 million cubic yards of garbage is precious public open space. But a dump is just a dump--until you unleash the creative energies of 18 landscape architects-in-training. That's what Associate Professor Heath Schenker did this spring in her "Art of the Environment" class.
This was the project she put before her class: In the year 2021, the Yolo County landfill is expected to reach its capacity and be closed; figure out how to turn it into a usable and inviting public space--in other words, into a work of environmental art.
"It is an obvious opportunity for usable open space of some sort, and there aren't any plans for it at this time," said Schenker. "So we approached this as landscape architects thinking about it in terms of aesthetics and human use--things that aren't really being considered now as it's being built as a cost-efficient waste-management project. The idea was to get the students really thinking like environmental artists as they created a public park."
The landfill is currently being constructed as a series of 80-foot-high "cells"--units with a multi-layered plastic lining on the bottom and on the top and compacted garbage in between. Pipes remove methane gas and leachate from the cells. Students were free to propose different cell sizes and shapes up to 120 feet high but were required to maintain the existing methane facility and leachate ponds and take into consideration current regulations. The projects had to provide for traffic, parking and pedestrian circulation.
To keep the emphasis on art, students were asked to focus on more passive uses for the site--like hiking, biking, bird watching and amphitheaters; sports facilities weren't allowed. "They have lots of experience of that sort in other classes, where we most often take the functional approach to design."
An artistic approach is, however, quite appropriate, said Schenker. Landscape architects find it much easier to argue for a project on functional, economic or even ecological grounds; aesthetics is often the hardest quality to justify. Even so, beauty is squarely in their purview. While ecologists are most knowledgeable about habitat and engineers about structural integrity, it is the responsibility of the landscape architect to ensure a project is aesthetically pleasing, said Schenker.
The students' solutions to the projects ranged from the fanciful to the monumental, with some of the more successful falling within two approaches. In one approach, students clearly reacted to the site, "the big sky and views," said Schenker. An example of this was John Suesens' project. He tied the site to the surrounding Sacramento Valley by sculpting the land to mimic the Sierra Nevada to the east, Sutter Buttes to the north, Mount Diablo to the south and the Berryessa hills to the west.
Another approach paid homage to the history of the site, to the trash itself. Kristin Personett, for example, cut away the hillsides in places to reveal the sedimentary-like layering of trash and the history of our garbage.
Schenker's hopeful that by 2021 some consideration may be brought to public use of the site. There's certainly precedent in Northern California, notably the Berkeley Marina Park, built on an old dump, and Byxbee Park, on the closed portion of a landfill near East Palo Alto. Schenker has proposed that a landscape architect-in-residence be assigned to the Yolo County site to focus attention on the landfill as a resource.
It's certainly been a resource for her class. Schenker said the project has encouraged her students to look for beauty and possibility in places that are considered ugly and throw-away.
