Before long, family vacations may take you to the “redeemed” site of a former toxic dump. The unnatural history of such a park won’t necessarily be posted along the trail, either. More likely, the truth will be trapped beneath “cap and cover” vegetation and other peek-a-boo devices. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann refers to that process as “putting lipstick on a pig.”
Bargmann’s Charlottesville studio, Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain (D.I.R.T.), offers a provocative counter to conventional makeovers of polluted sites. In her work, re-thinking degraded terrain isn’t a process of burial and disguise.
“I feel committed to giving the landscape a voice,” she explains. That voice may whisper of abuse, but it also speaks of the people who spent their lives in the factories, mines and industries that have shaped the country. Sometimes, too, a butterfly emerges from an acid mine.
For instance, in the former coal town of Vintondale, Pennsylvania, Bargmann—in collaboration with environmental artist Stacy Levy and others—converted a toxic property into a surreal, 35-acre public park. The ongoing project converts acid-mine drainage, a heavy-metal stew swept via rain from the mine into streams, destroying aquatic life and degrading water quality. At this park, visitors don’t stand before pristine falls but instead witness the psychedelic flow of a sulfuric acid stream downgrading its poisons, beautifully. As the water moves through limestone cleansing channels, it changes like a sunset from fiery orange to green, then blue.
In addition to helping create works like the Vintondale project, the 43-year-old Bargmann is an associate professor of landscape architecture at UVA, and conducts research there as well. In 1999 she taught a class at the controversial Ivy Landfill, where students proposed options for the site’s future, such as a park for extreme sports. Often, says Bargmann, she’s a student too, always prepared to try out a new technology. Tools like bioremediation and phytoremediation—using microbes and plants to detoxify an area—are her brushes, while dirty sites are the canvas.
There’s no end to the canvas, either—the country’s growing supply of long-lived toxic materials has become more and more a part of everyday life. In the United States alone there are more than 600,000 brownfields (industrial waste sites), ranging in size from a quarter of an acre to 1,300 acres.
Restoring these sites is expensive. Often the responsible party is long gone and the issue mired in politics—something Bargmann, who doesn’t consider herself a message-bearing eco-activist, has never embraced. “It’s healthier for me,” she says, laughing, “to focus on the landscape itself.” In the case of Vintondale, Bargmann and crew worked largely pro bono.
Rejuvenating toxic sites wasn’t always her goal. Bargmann began her career with a degree in sculpture. When studio work began feeling “too precious” she turned to landscape architecture, with an eye toward industrial ruins. Now she works more with forces than form, and rarely does so alone. Drawings help with visualization, but the interdisciplinary nature of her work involves engineers, scientists, artists and others.
While the collaborative effort and its lofty goals attract much favorable media attention, there’s also controversy surrounding Bargmann’s work. Not every company—or community—cares to unveil certain aspects of its history. After all, her job involves letting existing materials show through, even as a site undergoes metamorphosis. In Front Royal, for example, it was slow-going for the Avtex Fibers Plant when it tried to get the community’s approval to remediate the site. Not everyone felt that the place should be preserved.
Currently, Bargmann is working with the local think tank E Squared, as well as on Superfund sites (while the Bush administration has nixed the Superfund, an Environmental Protection Agency grant has allowed UVA to create the Center of Expertise for Superfund Site Recycling, with which she’s involved). She also has a book coming out in 2002, titled Toxic Beauty.