Can a tough girl from New Jersey teach the EPA how to make Superfund sites live and breathe again?
Metropolis
May 2003
Charlottesville, Virginia, is a picturesque town in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains. Every year thousands of tourist come here to visit its plantations and horse farms, to drive the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway and to stroll through University of Virginia¹s colonnaded campus. Eventually, they make their way over to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson¹s estate teeming with the orchards, vineyards, and ornamental groves that he himself once tended. ³There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me,² the founding father once said‹a sentiment much evidenced in his lush and verdant grounds.
Landscape architect Julie Bargmann, on the other hand, flees Charlottesville whenever it is humanly possible. On these jaunts she escapes Albemarle County, where she is an associate professor at University of Virginia, to seek landscapes of immense beauty and design potential: derelict mines, toxic dumps, rank landfills, and most recently, Superfund sites. This vast terrain of waste is to Bargmann what gardens were to Jefferson‹a perverse passion. ³I love the by-products,² she says. ³That¹s my obsession.²
³The two ends of my barbell are designer-artist and political animal,² Bargmann says from her cell phone. It¹s mid-January and the connection is scratchy because she¹s driving a van of UVA students on a field trip to Hagerstown, Maryland. The students have already begun to see their world through Bargmann¹s eyes: a landscape stripped of pastoral idealism. She begins each course by projecting a slide of a refinery-choked stretch of the Meadowlands as seen through an oily haze. Sometimes she does this dressed in ³the spacesuit²‹a decontamination outfit‹and a hardhat. ³Listen guys. I consider this beautiful,² she will say of the refineries, watching the students cock their heads to the side in puzzlement. ³This is where we are starting from.²
Now, in the van, the students prepare to hike in the foothills of an Environmental Protection Superfund site, one ravaged by years of fertilizer and pesticide production. While there, they will consider how a landscape can be transformed, a process that reaches far beyond simply Band-Aiding the site and walking away. For a site to be completely healed it must once again become viable to the community it serves. And it should expose or at least recognize its industrial past. ³This process is a culturally significant act, which is completely foreign to the EPA who never considers the site¹s next use,² Bargmann says. That Bargmann should choose a barbell to describe her mission‹as opposed to say, a spectrum‹is apt for many reasons. For one, the efforts undertaken to actually build any of her projects are prodigious economically, politically, and physically; they are also fraught with bureaucracy, denial, and shame. For another, the typical process of greening over a contaminated site often hides its history; Bargmann¹s heavy lifting is to expose how it became toxic in the first place. From her perspective there¹s something dishonest and superficial about giving a site¹s (fabricated) physical appearance precedence over its function and history. ³Reducing landscapes to visual terms is what I face all of the time,² she says. ³It¹s how a landscape breathes that constitutes its beauty.² In this respect her work is no different from Thomas Jefferson¹s Monticello (³The guy was fucking crazy and the site is an ingenious working landscape,² she says. ³Talk about a machine‹it works.²) ³My role is as catalyst,² she adds. ³How can a landscape of disturbance be reset and begin flowing again?²
Bargmann is perhaps best known for Testing the Waters, a 35-acre park on a former coal mine in Vintondale, Pensylvannia. Her design aestheticized the conversion of acid runoff from the region¹s abandoned mines into clean water with a series of filtering pools. For the project she enlisted an artist, a historian, a hydrologist, and most important, the citizens of Vintondale, whose volunteer efforts were necessary to build and tend the finished park. Whereas Vintondale was a grass roots effort, Revitalizing River Rouge was a massive corporate undertaking. If completed, it will breath life again into the monstrous 1,200-acre Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, Michigan. For these projects Bargmann was awarded the 2001 National Design Award; she has been called one of the most influential people of the 21st century by Time and CNN.
To understand what drives 45-year-old Bargmann, it helps to have lived in New Jersey‹Bargmann is from Westfield. It also helps to be a fan of Charles Sheeler¹s Precisionist paintings and Bernd and Hilla Becher¹s industrial photographs. However, it is essential to understand the legacy of the late earthworks artist Robert Smithson. ³It¹s been 25 years since Smithson¹s been dead, and I¹m still trying to build upon his work,² Bargmann says. ³He¹s my hero.²
Smithson was the progenitor an important art movement linking pre-historical land formations with apocalyptic postindustrial wastelands. His most famous earthwork is the monumental Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot basalt, limestone, rock, and earth breakwater that recently resurfaced from the northeastern waters of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah.
In his exuberant 1967 essay, ³A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,² Smithson celebrates what he calls non-sites‹pumping derricks, used car lots, and abandoned factories‹and wryly compares bleak Passaic to Rome. ³Actually, Passaic Center was no center‹it was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void,² he writes. ³What a great place for a gallery!² Bargmann¹s land reclamation projects are an extention of this viewpoint, a philosophy in which there is no privileged landscape.
³Julie is one of the leading figures in landscape architecture whose specialty has become the remediation of brownfields, [contaminated properties], and that circles back to her interest in Smithson,² says John Beardsley, senior lecturer at Harvard University¹s landscape architecture program and author of Earthworks and Beyond. ³Smithson recognized that the regeneration of a site is not only an environmental issue but a social and artistic issue as well.²
Bargmann lives in a loft in a 1929 converted Coca-Cola bottling plant in a deceptively quaint part of Charlottesville she calls ³the hood‹if you can believe that.² I met her there on a frigid January morning. The loft was as spotless as a house for sale and was flooded with sunlight. The mise-en-scene‹furniture, kitchen, roof deck carpeted in Astroturf‹was 1950s retro. Fella Yella, her frenetic canary, chirped and squawked from an ornate green cage.
Bargmann had just emerged from the shower. Her bleach-blond hair was still wet, revealing a row of black roots trying to reclaim their place in an otherwise artificial mane. Her blue eyes sparkled, rimmed with mascara thecolor of slag. She poured herself a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and described her ³brand-spanking new² work: Superfund sites. Last summer the EPA hired Bargmann and the environmental consulting group E-2 to scout 14 Superfund sites in 11 states for potential places for the EPA¹s pilot Superfund Redevelopment Initiative program. Instead of ³the old contain it, fence it, walk away,² Bargmann and E-2 will work with the local community to plan the site¹s next use. When asked why someone with her renown would choose such low-profile workat this point in her career she says, ³ So I can sleep at night!² Bargmann considers herself a critical practitioner, not a service provider. She doesn¹t need to ³own² the work.
³It¹s so depressing!² she says. ³Industry was the lifeblood of the town. You take that out of the equation and oh, it¹s so horrible. What you really want to do is reclaim the town, and that¹s when you really feel terrible.² Take Gary, Indiana, where Bargmann recently spent a weekend. Innocuous-looking fields of brown grass‹ growing on top of a 25-foot-deep landfill that pre-dated the 1977 sanitary landfill laws‹didn¹t appear toxic at all.³The only clue we had was a fence with a small sign that labeled it a Superfund site,² she says. The downtown, however, resembled a city that had been bombed. ³We saw vacant apartments, vacant stores. Everything was vacant, vacant, vacant. The entire city was a Superfund site.² When working with towns like Gary, her role is healer, and not only for the physical land but for its inhabitants. ³When the community tells you the story of their town, they totally light up,² Bargmann says. ³They were incredibly proud of that landscape, and now they¹re ashamed. It¹s a temporal context. If you look at geological time, its industrial history is only a blip on the screen.²
While six of Bargmann¹s previous landscape remediation projects have been realized (i.e. built), her Superfund work is more or less process-driven: frameworks intended to broaden the myopic focus with which the ³overworked,² and ²understaffed² EPA is currently reclaiming them. Actually, containing is more to the point. According to Bargmann‹and this is vintage Bargmann‹industry and indeed, government, is content to ³hog and haul² and ³cap and cover² over a contaminated site, a veneering process she calls ³putting lipstick on a pig.² For Bargmann this simplistic façade-building misses the point entirely which is, in a nutshell, transparency: to revive a dying place by exposing rather than denying its industrial history.
Bargmann often equates the remediation process to coming out of the closet. This is why, when working with industry, her role is to non-judgmentally goad companies into fessing up, even though doing so can result in severe financial repercussions. When working with depressed Superfund towns like Gary, her role is healer, and not only for the physical land but for its inhabitants, who have grown ashamed of their once illustrative industrial past.
The first Superfund site Bargmann investigated was the defunct 200-acre Roebling steel plant on the Delaware River in Trenton, New Jersey. Roebling Steel operated from 1906 until the 1980s, polluting the river with black slag and infecting factory buildings with arsenic and lead. Today Roebling is one of ten Superfund sites chosen by the EPA as a pilot for its eventual re-use. After Bargmann learned about the site from a graduate student¹s thesis, she begged the E.P.A. for permission to visit the site with her students. Although she often jokes that she is ³kept² by the university, the academic clout often validates her mission and usually, after some pleading, she is indeed granted the access she doubts she would have obtained otherwise.
But that access is limited. At Roebling, for example, the students were permitted only 45 minutes on site. Before a Superfund expedition, Bargmann, takes an aerial map of the site and parcels it into sections, something she calls a ³Superfund quilt.² Then she assigns each square to a student. Dressed in yellow rubber boots, hard hats, surgical masks, and glasses with side protectors, the students, who are forbidden to wander and who are tracked the entire time, are asked to recommend suggestions for how the site can once again be used by the community. While Roebling is an on-going academic study, Bargmann wants to transform another Superfund site, the HOD landfill in Antioch, Illinois, into a colossal park that would put playfields on landfills, farm methane to heat the local high school, and use leachate and storm-water-treatment filtering pools to revitalize the creek and surrounding wetlands. Part of the park¹s allure will be watching the toxic parts diminish.
Bargmann is the sixth of eight ³hyper-achieving² children. Her father was a plastics salesman in Toledo before moving to New Jersey. Her mother was a homemaker who taught her crafts such as quilting. ³I was born with a crochet hook in my hand,² she says with a smile. When it was time for college, Bargmann decided to study sculpture at Carnegie Mellon because the department there valued traditional crafts. After college she floated around, tending bar and trudging through life in what she calls her ³black hole period.² When, in the early 1980s, someone suggested she study landscape architecture, her reaction was ³What the HELL is that?²
Harvard¹s graduate department of landscape architecture is not the kind of program where you write ³Black Hole Period² on your application and are accepted; Bargmann got in on the strength of her sculpture portfolio. ³Landscape architecture is such a complete goulash of students,² she says. ³It¹s such a catch-all discipline, which is its strength and its identity crisis,² she says. Here she studied with Michael van Valkenburgh, whom she still considers her mentor, and also worked for his firm, designing public parks and private gardens. After a year at the American Academy in Rome, she was assistant professor of landscape architecture at University of Minnesota for three years. In 1993 Bargmann received a sizable research grant to study mined-land reclamation across the United States. ³I turned it into a road trip,¹ she says. Basically, I wanted to look at mined landscapes, and I did a huge loop around the country, which is when project D.I.R.T. started.²
D.I.R.T. is Bargmann¹s present design studio, a collaborative venture founded in 1992 and responsible for the reuse of such industrial sites as Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Ravenswood Quarry Winery in Sonoma, and Turtle Creek Water Works, in Dallas. ³I have a million acronyms [for D.I.R.T.], which confuses the fuck out of everyone,² Bargmann says with a laugh, rattling them off: Design Investigation Reclaiming Terrain; Doing Industry Research Together; and Dump It Right There. Last year the firm and its collaborators exhibited sandblasted glass etchings of Testing the Waters at last year¹s Documenta 11, perhaps the most important art show in the world due to its uncanny ability to ignite trends, such as, perhaps, viewing landscape architecture as art.
After lunch in the ¹hood, we drive over to D.I.R.T. in Bargmann¹s lustrous black ¹62 Comet. (³I drive like a granny and there are no seatbelts.²) The studio is located in the rafters of a fairly raw converted barn with unfinished wooden slat floors. Looking out the window to the east is a coal tipple. On the train tracks below, long coal cars roll past. And to the south rise the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Inside, drafting tables are suspended by cable wires. Shelves of hard hats, glass jars filled with ³yellow boy,² (a by-product of acid mine drainage) and a mold used for building the Roebling Bridge line the walls. Topographic maps, aerial photos, and collaged images of DIRT projects are everywhere. We sit together at a drafting table until dusk discussing her projects, map by map. Bargmann¹s fastidiously detailed portfolio belies her seemingly casual persona. Although she curses like a man in a hardhat‹and speaks a Jersey slang in which words like dudes, chicks, sissy, and shebang are prominent‹Bargmann¹s seriousness of intent is powerful.
Bargmann reveals two working industrial plants that are Superfund sites in every way but designation. The government, she believes, will never test such sites because if they test positive, so to speak, they will have to shut down. She shakes her head. ³There are over a million derelict sites,² she says. ³Three hundred thousand alone are abandoned mines. Only fifteen hundred are on the Superfund¹s national priority list.²
One imagines the frustration that must accompany Bargmann¹s efforts. To quote from her D.I.R.T. portfolio: ³There are many days when I bang heads with federal agents, corporate leaders, and city officials, and I wish I was just making gardens for the rich and famous. But then I remember my students, and I put my hardhat back on and try again.²
We drive to Crozet, a small town nestled below the mountains, for dinner. Over a glass of wine, Bargmann, who insists on paying her student-employees though they¹d probably work as unpaid interns, says many architects and designers ³say collaboration, but what they really mean is co-operation.² When Bargmann says collaboration she means a cross-discipline endeavor. In her UVA tenure review, 47 design firms, environmental consultants, scientists, artists, and historians are credited as collaborators; one suspects the number is ever growing.
Right now, however, Bargmann is the It Girl, the reigning toxic beauty queen of brownfield remediation. ³Julie didn¹t invent this, and her work is a result of collaborative input, but she¹s very effective at introducing complicated issues to the public,² Beardsley says. ³She¹s got a great public persona.² Bargmann concurs: ³All the work I do is collaborative. I¹ve become the spokesperson‹for better or worse.²
But even in the spotlight, with the power of the media behind her, Bargmann, like an oncologist, accepts the limitations of her work. ³I don¹t think I¹ll build many sites in my lifetime. They¹re gonna do them,² she concedes, referring to her students. In this she conjures the words of environmental philosopher Frederick Turner, who writes of Bargmann¹s approach, ³The process-oriented model knows that nothing in this universe is ever perfect and immortal, that death comes to everything, that the function of an ending is to open up new possibilities.²
Says Bargmann: ³I¹m the voice of the landscape.²
© 2003 Melissa Milgrom
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