Photograph by David Torrence
What, asks Dorothée Imbert, is the city of tomorrow? “Is it these giant hypercities which are happening in Asia? Is it the shrinking city, like Detroit, or St. Louis to a certain extent? Or is it well-defined, extremely vibrant cities like Manhattan? You have to take into account that there is no longer ‘inside the city’ and ‘outside the city,’ which is this kind of suburb/rural countryside. Now things are much more ambiguous.”
Imbert is well-equipped to answer questions like these. She has an impeccable academic background: She earned her undergrad architecture degree in Paris from Unité Pédagogique d’Architecture No. 1, then went on to get two master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (one in architecture, the other in landscape architecture), and taught landscape architecture at Harvard University for a decade. She’s written about Modernist gardens in France; about the work of Garrett Eckbo, a California landscape architect who designed Modernist gardens and camps for migrant workers during the Great Depression; and about Jean Canneel-Claes, a Belgian designer whose work during the 1930s and ’40s helped expand landscape architecture beyond the scale of the garden to that of urbanism.
In 2010, Imbert was hired by Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts to create a curriculum for its master’s-degree program in landscape architecture. “I was coming from the oldest department in the United States, if not the world,” she says, “and so the challenge of starting something new was daunting, but also extremely intriguing.” The program began last year with 10 students, most with undergraduate degrees in architecture or design. Another eight students—many without design backgrounds—started this fall. Part of Imbert’s task has been defining the program’s character, which is not as easy as it sounds.
“It’s a profession which is very widely defined,” she says, “ranging from residential gardens to regional conservation, where you are dealing with tens of thousands of acres,” or large-scale urban planning. Because the master’s program is through the architecture school, Imbert feels the backbone should be design, with urbanism and ecology as supporting aspects. “To me, architecture is about you within the environment—it concerns systems and patterns on a larger scale” she says. “Even if you don’t design gardens, I think you still have to pay attention with the human aspect of that.”
So far, studio projects have included design proposals for the city’s near north riverfront, which Imbert says presented some interesting environmental and social challenges for students: The site is wedged between an industrial area and residential neighborhoods; it is environmentally contaminated; it’s home to the residents of the tent city of Hopeville; and it’s a pass-through for employees at a nearby correctional center. One student proposed a nursery for growing trees for north St. Louis neighborhoods, which have far fewer street plantings than neighborhoods like Clayton or the Central West End.
Students also have studied Wash. U.’s Danforth Campus, designing a landscape that works with both its Collegiate Gothic buildings and contemporary architecture. This semester, second-year students will be looking at Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park, which was ravaged in 2005 when the upper reservoir at AmerenUE’s Taum Sauk plant burst. The younger group will be thinking about Grand Center. “It’s a very interesting area,” Imbert says. “It has these architectural monuments: Fox Theatre, Powell Hall, and the Pulitzer and the Contemporary Art Museum.” It also has “a sea of parking lots.” She might bring in a friend who’s made asphalt gardens to ponder the parking lots. As whimsical as it sounds, there are definitely precedents for gardens made of man-made materials. For instance: “There was this incredible garden from the 1925 Exposition in Paris, which was made with tall concrete trees, made with planes of concrete,” Imbert says, “which is quite fantastic, completely cubistic.”
Imbert’s current research focuses on productive landscapes and cities. She’s organizing a May symposium, Food and the City, at Dumbarton Oaks in D.C. The symposium will provide a critical historical framework for today’s urban agriculture movement; as Imbert notes, productive landscapes in cities have a long history, especially during times of crisis, from the growing of cabbages in Paris’ Jardin du Luxembourg during World War II to smallholding in England to the sheep that grazed on the White House lawn during World War I, whose wool, it is said, went to make Army uniforms. Though she says there’s a lot of urban agriculture going on here, she and her students will be focusing more on a different sort of urban vegetation: city trees.
“I thought having this position where we are at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and a city which has…all of this empty land within the city itself, that it would be a fantastic kind of laboratory for testing things,” Imbert says. In the end, what she wants to do is “put St. Louis on the map.” Not in the conventional meaning of the phrase, but rather by giving the city an awareness and understanding of itself and by creating an influx and outflux of ideas and people through the program that will transform the region.
“There’s globalization, and that’s great, but in the end we are also living somewhere,” she says. “If we are nomads, the here is ultimately something twice as important as it used to be. In this time of uncertainty—where you are dealing with your immediate hereness and locality—it’s something which is really essential.”
