The Design of Byxbee Park

Based on interviews with Peter Richards, Michael Oppenheimer, and Mary Margaret Jones

August 1, 2006

Peter Richards is artist in residence at the San Francisco Exploratorium. His best-known work in the Bay Area is the Wave Organ at the San Francisco Marina. Richards says, “My work is about experience, about place, about the evolution of how land is being used.”

Michael Oppenheimer lives in Oregon and makes mostly interactive environmental sculptures that have a decided scientific bent. Many of his pieces respond to wind and weather.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows. – Robert Frost, "Mowing"

“The first thing we did was go down to the site on a Sunday to have a picnic with our families,” says Peter Richards. “Then we designed an experience that was somewhat like what we experienced ourselves.” Richards is one of the two artists who worked with the landscape architecture firm of George Hargreaves Associates to design Byxbee Park in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Michael Oppenheimer, the other artist involved in the project, recalls the original site as “hostile, barren, odd, right in the middle of a vibrant urban landscape.” Attached to Palo Alto’s active dump, and a stone’s throw away from the water filtration plant, sandwiched between the Bay and the Bayshore Freeway, in the flight path of the Palo Airport and a station in the Pacific Flyway, Byxbee lies in fact right on the seam where the urban environment is stitched onto earth’s fragile skin.

Both Richards and Oppenheimer recall a strong desire in some quarters to let the park revert to the wild, to make it turn “back to nature,” presumably to counteract or disguise the essential unpleasantness of the garbage that gives the park its shape. It’s a common enough impulse to ignore or deny unpleasant realities, but as Oppenheimer remarks, it would have been “impossible and pretty dishonest to make it what it wasn’t.” And so their design emphasizes the artifice of the site and refers in various places to the garbage that is no longer directly visible.

Building a park on a garbage dump is subject to restrictions. One of these was voluntary, as the team agreed not to work on any ideas except those that came out of conversations among team members. And it is true that no one takes credit for any individual part of the design.

But most of the restrictions came with the territory. The mounds are what they are—no matter how artificial, there is no moving them. Fortunately for Byxbee, the garbage piles aren’t quite so linear as some other dumps that I have seen. The dump at San Mateo for instance nearly has the footprint of a coffin and the mound is highly reminiscent of a coffin lid. Byxbee’s irregular layout and uneven elevations is a little more pleasing to the eye, even if all its slopes conform to the standard landfill incline. Trees can’t be planted because their roots would compromise the cap, which is only 3 feet deep. And of course there’s no denying the machinery, the pumps and pipes, the flare.

In the end, Oppenheimer believes, the restrictions helped the team work with the subtleties of the site. They incorporated the flare, which burns off any methane that is not used for city heating—into the design of the park. They laid out a white gravel apron to the east of it that gives the ensemble the shape of a keyhole, to symbolize that this is the place where the garbage is still most directly visible in the site. When the sun shines from a particular angle through the heat waves above the flare’s chimney, they cast a wavery shadow on the gravel. The conditions are rarely right, but “when you do see it, it’s like a sundial,” says Oppenheimer.

The rugby chime, which turns out to bear the official name of Wind Waves also attempts to give visible shape to a nearly invisible process. The lines that dangle down straight in still weather “give shape to the wind as it moves across the landscape,” Richards says. “They are liquid nature and reveal the shape of the wind.” The rugbychime stands at the apex of a feature called the “Alluvial Berms,” which the designers hoped would support different vegetation because of the way rainwater would run down the sequence of ridges that seen from above take on the shape of an alluvial fan. Unfortunately, I only ever noticed it when I looked up Byxbee on Google Earth. Perhaps the birds enjoy them.

The pole forest also makes the invisible visible, but it does so over a longer period of time. The poles were planted perfectly straight, but because the garbage underneath settles in random fashion, they have started to tilt in different directions. You have to know it to be able to understand it, but the tilting of the poles reveals the action of the garbage they are planted on.

The pole forest is also meant to make reference to the past. Oppenheimer points out that in their resemblance to pilings, the poles allude to the fact that “people used to farm oysters in the area.” The trails at Byxbee were originally paved with crushed oyster shell, which is no longer much in evidence. The little hillocks—tear-drop-shaped as if in mourning over all the Bay land lost to urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture?—that were built on top of the mounds refer to the oyster shell middens left by the indigenous Ohlone, the original (and far less repulsive) garbage dumps that lined San Francisco Bay. The hillocks were also meant as places where visitors could be out of the wind, comfortably snuggled up with the with the ground squirrels and burrowing owls, but the designers didn’t reckon with the “habitat restoration” signs, which bid the hikers stay off the grass.

The K-rail chevrons, on the other hand, are “a joke of sorts,” Richards explains. “On an aeronautical map chevrons mean ‘don’t land here’.” At Byxbee they point the endless procession of small planes in the direction of the landing strip at Pal Alto airport. Originally, Richards says, the K-rail was to run all the way into the slough at the bottom of the slope, but the Audubon Society was offended and put a stop to such willful habitat destruction.

None of these works are entirely (or in some cases even slightly) self-explanatory, and it is difficult for the uninitiated to distinguish between features of the landfill and park design. But the overall effect of Byxbee Park is remarkably true to the intention of the artists to create an “interesting place” that does not deny the truth of what we are doing to the land.

Marijke Rijsberman

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