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Derelict Duty

by David B. Sokol
Spring 2007

You can’t blame the employees at Urban Outfitters’ new Philadelphia headquarters for thinking that the architects had a recycling fetish. The hipster clothing company occupies five buildings in the 400-acre former Navy Yard. As staffers come and go, they have to walk over tremendous chunks of concrete, past old rail tracks the Navy once used to haul mattresses to barracks, and sheet metal to hull fabricators.

This is the work of D.I.R.T. (Dump it Right There), a Charlottesville-based landscape architecture studio. For Urban Outfitters, founder Julie Bargmann and her team salvaged the existing Navy Yard concrete, chopping it up and arranging the chunks into pavers. Smaller concrete and brick debris is now protective mulch for hedgerows which shade the buildings and hold back stormwater from rushing into the Delaware River.

Bargmann’s large-scale recycling project represents a new attitude about how to deal with the shuttered factories and Superfund sites of America’s industrial era. D.I.R.T. managing partner christopher fannin sums up today’s prevailing opinion: “They’re toxic sites, blights, scourges—something that should be chained up and left alone.” The standard-issue landscape architect doesn’t see beauty in these places. But for Bargmann, who grew up in the shadows of New Jersey’s Meadowlands, hulking industrial relics are the quaint red barns of our generation. “We’re anxious that these places actually maintain some continuity to their history and culture, but take on previously unimagined uses,” Fannin says.

In reclaiming an abandoned reservoir pump house for a homeowner in Dallas, continuity meant reinforcing the old building, planting sumac and native grasses for its courtyard garden, and reusing reservoirs as cattail-lined birdbaths. Designing a landfill conversion in Antioch, Ill., involved more safety issues; D.I.R.T. proposed establishing playgrounds and seating areas above the landfill caps where the town had previously dumped its trash, and channeling the underground methane to heat the high school. Bargmann’s concept is not just to plant the grounds, but to heal the polluted soil underneath as well.

One of her first projects, which resurrected a former coal-mining site in Vintondale, Pa. captures the full breadth of her vision. Mining operations had made the site’s streams so acidic that they ran orange. Now, an aerator maintains a constant flow of oxygen in order to prevent algae from suffocating all other waterborne life, and the streams are lined in limestone to neutralize acid. The landscape design draws on the principle of bioremediation, in which plants remove contaminants from the ecosystem—in this case, cattail and mushroom planted–wetlands filter heavy metals and defuse acid from the water.

Since Vintondale, D.I.R.T. increasingly has been embraced by corporate clients like Ford and Urban Outfitters. And as Americans demand better environmental stewardship, Bargmann’s alternative green spaces may become our next Central Parks.

Naval Maneuvers
Urban Outfitters, Inc. Corporate Headquarters Campus, Philadelphia, PA.

urban2 Urban Outfitters moved into its new, $75-million “campus of creativity” at League Island, formerly the Philadelphia Navy Yard, in fall 2006. Although the company occupies only 60 of the site’s 400 acres, it sits at the terminus of the city’s Broad Street axis, so they had to accommodate pedestrians who wanted access to the Delaware River. D.I.R.T. reused two-thirds of the project’s demolition materials to build a landscape that accommodates both public and private uses.

The slightly jarring juxtapositions—parking lots’ artful drainage channels filter polluted rainwater and bloom with wildﬂowers, a cherry tree–planted employee terrace follows the arc of an old rail line, and large pieces of rubble are now pavement—inspire personal contemplation as well as delight.

Forever Mine
Litmus Garden, Vintondale, PA.

orange The children of Vintondale, Pa. grew up believing that orange juice filled their creeks. It was poison running downstream. Acid Mine Drainage is a condition in which mining waste leaches into the groundwater. In 1995, D.I.R.T. Studio collaborated on a model redevelopment initiative that encompasses 40 acres of Vintondale’s No. 6 mining and coke operations. Its crowning feature: the pH ponds, a series of limestone-lined basins. The water enters at an acidic 2.9 pH level. It goes through several interactions with the limestone as well as mushroom compost to eliminate its acid content; by the time the water passes through the sixth pond it has achieved a pH of 6.9. The ponds are surrounded by a Litmus Garden where the foliage matches the color of the water, and they release into wetlands where plants like cattails remove other heavy- metal toxins from the water. The project also features a playground, picnic areas, and links to a regional bike network.

Auto Motives
Ford Motor Company River Rouge Complex, Dearborn, Mich.

urban2 River Rouge may be the dirtiest thing that Ford chairman William Clay Ford, Jr. inherited from his aristocratic forebears. Years of auto manufacturing left 30 acres polluted with cancer-causing hydrocarbons at the Dearborn, Mich. facility. As part of a $2-billion reinvention, Bargmann drew up a design that reintroduced native plantings and cleaned up the damage of toxins past. Thousands of new trees, shrubs, and flowers, like Big Bluestem and Green Ash, were planted to absorb and neutralize poisons in the soil.

D.I.R.T also created a new Mustang car lot out of slag, a smelting by-product, and surrounded it with bio-swales—shallow depressions they lined with plants and shrubs to filter sediment and oil after a rain. Bargmann’s plan includes lining stormwater channels with hedgerows and transforming the major road on the eastern edge of the site into an industrial-heritage promenade.