ACCESSING THE LITTLE BAY CONSERVATION AREA – Fairhaven, Massachusetts
The Little Bay Conservation Area was a 70-acre parcel comprising a forested wetland with a dense understory of thorny shrubs, a grassy upland, and a salt marsh. The Town of Fairhaven wished to reserve the land for use as a park for passive recreation and solicited our class for some thoughts. My proposal responded to the condition of a wetland as the interface between solid and liquid, a place where run-off is temporarily detained and slowly released into the sea. The major interventions were three outdoor rooms, two situated at the forest edge and one in the forest interior. These rooms were connected by a tangled path system made by a simple maintenance regime of vegetation removal. The trajectory of each path would be determined by the brush cutter operator responding to site conditions and following the path of least resistance, resulting in an organic, seemingly randomized path network.
The greatest takeaway from this studio project was the idea of play and being willing to "kill your darlings". I know this is an adage reserved for writing but it has a direct translation to design. You have to keep making and destroying with a sense of freedom until your concept emerges from the exercise. Our teacher was French landscape architect Jacques Simon who periodically had us run drills where we spent time making a quick sketch or model. Then he instructed us to destroy it, the lesson being to never fall so hard in love with your first effort that you become unwilling to change or revise it. Nothing is that precious, and there is no such thing as having achieved perfection.
