Outside the Self

Abstract

The Allegheny Riverfront Park of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, conceived from the outset with artists Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil and international engineering firm Arup, proves that a collaborative model of action can work for the making of a public urban landscape. The willingness and skill required to promote shared design responsibility are rare commodities, however, and in Pittsburgh they have resulted in a work of unusual originality and uncommon success. Indeed, while the park exhibits several ingredients that would appear to be attributable to the artists or the engineers or the landscape architects, the project team reports an intense and overlapping collaborative spirit that enables each to claim more than the usual intellectual purchase on both the parts and the whole.