Ричард Хааг: Американдық ландшафт сәулетшісінің өмірі мен еңбектері

American landscape architect

Richard Haag (October 23, 1923 – May 9, 2018) was an American landscape architect who was known for his role in Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington and on the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. Richard Haag's modernist and minimalist ideals also set the tone for Northwestern landscape design.

Richard Haag was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended the University of Illinois, the University of California and received his bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture (B. L. A.) at the University of California, Berkeley, and his master's degree in Landscape Architecture (M. L. A.) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1958, Richard Haag joined the University of Washington faculty in Seattle, Washington to pursue Landscape Architecture and graduated in 1964. While at the university, he founded the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Washington in 1964. At the University of Washington, Richard Haag was the lead designer in Richard Haag Associates which he founded in 1968 before closing on June 30, 2016. Through his position at Richard Haag Associates, made over 500 designing and planning projects. He died in May 2018 at the age of 94.

In 1906, on a peninsula on the northern shore of Lake Union, the Seattle Gas Company constructed a coal gas plant. By 1956, this plant was shut down and left behind old refinery towers. Upon the City of Seattle's purchase of the land in 1970, Haag was the lone person who was asked to develop a park design for the site. While most planners had expected the demolition of the refinery towers, Haag decided to keep them. However, he did not incorporate them into the design for historic purposes, but rather to visually enhance the design of the park. While convincing city government to accept this radical plan was challenging, Haag's development of a design which integrated bioremediation methods in order to detoxify the soil without transporting and replacing it amplified the issue. Haag and his colleagues suggested using oil degrading enzymes and organic material to stimulate growth of microorganisms and breakdown toxic materials that were still present in the soil left behind by the ancient industrial processes of the plant. Before Richard Haag was asked to develop this design, he submitted the site as a design problem to a national undergraduate design competition. All 130 designs submitted removed any indication that a gas plant ever existed in that site. Through this, Haag took the environmentalist ideal to another level and acknowledged the potential aesthetics of industrial structures without causing harm to the environment. His design for Gas Works Park brought Haag his first American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) President's Award for Design Excellence.