BY SARAH COWLES

At Washington University, students document and memorialize a landscape in flux.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The crane whined, the cable tightened, the tree swayed, and the crowd murmured. But Tree B5, an 80-year-old, 85-foot-tall, 15-ton Quercus palustris, did not budge from its place in the Brookings allée. Earlier, a crew used high-pressure hydro-excavation tools and a giant vacuum to daylight the oak’s filigree of roots, and arborists jumared up with four cable slings to steady the crown. The audience in front of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis was transfixed by this massive marionette, anticipating the moment the formidable machine might pluck it like a weed. After the failure of the initial tug, the crew phoned the crane supervisor to ply more tension, and yet some grounding force would not let go. B5 was defiantly planted.

Choreographing this potent—and at times absurdly moving—tree-removal ceremony was Jesse Vogler, Affiliate ASLA, a 21st-century Fitzcarraldo and an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Vogler and his team of students thought this act of landscape demolition required a worthy ritual: extracting one tree of the 32 slated for removal for a new student center. They would honor its service, scale, strength, and site relationship, and also laser scan the tangled root complex.

The removal of Tree B5 marked the start of construction for the East End Transformation, an 18-acre expansion of facilities for arts, architecture, and engineering at Washington University’s Danforth Campus. The capital project includes an underground parking structure in place of the current Brookings Drive allée, to be topped with the new Ann and Andrew Tisch Park, designed by Michael Vergason Landscape Architects.

The roots were exposed using a combination of high-pressure water and a huge wet vac. Photo courtesy of the One Tree Project, Washington University in St. Louis.

To address the impact, Vogler and Ken Botnick, a professor of art, hosted a semester-long, interdisciplinary studio that asked students to physically engage with the scale, duration, and materials of the in-between landscape: “For some of [them], this was the first time they had held a shovel and dug a hole,” Vogler says. Over the semester he dispatched spades, laser levels, and 3-D scanners in the hands of students to analyze and interpret this landscape in transition. In the initial weeks of the studio, participants homed in on “obsessions” related to the culture and material qualities of oak trees. They initiated provisional projects to instigate discussions at the intersection of conceptual art, landscape architecture, and high-performance construction techniques. “The topic was well defined: to bring friction from this moment of demolition and construction,” Vogler says. “But the process of how we would make meaning from it was truly open-ended. We didn’t start out by saying, ‘We’re going to hire a crane to extract a tree out of the allée.’ We were building the ship while sailing it.”

The One Tree Project, as it became known, is exemplary of the innovative methods of landscape education that close the gap between low-risk methods of paper-based or digital design abstraction and the critical risks of working in landscapes at actual size, where true forces and materials are charged with powerful vulnerabilities and contingencies. “Critical lifting” is a specific crane operation, one that may involve an irreplaceable load, an uncertain weight, one with a potential shock load (the doubling of weight due to gravity), or a load that is unstable in flight. The critical lifting of Tree B5 engaged these material and safety risks—and risks of conceptual failure—in sharp relief.

Near the end of the day, a nearby excavator was dispatched to the scene to hasten the process. The operator leaned the boom and bucket against the trunk, pivoted, pushed again, and finally, Tree B5 gave way, its fall cradled by the careful slackening of the crane cable. Partway down it caught, the crown shuddered and blossomed, and it was finally laid to rest to bittersweet applause.