BY BRADFORD MCKEE

Thaïsa Way, now leading Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, wants deeper histories for the profession.

FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

The urban landscape historian Thaïsa Way, FASLA, relocated this summer from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she has served on the faculty for 12 years, to Washington, D.C., to lead the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks, an outpost of Harvard University. The program operates from an early 19th-century mansion surrounded by a Beatrix Farrand garden on 16 acres above Georgetown—one of the few largely intact designs of Farrand’s remaining. Way’s arrival follows the retirement of John Beardsley, who ran the program since 2008. We met on a hot July morning, and sat at the back of the garden inside a rustic stone pavilion called Catalogue House, which has two lead squirrels on top. The pavilion holds photographs that explain some of the garden’s plantings—such as the recent reinstallation of a famed aerial double hedge of hornbeams. The conversation quickly turned to history and the future of history.

Tell me about your new position at Dumbarton Oaks, its significance to the profession, and why you wanted to come here.

This is the only real research institute in garden and landscape scholarship history. There is the American Academy in Rome, and there are other places where you can go to do this work, but this is the only place that’s dedicated to this work. I see the work we do here as shaping the field. It’s where the discipline really emerged. In 2021 this garden will be 100 years old, and it was designed by Beatrix Farrand, one of the first individuals to call themselves a professional—she called herself a landscape gardener—but in the landscape architecture realm, she’s part of the founding of ASLA, so this is what we might call our first generation, right? I would argue that this garden is part of the emergence of landscape architecture as a profession in this country. In the 1940s, Mildred Bliss [a co-owner of Dumbarton Oaks], who’d already been collecting garden books, decided to really make a collection, to develop a whole collection, and her first focus was on landscape architects as new practitioners—bringing history to practitioners.

Now that you’re here, where do you pick that up?

This fall, we’re getting the senior fellows together to spend a day saying, “Okay, so we’re at 2019. Where is the field? Where are the gaps?” We just got renewed for a Mellon grant. The first was four years ago, under John Beardsley, who has done a remarkable job expanding Dumbarton Oaks from this sort of internal, cliquey group of scholars to something much broader. The Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies program allowed him to really reach out to practitioners, to think about cities. When you look at this garden, you don’t necessarily look around and go, “Oh, yeah. Urban studies.” But the truth is, this is a country estate in an urban setting.

The exciting thing for me is [the initiative] went from that broad, “We’re going to look at urban landscape” to the second phase, which is democracy in the urban landscape—race, identity, and difference. It’s going to be pushing more than leading, taking landscape history to address those issues that I think we’ve not addressed, which are issues of race and identity and difference in equity. I just read William O’Brien’s book, Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, and you just realize, landscape architects have been complicit in that history in all sorts of ways, and we just wipe it aside, and we kind of go on. We look at the design, and then we look at the designer, and then we look at it 50 years later and we talk about whether it lasted or not. We don’t talk about how it actually got received, who’s receiving it, who’s using it. What does that all mean?

It’s in the daily chatter of people in the design professions. I joked with a friend the other day, “Being woke isn’t what it used to be, right?” It’s a daily process of feeling stupid, and then trying to get un-stupid.

Feeling stupid, and then feeling so unprepared. I’m reading a lot, and having a lot of discussions, and I’m still amazed by how often I’m sitting in conversations feeling so unprepared for, “Okay, what is ______?” So I put together this advisory group for this Mellon grant initiative. It’s all people of color involved in really important work that’s related to landscape, but I’m bringing them here to say, “I want you to think about landscape more, and I want you to help us think about how do we bring out these histories and stories?”

We had an intern this summer who’s starting to look at who built this estate, and not so much the labor for the Blisses, which we’ll eventually do, but the Linthicums, who owned [Dumbarton Oaks] during the Civil War and for 10 years prior to the Civil War and 10 years after the Civil War, and who we know owned slaves. Where did those enslaved people go? Were they freed? Did they build this? The house was built in 1801. Chances are pretty good.

The University of Virginia has been amazing with that.

Yes, and Georgetown University. The colloquium in the fall is called Interpreting Landscapes of Enslavement. In the morning, it will be various museum people from Monticello, Montpelier, and the Whitney Plantation, all talking about what they’re doing, what they’re finding out in their landscape, and how they’re interpreting it. And then the afternoon is Georgetown University, UVA, and the University of Alabama talking about what they’re doing in terms of their academics and their campuses, and how they’re addressing their own legacies.

You’ve had a little runway up to this, having worked with John Beardsley for several years on various projects.

I was a senior fellow for six years, from 2011 to 2017. As a senior fellow, we choose the fellows and we generally oversee the symposia. Sometimes we direct one; sometimes we’re more from the background. When I was senior fellow I helped with all the symposia, but I led the River Cities symposium [in 2015], which came out in a book (River Cities, City Rivers) that actually is getting remarkable use.

As for fellows, who comes here or should consider coming here?

Anybody who is interested broadly in the history of the built environment, writ large. That sounds purposefully vague, but there was a time when you came here because you were interested in design, per se, or landscape design. Then it moved to cultural landscapes, and the idea it could be not professionally designed. Under the Mellon urban initiative, we’re asking how are people thinking about the environment, the place, being grounded in place? It’s not a place for an art historian who’s really focused on the paintings or the poetry. This is a place where you get to really think about how do you connect places that we can walk on and sit on and stamp on with what’s being written, what’s being drawn, what’s being described, what’s being photographed? I see it as really broad, and what I hope, with the urban humanities, is that there will also be people who will come here who are looking at cultural histories and political histories, and are interested in grounding it. People who are curious, and understand that grounding it in place isn’t just a matter of giving it a mark on a map. The tyranny of the map and GIS is that everybody thinks that because they’ve mapped something, they’ve somehow put it in place. And I’m like, “A map’s just another piece of paper.”

There’s a lot of mapping.

It’s another sort of false text on its own, but you could actually think about what it is to walk on the ground and be in the place. Obviously, sometimes we can’t, but the fellowships offer that opportunity. So I’m hoping to attract some people who will fully admit that they don’t know necessarily how to do that, and they’ll go beyond that spatializing that so many people are doing. I want us to be much more specific and say, “So, where in the city? Was it in the public realm? Was it on the sidewalk? Was the sidewalk wide? Was the sidewalk tiny? Was it filled with signs?” Whatever the actual, physical reality is, instead of these generic, “It’s urban. It’s rural. It’s suburban…”

You’re coming from the University of Washington, where you started a program called Urban@UW. What did that program do?

That program came out of the fact that University of Washington is an urban university that has never thought of itself as urban. It had thought of itself as a state university that was up on the hill. It didn’t have walls around it, but it might as well have. We got a president in who realized that we are not an isolated university, but who also realized we had to do something, be a part of the city. We had hundreds if not thousands of projects that people at the university were doing with the city, but everybody was going off and doing their own little thing. So I went and I said, “Let’s make a membrane across the university so that if you’re interested in urban issues, this membrane will provide you some structure and some connections.” We now have about 400 faculty who participate. It also said to the city and the region: If there are things that you’re thinking the university could be helpful on, here’s an entity that you can call, and we’ll help you figure out how to navigate across the university. Maybe they can’t hire a geographer, and a public health researcher, and a social service expert, and a landscape architect, not to mention an English historian, but we can. We started to identify what those needs are, and those issues came as absolutely no surprise: housing—affordable housing—homelessness, environmental justice, climate change, and data responsibility. We now have working groups that are funded to work cross-disciplinarily with cities on those five topics.

Tell me something that excites you in the field now.

I think the most exciting stuff is around race and difference and the public realm, and the history of our public realm. And yes, I include parks in there, but I also include sidewalks and streets, and rethinking public realms, or anywhere between. Maybe 25 to 34 percent of cities is public realm. What’s the history of that? How did it get to be the way it is, and why is it used the way it is, and how can we change it?

I think people, and designers in particular, are slowly learning that history is not a set of precedents. It’s not a set of flash cards of, “You could look like this or this or this.” It’s actually a way to expand the imagination and think about the future, and if you really want to think differently about the future, most of us do that better if we have some ideas other than what we see.

I’m having more and more students come in and say, “I need to understand how we got to where we are on this. Why do we think of parks as green grass and scattered trees and a baseball field? And I need to know, what else have people done? What are the controversies? Not so that I can sit and make it look like that, but so that I can actually rethink.”