A military base, reborn
The military controls about 15 million acres in the United States. That’s down by half from a Cold War peak, but enough that growing American cities and towns are increasingly brushing up against those set-aside spaces. Landscape architects and historians are awakening to the prospects for this little-studied military acreage, examining what Pierre Bélanger calls “the landscape of defense.” Proof of this awakening came in a recent daylong series of presentations by Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) students. Something of a general himself for the day, Bélanger, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the GSD, oversaw the logistics of 24 presentations from GSD 1211, “Landscape Architecture III.” There were 72 students, in teams of three, along with two dozen faculty and visiting reviewers (including reviewers from Belgium, Britain, San Francisco, and New York City). Piper Auditorium was converted on Dec. 5 into a 10-hour buzzing headquarters of poster walls on wheels, graceful...