volume 3

architecture and landscape architecture

territory

lunch volume 3 : territory

lunch volume 3 : territoryUniversity of Virginia School of Architecture

Campbell HallP.O. Box 400122

Charlottesville VA 22904-412

volume 3

architecture and landscape architectureUniversity of Virginia School of Architecture

territory

lunch volume 3: territory is published with support from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, The School of Architecture Foundation, and the School of Architecture Design Council.

Cover Image by Shanti Fjord Levy

Copyright © 2008 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VAAll rights reserved

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number is available.

Editors: Shanti Levy, David MaldaPrinted in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA

University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall P.O. Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122 434.924.3715 http://www.arch.virginia.edu/lunch archlunch@virginia.edu

ISBN-13 978-0-9771024-7-1ISSN 1931-7786

7 territory

9 Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance Elizabeth K. Meyer

23 Inhabiting Liminal Landscape Robin Dripps and Lucia Phinney

39 Climate Rhythms Anne Morris

45 Swann Park: Modular Participatory Ecologies Alissa Ujie Diamond

51 Harvest the City Grow D.C. Team

57 The Ethic of X-Change Mark Buenavista, Chihiro Shinohara, Ngoc Tran

61 Agua Shanti Fjord Levy and Elizabeth Hoogheem

69 Collective Landscape Hope Dinsmore

75 From estudio teddy cruz: Outpost on the Political Equator Andrea Dietz

95 Re-territorializing Place Noah Bolton and Robert Couch

103 Mix-House Karen Van Lengen, Ben Rubin, Joel Sanders

131 Agency and Abundance in the Hedgerow Landscape Molly Phemister

113 Rooting Landscape Urbanism Shanti Fjord Levy

131 Why Gardens? Jessica Calder

137 Intelligently Integrated Transport Bob Batz , Javier Del Castillo, Alec Gosse, Julie Ulrich

141 Planes, Trains and Rain / Double Crossing Tom Hogge and Serena Nelson / Peter Waldman

151 The Dresser Trunk Project William Daryl Williams

157 Northeastern University Veterans Memorial Marc Roehrle and Mo Zell

165 Addition W.G. Clark and David Malda

lunch Team:Noah BoltonRob CouchHarding DowellZoe Edgecomb

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Recipe:

For future volumes, lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Digital materials and submission inquiries should be sent to the lunchbox at archlunch@virginia.edu.

The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication. We are grateful to Elizabeth Fortune, Ellen Cathey, Derry Voysey Wade, James Lee, and the School of Architecture Foundation. Further thanks to our faculty advisors, Beth Meyer and Phoebe Crisman.

To support lunch, please contact:School of Architecture Foundation PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122 434.924.7149 http://www.arch.virginia.edu/alumni/giving

“Because ‘territory’ is historical and mutable it does not beg for definition (as Nietzsche once said, ‘Only that which has no history can be defined . . .’). Rather, it is something to be described, mapped, modified, and en-tered into. One takes impressions of it, soundings and probes. As practitioners, we espouse it, deploy it, exploit it and harvest it. . .” (Sanford Kwinter, “American Design?” Praxis 4: Landscapes, 2002)

Territory is strategic and scalable. It is the prompt for and the ground upon which to anchor the work we present in this volume. We invoke the relationship between territory and its root, terra, to emphasize how these projects are about places; they make design an act of responding to and revealing sites.

Rather than be defined by explicit border lines, territories are identified from within. This openness to overlap and hybridization nurtures ongoing discussions we find in our work about boundaries, both conceptually and spatially. In this body of work, we dwell within edge conditions as territories in their own right, exploring these at the scale of the body, the house, or a vast national border zone. We approach the city, enlisting productive landscape systems as generators of public space. We re-imagine water infrastructure as a way of interlocking ecological and cultural imperatives. The work included, we hope, begins to map the province of expertise engendered by the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Charlottesville, VA April 7, 2008

Editors:Shanti Fjord LevyDavid Malda

Lauren HackneyTom HoggeJames HuemoellerKarl KrauseJames Quarles

SUSTAINING BEAUTY. THE PERFORMANCE OF APPEARANCE: A MANIFESTO

Elizabeth K. Meyer

Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

ABSTRACT

Sustainable landscape design is generally understood in relation to three principles - ecological health, social justice and economic prosperity. Rarely do aesthetics factor into sustainability discourse, except in negative asides conflating the visible with the aesthetic and rendering both superfluous. This article examines the role of beauty and aesthetics in a sustainability agenda. It argues that it will take more than ecologically regenerative designs for culture to be sustainable, that what is needed are designed landscapes that provoke those who experience them to become more aware of how their actions affect the environment, and to care enough to make changes. This involves considering the role of aesthetic environmental experiences, such as beauty, in re-centering human consciousness from an egocentric to a more bio-centric perspective. This argument, in the form of a manifesto, is inspired by design work that is not usually understood as contributing to sustainable design.

Landscape design practitioners and theorists understandably focus on the ecological aspects of sustainability; this seems reasonable given that the site and medium of our work is landscape—actual topography, soil, water, plants, and space. It seems imperative given the growing consensus about the impact of human action on the global environment. Beauty is rarely discussed in the discourse of landscape design sustainability, and if it is, it is dismissed as a superficial concern. What is the value of the visual and formal when human, regional and global health are at stake? Doesn’t the discussion of the beautiful trivialize landscape architecture as ornamentation, as the superficial practice of gardening?

I call for reinserting the aesthetic into discussions of sustainability. I make a case for the appearance of the designed landscape as more than a visual, stylistic or ornamental issue, as more than a rear-garde interest in form. I attempt to rescue the visual, by connecting it to the body and poly-sensual experience. I try to explain how immersive, aesthetic experience can lead to recognition, empathy, love, respect and care for the environment.The Dell at the University of Virginia, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Photographer: Hara Woltz

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MANIFESTO

1. Sustaining Culture Through Landscapes

Sustainable Landscape Design Is Not The Same As Sustainable Development Or Ecological Design Or Restoration Ecology Or Conservation Biology.

Sustainable development requires more than designed landscapes that are created using sustainable technologies. Design is a cultural act, a product of culture made with the materials of nature and embedded within, and inflected by a particular social formation; it often employs principles of ecology, but it does more than that. It enables social routines and spatial practices, from daily promenades to commutes to work. It translates cultural values into memorable landscape forms and spaces that often challenge, expand and alter, our conceptions of beauty.

2. Cultivating Hybrids: Language of Landscape

Conceptualizing Sustainable Landscapes Requires New Words As Well As New Technologies, New Languages As Well As New Techniques.

Sustainable landscape design flourishes when fixed categories are transgressed and their limits and overlaps explored. This is a familiar trope in post-structuralist theory; it is a pragmatic imperative in landscape architecture design. Our profession is still hampered by the limited language of formal and informal, cultural and natural, man-made and natural. How does such language allow us to capture the strange beauty and horror of a forest polluted by acid-mine drainage caused by coal mining that has been transformed through bio-remediation into a park? Is that natural? Man-made? Its toxic beauty, a phrase I borrow from Julie Bargmann of DIRT Studio, is a hybrid.

Through hybridization, these and other paired terms have the potential to open up new conceptual design approaches between and across categories that restrict our thinking: social and ecological, urban and wild, aesthetic and ethical, appearance and performance, beauty and disturbance, aesthetics and sustainability.

These conceptual and experiential hybrids can occur within designed landscapes on disturbed sites across geographies whether in the coal fields of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern United States, in the vague terrain of swooping, highway interchanges in Barcelona, or among coal and steel processing plants in the Ruhr River Valley in Germany.

3. Beyond Ecological Performance

Sustainable Landscape Design Must Do More Than Function Or Perform Ecologically; It Must Perform Socially And Culturally.

Sustainable landscape design can reveal natural cycles such as seasonal floods, and regenerate natural processes—by cleaning and filtering rainwater or replenishing soils through arrested erosion and deposition—and do so as they intersect with social routines and spatial practices. This intermingling of ecological and social temporal cycles—seasonal floods and human activities such as holiday festivals or sports—links the activities of everyday life and the unique events of a particular city, to the experience of the dynamic bio-physical aspects of the environment. Nature is not out there, but in here, interwoven into the human urban condition. Hydrology, ecology and human life are intertwined.

The intersection of Meadow creek and the Dell’s stormwater pond is marked by a stone rill. This structure’s channel is shaped to allow sediment to settle within its channel, and then to aerate and clean the water as it falls. This obviously constructed moment allows a visitor to the Dell to understand it as a constructed system, and to recognize the landscape as the product of intention, of art. Natural processes, not natural forms.

The Dell, University of Virginia Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects: Charlottesville, Virginia, 2003Collaborators:VMDO Architects,Biohabitats of Virginia

Right: Release of Meadow Creek into the Dell Stormwater pond. Photographer: Hara Woltz

Below: Aerial view of stormwater pond. Photographer: Will Kerner

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6. The Performance of Beauty

The Experience Of Hyper Nature—Designed Landscapes That Reveal And Regenerate Natural Processes/Structures Through The Amplification And Exaggeration Of Experience, And That Artistically Exploit The Medium Of Nature—Is Restorative.

A beautiful landscape works on our psyche affording the chance to ponder a world outside ourselves. Through this experience, we are de-centered, restored, renewed and reconnected to the bio-physical world. The haptic, somatic experience of beauty can inculcate environmental values.

As Elaine Scarry writes, “Beauty invites replication…it is lifesaving. Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.” Furthermore, Scarry suggests that when we experience beauty, it changes our relationship to that object or scene or person. She continues:

. . . At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to Weil, requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position as the center…a transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.’…we find we are standing in a different relationship to the world than we were the moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede ground to the thing that stands before us (Scarry 1999: 3, 24, 109-110).

Scarry’s account of the experience of beauty resonates with that of art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto. He argues that beauty is not found or discovered, immediately, through the eye and in relationship to known tropes. Rather, it is discovered through a process of mediation between the mind and body, between seeing and touching|smelling|hearing, between reason and the senses, between what is known through past experiences and what is expected in the here and now. As Danto, drawing on Hegel and Hume writes, “We arrive at the judgment of beauty only after critical analysis—which means that it is finally not subjective at all, since it depends on the kind of reasoning in which criticism at its best consists…. Doubtless the critic should look. But seeing is inseparable from reasoning, and response to work of art is mediated by a discourse of reasons parallel entirely to what takes place with moral questions.” (Danto 1999: 192-193)

The experience of beauty, a process between the senses and reason, an unfolding of awareness, is restorative. By extension, the aesthetic experience of constructed hyper-nature is transformative, not simply in nineteenth-century terms or practices known to Olmsted. Rather aesthetic experience can result in the appreciation of new forms of beauty that are discovered, in Howett’s terms, because they reveal previously unrealized relationships between human and non-human life processes.

7. Sustainable Design = Constructing Experiences

Beautiful Sustainable Landscape Design Involves The Design Of Experiences As Much As The Design Of Form And The Design Of Ecosystems. These Experiences Are Vehicles For Connecting With, And Caring For, The World Around Us.

Through the experience of different types of beauty we come to notice, to care, to deliberate about our place in the world. In phenomenological thought of scholars such as Merleau-Ponty

4. Natural Process Over Natural Form

Ecological Mimicry Is A Component Of Sustainable Landscape Design, But The Mimicry Of Natural Processes Is More Important Than The Mimicry Of Natural Forms.

Natural looking landscapes are not the only genre that performs ecologically. This is especially true in constructed urban conditions when there are no longer spaces of the scale that might support a natural looking landscape. In these extreme conditions—in narrow, remnant strips between city streets and rivers, on compacted sites with no organic matter or topsoil, along abandoned post-industrial infrastructure such as railroad right of ways and factory sites—nature must be constructed in new ways, in different configurations, deploying technological and ecological knowledge.

Where space and soil are limited, plants can be opportunistically inserted between and along the ramps flanked by chain link scrims and cantilevered walks; hardy species can act as hosts and create habitat for other species of plants and wildlife; spontaneous vegetation can be facilitated with soil trenches and mounds; wetland grasses can be planted in floating planters instead of on terra firma. This is an example of what Joan Nassauer has described as framing messy landscapes—another form of hybrid—so that ecological design aesthetics can be recognized as art.

These types of projects—part technological construction, part ecological process—won’t be confused for natural landscapes. This may contribute to their longevity. Natural-looking landscapes may not be sustainable in the long term, as they are often overlooked in metropolitan areas. They are assumed to be found, wild conditions not needing care. Most constructed nature in the city needs care, cultivation, and gardening, especially constructed wetlands. In my experience, natural-looking designed landscapes quickly become invisible landscapes and neglected landscapes.

5. Hypernature: The Recognition of Art

The Recognition Of Art Is Fundamental To, And A Precondition Of, Landscape Design.

This is not a new idea; nineteenth-century landscape design theorists J.C. Loudon, A.J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted advocated such, when they were making the case for the inclusion of landscape design or landscape architecture as one of the Fine Arts. More recently, Michael Van Valkenburgh and his partners, Laura Solano and Matthew Urbanksi expressed their interest in exaggerated, concentrated hypernature—an exaggerated version of constructed nature. Creating hypernature was prompted by pragmatic acknowledgements of the constrictions of building on tough, urban sites and the recognition that design landscapes are usually experienced while distracted, in the course of everyday urban life. Attenuation of forms, densification of elements, juxtaposition of materials, intentional discontinuities, formal incongruities—tactics associated with montage or collage—are deployed for several reasons: to make a courtyard, a park, a campus more capable of appearing, of being noticed, and of performing more robustly, more resiliently.

Sustainable landscape design should be form-full, evident and palpable, so that draws the attention of an urban audience distracted by daily concerns of work and family, or the over stimulation of the digital world. This requires a keen understanding of the medium of landscape, and the deployment of design tactics such as exaggeration, amplification, distillation, condensation, juxtaposition, or transposition/displacement.

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and Berleant, these participatory environmental experiences not only break down the barriers between subject and object; they change us, and, at times, have the capacity to challenge us, to prod us to act. Many environmentalists speak of their early experiences in the wild or the countryside—some nearby woodlot or creek where they learned to revel in the exuberance of successional plant growth in unlikely places, the adaptive shelters of insects, birds and animals—as the reason they became environmentalists.

Designed landscapes can provide such experiences as well if they afford experience of the wild, when the abundance, the excessiveness, and the tenacious persistence of plants, wildlife, and water are uncovered in the most unexpected places—city drainage ways, urban plazas and gardens, above and below elevated rail lines and highways.

8. Sustainable Beauty is Particular, Not Generic

There Will Be As Many Forms Of Sustainability As There Are Places/Cities/Regions.

These beauties will not emulate their physical context but act as a magnifying glass, increasing our ability to see and appreciate context. Sustainable landscape beauty can find the particular in the productive as well as the toxic, the transposed as well as the transgressive, the found and the made, the regenerative as well as the resilient. Sustainable beauty may be strange and surreal. It may be intimate and immense. It will be of its place whether an abandoned brownfield site, an obsolete navy shipyard, or a lumbered forest. And yet it will not simulate its place. It will be recognized as site-specific design, emerging out of its context but differentiated from it.

9. Sustainable Beauty is Dynamic, Not Static

The Intrinsic Beauty Of Landscape Resides In Its Change Over Time.

Landscape architecture’s medium shares many characteristics with architecture, dance and sculpture. Our medium is material and tactile; it is spatial. But more than its related fields, the landscape medium is temporal. Not only do we move through landscape, the landscape moves, changes, grows, declines. Beauty is ephemeral; it can be a fleeting event, captured once a year in the mix of a specific light angle, a particular slope of the ground, and a short-lived drop of a carpet of brilliant yellow leaves. Or it can created by the long processes of stump and log decay, and regeneration in a forest garden.

These changes are multiple and overlapping, operating at numerous scales and tempos: the spontaneous, successional vegetation growth on slag heaps; the tidal rhythms of water ebbing flowing in a rocky, tidal channel next to a smooth, constant, gently tilting lawn; or the seasonal changes of temperature and plant growth. J.B. Jackson, the landscape historian, wrote that the act of designing landscape is a process of manipulating time (Jackson 1984: 8). Since sustainable landscapes reveal, enable, repair and regenerative ecological processes, they are temporal and dynamic. Sustainable beauty arrests time, delays time, intensifies time; it opens up daily experience to what Michael Van Valkenburgh calls “psychological intimate immensity,” the wonder of urban social and natural ecologies made palpable through the landscape medium.

Sustainability at Urban Outfitter began with the decision to re-use as much demolition debris as on-site building material as possible. The thick concrete pavement of the former Naval yard was reused as large-scaled porous pavement. The joints between were planted with trees and filled with smaller construction rubble. The forms and materials are not generic, but particular to the site.

DIRT Studio: Urban Outfitters corporate campus, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 2006Collaborators: Meyer Scherer Rockcastle, architects

Above: Photographs of materials salvaged from site demolition. Courtesy of DIRT Studio.

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10. Enduring Beauty is Resilient and Regenerative

Antiquated Conceptions Of Landscape Beauty As Generic, Balanced, Smooth, Bounded, Charming, Pleasing And Harmonious Persist And Must Be Reconsidered Through The Lens Of New Paradigms Of Ecology.

Projects that are dynamic, and not static, can be designed for disturbance and resilience. Floods that are anticipated are not disasters, but natural events that form part of a regular disturbance regime. Plants that can sustain extreme spring high water are planted. Knowing that ice flows damage tree trunks, we specify species that regenerate with numerous new stems when damaged. The beauty of this type of landscape lies in the knowledge of its tenacity, its toughness, its resilience.

This sense of beauty, not as a set, unchanging concept, but one that evolves over time, in response to different needs or contexts is accepted in many fields outside of landscape architecture. This changing conception of beauty, based on the resilience of a designed landscape’s materials and not on an a priori set of forms or types, resonates with contemporary concerns as well as the early theoretical foundations of our profession. In a post-September 11th context where American urban space is subject to increasing standardization and surveillance due to a culture of fear and security, the adaptation and resilience of plants and paved surfaces to the disturbances of extreme weather, flooding, pollution, low light levels, evokes hope and inspires alternative models for coping with the uncertain.

In one of his prescient articles that outlined many of the conundrums to be faced by American landscape architecture as it emerged as a discipline, Charles Eliot, Jr. established a position within the formal and informal debates of the 1890s by arguing that beauty was not intrinsic to either formal type.

The fact may not be explicable, but ‘it is one of the commonplaces of science that the form which every vital product takes has been shaped for it by natural selection through a million ages, with a view to its use, advantage or convenience, and that beauty has resulted from that evolution.…Whoever, regardless of circumstances, insists upon any particular style or mode of arranging land and its accompanying landscape, is most certainly a quack. He has overlooked the important basal fact that, although beauty does not consist in fitness, nevertheless all that would be fair must first be fit. True art is expressive before it is beautiful (Eliot 1896: 133).

Eliot recognized that changes in need, in society, and in the sciences, would alter cultural conceptions of beauty.

Closer to our times, paradigm shifts in the ecological sciences have influenced cultural conceptions of what is fitting, and beautiful in the natural world. Since the publication of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature in 1969, scientific theories about ecosystem dynamics have changed considerably. Resilience, adaptation and disturbance have replaced stability, harmony, equilibrium and balance as the operative words in ecosystem studies. Conceptions of stable, climax plant and animal communities have given way to an understanding of disturbance regimes, emergent and resilient properties, and chaotic self-organizing systems. These theories have enormous implications for landscape design, and yet twenty years after their general adoption in the sciences, many landscape architects and out clients operate on outdated, even romantic, conceptions of nature and its beauty. Just how beautiful is a green residential lawn maintained by pesticides and herbicides that are harmful to children, pets, and song birds?

A subsurface stormwater pipe at Averett University was brought to the surface and directed over, across and through an exterior courtyard to a new student center. The volume and velocity of the water in the system changes over time with the amount of rainfall and ground water infiltration. Sustainability is temporal and dynamic.

VMDO Landscape Studio (now Siteworks) (Pete O’Shea, Alan Wong, John Meaney): Averett University Student Center, Danville, VA, completed 2006Collaborators:Architect: VMDO Architects (David Oakland, Joe Atkins, Randy Livermon, Jim Kovach, Bryce Powell, Alan Wong)Civil Engineer: LE+D Professionals PC of Danville, VA

Above: Images of stormwater plaza under construction and after completion. Courtesy of Siteworks.

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Recent American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) conference themes are a case in point. During the 2006 conference there was little talk of brownfield sites; instead, “Green (not brown and gray) solutions only for a Blue Planet.” This past year’s theme was “Designing with Nature: The Art of Balance.” That sounded like a retrospective glance at landscape ecology and design from the 1950s-70s. As a professional organization, the ASLA needs to be more cognizant of contemporary ecological theory, especially given the recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report’s findings on global climate change and its implications for the future form of cities and settlements. Our adaptive designs must be part of resilient, adaptive, and regenerative urban form.

Twenty-first century associations of resilience are as much cultural as ecological. Three American landscape architects, each committed to the concepts of sustainability if not the rhetoric, have recognized the limitations of the word sustainable, and the potential of conceiving landscape architecture as regenerative and resilient: John Lyle, Julie Bargmann, and Randy Hester. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Hester’s account of the principles that support enduring settlements underscores the importance of replacing stability or balance with resilience:

…. Design of nature or mimicry of nature that allows human habitation to maintain itself efficiently and compatibly with its surrounding environment through often dramatic changes that threaten survival. Such design is the basis of resilient form that is fundamental to sustainable urban ecology…. This ability to endure is based on, among other things, having an urban form that continually provides what a community needs, even in times of temporary crises. Resilient urbanity has the internal ability to persist—to recover easily without significant loss from illness, misfortune, attack, natural or social disaster, or other dramatic disturbance. And it can readily absorb change. A resilient city is able to retain the essence of its form even after it has been deformed. In this way, resilience seems a better word than sustainability for design goals for the city. Resilient form maintains itself efficiently and seamlessly with both the landscape and the cultural networks of which it is a part (Hester 2006: 138-139).

11. Landscape Agency: From Experiences to Sustainable Praxis

The Experience Of Designed Landscape Can Be A Spatial Practice Of Noticing, Wandering And Wondering In, And Caring About The Environment. The Experience Of Landscape Can Be A Mode Of Learning And Inculcating Values.

The final tenet of this manifesto underscores the multiple discourses and practices where sustainability resides. Sustainability is a position within environmental ethics, as well as techniques or tactics grounded in the natural sciences. Sustainability, as an ethic, is decidedly a middle-ground position between an egocentric and ecocentric world view. It straddles the human and non-human, attempting a hybridity that see the interconnections between and across a homocentric and biocentric world view. I believe that the designed landscape can be built through various tactics, using sustainable eco-technologies, but it can also be an aesthetic experience that changes people’s environmental ethics. And from my perspective the latter is the most important reason to care about sustainable landscape design. The apprehension and experience of beauty, especially new, challenging forms of beauty, can lead to attentiveness, empathy, love, respect, care, concern and action on the part of those who visit and experience designed landscapes. It will take more than the estimated 15,000 registered landscape architects or 30,000 members of the ASLA to make the United States--the most energy consuming, waste producing, environmentally-challenged developed country in the world—a sustainable culture. But multiple those numbers by the number of people who are our clients, who visit and frequent the streets, public spaces, parks, gardens and communities we design, and whose understanding of the connections between human consumption, waste, and habits and eco-system health might be altered because of an aesthetic experience they have. Not all change will, or has to be based on education, guilt, or a sense of sacrifice. Sometimes, in the best of situations, persuasion takes place unknowingly, gradually, but convincingly, until the change is perceived to be internal and an act of personal will, not collective guilt.

Sustaining Beauty | Sustaining Culture

The mass media is replete with images and discussions of sustainability, green politics, and global climate change. During the past year around the annual celebration of Earth Day, a parka-wearing actor Leonardo DiCaprio shared the cover of Vanity Fair magazine with a small polar bear (May 2007), the Republican Governor of the State of California twirled a small globe on his finger like it was a basketball on the cover of Newsweek’s Leadership and the Environment issue (16 April 2007), Time magazine published a special double issue entitled “The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference” (9 April 2007), and a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover adorned with an American flag made out of green flower blossoms, moss, seed heads and leaves examined “The Greening of Global Geopolitics” (15 April 2007).

Design and shelter magazines run regular columns and issues on the greening of the design fields. Even Dwell. At Home in the Modern World magazine, dedicated to perpetuating modernist design, has run an article on sustainability in every issue since 2000. In a recent issue, A New Shade of Green. Sustainability is here to Stay, editor Sam Grawe captured the culture’s reaction to a year of green journalism in the wake of unexpected popularity Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, and his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize award (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, for its analysis

Stormwater system and public space at Averett University Student Center, Siteworks.

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and synthesis of global research findings). “I have to be honest with you. I am getting tired of sustainability. “ (Grawe 2007: 41).

Are these forums the only effective means to change values and practices? I think not. For as Grawe’s editorial attests, media saturation can as easily lead to cynicism as environmentalism. Especially when it appears that every product and industry is now eco-friendly or environmentally-friendly, from oversized SUV automobiles and “McMansion” houses to oil companies; when the sustainability-obsessed become eco-bloggers monitoring their daily impact on the globe, and patrons of eco-chic night clubs who party in a space made of recycled, renewable, sustainable, and not dangerous materials; and when the bio-physical world is depicted in ads for Home Depot hardware store as if were a toy or pet to be be-friended and hugged.

We need multiple forms and forums for caring and learning about the impact of our actions on the planet, some visual, some textual, and some experiential. As Lawrence Buell noted in Writing for an Endangered World, we need more than reports and data, we also need products of culture, narratives, images, and places to move us to act.

In this regard, design matters and beauty matters. It moves something in our psyche as the experience of a winter snow fall on the imprinted concrete waterfront promenade at Allegheny River Park, Pittsburgh, PA, demonstrates. In the absence of vegetation, in the linear marks left by imprinting native grasses in the concrete, water settles and freezes, icy shadows form reminding us of what is absent. These ground marks intermingle in mysterious ways with the motion of river water and the light from nearby street lights. Where is man and nature there? Formal and informal? Ecology and technology? Aesthetics and sustainability? All superceded by the fleeting, yet memorable, recognition of and experience of a place known in, and over, time.

It is not enough to design landscapes that incorporate best management practices, follow LEED (USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) criteria, and look like they were not designed. It is not enough to emulate the admirable design forms or practices of our colleagues from afar. Designed landscapes need to be constructed human experiences as much as ecosystems. They need to move citizens to action. The designed landscapes of the world take up a small amount of the globe’s surface. Yet they are visited and inhabited by people who have great impact on the environment in every thing they do--where they live and how they commute, what they consume, and whom they elect into public office. The influence of designed landscapes might be much larger than their immediate influence on a local ecosystem or watershed, as worthwhile as designing a rain garden or a green roof that reduces storm water run-off may be.

Many professions and disciplines will contribute to our understanding of sustainability. Landscape architects who are designers do so by making places that are constructed performing ecosystems and constructed aesthetic experiences. We are sustained by reducing, editing, doing less bad. But we are also sustained, and regenerated, through abundance, wonder, and beauty. The performance of a landscape’s appearance, and experience of beauty, should have as much currency in debates about what a sustainable landscape might, and should, be as the performance of its ecological systems. I think, I hope, such a shift might be one of the tools that jolts our clients and neighbors out of their complacency and inaction, transforming them into a new generation of environmentalist-citizens.

REFERENCES

Berleant, A. 1991. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University

Danto, A. 1999. “Beauty from Ashes”. In: Benezra and Viso. Regarding Beauty. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum: 183-197.

Eliot, Jr. C. 1896. “What is Fair Must be Fit.” Garden and Forest April 1): 132-133.

Hester, R. 2005. Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Grawe, S. 2007. “Sustainability 24/7”. Dwell. At Home in the Modern World (November) 11.

Jackson, J. B. 1984. The Word Itself. In: Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1948, 2004 translation. The World of Perception. New York: Routledge

Nassauer, J. 1995. “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames.” LandscapeJournal 14 (2): 161-170.

Scarry, E. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

This manifesto is an excerpt of a longer article in Journal of Landscape Architecture, Spring 2008.

All included projects are the work of alumni and faculty at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

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Inhabiting Liminal Landscape

Robin DrippsT. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture

Lucia PhinneyDistinguished Lecturer

These diagrams describe a process of progressively inhabiting a landscape through building, earthworks, water works, and engaging the wild energies. They offer insights into how developing research about spatial structure, inventive fabrication, and unconventional materials can work with natural process to alter the way a site can be inhabited and made productive. Construction at the scale of the machined detail as well as the more vast scale involving coordinated choreography of large earth moving equipment has been nearly continuous for over three decades. Ideas have been tested, reconsidered, put aside for later, and even discarded altogether.

Something of an intellectual journey through the artifice of construction, the process of building and dwelling is just as strongly directed towards evolving ideas about living on the land. Local watersheds have been reconnected through constructed wetlands and waterworks. Barren fields have been restructured and replanted with native vegetation to provide habitat for animal and bird. Gardens and orchards are the locus of experiments in organic agriculture that ultimately provides a sustainable food source for inventive culinary adventures.

The land and its construction have been an integral part of our teaching and its development parallels the reconnection of the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Virginia. This is more than the bringing together of two disciplines since no matter how close they become there will always be that problematic gap. It is here, in this provocative liminal zone that a more complex account of the relationships between artifice and nature can grow and in turn infect in the best sense each of these incomplete modes of acting.

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Spectacle

The initial idea was an interior room, an urban loft to house a wide variety of changing uses. Materials were mostly off-the-shelf industrial pieces repurposed for domestic use. Construction was simple yet articulate. Exposed ducts, pipes and wiring conduits revealed a complex inner life. Multicolored coiled cables hanging from trusses connected to a variety of machines, filmmaking equipment, music making and recording devices.

Its white double cubed exterior, somewhat at odds with such an active interior, was intended to be a contrast to the abandoned pastureland of the site. Wild, unkempt nature was both a source of wonder and a constant worry as flora and fauna threatened to encroach on this prismatic form. The spectacular setting with its long, undisturbed views towards the Blue Ridge Mountains was just that-a spectacle to be observed from within.

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Path

The first extension of this interior world into the land was the leveling of the earth to the northeast and the addition of a garage-workshop. This defines an intimate outdoor room as part of a trellised entry path extending into the surrounding forest. A retaining wall to the northwest redefines the boundary between inside and out, creating a threshold between the house and its vast landscape. This new plinth establishes a horizontal line to ground the curves of the distant ridge now framed by a row of Tulip Poplar trees. These two moves create a path that splices the well-traveled route to the forest with the well-viewed sight of the mountains.

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Program

Lateral enclosures to northeast and southwest amplify the interior program. Porch and stairs provide seating for the step-down theater to the northeast. To the southwest, the dining area opens onto herb terraces stepping up the slope to a semicircular hemlock hedge.

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Microclimate

Breakthrough agricultural technologies of the last 20 years create microclimates for plants to thrive well beyond their preferred climate zone. These technologies can also be used to create optimal terrain for humans. Scaffold structure wrapped in agricultural fabric creates a microclimatic layer protecting the interior from the summer sun and the winter winds. This wrap substantially reduces energy loads while facilitating free passage from inside to outside.

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Sustenance

Blueberries and grapes frame an intensive vegetable parterre, orchard, and fungi plantation. Using materials developed in Scandinavia, Japan, and Israel, crops will thrive year-round in the hospitable Virginia solar climate. This very personal food landscape provides unique produce and cuts food-travel miles to zero.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12family harvest month genus

Chenopodiaceae spinach, chard

Cruciferaceae arugula, kohlrabi

Asteraceae fennel, carrots

Apiaceae endive, radicchio

Malvaceae okra

Solanaceae pepper

Liliaceae onion

Fabaceae crowder peas

Cucurbitaceae melon

Fabaceae bush beans

Cruciferae broccoli

Solanaceae eggplant

Fabaceae edamame

Asteraceae carrots

Chenopodiaceae agretti

Liliaceae onions

Solanaceae tomatoes

Graminaceae sweet corn

Fabaceae pole beans

Cucurbitaceae summer squash

Cruciferae savoy cabbage

Fabaceae snap peas

Liliaceae garlic, shallots

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photo by Zoé Edgecomb

Hydrology

Rain falling on roofs is directed to rills on the ground that feed a new collector channel. The dining area now extends above this channel. Water is recycled through this system to supply fountains for evaporative cooling, and to provide the amphibian habitat that reduces mosquito populations. (In central Virginia, an impermeable surface will feed and replenish a basin 1/8 of its size. Thus, waterfront property is available even on hilltops.)

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pencil drawing by Serena Nelson

Landform Geometry

Local rectilinear geometrical structure reaches out to engage the curvilinear structure of the landform. The subtle underlying geometries of the land are revealed through geometrical terraces descending to the pond’s similarly shaped concrete wall that continues as a spillway in the form of a water stair. An aluminum catwalk suspended over the water furthers the arc of the pond but then links to a more meandering path following the natural swales that channel surface water into a constructed wetland and then the pond. Radii of these geometries orient the earthen dam and tractor access route to the extended axes of the house.

Lucia Phinney and Robin Dripps teach at the University of Virginia and conduct experiments in Batesville.

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CLIMATE RHYTHMS

Anne MorrisMArch 2007

How does an individual learn the cycles of her surroundings?

This project seeks to understand how individuals can become more aware of their surroundings and gain a better understanding of place.

MOBILE CULTURE

As our culture becomes increasingly mobile, it becomes difficult for people to root themselves and understand their place. Place entails an individual’s interpretation of both culture and environment. This study attempts to engender an understanding of place by revealing and inviting interaction with climate. Allowing an individual to manipulate the boundary between interior and exterior spaces creates opportunities for observation of both the smaller cycles of the day and the larger cycles of the seasons, in turn fostering greater understanding of one’s environment.

ExTENSIONS OF THE BODy

The built environment can become an extension of the body and prompt individuals to understand and participate in their surroundings. In The Hand, Frank R. Wilson discusses how the hand provides information and connects the brain to extensions of the body:

Cranes and backhoes work on exactly the same principle, substituting a human operator for the brain, motors for muscles, and cable (or hydraulics and pistons) for tendons. With experience, the operator eventually “incorporates” all of this machinery and begins to treat the machine’s bucket as if it were a spoon in his hand and he were doing nothing more complicated than eating his breakfast cereal. With a puppeteer, of course, there are no motors to assist with the lifting. From a control perspective, crane operators and marionettes confront many of the same challenges, despite striking differences in appearance (and scale) of the theaters in which they work. The crane operator, as we have seen “becomes one”with his machine; it is the same for the puppeteer.1

The senses are also essential to this information matrix. In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa discusses the need to make use all of the senses to understand one’s place. He discusses how the eyes want to collaborate with other senses, in an extension of touch. “The senses not only mediate information for the judgment of the intellect, they are also channels which ignite the imagination and articulate sensory thought.”2 Therefore, using multiple senses of the body allows for a more complete understanding of the cycles of the environment.

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COMMUNICATIONAs occupants the manipulate multi-layered panels to meet their needs, the façade changes constantly. This series of interventions performed by several individuals communicates to the public both an expression of community and an illustration of the wind at play.

TECHNOLOGyA solution was sought that would allow minute adjustments of the environment without constant adjustment by the individual. Microcontrollers fit the constraints imposed by the project well, due to their small size and low energy use. More importantly, they can be programmed to handle a variety of inputs, such as wind intensity and direction, and, in turn, activate a series of outputs, such as turning on a motor to close the window.

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STUDIESInitial studies categorized climate into into three sections: water (rain and moisture), light (including qualities of clouds and seasons), and wind (how air movement changes throughout the day and seasons). Because wind cannot as easily be sensed through the dominant modes of sight and hearing, it was chosen as the focus for the project.

The primary goal was to look at how wind changes over time. To understand this, a microcontroller and a combination of found materials, such as a mouse, drill battery, and several servomotors were used to create a working mock-up. To heighten the visibility of the wind, colorful shade fabric formed the panel bodies. The panels were set up to act like weather vanes pointing in the wind’s direction, allowing wind to pass through the structure. The system could also be set up to close the panels during extreme winds or to open only on warm days.

The mock-up became a window in space, allowing passers-by to understand the changing wind patterns. Additionally, some viewers interacted with the panels, adjusting them to suit their wishes. It was apparent that as individuals became more aware of the wind patterns, they also had more interest in their environment.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTSWith the public installation of the system, new ideas began to unfold, and new questions arose: the built system controlled each panel individually, but how effective was this decentralized approach at the scale of the whole building? Would it be possible for the microcontrollers to communicate with one another? How could the system be centralized but also allow individual control? Centralization of a system might allow an entire building to take advantage of calm, warm breezes that could cool the building, while at other times it could close itself to cold or extreme winds. A natural ventilation system could be created in which panels on the bottom of the cool side of the building could open to let breezes in, while panels at the top of the warm side could open to release those air currents. Within this larger system, the addition of a handle could provide a tactile interface, and allow an occupant to adjust the panel to her needs. This leads to the next set of questions, which are, as of yet, unanswered. Does the microcontroller take away too much control from the hand? If the hand isn’t constantly adjusting the panel, how will the panel become an extension of the body? How does the manual system overlap the digital?

ENDNOTES

1 Frank R. Wilson. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Pantheon Books (1998), 89.2 Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley & Sons (2005), 29-31.

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Swann Park, Baltimore

Swann Park:Modular Participatory Ecologies

Alissa Ujie DiamondMLA, 2008

The Middle Branch of the Patapsco River is a place that has seen drastic environmental changes and water quality degradation due to human development. From the mid-18th until the early 20th century, Middle Branch was a center for manufacturing and for water-based recreation. Today, both recreational and industrial tenants on the waterfront have largely abandoned the area.

The legacy of human use of the waterfront has caused major declines in water quality and shallow water habitat. Extensive submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) beds and tidal marshes once provided crucial migratory corridors, spawning grounds, nurseries, and habitat for many species. However, the introduction of pollutants, sediments, shoreline encroachment, and extensive filling of the urban shoreline has depleted this vital habitat, and removed a crucial buffer from severe storms and flooding events.

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This project identifies two scales of movement at the Swann Park Site: large scale transport traffic due to the park’s proximity to the highway, and small scale recreational use of circuit training and community sports teams. The module, which uses recycled shipping pallets as a base, is compatible with existing transport equipment, such as cargo trucks and forklifts. Each module contains 4 sub-modules that are small enough to be towed or carried by a single person. These submodules are used to engage recreational users on the site in the rituals of habitat restoration.

The terrestrial module engages the land-side users of Swann Park. Community football teams that play on site are asked to donate one day a year to marsh restoration. These teams are trained on site, and transplant grasses to submodules. These units can be carried to vegetated protection baffles for planting, or placed into the larger modules, which are taken by truck to be planted at local restoration sites. Through these processes, the park becomes a hub for community recreation and involvement, and a productive farm for the establishment of marsh grasses.

Summer training day

Terrestrial Module: Nested Scale of Collection and Dispersal

Submodules used to collect grasses from filtration/farm field

Submodules transported by hand to training baffle

Grasses transplanted to training baffle

Transplant demonstration occurs in training gardens

Modules loaded on trucks for transport to prepared restoration site

Grasses transplanted at restoration site from submodule

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Training Sequence

Restoration Sequence

Submodules transported by hand to loading dock Submodules loaded into modules for transport

Modular Terrestrial Restoration Strategy

Vegetated Submodule (20’’x24’’)

Recycled Pallet Base (40’’x80’’)

Metal Mesh Cage

Restoration Class

Hands on Restoration Training

Football Game

Submodules used to collect grasses from filtration/farm field

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Habitat Corridor After Installation (Shown in Summer)

Modular SAV Restoration Strategy

Germinated SAVs brought to site in trucks, unloaded by forklift

Floats are attached, and SAV modules are launched from dock

Modules are grouped and towed to pier structure in water

Modules attached to piers and lowered to appropriate depth

Submodules removed and inserted in towing container

Submodules placed in dissemination bays for pick-up

Submodules towed by canoers and kayakers to designated restoration pier structures

Submodules installed in restoration pier structure

Germinated SAVs brought to site in trucks, unloaded by forklift

Export Sequence

Aquatic Module: Nested Scale of Collection and Dispersal

Vegetated Submodule in towing container

Vegetated Submodule (20’’x24’’)

Recycled Pallet Base (40’’x80’’)

Metal Mesh Cage

Float

Import Sequence

Aquatic habitat modules are built on the same recycled pallet bases as terrestrial modules. These modules contain germinated underwater grasses, and are brought to the park habitats by truck. Submodules are inserted into towing floats, and kayakers take these units to restoration areas off site. Underwater habitat corridors are created by these incremental efforts of individuals.

The deployment of terrestrial and SAV habitat modules builds habitat over time. Phasing of the distribution of this community-restored habitat is based on the capabilities of people already using the site. The diagrams shown here assume that each of the 110 football teams that plays on the Swann Park site donate one 8-hour day per year to restoration activities, and 15 kayakers per day tow one SAV submodule during the months of April to October.

Through piggybacking on proposed recreational trails and existing social structures relating to the park, this project proposes to ritualize the creation and maintenance of the near-shore environment. As such, restoration is no longer seen as a technical enterprise undertaken by specialists, but becomes integral to the social and recreational life of area park users.

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2108: Washington DC harvests the city

2078: The new city generates more energy, more food, more clean products than it uses

2038: Citizen engineers re-ingurate the formerly monumental reflecting pools

2018: Rising sea levels cause the Federal Agencies to flee the city

Harvest the City: The Future of the city competition

Grow D.C. Team:

Julie Bargmann D.I.R.T. Studio / Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Chris Fannin D.I.R.T. Studio / Lecturer, Landscape ArchitectureNataly GattegnoFuture Cities Lab LLC/ Assistant Professor of ArchitectureJason JohnsonFuture Cities Lab LLC/ Assistant Professor of Architecture

William MorrishElwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture

Consultants: Kristina Hill (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture)

Byron Stigge (Buro Happold Engineers, New york), Jeana Ripple (Lecturer, Architecture)

Assistants: David Malda, Karey Helms, Steve Brummond, Steven Johnson, and Suzanne Mathew

In January 2008 the History Channel presented a design competition for The City of the Future. Entrants were asked to project a future for Washington D.C. for the year 2108. The competition program called for special attention to the future of infrastructure and environmental concerns. The Grow D.C. team was selected for the one-week competition and presented to a jury in a public dsiplay at Union Station in Washington D.C.

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The jury listens as Jason Johnson explains the models and drawings on behalf of the team.

Dear GrowDC team,Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on the technical infrastructure delivery of energy generation and water treatment processes. If built today with best practice technology, these pods will generate 4MW of solar energy and 1MW energy from biogas. This would power approximately 3,000 homes. But we project both solar technology and residential energy demand to improve to a point where it is reasonable to believe these pods would power over 12,000 homes. Water treatment settling tanks, membrane filtration and microbial treatment processes are easily scaleable to serve a population of up to 100,000 people per pod (though less is just as well) and are located under the solar canopy. Sludge waste from the settling tanks (known as ‘cake’ to those in the business) is the primary input into anaerobic digestion tanks which convert the sludge to soil fertilizer, liquid fertilizer (liquor) and biogas (methane). Biogas can be bottled for redistribution for cooking and heating or it can be burned directly in the energy pod to generate electricity and heat. The solar canopy and the water treatment functions are well suited for pod stacking but the water treatment plant needs only 1 acre under the solar canopy. Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on food production. An optimized, fertilized (organically), and heated farming pod can easily serve vegetables, grains and fruits for over 10,000 people for a year (no meat in my calc, sorry carnivores). Farming pods are likely to be more focused on fewer products for some economies of scale, but with enough human work input as many as 100 food products can be grown through the course of the year in one 10 acre food pod. Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on water purification. Reed beds, polishing ponds and water fountains make up a matrix of final water cleansing in the pod and can serve the potable water needs for 5,000 households under typical demands of today. This may actually be the limiting reagent as supplying drinking water through biological processes takes a lot of space (and heat in the winter). But in an emergency situation, a water purification pod could serve water demand of over 50,000 people. Of course a hybrid pod that contained all of the above infrastructure services is most ideal as solar energy feed water testment process, water testment process feeds agriculture process, agriculture process feeds composting process etc. All infrastructure systems are interdependent and the more they are pulled apart for economies of scale, the more unreliable and inresilient the entire system becomes. And a pod that contained actual living and working units and connected to other pods through regional transit would also maximize the integrated ‘sustainability’ of the concept. But this might just be called a ‘city’ - Though it would be a city of the future.-Byron

Each team was given 3 hours to assemble the model in front of spectators at Washington D.C.’s Union Station.

The Eco-Hub models (aka “fuzzy nuggets”) were manufactured at UVa and then assembled on-site.

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Harvesting the City

2058: The flooded Federal City spawns new networks 2108: The city becomes a productive hub

After years of struggle and decay the flooded city of Washington D.C. will be reseeded by waves of entrepreneurial neighbors cultivating adaptive communities on rising tides.

Out of submerged monumental land, grow productive landscapes from hydrologic processes. Out of Federal waste, grow exotic energy sources and intelligent building systems.Out of polluted rivers, grow living machines of water purification and community food supplies.Out of exclusive enclaves, grow equitable educational and cultural resources in agoras of productive exchange.Out of tangled gridlock, grow nearby hubs of local goods and fluid networks of shared services.Out of mixed messages, grow high tech local networks to cultivate global common understanding.Out of taxation without representation, grow revolutionary militias of urban activists and inventors.

2108: The city of the future and its infrastructure will be grown by the collective ingenuity of citizen engineers for equitable education, energy and exchange.

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The Ethic of X-Change:GG Venice Competition

Mark Buenavista, Chihiro Shinohara, Ngoc Tran, Graduate Architecture and Landscape Architecture

The island of Sacca San Matteo is simultaneously a stage of contradictory uncertainty and constancy. On one hand it is a site of potential flooding and domestic/visitor misuse, and, on the other hand, a field used for recreation and waste disposal. This park proposal re-imagines Sacca San Matteo as an exchange medium, operating between the scales of local Murano and the islands of the Venice Lagoon on an ecological, economic, and cultural level. The island is conceived as a constructed ground, organized along an open-ended series of operative ribbons that negotiate periodic flows, waste treatment, and human inhabitation. Some ribbons perform as living machines or a series of constructed wetlands that filter and remediate wastes produced by tourism and domestic use. Effluents from the wastes of tourists and local residents are unloaded onto the backdoor ( i.e. northeast end of the site) and are filtered and utilized for community agriculture distributed to the front door of the island (i.e. southern end). Prototypical growing barges that dock at the front door export agricultural products and species, potentially seeding and extending to other islands of the Venice Lagoon. Programs on the island shift and intersect the ribbons, taking into account varying degrees of necessity and ecological chance. Tourists and locals navigate between front door and back door, experiencing San Matteo’s cycles of waste to growth. “X-Change” takes a variable approach to the ground’s construction, allowing its ribbons to act as an armature for dynamic process and reciprocity between different pressures. Waste + food + People = X-Change

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AGUA

Elizabeth HoogheemMArch, 2008

Shanti Fjord LevyMLA, MArch, 2008

This proposal for a water infrastructure park responds to the combined intensity of development pressure and water crisis in the the fringes of the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA), the second largest megacity in the world. The park works within the planned development of a new urban corridor north of Mexico City, which intends to house an incoming population of seven million new residents. The developer’s proposal calls for a traditional, closed, chemical based water treatment plant and an adjacent, vaguely defined expanse of “open space”. We propose an alternative to this monolithic approach, finding ways for this infrastructure to hybridize into resources for public space, ecological habitat and economic stimulus to bolster an existing town and integrate an influx of new residents.

BASIN OF MExICO: A LANDSCAPE OF DUALITyThe landscape identity of this arid place is inseparable from its oscillation between dual characters. It is half a parched place with subtle traces of seasonal wetness, waiting, waiting for the rain. In this dry season, the rain comes suddenly, sweeping through the valley in powerful storms. During these months green colors become latent, leaving muted shades of sand. Month by month the rains return. Wetness becomes dependable, a daily event, leaving behind watercourses and pools, rendering the soil softer, allowing crops to grow. The city’s hydraulic endeavors over the course of its history have addressed this dual character as a dangerous problem, using huge infrastructural feats to fight its threatening floods and droughts. In developing Zumpango as a “new way of making a city,” as its planners intend, this dramatic flux can be recognized as critical to the Basin’s health and identity. The lake, reformed as a cultural, ecological system, could reconnect inhabitants to the cycles of water upon which they depend.

Maps of the Zumpango region during the wet season (below) and dry season (above).

Site photos of the Gran Canal and Lake Zumpango

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THE TOWN: HISTORIC CITy / FOULED REPUTATIONThe town of Zumpango has a vibrant, historic center, yet it has lost nearly all connection to the lake that spurred its original settlement and offered it a name. In the Federal District, many residents know little of its active zocalo and expansive lake, associating it instead with the course of the sewage laden Gran Canal.

THE LAKE: REMNANT / TANKLake Zumpango links the area to the Basin of Mexico’s unique history, as it is one of the last three remnants of the once powerful lacustrine system. The lake has been named a “Water Sanctuary” by the government, but steps have not been taken to define or investigate this status. Rather, the lake is better known for its role as a massive piece of infrastructure, a flood-control “tank.” While the lake provides a habitat for diverse flocks of migrating birds, its impenetrable edges raise questions of access, visibility, and missed opportunities. And yet people find ways to overcome these barriers, to precariously occupy the lake and its edges.

THE GRAN CANAL: BARRIER TO THE LAKE / CONNECTION TO THE BASIN Multiple linear barriers currently separate the town from the lake. The Gran Canal is the key culprit. The Canal, a ten-meter deep ravine, was heralded on the day of its opening as Mexico City’s savior, emptying waste and floodwaters from the basin. The deep channel carries the sewage of Mexico City north through Zumpango, running parallel to the eastern edge of the Lake, defining an extreme, uncrossable boundary. The blackwater is dropped into two grand ‘water boxes’ at the northeast corner of the lake. These inverted pyramids mark the entrances to a tunnel that shunts the effluent north, where it irrigates the agricultural fields of Hidalgo, the food source of the region. We see the canal as another missed opportunity, a monument in its own right, connecting the city, if now negatively, to the water system of the entire basin.

THE PACHUCA RIVER: ERODED ARROyO / POTENTIAL CORRIDOR The Pachuca River emerges at the summit of Mt. Pachuca and runs its course through the agricultural fields east of Zumpango. The seasonal watercourse has been described as the sewer line of the lands that flank its eroded banks. When it reaches Zumpango it is channeled in a concrete bed and dismissed from the life of the city, released into the fissure of the canal.

Lake Zumpango

Canal

Pachuca River

Historic Town

Above: Living machines create a structure of pathways with a permanent flow of nutrient rich water Below: Study models project ideas for connecting the to the lakeshore

Proposed Park

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Left: Bas relief model expresses elements of the proposed system. A spillway draws floodwater from the lake toward the town, flooding seasonal play fields and irrigating crops. The sequence of potable water treatment structures a procession from the town zocalo to a pumphouse in the lake. Wastewater treatment through living machines and wetland systems forms an armature for recreation and agriculture fields. Aquatic hedgrows make a more ecologically complex shoreline, while, on the city side, pocket parks create thresholds between existing neighborhoods, new infill housing and the park. Jacaranda hedgerows mark lateral pathways for stormwater and pedestrian access across the canal to the lake. The Pachuca river gains access to a wide, dense floodplain corridor.

exising conditions permanent water system fluctuating water system

wildlife and pedestrian corridors

potable water treatment park wastewater treatment park water systems structure public space

cultural destinations infill development

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Hoogheem

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DESIGN INTENTIONS1. Connect the new and proposed city to the lake edge.2. Celebrate the flood control function of the lake, creating public engagement with both the infrastructural role and seasonal fluctuations of the local water system. Direct floodwaters to support irrigation for intensive productivity. 3. Use public space as a way to connect the existing city of Zumpango and its residents with their neighbors arriving to the new urban corridor.4. Increase the complexity of the lake edge to create diverse wildlife and human habitats.5. Provide opportunities for citizen connection to wastewater processes within an experiential, productive, shared landscape. 6. Provide collective recreational opportunities to reinforce the identity of the city, both existing and new.7. Increase the lake’s local and regional significance by providing a destination along its shores.8. Strengthen the ecology of the lake as aquatic habitat, the Pachuca and the Gran Canal as wildlife corridors.9. Use an armature of hedgerows to channel, cleanse, and infiltrate stormwater while also creating access routes between local neighborhoods, the park and the lake. 10. Provide economic opportunities for production based on the resource of water, and tourism.11. Integrate facilities for public use: schools, environmental education, and recreational centers.12. Provide potable water to the city, making its processes of treatment visible with a linked procession from the center of Zumpango to the lake.

Above: Section perspective at lake edge through potable water promenade, and restored aquatic habitat. Below: Detailed model of transect from the urban grain of Zumpango center reconnected to the lake edge.

Left, Center: Potable water treatment and flood spillway offer access across the Gran CanalRight: Expanded Pachuca corridor

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Hoogheem

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COLLECTIVE LANDSCAPE: THE CONFLUENCE OF WATER AND SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN KUTCH RELOCATION HOUSING

Hope Dinsmore MArch 2007 Advisor: Robin Dripps

The Kutch region of Gujarat is no easy place to survive. An arid landscape bordering Pakistan and the Arabian Sea, the region is isolated by hundreds of miles of uninhabitable salt flats to the north and east. Primarily an agricultural society, the Kutchi population has always existed in a precarious balance with the harsh climate. These conditions have resulted in distinctive characteristics in the constructed environment as inhabitants must rely on their own resourcefulness and the support of others in the community.

Water plays a critical role in defining the built environment of Kutch. In this water-scarce region, a year’s supply of water falls in two days and briefly transforms the entire landscape. The Harappan Civilization first harnessed this rainfall five thousand years ago, constructing a complex infrastructure of water collection, storage and distribution that sustained its population throughout the year. In 1549, the capital city of Bhuj was established by channeling thirteen water catchment basins to a central lake which would adequately supply the city’s water needs for centuries.1 Rural communities, too, have devised remarkable systems of water harvesting that enable them to survive extended drought conditions and grow crops in Kutch’s saline soils.

Above: Transformation over time: opening of secondary partitions accommodates shifting family dynamicsLeft: Sequence: a house develops from a single cell to determine its initial form

Site Plan in ink washes

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Traditional dwellings in this region are shaped by the notion of “polyvalent space”2: each space, be it a room, a village square, or an infrastructural element, has a multiplicity of uses throughout the day and throughout the year. Simultaneously, this flexible attitude towards dwelling results in a continuum of public and private space rather than a sharp separation between the two. In this way architecture adapts both to the extreme climate and to the changing dynamics of the local population. Unfortunately much of contemporary construction is modeled after Western housing types which establish a barrier between inside and outside, both literally and figuratively. These new neighborhoods often fail to provide the social infrastructure required for a community to function successfully.

Today, Kutch is an unusual juxtaposition of remote villages, ancient architecture, and several rapidly globalizing cities. While development has improved living conditions in much of the region, it has also begun to disrupt the local practices of living off the land that have sustained the Kutchi culture for so long. Once revered and carefully managed, water is no longer used in such a way to support the local population. Rather, communities rely on pumping from the rapidly diminishing groundwater table or bringing water into the region from hundreds of kilometers away. One such population, the city of Bhuj, was devastated by an earthquake in 2001 and has since experienced an accelerated reconstruction, largely out of touch with the climatologically and culturally sensitive techniques present in older architecture. Bhuj provides a case study with which to explore the effects of this shift.

Constructed water infrastructure operates with vertical and lateral flows in a gravity-fed system.

Analysis of existing site hydrology, showing drainage paths at 20’ intervals.

Grid of houses is placed within the armature of the water system.

Section perspective through storm water collection channel, showing planted filters and marshes for grey water treatment.

A clay virda in Hodko, Kutch separates fresh from saline water to supply the needs of the village and its livestock.

Constructed water infrastructure is integrated with existing hydrology.

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This project proposes that a population can be supported locally and sustainably with the existing rainwater supply, by way of the careful location of water infrastructure within the natural hydrological system. Water infrastructure then provides an armature for dwelling and all of the resulting social activity. In doing so, the roof becomes the catchment basin, the street becomes the water filter and the groundwater emerges in the form of vegetation that cools and frames public spaces. Each aspect of the water infrastructure is made visible and has a critical use in the daily lives of residents. In this way, water can once again be recognized for its importance while emphasizing an enduring method of inhabiting the landscape.

This case study examines a cluster of two hundred and twenty houses recently constructed on a relocation site west of Bhuj. Although the houses are only two years old, families have already begun to abandon them because they don’t have access to the infrastructure the households

Above: Section cut through neighborhood cluster shows water distribution in public street rainwater capture in dwelling and drinking water storage in cluster’s ‘tanka.’ Below: Rooftop view of constructed water infrastructure on existing topography.

require. The project provides an alternate design for this community to be built on an adjacent site, incorporating the notions of the convergence of water and social networks. While this solution is site specific, it can also be seen as a model for analysis and intervention that could be employed elsewhere in the region.

Endotes1Interview with Yogesh Jadeja, January 13, 2007.

2Pramar, V. S. A Social History of Indian Architecture. Delhi ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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FROM ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ: OUTPOST ON THE POLITICAL EQUATOR

Andrea Dietzestudio teddy cruz

THE POLITICAL EQUATOR AS CONCEPTUAL MATERIAL

The Political Equator1, a Cartesian swath narrowing and thickening between the 25°N and 35°N parallels, denotes the materialization of an increasingly defined demarcation between the first and third worlds, a binary geographical settling of the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere into what Thomas P.M. Barnett terms the “functioning core” and the “non-integrating gap”.2 The notional boundary between the haves and have-nots, now, is actualized, manifest, solidified, in a line of fortifications damming a string of conflicted, congested urbanities that hug the divide between realities. Both a belt delimiting continental polarization and a link connecting many of earth’s embattled regions, the Political Equator incorporates such contested territories as the Mexico/U.S. border, the Africa/Europe bridge spanning the Mediterranean, the centralizing emblem of Middle East strife at Palestine/Israel, and the swirling junction of Kashmir/India/Nepal/Tibet and developing/developed China. Each of these concentrated locales, stressed and transgressed from the south by floods of human immigrants in search of stable economies and from the north by international corporations attracted to exploitable labor, shoulders the repercussions of pervasive consumptive ideologies and logics.

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FROM THE GLOBAL BORDER TO THE BORDER NEIGHBORHOODThe metropolitan hotspots bisected by or clinging to the Political Equator necklace, all concussant densifications, belong to no other typology. They exist not simply as globalized hubs but as pooled microcosms replicating, intensifying, and congealing the field standards that play out across and between the two sides. Tijuana is not Mexico: San Diego is not the United States. Tijuana, the historical byproduct of U.S. Prohibition and playground of Dry Law escape, while the most Americanized city in Mexico, simultaneously is the exemplary referent for Latin stereotyping. At the same time Mexican visitors to and long-term residents of Tijuana perceive the place as an “other” within their country, U.S. anti-immigration advocates rely on Tijuana as broadcasting headquarters of the invader tendencies towards abuse and criminality. San Diego, on the other hand, models a different inversion, a folding-in, as if the first-world excesses, upon hitting their property extents, collapse in upon and multiply themselves. Even within the riches of the U.S., allusions to Southern California connote an extreme, a bubble of egocentric naivety. Tijuana and San Diego, together, share more than proximity; both, the unique phenomena of 32°N overlap, defy, through problematic exponentiation, national identification. The region exists as a single complex, a network of indistinguishable interdependencies meshing a 50-mile cross-section of equatorial fat.

“The Political Equator”. graphic : Teddy Cruz, Andrea Dietz, and Esther Mildenberger of envision+. May 2007: Rotterdam Biennale.

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+25 MILES : BREAD BASKETLaced within and extending from the San Diego city limits lie some of the world’s most fertile and productive agricultural terrains. It is a land mired in paradox, both the object of patriotic pride and the beacon (at the mercy) of foreign opportunists. These and like farms, driven by the sustenance demands of the world and fueled by the efforts of migrant laborers, annually hire 1.6 million persons, “1.2 million [of which probably are] not authorized to work in the US.”3 In contrast, “under the H2-A [immigration] program, farmers can bring in temporary workers [only] after demonstrating that American workers are not interested in the jobs and after going through a lengthy application process. [This primary legal avenue] bring[s] in about 50,000 such workers a year.”4 The outcomes of these tenuous conditions include both a constant supply of fresh flowers, fruits, grains, and vegetables as well as canyons and parking lots occupied by tent communities and job-seeking loiterers.

+20 MILES : DEVELOPER DIGESTIONIn addition to (or in concert with the financial imbalance inherent to) the operational dilemma of US agriculture, despite ever growing raw food needs, property dedicated to cultivation shrinks in area. Census reports indicate that nationally in 1997, there were 954,752,502 acres of land in farms, but that, by 2002, there remained only 938,279,056 acres, revealing an approximate daily deduction of 10,000 acres.5 The undermining violence of this erasure compounds more conventional decries of sprawl as environmental depredator. Contemporary populating tendencies to treat ground not simply as source, but as consumable, to not simply restructure topography, but to shape alien ecology, lend hyper-meaning to notions of the cleared site. At the same time development techniques literally eat both the already plowed and untouched natural of the local, “building construction and [maintenance] account for half of US energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” draining also the resources of the global.6 The San Diego region grows by an average of 14,300 new housing units per year. 7

+15 MILES : BEIGE BAN(D)The occupants of previously dominated scrape spaces likewise are (con)formed to replica McMansions, insulated in series of gated communes, and shielded in transition by gas-guzzling hummers. These societal filters of sameness, coupled with comprehensive camera surveillance, assure, through the villainizing of difference, the exclusion even of the ideal of heterotopia. A read of the lay betrays a definition of arrival or comfort increasingly hijacked by the money logics of the mass generic and the fear-induced mentality of media hysteria. Ironically, precisely the risks assumed to achieve this deceptive safety augment the expectational enslavement, as those who buy into actually are bought by the advertised lifestyle image. “San Diego’s high housing prices [with a median half-million dollar sale value, along] with its relatively low wages, make it the sixth least affordable area in the country…. [And,] a 665 percent jump in home mortgage foreclosures between 2005 and 2006 [establish Southern California as an epicenter of the subprime crisis].”8 Herein, land use, interestingly, is the revelator of the desirability of ease, subsidized by debt fueled existence, pushed too far.

“+15 miles” . photographer : Andrea Dietz . April 2007 .“+20 miles” . photographer : Teddy Cruz . June 2005 .

“+25 miles” . photographer : Andrea Dietz . April 2007 .

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+10 MILES : FORT DOWNTOWNThe personal bunkers of the civilian suburbs mirror the military complex that is San Diego’s urban center. About a quarter of the area’s land is owned by the federal government and dedicated as marine and naval bases. The people affiliated with or working in these restricted access zones account for over 15 percent of the region’s population.9 The air of paranoia and secrecy emanating from these focal enclaves establishes the guarded as the norm. Supplementary to the censuring and control methodologies of the national, similar troop binding tactical maneuvers lock the local in, arguably, one of the country’s most arbitrarily stringent environment determining systems. Having relinquished downtown construction responsibility to the Centre City Development Corporation, an independent organization charged with a singular objective, the bankrupt City of San Diego steered the physical making of place into a profit redeeming endeavor. CCDC and like pocket neighborhood commissions, all carrying the force of law, combined with overly-complex and unwieldy building regulations, and weighted by a prohibitively expensive and lengthy permitting process, reduce the measure of quality design to assimilation with pre-determined formulae. Architects and planners serve a mere auxiliary role in this process, staying afloat by positioning themselves as mass-production cloners; or forced underground as clever manipulators of the rules.

+5 MILES : INFORMAL FIRSTSilently lurking in the shadows of the skyline of cranes, a population of 10,000 homeless10 creates a sub-texture within the totalizing frame of the core. Dependent primarily on the under-funded generosity of private non-profits, the crowds of the unseen thicken on the urban fringes, forming a spontaneous service sector on the shifting joint of a semi-active tectonic fault line. This no-man’s land, in concert with the diving and towering concrete incision of Interstate 5, establish a double barrier between two versions of newness, a clear boundary separating US San Diego from Mexican San Diego. The post World War II ring of residential growth, which extends southward to the international border, along with an east and northward scattering of island communities, wears the re-adaptations of the recently immigrated. Mutated by both formal and functional, ignored and under-the-radar contraventions in code and zoning, the ubiquitous becomes singular, taking on new life as the row-house mercado, the dim-sum strip mall, or the artist factory. Only in these government neglected territories does the visible fabric reveal a comfort in the display of identity and ownership.

“+5 miles” . photographer : Andrea Dietz . April 2007

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“+10 miles” . photographer : Teddy Cruz . May 2007

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FIELD: GREEN ARTIFICEUnified as an oasis in the desert, San Diego acquires only 10-20 percent of it’s water supply locally, with 80-90 percent imported through a 242 mile-long aqueduct from the Colorado River and a 444 mile-long aqueduct from northern California.11 The residents who depend on this construct inhabit an elaborate farce of plenty decorated in a blanket of non-native plant species.

GROUND ZERO : THE WALLThat from which the built fabric of San Diego runs and to which the built fabric of Tijuana flocks is a 14-mile, sheet-metal barricade, thickened into no-man’s bands where the wall, in places, is doubled and tripled. A primarily symbolic gesture of deterrence, terminating in the true obstacles, the turbulence of the Pacific Ocean on the west and the forbidding sands of the Sonoran Desert on the east, the narrow strip shelters only the covert activities of the Border Patrol. The central puncture, the world’s busiest port of entry, ushers through an average of 93,000 vehicles and 20,000 pedestrians each day.12 The control measures frequently are skirted by elaborate smuggling schemes and bypassed altogether in upwards of 30 known underground tunnels varying in length and sophistication. Though, the only unrestricted flow, that of the Tijuana River, which crosses from Mexico in the United States at its mouth, carries the byproducts of an inadequate sewer and waste system into the northern neighbor’s waters.

FIELD : BROWN NATUREThe precarious actualities of the regional ecology are exposed in one simple geographic displacement; the earth literally betrays the international demarcation in an abrupt transition to dusty, windswept lots and dirt roads littered with potholes. Already, up to 65 percent of Tijuana’s water is a provision of the United States, traveling from a Colorado River aqueduct. Combined with the remainder, originating in underground aquifers, the drinking supply services only 85 percent of the city’s population, a daily dearth of more than 114 gallons per person.13 “The Wall”. photographer: Andrea Dietz. April 2007.

“In no place have I felt, as in Tijuana, the force that a territory imposes on its inhabitants. The city has a vocation of belonging to all and in it one can breathe a strange pride, maybe the pride of being a gigantic hotel without doors. Not being imagined as a real city, but as part of a strategy, not as end but as means, ruined that aura of ‘being for always’ that the majority of cities have. There is this sense that at any moment everyone will go and will move to the middle of the desert or to another border.”

Guillermo Fadanelli, as quoted in Here is Tijuana!, by Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, and Heriberto Yepez. (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006)

“You seem to see the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure. Here our people, so long told to go ‘West’ to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight. Among the sand-colored hotels and power plants, the naval outfitters and waterside cafés, the old spread-roofed California houses…they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun….”

Edmund Wilson, as quoted in Under the Perfect Sun : The San Diego Tourists Never See, by Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller. (New York: New Press, 2003)

“Green Artifice”. Photographer: Andrea Dietz. February 2008.

“Brown Nature”. photographer: Andrea Dietz. April 2007.

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+5 KILOMETERS : COUNTER-TOURISMAvenida Revolución, the emblematic engine of Tijuana’s center city, confines both the imaginations and movements of the “daring” visitors. It is home of the caesar salad and donkeys painted like zebras, where wrestling mask dealing magnates are interrupted by panhandlers who thrill those marveling in disbelief at their whereabouts. Meanwhile, the seasoned blend into the fray: the ailing and elderly stocking up on prescriptions at the drug warehouses; fugitives from US law enforcement choking down Cuban cigars while leaning in shaded thresholds; teens stumbling to the next alcohol-serving, neon-blinking, base-thumping club; and midshipmen, in search of company and relief, strolling through the blaring and dinge of the red-light district. Or, so they say.

+10 KILOMETERS : MINI-MIRRORINGFar past the boundaries of the stereotypical, the footprint of Tijuanain quintupled in size during the past decade. Attempts to meet a 60,000 unit housing shortage play out as a mimicking in miniature of US development practices.14 Stylistic photo-copies, the Mexican tract homes, shoulder the dreams and ideologies (but with a quarter the square footage of ) their first-world counterparts. Use distinguishes them, however; for, in time, formal permutations express familial evolutions, micro-economic ventures, and theatrical staging. Absent the societal expectations dictating artifact treatment, the ranch burgers squelch their homogenizing origins.

+15 KILOMETERS : MAQUILADORASOver-shadowing the quilt of residential patches, 562 foreign-owned assembly plants, NAFTA’s subjects, employ more than 100,000 Tijuana residents. Warehouse factories spanning asphalt sheets operate comfortably within the nation’s minimal environmental, employment, and health regulations. Their finished exports, automobiles, electronics, furniture, mechanical systems, and toys, world-wide, bear the “Hecho en México” label. Otherwise, the predominant work in Tijuana is in San Diego; one out of ten locals round-commute daily across the border to earn a living.15

“+5 kilometers” . photographer : Andrea Dietz . April 2007 .

“+10 kilometers” . photographer : Teddy Cruz . June 2005.

“+15 kilometers” . photographer : Gregorio Ortiz. May 2007.

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+20 KILOMETERS : FAVELA SUSTAINABILITyRedefining the recycling movement, the shelters of the desperate impoverished, some sitting in the factory run-off, assembled from manufacturing scraps, some scattered around and in landfills, agglomerated with the (13,500 plus16) tons of waste gifted daily from Southern California, all hovel in the underserviced outskirts and on the fragile slopes of slide prone ravines. A makeshift infrastructure of electric webs tapped into existing power lines, pallet rack bridges, plastic bag fringed channels, and tire retaining walls unite the communities in parasitic dependency. But, within the apparent hopelessness of slum arrangements, inhabitants operate on a premise of empowerment through temporality, building silently and slowly out of anticipation of squatter rights application, the legal provision for property ownership after five years of camping. The lean-to shack dreams of box legitimization.

+25 KILOMETERS : LAWLESS WILDSThen it all just ends, opening in expanse to unknown worlds of both defeat and promise. The geography, on the one hand, echoes bandit history. A newly contested field separating Sinaloa and Tijuana drug cartel lordships destabilized by the August 2006 US arrest of kingpin Francisco Arellano-Felix sends reverberations of violence into the urban core. In January 2007, with the local police suspected of corruption, the Mexican government ordered Tijuana under military rule. Tensions continue to escalate between complex bads and goods through regular kidnappings and increasingly visible shoot-outs, including a most recent neighborhood street battle in January 2008.17 But in parting the screen of the extreme, the Baja plains simultaneously shelter a different version of rebellion. Mexico supports the greatest number of worldwide US ex-patriots, gringos seeking cheaper living, greater freedom, and warmer climes. And, despite the technical illegality of foreign property ownership, coastal resort building booms, multiplying insular copies of first-world villages, reflect both a government and a ground dramatically responding to an influx of relocators. Heralding the Americanization charge, the New Urbanist and sustainability teams render unrecognizable, through immensely scaled Loreto Bay and like projects, larger and larger chunks of a land not home. Meanwhile, the everyday occupants, primarily the marginalized families of US migrant farm workers, in an otherwise barren peninsula and of way stations like Salsipuedes (Leaveifyoucan), go about waking, fishing, selling, and sleeping.

“+25 kilometers”. photographer: Andrea Dietz. April 2007.

“+20 kilometers”. photographer: Andrea Dietz. April 2007.

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FILLING VOIDS

As a re-unified Political Equator pearl, a ‘figuralization’ of the San Diego/Tijuana marriage reveals the opposing density logics, space expendable versus space indispensable, juxtaposed in one binary metropolis. Ironically, both inhabitation tactics construct ecological exploitations, the one environment pushed into un-nature and stressed to sustain a scattered populace actively insisting on the maintenance of their own personal utopias, the other raked for every last resource and drained by crowds compelled to cling to bare surfaces all too painfully proximate to the idealized alternative. Voids open in both schemes: in the north, as abundance normalizes space unconsidered, place ornamentally and programmatically empty both in actuality and conceptually and under-activated by a culture that values interiority and delimitation over community and expression—in the south, as gaps in infrastructure and provision necessary to feed an otherwise lively debate over the challenge to balance the expectation of surplus in an environment that barely promotes survival. These holes establish the platform for projective intervention, efforts in the social engineering of the gray lots and in the structuring of the life-support network of the appropriated.

“Filling Voids” . graphic: Teddy Cruz and Andrea Dietz. May 2007: Rotterdam Biennale.

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DESIGNING POLICyObservations of, and even opportunity identification within, the context of the Political Equator, weighed with a domineering system of monetary prohibition, over- and under-regulation, and societal oblivion position designer solution tactics against mission next-to-impossible. Certainly, singular formal pieces, even those intended as strategic manipulations or as awareness magnifiers, ineffectually address the depths of border distress. Individual and grassroots campaigns facing an apathetic majority and power-wielding institutions struggling under their own unmanned bureaucracies put in question both the traditional bottom-up and top-down control mechanisms. Uniquely, the scale of architecture demanded of such a daunting scenario is that of the theoretical. In turn, the project of The Political Equator is an unachievable synthesis of comprehensive and detailed conjecturing on the maybes of cause-and-effect impacts, a complete vision intended to compromise and inspire, through criticism and debate, another reality.

THE POLITICAL EQUATOR AS CONCEPTUAL MATERIALThe Political Equator (www.politicalequator.org) is, thus far, a biannual happening born of the idolization of the Situationist International agenda and practice. Not only sympathizing with predecessor disillusionment that “[t]he benign professionalism of architecture and design ha[s…] led to a sterilization of the world that threaten[s] to wipe out any sense of spontaneity or playfulness,”18 but that this antiseptic harbors and propagates a disturbing and totalizing cultural world order, the event organizational scenarios provoke a series of literal counter trajectories to the geographic Political Equator, the superstructure junction. Strategic crossings and gatherings of architects and artists working within or on either side of the divide interrupt, if negligibly, the dominant mechanistic flows and initiate a conversation between potential like-minded revolutionaries. Reflection through comparison and, in turn, re-evaluation of work scope offers a minimal hope to forcing figureheads already united in world-altering cause along intersecting pathways. Greater still is the possibility of encouraging, through dialogue, the unsuspecting participant to do and see what the current design administration cannot, to transcend the introspective superficiality of observation and speculation, even the perspective altering suggestive of the inconspicuous, and to lead comprehensive and projective change through social engagement.

“It is known that initially the situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more. And during the entire course of events various partial projects had to be abandoned and a good number of our excellent capacities were not employed, as is the case – but how much more absolutely and sadly – for hundreds and millions of our contemporaries.”

-Guy Debord, as quoted in The Situationist City, by Simon Sadler. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) “The Garage”. photographer: Eloisa Haudenschild. November 2007.

FROM THE GLOBAL BORDER TO THE BORDER NEIGHBORHOODCombined with the energies of the Transitory Público conferences (www.publicotransitorio.com), The Political Equator2 (16-17 November 2007), described herein as a purely logistical experience, congealed as a heterogeneous assembly on the Los Angeles Union Station platform. The mass, manipulated into a moving colloquium, traversed the border cross-section – by Amtrak through the omnipresent texture of southern California to the Haudenschild Garage (an alternative gallery space in the eight-car shelter of wealthy La Jolla art patrons), by University of California San Diego shuttle to lodging in the heart of downtown gentrifying redevelopments, by trolley to The Front at Casa Familiar in San Ysidro (the main-street face of a local non-profit organization active in both planning and service endeavors), by foot across the Homeland Security check-point into Mexico, by bus on tour of Baja’s northern fringe and concluding at Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT). This hyper-introduction to the overlapping complex of the region’s formalized dilemmas, narrated by a panel of influential voices, intentionally exhausted travelers in the frenetic over-abundance.

FILLING VOIDS By DESIGNING POLICyOf course, both obvious danger and potential evolution lie within an effort modeled after the stimulating, but ultimately failed, International Situationist discourse. History too easily repeats itself in the absence of learning from constructive criticism, through protectively autonomous independent and disciplinary pursuits, through the pedestaled placement of star monologues, and through the open-ended and undirected classification of problems. The Political Equator, having attracted substantial interest and founded a platform for debate, sits at a fork, between either, in keeping with precedent, documenting in time a nostalgic confluence of forces or, surpassing assumption, establishing a legitimized network out of networking. If there is an ideal outcome to The Political Equator, it is the establishment of an international cooperative, a world-wide studio, a boundary-less think-tank charged with and ordered through an executable and identifiable mission statement of collective reform. Inherent to the proliferation and success of such a union is a call for leadership, social responsibility shepherded through organization, skill, and vision.

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“Bus Stop”. Photographer: Peter Hilligoss. November 2007 .

“Moving Colloquium”. Photographer: Kyong Park. November 2007.

“The Line” . Photographer: Peter Hilligoss. November 2007.

“Taco Victor”. Photographer: Kyong Park. November 2007.

“The Boredom Patrol”. Photographer: Peter Hilligoss. November 2007.

ENDNOTESENDNOTES

1 Cruz, Teddy. “Border Postcards: Chronicles from the Edge.”inSite 05 / A Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Terrain. Manitoba: Friesens Book Division, 2007.2 Barnett, Thomas PM. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. New York : GP Putnam’s Sons, 2004.3 Holt, James S. “Comments to the California Board of Food and Agriculture.” Del Mar: 26 April 2006.4 Greenhouse, Steven. “US Seeks Rule to Allow Increase in Guest Workers.” The New York Times, 10 October 2007.5 www.agcensus.usda.gov. The Census of Agriculture. National Agricultural Statistics Service: United States Department of Agriculture. 2002 census results.6 Hawthorne, Christopher. “Turning Down the Global Thermostat.” Metropolis. October 2003.7 www.sandag.org. Lamphere, Karen. “Population Growth Outpaces Housing Construction”. News: Full Story San Diego Association of Governments, 2004.8 www.sdhc.org. “San Diego’s Housing Crisis: Statistics and Trends Impacting the Local Housing Market.” San Diego Housing Commission. 21 March 2007.9 www.navydispatch.com. “San Diego Military Info: Navy Facts.” Navy Dispatch Newspaper.10 www.rtfhsd.org. “Regional Homeless Profile.” Regional Taskforce on the Homeless. October, 2006.11 www.sandiego.gov/water/quality/index.shtml#a. “Where Does Our Water Come From?”. The Water Department: The City of San Diego.12 Montezemolo, Fiamma with Rene Peralta and Heriberto Yepez. Here is Tijuana! London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006.13 Camou, Rafael. “Water Demands in Baja”. San Diego Source : The Daily Transcript. 16 November 2006.14 Montezemolo, Fiamma with Rene Peralta and Heriberto Yepez. Here is Tijuana! London : Black Dog Publishing, 2006.15 Montezemolo, Fiamma with Rene Peralta and Heriberto Yepez. Here is Tijuana! London : Black Dog Publishing, 2006.16 Ruiz, Ramón Eduardo . On the Rim of Mexico : Encounters of the Rich and Poor. Boulder : Westview Press, 2000.17 McKinley, James C. “Mexican Forces Clash with Drug Cartel Gunmen in Tijuana.” The New York Tiimes. 18 January 2008.18 Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

Andrea Dietz received a BS in Architecture from UVA in 2000 and an MArch from Rice University in 2005, having worked for Design Corps (a Raleigh, North Carolina based non-profit architecture organization) between. Since and currently, she teaches a theory and degree project studio at Woodbury University School of Architecture San Diego and collaborates with estudio teddy cruz, for which she is the project coordinator of The Political Equator.

“The Front”. Photographer: Andrea Dietz. July, 2006.

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The 1,952 mile border that separates the continental United States from Mexico is a datum by which information of demographics, topography, and the social and cultural exchange between two nations is measured and extracted. By visualizing these datascapes in an innovative manner and by giving subjective form to otherwise objective and quantifiable information, the designer re-imagines the physical and experiential aspects of the land. This process distills and filters the information in order to expose unforeseen relationships and to present new possibilities.

Re-territorializing PlaceNoah Bolton and Robert CouchMArch 2009[fig 1] Politcal Border [fig 2] Migration Edge

[fig 4] Topographic Edge[fig 3] Climatic Edge

[fig 5] US Population Density

A series of animation stills (figs. 1-5) represents the US Mexico border according to temporal environmental or demographic conditions. Each border varies in depth and transparency to describe their relative trans-gressability. (Suzanne Mathew)

800,000 people a day enter the United States from Mexico.1

141,000 pedestrians a day enter the United States from Mexico.2

245,000 passenger vehicles a day enter the United States from Mexico.2

11,800 commercial vehicles a day enter the United States from Mexico.2

80% of border traffic involves same-day travel.3

Two of the ten fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States are on the border with Mexico.1

The total cost of building a border fence between the United States and Mexico and maintaining it over a 20 year period is estimated at $49 billion.4

Mexican migrants make up as much as 37% of the population in some areas of the United States. 5

Between October 1, 1999 and September 30, 2005 more than 800 migrants died while attempting to cross the deserts of southern Arizona.6

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BORDER FLUx: Suzanne Matthew, MArch, MLA 2010

This project examines a series of demographic and environmental boundaries in the United States in order to define the border with Mexico relative to the movement and cultural exchange that occurs between these two nations. Factors such as climate, topography, and population densities are used to create boundaries with varying degrees of porosity that change over time (figs. 1-5). In consideration of these temporal limits, the US is represented as a matrix (fig. 7) allowing for movement from north to south (left to right) with the border delineated as a permeable boundary that filters these flows. A new topography is generated that interprets Mexican population density as a heightfield in order to describe this new cultural landscape. Sections through the terrain inverted this topography in order to reveal channels of migration across the nation (fig. 6).

The projects included here seek to represent specific border conditions using the diverse datasets of checkpoints, physical and cultural exchange, migrant deaths, cell phone coverage, and migratory paths. This information is overlaid and recombined in order to generate a new terrain or border.

Rather than viewing raw data as a departure point for design, or a generator of form, these projects visualize specific datasets of unique conditions in order to elicit multiple, layered, and simultaneous meanings. Just as the selective presence of data alone cannot be considered form, neither can the concept or the technique used to represent data be directly transmutable into architectonic reality. Through the visualization and spatialization of information, the seemingly objective qualities of place and condition are subverted into a subjective reading that allows for multiple interpretations and new understandings of phenomena. These representations are capable of incorporating both quantitative data and qualitative experience. The process of giving form to information uncovers hidden forces that underlie numerical representation.

[fig 6]

[fig 7]

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OPPORTUNITy IN SEPARATION: Bryce Powell, MArch 2008

This project attempts to reorganize the physical characteristics of the 1,952 mile border through an analysis of datasets of demographics, topography, regulated traffic and trade flows, approved crossing procedures, and the presence of physical barriers in order to address issues of security. Diagram and model studies (figs. 8, 9) seek to define the spatial nature of the actual border crossing through the movement of people and goods from one side to the other. A detailed analysis of existing processes re-organize the constituent parts in order to optimize the flows of existing systems through security checkpoints while also seeking to locate common zones that would benefit from the introduction of new program.

The technique, whether diagram, map, or trace, exists as a means for exploring complex relationships between data. This method generates imagery that conveys multiple meanings resistant to the delimiting of interpretations. Through new means of visualization, the role of the designer as mediator is heightened to its fullest, and the diagram transcends representation to become “an ‘abstract machine’ that is both content and expression.”7

Not only is the desert terrain that occupies a significant portion of the US-Mexico border constructed of layers of sand, rocks, and cacti, but also sub-strata datascapes of political, social, and climatic forces. Together, these constitute the topology of a specific terrain, condition, or phenomenon. Terrain is uncovered in order to re-territorialize place and render hidden cultural forces that question a priori notions of a purely geographic understanding of place. This is achieved through a collapsing of diverse datascapes that are given form through “a strategic and imaginative drawing-out of relational structures.”8

[fig 8]

[fig 9]

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The preceding projects were executed during the Fall of 2008 for the seminar course INFOLAB under the direction of Assistant Professor of Architecture Nataly Gattegno. INFOLAB takes on the critical task of gathering, filtering, comprehending, processing, interpreting, forming and representing information in a clear and coherent manner.

The goal of these visualizations, however, is not the simple representation of objective data in space. It is also a process for critique that accounts for political, social, and temporal landscapes rather than just geographic attributes. This type of representation calls into question the normative procedures and understandings that are described. The power of these representations lies in the variability of the data that is visualized and their potential to explore its latent qualities while questioning accepted spatial, social, and political boundaries. The new terrains that are generated present the border condition as more than just the sum of physical attributes. Discrete timescapes and datasets coerce the existing conditions into new relationships capable of exploring diverse functions in the production of new interpretations.

BORDER CROSSING GUIDE: Robert Couch, MArch 2009

In this project, datasets of migrant deaths, migratory paths, cell-phone coverage, climate and topography are collapsed in the production of a new terrain that re-situates the physical and cultural topographies of southern Arizona relative to the economic diaspora of illegal Mexican immigrants that traverse this land. The three-dimensional representation of these forces is placed over a base map of known and assumed paths, borders, cities and townships. Along with warnings for illegal immigrants this guide attempts to aid the often doomed travelers in a humane subersion of the political forces that currently delimit not only sovereign territories but also race and class [figs. 10-12].

[fig 10]

[fig 11]

[fig 12]

Notes:

1. http://www.borderhealth.org/border_region.php (accessed April, 2008).

2. http://www.northamericaninstitute.org/pdf/guptavargas.pdf (accessed April, 2008).

3. Jill L. Hochman, ‘Border Planning for the 21st Century,’ in Public Roads, vol. 68, no. 4, 2005.(article available online at http://www.borderplanning.fhwa.dot.gov/current_article1.asp).

4. http://mexidata.info/id1778.html (accessed April, 2008).

5. http://www.migrationinformation.org/DataHub/maps.cfm#2 (accessed March, 2008).

6. http://www.humaneborders.com (accessed March, 2008).

7. Ben van Berkel + Caroline Boss, ‘Diagrams,’ in Move, vol. 2: Techniques, UN Studio & Goose Press, The Netherlands, 1999, p.19-25.

8. James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping,” in D. Cosgrove (Ed.), Mappings, Reaktion Books, London, 1999, p.231-252.

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MIX-HOUSE

Karen Van LengenKVLA / Dean, and Elson Professor,

Joel SandersJSA

Ben RubinEar Studio

Mix House expands the modernist notion of visual transparency afforded by the ubiquitous picture window, now allowing occupants to hear as well see the outside world. The house’s three sonic windows incorporate a parabolic dish that electronically targets domestic sounds and transmits them to an interior audio system controlled from the kitchen island. From this sound command center of the house, occupants are free to design original domestic soundscapes by mixing media-sponsored sounds with the ambient noises of the neighborhood.

Over time, hedgerows evolved to suit multiple functions. Looking across the contemporary landscape, the variety of forms speaks to these variations in natural materials, intention, and the variety of human intervention styles over time. These are not landscapes instigated and then observed. The bocage landscape is a landscape of constant, albeit episodic, agency, the results of a long term dialogue that has influenced the evolution of both flora and fauna, the creation of social and cultural systems, human population densities, and even the weather. With a basic understanding of the origins and functions of the hedgerow networks, I offer a series of brief considerations as to how hedgerow dynamics might be able to impact contemporary, highly manipulated landscapes.

AGENCY, ABUNDANCE, AND FLOW IN THE HEDGEROW LANDSCAPE

Molly PhemisterMLA 2007

Windshadows

Woodland

Hedgerow

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The term hedgerow traditionally refers to a complex unit, not just the plants. Often used along property boundaries, the ditch beside the hedge, and not the hedge itself, is the delimiter of that edge. The ditch was dug in order to pile up the dirt just inside the property line and create a bank. Banks are ecologically valuable not just for their protection of the root zone, but also for the herbaceous layer they acquire, and for the species that can harbor within the soil. Varying by species, climate, use, and other related factors, a hedgerow must be laid every 6 to 20 years. This involves cutting the thick stems (pleachers) nearly through, leaving a narrow band of bark, cambium, and sapwood. The pleacher is then bent at an angle and woven between 4’ rods driven into the ground. Pleachers are held in place by a weaving of vines or other narrow wood in a manner similar to the tops of many woven baskets.

In fact, the bank is sometimes the hedge. One or two stone walls with dirt behind (one) or between (two) and turf on top is what constitutes a hedgerow in some stonier areas. In the 1800’s in Devon the banks were larger, commonly six feet high and five feet wide on top. The walls are built somewhat concave, anticipating that they will settle out to be flat. If the wall remains concave, it scoops the wind, protecting the far side of the wall more intensely.

Beetles over winter in the bank. The soil under the shelter of the hedge and the insulation of the leaves is the last to freeze, making this zone a popular feeding spot for ground birds.

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Fence Calm DisperseEnclose Retain InfiltrateConnect

The ability of a hedgerow to buffer the wind on a site is related to its density. In general, wind is diminished on the leeward side for a length equal to 10-15 times the height of the hedgerow, and a short distance on the windward side as well. Too dense of hedge, such as juniper, will cause an air pressure vacuum on its leeward side, sucking some of the wind down sooner and creating turbulence.

Hedgerows placed perpendicular to a slope will impact the natural daily air movements up and down the hill. In cold areas, the “U” shape shown to the right is ideal for diverting frosts as they sink down a hillside. As the cold air sinks, the warmer air from below is displaced and moves up. The hedgerow here catches that warmer air and creates a nice microclimate pocket downslope. Note that even though most of the frost will be diverted, some will pool just above the hedge, creating a colder microclimate than there would have been without a hedge there.

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ROOTING LANDSCAPE URBANISM

Shanti Fjord LevyMLA, MArch 2008

INTRODUCTION: ExTENDING LANDSCAPE URBANISM’S HISTORy

In practice, landscape and urbanism have often been held apart by the professional boundaries between them, which are reinforced by divergent tactics and working scales. Joining these two terms into a hybrid methodology, as landscape urbanist practitioners have recently done, can be generative, sparking new ways of approaching the condition of cities as vast horizontal networks. Landscape urbanism promotes a “disciplinary realignment where landscape supplants architecture’s role as the basic building block of urban design.”1 This collision of terminology and methodology has contributed greatly to current design discourse. At the same time, what seems to be a prevailing effort to present landscape urbanism as a new, emergent discipline obscures a lineage of thought that would only bolster its credibility, if not its claim for originality. In fact, prioritizing landscape as the foundation for a sound urbanism, and doing so through synthetic, interdisciplinary practice, has strong roots in the work of the earlier urban theorists Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Benton MacKaye. While landscape urbanists mention these important thinkers who broke the molds of top-down planning methods, they offer little discussion of the continuities between landscape urbanism and this history of urban critique based in the landscape.

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Particularly, this essay will respond to what Australian landscape architect Peter Connolly refers to as the “default” understanding of what landscape urbanism has been, as defined in North America by Charles Waldheim and James Corner in The Landscape Urbanism Reader2 and Praxis 4: Landscapes3. In these primary texts, Waldheim and Corner seem invested in a perception of their work as a break from past practices, as a unique praxis poised to address new urban situations. This emphasis on newness allows their work to be appreciated as emergent, in connection with the same ecological spontaneity landscape urbanists hope to nurture in practice. At the same time, in contrast to the spatial, infrastructural flows advocated in their design work, stressing the newness of their approach potentially defines it as an intellectually autonomous city of thought, rather than a flexible, historically integrated working method. I will be responding to this “tacitly agreed upon idea of what landscape urbanism is,”4 questioning the need for the field to be developed as an “ism” linked to a particular self-proclaimed genealogy and practice, rather than be seen as an open set of principles valuable to current urban conditions that may guide practice today in landscape architecture, urbanism and architecture in important ways.

The most recent North American text about landscape urbanism, Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism5, begins to amend these gaps, presenting the recent history that has informed landscape urbanism in an expanded collection of essays. Yet, this history only goes as far back as Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature in 1969. Building a foundation for McHarg’s work, but distinct from it, Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes and Benton MacKaye, as well as earlier urbanists whose work they drew upon, foresaw the need to approach the newly dispersed and more intensely interconnected city with new vision and strategies. Central to their approaches to what Mumford termed “living urban tissue” (1969), and Geddes called “conurbation” (1923), is an understanding that landscape as a cultural product underlies urban order.

Geddes, Mumford and MacKaye express an understanding of how the dissolving city has lost its complexity and charge, and offer ideas for how this vitality might find replacement in the new, expansive urban form. Their work suggests an important extension of the ancestry of landscape urbanist thought, reinforcing key definitional concepts and introducing salient vocabulary. At the same time, these historic writings suggest how landscape urbanism as a practice might be strengthened by greater attention to cultural/ecological landscape identity. Folding these historic urban ideas into the current practice of landscape urbanism has the potential to strengthen the discipline’s regard for both landscape and urbanism. Rather than focus on an essentially architectural understanding of urbanism-as-program and landscape-as-surface, these theorists’ insights encourage a greater recognition of how landscape can be the generator of infrastructure, and of urbanism as necessarily formed by cultural interaction in the landscape over time.

One key way that Geddes, Mumford and MacKaye build a foundation for current landscape urbanist theory and practice is in their common support of a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to the city as a newly hybridized phenomenon. As landscape urbanists express, a hybrid understanding is important in approaching a new set of urban conditions where distinctions between urban and rural need to give way to the disintegration of categories. James Corner writes that landscape urbanism “is a proposition of disciplinary conflation and unity, albeit a unity that contains, or holds together difference–difference in terms of the ideological, programmatic, and cultural content of each of those loaded and contested

words, ‘landscape,’ ‘urbanism’.”6 In their descriptions of the urban condition and the approach it calls for, Mumford, MacKaye and Geddes all support conflations of disciplines and categories traditionally held as distinct. Their writing and suggested methods disrupt binary understandings of city/country, urban/rural, human/nature. Much like the landscape urbanists, these three forward new images of an interconnected city-landscape rather than view settlement as necessarily a corruption of nature. In this sense they (to varying degrees) violate tendencies to posit environmentalism as simply conservation of designated wilderness areas. They each, at least rhetorically, also eschew top-down planning methods which seek to apply abstract, rational means of ordering urban dynamics. Instead, they look to the systems of order already existing in the landscape which have cultivated a heterogeneous cultural cohesion within particular regions. Each author offers an early definition of the city as a weave of urban and rural categories whose entanglement they see as more productive than polarization would be. They pursue urbanization that maintains the identity of place by effectively integrating these categories and preventing the destructiveness of homogeneous settlement. I will elaborate now in more depth on the vocabulary and methodology each of these authors specifically presents in addressing the dispersed city.

PATRICK GEDDES: SyNTHETIC THINKING AND THE REGIONAL CITy

Patrick Geddes brought his background in botany and the natural sciences to the study of cities. He expressed an idea of the new, synthetic city as a concentrated expression of the rural area around it, rather than distinct or opposed to it. Geddes developed his idea of the “Valley Section” out of his analysis of the fraying of bounded cities into what he termed “conurbations”, or interconnected city-regions.7

The Valley Section, which traces a diagrammatic slice from a river’s source in the mountains to its mouth at the sea, attempts to relay how human adaptations have developed in relation to their position in this section, as well as reveal how the zones of a landscape are linked by a common waterway. This method, which applies botanical concepts of plant distribution6, explores the potentials of a region while seeking to elucidate elements of landscape as both ecological and cultural identity. His method is useful first in that it emphasizes the importance of an interrelationship between settlement, culture and landscape, and second in how it communicates this relationship between people and place that is not easily expressed through the flattening qualities of a plan, but linked to the particulars of geography better shown in section.

In 1915 Geddes had already rejected the concept of the suburb as a “garden village”, as something that emerges from the city and extends out into the countryside beyond. Rather, he saw the need to extend the character of the rural into already formed “conurbations”. Instead of suggesting a boundary or limit to growth, Geddes suggested a reverse rural-urban colonization that is less nostalgic than opportunistic, sharing qualities with landscape urbanism’s hope of reintroducing complex ecologies in degraded sites. In the “synoptic vision of Nature” Geddes supports, nature is preserved not through separation from humans, but rather through a heightened relationship developed by cultivation (sylviculture, arboriculture, park-making). Geddes suggests that when landscape is cultivated as the foundation of urbanism, a durable, complex integration between city and landscape becomes possible. Creating the synthetic city “is more than engineering: it is a master-art; vaster than that of

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street planning, it is landscape-making; and thus it meets and combines with city design.”9 This hardly seems far from James Corner’s recent claim that “landscape drives the process of city formation.”10

Akin to current landscape urbanist thinking, as well as landscape architecture itself as a hybrid discipline, Geddes’ work encouraged what he called a “synthetic form of thought.” His “polymathic wanderings between disciplines” were influenced by a commitment to “the reconciliation of science, morality and aesthetics”11 and his resistance to disciplinary specializations. Within his overarching goals of cooperation, he also saw the value in connecting theoretical inquiry with practical application. Geddes’ desire for a synthesis of life’s complexities translated into his development of the graphs he termed his “thinking machines” which sought to codify all arenas of life into 36 categories of interrelationship.

While Geddes’ goal of seeking synthesis remains valid, his overall vision of this synthesis taking such a definitive and holistic shape is limited. Mumford, Geddes’ reluctantly critical student, had trouble with what he saw as Geddes’ contradiction between his hopes for a synthetic form of thinking and his proposition that synthesis could be characterized by an arrival at a steady end point, rather than a productive instability or flexibility. As such, Mumford’s understanding of the city forecasts later developments in ecosystem ecology, shifting from a search for equilibrium or static balance to a recognition of the richness of dynamism and change. Mumford writes, “the possibility of constructing such a ‘final’ synthesis was, in terms of [Geddes’] own most vital insight, a delusion. Synthesis is not a goal: it is a process of organization, constantly in operation, never finished. Any attempt to produce a single synthesis for all times, all places, all cultures, all persons is to reject the very nature of organic existence.”12 Underlying Mumford’s unease with this approach is his strong conviction in the necessity for situated knowledge. He was fiercely resistant to false unities borne of generalizations which he saw as a form of violence in their suppression of vital distinctions of identity.13 In a letter to Geddes, Mumford points to the key distinction in their approaches as deriving from a generational rift. While Geddes developed intellectually in a period of hope, Mumford’s outlook had been tempered by the infusion of war-torn despair.14

This contrast, perhaps, explains Mumford’s deeper discomfort with totalizing theories and methodologies.

LEWIS MUMFORD: A SEARCH FOR URBAN COMPLExITy

While key conceptual differences set Mumford’s take on the character of the dissolving city apart from those of his proclaimed “master”, his urban theory is consistent with Geddes’. Particularly they share an emphasis on the importance of the region as a place defined from within, and an effort to introduce new, hybrid vocabulary and methodologies. Setting the stage for his book, The City in History, Mumford traced the development of cities back to their initial processes of growth and decay, hoping to understand the history that underlies current conditions. He introduces the idea of emergence as key to understanding how a city develops:

The city came as a definite emergent in the paleo-neolithic community . . . In emergent evolution, the introduction of a new factor does not just add to the existing mass, but produces an over-all change, a new configuration, which alters its properties

. . . The old components of the village were carried along and incorporated in the new urban unit; but through the action of new factors, they were recomposed in a more complex and unstable pattern than that of the village–yet in a fashion that promoted further transformations and developments . . . Out of this complexity the city created higher unity.15

In defining the city as a “complex and unstable pattern” and the basis for ongoing “transformations”, Mumford sets up the characteristics of mutability, “unstable and fluid emerging forms”16 as well as fertile, complex tensions as essential to a city. He describes the transformation from the city as a walled entity to its current state of fragmentation as an explosion, “the city has burst open and scattered its complex organs and organizations over the entire landscape. The walled urban container indeed has not merely broken open: it has also been largely demagnetized, with the result that we are witnessing a sort of devolution of urban power into a state of randomness and unpredictability.”17 The cultural productivity that the bounded form of the city was able to foment by ensuring social interaction has been lost in urban dissolution. Mumford writes that this obsolete, bounded city, “through its very form held together the new forces, intensified their internal reactions, and raised the whole level of achievement . . . As with a gas, the very pressure of the molecules within that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries.”18 Here Mumford makes an argument that the interactions that were able to be generated by the spatial qualities of the bounded historic city form need to find a new impetus in the “exploded” city. While, as his book goes on to exhaustively chart, the bounded city eventually became too limited and lost its productive efficacy, dispersed cities have yet to find comparable instigators of the needed collisions, interactions and reactions.

Not that Mumford sees urban dispersal as a bad thing. In fact, as Geddes before him and the landscape urbanists after, Mumford valued a horizontal tapestry of interspersed urban and rural characters. What he called a “green matrix” was the model of the city he most sought. He writes in support of an idea that the “maintenance of the regional setting, the green matrix, is essential for the culture of cities. Where this setting has been defaced, despoiled, or obliterated, the deterioration of the city must follow, for the relationship is symbiotic.”19 Here it is again important to distinguish Mumford’s stance from an anti-urban polarization of city and country, nature and culture. He does not set urbanization, generally, opposite an archaic image of nature as untangled from human settlement. Rather, he argues against the sort of urbanization that forms “low grade urban tissue” or “formless exudation” unresponsive to the particularities that compose a region as both ecologically and culturally unique. For Mumford, this type of problematic urbanization is directly linked to mechanization and its driving infrastructures which he sees as heavy-handed and oversimplified to maximize efficiency in transportation at a high cost to regional viability.

In Mumford’s view, the region is a key scale at which to pursue viable urbanism. A region can be understood as large enough to have heterogeneity but small enough to have distinct shared values. It develops directly out of a relationship between culture as the “social emergent”, which acts upon the substrate of geographical characteristics. In this view, which tightly links social and ecological aspects of a place, natural influences prevent the human tendency to oversimplify – a tendency exemplified in what the suburb has become.20 Mumford points out that initially, though, suburbs acted as a critique of over-engineered, over cramped space.

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They offered a type of settlement where domestic requirements could be more responsive to landscape qualities, favoring minimal built intervention over maximized engineered efficiency.

The problem, then, occurs for Mumford not in the suburb’s lower density, but rather in that, first, this urbanization over time became less and less responsive to the qualities of a regional landscape and second, that it recreated rural problems of isolation, only to be met by the clumsy apparatus of built transportation infrastructure. Simultaneously, its heavy handed infrastructure recreated the rigid control characteristic of urban order.21 In this way, Mumford rejects suburban development as lacking the complexity he understands to be necessary in a city, seeing it as the “anti-city” which “annihilates the city whenever it collides with it.”22 As opposed to his definition of the city as complex and alive with emergent social conditions, in the isolation fostered by the suburb “. . . nothing can happen spontaneously or autonomously – not without a great deal of mechanical assistance.”23 In order for a dispersed city to gain viability, then, it will have to support multiple scales of space and time, encouraging a maximum of interactions. Further, it will have to regain the fertile tensions and collisions that Mumford claims the city has lost in its “demagnetization” through creating greater diversity in its extended “green matrix,”

Lewis Mumford’s account of Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City” is a telling portrayal of what Mumford sees as the discrepancy between his idea of a magnetized urban constellation and the horizontal city as it has become. Mumford notes that what gets lost from a reading of Howard’s proposals is an understanding of the density Howard advocated, which is often five times greater than common suburban settlement. Most often, Howard’s ideas are dismissed as suburban without a careful look, and garden is given weight over city in its name, reducing the effectiveness that arises specifically from the tension between the two terms. “But the garden city, in Howard’s view, was first of all a city: a new kind of unit whose organic pattern would in the end spread from the individual model to a whole constellation of similar cities. It was in its urbanity, not in its horticulture, that the Garden City made a bold departure from the established method of building and planning.”24 As such, Mumford’s case for the value in Howard’s term is much like the argument Kristina Hill makes for “constructive oxymorons” as a way of disrupting our “outdated assumptions, linked to unquestioned and outdated mental categories” which “cloud our perception of these landscapes” of extended urbanization. Hill puts forward terms related to Howard’s such as “Habitat City” and “Wilderness City”, hoping to jolt our neat perceptual divisions between cultural and ecological categories.25 The tension of these charged terms of association recalls landscape urbanism’s efforts to create a hybrid practice and name.

While Howard’s neat diagrammatic organization of this settlement into rational patterns and defined limitations is inadequate, his refusal “to be tied down to a particular image of the city or a particular method of planning or a particular type of building,” instead arguing that “the specific forms of such a city would be a resultant of the landscape and the climate” remains valuable. Howard, as a strategic designer of a backbone of essential qualities rather than particular forms, offers a useful precedent to landscape urbanists who stress the performative over the formal aspects of design.26

Howard’s underlying concept of de-densifying by distributing the magnets of urban necessity begins to answer Mumford’s call for a means of countering the isolation of a horizontal city. Magnets take the place of the bounded city’s walls in sparking social collisions and

interactions. Mumford’s description of the city’s shift from a walled entity to an extensive “tissue” forecasts a shift in the metaphors used to describe and study ecosystem ecology. An organismic concept of an ecosystem as an individual entity bounded within a skin has been exchanged for a systems metaphor, which instead focuses on flows, seeing places through the relative intensity of interactions they foster as nodes in larger, overlapping networks.27

As Mumford calls for the replacement of those fruitful “social collisions and interactions” lost in the obsolescence of urban boundaries, it is possible to see that, in the city as matrix, the impetus for these vital interactions might, borrowing from ecology, be highly charged or magnetized nodes within a larger boundless network or system. Rather than Howard’s codified magnets, the city becomes distributed into a field of variously scaled and charged magnets as nodes in the larger urban-ecological “green matrix.”

BENTON MACKAyE: GEOTECHNICS, REVEALING INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE LANDSCAPE

Benton MacKaye’s strategies of “geotechnics” explore how the landscape itself can provide organization for the city as a charged field. As Mumford distinguishes between the regional inflections of a “green matrix” and the non-responsive character of “low grade urban tissue,” MacKaye sets apart development that is “genuinely urban, which furthers an active community life and produces a good environment, and metropolitan growth, which wipes out a good part of community life and produces a deteriorate environment of both town and country.”28 For MacKaye, metropolitan growth is that which follows the lines of least resistance, while the “genuinely urban” is a mosaic of integrated urban and rural elements particular to a region. Geddes’ word for MacKaye’s practice, “geotechnics”, expresses it as an alternative to technocratic principles, as MacKaye set technology against a background order derived from geology. Geotechnics itself is a hybrid term, combining “geography, forestry and conservation, engineering colonization, regional planning, and economics.’”29 Though MacKaye’s proposals address political, economic and cultural aspects of the landscape, they developed out of his background in natural sciences, particularly his study of dynamic geologic processes. In this way, the multi-disciplinary scope of regional projects he suggests invokes a “composite mind” to address complex issues.

Applying his understanding of geologic processes, he saw the city and surrounding countryside through their connective flows rather than as a bounded urban figure set in a separate, uniform rural field. For instance, he diagrams Boston as a “mouth” of flow, or a consumer of the region’s economies, while also showing it to be linked to its surrounding countryside as a “source” of population flow. MacKaye shows how an area might be delineated with a topographical boundary if its watershed is considered, while an equally important “industrial watershed” will define the same area with different bounds. His work reveals how allegiances, orientation, and tactics can be organized and re-organized around landscape systems depending on the issues on the table, yielding potentially useful conditions of overlap. With his emphasis on flows, MacKaye could leap easily across scales, mapping the landscape infrastructures of a locality or expressing the world as an interconnected system of traffic. In focusing on the paths of connection between city and surrounds, MacKaye’s work confounds neat distinctions between the urban and rural, while his conflation of hydrological process with human movement confronts the tendency to set people apart from the mechanisms that drive natural systems.

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MacKaye hoped to cultivate more viable urbanism by integrating and preserving the landscape’s figures as underlying structure, creating a heterogeneous mosaic of urban patchwork. MacKaye writes, “these definite lines of open landscape between towns and villages–these wild lands, and near-wild lands, and wastelands–form together the ingredients of a system. It is a system of crossing, flanking, and interlocking with another system–that, namely, of the motor ways and the lines of metropolitan flow.”30 Characteristic to his approach is that, rather than extensive building projects, he simply suggests new ways of seeing the potentials offered in the landscape structure that already exists, allowing it to become culturally activated. For MacKaye, the work of a regional planner is connected with that of a civil engineer in how “he does not create his own plan, he discovers nature’s plan; he reveals a hidden potentiality which nature’s laws allow.” As such, a planner is “a man who finds rather than plans a region’s best development: one who builds on the actualities disclosed by exploration.”31 Rather than looking for an abstract order, MacKaye understood that many systems of order are latent in the landscape itself, and often it is only a shift in vision that makes these operative.

This methodology is perhaps best exemplified in his proposal for the Appalachian Trail as an infrastructural, organizational system. The strength and viability of this type of landscape infrastructure lies in its emphasis on changing one’s vision or understanding of the landscape rather than changing the landscape itself. Keller Easterling writes on MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail proposal:

It was a void or a line of force, not a construction. This largely invisible physical alteration, however, effected a simple but radical reversal in the flows of commerce and population migration. Without vastly changing the physical arrangements, but reversing the protocols of its use, this ‘supertrail’ remagnetized and recentered development in the territory through which it passed, remotely affecting areas at some distance from the spine.32

In terms of sustainability, this approach is highly relevant, as it involves little material expenditure or heavy construction to enforce a change, but rather is tactical in that it focuses on the most minimal intervention to spur the most fundamental re-ordering. In this way, the minimal nature of a path has resonance with landscape urbanism as a practice that posits landscape as the fundamental ordering system in the contemporary urban condition of dispersal and fragmentation. As Charles Waldheim expresses, an approach centered around landscape is more viable than the “‘weighty apparatus’ of traditional urban design [that] proves costly, slow, and inflexible in relation to the rapidly transforming conditions of contemporary urban culture.”33

While Mumford critiqued MacKaye’s work for its focus on infrastructural systems at the cost, at times, of the people and places they connected, Lewis Mumford also forecasted the necessity to respond to changing, decomposing urban conditions with more adaptive strategies. In a chapter entitled “Flexibility and Renewal,” he voices a concern that is later echoed by the landscape urbanist’s emphasis on adaptability. Mumford writes, “the more the energies of a community become immobilized in ponderous material structures, the less ready it is to adjust itself to new emergencies and to take advantage of new possibilities.”34 Based in this concern, Mumford denounces infrastructural and urbanization efforts that neglect the opportunities of a site in favor of elaborately engineered means of accommodating bad initial choices. The priority that Mumford and MacKaye share, to maximize the potential of the landscape and minimize dependence on permanent, built solutions, offers a regionalist precursor to landscape urbanism’s current intentions.

THE REGIONAL CITy: A CHALLENGE TO DELINEATED BOUNDARIES

In addition to a focus on activating existing landscape structure, Geddes, Mumford, and MacKaye’s ideas are linked in their view that cities must emerge as continuities within this overall landscape structure, inseparable from the cultural and ecological systems that compose it. This concept of cities as woven within extensive regions problematizes notions of political bounds. For Geddes, rather than boundary lines, unique plant associations and shared cultural production act as ways of defining a region–two systems of categorization which make fuzzy edges. Volker Welter writes on Geddes:

Natural regions in biology do not necessarily have clear boundaries, but this is not so much of a problem for biologists concerned with plant or animal distributions. Habitats can be mapped, and the regions of various species can yield zones of transition or even overlap without creating a problem for the theoretical concept as a whole. But using regions to distinguish among human societies and cultures puts the question of boundaries at the forefront, especially if regionalism attempts to reorganize existing administrative units. In such cases the regionalist deals with the distribution of power and zones of influence of various local elites, which find their limits at the boundaries.35

As such, it is difficult to translate regional concepts into definitive political divisions. MacKaye’s organizational strategies, based in systems, also challenge the relevance of political jurisdictions. Keller Easterling notes how at a time when “. . . the design professions typically tried to frame the boundaries of an organization and control the territory inside those boundaries, MacKaye often adjusted organizations by indirect or remote activation of sites.”36 In putting forward a definition of geography as unintelligible through political boundaries, these urban theorists point to a still potentially crippling disjunction between understanding place through its landscape identity, and the role of boundaries as active mechanisms of political control. Mumford claims that political boundaries are only useful toward exacting (the pretense of ) political and economic command over an area. As such, they have the potential to damage the places themselves. For example, in the process of drawing political boundaries, rivers, which otherwise play a connective role, become appropriated as divisive lines of separation. This idea of a territory divided for control has much more to do with tactics of warfare than with efforts of sound urbanism, as it undermines existing relationships between people and places that make settlement viable. As a critique of these political practices that prove divisive to regional identity, Mumford also calls for a decentralization of political power in an effort to give voice to disparate, local constituencies.

An expression of the region as a powerful scale for landscape infrastructure contributes toward a critique that North American landscape urbanists are not making–regarding how current political structure undermines efforts to truly develop an urbanism based on landscape systems which transcend units of political power. Kelly Shannon points to this limitation in North America in contrast to Europe, where environmental, public space, and public transport agendas have become established, mainstream priorities. She sees this as underlying the fact that, while landscape urbanist theory predominantly comes from North America, its practice here remains sparse. She notes that, “unless and until there is a significant change in the politics and policy surrounding public work in that context, North American landscape urbanists will no doubt look longingly at the opportunities now available in Western Europe.”37

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LANDSCAPE URBANISM: VEERING TOWARD THE FORMAL FIELD OPERATION

Though Charles Waldheim offers his hope that landscape will replace architecture as the fundamental building block of urbanization,38 current North American landscape urbanist work makes little effort to draw out the systems of order inherent in the landscape that would make this possible. Rather, these practices paradoxically seem to suppress differentiations already existing in sites in favor of promised overlays of future order. Landscape urbanists express faith in abstract systems, such as the grid, as means of finding order in the vastness of the “mat city.” James Corner writes optimistically:

. . . the grid has historically proven to be a particularly effective field operation, extending a framework across a vast surface for flexible and changing development over time, such as the real estate grid of Manhattan, or the land survey grid of the Midwestern United States. In these instances, an abstract formal operation characterizes the surface, imbuing it with specificity and operational potential. This organization lends legibility and order to the surface while allowing for the autonomy and individuality of each part, and remaining open to alternative permutations over time. This stages the surface with orders and infrastructures permitting a vast range of accommodations and is indicative of an urbanism that eschews formal object making for the tactical work of choreography, a choreography of elements and materials in time that extends to new networks, new linkages, and new opportunities.39

Mumford’s call for local variation leads him to a very different conclusion about the grid as an applied means of organization, noting how it has been an effective tool used toward singular, economic ends. In his chapter entitled “The Speculative Ground Plan,” he denounces the grid as part of the “speculative adventure” of commercialization and capitalism, employed because it simplifies territory into units that are “regular and calculable” for ease of transaction. The city is cut up into “abstract units for buying and selling, without respect for historic uses, for topographic conditions, or social needs . . . If the layout of a town has no relation to human needs and activities other than business, the pattern of the city may be simplified: the ideal layout for the business man is that which can be swiftly reduced to standard monetary units for purchase and sale.”40 Furthermore, Mumford denounces speculative grids as “spectacular in their inefficiency and waste” due to the standardized scale of its units, which end up causing equal infrastructural resources to be allocated, regardless of the scale of occupation. In this way, this abstract order neglects the particularities of site, such as wind, light, soil and topography in favor of formal consistency.

Corner trades the “formal object”, rejected by landscape urbanism, for a field he proclaims to be an “abstract formal operation”. The grid’s very abstractness as an applied order challenges the claim that it might be capable of “imbuing” a place with “specificity”, as Corner proposes. Implicit in his statement is a conception of sites as devoid of “operational potential” until the designer applies it, or, as Koolhaas writes, directs the “irrigation of territories with potential.”41 In light of the landscape urbanist effort to value the landscape as the primary medium for structuring cities, the concept of infrastructure as something added or overlaid on the landscape seems counterproductive. This application of an external order becomes an act of obfuscation of the landscape rather than revelation of the landscape’s specificities. It would seem that the first step to a landscape urbanist approach would instead account for the landscape as infrastructure, and then find ways to plug in to it, expand and adapt it to accommodate the activities and settlement of people. The orders already present in the landscape, even those obscured through histories of human disregard, are then able to perform as the landscape structure, the field operation.

As the application of abstract order reflects a disconnect from larger landscape systems, it also allows for an arbitrary limitation to be drawn at a given site’s edge. Competitions such as those for Downsview Park, Toronto, and the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, reveal a tendency to focus on systems of indeterminacy within the bounds of a parcel. At Fresh kills, beyond the exception posed by Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha + Tom Leader’s submission, Dynamic Coalition, little exploration is presented that engages the terrain beyond the legal limits of the sites in question, in plan or related to the sectional qualities of the site as landfill42. At Downsview Park, the larger view is equally limited. A regional approach would see such large infrastructural projects as linked to extensive systems of landscape order. Kristina Hill discusses how, in all but Tschumi’s entry for Downsview Park, rhetoric of programmatic indeterminacy derived from ecological metaphor overrides imperatives for local ecological function as drivers for the designs.43 A focus within the outline of a parcel further prevents these projects from elucidating what Robin Dripps describes as a site’s “special repository of clues,” or indications of larger systems too extensive to be contained in a small parcel. As fragments, these “clues” offer opportunities for potentially vital diversity “in their ability to be combined, reconfigured, or hybridized without the formal or intellectual compromises suffered by a more complete or closed entity.”44 By focusing within a site’s legal bounds, especially in these sites with long histories of degradation, the systems of order which form the backbone of the site’s future events are constricted, curtailing the effectiveness of these proposals in an urban sense.

By not acknowledging sites as already dense with potential, sites are represented as neutral and without agency. This tendency follows Koolhaas’ lineage by developing systems of order through applied programmatic possibilities rather than found site qualities. As landscape urbanists are acting in a landscape carved by the engines of undifferentiated urbanization that Mumford, Geddes and MacKaye fought against, it becomes even more difficult, but no less important, to see the links between these places and the stories that lace them with cultural significance and ecological richness. Peter Connolly takes issue with this tendency in landscape urbanism, exemplified in Alex Wall’s idea of the “urban surface”. Wall equates areas of extended, horizontal urbanism with abstract space. Abstracting the specifics of landscapes becomes a liability, where, in contrast to claims of landscape shaping urban interventions, the “very abstractness of this surface seems to liberate architects into the landscape.”43 Ensuing applications of abstract order suggest a certain degree of determinism that landscape urbanists critique in common planning practices.

IN SUPPORT OF MIDDLE SCALE, SUBJECTIVE METHODS

One danger in such abstraction is the distancing of not only techniques for understanding and representing the landscape, but also the ability for the landscape itself, molded after this abstract view, to foster stronger connections with its inhabitants. In this representational distance, epitomized by the aerial view and the seeming authority of digital site representations, the subjectivity of a site’s design and hence, its ability to communicate, becomes suppressed.

The veil of authority offered in this distance has much in common with what Mumford critiqued in Patrick Geddes’ overvaluation of an abstract, authoritative graphic method, lacking the flexibility and potential layering of language. He saw Geddes’ graphic “thinking machines” as more insidious for their claim to objective authority. Mumford reveals how,

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despite Geddes’ claim to the universal applicability of his graphic method, it was, in fact, deeply personal. In a period of temporary blindness, Geddes developed these folded graphs as a way of supplanting his missing sight, finding a tactile order in his perceptions. Long after regaining his sight, Geddes stressed the importance of a graphic method which privileges visual thinking over all other forms. Similarly, Kristina Hill makes an observation about Ian McHarg’s work, as she realizes a connection between his methods of visualizing landscape overlay and his personal experiences reading the grayscale x-rays of his own lungs.46 Hill claims that exposing the personal nature of this method gives it more strength, offering it as an example of how our own subjective stories will direct our vision of the landscape. Both Geddes’ and McHarg’s methods were proselytized by their authors as unquestionable, universally applicable methods for understanding the complexities of culture and place. Notably, both were also methods developed out of highly personal experiences, moreover, corporeal experiences of contact with a sense of mortality.

Due to tension between the sense of authority a map confers and the true subjectivity that underlies it, mapping practices are similarly poised. James Corner’s mapping techniques and theories, which break from McHarg in their embrace of the map’s subjectivity, contribute significantly to landscape architecture. At the same time, like Geddes’ and McHarg’s methods, Corner’s maps have power because there is little evidence of the subjectivity underlying them, allowing them to maintain an aura of authority. Corner celebrates this as a map’s key means of agency. Yet, because maps are, as Corner writes, “extremely opaque, imaginative operational measurements,”47 maps need to be accompanied by other, experiential forms of notation that can be more easily accessed by others.

Mumford took issue with a similar opacity and distance that characterizes the graphs made by Geddes’ graphic method. He was bothered by a disjunction between the rigidity of this method and another method Geddes also practiced: walking and experiencing a city first hand. Mumford writes:

When asked to replan an historic city, he would first ramble about it for days at a time, soaking in the entire milieu, without reading about its history, or getting current information about its economic or political institutions, or even consciously directing his thoughts anywhere . . . he allowed feelings, emotional urges, ideas, institutional ideas, remembered images of other villages and towns to float into his consciousness by the most random route possible. And if actions speak louder than words, Geddes’ actions likewise spoke louder than his graphs . . ..48

Geddes, a constant supporter of walking as a way of knowing, called for lived experience as the primary means of understanding the city.

Like Geddes, Mumford and MacKaye advocated a new type of synthetic regional planning tightly linked to the ways they learned of the dynamics of places through lived experience. Though Mumford studied in New York universities, he accrued his first education in the workings of the city while he was “. . . introduced to nearly every part of Manhattan on weekend walks with his German grandfather. By the time he was 20, he was systematically exploring the City on foot, making notes on its neighborhood life, studying its buildings, bridges, and street plans, and taking specimens for an amateur geological survey of Manhattan.”49 Much like Jane Jacobs, whose knowledge and guiding principles about cities derived from her own life in a New York city neighborhood, involving the fine grain of relationships inscribed in it, Mumford’s ideas of cities, their vitality and value, derive from his own embedded observations.

Mumford also discusses MacKaye’s formative walks in the landscape. In his introduction to MacKaye’s book, The New Exploration, Mumford makes the point that MacKaye’s life of “explorations” can be traced to his childhood walks in the New England forest. MacKaye was frustrated by the fact that his walks were “just walks,” that he didn’t “do anything with them”50 and, as an adolescent, began to develop maps of the forests based on his observations of their character and terrain. His idea of regional planning, then, began with an experiential cartography.

Walking has been pursued and discussed as a practice that addresses many of the same problems landscape urbanism tackles, of modernism’s totality and universalistic tendencies. Yet, it addresses alienation by valuing a vantage point on the ground, one rejected by the predominating methodology and scales so far employed by landscape urbanist practitioners. Walking offers an embedded understanding of a place, as the “city is sliced and exposed by a walk, constructing a grounded view rather than the remote, overhead, ‘all-seeing’ vantage point of a traditional map. The eye in the sky is so detached that the city . . . is shown devoid of citizenry.” From this perspective it becomes clear that “the city might best be understood and designed in section–the plane of perception–rather than in plan–the plane of construction. The walk, here, constitutes a pop-up sequencing of the city in four dimensions.”51 The complex understanding of a place made possible through walking argues for the necessity of situated, notational methods to accompany aerial mapping techniques.

In Waldheim’s discussion of West 8’s work, he argues part of the strength of their work, and a characteristic he values in a landscape urbanist approach, lies in a de-emphasis on “the middle scale of decorative or architectural work and favoring instead the large scale infrastructural diagram and the small-scale material condition.”52 In leaping back and forth between the total intimacy of the individual and the large scale, “latent” relationships, that exist outside of the range of human perceptual scale, this bipolar expression of landscape urbanism reinforces rather than challenges the experience of living in an undifferentiated horizontal city. On the ground, the experience of the “mat city” is characterized by both intense isolation as well as the disorientation that results from being overwhelmed by something much larger than a person can grasp. Leaping from the individual to the synoptic totality skips over the scale where interactions occur. For urbanism to be landscape urbanism, it must engage this experiential human scale, a subjective scale in which relationships between people and between people and place occur. This is the middle scale of public interaction at which Mumford’s “social collisions” occur and the scale at which community is expressed.

While the examples Mumford, MacKaye and Geddes offer regarding the importance of walking are far from definitive in a wide body of literature surrounding walking as a subversive practice53, they are relevant here for they reveal how, underlying the resistance to the application of top-down planning techniques shared by these three figures known as regional/urban planners may be their own value of the “middle scale” of knowing and understanding landscape in all its subjective complexity. Their examples suggest that the scale of experience, beyond merely “decorative” is actually the scale at which we develop and communicate both meaning and identity in the landscape. The importance of this middle scale queries landscape urbanist fixations on large scale aerial views, privileging those landscape relationships that exist outside of human perception, neglecting those that are experienced.

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CONCLUSION: THE GARDEN CITy REVISITED

While Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes and Benton MacKaye are all remembered for their roles as urban theorists and planners, they contribute to current landscape urbanist principles not only the vocabularies and methodologies they developed in response to shifting urban conditions, but also a fundamental consideration that the creation of real cities relies on the existence of a shared, locally situated landscape identity. Both scale of human experience and the concept of the garden come into play as means for creating cultural traction in changing landscapes. Chris Macdonald, in his essay “Machines of Loving Grace” resets landscape urbanism’s imperatives to focus on a “matching of the intricacies of nature and city life.” In setting up a critique of the legacies of modernism, Macdonald uses “the motif of the garden as a challenge to the modernist planning precepts that cultivate social fragmentation and disjunction.”54 Likewise, Richard Plunz and Inaki Echeverria, in attempting to address the issues facing Mexico City, write of a “gardener’s logic” as a way of situating human actions and dwelling within “the complexity of cities and territories as entities in constant flux.”55

The garden, as a site whose shared cultural and natural authorship is undisputed, is a useful analogy for the aims of landscape urbanism. Culture can in this sense be linked to a new idea of cultivation of the landscape, generating new overlapping social and ecological sources of productivity. Lewis Mumford makes the claim that the creation of a viable urbanism will depend not on the preservation “. . . of the primeval, but extending the range of the garden, and introducing the deliberate culture of the landscape into every part of the open country” (emphasis added). He recognizes that “the culture of the environment” is not entrenched enough in our consciousness.56

While historical urban thinkers are often dismissed by current landscape urbanists, perhaps because the alarm these historic theorists express seems antiquated in a post-industrial urban realm, it is useful to re-examine their views to decipher a legacy of value placed on viable interrelationship between culture and landscape, urban and rural. These writers bolster landscape urbanism’s potential to develop key strategies of urban sustainability, drawing on the relationships already embedded in the landscape to cultivate vital, rooted cities. I echo Chris Macdonald’s hope that, as the discipline of landscape urbanism “emerges, it might take delight in matters of subtle consequence alongside those of strategic insight.”57

ENDNOTES1 Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism” in Waldheim (ed)The Landscape Urbanism Reader, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) 37.2 Ibid.3 Amanda Reeser and Ashley Schafer (eds), Praxis 4: Landscapes (2002).4 Peter Connolly, “Embracing Openness: Making Landscape Urbanism Landscape Architectural” in Julian Raxworthy and Jessica Blood, The Mesh Book: Landscape / Infrastructure, (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004) 76-103, 200-214.5 Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).6 James Corner, “Terra Fluxus” in Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 23.7 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, (Reprint London: Knapp, Drewett and Sons, Ltd., 1949. Originally published 1915) 14.8 Volker M. Welter discusses the influence of biologist Charles Flahault’s plant survey work on Geddes, which used plant associations to identify economic possibilities of a region. Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).9 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 52.10 James Corner, “Terra Fluxus”, 24.11 Ian Boyd Whyte in Foreword to Welter, Biopolis, xvii.12 Lewis Mumford, “The Geddesian Gambit” in Frank G. Novak, Jr. (ed) Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: the Correspondence. (London and New York: Routledge ,1995), 362.13 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1938) 311.14 Lewis Mumford, letter from March, 1923, in Novak, 171.15 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969) 29.16 Ibid, 33.17 Ibid, 34.18 Ibid, 34.19 Ibid, Graphic Section IV, 58 “Green Matrix”.20 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 320.21 Ibid, 510.22 Ibid, 505.23 Ibid, 513.24 Ibid, 519.25 Kristina Hill “Visions of Sustainability” in John F. Benson and Maggie H. Roe (eds), Landscape and Sustainability (London and New York: Spon Press) 307.26 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 521.27 Kristina Hill “Shifting Sites” in Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn (eds) Site Matters (New York: Routledge, 2005) 137.28 Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962) 39.29 Benton MacKaye qtd in Keller Easterling, Organization Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) 14.

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30 Ibid, 181.31 Ibid, 33.32 Easterling, 28.33 Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism” 37, 39.34 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 441.35 Welter, Biopolis, 72.36 Keller Easterling, Organization Space, 16.37 Kelly Shannon, “From Theory to Resistance: Landscape Urbanism in Europe” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 159.38 Charles Waldheim “Landscape as Urbanism” in Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 37.39 James Corner, “Terra Fluxus” in Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 31.40 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 421-422.41 Rem Koolhaas qtd in James Corner, “Terra Fluxus” in Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 31.42 Competition finalists published in Praxis 4: Landscapes (2002).43 Kristina Hill “Urban Ecologies: Biodiversity and Urban Design” in Julia Czerniak (ed) Case: Downsview Park, Toronto. (London, Munich: Prestel, 2001).44 Robin Dripps, “Groundwork” in Kahn and Burns, Site Matters, 71.

45 Peter Connolly, “Embracing Openness,” Raxworthy and Blood, 82.46 Kristina Hill, “Visions of Sustainabiilty,” in Benson and Roe, 302.47 James Corner “The Agency of Mapping” reprinted in Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism, 171. 48 Lewis Mumford “The Geddesian Gambit” in Frank G. Novak, Jr. (ed) Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: the Correspondence. (Routledge: London and New York, 1995), 369.49 From a brief biography of Mumford at the Lewis Mumford Center website: http://www. albany.edu/mumford/about/about1.html.50 Mumford quoting MacKaye in his Introduction to The New Exploration, ix.

51 Anthony Hoete, Reader On the Aesthetics of Mobility (New York: Black Dog Publishers, 2003) p.56.52 Charles Waldheim “Landscape as Urbanism” in Waldheim (ed). The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 45.53 For instance, see recent books by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a History of Walking (2000); Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002); as well as a broad bibliography compiled at www.walkinginplace.org54 Chris Macdonald “Machines of Loving Grace” in Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism, 205-211.55 Kelly Shannon, “From Theory to Resistance,” 153.56 Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 448.57 Chris Macdonald “Machines of Loving Grace,” 211.

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WHY GARDENS?

Jessie CalderMLA 2008

Why Gardens? explores the garden as an urban landscape strategy as well significant artifact and mode of expression that is essential to the well-being of individuals, communities and cities.

The garden as city, as the fundamental fabric of the city, foregrounds the multi-layered landscape as essential to city building, and challenges the current norm of New Urbanist practice that privileges neutral objects such as the block, lot, building and street as basic elements of city building. Urban Design Associates: Louisiana Speaks: Planning Toolkit outlines strategies for rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina that focus on mobility, neo-traditional housing types, big box development and general convenience. According to the Planning Toolkit, scales of development relate to the region in terms of land management and use; the city in terms of a framework of systems; the neighborhood in terms of elements like streets and open space; the block as a configuration based on uses; and the lot as a place for “preparing sites and placing structures on them” (Urban Design Associates, 17). The assembly kit framework is limited in that it does not account for the subtleties or nuances of a particular place. Rather, the planning proposals are outmoded strategies that fail to celebrate natural and cultural idiosyncrasies of Louisiana’s many and varied landscapes.

Industrial Canal Vertical Gardens : Elevated scaffold

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Given that the garden “is a medium that has been with us more or less since the beginning of recorded civilizations,” John Dixon Hunt asserts that gardens “must presumably reflect, answer, even create certain human needs and concerns” (Hunt, 13). As a cultural product that is of, but set apart from the surrounding landscape, gardens express time, place, activity, material, creativity, hope, desire, necessity, and nourishment. Gardens are embodied fabrics of culture and nature as they attempt to represent an individual or culture’s relationship with the natural world. Reflected are multiple meanings and layers of association. Multiple scales of territory, time, material, climate, history, experience and culture are woven into intricate stories. Understood as a richly layered idea as well as an idiosyncratic place that is imbued with implications of survival, creativity, experience, contemplation and hope; the transformative power of the garden is undeniable.

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In his work Greater Perfections, Hunt inquires about the significance of the garden in the future practice of landscape architecture, “landscape architecture… has lost touch too, with gardens not as items to be designed and built but as models or ideas for larger enterprises” (Hunt, xi). As a means for moving away from the city as a loose and undefined sprawl of objects and open spaces, Rowe and Koetter in Collage City suggest a new potential for the garden in the organization of cities: “if the garden may offer the presence of a constructed situation independent of the necessity for any buildings, than gardens may be useful; and we think not so much of the acknowledged set pieces … as of the impacted Hadrianic disarray…” (Rowe and Koetter, 175). In response, this study of the urban garden as essential and incremental implies a rich mosaic of urban ecologies, past and present, and suggests a new kind of urbanism that privileges the multi-layered landscape over New Urbanist models that privilege objects, neotraditionalist aesthetics, and abstract systems.

dwyer canal wetland easement gardensbiodiversity | drainage | aquaculture | habitat

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Balmori, Diana and Morton, Margaret. Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Helphand, Kenneth. Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. Trinity University Press. 2006.

Hunt, John Dixon. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Rowe, Colin and Koetter, Fred. Collage City. Boston: Birkhauser, 1984.

Urban Design Associates. Louisiana Speaks: Planning Toolkit. Louisiana Recovery Authority, 2007

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Intelligently Integrated Transport Ulrich, G

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Intelligently Integrated Transport (IIT) is a new system-model for public transit and multi-modal transportation. IIT allows users to make smart, informed travel choices, and to get where they are going faster, with fewer stops. The system consists of intelligently routed small busses and other modes of transport to provide the mobility of a personal automobile without the associated costs to riders, the community, and the environment. Riders tell the system where they are going; the system provides costs, travel times, and distances for each available travel mode.

IIT does not involve radical new technologies, only modest investments to enhance existing infrastructure. It is a fundamental reordering and reallocation of system resources. IIT utilizes existing busses, then slowly adds and replaces them with much smaller busses over time. IIT adapts to the rider, instead of asking the rider to adapt to the system. IIT does away with fixed-routes, schedules, and transfers, which are encumbrances to riders, by allowing information technology to route buses according to real-time travel demands. The effect is something like having a highly responsive taxi-cab network available at the price of a bus.

INTELLIGENTLY INTEGRATED TRANSPORT

Bob Batz, Javier Del Castillo, Alec Gosse, Julie Ulrich

Graduate Students, Department of Urban and Environmental Planning

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PLANES, TRAINS AND RAIN:ON DESIGN TRANSLATIONS IN CHINA

Tom HoggeMArch, MLA 2009

Serena NelsonMArch, MLA 2009

In the summer of 2007, Huangbaiyu, one of seven agricultural villages in northeast China, was planning for a new school.

Designed by William McDonough and Partners and translated by Mr. Dai, a local developer, the new village of yellow houses stands as a reminder of the master plan and housing prototype McDonough and his associates developed for the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development (CUSCSD). This housing project would serve as a model of sustainability for villages across rural China. After several phases of construction in the village, the CUSCSD, which counts McDonough among its board members, convened the Rural Village School Workshop in August, bringing designers to Huangbaiyu to speculate about new interventions into this ongoing project.

We were a cadre of students and professors from both coasts of the United States. Three from the University of Oregon met four from Jefferson’s University on the west and traveled to the far east. In Beijing, we joined ten students from universities in north and south China. Five of these counterparts and co-conspirators had completed a similarly long journey by train from Tongji University in Shanghai. From Beijing, home to Tsinghua University and the remaining five, a kindly shorter bus ride delivered our new group to Liaoning province and Benxi city, thirty kilometers west of Huangbaiyu village.

The Workshop established lofty goals: imagine a new school as a prototype for sustainable design and green technology, as a center that draws villagers back from the city to reunite families and farms, and a new territory that improves the education of citizens and children.

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These goals could only be achieved by envisioning a community center that incorporates new technologies and engages the customs and culture of a community that has sustained generations through a close relationship to the land.

As strangers to this culture, we relied on close collaboration with our eastern counterparts: architecture students from urban universities who were citizens of China, yet strangely out of place in its rural reaches, where a single road stretches out between two mountain ranges to meet the village.

On our first day in the village, the morning rain was flowing into concrete and stone swales that lined dirt roads and formed moats around each block. These rills emptied into pipes that pointed toward a large hole in the ground at the north of the neighborhood, where evidence of a leaky drainage system was open to the sky.

One could forgive the faulty drainage. The system and other applications of “sustainable” and “green” technologies are new to not only the villagers but also the developer, accustomed to methods of typical urban construction. Implementing such technologies requires a shift in approach that has yet to be fully translated. In concept, McDonough’s master plan carefully established long-term intentions, but in application the development has taken on more of an experimental tone.

A new village between two mountain ranges, along a river, at the edge of agricultural lands. The large tank filters and holds bio-gas, processed from organic compounds.

Site analysis (Serena Nelson)

Community courtyard and preschool (David Malda)

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McDonough’s team developed prototypes of the housing systems through collaboration with GreenBlue of Charlottesville and UVa architecture students. The houses use straw-bale infill in concrete and brick structure to insulate against frigid winter temperatures. Testing fuel efficiency, a massive green tank full of bio-gas squats at the northwest corner of the village; a long low building adjacent to the tank processes gas from organic corn crop waste for storage. A house nearby remains open as a sort of demonstration laboratory, with three stoves on a table along one wall of the otherwise empty house: one stove burns coal, another natural gas and a third pipes in gas from the green tank. Plans for piping the bio-gas to all 60 of the yellow houses are underway. As of August, two of these houses were occupied, while residents of the six villages outside the yellow complex rely on sun, sticks or coal to heat their rooms and “kang” beds to capture heat from a central hearth, radiate it to the rest of the room, and fend off cold nights.

During that first visit, we oriented ourselves with familiar movements of the sun and the long shadows of the surrounding mountains. We walked among the houses, welcomed by villagers, and witnessed intimate customs of cultivation and inhabitation long established within the territory. Our Chinese colleagues and our pencils were translators, helping as we interviewed residents, shop-owners and factory workers. Though not citizens of this place, we walked dirt roads as native speakers of this shared language of drawing, and, observing patterns of daily life, began to form intentions for establishing new rituals.

The rain stopped before our second visit. The mountain walls of the village emerged, revealing new vistas and visions for a school as a garden. Enclosed to the south by the yellow houses and to the north by the walls of the factory of Mr. Dai, the school yard offered clear views east and west. Eager for another vantage, we scaled the factory walls by stairs and cordial requests. The black tar of a roof put us above the red carpet of asphalt shingles and rows of ripening yellow houses to the south and green corn to the north.

Several packed train cars carried our workshop to Shanghai. Sleeping sometimes on folding seats, working often on low bunk beds, we translated our initial sights and sketches into intentions about site and space. Our teams began to formulate versions of a school-as-community center that could leverage the traditions and skills of the villagers and recover a place full of culture and community activity.

Dreaming about earlier treks into the Forbidden City of Shenyang, we imagined roofs like mountain ranges collecting water and children in central courtyards and were swept into the Shenyang library beneath the undulating ground of its roof, with books below and views above.

We awoke in Shanghai, a city growing fast and tall, where giant stalks of steel and glass puncture the skyline. We had little time to contemplate this urban field before we were on another bus, heading this time to the French Quarter. A territory trespassed by settlers throughout its history, the district is now a neighborhood bustling with foreign feet and chic boutiques. Then the rains returned, greeting our damp heads as they would have the British, then French settlers who were ceded the area for dwelling and selling, setting up markets and a confluence of culture in the corner of the city.

Water collection system (Tom Hogge)

Site plan (David Malda)lunc

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On a project, on a train: The Beijing-to-Shanghai trip was more time for work and critique - but little sleep.

When the skies cleared, we understood a few more of the layers of this place, and could settle in to a new routine.

We assembled within the studio walls of Tongji’s School of Architecture, hovering seven floors above a tai-chi garden and an informal one-man bookstore. Pasted with tags and collared with blue shirts, we were regrouped into teams of three. With two Chinese students to each North American, our new teams worked day and night to learn from and about each other, and to devise five distinct schemes. We sweated and made drawings in our new room, imagining how to make new rooms for the community of Huangbaiyu, emerging from our workspace only for rice, beer and cheap architecture journals. Amid scattered conversations and sleep, the roar of nearby construction reminded us how far we had come from the yellow houses and corn.

Trespassing into that village to imagine a new school for an old community, we brought those lessons from the landscapes of Shanghai and Shenyang alike. The school of Huangbaiyu would be a place in which shared experience, like a customary meal, brings village residents and students, family and faculty together, reaching chopsticks across, between, among—anxious to see what is next served for lunch.

Thomas Hogge (MArch, MLA candidate) and Serena Nelson (MArch, MLA candidate), with David Malda (MArch, MLA candidate) and William R. Kenan, Jr. Associate Professor of Architecture Peter Waldman, represented UVa at the 2007 Rural Village School Design Workshop, sponsored by the China - U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, among others. Participating universities included the University of Virginia (Charlottesville), University of Oregon (Eugene), Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning (Shanghai) and Tsinghua University (Beijing).

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Double Crossing: Huangbaiyu and Shanghai

Peter WaldmanWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture

In rural territories, the enduring cycles of agriculture and husbandry reconfirm frames of reference. In these territories the modest countenance looks down to the ground. It is rumored that especially in these territories people lower themselves to taste the earth.

In the modern city, the cult of the new, the shock of the extreme agitates the citizen and stranger to look up to thousands of cranes in the sky, to wince, to sneeze and to cough in a bath of polluted air. In these new cities hubris turns heavenly, however briefly to territories in the sky. This is a story of landscape and skyscape, days gained and lost, and mud and watermarks.

Last August, under cover of dark, three graduate students and one faculty member from UVa crossed the international date line where the sun never sets and found themselves 36 hours later camouflaged in mud and feces from head to toe in the midst of a fierce rainstorm in rural Huangbaiyu China. The next day the sun came out, sheets of water ran into irrigation ditches, ducks and carp splashed in a multitude of ponds and two huge mountain ranges one to the east and one to the west now clearly emerged from the mist to reveal the proposed site of a new rural village school. Collaborating with students and faculty from the University of Oregon and Tongji (Shanghai) and Tsinghua (Beijing) Universities in China, we crossed paths between the now industrial powerhouse and former Manchu Imperial City of Shenyang and a twenty-minute bus ride to our rural site of enduring agricultural production and a 21st century biogas industrial complex adjacent to the rural school site. Three days later after double-crossed drenchings and brilliant chiaroscuro sunsets we left Shenyang in another fierce rainstorm to take a 30-hour cattle-car train trip, standing room only to steamy Shanghai. In Shanghai, the teams were issued uniforms, to charette day and night in a strange condition of workshop and competition in Tongji's new School of Architecture. On the first day we discovered the French Concession, another kind of territory of narrow alleys and burned brick the size of one's now stained hands. On the last day we feasted in Shanghai on carp and duck, on lotus roots and twice cooked pork and thought here and there, between Huangbaiyu and Shanghai these ingredients had also been double crossing on that memorable slow moving train connecting a fragment of this immense territory on our maps the size of one's hand.

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THE DRESSER TRUNK PROJECT

William Daryl WilliamsAssociate Professor

The Dresser Trunk Project is a traveling exhibition that chronicles the lost stories, memories, and places of refuge for black travelers during segregation. The connection of cities by train facilitated the migration of black travelers between the north and south. For black musicians, train travel was often restricted to riding in the back with Pullman porters, or in segregated railcars. The porters would advise the musicians and travelers on the best—and, sometimes the only—hotel where they could stay after performing for black or predominantly white audiences. This was especially true for musicians playing the Chitlin Circuit while traveling in the South during the Jim Crow era.

The objective of this exhibition is to tell the story of eleven locations through the construction of a memory box. These memory boxes allude to the work of the artist Joseph Cornell, and the large dresser trunks that were popular during the early days of transatlantic, and transcontinental travel. The “Dresser Trunks” contain stories, photographs, and maps, describing the cultural history of these places while making connections between them. These connections form a chain of identity, like pearls on a necklace, through which each is allowed a place at the table of history.

The Dresser Trunk Project is timely in that many communities are awakening to the reality that the preservation of their unique cultural heritage is a critical component of cultural and economic development. Places like the Whitelaw Hotel in Washington D.C. and the Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans have survived, but many have been lost and/or forgotten. This project strives to stem the tide by linking isolated places together in a chain that gives each their rightful place in architectural, music and cultural history. Many of these hotels, clubs, and other sites are being lost to the ravages of time and the pressures of development. Unfortunately, many do not qualify for historic designation as individual structures. However, when they are seen as part of the larger cultural phenomena of segregated travel, whose influence is still felt today, their memory if not their physical existence can be preserved. Beyond the preservation of memory, this project aspires to pass on memory as a form of inheritance upon which communities can build and in many cases rebuild.

Ten participants have designed eleven trunks. These trunks represent hotels, nightclubs, and even a Negro League baseball park. All are places located in cities served by the Southern Crescent Line, which travels from New York to New Orleans.

Southern Crescent Line, Amtrak

Elmaleh Gallery, University of Virginia School of Architecture

(All Photographs Courtesy SF Smith Unless Noted)

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Glory Hole Club, Harlem, NY William Daryl WilliamsHotel Coleman, Newark, NJ

Mabel Wilsondefacto/ dejure, Philadelphia, PA Yolande Daniels

Whitelaw Hotel. Washington DC William Daryl Williams

Charlotte, NC Walter Hood

The Royal Peacock, Atlanta, GA David Brown

Meridian, MS Scott Ruff

Carver Inn, Charlottesville, VA Lisa Henry-Benham

Littlejohn Grill, Clemson, SC Mario Gooden

New Orleans, LA Nathaniel Quincy Belcher

Rickwood Field, Birmingham, Al Craig Barton

Whitelaw Hotel, Washington D.C. (William Daryl Williams)

Hotel Coleman, Newark, NJ (Mabel Wilson)

Glory Hole Club Harlem, NY (William Daryl Williams)

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New Orleans, LA (Nathaniel Quincy Belcher)

Littlejohn Grille, Clemson, SC (Mario Gooden)

Meridian, MS (Scott Ruff )

Rickwood Field, Birmingham, AL (Craig Barton)

Elmaleh Gallery, University of Virginia School of Architecture(Image Courtesy Kirk Martini)

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NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY VETERANS MEMORIAL

Marc Roehrle BSArch 1992 , BauenStudio

Mo ZellBSArch 1994 , BauenStudio

The nature of memorials has evolved concurrently with the cultures and ideologies of the societies that have erected them, reflecting their goals and aspirations both through physical entities and as an embodiment of formless remembrance. Traditional monument types often employ iconic forms to communicate an official meaning, neglecting the conveyance of any vernacular one. Their use of symbols, such as statues and obelisks, allows viewers to readily absorb meaning imparted by these representational signifiers. To be legible, these non-interpretive, representational memorials rely on culturally agreed upon constructs. The official meaning they wish to convey, therefore, is not absolute. It is inherently related to time and thus can change with its passing. The intention of a memorial thus comes into question. What, if anything, do monuments sacralize? Whose interpretation should the memorial reflect, an official or vernacular one? To these ends, memorials should address not only the commemoration of the fallen, but also larger cultural issues of memory and meaning.

The Northeastern University Veterans Memorial challenges traditional roles of memorials, supplanting iconic forms with abstraction and space-making strategies. The design embraces the multiplicity of readings found in spatial memorials over the single iconic reading of traditional object memorials that rely on conventional and formulaic imagery to signify their purpose. The Memorial suggests that meaning and intention, to accurately be communicated through commemoration, must be derived from careful introspection and that the memorial must simultaneously convey official and vernacular meanings. It avers that the role of the memorial is to represent the collective conclusions about the past as well as commemoration of the fallen.

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Multiplicity of spatial legibility and interpretations of distance, both literal and conceptual, are at the core of this design. Views are carefully orchestrated using various framing devices. Existing building facades, cornices, and plantings, in conjunction with new design elements such as walls and trees, structure these views. Three parallel elements slipping past one another organize the site. A black granite wall, contemplative garden, and public plaza are situated in a manner that allows for multiple readings of space. Views from three access points establish the location of the memorial wall, the orientation of the wall on site, and the dispersal of the programmatic elements of the memorial. Interwoven within the contemplative garden is a paved ground plane abstracting the American flag with 13 granite strips and 50 lights. A grove of birch trees to the North and East participate as framing devices while also helping contain the space.

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The dichotomic nature of the memorial addresses issues of vernacular and official meaning through macro and micro scales. A 40’ long, polished black granite wall spatially organizes the site. The southern elevation of this wall, facing the campus, serves as a backdrop to the campus community, while the northern side, the contemplative side, reflects the intimate nature of war and loss. The wall provides an edge to the public plaza while simultaneously acting as center, the focal point, in the contemplative garden where the names of the soldiers are presented. On the public side the official meaning of the memorial is conveyed. Iconic images of the conflicts are laser etched on the wall. These vignettes represent the various branches of the military, the contributions of men and women and the multicultural and racial diversity present within the armed services. Equally important, the vignettes exemplify significant iconic images from the various conflicts. Just as time and distance from a subject gives one a clearer perspective, when viewed from afar the pixelated images are clear and lucid. When viewed up close these images blur into the granite with an ephemeral effect.

The vernacular meaning of the memorial is conveyed through the appropriation of a powerful icon of war – the soldier’s dog tag. Like the tags, each plate is etched with information about the soldier including name, rank, hometown, birth date, date of death, major and graduation year. When familial relationships have expired, one can still make connections to the soldiers on a personal level. The dead become more than a soldier; they become classmates, colleagues, neighbors, and heroes. The 279 stainless steel plates operate at both the macro and micro scales. From a distance, the dog tags collectively represent the mutual bond soldiers develop in times of war. The voids created by the organization of the plates symbolize the voids that have been left in the lives of the loved ones and the community, as well as the loss of life experienced in war. In addition, the voids allow for the unfortunate addition of new tags in the future. By contrast, up close, the stainless steel plates are designed to be touched and lifted; singly reflecting the individuality of each soldier. The stainless steel plates, which reflect the faces of the visitors, unite the dead with the living. The physical search for names on the wall necessitated by their random organization encourages the visitor to engage more intimately with the memorial and discover the common threads that often tie the fallen soldiers together.

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Marc Roehrle and Mo Zell each received their Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia and their Master of Architecture from Yale University. Marc Roehrle has taught design studio and drawing at Northeastern University, Wentworth and the Boston Architectural College. Mo Zell is a full-time professor teaching design and drawing. She has taught at Clemson University, North Carolina State University and Northeastern University. They are principals in the firm BauenStudio in Brighton, Massachusetts.

To convey significant cultural meaning, both official and vernacular memories, opposed to emotional ones, formulate the intentions of this memorial. The architectural and spatial execution of the project, through the careful consideration of materials and scale, create a physical embodiment of memory. The passage of time ensures that future generations will have the ability to grieve and, of equal importance, learn from the actions of those before them. It is only when one can objectively consider an event that meaning can be assigned without bias.

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In his essay Replacement1, W.G. Clark proposes that “building is the reconciliation of ourselves with the natural land.” Because we are largely incapable of living directly on the land, we engage in the practice of building to sustain our presence in a place. But first, before we build, we arrive and make the decision to become a part of that place. The decision to dwell might be considered the first act of addition. We add ourselves to the land. In a world where little territory is left unclaimed or uncharted, this idea extends to those places left abandonded, forgotten or unfit to support life. We no longer understand the world as a struggle between man and nature. The land around us has already been settled and more often than not we find ourselves responding to the work of previous generations and the results of their engagement with the terrain.

Anyone who has spent much time around Carr’s Hill over the past two years is undoubtedly aware of just how disruptive addition can be. A vast array of machinery occupies the hill, and the jarring vibrations of excavation and demolition accompany every new sign of progress. Construction demands something significant of the land and all who occupy it. The only possible atonement for such an invasive act is to offer something worthwhile in return.

ADDITION

W.G. ClarkEdmund Schureman Campbell ProfessorW.G. Clark Associates Architects (Charlottesville, VA)

David MaldaMArch, MLA 2009

The following article is a based on a series of conversations with W.G. Clark.

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Reflecting on these ideas, W.G. Clark now suggests that all projects might be considered additions. Rather than mandating a process or course of action, this idea of addition is an attitude for beginning. At a minimum it is the recognition of precedent, and this demands a certain degree of humility on the part of the architect. In Clark’s words it “makes you pay close attention to that to which you are adding.” There is no new construction.

In his teaching, W.G. Clark uses the Woolen Mills in Charlottesville to explore a lesson of addition and the potential embedded within a site. The site of the Mills is rich with an atmosphere of all that has passed. Through fire and abandonment and the continuous activities of the river, building and earth are engaged in a sustained negotiation. The land itself is embedded with the fragments of previous constructions, and the force of the river continues to transform the land throughout the year. Building in this place can only be considered an addition to all that has already accrued.

In a discipline where agendas for sustainability and scientific process attempt to project more and more certainty onto our actions, the humility that accompanies a recognition of preconditions offers a refreshing moment of pause and consideration at the outset of the project. It alleviates some of the anxiety of the new while at the same time demanding a respect for and responsibility to the life and memory residing in a place. There is never any certainty that our actions will be well received or that they will not do some unforseen damage to a place. According to Clark, one of the greatest aspirations of architecture is “an intensification of the place, where it emerges no worse for human intervention, where culture’s shaping of the land to specific use results in a heightening of beauty and presence.”2

1 W.G. Clark, “Replacement,” Clark and Menefee, ed. Richard Jensen (New York: Princeton Architectural Architectural Press) 10-13.2 Ibid, 10.

photograph by Noah Bolton

photograph by Maggie Hansen

photograph by Maggie Hansen

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The Woolen Mills project can only be considered as an addition. The site of the Mills is at a critical location along the Rivanna River and a primary reason for Charlottesville’s founding in the area. Years of building, working, and decay have left their mark on the site. This second year graduate studio began with a walk down the then dry river bed. For most it was their first contact with the place.

Despite the historical significance of the Mill’s relation to the city, the territory is largely invisible to the majority of the city’s population. Students were asked to develop project that sought to come in contact with the river as well as to foster a better understanding of its natural and cultural importance. It required areas for display of artifacts, work and research. A second major component of the project was a bridge to span the river and link a series of trails that pass through the area.

Rivanna River MuseumArchitecture 701 Studio

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Anna Dismuke

Jay CantrellNoah Bolton

Kurt Petschke

Leslie McDonald

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photograph by Kirk Martini

East Addition to Campbell HallW.G. Clark Associates ArchitectsSMBW Architects

The East Addition to Campbell Hall is a long awaited project. It is one of a series of constructions that has transformed Carr’s Hill over the past two years. Though a relatively small footprint, the building has a significant impact on the surrounding hill. The addition offers a new face to the School of Architecture, provides three additional review rooms, and establishes a connection to the existing lecture hall buried within the earth. The attention to the details of daily life within the School exhibits an appreciation of, and respect for, the rituals of gathering and review. The rooms themselves provide a carefully crafted environment for these conversations and the presentation of student work.

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The East Addition was initially envisioned as a square tower extending from the east end of Campbell Hall. In an effort to preserve wall space yet still admit light, the corners were subtracted.

The square footprint was soon modified to acknowledge the hill to the south and the entry terrace to the north. This transformation was coupled with a realization that the center of most review rooms is typically left unused. The result was an elongation of the building situated against the mass of the hill. The east and west ends of the building were subtracted to establish a visual extension beyond Carr’s Hill to a main pedestrian route.

In an effort to maximize available wall space, a system of operable panels and tables was devised. These panels will allow for a transformation of the space as requirements vary. By pivoting down a table, a window is revealed. These components contribute to the “collage” of the north facade where the work of the school will be on display to those passing by, and glimpses of the world beyond will offer students an escape from long-winded reviews.

The term ‘lunch’ is an informal derivation of the word luncheon. The colloquialism of the term coupled with some “talk of you and me” speaks to the core intention of this collection. lunch is inspired by chance; by chance discussions that grow from a meal in a shared setting and by chance discussions that alter or challenge views of the space and place we inhabit. lunch provides for the meeting of diverse voices in common place tended by a casual atmosphere. To lunch suggests an escape from the day’s work; perhaps even a break.

Kevin Bell MArch, 2006Matthew Ibarra MArch, 2006Ryan Moody MArch, MLA, 2007