The Ecologies of Peru: Hardly Primitive

Joseph Rykwert, author of The Idea of a Town, once scolded me when I casually called an African tribe primitive.  The distinction he insisted upon was that some cultures may have primitive technologies, but this by no means meant that they were primitive.  Peru is a lesson on this perspective.  Interior Peru is mountainous with altitudes from 8,000 feet to over 14,000.  For thousands of years, the people have worked the land according to its various capacities in what can only be called symbiotic vertical farming.  Generally, coco leaves – a necessary remedy for altitude sickness – grows only at the lower elevations while other crops and grazing are possible at higher elevations.  Families often have multiple plots and employ a barter system that brings a seemingly inhospitable situation into balance.

Today, landscape architects are working to change the public’s attitude in response to climate change arguing for sustainable land use practices.  For example, industrial waterfronts that were detoxified and converted into urban amenities are now also charged with protecting the city from storm surges.  Grassy lawns and manicured beds in office parks and suburban developments are being challenged as unsustainable water consumers, to be replaced by shade trees positioned to channel breezes toward sustainable buildings dependent on “natural” daylight and ventilation.

People who predict our unsustainable society’s future collapse are called “doomers.”  Citing excessive energy use and other wasteful practices, especially by Western countries and China and India’s emerging economic powers, doomers speculate that in the future we’ll have to return to the ways of peasant:  bartering labor and goods with local economies and distinct cultures reflecting small, dependent villages.  The English writer John Berger has lived in a small peasant community in France for over 40 years.  Appreciative as I may be, this is a slightly romanticized version of peasant life (with the benefit of technology when desired) than the one painted by the doomers.  That version is more reminiscent of muddy hillside squatter towns with no electricity, running water or sanitation.  Education and security is dictated more by custom than the law of the land.  Subsistent survival is likely the norm.

Compare that to the reed island villages on Peru’s Lake Titicaca.  Made primarily of bound reeds, the half acre villages float on thick reed pads, shelters are made of plaited reeds, furniture is minimal … and made of reeds, and even the inner core of the reed is edible.  Men fish and women weave, cooking is communal, and reed boats take children from their home island to the one with the school.  Textiles are traded for additional food and goods.  They have cell phones and internet.  When it rains, they get wet; when it’s dark, they sleep; when they are sick; they have a healer.  When one person gets angry with another, they turn their house around so that their front door faces the lake.  To an outsider, they are living very close to “nature.”  If this is our future, it hardly sounds primitive.

Sustaining fragments from the past

Some people enjoy poking through antique stores; others love hardware stores.  There are few places I’d rather linger than The Brass Knob, Washington’s store that sells reclaimed and restored building fragments from door knobs to stained glass windows.  This is where you go to find the unusual; when Crate & Barrel products all merge into a mass of over-indulgent consumerism.  These are the wonderful things made when hand carving and expressive ornament displayed extraordinary craft.  Ron Allan started the store in 1981 with a partner just when the historic preservation movement was gaining traction, and just when people were restoring their historic homes.  Ten years later, Ron took the bigger things:   carved wood panels, doors and mantles, heavy timber, stonework, cast iron radiators, plumbing fixtures and fittings, and special windows to The Brass Knob Back Doors Warehouse, a massive yard of arranged stone, metal and wood fragments.

Two years ago I interviewed Ron.  His point of view about salvaging was that first the piece had to be great, not junk, and that these fragments were capable of not only replacing some missing element, but in new work they could also become the focal point or iconic marker for an otherwise banal design.  He did not mean to suggest that such fragments could only be used to “spice up” a design as an art object; he thought big too.  He talked about a beautiful building in Baltimore that had been knocked down after a fire (demolition by neglect, he speculated) and how he spent a month working through the rubble with a forklift sorting over 300 large granite stones with hand-tooled rusticated faces.  These he thought might become walls in a new park – he wasn’t quite sure – but he did know they were too special to waste.

Ron especially enjoyed telling me about the 150 cast iron radiators he ships to Belgium annually.  Apparently they lacked the right combination of material, technology, style and craftsmen that American had when hot-water heating became popular here.  For Ron, sustainability meant re-using, but when designers want to do so, they have to know where to look.  You also need the trained eye.  An old piece of wood may look promising, but that assumption takes experience.

Unfortunately, the place closed last spring.  Some stock was sold to the Community Forklift, but it’s not the same.  When I went there looking for wrought iron fencing, I found a junk yard with discounted builder’s cast-offs and scraps, run by a few well-meaning and over-worked people.  But, no great stuff anymore.  It reminded me of the struggles I had to feed my young son who was allergic to everything.  With no Whole Foods, we had to manage with co-op health food stores and their sawdust-like cookies.  And is this where we are today?  If designers don’t take advantage of places like the Brass Knob Warehouse and work re-purposed fragments into their new designs, then we lose the ability to do so.