The perishable paradigm

Visitors to Andrew Jackson Downing’s home recall his habit of putting a flower on their breakfast plate that he knew to be his guest’s favorite. What a lovely, civilized act. Of course, breakfast in a mid-nineteenth century gentleman’s home on the Hudson is a bit different from the typical mad scramble of the over-worked American family facing a long commute to an uncertain job. For Downing, this was a reminder that life is more than unending labor; also important is leisure and its display.

My mother did something similar. Often her day would start with picking a single bloom and placing it in a bowl of water knowing full well that it would fade by the end of the day, and then the cycle would have to be repeated. For her, that flower represented all that was beautiful, especially the fleeting things that are so difficult to capture in design. No matter her worries – and she had many – taking a moment to bring a fragile blossom into her world was time well spent.

Recently, the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington hosted a symposium on food and the city. Presentations covered many aspects of food production, delivery and consumption over the last few centuries and across many cultures. Unfortunately no one seemed to address a key issue:  what is food? If you ask a nutritionist, whose expertise was not included with these scholars, the ideal response might be a list of nutritional plants, organically grown in local farms that are readily available to people where ever they live. No fast food, engineered varieties, hormone-laden animals, corn-based sugar products or even restaurant fare would come to their mind. And then these fruits and vegetables would want to be carefully and slowly prepared, mindfully eaten with family in a relaxed manner, and with gratitude for the sense of calm and well-being that surely emerges.

Is this possible? Well, yes. Just as Downing found that a little consideration only took moments to execute engendering feelings that lasted all day, bringing perishable food onto our tables requires thinking a little differently: a paradigm shift from days full of business, distractions and attending to our needs in the most convenient, although unsatisfying manner to valuing the perishable. The effort to do this might be bundled with other aspects of our lives: spending time with family and friends, committing to work projects of significance, and amusing ourselves with only the best cultural productions. Attaching too much importance to the quantity of commitments produces only a false sense of accomplishment as getting through the day is a heroic achievement. Perhaps the lessons from the recent recession and our new understanding about making more sustainable choices means attending to fewer things, but insisting they be of quality. To value the perishable then may require recalibrating our expectations, but it would also support more appreciation for what is possible in dwelling . . . well.

The origins of American park design

When I wander through a park, I hear the echo of Andrew Jackson Downing, an American whose short life left little physical trace, but whose influence endures. Downing’s work as a landscape architect started with the land and its production. His family’s five-acre nursery in Newburgh, New York provided experience with practical horticulture. Downing learned about design when he expanded his services from supplying plants to laying out estates along the Hudson, made newly possible with quicker steamboat commuting from New York City for wealthy businessmen. Downing’s landscape improvements frequently coupled with changes to the house, and for such projects he recommended Alexander Jackson Davis. From late 1838, Downing and Davis referred potential clients to each other and Davis prepared Downing’s sketches for his publication's illustrations. 

In early 1850 with his increasing popularity, Downing wanted to form a more permanent partnership with Davis, who declined. Downing sailed for England that July where he saw the sensitive landscape watercolors a young architect had made of his continental tour. Downing persuaded Calvert Vaux to return to Newburgh with him where they worked together for thirty-five months until Downing died in a boating accident. Having moved to New York in 1858, Vaux began a long partnership with Frederick Law Olmsted whom he knew from his correspondence with and visits to Downing’s home. One of Downing’s apprentices had even fortuitously suggested Olmsted apply for the Central Park superintendent position. In 1858, Olmsted and Vaux submitted the winning competition entry for Central Park where Vaux was responsible for bridge and park structures, and Olmsted for planting design, although according to David Schuyler, Olmsted described Downing as the design “originator.” (1996, 274) 

Central Park was not a new idea. Downing’s self-avowed mentor, John Claudius Loudon, was the landscape architect for Derby Arboretum, the first English park designed to be public in 1838. From 1848 Downing editorialized about the need for American public parks and gardens. As the preeminent American landscape architect, Downing was commissioned to design the Public Grounds at Washington, submitted for congressional funding in February, 1851. In August, Downing published an editorial, “The New-York Park” where he called for the city to no longer be satisfied with “little door-yards of space,” but that a grand plan of relief for the congested city was needed and he criticized the planned one hundred and sixty acres park as being too small.

Downing’s Washington Mall park design was composed of six “rooms” with distinct characteristics of instruction and recreation. Vegetated borders united the design concealing the cross-park drives that unfortunately interrupted the intended landscape experience. Olmsted and Vaux applied this idea more successfully in Central Park with grade separations between four recessed traverse roads for vehicles and over-arching bridges for a seamless landscape. Also, just as the Smithsonian Institution was part of the Mall housing the nation’s cultural and scientific achievements, Central Park has The Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of which define the park design ideal as attending to the physical and intellectual health of the people.

Maintaining

Over many years and hundreds of clients, I have never had a single one who asked for a project that required maintenance. Busy, busy people who panic when their dentist says they need to brush for two solid minutes and then floss, or when the recommended exercise program suggests they walk a mile three times a week. How is it possible to find the time?  And keeping up with maintenance? No one wants more.

Nevertheless, there’s a paradigm change afoot, for architects and architecture, and landscape architectural practices will lead the way. The dynamic characteristics of a garden full of living plants always require some attention: watering, pruning, replacing spent plants, and generally responding to changing uses. Martha Schwartz said a garden is like a pet, if you don’t want to care for it, get a stuffed animal. In some projects with rigid clients, she used plastic elements that gave the desired look, but required no human attention. Other than such artificial designs, gardens and landscapes have always needed maintaining, and offered the reward of fragrant flowers, screening shrubs and shady trees in a life outdoors that is closer to nature.

For the new sustainable guidelines for architecture, many aspects are predicated on monitoring high-performing equipment for optimal performance and minimal energy consumption. This is called commissioning, and it is designed into the project and is confirmed once the systems are fully operational. It will also have to be repeated over the long life of the building because performative standards will degrade without vigilant maintenance including annual filters replacement, seasonal cleaning, and replacing silicone-based sealants that wear out about every five years. What if the person who cared for the building landscapes did this work? This expert in storm-water collecting and distributing systems, green roof management, bio-swale functions (that absorb impervious surface run-off), and even the flower gardens would have someone who maintained their healthy operations along with heat pumps and air chillers.

The word ‘maintain’ comes from the Latin: manus or hand + tenēre or to hold. To hold in the hand, that is, something that is handy, is not just a thing. It is also an approach. Gardens have always been hand-crafted and then hand-worked. Homes rich in dwelling are too. However the rest of our buildings, where we work, learn, shop, worship and amuse ourselves, are often of an impersonal scale devoid of human touch. Perhaps the new sustainability requirements intent on zero-carbon energy operations can embrace an interior gardening mentality. This means a person can open a window, adjust the shades, direct their waste in the appropriate direction, harvest their lunch, and generally live in ways that are closer to the forces of nature. Self-sufficiency is part of the American character; a right to fully-controlled, air conditioned places, even when they are wastefully unoccupied, is not. Let a new sensibility of comfort evolve from holding at hand designs that respond to our world and let us manage our contribution. Less engineering and more maintaining.

Polyculture on an Urban Scale

Gardeners and farmers have practiced a symbiotic method of planting for centuries.  Called companion planting, specific plants are combined to return lost nutrients to the soil, to control pests and to aid pollination. For instance, American Indians planted corn, pole beans and squash together so that the corn stalks served as a trellis for the climbing beans and squash. Even small gardens can take advantage of this approach by mingling marigolds with other plants to repel aphids and attract their natural predator. While cities do not often have large areas available for re-design, sometimes waterfront and post-industrial sites become open for new development. What if urban design had a similar approach resulting in the companion placement for new buildings and landscapes forming an urban polyculture?

Mandates requiring sustainable architecture have three priorities: 1. sensitive building orientation; 2. maximize natural daylighting and ventilation; and 3. at least 80 percent of the operational energy required comes from the building itself. In more detail, building orientation is important because depending on the local climate, buildings need to defensively position themselves in order to minimize harmful exposures – for instance to avoid the summer sun in southern locations or winter wind in northern locations – and to maximize beneficial exposures. Building envelopes that thicken with reflective shading devices, insulated glazing, light trays to control daylight as well as operable windows to take advantage of breezes on days with mild temperature will require less summer cooling as there will be fewer light fixtures emitting heat. Local energy sources such as solar voltaics for hot water heating, geo-thermal heat pumps working with air temperatures that need less adjusting, and other engineered equipment will allow buildings to be more self-sufficient and less reliant on diminishing natural resources. If this thinking is broadened to the community scale, how might that affect urban plans?

Suppose buildings were arranged so that one vegetated screen wall protected the southern-most exposure of one building with the others benefiting from the subsequent shade. Then their placement could be refined to channel prevalent breezes creating wind tunnels for turbines and windmills. Instead of slowing and then disposing stormwater in remote municipal treatment facilities, water could be gathered in reflecting ponds to bounce light into buildings. Small waterfalls could provide natural air cooling if they could take advantage of breezes, and if the pools were a sufficient depth, the consistent temperature could reduce the energy required for heating and cooling equipment.

By clustering buildings to take advantage of their proximity, they can assist each other in what natural forces they attract and repel. The result would be increased productivity. Planning for zero-carbon cities usually means reducing waste, improving a building’s ability to respond to light and air, and specifying more-efficient and more-accurately sized engineered equipment that generate local power for energy needs. People are fragile and need shelter; but they also like to be comfortable. Polyculture as a design approach might mean that their needs, physical and emotional, are satisfied more naturally.

Scheming Schemes

Design begins with scheming. This imaginative act examines possible activities or experiences that are searching for realization. So the scheme becomes the pre-figurative declaration of what might be. From the Latin for ‘form,’ ‘figure,’ or even ‘style,’ early design sketches work through the designs’ complex combination of physical and metaphysical elements towards a resolution that encompasses what is critical to that particular design. Thus the materials used in this exploratory step are important. Usually pencil-drawn plan compositions on paper are helpful, less so computer programs, but this investigation can also be undertaken in three-dimensions with messy models of clay to allow easy building up and carving away, or with torn paper and found fragments to collage assemblages with surprising overlaps and juxtapositions.  

‘Scheme’ is a noun and a verb, and is similar to ‘plan’ in that regard. We make plan drawings that represent compositions, and in doing so we plan as an action setting up potential experience. Designers scheme by making schematics; so logically schematics are the evidence of scheming, which is difference from planning. If you search through the long list of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions, the one I prefer for ‘scheme’ is “to effect by contrivance or intrigue.”

This brings us to the delightful question of what is intrigue in design. There is no doubt that the productive arts – landscape architecture, architecture and urban design – are crafty arts; that is, their ideas evolve into reality through the craft of building. Marco Frascari wrote in “The Compass and the Crafty Art of Architecture” about tools used to contrive design intent. But, before the carefully chosen tool can be used craftily, I suggest a silent intrigue is required. Perhaps this intriguing consideration comes from schematic drawings and models that do not have true measure, but have measure in mind. So too, schematic drawings and models may not have true structure, but have weight and gravity in mind. Likewise, schematics may explore relationships:  the movement of body and eye, historic traces through time, or proposed futuristic visions of alternate social protocols. A scheme’s only purpose is to suggest intended presence with guidelines that recede as the bricks, wood and stone are formed on the site to stand in the light, to receive the rain, and to temper the situation as it affects people and their experience of place.

Thus the scheme is informed by design facts. The schematic investigation isn’t simply of abstractions, but has presence and significance because it considers the language (vocabulary and grammar) of material, light, wind, climate, topography, soil, structure, purpose, and context in a unified and harmonious whole. This phase of design is made up of acts of reciprocity between a scheme and its development, which means a continual going back and forth between schematic ideas and their implications. These can only be found by speaking and listening to the program in a process of continual becoming, leading to human activities made manifest in the operational landscape.

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.