"Keep Off" or "Keep Out": Mixed Messages at Rocky Mountain National Park

The life in an alpine tundra is fragile. This land type occurs above the treelimit where trees cannot grow. Trees need the average temperature of the year’s warmest month to be above 50˚F. The word ‘tundra’ is Russian for ‘land without trees.’ Alpine tundra has a very short growing season, but it is long enough to support a complex ecology of wildlife. The trees grow slowly often starting behind sheltering boulders. Once exposed, they twist into what is called a Krummholz, a German word for ‘crooked wood.’ These trees may be several hundred years old, yet they barely stand a foot or two. This tundra goes through nearly a hundred freeze/thaw cycles annually. Because water expands by nine percent when it turns to ice, these dynamic forces split rocks and ice/rubble flows create patterns of debris where fragments eventually settle. Reading this landscape to understand its life and forms is difficult although the National Park Service has done a masterful job of marking paths and overlooks, providing parking and installing instructional plaques.

One such overlook is about one hundred feet away from the parking area. It’s worth the trip because it presents a 270 degree panoramic view of astonishing valleys, meadows, glacial pockets and mountains covered with pole pines (many dead from the Pine Beetle infestation) and aspens with leaves that glow as if illuminated. Signs clearly warn people to stay on the path so as to not injure the adjacent plants that can take decades to recover. In no less than ten minutes, I had to remind three people, of which only one was a child, to stay on the path. The signs said “Keep Off” and perhaps this is just vague enough for people to think its negotiable. After all, the ground looked dry and bleak, just rocks and a few straggly plants. Other parts of the park are under restoration and entire areas adjacent to the path demand that you “Keep Out,” and people do. What’s the difference?

Both are lands that are clearly inhospitable to human occupation, at least according to modern sensibilities. That makes everyone a visitor. Warnings that insist you “Keep Out” give the clear indication that you don’t belong there because park operators are doing something and a visit will have to wait. On the other hand, “Keep Off” seems to be about protecting surfaces that appear tough. What’s the harm if I want a photograph from a slightly different angle? You can’t possibly mean that I can never go someplace I can clearly see is easily accessed. The problem, of course, is that not all landscapes are for people. The National Park Service weighs carefully the paradox of exclusion thus protecting wilderness versus the potential to enhance a sense of stewardship people gain by a limited experience such places. For them to increase restrictions caters to people who only respond to yelling and jeopardizes opportunities for others to listen for whispering.   

Food as Art

The 20th century British philosopher Robin Collingwood made a useful distinction between craft and art. A
well-crafted object and a piece of art possess some of the same traits:  an idea, technical perfection uniting form and material, and a sense of purpose. The difference is in the artist’s approach to the making. Unlike the craftsman, the artist is willing to undertake a process with an uncertain outcome. Like a hunter, the artist can intuitively “tell” the direction and “know” when it is done. The difference is the openness of the target. This is the difference between a cook and a chef, with the ultimate chef being the one who makes pastry.

The aesthetics of pastry involves the complete perception. Pastries have a look, smell, taste, feel and even sound when eaten, thus engaging all the senses. Further, chefs know that something tastes good when it includes tastes that are a little salty, sweet, sour and bitter. The pastry chef’s skill comes from the experience of combining ingredients for flavor and texture, decorating the object for appeal and baking it properly. Experience also allows the chef to understand preparation efficiencies and sequences thereby refining commercial applicability. Unlike other forms of cooking, baking stubbornly resists any effort to adjust the result that falls short of expectations. Endless revisions halt once the chemical reactions are set in motion. While a malformed cake can be disguised under thick layers of frosting, chefs consider such compensating methods unprofessional. Pastry chefs need a particular confidence to commit to making something that has no room for final adjustment.

But is pastry making an art according to Collingwood’s definition? Perfecting a specific type of pastry requires a predictable consistency in technique and result. Experimenting with a new ingredient or procedure through a trial-and-error process is needed before a level of certainty is obtained. Once understood, the recipe wants to be repeatable. Do these factors preclude the result from being considered art?

Architecture has a similar question. Good architects master techniques to investigate the issues of each project from the particularities of a specific site, the client’s programmatic needs, and technical demands for safety and performance to the inventive combination of materials. Nevertheless they can never absolutely predict the experience. Working through drawing and modeling gives them some idea of what to expect, but the projected experience is not guaranteed. The complexity of the art defies complete predictability. The art of architecture depends on the architect's ability to evolve to where the fundamentals of shelter are secure and the intended delight is likely. So too, the complexity of pastry combines nourishment with sure technique and consistent results and the unexpected pleasure of unfolding flavors, subtle sensations and provocative aftertastes. No chef can make someone respond a certain way on demand. Like all artists find, and if anything this is truest for food as art, there is no accounting for taste. Unlike architecture, the final test of pastry is in its disappearance when eaten. Then food as art finds expression in satisfied appreciation, and like fading musical notes, it lasts only as a memory.

Getting People to Look at Plants

The New York Botanical Gardens has devised an ingenious way to encourage people to look at plants.  In the summer of 2011, curators paired a display garden inspired by the Alhambra with Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry on landscapes printed on strategically placed boards throughout the gardens.  The exhibit entitled Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra occasionally hosted flamenco music and dancers, and the cafes offered Mediterranean cuisine.  This summer, the curators brought together plants found in Monet’s gardens at Giverny and the French Symbolist poets Mallarmé and Rimbaud.  There was also an exhibit of Elizabeth Murray’s photographs of Monet’s gardens as well as Water Lily Concerts with chamber music by French composer Debussy.  Of course the cafes offered French food.  This mix of gardens with artist, poet, photographer, musician and chef unites similar sentiments expressed through different medium any one of which might be enough to spur a visit.  Once there, the experience multiplies as the initiating art form exposes you to the possible enchantment with another.  Further, associations are refreshed through the reinterpretation of a foreign land’s gardens or remembered from viewing Monet’s water lily paintings in a museum.

This exhibition is wonderful in its complete aesthetic experience.  Aesthetics is not limited by definition to visual perception alone; aesthetics is the perception of all five outer senses.  People experience the world through their perception of it and find it more meaningful when all the senses are engaged.  While designers tend to focus on appearances, and it is true that the visual sense is privileged, deeper feelings depend on the alerted perceptions of sound, taste, smell and especially touch.  Teachers of young children know that learning occurs differently for each and cultivate a variety of sensory techniques to effectively convey information.  People may develop compensating skills for difficult learning, but prefer methods that are more easily accessed.

Designers know that most projects are dominated by function with the “niceties” vulnerable to practical cost saving cuts.  People do need for things to work.  The generous budget might seem excessive with upgraded products or finishes often absorbing the so-called excess.  However, opulent gold-plated bathtubs do not enrich the experience of bathing.  One lesson from this recession – I hope – is that longer-lasting materials will be chosen making them both more sustainable and more likely to be emotionally satisfying.  The sustainable aesthetic then would be design that achieves its purpose through full aesthetic experience.

If I argue that the Monet’s Garden exhibit does this, how does that compare to the design premise of Disneyland or Las Vegas hotels?  Simulating European cities or ancient Rome can never stand for the true experience because its sanitized version is a thin visual veneer of the actual experience.  Meant to entertain, the spectator has to buy into the illusion absent the smells, sounds and feel of the actual place.  On the other hand, Monet’s Garden exhibit is meant to educate, and this makes the difference.  Each form of artistic expression offers either something familiar, or something new and challenging.  Thus the plants participate with the poetry, music, food and feelings, and have a chance to inspire the imagination.

Body of Work: Diebenkorn at the Corcoran

The Ocean Park series is the name of the body of work painted by Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993) during the last twenty-five years of his successful career.  An abstract expressionist, Diebenkorn lived in Southern California during this period and named his paintings by place and number alone.  Following the first major retrospective of the series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then at the Orange County Museum of Art, the exhibit came to the East Coast at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the summer of 2012.  Large oil canvases, smaller acrylics on paper, watercolors on flimsy trace, and even tiny paintings on cigar box lids, this show encompassed his full exploration of media as well as his thorough investigation of, in his words, color, form, space and line.

Diebenkorn’s work attracted my attention many years ago.  I remember paintings with chalky and smoldering color patches next to lines that frame and release simultaneously, and suggestions of picture-free landscape.  Diebenkorn’s larger paintings are bigger than a spectator making them fields to enter, and the smaller ones seem to be windows to peer through.  They are balanced without mirroring symmetry, centered without objects, frames or perspectival devices, and complete without being overly polished.  Nothing seemed rushed or accidental or over-wrought.  The art opened my sensibilities and retained my interest without insulting my emotions.

Those who create have their purposes and corresponding materials for execution.  Each project has unique pressures in the making and judgment in the finishing.  Over time, sometimes, an artist develops both vocabulary and methods that becomes a signature recognizable to others.   Those who follow this work see the flow of thought from one project to the next, and these developments and evolutions become clearer with exhibitions that gather a lot of work in one place for viewing.  Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many, many times, but until the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit where a dozen of these paintings of the same subject were displayed in the same room, their visual connections were more imagined than perceived.  If before the paintings were only available sequentially, now they could be experienced in the sweep of the eye collecting impressions in layers.

Taking an idea to exhaustion gives it a chance to be fully realized.  The patience to work through one project, learn all you can, accept that it is the best you can do at that time, and then set it aside for the next commitment takes disciplined curiosity.  Seeing a collection of such work allows others to participate in this forward motion as well as to witness the artist’s honest reappraisal of past effort.  No one does this better than Diebenkorn whose play of tones for instance in blues, greens and grays, cut with fine black lines, scraped down and built up as repetitively as a Philip Glass piano solo, and in this he shows his hand, his eye, his arm’s reach, the concerns of his heart and his intellect’s questions; that is, his whole body in his work.

To Nest or not to Nest

More and more American households are made up of single people.  From recent graduates to the retired, developers are predicting the greater rental market to be studio and one-bedroom apartments.  While some designers think that great interior design is only worth attempting in larger homes with “themed” rooms expressed in furniture style, material textures and colors, and associative “meaning,” good design is even more critical if small spaces are to feel like home.

Such design begins from the moment you open the door and cross the threshold.  What greets you?  Make it strong so that it is noticeable.  A soft carpet under foot, a favorite picture on the wall, and a shelf or table for your keys, bag and mail instantly welcome you.  Keep functional kitchens and baths clear of clutter, and shift the focus away from the fixtures and appliances with new towels and matching accessories.  If the cabinets are acceptable, add things that blend enhancing their presence; if not, add things that contrast and distract your visual attention.  Keep this simple:  if purple is your favorite color, then use it plainly and boldly.

For the primary living spaces, first think about the visual assets.  View is important because you “borrow” space from beyond your limited square footage.  If you have a good view, place your reading chair or desk there.  You’ll appreciate it every time you sit down or stand up.  Even if you don’t have an appealing view, put your dining table by a window.  This may mean that the table is not right next to the kitchen, but there’s no reason to save a few steps when the destination is pleasant.  Eating is a reflective and nourishing act.  Put a small lamp on the table reminiscent of an intimate bistro.  In the sleeping area, avoid jamming the bed sides against a wall or it will be too difficult to make.  A made bed is probably the single most worthwhile daily effort to make to keep a small place tidy and inviting.  Above all, have good lighting.  Evening hours matter and multiple lamps provide better illumination than a single bright ceiling light.  It is also nice to turn lights on when you arrive and off when you are putting your home and yourself to bed.  Include a plant – they clean the air and say a caring person lives here.  If it dies, replace it and try again.

One of the harder lessons is that it is better to have nothing rather than furnishings that are cheap, in poor repair, or that you just don’t like.  If it is dirty; clean it.  If it is beyond repair; throw it away.  If it doesn’t fit; sell or donate it.  Sparse is easier and quicker to clean, but shabby just makes you feel … well, shabby.  Even if you like to entertain, arrange your space to work best for when you are alone.  The activities change anyway when friends are over, but when you are alone, your nest has to support you both physically and emotionally.

Rules of Engagement

When the future of design is discussed, on any scale, sustainable directions point to the densification of cities, preservation of rural farmland and an uncertain fate of the suburbs. Many cities, especially those with significant mass transit options, are experiencing an increase in population. Primarily young adults and those whose children no longer live at home are taking advantage of urban cultural, social and economic opportunities. The parents of school-age children are less likely to live in a city because urban public schools are often sub-standard. Public school systems that have Boards of Education with the children’s education as their top priority (as opposed to serving as a jobs program) will eventually provide the quality of education necessary for all people to want to live in the city.

In the mid-twentieth century, zoning regulations and building codes were written with strict guidelines addressing over-crowded tenement slums located near industrial and manufacturing factories. Now that the United States has evolved from a producer of goods to a provider of services, codes are being revised to embrace mixed-use development. While in the past it was healthier to separate commercial enterprises that produced toxic air and water from housing, now the ideal is to have “clean” businesses, high-end shopping and dining, exciting cultural activities, lovely parks, great schools and enriching after-school programs all within a “magic mile” - a 15 minute walk of each other. Public spaces are safe and fun; public transportation is inexpensive, quick and reliable; and cars are used for pleasure touring and not facilitating the agonizing multi-hour daily commute suffered by so many today.

What do designers have to do to make this happen? Building codes protect dwelling units from spreading fires, and the justice system upholds expectations of safety. Health care advances have reduced the fear of diseases from impure water and poor sanitation; however, protections of public health and safety are not enough. Welfare is the third aspect of the design triad for which architects are trained and people expect from what is built. But public welfare is hard to define and even harder to insure. What makes a city vital and interesting?

Public park design offers a hint. Early public parks were first royal gardens that were opened occasionally to the public, but only if they were properly dressed and behaved well. Just as train travel needed conductors to monitor the passengers’ conduct, public parks had people, now signs, to enforce rules to everyone’s benefit. Active recreation – sports fields, boating and playgrounds – were separated from areas for passive activities – people watching, listening to live music and strolling through gardens. For people to live in dense cities, architects will need to design buildings for acoustic and visual privacy. This will change the city from a place to plunder and then escape, to a place of contribution and consideration for people of many economic levels. The more diverse, the better, so long as the rules of engagement respect the health, safety and welfare of urban dwellers.

San Antonio's River Walk

Many cities were built on rivers. The waterfronts serviced industry and transportation as it was usually easier to build a private boat than a public road. For centuries, rivers were also used to flush waste gradually polluting the waters. Fortunately manufacturing has decreased and the public appreciation of urban waterfronts has increased slowly improving water quality. As cities grew, internal waterways were usually buried so that development could spread undeterred. Because subsurface waterways do not disappear just because they are unseen, many buildings built over them have basements that require constant pumping.

San Antonio has a river running through it. To control flooding, in 1939 the EPA built flood gates, the Olmos dam and channelized part of the river. In 1962, two miles were improved using local limestone making it cleaner and safer. Since then, its length has expanded to five miles with extensions under way for a northern Museum Reach and a southern Mission Reach. Along the walk are waterfalls, an amphitheater and other places for gathering. Hotels, apartment and office buildings open directing onto it, and restaurants commandeer space for sidewalk cafes. A convention center and Rivercenter Mall anchor an extension. The historic district called La Villita has preserved mid-nineteenth century cottages used by local artists. Tour boats holding 40 occupants paying $15 apiece motor along only a few minutes apart. Needless to say, this destination is a magnet for tourists and boasts that it is the biggest attraction in Texas. Is this a prime example of a possible response to the Walmart effect that has decimated so many town centers with further threats by online shopping limiting urban street life to patronizing Starbucks? Is this destination the public place of the future?

If so, then the “Rules of Common Courtesy” that list prohibited activities in the Mall area will come to define proper urban behavior. Noting concern for public safety and comfort, smoking, obstructing customer traffic, possessing or consuming drugs or alcoholic beverages (except in licensed restaurants), disorderly or disruptive conduct, pets, unlicensed (street vendor) sales, skateboarding, bicycling although you can bike there, and possession of illegal firearms although in Texas it’s hard to know what that exactly means is not tolerated. People must wear shoes and shirts, and wearing clothes with vulgar, obscene or sexually explicit language is forbidden. People stroll, shop, eat and watch each other. About 20 activities such as craft fairs, culinary tastings and water races are held annually. While people have always come to cities for economic opportunity, they get the city they make.

New urban mixed-use development labeled “Work, Live, Play” market the advantages of dense urban living. Even though most of River Walk does not have a Disney-like appearance of newness and homogeneity because it has taken over fifty years to develop, it’s still a place of spectacle. One look at the declining areas beyond the River Walk District in San Antonio shows what can only be described as the new Walmart effect.