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.

Design for Emotion: The 9/11 Memorials

Teaching design, learning design, and especially experiencing design is an activity with two often conflicting attentions.  If the concentration is on the appearance, evaluating performance waits, or if the focus is on more technical aspects, criticism arises that feeling or emotion is lacking.  Most designers are naturally stronger in one way and must work to find a balance so that the result accomplishes both its purpose and appeals to people.  Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in memorial design, particularly design that refers to a culturally significant event.

I visited all three 9/11 memorials this year.  Only the Pentagon site is finished with its dedication on September 11, 2008, seven years after 9/11.  The two-acre plaza is designed as a sacred grove with 184 metal and granite benches cantilevered over pools of moving water.  59 benches representing the people onboard the airplane face the flight path, and 125 benches face the Pentagon representing the people who died there.  Paperbark maples were chosen for their peeling bark, vibrant fall color and because they hold their foliage long into the fall.  Due to poor maintenance, they died even in this short time and have been replaced with crape myrtles, which is unfortunate because late-summer blossoms give a very different effect than turning leaves, and they will never provide enough shade for a place with southwest exposure.

The World Trade Center site is partially finished and visiting it is a very different experience.  Unlike the Pentagon site which is free, continuously open and completely accessible, this site requires a ticket, security screening and waiting in line.  While there is no doubt that the place is large with two overwhelming fountains in the former towers’ footprint and a austere plaza, my most striking impression caused by the ‘survivor’ tree.  This 30-year old Callery pear tree was found burned and damaged in the rubble.  Nursed back to health, it was recently replanted in a spot that seems contrary to the meticulous plaza design.  The tree trunk is staked so thoroughly that it seems like every hope that anyone there ever had for surviving the 9/11 tragedy is pinned to this single tree.

Both places suffer from the way people act while there.  Unless they seem to have a personal connection, many visitors act like tourists visiting a destination.  The third site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is different.  After the arrival court which has the narrative and pictorial account, there is a long walk lined with a black concrete bench and a sloped granite wall edging the impact site.  As you walk toward the wall of names for the 40 people who died on Flight 93, the gradual approach transforms the visitor.  No longer chatting about the long car ride or where to buy lunch, people become more reflective attending to the reason why they are there and what this memorial means.  In this way, the design’s purpose and form unite causing an emotional response, and making it the more successful design of the three.

Referencing brick

Two 2011 AIA Honor Awards for Architecture went to new buildings in Manhattan that specifically claim heightened sensitivity to their historic context by referencing brick, the prevalent material in the area.  The Barnard College Diana Center by Weiss / Manfredi is a multi-purpose glass building well-scaled to fit within its surroundings even with its hovering cantilevered shapes.  The claim for its respectful contextual nod comes from the orange vertical strips painted on the inside surface of the outer double panel window wall.  The thin to wide stripes look like a vertical blind that is slightly off its track.  The orange color – some would more generously call it brick or terra cotta – is also used as full colored panels giving a sort of air-brushed appearance to the exterior.

One Jackson Square by Kohn Pedersen Fox is a 35-unit luxury housing building in Greenwich Village across from the triangular-shaped park from which it takes its name.  Again, the building’s form is appropriate to the surroundings with the lower seven stories establishing a firm street presence and the upper six floors set back.  The project description claims the “predominantly masonry structures of the immediate surroundings, along with the park, are “played back” in the glazed façade, creating an intimacy of scale congruent with the local context through juxtaposition.”  What actually happens is that behind the curved glass curtain walls flanking the lobby entrance are thick, undulating, laminated and stained bamboo walls with rectangular horizontal cut-outs that have mirrored backs and are randomly located.  These gaps are meant to suggest brick.

Both projects were built in places that people care about intensely.  Asserting that the context was “intimate” and the historic urban fabric “intricate,” the architects responded with building sizes and shapes that aligned well with their proximate situation.  As anyone who lives or works within an historic district or a homeowners association review board neighborhood knows, controlling the heights, volumes and set-backs from public space of proposed structures is managed with numerical limitations.  Matching forms insures the new work does not overwhelm the existing, but that alone cannot secure positive results. Duplicating existing materials also does not guarantee appropriate outcomes because imitating past methods of construction in simplified interpretations is superficial.  Cutting-edge design for commercial buildings responding to sustainable mandates have little need for stone carvings, cast terra cotta panels, and complicated brick details.

Still, this doesn’t mean that glass buildings become welcome members of historic places by referencing commonly found materials through paint and cut-out shapes.  The power of Michael Arad’s 911 Memorial fountains comes from the objects that are the footprints of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, evoking feelings of loss and absence.  Negative form references positive form.  With materials, referencing color and shape alone misses most of inherent qualities.  Brick has earthy origins, achieves its hardness and finish from firing, and is human-scaled because it is laid by hand.  Emotional associations are carried by physical manifestations without which the result cannot help but be an empty sentiment.

Urban Interstructure

When design practitioners cross disciplines, interesting things can happen.  In the 1970’s, architects started identifying themselves as urban designers because they love cities and felt that master planning fell within their design expertise.  The New York architecture firm of Rogers Marvel recently presented their work at the National Building Museum made up entirely of landscape architecture projects including their competition winning proposal for the redesign of the White House’s South Park.  While it sometimes seems that projects are awarded to the professionals who have the better design idea no matter their license type, it can also be beneficial for the expanded point of view crossing disciplines provides.

Infrastructure projects have received significant funding boosts under the current administration for two key reasons:  the work needs to be done, and such improvements advance national capabilities.  Hard infrastructure projects build roads, and provide water supply, sewers, electricity and telecommunications; elements that are only partially infrastructure.  The prefix ‘infra’ means ‘below’ or ‘underneath.’  These built objects are usually thought of as silently and invisibly serving other purposes.  For instance, roads facilitate mobility, water and waste piping free landowners from individual digging wells and having septic fields, and power lines support the information age, although they are hardly silent or invisible.  Some designers today are finding opportunities to express the function of this hard infrastructure in order to increase civic awareness and therefore appreciative stewardship, and this is found in storm-water management techniques such as open runnels and vegetated swales.  The systems that operate these projects are known as soft infrastructure, again neither silent nor invisible.  We need a new prefix.

Interstructure would imply a ‘between’ and ‘among’ relationship.  Given that these projects are built on publically-owned land and are funded with tax dollars, they have impact on our shared physical and organizational civic world, most keenly felt in cities.  Rather than an additive process where urban public space is filled up with stuff, why not a more integrated approach where all built elements needed to support community life were blended into one spatial and temporal realm.  This would include the hard inert elements and the living landscape.  Sticking trees in boxes located along streets where curb cuts have left a little space is the opposite approach to what we need.  If instead belts of trees, shrubs, flower gardens and plots to grow food could be woven between and among the buildings, just like the roads.  A simple correlation:  The greater the density of the “hard stuff,” the greater the concentration of the “living stuff” to insure the balance so often referred to as livability.  A good example is Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, New York.  To do this, urban designers, architects and landscape architects need to think collaboratively; that is, between and among their distinct disciplines.

Emerson could be our guide.  He said,

            Solitude is impractical and society fatal.

            We must keep our head in one and our hands in the other.

The delight of waste

Every adult knows how to balance their checkbook.  Not always a happy result, the reality of balancing income with expenses must be faced continually.  The challenge to “live within your means” is ubiquitous and so any surplus is welcome.  Upon those occasions, instead of living paycheck to paycheck, that surplus elevates existence to a level beyond mere survival.  If saved, the surplus provides a means to manage an unexpected future need; if spent, the surplus enables an activity or acquisition that is more wanted than needed.  Can we say that spending, maybe even wasting this surplus supports what we desire and advances culture?

Today there is no distinction between the words waste and trash.  Both are used for what is flushed or thrown away as unwanted and useless.  New sustainable practices advocate for graywater systems that take laundry, kitchen and bath washwater, and air conditioning condenser drips, and treat, filter and then use water mostly to irrigate gardens that are huge consumers of potable water.  (Blackwater from toilets and garbage disposals is still to be piped to treatment plants although there have been societies – Paris in the 19th century for instance – that put the fertile “night soil” to good account in urban vegetable gardens.)  Waste, I would like to define, is biotic; trash is not.

Waste has associations with the barren desert, the uncultivated, loss, and decay; to waste is to devastate.  An intoxicated person may declare they are wasted, but no one likes to consider themselves trash.  Trash, a word with unknown etymological roots, implies worthlessness.  But, we know that no desert is a barren wasteland and that its ecology is subtle although usually hostile to humans.  We also know that uncultured is another word for natural, and that loss and decay are part of endless regenerative life cycles. 

Sustainable design may have been spurred into social consciousness with concerns about global warming and the impact of climate change, but as one analysis of President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address observed, the tag is now clean energy.  This implies the target is developing non-polluting fuel from renewable sources that reduce the impact of energy generation and use, but do not require altering behavior.  Recycling and repurposing what we already have into what we want is recommended as a way to avoid adding to landfills.  With this attitude, our appetite for material consumption is not to change, just to depend on resources that are not finite, such as oil.  If designers thought of waste as surplus to expend, not by necessity but by choice, then the waste itself becomes something of value.  Of course this requires designers to be mindful of what is destined to be trash, whether this is non-biodegradable packaging, cheap products that break easily and are impractical to repair, or shoddy construction.  Design is sempiternal; that is, the made object endures.  Whether its lasting existence is of delightful use or in a landfill depends of the quality of the design, and the insistence of consumer-driven markets.

Poetic ? Pragmatic: Design inclinations

My mother had funny ways of trying to connect with my professional activities.  In the most accusatory tone, she would claim that all an architect really wanted was to be a poet.  I have written poetry:

When I think back to the beginning of time

Artists have struggled to make things refined.

Philosophers ancient and modern agree

To do so has requirements three.

and then the poem goes on to describe the Vitruvian triad:  firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis (strength, utility and grace); the attributes of all design.  Nevertheless, I hardly consider myself a poet.  On the other hand, no client of mine has even asked for or have I ever offered a design I consider purely pragmatic.  Absolute functionalism may be the target for those interested in efficient design free from ornament or any unnecessary aspect.  In other words, design with the absolute economy of the cheapest materials producing buildings with the lowest cost per square foot.  This results in an impermanent object not likely to last long, such as big box buildings with a projected life of five years.   No one claims such buildings are architecture.

The designer as poet is reaching for two things:  the precise choice of elements – words or objects – and the openness created in between which allows for the other’s imagination.  This vague terrain may be found at all scales of design from the humble clay pot to a city.  It is in these spaces, real or abstract, that people find their own voice, their own sentiment and then their own opportunity of expression.  Poetic design frames such possibilities.  The designer as pragmatist is reaching for something even more difficult to achieve:  a design that works so well that its form in material become synonymous with the object:  the design is the meaning.  From ergonomically-designed objects to the IPod, pragmatic design imbeds the poetic, and vice versa.  The reactive imagination and the appreciative use blend to the point that they are indistinguishable.

Teaching design with this goal in mind presents the only challenge that is really worth considering because, if you are successful to any degree, you have supported a learning experience that transcends the particular momentary design problem and is a process applicable to any design endeavor.  This method does not take the form of a recipe, nor is it haphazard experimentation.  I think it combines activities of understanding a physical material’s inherent capabilities, of appreciating the human body and how it wants to work in the world, and of the asking a good question.  What if . . . poses the situation of a design investigation.  Judicial subtraction eliminates extraneous and competing motives.  Checking bigger and smaller scales intensifies the design by making its proper fit more specific.

The relational paradigm of poetics | pragmatics poses neither the conventional Western duality of either/or, nor the Janus-like two-faced dilemma where one is the privation of the other.  Rather, they are linked simply because the best poem serves a purpose just as superior functioning design is poetic.  Some call this the beautiful, but who today considers beauty the goal of design?