What I am thinking about these days is that architecture / landscape is the physical "platform" or "container" in which social interactions take place.  The interactions are face-to-face, but these days they are also digital.  Did you go to the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival http://www.sfoutsidelands.com/ last weekend (Aug 22-24 2008) in San Fran?  Lots of great music, apparently, and even though I couldn't be there the most interesting thing for me was the Crowdfire app http://www.crowdfire.net/ that allowed participants to upload, tag, and remix images, text, video, and audio captured on cellphones, resulting in a shared, immersive experience.   

What's the connection of Outside Lands with Los Medanos http://www.losmedanos.edu/, or any college campus for that matter?  Answer: I think that the Outside Lands kind of experience will become normative, because the technology is all here.  And the first place that it will become normative is on college campuses, because young adults are so tuned to the new technology.  What does a campus look like when there is an endless, integrative ocean of streaming, tagged, diverse media and online relationships-building for both substantive ("courses") and non substantive ("extracurricular") content overlayed over an ancient tradition of academic discourse and contemporary profit-driven business education?

Sylvia Paull http://www.sylviapaull.com/, who graciously spooned me up just as I gave my left ankle an incredibly painful sprain (why I didn’t go to Outside Lands), commented: “digital is just another ‘scape’."

Posted by geoffreykatz at 12:58 PM PDT

Updated: Friday, 7 November 2008 4:31 PM PST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Last year (October 2007) I attended the ASLA’s national conference, which happened to be held here in San Francisco.  So it was easy to attend a lot of the sessions.  One morning there was a plenary session which featured four of the Landscape Architecture world’s leading designers.  They sat on a podium before an audience of what seemed like upwards from 1,000 landscape architects and others.  I was towards the middle of the room and could barely make out the four on the podium.  To overcome this there was real-time video feed presented on two enormous screens above them.  The screens were amplified by color and lighting surrounds to elicit a mood and help the audience focus on the activity on the podium.

It was pretty clear to me, though maybe not to many others, that while the content of the presentation was a comparative discussion of current landscape work among the four, the landscape that we were all participating in in real time was an interactive field.  The physical world consisting of the set was just the basis of the landscape.  The rest of the landscape was the aura of colors and lights, and the live screens – and the half-acre of audience in the darkened hall.

Similarly, the landscape “out there” – city streets, parks, natural areas, sports stadiums, office towers, highways and roads, etc., the kind of stuff typically designed by architects (the buildings), engineers (the roads), and landscape architects (the pedestrian environment and planting / natural areas) – is (just) the basis of our current landscape.  In North American cities, at least, half the population it seems is now walking around with their mobile phones glued to their ears or viewing email and internet content on their Blackberries.  This is now an immersive, integrative environment, in which the local landscape that we walk in is now a part of the virtual environment in which we have quite as deep, engaged, meaningful relationships – and vice versa.

Ten years ago this was not the case, perhaps.  And in ten years from now it seems likely to me that it will be even more integrative, as 3-d content (as in electronic games and virtual communities) becomes more common, accessible, and naturalized. 

Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California, for which I was project manager at Smith & Smith, is an integrative, immersive environment.  Exterior spaces are shaped for formal ceremonies, daily student use, and local community use, and campus entrances for both function and appearance.  But integral to those exterior spaces are the irrigation, lighting, security, information kiosks, and other systems that are centrally, digitally controlled.  Even the shape of exterior spaces is strongly influenced by the network / utility configuration that is mostly underground, with surface expression in light poles, in-ground vaults, the fountain jets, etc. 

The clue for me for all of this is the very word “landscape”.  “Landscape” ≠ “landscaping”.  “Landscape” means “a composition of man-made spaces on the land” (page 7, JB Jackson 1996 “The Word Itself” in Reading the Vernacular Landscape).  It is only a late 20^th Century understanding of the word which misses the evolved, contemporary culture and its arising landscape.

Posted by geoffreykatz at 5:30 PM PDT

Updated: Friday, 4 July 2008 3:41 PM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

These days thought and feeling about sustainability seems to be arising from every conceivable corner of the world these days, from neighbourhood community action groups to corporate strategists.  Meanwhile design professionals who are inundated with demands for product and services in increasingly short time horizons are also now called on to be experts in sustainability. 

Many architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and engineers are genuinely attempting to provide competent information to their clients – either directly or through specification of materials and suppliers.  However LEED http://www.usgbc.org/ (and similar programs) notwithstanding because of the amount of information available many professionals often find themselves too busy producing “sustainability stuff” without genuine attention to examine and evaluate – “not enough time to think”.
 

Regarding "time to think" about sustainability here are some interesting and worthwhile websites. 

http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/

http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/

http://www.urbanrevision.com/

and http://www.treehugger.com/ also has an architecture and design section.

Such websites aim to collect ideas, designs, and plans for sustainable architecture.  Basically it seems that these websites are leveraging the power of the internet and social networking: the internet makes the information accessible to many people and the social networking applications allow those people to upload and share files and ideas - and not incidentally thereby create a "buzz" and group of users whose size and common interest can attract advertisers and investors. 

The tendency of such websites may be toward something like an architectural "wikipedia" in which anyone can say or present any idea, some of which are actually buildable and being constructed and some are little more than Gulliver’s Travels fantasies.  User beware!  But this is where architectural practice and experience may come in: an important role of an architectural professional these days may be to provide sound judgment on what is real versus what is some well-meaning but starry-eyed wishful dream or worse a manufacturer's hoax greenwash – as much as to provide professional design services and products. 

Still the buildable along with the fantasies on such websites may be worthwhile because they might spark thinking which leads to buildable projects, or provide ideas to be built into real projects.  Whether any of this has any staying power time will tell, as we seem to be in the middle of a green bandwagon bubble.

Posted by geoffreykatz at 11:14 AM PDT

Updated: Wednesday, 14 May 2008 11:19 AM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Landscape and Inscape are the constructed and the construct, respectively.  But how to tell them apart? 

For example, Steen Høyer on the Danish landscape (in Recovering Landscape 1999):

“For the most part, Denmark is a coherent and yet diverse fabric of fields, woodlands, small towns, and gentle, glacial topography bathed in changeably soft and luminous light.  The character of the landscape derives not only form natural conditions but also, and perhaps in larger measure, from a collective and organized approach to its management… The country enjoys a clarity of open order that expresses the Danish democratic and social tradition…”

Is this poetic passage descriptive of the landscape as constructed or is it recounting the cultural construct?  Perhaps for landed cultures (cultures that have a nation state with definable borders) it may seem easier to examine the constructed landscape and harder to get at the cultural construct.

What of the landscapes of Australian Aborigines, Puerto Ricans in the USA, Polynesian Islanders, Inuit, African Americans, Jews, or Chinese in south-east Asia?  It seems that these cultural groups have large populations that are either thinly spread through a very large geographical area, exist within the cultural matrix of other larger groups, or both.  What do their landscapes look like?

Luis Aponte-Pares on Puerto Ricans in New York City (in 2000 Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America):

“… Villa Puerto Rico, a casita, or little house, in the south Bronx…is a source of pride and memory – it articulates and validates the community’s Puerto Rican identity in space.  …casitas stand as cogent metaphors of place and culture.”

An Inuksuk is a stone figure traditionally used by Inuit and other indigenous people in the Arctic.

“Among many practical functions, they were employed as hunting and navigation aids, coordination points, indicators...  The term Inuksuk means 'to act in the capacity of a human.' It is an extension of Inuk, meaning 'a human being'.   …they appear not only on the earthly landscape but in legends and stories, in figures that emerge from the movements of fingers playing string games. These stone figures were placed on the temporal and spiritual landscapes.  http://www.arcticinuitart.com/culture/inuk.html

Yiddishland in one conception refers to the former Jewish pale of settlement in pre war Europe:

“Yiddishland, a mythical and real land that has never appeared on a map of the world, but whose frontiers have forged rivers, crossed oceans and spanned continents…. alive with rabbis, professional marriage brokers, itinerant water carriers, bright-eyed yeshivot students, porters…, plus synagogues, hospitals, cemeteries…” (amazon.com review of Yiddishland by Gerard Sylvain et al.)

In another conception Yiddishland refers to

“…a virtual locus construed in terms of the use of the Yiddish language, especially, though not exclusively, in its spoken form… Yiddishland infers a highly contingent tenacity inherent in any spatial entity defined by language use…” (Jeffrey Shandler 2006 Adventures in Yiddishland)

So what do their landscapes look like?  Constructed cultural signifiers within the larger environment that humanize and/or appropriate the environment and confer cultural meaning to those who thereby recognize the Landscape and read therein the Inscape.

Posted by geoffreykatz at 5:21 PM PDT

Updated: Wednesday, 14 May 2008 11:22 AM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Gustave Flaubert:  On ne choisit pas son sujet. Voilà ce que le public et les critiques ne comprennent pas.  Le secret des chefs-d'oeuvre est là, dans la concordance du sujet et du tempérament de l'auteur.

One does not choose one’s subject matter; one submits to it.

(extrait de la Correspondance)

Posted by geoffreykatz at 5:29 PM PDT

Updated: Tuesday, 13 May 2008 5:47 PM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

While biodiversity may be the basis of resilience, it is not the only foundation for resilience.  Ecosystems depend also on physical, structural characteristics to keep from being overwhelmed.  Some examples:

·        In the aftermath of the tsunami hitting the coast of Indonesia in December 2004 aerial photography revealed that some parts of the coast were hit harder than others.  Research subsequently demonstrated that the coast suffered less damage where the offshore reef was intact.  Apparently, many reefs areas around the Indian Ocean have been exploded with dynamite because they are considered impediments to shipping, an important part of the South Asian economy.  Similarly, the removal of coastal mangrove trees (for residential development) is believed to have intensified the effect of the tsunami in some locations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
Damage from the tsunami was reduced by the presence of an extensive, intact mangrove fringe. 2005, Danielson et al. Science 310:643 “The Asian Tsunami: a protective role for coastal vegetation”

·        In the aftermath of Katrina, the hurricane that made landfall August 29 2005 in southeast Louisiana, USA, it was shown that where the offshore mudflats were more intact, the impact of the storm was reduced.  “Barrier islands, shoals, marshes, forested wetlands, and other features of the coastal landscape can provide a significant and potentially sustainable buffer from wind wave action and storm surge generated by tropical storms and hurricanes.  Anecdotal data accumulated after Hurricane Andrew suggest that a storm surge reduction along the central Louisiana coast of about three inches per mile of marsh…  Emergent canopies such as provided by forested wetlands can greatly diminish wind penetration, thereby reducing the wind stress available to generate surface waves and storm surge.  Shallow water depths attenuate waves via bottom friction and breaking…” pp3,15   2006-Jan-26, Working Group for Post-Hurricane Planning for the Louisiana Coast, A New Framework for Planning the Future of Coastal Louisiana after the Hurricanes of 2005. 

·        In the coastal forest extending from the Canadian west coast into the American pacific northwest the bark near the forest floor of Redcedars, Douglas-firs, Redwoods, and other large trees is thick enough to be able to withstand small fires, such as would occur naturally by lightning and that would consume the local underbrush.  Where a fire suppression policy is in place, underbrush builds up – providing fuel for a potentially large and hot fire – which might be hot enough to destroy the large trees.  The Oakland Hills fire of 1991 was at least in part a result of this condition:  “At the fires peak it would destroy 1 home every 11 seconds.  In addition to the winds and the heat, an important factor in the rapid spread of the fire was that it started in an area that was at an interface between developed and undeveloped land. Many of the first dwellings to burn were surrounded by thick, dry vegetation.  In addition, the nearby undeveloped land had even more dry brush along with several groves of non-native volatile eucalyptus trees.  The same conditions contributed to ..the Berkeley 1923 fire.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Hills_firestorm A major fire near Limantour Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore in October 1995 consumed 48 homes and scorched 12,000 acres (1/7th of the park.)  Some say that Marin County, California (where I live) is a forest fire disaster waiting to happen…

Posted by geoffreykatz at 2:14 PM PDT

Updated: Friday, 11 April 2008 2:21 PM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Any habitat goes through cyclical perturbations like storms, flooding, fire, in addition to regular occurrences like seasons.  Habitat succession may follow a course of slow change but also diverge suddenly and reach a completely new state.

The ability of ecosystems to recover, reorganize, and adapt is commonly known as “resilience”.  The basis of resilience is biodiversity.  The more biodiversity, the more library information the habitat has to keep from being overwhelmed and from being changed to potentially less desirable new states.

What are some of the appearances or symptoms of those “less desirable states”? 

·        High Floods

·        Desertification, loss of topsoil, and duststorms

·        Erosion and siltation of streams and rivers

·        Subsidence

·        Very hot and fast-spreading wildfires

·        Appearance of pest animals like rats.

As urban environments invade and displace rural and wild environments natural areas in cities connected to sub and exurban natural areas become the location in which natural systems may find their balance.  Natural areas in cities typically include parks or greenways, ravines and streams, abandoned and regenerating industrial or transportation lands: both large and small.

In addition where natural systems are allowed for, people generally use the natural areas, engaging with natural areas for recreation, or to find meaning and inspiration.  Property values may also be higher in proximity to natural areas.  Flourishing natural habitats may also support native plants and wildlife – and the rats and pigeons might not be able to compete with them.  Events which might otherwise be “natural disasters” may become limited in impact and property damage and human loss.

 In a development project, the professional team may map habitat types within and adjacent the master plan area, matrix-patch-corridor and landscape flows, and – since the progression of the natural areas is open-ended – identify alternative/possible scenarios for the natural development of the habitats.  This information contributes to the base data used for community planning and urban and landscape design.  For example, the information may be used to identify areas that have great value for natural processes; the information may also be used to identify preservation measures (i.e., legal protection) and conservation measures (i.e., management activities) for those areas.

Even while natural processes carry on eternally, “nature” is also a socially-constructed landscape value.  So a development plan could program a range of activities and services for the natural areas for its future residents and people who might visit from outside the region.  These activities and services could include trail hikes, a nature interpretation center, sustainable gardening center, etc.

Urban open space for natural process and recreation is a “land use” in a development plan.

Posted by geoffreykatz at 2:02 AM PDT

Updated: Wednesday, 29 July 2009 1:00 AM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Our separation as humans from the natural world / natural processes is an illusion.  We humans are an integral part of the natural world and the processes which animate it, or to put that another way, from natural processes and their appearance as a steady state called the natural world.  I have read I can’t remember who said it that in a way humans are the way that nature knows about itself, the way nature has self-awareness.  

The wild-eyed pigeon, the gull, and the brown pelican that you encounter at the Marina breakwater in San Francisco are not primitive creatures, they are your contemporaries and our lives (their lives and our human lives) are bound up together.  Their lives may be short but so is a human life, relatively speaking.

In constructing or renovating landscapes all sorts of measures for sustainability, like using native plant species or conserving irrigation water, are good but not because ecological systems provide ecosystem services to us humans, such as providing shade or purifying water, but because they extend our connection to the natural world, enable us to live more fully integrated.  “Resourcism”, the identification of the natural world/natural processes only as an assembly of useful resources, of materials and operations, for human benefit is what got us into trouble in the first place – a utilitarian approach to the world.  Resourcism is an “I-It” relationship rather than and “I-You” relationship, in the words of philosopher MartinBuber. 

Our human connection with the world is spiritual.  If our relationship to the world is “I-It” then not all the food, sex, money, hybrid Camelias, or recycled water irrigation systems in the world will fulfill us, there would always be more that is needed.  But rather by a relationship of “I-You” where we let go of attachment to these things, letting the inconsistencies of life have their moment, yet participating and seeing the perfection which includes the imperfection may give us the opportunity to connect and heal, heal our bodies, heal our minds and spirit, and bring healing to others, human and non human who can only communicate with us when we set ourselves to listen.

“Sustainability” is not for the future.  Yes we want the next generation those who are now children to have all the benefits and a good life as we do and we can be conscious to not use up everything so that they have nothing.  But really sustainability is always about now, about being present, present in the world, present in our lives, present with a reality that has transformed the image of “America the beautiful” to an America that includes large urban parks built on old landfills like Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York – a constant presence of what we may have thought we were “throwing out” – out of sight out of mind – but in the end thrown only as far as the other side of the river.

In creating landscapes practical measures are necessary because we do not live only as spiritual beings.  In creating landscapes sometimes we turn surface run off into storm sewers and sometimes we use bioswales to recharge groundwater systems; it is important to know when each of these is the really sustainable measure.  There are different levels to our existence: we still have to eat and put out the garbage.  It is how we do it, how we eat and put out the garbage, that counts; it is the intention with which we do things.

(Thanks to Zoketsu Norman Fischer and to Gloria Justen for helping to crystallize some of these thoughts.)

Posted by geoffreykatz at 11:12 PM PST

Updated: Wednesday, 12 March 2008 2:12 AM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

It is almost impossible to imagine any great landscape architectural design in isolation from a broader social context and in particular from an urban condition.  The great gardens that exist today and that have been preserved over in some cases centuries embody a public discourse or social relationships.  Large parks like New York’s Central Park were imagined in the context of the urban condition that it would ameliorate.

Referring to 19^th century park designs Beth Meyer writes:

“These park designers and their clients believed that spatial practices such as promenading, riding, and boating in the company of others engendered what Olmsted referred to as a sense of “communicativeness” or “commonplace civilization”.  A democratic community emerged through the enactment of everyday recreational spatial practices in constructed rural scenery”. 

These days, in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, most people ride bicycles, not trotting horses.  We’re there for a run, hanging out with friends, or Lindy-in-the-park, not promenading.  And, in addition to the official uses, Golden Gate Park has a host of unofficial uses – commercial sex, other kinds of deals.  As John Beardsley writes:

“...parks are among the few places where people are most free to pursue the ordinary and (my italics) extraordinary expressions of daily life. . .  We need to reclaim parks as part of our essential urban infrastructure, as key features in functioning urban social systems, …maximize their potential as ecological systems, … and promote them as the vital laboratories of democracy”.

Though the specifics have changed, the effects still seem to be true.

It is easy enough to think about urban parks, even though urban parks may not be the same things today as they were in Olmsted’s time, because “urban park” provides a handle to grasp contemporary urban landscape.  But contemporary cities are urban megalopolises, not the large 19^th century cities, and we’re really talking about a network-patchwork of fragmented (socially, programmatically, ecologically) landscape of which large parks are (just) large patches.  Even the large well-known park projects in the news these days – Fresh Kills in NYC, Downsview in Toronto, Great Park in Orange County (Los Angeles) – are connected to and have relation with adjacent or nearby landscape features.  It’s just that in some cities we see the large patches of landscape and in other cities the network-patchwork of landscape is more intact, that’s all. 

It is not just the big urban parks that deserve our attention as designers these days but it is the network of urban landscape open space.  As a whole the network-patchwork can address a host of urban "problems": creates connections at nested scales (from local site to region), provides for flows of people, water, wildlife, and plants, provides recreational and educational opportunities, meets various municipal regulatory codes, reveals its intrinsic character.  The network of landscape areas, large and small, public and private is the contemporary Central Park.

Posted by geoffreykatz at 12:54 AM PST

Updated: Friday, 14 March 2008 12:32 PM PDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

“Sustainability for what?”

“Well, for landscape areas.”

“Landscape areas – you mean the paved walkways, planting beds, seating spots, and so on around public buildings?”

“Yes.”

“For those landscaped areas a worthwhile approach is sometimes called “designer ecology”.  That’s an aesthetic, educational, and inspirational design with straightforward user programming that recalls the native habitat type of the place.  People love it, even though it often requires intensive gardening maintenance.” 

“OK but what about for larger areas?”

“You mean like 50 or 100 or even 500 acres?”

“Sure.”

“The larger the area the more chance that it will have capacity for ecological resilience.  Resilience – that’s the ability to recover from disturbance, accommodate change, and basically continue to function in a healthy way.” 

“Can you design resilience?”

“One approach is to establish hearth areas with native plants: you might establish a wetland area, a sunny oak grove, a cool pine stand, and an open field.  Then let nature take its course.  We can’t really predict how that landscape will develop but creating habitat diversity and allowing nature to build up biodiversity we are creating the beginnings of a sustainable landscape."

“Beginnings… so there’s more to it?"

“Yup: even the designer ecology pocket park is much more sustainable if it is connected to other natural areas.  You know native birds will inhabit any area with the native trees that they like, but only if they can see them and get to them.  So the downtown designer parks connected by a greenway bicycle path connected to larger parks in the suburbs which are in turn connected by greenways and stream corridors to big old remnant forests and fields outside the city has a lot more resilience." 

“Aren’t we forgetting something?"

“Like what?"

“People!  All that ecology stuff sounds lovely but landscaping is for people, isn’t it?  You want to go for a walk or a run, have lunch with your co-workers outside, picnic with your kids, have coffee with your boyfriend, or play a pick-up game of football with your buddies.  Like that old winery they are going to turn into a park. . .  and besides, who is going to pay for all that ecology – so if they do turn that winery into a park it will have to be revenue-generating.” 

“You’re right.  Any large landscape area, whether it is a corporate campus or a public park, is probably going to have both ecological and programmatic complexity.  So you build the wetland, and it also works for stormwater management.  You establish a forest grove, and it also works for shade.  When they do that winery they should remember to include hiking trails, interpretation, and they can turn the courtyard into a multi-use plaza with a coffee place for informal hanging out and programmed events like outdoor theatre.  They could even reestablish a small winery operation, sell memberships, and members would produce a vintage every year with the old label... 

Keeping the old winery buildings with their outdoor courtyards and updating their use is another part of landscape sustainability – it is called maintaining the cultural landscape, and people really love to poke around, explore it.  It connects them to the lives of their Moms and Dads who worked in the winery, and lets their kids get to know what it was like.

Any landscape, big or small, could be successful and maybe live on long past its builders time if it is ecologically resilient and if it has a constituency of people who love it and use it and for whom it carries meaning.” 

Posted by geoffreykatz at 5:27 PM PST

Updated: Monday, 26 November 2007 1:15 AM PST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink