In our previous post, “Tree Tag…You’re It”, we let you in on the details of what landscape architects call “tree tagging,” as well as my spring experience with tulip poplars, and some of the challenges we face in the field during the selection process. Here we discuss the post-tagging process.

The landscape architect’s job doesn’t end when she leaves the nursery. The trees we’ve selected must be maintained, cared for, and prepped in anticipation of delivering them to the project for installation. This multi-step process involves digging up the trees from the field, preparing each tree by its root condition, packaging, delivery, and finally, installation.

Tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) tagged in spring 2012 were alive and well at the nursery in the fall …and had grown over an inch in caliper in five months!

Digging Times

Digging trees is dictated by the calendar year and season, as well as by planned installation schedules, and even specific plant types.

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichtum) trees tagged in the field are dug and balled in burlap by machinery in early spring, prior to the planting season.

A tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), for instance, isn’t a picky tree, but others certainly are. Trees we call “fall dig hazards” drop their leaves well into the season—they don’t go dormant until very late in the fall. These finicky species include hawthorn, sweetgum, cherry, and pear trees. Read more…

Interior lighting has a profound influence on our psychological and physiological processes, so say researchers. Light affects our hormonal and chemical balance, sleep patterns, productivity, and mood. With the incandescent bulb on the verge of extinction and the global push for energy efficiency, we continue to seek environmentally friendly lighting alternatives. But some new lighting technologies, such as the CFL bulb, contain mercury and other hazardous chemicals while they emit UV radiation, which could pose long-term health risks including cancer, depression, diabetes, and fatigue. As we spend some 90 percent of our time indoors, we need to find other design alternatives that promote a healthy interior and protect the environment.

Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art and science, can help. The practice suggests that the strategic placement of light sources in a room can improve our health and wellbeing. The proper distribution of electromagnetic radiation transmitted by light is fundamental and Feng Shui strives to enhance quality of life by channeling positive (Qi) energy to create a perfectly balanced environment. In addition, the shape, material, and color temperature of a lighting fixture should be carefully considered in order to promote wellness. I designed the fixtures in this blog, following by Feng Shui principles, to counteract some of the most common illnesses that affect millions each year.

Depression Lamp Sketch and Photo

With an estimated 19 million Americans diagnosed with depression, an accent lamp may be ideal to counteract this psychological disorder as it focuses energy in a specific area of the room. The lamp would feature two nodes of linen burlap fabric encased in glass and connected by a stainless steel frame, in order to boost self-confidence and mental strength. According to Feng Shui, glass exhibits properties of slow, sinking “water” energy, also seen in those who are depressed. When glass is used in conjunction with linen fabric and a 4,000K LED lamp, the glass functions to cool down anger and stress. The north side of the living room and the southeast corner of the bedroom are optimal locations to achieve balance and reduce exposure to electromagnetic energy. Read more…

On a flight into Phoenix I was thinking of light as a metaphor for ideas. I thought of the city lights as a field of minds in a network of shared ideas. As I found my way to Taliesin West in northeast Scottsdale, memories ebbed and flowed with the illumination of the roads that, at each turn, gave way to an experience that embedded itself in my personal map of this metropolitan area in the Arizona desert.

There is always a moment before reaching Taliesin West at night where city lights disappear. Suddenly suspended in the darkness of the desert, I turned on my inner light—my knowledge of the place that has been embedded in my memory through living at the camp where Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered the principles of Organic Architecture. Slowly, the camp reveals itself through deliberate lighting, as ideas to be contemplated. I walked through this silent masterpiece, listening to the old ideas and observing the potential ones to come from Minding Design, a symposium on neuroscience, design education, and the imagination.

Last November the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and School of Architecture hosted this full day symposium, bringing together the ideas and research of architects and neuroscientists in a series of presentations and panel discussions. Juhani Pallasmaa, Michael Arbib, Jeanne Gang, and Ian McGilchrist were the keynote speakers in a dialogue that explored the opportunities of cross-pollination between architecture and neuroscience. The range of discussions was impressive and left my mind saturated with seeds of light/ideas and questions to contemplate and assimilate into my own design process.

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As a longtime subscriber to NASA News Services and a frequent user of Google Maps I get to see some thrilling and, often sobering, views of the Earth from space. For some time now, I’ve been watching the polar ice cap recede at an alarming rate while hoping that millions of others, too, are looking at the same images. It’s hard to deny that climate change is real when the evidence is right in front of you.

Image Credit: NASA/Aqua

Now we have another image to ponder: Snow Covered Desert. This phenomena, notes NASA, is “rare but that’s exactly what the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed as it passed over the Taklimakan Desert in western China on Jan. 2, 2013. Snow has covered much of the desert since a storm blew through the area on Dec. 26. Read more…

The concepts “natural selection” and “survival,” in the evolutionary sense, ultimately mean competitive reproductive success – passing the genes on to other generations – and they are implicit in – in a sense they drive – everything we design, build, and inhabit.

The ancient city of Petra at a desert crossroads, now in Jordan

In practice, every human choice is about “rewarding” ourselves with “pleasure.”  Scientist Steven Pinker puts it neatly “…(G)enes selfishly spread themselves.  They do it by the way they build our brains.  By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.”  In other words, when our thoughts and actions trigger pleasure circuits – a reward system of connections and chemistry in the brain and body – we sense we are enhancing our odds for surviving and prospering – winning Pinker’s “lottery” – in whatever environment we encounter.  The “happiness” we’re in “pursuit of” is not an abstraction, but repetitions of these kinds of physical pleasures.

Naturally, “survival” – the word I’ll use to refer to “natural selection” or “reproduction of the fittest” – means staying alive and healthy, pairing with the right mate, raising a family and building a secure, nurturing habitat.  It’s built into innate predilections. Then, in practice, “survival” involves competing, winning and sustaining the independence to control “my” surroundings for “my” interests.  That, in turn, is likely to work best by acquiring the strength of more knowledge, better tools and more skills, multiplying them through trusting alliances, and exploring, migrating or trading to gain access to still more resources. It involves, too, constantly moving ahead, avoiding losses and anchoring security by storing-up and protecting the “wealth” that has been won, earning respites from challenges – in other words “prospering.”  The most valuable “wealth” was and is, of course, the accumulated knowledge needed to master the environments we encounter and to manage them in ways that maintain a constant competitive edge.

Further, the natural in-born human limitations that can stand in the way of competitive success keep us searching for ways to transcend them.  And with our evolved creative imaginations we continually develop technologies – tools or weapons – that diversify and multiply our biologically constrained skill, time, and energy.  Equally important, innate predilections – reinforced by body chemistry – to advance by cooperating comes into play.

Survival-of-the-fittest includes a propensity for the forms of moral behavior that make trust and collaboration possible. We’re prepared to volunteer to compromise a hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – by merging our own personal projects into the survival and prosperity of larger and more powerful alliances – mating, friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  We exchange a measure of freedom for strength and diversity. And then those connections, in turn, become part of our identity. They draw their power from another innate level of pleasure we tend to call spiritual experience – the sense of entering into and sharing – belonging to – something larger than one’s “self” – a larger purpose and sense of destiny.  The ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally; joining in time cycles that exceed our lifetime and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.  Some, of course, try to escape the rigors of earthly competition altogether by living in an imagined or virtual world.

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A Chicago Tribune series this past summer, “Playing with Fire,” shed new light on an old but hidden problem – the ubiquity of toxic chemicals embedded in many of the materials used in our indoor environment, halogenated flame retardants (HFRs) for one. Boiled down to the essentials, the issues call out for our attention:

• Flame-retardant chemicals are included in a wide range of materials and furnishings as the most expedient and least costly path to meeting the flammability standards. These sandards are written into law with the intent of reducing fire hazard by slowing the spread and intensity of fires. The state of California’s flammability standards for furniture are most often met by adding HFRs to foam; the International Code Council (and the local jurisdictions that adopt their standards into codes) leads to HFR use in foam insulation; and their use in electronics is a result of standards set by the International Electrotechnical Commission. These standards for furniture and insulation developed largely in response to the increased use of foam in the built environment, coinciding with an increase in fire incidents, primarily involving cigarettes. These standards were written reactively and without much planning or evaluation of appropriateness at the time they were implemented.
• In the case of foam insulation, the requirement that is met through the use of flame retardants is based on an inappropriately-applied flame test: The Steiner Tunnel Test is designed to study flame spread in tunnel conditions, not in a building’s interior. At a summit on flame retardants held the day prior to Greenbuild in San Francisco last month, fire scientist Dr. Vyto Babrauskas stated that the Steiner Tunnel Test “Might be an appropriate test if we lived in coal mines, with a low ceiling and a massive fan blowing heat through the space.” California’s furniture flammability standard, adopted in 1975 and known as Technical Bulletin 117, utilizes a small flame test. As a special 2011 report by Environmental Health News explains, “Naked foam treated with flame retardants to meet TB117 can resist a small open flame. But when fabric starts to burn, the foam will be exposed to a much larger flame than used in the TB117 test, and there’s no evidence that treated foam can resist that larger flame.” Since manufacturers who want to sell furniture in California must meet these standards, and since the state has such a significant economic influence, the state standard becomes the default standard for the rest of the country as well. Read more…

Three years ago, faculty and students from three schools came together to form the Empowerhouse Collaborative. The participants—Parsons The New School for Design; the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School; and Stevens Institute of Technology—joined forces to compete in the US Department of Energy 2011 Solar Decathlon. We wanted to change the way affordable housing is designed and developed.

This December 4th we realized our goal, joining Habitat for Humanity of Washington, D.C. (DC Habitat) and the D.C. government to celebrate the dedication of Empowerhouse, a new home for two local families in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington. This was also a celebration of a series of firsts in the district: the first net-zero-site, the first Passive House, and one of the first low-impact residential developments.

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When we published a Metropolis issue on Access in 1992, we were optimistic about the positive changes the Americans with Disabilities Act would bring to the designed environment. Signed into law by president Bush the elder two years earlier, the ADA was a hopeful expansion of civil rights, promising to include citizens with disabilities, in all that America offers. Considerate design was to be at the heart of this momentous social change. Well, it didn’t quite turn out to be that momentous. Compliance to the law seemed to wipe out the possibilities for design thinking about real people’s real needs.

Five years earlier we told the story of Patricia Moore, an industrial designer and gerontologist, who as a young woman took aging seriously and set out to experience the built environment—from street crossings to shopping—as an eighty-something. With the aid of a professional makeup artist, she navigated the world as an elder whose mobility and reflexes had been compromised by the natural process of growing old. In addition to her own research, Moore was also instrumental in helping craft the ADA. Through the years, her abiding commitment to inclusive design has never flagged (though it has been often frustrated by an uncaring marketplace).

As we developed our 9^th Annual Next Generation Competition, focused this year on inclusive design, we asked Moore to serve on our Advisory Board and as a member of our jury. In between one of her trips to China and some other far-flung stop, we caught up with Patricia A. Moore, president of MooreDesign Associates, LLC. Her stellar credentials include communication design, research, product development and design, package design for such clients as AT&T, Bell Communications, Citibank, Maytag, 3M, Sunbeam, and scores of others. As February 18, 2013, the deadline for Next Gen entries nears, I decided to ask my friend Pattie to talk about design in the service of human needs, give some advice to practicing designers, as well as those just stating out. Here is what she told me:

Susan S. Szenasy: Your game changing work came into my consciousness when we, at Metropolis, ran an article on you at age 26 navigating the built environment as an eighty-something. This was 26 years ago, when I came on board as the editor of the magazine; your story has informed my thinking about design responsibility ever since. For those few who might not know your story, can recap the reasons for your so-called “cross dressing” adventure?

Patricia A. Moore: In 1979, when I undertook my “Elder Empathic Experience,” the focus on ageing was primarily a medical model for treatment of illnesses and the chronic conditions related to growing older, and being an elder. The architecture, design, and engineering communities were essentially ignoring older people, with the very erroneous assumption that elders were not “consumers,” but rather “patients,” and therefore, not their concern.

My personal tipping point was the moment I was chastised by a superior at Raymond Loewy International. I was the youngest and only female industrial designer in the New York Office. We were gathered in a meeting room, discussing the design a refrigerator, when I asked if we couldn’t consider some door handle solutions that would be easier for elders and people with grasp and strength limitations to use.  The response was a dismissive, “Pattie, we don’t design for those people!” Those people? If the Raymond Lowey organization wasn’t designing for consumers of all needs, then who was?

I realized that observation and surveying, while important tools, would not be adequate to communicate the findings I so passionately knew to be true. As a child, watching my grand parents and their friends struggle with the activities of daily living, I instinctively knew the failure wasn’t theirs, but the result of poor and inadequate design solutions.

When I met the television and film make-up artists who helped to create the various elder personas I utilized, from the first day my foot touched a sidewalk in New York City (May 1979) until my last sojourn in October of 1982, I realized the means to provide a proper “wake-up” call for action. By becoming woman in her eighties, I was able to immerse myself into the daily reality of life as elders living in a youth-oriented society.

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Though this post was originally set to address the exterior enclosures of mid-century modern buildings, we thought it important, instead, to reflect on the recent death of modernist master Oscar Niemeyer and what might have been.

Niemeyer’s passing serves as yet another benchmark in the passing of the mid-century modern movement into our distant memory. Generally speaking, North American architects are not very familiar with the Brazilian architect’s work. Many would be unable to conjure up mental imagery of it, beyond his government buildings at Brasilia, United Nations collaboration, and perhaps a residence or two. During Niemeyer’s prime, these architects were, as they largely remain today, primarily Eurocentric in their focus.

In mid-century America, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe were chiefly regarded as the “true” masters of the modern movement. Even in more recent history, we’ve paid little attention to the legacy of Niemeyer and his colleagues to the south such as Alfonso Reidy and Lina Bo Bardi in Brasil, Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela, and the Mexican masters Juan O’Gorman, Luis Barragan, and Felix Candela. We seem to know of them, but not much about them. All of this this might have been very different if Harvard GSD had followed through with its intention to select Niemeyer as its dean when it had the chance.

Carlos Raul Villanueva. Covered plaza, University of Caracas, 1952-1953. Photographer unknown. Printed in do.co.mo.mo, Journal 42 – Summer 2010.

Alfonso Eduardo Reidy. Primary school and gymnasium, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948-1950. Printed in Latin American Architecture Since 1945, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955.

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Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth, Western facade during renovation

When I read Robert Campbell’s recent article in The Boston Globe on designLAB’s sensitive renovation of a significant Paul Rudolph building at UMass Dartmouth, I was intrigued to learn more. The word that got me going was “Brutalism”. For some time now we’ve been covering this experimental, some call it aggressive or even willful and arrogant, form making. Our story on the ongoing struggles to keep Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Chicago dates to 2009, our more recent blog on the last minute reprieve of Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center brightened my day even as I mourned the loss other important works from that optimistic period in our culture’s history. And so we welcomed Brunner/Cott & Associates’ ongoing blog series on the trials and tribulations of saving and adapting Brutalist buildings.

Eastern facade during renovation

It’s no surprise, then, that the Boston architecture firm, designLAB Architects’ success at the library at UMass Dartmouth re-awakened my evergreen curiosity about Rudolph, Brutalism, preservation, adaptation, research, and progress. So I went to the source and asked designLAB’s Robert J. Miklos, FAIA, to talk frankly about these and other issues swirling around one of the most controversial movements in architecture history. Here is what he said:

Susan S. Szenasy: Now that your renovation work on Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is nearing completion, it would be great to hear some of your reflections on the project. I believe that you and your firm, designLAB, consider Rudolph an architecture hero. That relationship can be intimidating to some architects. Did you struggle with Rudolph’s spirit? Or did his spirit seem to be at ease with your re-interpretation of his iconic building?

Robert J. Miklos: Truthfully, we don’t see him as a hero.  His work is heroic, perhaps, but I am a product of 1970’s GSD and was conditioned to reject the work of Rudolph.  At designLAB, our ‘courtship’ of the hero was a long process of research and analysis before we were able to find any true ‘affection’ for his work.

Rudolph with the library site model

It started with a talented young designer on the team who studied his early work at the University of Florida. There, Rudolph truly is a hero, if not a cult figure. I traveled to Florida to tour all his work in Sarasota—it was inspiring. His career is filled with contradictions: rationalism vs. expressionism, structural determinism vs. a personal obsession for hexagonal form. While we were continually trying to understand the original intentions and spirit of this project, we always recognized it as one of many experiments filled with successes and flaws. A radical approach to the interpretation and transformation was necessary, yet we believe our approach is rooted in the spirit of Rudolph.

It’s also important to note that at designLAB, we are invested in expanding the language of a specific context, whether natural or constructed. In this project, the existing building was that context, which we termed ‘Post-Utopian’. Our methodology is similar to what we have used in other contexts, determining when to push back, when to be deferential. Throughout our design process we immersed ourselves in Rudolph’s ideas and process developing a dialog between existing and new where the interventions might amplify the power of his original ideas and compositional themes. We also were not afraid to correct inconsistencies in his approach.

Library’s eastern facade during renovation

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