In a season of climate change, we’re plagued by more than high winds and rising waters, massive blizzards and hail storms, damaging surges and colossal floods. Though more and more of us live through these frequent disasters, we can’t seem to find ways to focus on the key question they raise about everything from protecting our coast lines and river banks, to where to develop real estate and where to find next the tax base. Distracted from these very real but hard to solve problems roiling around us, our ecological strategies remain unfocused, kept under our radar by a general lack of clear communication and public discourse. Here Kevin Shanley, FASLA, is CEO of SWA Group and a long-time resident of Houston, provokes us to think deeper than the next tweet. –SSS

Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group

Jared Green: You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

Kevin Shanley: There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost. Read more…

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…

One December day seven years ago, I was just about the only person driving around Gulfport, Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina had hit three months earlier, and the downtown and neighborhoods nearby still looked like Armageddon—house after house had been crushed or split open by the storm surge. Nobody was fixing anything. People were waiting on the government to draw up new flood maps so they would know what might be insured if they were to rebuild.

By now, a lot of people have rebuilt their houses in Gulfport. Many of them are quite close to the water, just like they were before Katrina. If you look at the street views on Google Maps, you see houses rebuilt, as if no 24-foot storm surge could ever happen again. There was a rule: If less than 50 percent of your house was damaged, you could rebuild at the previous elevation. If more than half was damaged, you had to build above a 17-foot elevation. People who rebuilt low to the ground in the surge zone either squirreled under the 50 percent threshold or they don’t have insurance. Many of these people can’t afford the high cost of insurance, the city’s director of economic development, David Nichols, told me recently. They may have had their house passed down through family, so they have no debt but no money either, and nowhere else to live. Redevelopment in Gulfport generally has been suppressed by unwillingness or inability to rebuild to the mandated elevations, or by a lack of insurance—there are still also plenty of empty sites in town. But for many who have rebuilt, you can see a disaster setting up all over again.

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Jeff Stein, photo by Jared Green

At 42 Arcosanti, a community north of Phoenix, Arizona has been celebrated, yet generally ignored, by the world at large. Nevertheless, the place that architect Paolo Soleri and his followers buit in the desert, survives. Indeed, it can teach us enormously important lessons about cities, buildings, people, nature, and authenticity of place. Jeff Stein, AIA, is president of the Cosanti Foundation. He has taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Wentworth Institute, and was dean of Boston Architectural College for seven years. He attended his first building workshop at Arcosanti in 1975. Here he gives some revealing answers about how an urban system can function as a super-organism, how historic context can shape a place and its life, as well as thoughts on the efficient use of land, growing plants and making moisture in the desert, and many other timely topics.

Jared Green: Arcosanti is a living, experimental laboratory for the “arcology” theories of Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, who recently won the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. Arcology, a literal joining of the words architecture and ecology, calls for a new alternative to today’s “hyperconsumption,” a self-reliant urban system that functions like a super-organism. How are the theories of arcology working out in practice out here in the desert at Arcosanti?

Jeff Stein: They’re working out really well but at a very small level. Arcosanti, some 42 years after it first was begun in 1970, is just a tiny fragment of what it intends to become — a town for a few thousand people. Right now, we’re at a population of a little less than 100. It’s pretty easy at that small scale to join architecture and ecology, but we have in mind some bigger ideas. While they certainly come from Paolo Soleri, they also come from Henry David Thoreau.

Before I moved to Arcosanti this past year, my wife and I lived near Walden Pond for about a decade. The contrast between that place and this is pretty interesting, but the ideas that Thoreau and Soleri both have had are pretty congruous. Thoreau said, “Give me a wildness no civilization can endure,” which isn’t quite what we’re after exactly, but you could understand his attitude back then. There is wildness that no civilization can endure. Instead what we’re after is trying to create the beginnings of a civilization that wildness can endure.

Here at Arcosanti we’re only building on a few acres of a 4,000 acre land preserve. Some 3,985 of those acres are intended to remain wild. While at the center there isn’t a group of hermits but a lively cultural center. Arcosanti is meant for a few thousand people– not just as retirees living in apartments who have to drive 20 miles for groceries — but a living, working community whose architecture is gaining some light and heat in the wintertime and shading itself in the summertime, and whose solar greenhouses are recycling organic waste and growing food for the population and producing heat energy to power the town itself.

Arcosanti, photo courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation

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Diana Balmori / Image credit: © Margaret Morton

Architecture as an object in the landscape is an old fashioned idea. We now know that this attitude is dangerously shortsighted. One woman makes a strong and memorable argument for integrating the two fields of practice for the benefit of both, as well as the Earth and its creatures. Diana Balmori, PhD, FASLA is principal of Balmori Associates. She also teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has served as a senior fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C for seven years. She serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Balmori’s most recent books are Groundwork (Monacelli Press, 2011) with Joel Sanders and Landscape Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2010).

Jared Green: In Groundwork, your new book with architect Joel Sanders, you argue that designers must “pursue a new approach that overcomes the false dichotomy between architecture and landscape.” How did this false dichotomy begin? What are architects and landscape architects doing to perpetuate it?

Diana Balmori: Architects think of architecture as an object, and of landscape as background to that object, just something you put the object on but not something that has anything to do with the object itself. The famous dividing line given is five feet from where the building ends is where the landscape starts. That explains the separation in a very graphic way. While many arts have really been moving away from the object, architecture has really become more and more object-oriented.

The change in the relationship between the two has a lot to do with the fact that space has become more important than the object. That elevates the status of landscape on the one hand and diminishes the status of the object. That’s the beginning of the change. It’s quite evident that this is happening now so architects have suddenly become more interested in landscape.

It is now space that interests us. And landscape is the discipline in which artistic ideas are being debated. It has become the place in which to have the debate. Now I’m saying this as if it had already happened. You’re going to see places where it’s not happening at all, you’re going to see places where a little bit is happening, and you’ll find places in which it’s very clear has happened.

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As mediators between the built and natural environments, landscape architects have come to play a critical role in creating vibrant, sustainable public spaces. Recent successes like the High Line Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Park have put the spotlight on landscape architecture, and leading practitioners like Michael Van Valkenburgh have come to enjoy a certain celebrity. But while I know that there’s more to landscape design than pretty plantings, it is often tough for a non-initiate to get into the more technical aspects of what landscape architects do. Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes, a new online exhibition by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), is both an attempt to take stock at this moment in the profession, and to create a better understanding of the challenges landscape designers face. Read more…