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…

For millennia we have applied our innate capability for reasoning in mathematics to understand and master the environments we face. Whether “god-given” or laboriously evolved, structures built into a brain are prepared to organize sensations of space into complex orderly relationships and, in built environments, simple geometries.  Once they have been identified and put to work, generations of designers and their patrons have come to believe in the divinity, magic or purity of circles, squares, triangles, pentagons, trinities, and pairs, as well as wholes and proportions – like Palladio’s simple whole-number ratios or a double-cube room or musical rations – as if they may somehow be inherent in an underlying cosmic order – a harmony of the universe.

Their unfolding recognition may have been an experience of what we call “formal beauty.” Plato, who thought deeply about it, found Greek geometry “eternally and absolutely beautiful” and whether it is or not, its systematic use in skillful hands has produced extraordinarily pleasing, coherent harmonious design. For uncounted people it has felt deeply “right” and the forms have pervaded the patterns of both secular and sacred monuments from ancient classical design to Hindu mandalas to French rose windows and ornament around the globe. Their practical survival value has been put to work, too, in enormous investments in geometry – in points and lines that seem to decipher the sun and moon’s movements at Stonehenge and stone structures across the British countryside. And our ancestors embodied the divine itself in geometric forms, placing Poseidon as an architectural presence in the temple where his wild, open Aegean Sea begins at Cape Sunion.

The Greek god Poseidon embodied in the geometry of a temple where his wild,  open sea begins at Cape Sunion.

But there’s another plausible hypothesis that our readiness to “see” geometric principles and the simpler numbers we use in built environments can be found within ourselves – that, again in Plato’s words, “the mathematical structure of nature and the beauty of pure mathematics” is natural selection at work. They are representations of the complex realities “out-there” that have been created by evolving mental structures “in-here” – structures enabling logic and reasoning – as our ancient ancestors learned to master a natural setting through spontaneous, everyday visual, tactile, muscular experience. We ourselves live inside forms that have clear, coherent boundaries, bi-lateral symmetry, the insistent perpendicular pull of gravity, cycles of full circle rotation, straight lines of sight, and parallel, angled, jointed limbs, plus a propensity in our minds to see lines and shapes implied by points. In interactions with our surroundings we observe celestial geometry, and we discover crystalline forms, smooth, curved arcs of trajectories, our own flows of movement, the efficiency of straight-line paths and the stable horizon line. From all those and related sensory experiences, one might trace a direct path, through our capacity for abstraction and logic – and the pervasive human dream of perfectibility – to the simplified, cohesive, lucid, predictable, idealized relationships that have seemed so obvious in Euclidean geometry. In other words, the working geometries of places we have been building may well have developed out of human interaction with nature as the relevant “deeper order.” Read more…

PID Week participants and students.  Photo credit:  College of Design

The University of Minnesota’s College of Design (Cdes) hosted the premier Public Interest Design Week (PID Week) from March 19-24.  Attracting approximately 500 participants nationally and internationally, the conference was organized by a tireless team led by conference chair, John Cary, of PublicInterestDesign.org, who is also a research fellow within the Cdes.  If the many issues and problems percolating at the intersection of design and service were not addressed or resolved in 5 short days it was not for lack of trying - PID Week was a blazing success because it put a critical lens on many design challenges from macro to micro, urban to rural, economically rich to poor, from the United States to Africa. What struck me as singularly inspiring was the keenness and enthusiasm brought by the keynote speakers, the session leaders and participants to the PID conference’s platform. It seemed highly unlikely that participants were hanging out in the hotel bar due to lack of content.

PID Week participants, L-R: John Cary, PID Week Chair; Liz Ogbu, designer, social innovator and Keynote speaker;  Laura Marlo, Reed Construction Data, a PID Week sponsor; and, Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design, U of MN.  Photo Credit:  College of Design

Central to PID Week’s success is the role of Thomas Fisher, professor of architecture and dean of the College of Design (Cdes) since 1996. Fisher is recognized as a catalyst in the design world as a university educator (John Cary is his former student), an advocate for good design from freeway bridges to football stadiums to healthcare, and a provocative intellectual force. He’s authored numerous books including Designing to Avoid Disaster: The Nature of Fracture-Critical Design (Routledge, 2012); The Invisible Element of Place: The Architecture of David Salmela (U of MN Press, 2011) and Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).  His expansive mind and professional acumen is buoyed by a sense of humor. He is approachable. Even funny. Grass does not grow beneath Tom Fisher’s feet.

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I am intrigued by the human resilience angle that Eric Klinenberg uses in making the case for better urban design in his New Yorker article, Adaptation: How can cities be “climate-proofed?” In it he discusses disaster preparedness in general and describes several large-scale engineering solutions to climate change, solutions that are of necessity government backed. He also writes about the role a resilient civil society can play in increasing an individual’s chance of survival in a disaster. A professor of sociology, public policy, and media, culture, and communications at New York University, Klinenberg writes, “Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding our cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times.” He mentions Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, who “has been measuring the strength of social ties, mutual assistance, and nonprofit organizations in Chicago communities for nearly two decades. He has found that the benefits of living in a neighborhood with a robust social infrastructure are significant during ordinary times as well as during disasters.”
He adds that “Alonzo Plough, the director of emergency preparedness and response for the County of Los Angeles, says, ‘But it’s not just engineering that matters. It’s social capital. And what this movement is bringing to the fore is that the social infrastructure matters, too.’”

Enter the urban designer and landscape architect. How social infrastructures are enhanced by landscape infrastructure and open space is the focus of studies by the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, and the subject of an earlier social impact design blog post.

We have an opportunity here step up to the plate and play an important role in enhancing and creating the social capital that makes our communities and our society resilient. While I love and value aesthetics and believe fervently that beauty matters, our work as urban designers and landscape architects is more than a matter of creating artful places. We can, and should, learn to design to increase social connectedness. What would that look like?

For me, this brings us to questions of morality, and of shared societal values. Shared societal values are one of the ways that a group can create cohesion and a sense of mutual responsibility. The lack of a shared moral system tears down the sense of social connectedness. In the entry on morality Wikipedia says “The phenomenon of ‘reciprocity‘ in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality.” Reciprocity as in the Golden Rule; remember that “quaint” idea? Read more…

In the age of ecology and sustainability, landscape architecture, like other design professions, is in the process of finding new areas of exploration, new types of work, and a more diverse group of clients that require renewed research and learning. Gary Hilderbrand’s erudite and accessible essay, in a new book on his firm, is an inspiring guide through a modernist’s commitment to rationality and abstraction while it shows a deep understanding of and respect for the immense variety and unpredictability of the profession’s pre-eminent material, Nature. Combining skill with hope, the firm has created and is in the process of creating, some of our most memorable, yet sometimes invisible landscapes, thus the name of the book, Visible/Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand, newly published by Metropolis Books. In addition to Gary’s enlightened view of his profession, we hear from such notable figures as Peter Walker and the photographer, Millicent Harvey, among others. But it’s Hilderbrand’s own words that make us want to see, examine, marvel at, and appreciate what his firm is doing. “The landscape is bigger than we are,” he writes. “We alter its substance and its processes, and it grows back at us with force. We can’t see exactly how, but we know it will. We come to embrace a certain image. Is it right?” —SSS

In the early morning light of a photograph taken by Alan Ward in the summer of 2010, a canopy of cedar elms hovers over a pavilion, a swimming pool, and gently graded lawn terraces. The image was made on the bank of Upper Bachman Creek in Dallas, Texas, on a 6-acre property where Philip Johnson designed a house in 1964 for Henry S. and Patricia Beck. When Doug Reed and I first visited this site in 2003, the spatial power of these trees was barely visible. Fully engulfed in a tangle of two species of Ligustrum—one shrublike, growing up to 12 feet in height, the other with 3-inch trunks reaching nearly 20 feet—the land was virtually impenetrable. For perhaps two decades, an aging Mrs. Beck had neglected portions of her property east of the creek and benignly allowed nature to run its course. More than a hundred volunteer cedar elms and a handful of other trees, including several Texas live oaks and a single giant cottonwood, had formed a canopy that merged with comparably overgrown woodlands on either side of the parcel. We saw a degraded, illegible landscape.

Mrs. Beck sold the property in 2002 to a young Dallas family of four, and the new owners committed to a massive project to rescue and reinhabit Johnson’s house and to recover health and functionality for the landscape. Over a seven-year period, we transformed this patch of emergent forest through a set of operations and practices whose evidence is sometimes visible but often obscured. Recapturing a space for family life and for the display of sculpture necessitated significant disturbance and successive rehabilitation efforts: removing dozens of the poorest trees and preserving the most viable; opening up the canopy to improve light and air; eliminating invasive plant species; correcting drainage and soil structure; reinforcing and replanting the stream bank; and establishing several kinds of grassland and prairie and groundcover crops. Read more…

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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Shimmering water stretches out before you. In the backdrop the city glitters and the stones whisper to the waves. A warm breeze blows through the trees while you, from your perch on a slab of granite, cool your heels in the flowing waters and admire the stars you rarely see.

That’s what I imagine when I think of a waterfront part in New York City. What do you imagine?

Collective yearnings to connect with nature are the very essence of our urban dreams, and also the ambition of every designer. Whether they work with silk, rubber, steel or oak, designers aim to inspire a connection to you, your life, and your environment.

How would life in New York City be different if the water served a more civic purpose?

When something is civic it has an obligation, a responsibility, to fulfill the needs of the community that it is connected to. So it’s reasonable to expect that a civic waterfront should be one that belongs to a community and fulfills its needs.

Recently I spoke with Michael Van Valkenburgh, the lead landscape architect of the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who helped create Brooklyn Bridge Park. The same park that’s recognized by the Van Alen Institute as a place that creates “cultural, environmental, and economic vitality”.

The exhibition space, photo by Paul Makovsky.

The park is the current focus of a Van Alen exhibition, on view till October 19th, the first in a series to recognize cities that have reclaimed their riverfronts.

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Valencia’s Green River, Photography by Brian Phelps.

Bold ideas are easy, implementing them is hard. This is particularly true as cities around the world want to use their landscape infrastructure to address the issues they face. How can interventions be woven into the existing urban fabric? Beyond simply mustering the financial resources or political will, one must seek opportunities to carefully insert or adapt landscape systems to the constraints of established urban communities. New York’s High Line, Atlanta’s Beltline, and Madrid’s RIO project all relied on abandoned or superseded rail or highway infrastructure to thread linear landscapes through the hearts of old cities. Valencia, on the other hand, relied on a crisis, and in the words of Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly three quarters of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

1957 Flood in Valencia: Photograph extracted from PereDrak’s Valencia Slideshow.

Re-routing the City’s River..

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