In her new book, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, Akiko Busch discusses how a thoughtful citizenry can learn, understand, and act upon their findings as they observe, closely, the rapidly changing natural world around them.  In reading her introductory remarks, in which she gives the pride of place to a quote from Edward O. Wilson—“We do not understand ourselves yet and descend further from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us”— an overwhelming truth hit me square in the eye. As a long-time resident of the big city, I have forgotten my innate connections with the natural world. As I went deeper into Busch’s text, I came to a painful realization of what this careless disconnection has done to me. I now know that the further I have turned away from that natural world, the more impoverished I became, both intellectually and emotionally.

Busch’s examples of citizen scientists, those who regularly observe, record, and act upon the wrongs visited on the natural world in their own back yards, seem to have a deeper sense of place than those of us who stopped paying attention. In addition to using their keen powers of observation, these alert citizens take it upon themselves to share their findings with others through all kinds of social networking, thus adding to the sum total of human knowledge of our world.  They also get their hands dirty, like Busch and her cohorts have done in the Hudson Valley, where she made these observations about nature, human nature, and the nature of deep connections to place. Here, as she talks about her encounter with water chestnuts, she got me intrigued about Bats in the Locust Tree, Coyotes Across the Clear-Cut, Eels in the Stream, just a few of her evocative chapter headings I’ll be getting involved with next.—-SSS

Weeding water chestnuts (trapa natans) from the river is an exercise in which leisure and industry easily coincide; it’s a brand of gardening in which a sense of purpose can intersect with being languid. From time to time, I saw an elver, a juvenile American eel, winding around a stem or root like some weird extra plant appendage. Although the fish diversity is lower here than elsewhere on the river, eels can withstand the low oxygen levels of the water chestnut bed, all the while snacking on its assorted invertebrates. Yet if the eels swim off quickly, everything else seems to take its own time. Like anything else that is done in water, weeding is done slowly, as though it is possible to take on the liquid motion of what is around you. The stems can be pulled out with the gentlest tug; their attachment to the riverbed seems slight, their resistance imperceptible. Yet there is the smallest bit of spring to them, as though some bit of elastic thread has woven its way through the watery pink tendrils, and they have that sense of give that the most tenacious opponents sometimes seem to have. With a bit of stretch, these interlopers seem to be hanging on, though without much faith. And the mud on the bed of the river has a give, too; at each step, we sink in a bit. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to the waterworld of rivers: nothing here stays the same for too long; things are always shifting, drifting, gently giving way. Read more…

Storms and hurricanes are nothing new for New York City. Some four decades after the European founding of the municipality in 1625, a severe storm was chronicled in Manhattan. Subsequently, the Great Storm of 1693 rearranged the coastline, likely creating the Fire Island Cut. Many more significant storms followed over the centuries. To underscore the lessons of super storm Sandy, there are people alive today who can remember the great hurricane of 1938.

What’s new in recent decades is the relentless development of the coastline, haphazardly accelerated with apparent disregard for protective natural buffers, such as wetlands and dunes. As recently as the 1980s, development exploded in today’s storm ravaged Staten Island, even filling and building on marshland.

Also new to many people is the realization of the human contributions to climate change through our modification of atmospheric gases, a warming climate, and the attendant increases in sea levels, storm frequency and severity, droughts, heat waves, and more. These meteorological changes are real and measurable.

Hurricane Sandy, aside from its tragic aftermath, has done us a huge favor, providing a loud and unequivocal “I told you so!” in the nation’s densest population areas and most developed coastline. The visible devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore brings tangible urgency to our efforts to take all possible measures to alter the lifestyle and behaviors that have brought us to this critical juncture. We need a paradigm shift in our land-use patterns and energy consumption. Most fundamentally, we must change the ways we interact with the natural systems of the earth.  Massive sea gates and walls might protect against some storm surges, but what will they do to fisheries, sediment transport, water quality—to mention but a few potential repercussions? We need an integrated approach to climate adaptation and mitigation that uses natural systems as ongoing guides.

Wetland Restoration and Mitigation, image courtesy of appliedeco.com

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As we wound down our a charrette, an exercise somewhere between a Top Chef “quick fire” and a game of “exquisite corpse,” we remembered seeing flickering pixels, oversized movable louvers, folding organ-like planes, and stretching ribbons. Our research yielded a number of innovative precedents —both theoretical and built— from architects and engineers experimenting with movable facades around the world. We had examined automated fins and shading umbrellas, tessellated screens and adaptive fritting from ABI, the homeostatic façades from Decker Yeadon, and the Aegis Hyposurface from Goulthorpe, among others.

But it was not enough that these façade components moved, either by means of carefully controlled computerized programming or by more rudimentary manual, hydraulic, or mechanical means. The movement that we were trying to describe was different. It had to be tied to performance. It had to respond to the sun. As Mike Hickok often said, it had to behave “more like a plant, less like a machine.” With our newly acquired understanding, how could we propose a future in which shading devices would deploy and contract biomimetically, like the artificial muscles we studied, in response to the sun?

Then we had a rude awakening. How could we even begin to tinker with these shapes with our limited experience, with the kind of software that had the capabilities to produce what we needed?  Clearly we had found ourselves at the convergence of technology, media, and representation. We needed to make leaps in all three. As Lisa Iwamoto describes on her book Digital Fabrications[i], our design had to inform and be informed by its modes of representation and production. We had to go beyond, way beyond, the limitations of what we traditionally produced in-house and do it at the fast pace of a design competition. At once we were dealing with modeling software shortcomings, researching smart materials, studying artificial muscles, defining performance, contracting out the scripting of algorithms, buying software, and storyboarding the presentation to determine deliverables and staff allocation.

Rhino image of ribbon

Mike Fischer[ii], a fifth young designer was brought on board, contracted to work side by side with our team to help with computational modeling and scripting. We shifted to Rhino, a NURBS-based modeling software that would allow us to conceptualize, tinker, and control our shading strands. While developing the component, we needed to test it across the façade. Mapping it and remapping it to control its size, density, and openness required formulas—a lot of formulas—which we crunched in Grasshopper.

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I picked up the phone one morning and heard a man say in Hungarian, “Korab Boldizsar vagyok,” I’m Balthazar Korab. He needn’t have followed up by adding, “I’m a photographer.” I had known that for some time. As a young design magazine editor I was drawn to his crisp, moody, beautifully framed black and white images of the built environment, including the best of modernism. But I did not know, until that morning, that we shared a homeland and were both shaped by the cold war.

His story, like mine, began in Hungary. He came to the US in 1955. I arrived here in 1956. We were both refugees from post-WWII Eastern Europe. He left Hungary in 1949 when the Iron Curtain closed around the Soviet Union’s newly claimed satellites. Eight years later my parents whisked my sister and me out of Hungary, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the revolution.

After I heard Korab’s voice and I learned of our shared beginnings, I redoubled my interest in his work. His color photos taught me to appreciate the modernist innovators who built a small mid-western town, long before I visited there (Columbus, Indiana: An American Landmark, 1989). Then I found out that his intense images of Eero Saarinen’s work also revealed the story of the architect’s design process. In 1955 when he arrived in Michigan, Korab was hired by Saarinen to document the design development on buildings that were destined to gain iconic status. It’s not hard to make the connection between the initial fame and historic legacy of buildings like Dulles Airport in Virginia and the photographer’s eye.

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In a study he calls The Origins of Architectural Pleasure, architecture professor Grant Hildebrand analyzes how specific responses to architecture, including aesthetic experience, could well have originated in evolved behavior. The details of the research and reasoning he assembles seem to me a clear, persuasive foundation for a more rigorous, more effective humanism.  He’s distilled the enormous complexity of a mind and body into concepts usable in day-to-day design, and that’s why my own explorations build on and in a sense grow out of his.

Habitats

He starts with the idea that natural selection clearly favors those who have imagined, found, and then re-shaped an environment into a “good home.”  And, as a result, natural selection has favored “an innate predilection to build in some ways and places rather than others,” adapted to the natural settings where a family would thrive.  Drawing on the social sciences, literature, the arts, plus his own observations, he traces the value we place on these selected sites and architectural forms back to biology – to innate survival-based behaviors.  Naturally, many of his insights are being applied in our day-to-day practice, though many are ignored or given a low priority, but whatever theory guides a design, he shows ways our publics are most likely to respond and why.

Specifically, Hildebrand points out that a safe, effective habitat must offer both a refuge, providing a microclimate, protection, and concealment – especially for the times when we are least watchful or most vulnerable – and a prospect, a look-out with views over well-lighted open spaces, the places that may offer opportunities – food and water, “provisioning,” exploring, trading – or reveal threats and approaching predators.  The natural places that would offer both together – a cave, cliff dwellings, and edges-of-the-forest, with an overlook ahead, protection behind – and ready access to a generous, fertile, natural setting of climate, land, and water – seem like archetypes, found again and again.  And he cites examples from a range of cultures over long spans of time – in Japan, throughout Europe, and today’s America.

“We built ourselves into the life of the desert” — Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Scottsdale

Building ourselves into the life of the land. Hildebrand explores in more depth the design implications of “refuge and prospect,” but first I want to expand further on responses to the component of experience we tend to call “nature” – the interacting processes of climate, geology, hydrology, and biology that go on whether we intervene or not.  Our relationship is inherently ambiguous.  Surviving and prospering depends on understanding, mastering, and managing its impacts, and our human “dominion” over nature – our separation and superiority – is institutionalized in our biblical and classically based civilizations.  Yet in practice, we are an inseparable part of any natural environment we invade, and whether driven by visions of quick exploitation or sustainability, private possession or the public domain, ultimately we rely on an intimate, nuanced collaboration.

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Children are destined to inherit the planet – but they already inhabit our cities. So how can we nurture and protect a child’s infinite capacity for play in the big city?

“Grasshopper Green”
Stick-let

In Philadelphia, Stick-lets industrial designer Christina Kazakia has discovered a way to “reconnect urban children to nature with play” combining a transportable, minimalist design with limitless configurations. Her new color silicone kit is currently on display at the Art Alliance on 18th St. in Philadelphia as part of the 2012 Philly Works exhibition.

“What was your favorite childhood memory?” she had initially asked some childhood friends at dinner. Most memories centered around the outdoors where risk taking, mischief, and pent up energy found release. “Nature is nurture,” believes Kazakia who grew up wandering the woods out back from her childhood home in New Jersey. As a professional designer in the making, she wondered how kids today could unplug and engage in the un-tethered play of imagination in nature that she was so fortunate to have experienced.

At The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Kazakia was asked by her thesis advisors how she could narrow her design focus. “I want to build a tool to build forts,” she quickly responded, launching into eight months of research, prototyping, and documentation that illuminated the “natural imagination” of children. Kazakia says designers too often skip the research, what the user is telling you. She credits critical fieldwork and her supportive classmates of diverse backgrounds for having spurred her pathway to a solution.

Kazakia observed kids at play in the city as they invented elaborate games with simple sticks. If only they had some kind of simple, versatile connector they could build something with those sticks—something that would spark a kind of wonder, a primal satisfaction, and sense of accomplishment.

Stick-let starter kit

At the Art Alliance show I couldn’t help noticing that Stick-lets bore an uncanny resemblance to bicycle chain components. When I asked it evoked laughter of recognition as Kazakia added, “Maybe I came up with this shape after exploring the release lock system on bikes as a potential mechanism for a stick connector (early prototyping phase).”

Bicycle chain diagram
Attribution: Marcus Roeder

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We all fondly remember our college days and our favorite professor’s ‘additional reading’ list that always followed the 15 page syllabus. Those pages were chalk full of titles that, not being the classics, didn’t make the cut to be required reading. And while some of us still have those lists sitting painfully free of any check marks, others of you need to continuously find new books to feed your knowledge appetite.

So take out your pens, ready your computer’s copy function, because here is another list, and it’s one that will further your understanding of the great topic of sustainability.

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The airport in Jackson Hole, Wyoming is a place that works for a very simple reason: it connects with nature. Here, while waiting for your flight you get a magnificent view of snow capped mountains, vegetation, and the big sky of the American west.
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Fantastically futuristic, there’s something eerie about this geodesic sky-dome. Like a 1950s vision of the future coming to life, it’s otherworldly — something out of a science fiction movie. In late 2011, this dome, aptly named The Home for the Future, however, will become a reality.

Providing a year-round microclimate that showcases cooperation between man, technology, and nature, The Home for the Future was designed by Laboratory for Visionary Architecture Asia Pacific (LAVA), with the goal to create a space where technologies are seamlessly integrated to satisfy human needs. Read more…

“We are nature.” So goes the new mantra in some design circles. And the word “biomimicry” comes up with increasing frequency. When we heard that Jane Fulton Suri, a partner and creative director at IDEO and author Thoughtless Acts? Observations on Intuitive Design, is working to reconcile nature with design, we couldn’t resist asking her a few questions.  She comes to design from psychology and architecture, as a pioneer in empathic observation and human-centered design she encourages us to be curious about everyday human behavior. At a time when designers are starting to tackle complex and systemic challenges, Jane is looking beyond human behavior, exploring how the exquisite patterns in nature and sustainable living systems might inform and inspire us to create more elegant and less harmful solutions.

Susan S. Szenasy: The refrain we hear often today goes like this: “We are nature.” Architects say it, designers say it, so do biologists, and others. How can we begin to understand this belonging, when our species has spent a century separating ourselves from nature? Can you give us some practical advice, something hopeful about how we reconnect in this age of electronic overkill?

Jane Fulton Suri: I wonder if the refrain “we are nature” is really all that common among architects and designers today. Read more…