design on consumers [clipping]

Testimony to the power of design over mental capacity and cultural world-view.

Fear of Not Having Had

Orion Magazine

The first fully enclosed shopping mall in America, and probably the world, was the Southdale Center in Edina, outside Minneapolis. Built in 1956, it is credited to Austrian immigrant architect Victor Gruen, who wanted to re-create the intimate scale and feel of the traditional Viennese plaza. Ironically, the opposite has happened. In this climate-controlled bubble, Gruen used an aviary, an orchestra, a hanging garden, and artificial trees to entice people and keep them shopping. “More people—for more hours,” he wrote in 1973, “means cash registers ringing more often and for longer periods.” So successful was he in this that today’s malls are bought and sold on the basis of their “Gruen transfer” factor. This is a measure of the seconds or nanoseconds it takes, from the moment of entry, for the mall to slow a shopper’s purposeful gait to the ambling stroll that signifies “scripted disorientation,” for the hunter to become the gatherer, the wolf to become the sheep.

I will vegetate your roof

The American Society of Landscape Architects has launched a new Green Roof Education Site that maintains a delightful amount of accessible and technical information on green roofs. They include an inspiring tour of the ASLA building’s green roof.

Green roofs have caught on more in Europe (Germany especially with 14% of new flat roofs vegetated) than here in the US, but with so many new projects going after green roofs, we can feel optimistic about our national meter of design. The ASLA leading benefit of green roofs, “saving the environment,” is actually all about saving ourselves. Each of the benefits of green roofs represents how inextricably connected we are to our environmental conditions. The site reviews the keys to green roofs as:

• contribution to heating/cooling buildings (reducing operating costs)
• stormwater management (maintaining our drinking supply), the urban heat island effect (keeping us healthy)
• urban wildlife habitat (keeping ecosystems functioning)
• aesthetic resources (give us a sigh of relief)

With so much energy being expended into heating and cooling buildings and destitute watersheds from stormwater flash floods, somehow green roofs seem an absolutely necessary penitent action. A Bioscience study shows that green roofs can even contribute to bird and invertebrate habitat in urban settings.

A classist said what?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/dining/02cheap.html?pagewanted=all

The current system, they argue, is almost completely reliant on petroleum for fertilizers and global transportation. It has led to consolidations of farms, environmentally unsound monoculture and, at the end of the line, a surplus of inexpensive food with questionable nutritional value. Organic products are not subsidized, which is one reason those products are more expensive.

How on EARTH can Pollan and Waters celebrate higher food prices?!

They suggest higher food prices come primarily from increasing fuel costs for trans- and intercontinental transportation of food. I do not see the logic of how higher food prices encourage people to buy more sustainable food. Most of the poor people they hope to stop buying cola are geographically excluded from any markets where these wealthy whites are buying their hip local food.

They should be FREAKING OUT that this country has maintained no respect for small, local farmers, and entirely degraded any transportation and social-networking system that provide for local food markets in lower-income districts. Alice Waters needs to get off her sustainability-priced-above-$50 wagon, and get back into the dirt to grow food for hungry people.

Good food, like good gardens, are not only meant for white upper-middle class Californians.