Muir Woods

The Muir Woods are a momumental international landmark that exemplifies the traditional of environmental preservationism (protecting spectacles in wilderness from disruption and development).

The site of the Muir Woods Visitor center is an rather astounding work of landscape architecture.  Indeed, my experience there was not focused on the trees, so much as the desgin choices about how to protect the place while increasing visitor accessibility to the area.  Of particular interest:

• An immaculate boardwalk that creates a sense of almost ethereal levitation above the forest floor, protecting the soil from the compaction of visitor foot-traffic, which could disrupt the sequoia’s root functioning.
• Several polished bridges over the rambling creek that serves the giant sequoia’s giant thirst.  These bridges evoke a sense of the bucolic pioneer era with there broad beams and hand-crafted workmanship.
• Notably failing erosion-prevention measures in the exposed black netting present on trails with a steep grade.  Many tree roots were exposed on level hillside paths as well.
• Wood post railings keep visitors from wandering off paths, provide for a momentary restful lean, and dignify the human position in the landscape through the display of a well crafted fence.

I am struck though by the similarities of Muir Woods to any theme park or amusement ride.  We, the visitors, are expected to remain within rather narrow bounds (rightly so, avoiding the threat of mobs trampling the forest floor) and simply gaze onto the boxed in, frozen idea of “nature” in its actual state.  While the design measures in this case (except for trail compaction and soil retention) seem well placed and effective, it perfecting represents the modern industrial mindset of the forest–to be seen as an amusement, not as a home.  I wonder how we in the 21st century can work to design preserved spaces for exploration, discovery, meditation, and reconnection.  Some ideas:

• Have a constant tree tending and planting area.  Let visitors help propagate and cultivate the next generation of redwoods by planting them in the soil.
• Maintain not only interpretive signage cataloging some of the historical, cultural, and ecological information, but some signage declaring the intent of meditative intent of the area.  Have silent areas for reflection and more areas to sit and contemplate.
• Create doubled trails so that they may rotate annually/semiannual (like rotating crops) so trails get some time to recover from compaction.

My hope is that my career in landscape architecture can bring people closer to the land they inhabit through some of these means.

House of Light [clipping]

PingMag, Tokyo based desgin/art review, has put out a series on an amazing work by James Turrell: a house that focuses on the inhabitants experience of light.  A Californian by birth, Turrell has built a career in installation art known as the “artist of lights.”

This work evokes my memories of Nils Udo’s works that focus on decanted materiality, texture, and illumination.

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My Sensei 私の先生です

Shunmyo Masuno:

I will be working to design and build Japanese Zen gardens under the guidance of Shunmyo Masuno in Yokohama, Japan beginning in Septemeber as a Henry Luce Foundation Scholar.

Red Ribbon

One of the “seven modern architectural wonders of the world,” created by Turenscape in Beijing.

I am in love.  Detailed post coming when I visit in October.

http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/may/22arc8.htm

http://www.turenscape.com/English/projects/p_view.asp?id=336

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.

The ends of the Earth

A new installation has come up in Antarctica: Stellar Axis created by Lita Albuquerque explores space-greater-than-Earth by propelling us beyond what we think to be the ends of the Earth.

This work engages a rich history of land art, coming from Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. These large installations can be as accessible as central park or distanct as the antarctic, but often are heavily documented in photographs and video to maintain an immenent form of physical resonsoance.

I’m particularly interested in the physical installation of this work, that so many people gave their time to go freeze in abstract art in Antarctica. Albuquerque says something particularly telling about this in one of her videos:

What I’m interested in is not so much art as object but an art that is in relationship to the world and that shows you your own relationship to the world and to your life.

This is the precise legacy I’m hoping to embrace with landscape architecture, since gardens, parks, waterfronts, and atria are the places where so much of our relationship to the world is expressed and explored.

chinampas

During this summer on Orcas Island, I was lucky enough to participate in constructing one of the most interesting forms of vernacular environmental engineering bred on the American continents pre-European occupation: chinampas.

The Bullocks had flooded a previously drained wetland to reestablish wildlife habitat and potential for thriving riparian vegetation, aquaculture resources, and water storage.  They had set out over several years to construct chinampas by essentially pilling cut reeds and mud from the wetlands to create floating islands rich in nutrients.

The community labor proved to be the most enjoyable part, as a transient community coming together during our Permaculture Design Course to build something ancient and innovative that used what the wetland offered, rather than draining it from fear.

The result was a sturdy and fertile substrate for beneficial riparian and aquatic plants to utilize–willows, water chestnuts, etc.  This effort also represents the permaculture mainstay of looking to obscure indigenous agricultural methodologies to develop the most productive and syngergistic utilization of extant conditions.

The Bullock Permaculture Homestead

The Bullock Brothers and their families have made a most impressive set up–particularly in the use of water. All irrigation water for the property is pumped out of the lowland marsh by solar panels into tanks and dams (at a higher elevation than crops) to be gravity fed onto water-ready cultivars.

Rainwater is pumped through solar hot water heaters (photo 1) before passing into several outdoor graywater showers (photo 2), which pass effluents into thirsty bamboo. This ensures immediate recycling and use of the bamboo, which serve an extra function of offering privacy to bathers.

They also maintain a mobile jam station with solar panels and a DC car stereo for working in the garden (photo 3). Solar panels run electricity in a direct current, so it is more efficient to hook up into DC appliances (like those in cars) than run convert into an alternating current (what most household sockets run).

I fell in love with their use of sheet-mulching, which is simply cardboard or layers of paper over existing vegetation covered with woodchips, soil, or compost. It serves to easily convert existing areas to new garden beds without pulling up all the existing plants and fertile topsoil. It can take a few years for the process to finish, but often one can plant crops like squash or melons into the sheet mulch by making a hole in the sheet layer and planting a seedling directly into the ground.

My last all-star trick from the Bullock homestead is their compost bubbler. The process begins by dropping a satchel of compost (analogous to a large tea-bag) into the tub of water, which has an air intake to “bubble” and increase aeration and diffusion, and letting it bubble all night. Then the high potency “compost tea” can applied as a liquid amendment to growing media. This can save time and backs from transporting composting onto existing beds, while maximizing the spatial extend of one’s compost heap.

The Olympia-Yashiro Japanese Garden

Shuffling around Olympia, WA made me miss the wide sidewalks of Portland protected by street trees. One has to wander pretty far from the downtown scene and the gorgeous, monumental Washington capital to discover The Yashiro Japanese Garden, built to honor the link between Yashiro, Japan and Olympia as sister-cities. The Garden was designed by Robert Murase Associates and installed primarily by volunteers.

The Garden serves as an international link, resonate as a symbol of cultural exchange. The garden serves to highlight facets of Japanese plant selection, stone usage, religious symbols, woodwork, and lighting choices. The precedent of Japanese Friendship Gardens in no way belongs to Olympia; San Diego and Phoenix have well-established gardens as well.

At less than an acre, this small oases in a motor-opolis serves to provide a sense of respite and reflection from the overwhelming intersections just outside the gates through the use of dense vegetation and water features. The design explores the placement and texture of stone, an expression of primacy in the Japanese garden. The Buddhist stupa provides a strong center to the garden, places its intent and meaning on the path of spiritual enlightenment. This concept of garden as a space for meditative practice, versus viewing and smelling robust blooms, is supported by the tall stone walls encasing the garden, and even taller bamboo shoots to the interior of the wall.

Overall the garden serves to connect visitors to a more pensive rooting in the natural connections between human, air, stone in the middle of a sea of pavement. Even the lighting fixtures are special to me for their shape reveals a sort of strength and nonhierarchical view of the landscape–they are not spotlights highlighting one feature, rather they are distributing light along eight paths equally. This octagonal nonhierarchy produces a very grounded sensation that is echoed in the placement of the stones, being not just for paths or sculptural viewing, but to participate fully in the over textural sensation of the garden.