Island Addict.

Two days ago, I boarded a plane for island #5. It's the 5th island I've spent significant time on, leading me to believe I have a previously unidentified thing for islands. Vancouver, Cuba, Japan, Manhattan, and now Madagascar - #5. Islands.


















I packed a plastic crate I was given as my only luggage, with lot of survival items and everything made of cloth in its very own zip lock bag in order to keep clothing dry in the stifling tropical climate. Of course my carefully packed crate was lost somewhere between Paris and Madagascar - that long 13 hour flight over the entire continent of Africa. Perhaps some Somalians are enjoying a bottle of Dramamine and someone in Mozambique has new Smartwool socks. Regardless, I will find out tomorrow if the next 5 weeks will be spent in the same outfit, when the twice weekly flight from France lands.

Meanwhile, we've been staging at the project team office in stupendous Antananarivo, preparing for our departure on a 20 hour land cruiser ride to where we will be working for the next 5 weeks. The Malagasy team is amazing and impassioned to bring about change to their country and one of a kind landscape.

Expansive Fodder.

The grain elevator project has finally hit puberty after a long, arduous adolescence. An evolution was birthed this week at a board of directors meeting. The project will re-emerge in 2010 as a large scale temporary public mural project. The idea is to call artists, national and international, to conceive of a panel image the size of a silo (25' x 100') that speaks to land use, agriculture, and food production. The panels will be up-lit at night, most likely printed on large vinyl canvasses, and sponsored by the many food oriented companies headquartered in the area. The day of unveiling will include a notable national speaker. The next part is not confirmed, but emerged from an inspiring conversation with our newest volunteer whose pre-landscape architecture profession was the culinary arts. The night of the unveiling will also include a 300' dinner table on the ground next to the elevator - the same length as the elevator's footprint - and the most amazing locally produced meal we can conjure up. There is nothing more compatible than dinner tables and infrastructure............................ right?




















[Image Credit: Longest dining table in the world in Lisbon, Portugal, photo from the BBC]

Insane Entropy.

It's unavoidable. It happens every time. Like clockwork. I know this all too well, but somehow am still surprised with each new occurrence. Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Perhaps the universe knows it can tease out the best effort and performance when you're already in a flurry. It has learned throughout it's 13.7 billion year life (depending upon which age of the universe theory you may subscribe) that it cannot otherwise depend on idleness. So, here we have it, as expected, 48 hours before departure to the Third World with so much to do, now an RFP invite for a very VERY cool collaborative design project with two amazing architects. Bring it on.



[Image Credit: Loess Hills, photo by Iowa State]

The project is the redesign of a science day camp in one of the only fragments of the Loess Hills west of the Missouri River. The camp handles about 3000 elementary students each summer. The city is planning to demolish the disintegrating existing facilities and replace with a new structure and alternative energy that provides environmental education curriculum - thus facilities that ARE landscape? Drool.




The Loess Hills are a landscape wonder in Iowa that Omaha peers at across the muddy Missouri River. 10,000 acres of this land have been selected by the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service as National Natural Landmark sites. The only other place where a similar landform and ecology exist are the Rhine Valley in Germany and central China. For the sake of time and brevity, a little help from our friend Wikipedia on the formation of Loess Hills:

During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced into the middle of North America, grinding underlying rock into dust-like "glacial flour." As temperatures warmed, the glaciers retreated and vast amounts of meltwater and sediment flooded the Missouri River Valley. The sediment was deposited on the flood plain, creating huge mud flats. When meltwaters receded, these mud flats were exposed. As they dried, the fine-grained silt was picked up by strong prevailing westerly winds. Huge dust clouds were moved and redeposited over broad areas. The heavier, coarser silt was deposited close to the Missouri River flood plain, forming vast dune fields. The dune fields were eventually stabilized by grass. Due to the erosive nature of loess soil and its ability to stand in vertical columns when dry, the stabilized dunes were eroded into the corrugated, sharply-dissected bluffs we see today.




[Image Credit: Formation of Loess Hills, image from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources]

So, here is to what I suspect will be an all-nighter in search of some hefty conceptualizing. This profession is truly amazing - what better inspiration than the power of nature and land formation to motivate, encourage, and educate.

Status Quo No.

There may be a deluge of posts here in the next few days. Something weird happens when cranking oneself full of invisible chemicals that apparently keep the incredibly sterile western body free from things the rest of the world faces on a daily basis. It's somewhere between hallucination and mania, fear and empowerment.

My four weeks in Omaha have seemed long, but nonetheless, active and busy. Time has been spent both rural and urban - which is quite enjoyable as I always think it builds muscles to see both sides of situations, people, and places. Yesterday was a departure from farming, with a looming application due for a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. I thought for a long time before I composed the application - do I want to do this in NYC or Omaha? Where will it make the greatest impact? Where are the resources most available and least encumbered by silly things that I do not want to deal with. Omaha won with it's unequivocal support, resources, and perceived impact. Never has an application meant more.



I would like to spend 2-3 months next fall making giant 8x10'abstractions of endangered world river deltas on cor-ten steel, utilizing various methods of self-galvanization and annealing. I have compiled an inspiring list of non-profit organizations that concern themselves with humanitarian and environmental causes in each delta region. My hope for the finished pieces is their auction/sale to benefit these organizations. It's both a return to my past life sculpting with metal and a recent rendezvous with weathering steel in New York City.

Tonight I took Kim - an amazing new volunteer at Emerging Terrain - to daOMA's first speaker in it's third season, Chris Dykers of the firm Snohetta. In my opinion, this was our best speaker to date. His presentation was significantly more about landscape than Walter Hood's back in May. He spent 1/2 of his presentation discussing the firms philosophy and overarching vision of ultimate teamwork. This was enthralling - the public negotiation of salaries through a series of elected representatives, in house chef to promote eating together and time efficiency, office espresso machine, multidisciplinary structure on each and every project, and the entire firm's annual climbing of Mount Snohetta in Norway. He then showed several breathtaking projects that displayed a grasp of landscape I'm not sure I've seen before. Like, ever.



[Image Credit: Oslo Opera House by Snohetta, photo by e-architect.co.uk]

In a pre-presentation interview with the city newspaper, Dykers said this:

What advice would you offer young architects who are looking to create their breakout works?

Never place architecture ahead of life and experiencing life. Architecture is best when it is informed by the experience of life. Also, do not enter the profession with the feeling that finding a job is the primary role of the graduate of architecture. It should not overshadow the larger goal of improving the built environment. Find as many related tasks as possible, whether it is donating time to nonprofit agencies that affect the built environment or actually building things such as furniture. Write poetry and explore places. Find alternative routes to success. Otherwise, you may find yourself successful but still lacking purpose.

Potential Ovule.

The countdown to departure for Madagascar is exactly 6 days. Of course, like any trip there is much to do between now and then. But this trip demands some preparation I've never before encountered, including 5 giant immunizations in my bum because there wasn't enough room on my arms. The staff at the epidemiology clinic and I decided it's better to walk with a limp for a few days than be like an armless woman. Other than having copious life-threatening diseases injected into my body, I've been purchasing all the gear - moisture-wicking undies, 100% DEET, enough baby wipes to be 6 weeks worth of showers, sterile hypodermics (in case of medical emergency - thanks Yolonda), lots of Smartwool, spices, Tabasco, Malaria pills, and of course, rolls of trace and pens for sketching and drawing.

So, in addition to making enormous base maps of the whole 5000 acre site and writing copious grants for funding, I got a wild hair the other night and whipped up some vegetable seed packets to take along to pass around the village of Kianjavato.


















The project team keeps finding ourselves in deep discussions about the importance of gently leading a society from poverty to independence through infrastructure. Although most of the long term components of the project are typical infrastructures: water wells, solar exchange, retaining walls and water capture systems, sustainable micro-finance businesses, improved stoves and briquettes for cooking, linking isolated forest patches, building productive fields and farms, etc, I began to think about the most simplest of infrastructure. The seed. What can a single seed do when properly chosen, planted and nurtured? Possibly more than any of the above infrastructures. Plus, it was tremendously fun to have a Thoreau quote translated into Malagasy!

Now That's Contradiction.

[Image Credit: Freelancers Union Blog word cloud]

This should have been yesterdays post in order to appropriately observe a hallmark. Yesterday - October 1 - marked the start of my financial (therefore ideological) support of The Freelancers Union as the source of my health insurance (not to be confused with Health CARE for my legions of Canadian friends). Health insurance - or as I like to call it, Sick Care - in the US means that in the event of illness you will be cared for, at no doubt, the best standards of care and technology in the world. Health Insurance is not the same as Health CARE, as I learned during my time in Vancouver which included unhindered access to everything I deemed necessary to manage my health (acupuncture -nervous, chiropractor-skeletal, naturopath-diet, homeopath-still don't understand, psychiatry-mind, massage-muscular), i.e. decrease my need for Sick Care.

Anyway, I left my job in May and thought it disrespectfully advantageous for the insurance company to charge me $700/month to continue the Sick Care coverage my last job provided through COBRA. I'm 33, healthy and active. Except for that damn peanut allergy. Yep, that bizarre 'pre-existing condition' that might require my presence at an emergency room once a decade. And as I discovered, not many insurance companies want to take on the 'risk' of a peanut allergy. Actually none. It has been eye-opening to experience what independent workers and small business owners go through to secure a basic assurance of health. At the end of the day, it's not only about being able find the services when one needs them, but a sense that your general well-being is valued as part of the greater whole. I guess some would call this idea socialism, I like to call it humanitarian, and quite frankly, Christian.

























So, not only does the (liberal?) Freelancers Union exist to provide affordable SickCare at 2/3rds the cost of COBRA, but it now provides networking opportunities for a freelancer to find new gigs as an independent, revolutionizing entity? This all seems very conservative. At least conservative as identified by early Republican ideology of "Free Labor", referring to the advocacy of a mobile middle class that leaves the workforce to set up small businesses. But perhaps we've grown accustomed to a Right that seems, at best, confused in its simultaneous advocacy of citizen capitalism and corporate socialism.

How is that for approaching the top three most feared topics in American culture: politics, religion, and healthcare?

Analogous Herbage.

A farm in Nebraska is a long long way from the streets of Harlem - both geographically and ideologically. But I couldn't help but make a simple connection yesterday when I was out cruising around the farm.



This is a rendering of the streetscape I worked on in Harlem. We spent some time fighting for this kind of tree planting - clustered for increased biomass and settled on a non-traditional Kentucky Coffeetree because of it's connected root system and tendency to clump together.


















Here is the same Kentucky Coffeetree formation in a windbreak on the farm. It is a common species and form throughout the midwest landscape. Images of this came to my mind often when I was working on the streetscape. It is often surprising to discover the genesis of the forms we create and even more surprising to discover that the most simple of observations can apply themselves in unexpected and seemingly unconnected places and conditions.

Commonplace Compulsion.

Do you ever worry about your passion for something? Like, maybe it's a type of psychosis. An unhealthy attraction. A really good acid trip with no acid. That would make it a delusion, right? One would think after 15 years in the profession of landscape architecture, that I'd be, at best, jaded. But it seems to get better and better.

Prairie. Augers. Soybeans. Oak Trees. And a bit of suburbia as borrowed landscape.

It's nice to be back in the landscape that spawned it all. Welcome home.

Animals Articulate.

There are usually only a few tried and true ways of making a land survey. In my past life designing public spaces in NYC, the survey would just magically show up from an engineer or surveyor, end of story.

If you've followed the past few entries here, you know there have been some rumblings about surveying land in the mostly foreign and remote Madagascar. I have spent hours plotting 10-foot contours on Google Earth and turning them into possibly fictitious contour lines, to be determined with hand held GPS equipment upon arrival in Kianjavato in less than 3 weeks. Here is the result:






Are you ready for the coolest part? Here is a map of GPS coordinates from collars on lemurs in the wild. The coordinates include X, Y, and Z - Z being the elevation. So over time, I can lay the Z coordinates on top of the topo map and eventually have a land survey done by lemur movement. And really, who knows the land better than the lemurs. Need I say anymore, ever again, about the benefits of practicing landscape architecture on multi-disciplinary teams. Never did I think that would include legions of little furry, wide-eyed, human-like monkeys. I'm usually the monkey (bad CAD joke, I couldn't resist).

Tigris-Euphrates. Midwest Style.

[Image Credit: delta of combined Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as it empties in Iraq at the head of the Persian Gulf - www.fas.org]

This is one of the more inspiring charities I have stumbled upon to date: Assisting Marsh Arab Refugees within the historic area known as Mesopotamia, part of the larger Fertile Crescent, having seen the earliest emergence of literate urban civilization for which reason it is often dubbed the "Cradle of Civilization". It and its people are now under threat of an endangered larger ecosystem, as reported in the NYTimes earlier this summer. Much of the Tigris-Euphrates is dry as a bone. But this organization is inspiring me to plot a giant movement within Emerging Terrain. Watch for more details to unfurl right here on Midpoint Meander. I think it will include a ton (literally) of Cor-Ten steel. Curious?

Mundane Invention.

Yesterday commenced my involvement in land planning in Madagascar. After a 7-hour meeting of project introductions, my head is spinning with the task ahead. It is beautifully multifaceted: 4800 acre rainforest development, restaurant and sustainable educational farm, eco-hotel, research facility, support structures for a non-charcoal briquette industry, greenhouses, grad student dormitory, and all of the above developed with alternative energy. Wheh. The progress thus far by the team is incredible and infrastructural but damn do they need some larger scale direction. The team is oozing possibility and I have to wait three more weeks to meet the Malagasy team members.

Initial assessment sent me away screaming. NO SURVEY. None. And acquiring one is outlandishly expensive because of the remoteness (several hundred thousand dollars). So, until we can secure funds for a real survey, here I am plotting 10 foot contours on Google Earth with the ubiquitous 'my places' push pins. It is comical how low tech high tech can be. I've finished about 100 acres so far, included the village of Kianjavato. 4900 acres more and some time in AutoCad and we'll have a remedial survey. I plan to print all 15' of the final plan and let the team scribble in things they know about the site from their many visits GPS collaring lemurs over the years. I think this might be the best way to gather experiential information until my own eyes, ears and intuition arrive on site. Can't wait.

Grand Finale.

Herein lies the last NYC post for awhile. As I prepare for a couple weeks in the Midwest driving a combine while I help my dad harvest the crops and then on to an adventure in Madagascar planning landscapes for the betterment of the environment, economy, and human welfare, life is absolutely delightful. Like, the kind of pleasure that is suspect. Is it real? But, since I've worked hard and taken some very decided risks to build this, I will shelf the suspicion and simply enjoy.

As I pack up the apartment, submit final student grades, welcome a very lucky subletter to my comfy pad, load the dog into the car, say goodbye to some of the most amazing friends I have ever had, and drive half-way across the country to the music of Amadou & Miriam, Manu Chao, and Rosetta Stone French I, there is one last bit of business here in NYC. Below is my final energy expenditure to West 125th Street. It's a program to enlist local artists to interpret the cultural landscape history of the site and with the help of an architecture/planning studio, turn the interpretations into a type of site installation during construction. This is something the community requested each time we met with them, and now that I have access to academia and an acute knowledge of the site and players involved, can possibly make it happen, or at the very least, instigate a conversation amongst the powers that be. I hope. We shall see, as emails are sent off to create possibility.

Rusty Dreads.

In order to prove there is still some superficial, contradictory New Yorker in me, I must post this before heading off to the Third World.

My hair guy, the beloved Angel Hair God, has been working feverishly over the past year to perfect my color that I like to call 'Weathered Steel'. I think he has hit the mark. As I walked out of the salon today, he said "God doesn't make many mistakes, but not making you this color was one of them".



[Images from left to right: a piece of Cor-Ten I weathered on my fire escape, my new doo, Cor-Ten at The High Line (while it was still under construction), and the lovely colors of Ms. Frida Kahlo]

Solicitous Opening.

[Image Credit: a fake image of what the parting of the Red Sea might have looked like - The Glue Society]

Life has provided so much to write about lately that it is difficult to write about anything. In short, finished up teaching a design studio at Columbia, book project continues but goes on momentary hold while I head to Nebraska to help my dad harvest a couple hundred acres of corn and then on to Madagascar to cure malaria via sustainable land design with a group of lemur geneticists. Needless to say, there are 10,000 blog entries implicit in all this landscape architect-ing and I must draw them out eventually or the moments will go unrecorded. In all honesty, the midpoint is shifting to a much larger radial tangent and it's temporarily disorienting. Midpoint goes global, now encompassing a couple oceans, several continents, and enough immunizations to turn ones blood to mercury.

The most important thing to record at this particular moment is the consummation of 125th Street. If you've followed my ramblings for any period of time, you know I have spent the better part of 2 years obsessed with a belligerent streetscape in Harlem. It's a place as tempestuous as a toddler tantrum, so taking it on as a student studio project was brave. Hindsight is always prophetic. I hope this two year wrestling match is training for what lies ahead in working with aboriginal communes and villages in Madagascar to achieve our goal of land use development and education for a more economically and environmentally sustainable future.

So, the studio ended on a happy note. The students performed a few miracles in the final 24 hours and made me proud as they presented to a cadre of my generous design friends in the city (thank you Jamie, Michael, Roy, Phillip, Liz, Molly, and Runit). They also displayed a slight evolution in thinking about and reading the world around them. And most importantly, each project was vastly different than the others, signifying individuality - something deeply important to me as an educator. I hope this experience changed them as humans. I know it changed me.

Finishing the semester is an important threshold. It signifies a true purging of information, numbers, details, and specific knowledge amassed while working on 125th Street at the firm. Letting go of these things is one of the more personally difficult tasks I have faced. But teaching is the perfect way to purge because one really is transferring it on to others, in this case in the form of education about ourselves in the physical world (which, really, is the essence of landscape architecture). Sometimes it's nice to get rid of things that are no longer useful to make way for new commitments that are also challenging enough to draw blood. I remember a poetic monologue my friend Shaun once performed. He explained that scars and remnant pain from incidents are memories made endearingly physical. There are certainly a few scars - if Heather is reading this I hope she laughs - but the discomfort is certainly lessened, and maybe even disappearing through expelling towards an investment in the future of others.

Global Dirt.

A consortium of soil scientists have come together to produce a digital soil map archive of the whole world. This is a tremendously wild undertaking, because until now, this kind of information has been scattered, disconnected, and at best, a personal trip to an obscure archive in a basement in the Congo might result in the map you need to do good work. Not to mention how you would resolve replicating the map in any way other than bringing your own personal scanner with stand alone power source to said basement in the Congo.

This is a very exciting development in the global sustainable development community because soil is the basis of everything: food, food security, water scarcity and threatened biodiversity. Soil sustains us, and by 'us' I mean all of us. Not just Americans. If you go to the site you can see quotes from stupendous people making a difference, like Jeffrey Sachs and Kofi Annan.

So I tried the site out, and in less than 2 minutes I had a comprehensive soil map of Madagascar. This essentially saves me a couple weeks of time. And it's absolutely gorgeous.

Arrivederci Disastro Del Mondo.

I whipped up an entry for Dwell/Inhabitat's ReBurbia Competition today. I decided to forgo the typically serious designer heaviness and have a little bit of snarky fun. The project is a story called Arreviderci Disastro Del Mondo (Farewell World Disaster). What a fun day this was!

Literal Literacy.

It has definitely been the summer of books - both reading and writing. I've consumed over 100 books since leaving pseudo-corporate firm life in early May, as part of my commitment to 'stopping the madness'. I'm hoping that many in the world take this unique time in history to think a bit more than doing, although my acquaintance Arash claims that most are just trying to get back to where we were a couple years ago. C'est la vie, I feel there is no time to ponder such things. My literary selections have been all over the map, from existential philosophy of Kierkegaard, deconstructionism of Derrida, space making politics of Lefebvre and the contemporary landscape urbanism of Corner/Waldheim to the poverty eradication economics of Bono and Sachs, I've been a consumer of words, which are not unlike spaces. They both form places where we reside, interpret, and evolve.

A couple disturbing/enlightening reads were 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman and 'Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems' by the founder of Whole Foods, Michael Strong. It's been nice, and fulfilling, and much needed after a couple years of do do do at relatively high speed with scant critical reading other than graphics standards and charts about bituminous characteristics.

One such read of the summer was suggested by a dear friend and colleague who I've never before mentioned in these writings, the lovely Myles; Joseph Campbell culminated a trend of recurrent theories of individual narrative such as Maslow, Spiral Dynamics, and finally, what may be my fave read of 2009: 'The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World'. This book was published almost a decade ago but was like reading my own biography, although I'm skeptical about it's stereotyping. Here is an interesting excerpt:

"As we traveled across the country and sat in living rooms and offices and churches listening to stories like these, we found ourselves thinking of women meticulously patching calico and velvet into quilts, and fisherman patiently mending their nets at the end of the day. Cultural Creatives are like this. As they step away from the mainstream assumptions and values of modern culture, they are piecing together a life they passionately care about. If you ask them, they'll probably tell you that it's a slow and awkward process. In the midst of a society with compartmentalized values, they are doing what they can to weave a coherent and integrated life. They don't claim to have all the answers. Picking and choosing what matters most to them, each one is trying to create a new system of value and meaning.

The educator Parker Palmer says that movements begin when people refuse to live divided lives. This is what is happening with Cultural Creatives. Many of them are going through major life transitions as they look for ways to live the values they have come to believe in. Some stay stuck. Others appear to be stuck in unpromising situations for a long while but then come out shining, to the amazement of their friends and colleagues. What Cultural Creatives have in common is not their success in navigating the cultural crossover, nor their personalities, intelligence, religion, or ethnic origin. They are simply ordinary people who share a culture of values and worldview and, to some extent, a lifestyle."

And another I found particularly enchanting:

"The kind of learning that Cultural Creatives like is intimate, engaged knowledge that is imbued with the rich, visceral, sensory stuff of life. The kind of action that especially appeals to them is what Margaret Mead called "whole process" where they can be part of creating something from the beginning, middle, end, and through to the new beginning. They would agree with educator Jean Houston, one of the early Cultural Creatives, that the world is too complex for linear analytic thinking now. To be smart in the global village means thinking with your stomach, thinking rhythmically, thinking organically, thinking in terms of yourself as an interwoven piece of nature."

And finally, my favorite:

"It's not an easy choice. many Cultural Creatives go back and forth, trying to convince themselves that they shouldn't care as much as they do, imploring themselves to please just fit in and not be so difficult. If they're lucky, they lose this battle. In time, they learn to seek their own counsel, to abide by what they believe to be most important and act on that.

So whatever subculture you come from, whether you are a Modern or Traditional or a Cultural Creative, as you meet the Cultural Creatives, you probably will feel some of the fascination and discomfort of a stranger in a strange land. In order to meet them, you'll need time and a variety of vantage points. To understand why the Cultural Creatives are emerging now, you'll need a long view, one reaching back to the 60's. And to understand them, you'll need to get close enough to hear their stories, or there will be nothing to connect your heart to theirs. Finally, you'll need to take some wide-angle views, or you won't fathom how many of them are already gathering together to create new social solutions and build intricate networks in the United States and around the world."

Needless to say, these 'Cultural Creatives' sound like the folks I must, desperately find to work, live, and play for/with. I would like to personally know every single one of the 50 million. I do wonder if each of these 50 million are living without health insurance, much like myself, as a sacrifice in modern America, to live a life that we passionately care about.

Ideological Ambidextrosity.

The entries are many these days. I'm not sure where they are coming from, but will keep churning as they present themselves.

There has been a ideological confluence of posts lately. The last post insinuated how the middle of nowhere can sometimes provide the basis to the center of everything, and several previous posts shifted the midpoint focus a bit to the right. Or left. It's unclear which direction indicates something halfway around the world. But since most of us are growing weary of the pettiness (and otherwise wasting of useful energy) associated with determining the 'rightness' or 'leftness' of things, people, places, and ideas, this entry will focus on something neither right nor left. The island of Nauru.
























[Image Credit: satellite image of Nauru - sprol.com]

There was an episode of This American Life about it several years ago. It was one of those audio experiences I think about often, like weekly, perhaps. The show told a Faustian cautionary tale of an island in the middle of nowhere that became the center of everything; involved in the bankrupting of the Russian economy, global terrorism, the protection of North Korean defectors, and ultimately an 'end of the world' scenario of a nation that digs up and sells off the interior of their homeland in order to compete in the new global economy.




[Image Credit: Nauru from plane - care4nauru.com]

The 30 km wide island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 1200 miles from the nearest land, contained an unprecedented amount of phosphate perfectly decomposed from centuries of petrifying sea bird dung. Opening up their tiny island to mining of the phosphate left them the richest country, per capita, in the world. The deluge of profits flooded the island with amenities - a golf course, western food, satellite television for everyone, a single circumventing road, automobiles, and the advent of diabetes. But then the phosphate ran out and their western investors robbed them blind. 90% of the island is now a mined out ruin, useless. Everything has been dug down to the structural coral reef. Some sand and trashy vegetation provides hunting grounds for feral dogs.

























[Image Credit: Naura landuse model mined land - care4nauru.com]

This story has remained in my mind for about half a decade and has finally come to the fore as perhaps, for the first time ever, our country seriously begins to look towards non-exploitable resources (those with the impossibility of running out - sun, wind, geothermal, etc.). The petri dish of Nauru provides evermore reason to do so before our own much more vast exploitable resources really do run out.

Nauru is also of interest as I approach sustainable development work in Madagascar - a similar, although more complex island in the middle of nowhere. I seem to be attracted to islands, perhaps stemming from my ancestry in Atlantis (thanks Lester).

Financial Formation.

How can a personal wealth map be spatial, you might ask. I don't suspect Forbes intended for their map of the world's billionaires to indicate space, but Midpoint Meander enjoys the correlation of urban structure to the stacking of billionaire dots. Take a close look at Omaha versus New York City. Warren Buffet's $44 billion purple dot forms quite the expansive base compared to the tall, seemingly teetering stack of billionaires in New York. Furthermore, those smaller dots in New York, when added up, still fall short in sum to the Gates/Buffet wider, expansive bases. Everything is spatial. Everything.

Glowing Remnant.

At the risk of over-dramatizing, I think I've officially had the strangest New York experience to date.

In April, I moved, yet again. Finally this time to an apartment I will have to be pried away from, sky-lights and all, on the Upper West Side just one block from Central Park. It's mostly bliss, and a very calculated move, having begun the transition to a more introverted life for a bit. The building is an old, somewhat decrepit brownstone, where a lack of maintenance is under the guise of 'character'. The owner of the building lives directly below me, and my 3-south facing windows look out over his lush, center courtyard garden. It is clearly his prize and joy and what gets him out of bed in the morning.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard he was in the hospital, but he returned to the building rather quickly to a non-stop flow of visitors to his apartment. I was happy to see his apartment and garden again occupied. The influx of guests heightened to what sounded like a fun and jovial evening garden party. The next morning, I was surprised to follow a small crowd of police and a coroner out of my building, apparently removing Victors body. He died. And both he and his friends were preparing, through celebration, over the last few days. The NYPD sealed his door with a large sticker that reads D.O.A. Do Not Enter. It is very eerie to pass by each day.

Aside from not being sure who to pay rent to, who to go to for building superintended issues or what to do with his daily NYTimes, more concerning is the continual glow into my apartment from the lights in Victor's garden below. They have been left on, and will be so until someone is authorized to enter his apartment. I wish I could appropriately catch it in photograph, but it's just not possible.

But I must say, there is something sublime to the sequence of events, and of course, it all ending in an expression of the landscape. What an interesting remnant to leave behind: a glowing garden in the middle of New York City.

Inherent Interconnection.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir (1838 – 1914)


Today I stumbled upon the above diagram of malaria percentages on the island of Madagascar, published by the CDC in 2006. Notice the largest dot and the associated percentage of malaria cases. The corresponding image is a Google Earth shot of the area comprising the largest gray dot, which includes two river deltas both heavily overloaded with erosion sediment from the burned rainforests (orange).

There are many factors contributing to the high percentage of malaria cases in this region such as higher population and port proximity to the Comoros Islands where new strains of Malaria arrived from. But this area is also the driest ecosystem on the island. Malaria typically proliferates in more humid climates.

So, back to my theory that sediment overload of water courses ultimately causes Malaria and in the cycle of things, nothing can exist separate from land use. Although the burning of the rainforests may be happening far upstream from these deltas, it is causing an increase in disease at the river mouth. In the United States, obesity (and therefore diabetes) is a result of land use (higher percentages in suburbs than cities), and in the third world, Malaria is a result.

Spatial Addiction.

I have an addiction to 125th Street. Kind of sad, you might say. At least an addiction could be, at the very least, decadent and debaucherous. I can't fully explain, but here I am 2-months outside of the job that brought the troubled project to my life and I still spend about 4 hours a day with the place. Not only am I teaching a studio at Columbia using the site but am also developing both a national competition entry and some public programming involving it. Oy vey, I say. But sometimes, along with addiction comes deeper discovery. And when you're fully invested in an addiction, such discovery is like finding an entirely new drug you're quite sure isn't on the market yet. That is momentarily exhilarating.

A students discovery of the image below is enough to make a spatial addict's heart race. This is 125th Street in 1609, according to the brilliant Mannahatta Project showing the site as a 378m. tidal creek:















Here is the site now:





















At a studio critique this past week, two outside critics Molly and Runit discussed how no time has been as exciting as now for landscape architecture in the city. We are seeing the ecology of the water edges seep into the city through various movements of design and policy. As well, we are being exposed to tools like Mannahatta and the first built project in NYC born out of the theory of landscape urbanism: The High Line. This is the first contemporary theory our profession has seen since the Picturesque, and is proving to be materially (as well as intellectually) successful. As a profession, we are becoming empowered, not without the help of the recession which has disabled architecture. But even more empowering is when these new tools, times, and economies allow us to see and understand the sites we work with in new holistic, systematic, and informed ways. When the 1609 condition of 125th Street is overlaid on the current site, we can clearly see how the site's natural history has been inherited in it's current form, as the creeks and the streets reflect the same course. But now our responsibility is to take this information a step further as we work tirelessly to form a more thoughtful future city.

Apocalyptic Occupation.

This is a photo my friend Meghan took of a stunning sunset sky in New York City. This photo has not been manipulated in any way. I happened to be in The Village with John at the time where everyone had emerged from the cafes and filled the streets to look up at the sky. I think it's possible The Rapture occurred and we're all still here. Party on!

I've never seen a sky like this. But this sky wasn't just about something to view. It literally filled the streets with a soft orange light that gave everything a soft glow - I presume a light quality that many a film maker would love to have the opportunity to shoot in naturally.

I will never forget the tiny village street that evening, and again, how the landscape of the sky (one we often forget because of our limited views of horizon) filled the landscape of the city.

Aquatic Enunciation.

As an extension of the first blog of 2009 about literal and figurative tectonic shifts, here is an image of what's going on in Madagascar. This is the Betsiboka River Delta completely loaded with sediment from dramatic erosion caused by the burning of the rainforests. This sediment is what ultimately causes the flooding of villages, therefore the advent of water-borne illness. In my infantile 2-months studying these patterns, I think sediment at river mouths can tell us a lot about the impact of human activity. Plus, they have to be one of the most gorgeous landscape features on the planet. Seriously, aside from watershed ridgelines and geological formations (Bob Furlong would be proud), what else creates patterns and spaces like these? A little different than the Grading and Drainage Registration Exam, hey? (that's for you, Michael!)
















Betsiboka River Delta (Madagascar - Bombetoka Bay)






And since seriality always leads to discovery, here are images of other world river deltas (you can tell everything about a river's mouth - similar to a human's eyes)



















Nile River Delta (lower Egypt - Mediterranean Sea)

























Amazon River Delta (Brazil - Atlantic Ocean)

























Mississippi River Delta (Louisiana - Gulf of Mexico)

























Selenga River Delta (Mongolia/Russia - Lake Baikal)

























Niger River Delta (Nigeria - Gulf of Guinea)
























Mekong River Delta (Vietnam - South China Sea)

























Ganges River (Bengal [Bangladesh and India inter-tidal] - Bay of Bengal)

















Tigres-Euphrates River Delta (Iraq/Iran - Persian Gulf)
Highly Endangered Region
























Volga River Delta (Russia - Caspian Sea)



















Irrawaddy River Delta (Burma - Andaman Sea)
























Ural River Delta (Kazakhstan - Caspian Sea)


















Gabon River Delta (Gabon - Gulf of Guinea)



















Okavango River Delta (Botswana, the world's largest inland delta)





And just to bring seriality back home, full circle, here is our lovely New York Harbor.











I don't know what it is about this topic, but it really affects me. There is just something about water. More in next blog about this, as it pertains to Harlem. Oh sweet Harlem.

Tectonic Shifts.

Has it really been 9 months since the last blog post? That's long enough to gestate a human being. I don't know exactly what I've been gestating in that time, but it certainly is not another person. Here is a quick rundown: worked on Obama campaign, went to Inauguration in D.C., Inauguration screwed up my head, took all registration exams, and quit perfectly good stable job in recession because it seemed ineffective and inefficient to be hanging on to status quo, when clearly the world is a changing. So, yup, I'm trying to make it more independently than a bi-weekly paycheck and a nice health plan.

So far, so good. Working on writing what could be a killer book about the energy landscapes built through the stimulus, teaching at Columbia University, and figuring out a way to link the non-profit to sustainable land development in Madagascar that could essentially devise a social-entreprenurial prototype to eradicate poverty and environmental destruction.

So, here's to a new world full of all sorts of possibility. I think we've shifted a stage of consciousness as a country, and there is undoubtedly another shift coming at the end of this economic thing, or rather, happening as we speak. We can only hope.

All I know for sure, is that tectonic shifts have historically created some of the most amazing landscapes on the planet.

Rats and Crack and New Times.

I was walking to the Obama campaign office on Wednesday after work to pick up some flyers and other literature. I'm excited to have Nov. 4th off of work to work the election. I'm trying to talk my politico friend Jamie into either going back to Scranton (where we spent some time canvassing not long ago) or to Ohio. On my walk down Broadway I saw this new piece of graffiti - it had to have been done between Monday and Wednesday. Very apropo, indeed.

Borough Bellow.

Brooklyn. Counter cultural. Often cliche. Your centerlessness only solidifies your dislike of tradition and hierarchy and any recompense for societal expectations of responsibility. In a way, I like you. Although I never have moments of 'awe' in your presence. When I see pictures of you, I think 'Ah Brooklyn, so cute, so livable, the best borough for shopping thanks to all the artists and designers you stole from Manhattan. Apparently you are what Manhattan was 20 years ago, in it's creative prime, sans the crime, bankruptcy, and debauchery. As a result, you would be 4th largest city in America, if you weren't actually part of New York City. I think I'm glad to be experiencing you intimately, but I still seek answers to why you are not as comfortable and understandable as Manhattan who is fast, dirty, intense, concrete, expensive, and polluted. Brooklyn, I will study you for the next 9 months and try to understand what makes you tick. Meanwhile, I will quietly plot a return to my home: Manhattan.

Morphological Adaptation.

A couple weeks ago I flew to Omaha for the second speaker in our da_OMA speaker series. Thom Mayne came to Omaha for a 1.5 hour presentation and a fabulously fun and expensive dinner. It was one of those nights I'll never forget - sitting at V.Mertz in the Old Market Passageway across the table from a rather interesting architect while eating wonderful Omaha steak talking about New York City, his project there that I had the pleasure of briefly working on, our mutual acquaintances in Vancouver, and various other topics. At moments of pause, I reveled in the marvelousness of this situation. What a perfect moment of Midpoint perspective - one that I don't have to work hard to analyze, but rather just enjoy.

A few days after this encounter, I received a curious clear envelope in the mail at work. Thom sent me the following letter, which took a team of my coworkers to interpret.



























"Anne. I enjoy surprise encounters...Nebraska no less...hope to see you
@ the site one of these days. Thom"

Celebration.

This poor blog. The entries are scarce in 2008. I guess it's not the year of blogging for Midpoint Meander. There have been hundreds of great topics passed up - bizarre encounters, moments of epiphany, weird urban conditions, even weirder design experiences. But tonight, I must blog. It's is imperative for the occasion. Today is my 1 year anniversary of moving to NYC. One year ago today, I packed a few necessities into 2 bags, boarded an airplane to NYC with no job, no place to live, and essentially no contacts in the Big Apple. And I must say that almost each of the past 365 days has been exhilarating. NYC is my city. We jive. We get along. We understand and seemingly respect one another. So, here's a giant nod of appreciation to my fair city and a virtual toast to another year of a relationship I hope never ends.

Mattel Recruits.

There are clearly some future landscape architects living on my block.

Ghetto Scaping.

On Thursday morning I guest critiqued a visual arts class at the Bronx High School for the Visual Arts. It was rather amazing to be in a classroom in what most of New York calls 'the ghetto' talking with highschool kids about the spaces of their community. They've been working on a project that started with exploring themselves in the community, their school in the community, and now they will be designing a vacant site near the school. As they were presenting their maps, collages, and polaroid photos of the things they've documented so far, I couldn't help but find total joy in the types of conditions they were finding: laundromats as typology, one side of the subway platform as wealthy and the other side as poor, how uncomfortable 'private' parks are to occupy, etc. Furthermore, a good majority of these kids might not get through high school, but how cool that while trying they were exposed to the tools we designers use everyday in our professions. And even cooler that they get to do so not in the suburbs where spatial conditions are mind numbing, but in the vibrancy of even the derelict urbanity of the Bronx.

Content.

Since August, my work (and subconscious) life has been all about Harlem. Never in all these years of school did I think I would be caught in a relatively fierce social, racial and political battle between the community of Harlem, and the development of Columbia University. It has been strangely exhilarating to work with such absurdly interstitial spaces that contain unbelievable history, heritage, and context. And to see all the politics duke themselves out in the public spaces of the landscape - as they often (and should) do. It's about social justice. Precisely why I keep on keeping on in landscape architecture.

Today we had word of a huge victory. We have been fighting with city agencies to provide Harlem with the most quality and consistent street lighting possible. The community wants whatever they can get fast because they are (rightly so) tired of dark and dangerous streets. The city agency agreed today to find and provide a distinctly 'Harlem' light that will span the whole island through the center of Harlem. One mark on the chalkboard towards quality public space.

This whole experience, thus far, makes my trek to New York worth it.

Phorgotten Photosynthesi.

Photo taken in Red Hook, Brooklyn


Photo taken on my project site in Jamaica, Queens



Because I love the subtle relentlessness of landscape.

Sequestered Sustenance.

I'm preparing for another move. Truly unbelievable - #5 in one year. This time a legitimate lease where my rent will be expected, and cashed on the 1st of the month. No more guessing, no more 'deals'. Just straight forward real estate. I've never been so excited for stability in this regard.

I am, however, sad to be leaving my neighborhood; the friends and neighbors I see daily. And The Owl. That's right. The Owl with a spinning head that resides on the cornice directly across the street from my bedroom window.

When I first moved to NYC a year ago, a hot date took me to a quaint little restaurant called The Little Owl. It was a lovely dinner and evening. Six months later, I moved into an apartment above The Little Owl, to find said cornice owl staring into my bedroom. The only way one would know the meaning behind the restaurant name is to see the owl from the apartments that over look it. That is nice. That is New York.

So, the same owl that welcomed me to Manhattan, is now bidding farewell as I prepare to depart the borough. Goodbye Manhattan. From now on I will study your skyline from across the East River.

Banal Conjecture.

I was walking my dog at 6am this morning, as I do every morning. Walking a dog is a seemingly banal exercise. But doing so three times a day in a place as complex as NYC is actually quite stupendous. This morning I stumbled upon this little scibble on the sidewalk. If I had any proclivity towards urban tagging/grafitti/etc., this is what I would write. What a fab use of the beloved landscape.

This word led my mind on a tangent for the remainder of our walk. 'Think' is a powerful word. And how interesting that my little urban hound only stands 18" from the sidewalk where it is written. I'm so much farther away. I'm not saying my dog is smarter than me, although some may argue! But sometimes I wish I could experience our walks from her perspective. She is in a great position to notice subleties. And what, really, adds more brilliance to life than sublety? Possibly only absurdity.

Photographic Sacrifice.

It's been so long. Me and the blog. And I must say, I've missed it immensely. I don't look at the world around me as closely and critically when I'm not looking for blog topics. And that's unfortunate. It promotes a different type of awareness. I'm not saying there haven't been things to blog about in the last 2 months. New York City continues to be absurd. Coincidental. Moments of delight each day. But I do feel like I've missed some things.

I've moved, again. 4th time in 8 months. People tell me that's just how it goes for the first year in NYC. When a better situation presents itself, so do you. No matter the hassle. This time I moved on New Years Eve to an apartment in the lower west village. The apartment belongs to a guy who can't get back in the United States. Although he's a Yale educated lawyer, his Israeli citizenship presents a long wait for a greencard. Perhaps U.S. immigration is wondering if we really need more lawyers? Perhaps U.S. immigration would prefer that Israel have another lawyer. I don't know. Meanwhile his apartment sits vacant.

So, I now live in the building where the show Friends is presumed to have been filmed - although it really took place on a Hollywood set. The exterior of the building was panned in the beginning of every episode. Each morning there are hoards of camera donned tourists snapping photos of my apartment. Who are these people? And do they really find pleasure in photographing the exterior of a building that was used in some brainless sit-com? Nevertheless, I'm sure they hold some lewd photos of me getting dressed for the work day.

I love the above photo. Not only is it a delighful Truffaut-ian angle on the street below, but it is absurdly hilarious in a very New York way. It's a damn cold, blustery, snowy day and these people still trek to this exact corner to photograph a building because it was on T.V. This is the sort of thing I need to draw a Venn diagram of to fully understand.

Rattus norvegicus.

I've been obsessed with rats lately. Their prevalence, both literally and figuratively, is too ubiquitous to ignore.

For an entire month now, I've been trudging through Camus' book 'The Plague'. It never takes a whole month to get through a piece of literature, but this is one heavy read and I refuse to turn my back on a book midway. I've made it through the rat deaths and onto the human deaths, meanwhile I've been purchasing new, more jovial reads in anticipation of completion. Although it's written with continuous strings of beautiful transitions, the basic premise is dangerous in the hands of an overactive imagination.

Each time I'm in the East Village I see copious numbers of rats. Last weekend I attended a Thanksgiving feast at a friend's warehouse in the Lower East Side and literally had to scatter the rats with my feet at the building's threshold.

Last weekend, my friend Andy who writes for the New York Times led me to a You Tube video of an event last summer at a fast food joint near my apartment where hundreds of rats were seen inside during off hours. He also forwarded an article about a group of people who have rat fetishes and think they positively communicate with the creatures.

Also last week, I was handed a 'rodent proof planting guideline' devised by the City of New York. I was instructed to become familiar with it as I proceed on various landscape projects around the island.

During one of my daily New York Times reads this week, I stumbled upon an article declaring there are 9 rats for every human in New York City.

Last night I had a showdown with a very large rat at my local subway exit. His/Her boldness in the face of my much larger stature was intimidating to the point of contemplating getting back on the train behind me.

This morning, I experienced complete rat meltdown during my morning leisurely jog when I spied this announcement on a restaurant door near my home:
















I hearby, for the first time in my life, quit a book before completion. That's it. I'm done. No more plague. Sorry Mr. Camus, but congratulations on your Nobel Prize.

Curb. Kerb. Querb.

I've spent many an hour in my life being poked fun at from my architect contemporaries over landscape architect conventions like curbs, sidewalks, bollards, benches, etc, etc. And most of the time I agree with them. In some ways there is nothing more banal than a curb - that small rise of concrete that separates toxic car debris from other environments beyond, directs all the water that makes it to earth to some undisclosed underground hiding place, provides a barrier between the potential harmful actions of a vehicle toward the pedestrian milieu, and ultimately creates a micro-groundplane.

In a very short period of time practicing landscape architecture in New York City, I've come to the conclusion that the state of a city's curbs is an indicator of it's greater social mores. Yesterday at work I asked a general question of my colleagues about the height of a roll curb. "A roll curb? What is that?" No one knew the answer. No one even knew what a roll curb is. So I quickly assumed it to be yet another Canadian practice that I haven't yet learned the American equivalent. I'm finding a lot of Canadianisms in my practice and sometimes I feel like I learned landscape architecture in a different language. I did some research on 'roll curbs' on the web and discovered it's not at all explicitly Canadian, but it's certainly not New York.

In New York the curbs come in two sorts: thick steel faced concrete, and 1'x1' granite. That's right, a 1' rise from the street. And yes, most curbs need a big fat steel edge to keep them intact:





In Vancouver, many curbs in new development are roll curbs: 3-4" tall with a very nice soft roll sometimes rendering them almost indistinguishable:
















In New York, curbs are tough, industrial, in your face but very functional.
In Vancouver, curbs are precious and suburban.

Constancy of Repetition.

I promise this will be the last old-timey blog post. One can't think about the future without considering the past.

I stumbled upon the above image and text today in a book called "Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem" by Eric K. Washington. How intriguing that the same kind of critiques of gentrification were happening in 1912, as are happening now. Just via different forces.

Cotton Wears Thin.

I haven't written about Harlem for awhile, not for lack of material, but for concern that I was on the verge of creating a blog entirely about it. However, while Shaun was in town my coworkers arranged reservations for an evening at the infamous Cotton Club of Harlem resulting in an experience worthy of blog time. The Cotton Club happens to be in the middle of my project site redesigning the streets of Manhattanville for the impending take over by Columbia University. I've been dying to check out the joint, considering it's questionable future in the current locale. I think my coworkers have become increasingly intrigued by the urban phenomenons of West 125th Street through my sometimes over exuberance. I've never worked on a more hostile, yet thoroughly engaging project in my life.

True to Cotton Club form, we were ushered into a performance entirely by African-Americans for an entirely Caucasian crowd, geriatric Europeans to be exact; this to my total surprise. Yes, the Cotton Club, once the seminal Prohibition venue for some of the greatest African-American entertainers, and a public spectacle of the racist imagery of the times, is now akin to after dinner entertainment at an all-inclusive resort somewhere in the Caribbean. Perhaps one in Cuba where American tourists are scant, and European ones are aplenty.

The whole scene made me realize that it's over. I have to be careful not to be naive here, but a phase is over. The music, the culture, the controversy, the shameless American spectacle of racism; now a much more subtle and less honest contemporary. I guess experiences like this are further confirmation that the only way forward is through an invested interest in healthy urban evolution rather than nostalgia. Things can't stay as they were, nor should they. Urbanity in America is not 'done', as several of my American professors in graduate school in Canada proclaimed. Rather, it's in transition and although I don't really get it sometimes, I have to continue to be an active part of it all.

So here's to almost 100 years of the Cotton Club.

[Image: © Ronald C Saari]

Seeking Inclemency.

I stole this image from BLDGBLOG because it brilliantly represents what has been on my mind about the New York I have been immersed in for 6 months now. I am dying for the first snow. I can hardly wait.

I am tremendously fortunate that my re-introduction to true, distinguishable four-seasons after a 4 year hiatus on the West Coast is in New York City. The seasons of the city are amazing; the change in the air, the smells, the wind patterns, the fashion, the behaviors. Something about the compaction of density makes subleties more extreme. Bring on the blustering snow. Please.

Jamaica. Not in the Caribbean.

I have yet to experience a morning to which I wake up not interested in going to work. I attribute a bit of this enjoyment to the fact that the office keeps handing me these absurd racial-socio-political design projects with the instructions: "Go to Town, Do whatever you need to do". This happened again last week with this project and site - the future 'entrance gateway' to Jamaica, Queens.





The site is amazing. It is on an entirely infrastructural corner a few blocks from a brand new transit center - the hub for all travelers into and out of NYC from JFK airport. The large meat packing plant in the center of the site will be demolished to make way for the continuation of the roadway to the left of the arc of the overhead rail. The narrow clapboard houses will all remain creating an utterly bizarre design challenge: a street and a park on the same block as residences and large transit infrastructure. How exciting.

I believe there was an event a few weeks ago at the United Nations (one of my favorite Manhattan haunts) to publicize the revisioning of the entirety of Jamaica Queens; now rising up from decades economic problems. So, we'll see where this design challenge takes us as there is so much to work with by way of constraints. Constraints always make a designers work more engaging.

Sacrificial Relativity.

I wonder how many other young women are sitting in their New York apartment on a beautiful fall Friday night after a long work week at the office writing a grant for the future use of a random vacant grain elevator in the Midwest? Probably none. I even hope there are none because it's feeling a touch sad and nerdy at this particular moment. I can always be consoled by the fact that at any time there are people being more nerdy than myself all over New York City.

In order to keep myself jazzed up and pushing forward on what seems like an impossible grant deadline, I surf the web. Tonight I found the image above: the DeBruce Grain Elevator in Haysville, Kansas. This 2,717 feet long cement structure is listed as the largest grain elevator in the world. In 1998, an explosion at the facility killed seven people, and heavily damaged the structure. The elevator is composed of 246 individual 30 foot by 120 foot tall connected concrete tanks in three parallel rows, all under a single headworks. The structure had a capacity of over 20 million bushels of wheat, enough to supply all the bread consumed in America in a six week period. The facility is owned by DeBruce Grain, Inc., which was fined $685,000 for the explosion. Information from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Spanner in the Works.

"Inspiration comes of working every day." -- Charles Baudelaire

I like this quote. It keeps me near the realm of sanity. And reminds me of the graffiti I stumbled upon awhile back in the image above.

I've been working on yet another grant application - the largest to date, and one that will determine the time-line of the foreseeable future for the nonprofit I've begun. The grant is for $100,000 to pay 10 design teams to consider the future of the vacant grain elevators I've been intently focusing on in the Omaha landscape for a couple of years now. The words of Mr. Baudelaire remind me that time, routine, and perseverance are crucial. That maybe every small act of 'work' creates energy that produces both the inspiration to keep going and eventually the progress one seeks.

During this particular grant I've been increasingly entertained, at moments to the point of uncontrollable laughter, by the process involved in obtaining money from the US Government. When applying for a federal grant, there are 10,000 steps to complete in order to be legitimate. Since grants are all about crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i', there is no step in the bureaucratic bullshit that can go unaddressed.

This week, I've registered with Dun and Bradstreet for a DUN number. I've registered with the Central Contractor Registry in order to be valid with the government grant organization. And I've registered with grants.gov credential provider. All of this for a single grant application that may not even be awarded, and in addition to the recent year long process of obtaining official 501c(3) status. Amazing, really. None of these steps do I really understand the purpose. I do what the list says, because in order to persevere, I can only give energy to understanding my ultimate goal. Isn't that funny? As someone trying to create something new and unique, with a vision for something greater and independent, I submit to rules I don't understand. Is it impossible to avoid being a cog in the machine? Or do we have to be a cog in some respects in order to be a spanner in the works in others? I just don't know.

Hipsters Lament.

I've been spending increasingly more time in Brooklyn these days. I realize the more time I spend there, the less likely I am to reach one of my top ten New York goals: to attend a party at The Dakota. Anyway, last weekend Shaun was in town for the Go! Team concert, which by the way was stellar. Before the show we met up with Aaron at Galapagos in Williamsburg for 'Opera and Beer'- 5 female opera singers performing with a keyboard in various operatic European languages. It was a perfect day of perfect activities for a dialectical sensibility. Galapagos is a gorgeous art space/bar-of course one of dozens in New York. True to the scale and form of Brooklyn, it occupies a rough industrial space, but possesses a glass like reflecting pool of water at the entrance which one has to pass over on a metal gangway upon entering. From inside the bar looking out, the water creates a stunning reflection of the concrete plant across the street.


(from Galapogos website)























(photo from Shaun Smakal)

Each time I'm in Williamsburg I can't help but muse over it's shocking similitude to Omaha; the scale, the industrial desolation that teems with artists, the thrift store meets Prada inspired fashion, the restaurants, the PBR on tap, and especially.....the hipsters. I've always perceived these similarities, but not until this recent rendezvous did I realize their depth. The breed of hipster that has colonized Williamsburg in the last 5 years have derived from the hellmouth of hipsterdom: Omaha's Saddle Creek Records. I witnessed the birth of this movement in the early/mid 90's when I would help my friend Jen sneak the would be Bright Eyes lead singer into our female only college accommodations. He was 13 and she swore to us this greasy haired, acne faced, pre-pubescent boy was going to be something big. Now consider the effect Saddle Creek has had on our nations music scene.

As Shaun and I wandered the streets of Williamsburg in between events, I realized another unforeseen outcome of that greasy haired 13-year old kid who feverishly recorded songs on 8-track in his laundry room during repeated month long snow blizzards in Omaha. It may be a stretch to suggest that Conor Oberst is responsible for the myriads of yuppie condo developments sprouting up all over Williamsburg, but it is an unavoidable, as well as intriguing connection. It is a connection that solidifies the fact that one's passions and hard work can contribute to an ideological trajectory opposed to the original intent. These are the guts of gentrification, and a very typical story in the development of American urbanity. Culture and urban form are intimate bedfellows.


























































Even more intriguing is the disparate connection between a group of musicians/artists who are the bastions of independence - they have self produced every album as a collective, have resisted multi-million dollar record deals with every imaginable record company, continue to reside in Omaha in their original neighborhoods and support the local arts scene - with that of the notion of developer driven condos. Condo living may infact be a contemporary typology representative of mass-mindedness.


Images are from various developer website. Yes, I'm getting sloppy with the pilfering.

M.Ward, S.O.M., Ken Smith, and Omaha.........

........all have something in common. As usual, it's slightly convoluted through the eyes of yours truly.



On Thursday at 5pm, my coworkers and I raided the studio fridge of all past happy hour odds and ends beer and headed a couple blocks down to 7 World Trade - a new building and plaza built in the aftermath of 9/11. 7 World Trade was the last building to collapse on September 11, and the first to be rebuilt. I suspect it's form, materiality, and urban contribution is a prelude to what awaits the City of New York with the new Freedom Tower. The tower's flush curtain wall of alternating glass and metal grating was designed by corporate giant SOM and the schizophrenic plaza paving and voluptuous entangled cherry fountain sculpture by landscape architecture's Elvis Costello - Ken Smith. The performance stage was set for a free public concert featuring M. Ward, and more importantly, my friends from Omaha, McCarthy Trenching. Sadly, I missed the performance of Dan, Steve, et al., but it was great to spend time afterwards.



















As the typically vacuous and isolated plaza filled with a Brooklynesque crowd uncharacteristic of Lower Manhattan, I was mostly preoccupied with avoiding a $25 open container fine and the continually scrolling digital letters inside the tower's lobby that formed the backdrop to the stage. The scrolling words are all catastrophic capitalized fragments: FIRE, HYPNOTIC, SMOKE, CITY. The whole scene was such an odd combination of the brightly colored, fast moving glass framed text completely out of sync with the soft, honky-tonk lyrics of M.Ward. But the combination provided a moment so fundamentally American to me; tragic, over-the-top, yet completely humble and heart felt, inseparably jumbled. Ah America. You're so intriguing.

Coffee Flavored Coffee.

Eisenberg's is one of the oldest old-school diners in New York City. They gave me a crazy complimentary East Coast diner drink called an Egg Creme which coincidentally contains no egg products. However, their sign boasts a nice hot cup of coffee flavored coffee. Egg creme with no eggs and coffee flavored like coffee. Hmmmmm.

Photo credits: Shaun Smakal

Ghosts Aplenty.

This week has been mania and the blog has received the short end of the stick. Thanks for the emails in the interim checking on my existence. I've had 3 separate house guests this week, bringing the grand total to 21 or 22 guests (I lost count somewhere) since moving to NYC mid-May. It seems that there is nothing more coveted than free accommodations in NYC and I've been happy to host everyone. Moving to New York seems to have bridged many different realms of my past - reconnecting with friends from decades ago and I guess catching up after the period of time I lived in Vancouver and was more or less secluded from my previous worlds. NYC does sometimes seem like the center of the planet through which everyone and everything passes.

In addition to guest-o-rama, Halloween was mania. New Yorkers can't do anything in a mellow fashion and really, what city is more secular and celebratory than The Big Apple? Since I live in the West Village, it was incumbent on me to participate in the 34th annual NYC Village Halloween Parade despite any of my actual desires. Plus, what is more relaxing after a long day at work than 2 million spectators and 50,000 parade participants in a Bacchanalian frenzy in your small, quaint 1800's brownstone neighborhood? The Village Halloween Parade is apparently the largest celebration of its kind in the world and has been picked by Festivals International as "The Best Event in the World" for October 31. This year is the first time in the parade's history that it started before dusk since daylight savings time has been extended for an extra week this year. I only saw a small portion of the parade, which was other worldly as far as the costuming. Unbelievable, in fact. There were no plastic masks, homemade rockstar outfits or anything from the domestic tickle trunk. The theme was a giant puppet show, which seemed ironic to me since the streets of New York are like a giant puppet show everyday. I guess this performance was simply making it literal.








Like all great festivities, the true culturally interesting part came afterwards when the already barricaded, police lined streets turned into something akin to a purposeless version of the Paris riots. Domestic disputes, car accidents, vomiting witches and goblins. I even saw a cop get pummeled by an airborne pumpkin. That made me laugh. It was total anarchy with no purpose other than debauchery. The police helicopters hummed in the sky over my apartment late into the night, perhaps until morning.

The next morning on my way to the subway for my daily commute, the streets of the village were eerily silent and covered in more trash than I've ever witnessed outside of a third world country. I missed the boat by not having my camera with me to document the ghostly remains of an event that almost seemed imaginary.

Another Italian Down.

Another pair of Italian shoes have succumbed to the streets of New York. What the heck? Why aren't the Italians coming through for me here? I have invested in them with staunch loyalty. But 2 in one month? And this pair sadly before the first snow. I'm considering an investment in foot protection made of Kevlar. Maybe by Russians. Or Mongolians.

Power of Politic.

So the best thing about working for a firm principaled by two women is the amount of resources put towards female types of initiatives - collaboration, education, hospitality (parties), etc. This statement may seem stereotypical but there is actually a significant body of research regarding the leadership styles of women. Especially so since more and more business leadership roles in the states are being created and filled by women.

Last Wednesday, my principals arranged a morning long office tour of Central Park with one of the park tour guides. I can't imagine a more frustrating tour for a guide - 15 landscape architects who collectively might know more about Central Park than himself. Many small details were discussed about what sculpture came from where, which trees have been replaced in the last 150 years, that the reservoir would be empty in exactly 8 minutes if it were ever needed as an emergency water source for the population of Manhattan, that boys once had to present their report cards to be able to play in the children's park, that girls were not allowed in the children's park for more than 75 years of it's existence.



Aside from the details, every trip to Central Park astonishes me; the foresight, the legacy, the grand intent of social justice in 843 acres of entirely public space in the dead center of one of the most urban environments on the planet. Of course, the great American empire has fostered an edge condition to the park that is entirely unaffordable and unobtainable to anyone outside of extreme wealth or aristocratic pedigree. Ah the contradictions of fabulous intent met with capitalist zeal. I digress. In addition, the park is a primary example of 'landscape urbanism' 150 years before the term was popularly coined; the argument that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. It seems that Olmsted and Vaux fervently believed in this principle but at the time had no idea what effect on the surrounding urban fabric their park would ultimately induce. Comparing Central Park to other parks of it's size around the world leads to a curious question: is a park in the middle of a dense urban island a more complex and more effective gesture than one on the edge or in the middle of an already natural surrounding - the condition of a majority of park space/land in the United States? This question makes me think of Stanely Park in Vancouver, a park I know very well. Although a gorgeous and important civic (sort of) space, I always secretly wished it contained more 'designed' urban park elements simply because of the 5 minutes away availability of the type of 'wild' open space it mimics on the North Shore.

The tour was enjoyable and as a finale we were ushered into a room that houses the original 10' long, hand drawn site plan of the park. Of course it was cool to see, but I have to admit I was more intrigued by a clock that hung above the door:



















At first I assumed it to be counting down the days until George Bush leaves office - a very logical assumption. But no. It is a countdown, to the second when Mayor Bloomberg leaves office. The clock, which apparently exists in every city office that has anything to do with parks, open space, public space, is a reminder of the fear of the unknown successor to the 'green' friendly Bloomberg administration. The open and public spaces of New York City have not received as much support, perhaps ever, from a city mayor. And people are working like crazy to accomplish many things before that clock runs out. 801 days left - most of which I plan to spend contributing to this effort.

If You Build It.

This morning I arrived at the office to a flurry of excitement over this photo one of my coworkers acquired:



It's the first sign of progress on development of The High Line and it was installed sometime between Friday and Monday. Yup, it's a bench. A little old bench and some mighty sexy paving. The first of hundreds to be installed across the entire derelict elevated rail corridor that runs for 1.5 miles above most of West Chelsea, much to the excitement of skateboarders throughout the city. I hadn't thought of the inhumane skateboard deterrents we installed all over Vancouver when I was practicing there until I saw this photo. Such miscreants were so rabidly eschewed in most details of the built form in that city. I'm guessing (and hoping) there won't be any metal spikes installed on this project.

The Highline will be converted into fully publicly accessible park space by I believe 2010. There are a bunch of construction photos here


Current Highline.

Future Highline

It's so funny to me how excited everyone in the landscape community here gets over the installation of 'a' bench, but I like it. It's about collective progress in a good way. But I'm sure this small little construction moment will instigate an even faster and mightier brand of real estate action around the corridor. I suspect the warehouses in the project rendering above will soon be much shinier than represented there. Sometimes landscape architecture is a double edged sword - often the first step in more gentrification. But we can't stop. And we shouldn't stop. Right? Sometimes I'm not sure.

Image credits: Friends of The High Line and Curbed.com

Attempted Atonement.

Friday night I met up with Dustin, Jessica, and Aaron in what was my attempt to do penance for the deplorable fact that I missed the Gordon Matta-Clark show at the Whitney this summer. One thing about living in NYC is the logistical impossibility of attending the thousands of potentially valuable and enriching events around the city each week. Out of sheer exhaustion, it eventually becomes a game of chance.

The Center for Architecture showed three of Matta-Clark's short videos of the various site-specific installation projects he undertook in the 60's and 70's. Although the acoustics were horrendous due to the noise of floor fans compensating for the broken geothermal system at the Center, it was fun to watch the process-oriented Super 8 filming as Matta-Clark and cohorts sawed a house in half allowing a sliver of sunlight to reflect through the house to the ground opposite:


The next video reeled while they peeled apart the facade of another in a series of 9ths in preparation for demolition, creating a condition where the interior became completely exposed to the surrounding landscape in an almost eerily vulnerable architectural section. The final footage was a dalliance in the underbelly infrastructure of New York City; giant concrete pipes, dripping water, sewage aqueducts, and even fields of columbaria. Matta-Clark has been in my realm of knowledge maybe since high school, but I've never seen these videos, and sadly, I've never seen the drawings, montages, pieces of walls that were undoubtedly in the Whitney show. Friday night, I learned that there are just some things for which there isn't acceptable penance.

Morphosis-ing? Morphosis-izing? Morphing.

Last week I finally got to sink my teeth into a project that's been sitting on the periphery of my workload for weeks, shoved to the side by the almighty Harlem. I was worried the project was going to get passed off to someone else in the meantime. But alas, a couple days freed up and I got to indulge.

Morphosis architects in Los Angeles have been designing a new school for Cooper Union in the East Village. We are the landscape architects on the project and are doing a roofscape - mostly a narrow 160' long bed of eight types of mass planted grasses and strips of crushed glass, running underneath a series of columns, directing occupants vision towards the skyline of downtown Manhattan. Everything in between the project site and downtown is low built form due to a giant slab of bedrock that could never be heavily built upon, therefore affording a fantastic view corridor. I wish I could post photos of the project renderings, but that might get me in trouble. Here is one I grabbed from Arcspace. Way not as cool, but will give you an idea of the project:

The greatest asset of the site is that all four sides have free, unencumbered facades, leaving the architects with tremendous freedom. Very seldom is a new building constructed in New York City with more than 2 free facades.

I wanted to experience this project, even if only briefly, because Thom Mayne of Morphosis is our next speaker in the Omaha design speaker series I've blogged about previously. I'm looking forward to attending dinner with him on that occasion, and knowing this project gives me something with which to connect. I also wanted to experience this project because of the uniqueness of Cooper Union as an institution, as well as their position as vast property owner in Manhattan. They now own the Chrysler Building as part of their endowment. However, the school is most well known as one of the few American institutions of higher learning to offer a full-tuition scholarship to all admitted students.

The Cooper Union was founded by American industrialist Peter Cooper, who had less than a year of formal schooling but went on to become an industrialist and an inventor; designing and building America's first steam railroad engine. Originally intended to be called simply "the Union," the Cooper Union began with adult night classes on applied sciences and architectural drawing, as well as day classes for women on the subjects of photography, telegraphy, typewriting and shorthand; types of education not widely available to women in the late-1800's, at what was called the Female School of Design. Those free classes—a landmark in American history and the prototype for what is now called continuing education—have evolved into three distinguished schools that make up The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The Cooper Union is also where the Red Cross and NAACP were organized and where Susan B. Anthony had her offices. How cool.

Peter Cooper's dream was to give talented young people the one privilege he lacked—a good education. He also wanted to make possible the development of talent that otherwise would have gone undiscovered. Considering this history, I feel fortunate to spend even a couple days, in a relatively indirect way, in hopefully what is a reciprocation of gratitude and good will.

Urban Bivouac?

I'm learning that the modern conveniences of real city living aren't as predictable and stable as they seem. My building has been without water for 2 days now. For the average New Yorker this is akin to living in the country. The photo above displays the culprit of the situation - a broken water main that has turned into some type of dispute between the City of New York and the utility company. We don't know the whole story, but it has turned our lives into a sort of urban camping. This morning I took my pre-work shower in the sink of Doma - the Italian coffeeshop across the street, last night my bedtime bathroom routine at Extra Virgin - the wine bar next door. I more or less brushed my teeth with red wine.

And of course, I can't help but revel in the contradictory nature of it all. It's only 2 days - not a big deal when mindful of the condition of the world's water supply. But considering the exorbitant financial sacrifices one makes to live and work in hyper-urbanized Manhattan (every penny worth it), living without a toilet, shower, drinking water, etc. is enjoyably absurd.

If this situation continues through the weekend, some neighbors and I are considering hitting the Central Park lagoon with camp suds. Could be fun.

Re-Action.

Re-action is about rearranging, repositioning, or reordering an old (and maybe ineffectual) action. But if there weren't the initial action, there would be no reason for a Re-action. So here are props for every action that helps to initiate something better.

Happy Blog Action Day!

Where Will You Walk?

This entry is for all of you who attended graduate school.

All those dollars, all those hours slaving away on some arbitrary project ultimately to be judged by some random person who, mostly by your own admission, holds intellectual prowess over you and your ideas. I will never forget a professor telling me he could 'teach me how to think'. Really? Wouldn't I love to finally learn how to think after all these years! Thanks for the generosity and the patronization. Academia is often a bizarre place. And then you graduate to find the world outside those walls doesn't much care what you produced late some Saturday night during winter vacation based on an obscure theory devised by a Marxist Frenchmen in the 1960's on the streets of Paris(RIP Henri Lefebvre, hearts to you). I did spend a semester studying architecture in Tokyo in what was a decent educational experience. During that time I worked on a little project serially documenting the crosswalks of Tokyo as occupiable ground plane delineated by simple paint. The project didn't garner much interest in the classroom, but I had a great time doing it, trying to represent an often overlooked, albeit undeniably vibrant, urban space.





















































































































































































Here I am, 3 years later, spending countless hours a day staring at CAD drawings of the crosswalks of Harlem. It may be the first time in my professional life where my graduate experience is influencing and even animating my work. In many ways the crosswalks in my Harlem project seem more complex and beautiful than those of Tokyo because of the overhead transit infrastructure. However, they don't have the sheer volume of people creating a mini-city every 12 minutes for 40-seconds.

This has led me to a curiosity of the greater Manhattan crosswalks and an evening spent with a landscape architect's best friend - Google Earth - in search of the coolest crosswalks in Manhattan. My search came up completely empty. Even Times Square isn't all that intriguing. But what is cool about the crosswalks of New York is both their regularity and relentlessness. They comprise a shockingly large percentage of the public urban landscape. I could expand this study by finding a total square footage of crosswalks in Manhattan. That would be fascinating............Maybe another day!

For now, I pieced together an image of Park Avenue from it's southern terminus at Union Square to where it more or less ends on the ground at East 97th - 83 blocks of crosswalks. Blogger won't let me post the entire image since it's 400 inches long. Here they are tiled side by side, progressively from north to south:

Landscape Personified Cinematically.

This weekend is a cinematic glut in New York City. With the openings of "Lars and the Real Girl" - the blow up doll movie that dominated the Toronto Film Festival, "Control" - the black-and-white biopic about the leader of Joy Division, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" - who can miss another stellar Kate Blanchett movie, Kenneth Branagh's remake of "Sleuth", and the New York narco-drama "We Own the Night", or any of the other dozen movies opening this week in the city.

But most importantly was the kick off of the annual NYASLA landscape film series on Friday night. This year the films were chosen for containing a landscape so consequential to the narrative it became it's own character. Landscape as character. Of course. It seems more than logical to me.



The line up is small but nice. I'm always happy to see both Godard and Kurosawa in a discussion regarding landscape, and usually just in general. I know nothing about "Gerry", and unfortunately I missed it due to an idiotic Friday evening Polshek deadline at work.

I have since taken the liberty of building my own list of films I would include in a must-watch film series for die hard landscape obsessives.

Here it is:

Yasujiro Ozu, "I Was Born, But...." (1932)
Robert Rossellini, "German Year Zero" (1947)
Nunnally Johnson, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1956)
Walter Lang, "The King and I" (1956)
Orson Welles, "Touch of Evil" (1958)
Yasujiru Ozu, "Good Morning" (1959)
Francois Truffaut, "The 400 Blows" (1959)
Peter Brook, "Lord of the Flies" (1963)
Gillo Pontecorvo, "The Battle of Algiers" (1965)
Frank Perry, "The Swimmer" (1968)
Bryan Forbes, "The Stepford Wives" (1975)
Don Siegel, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978)
Tobe Hooper, "Poltergeist" (1982)
Luchino Visconti, "Death in Venice" (1985)
Hector Barbenco, "Pixote" (1985)
Cheech Marin, "Born in East L.A." (1987)
Kar Wai Wong, "Happy Together" (1987)
Abbas Kiarostami, "Where is the Friend's House" (1987)
Abbas Kiarostami, "Life and Nothing More....."(1991)
Mira Nair, "Mississippi Masala" (1991)
Mathieu Kassovitz, "La Haine" (1995)
Martin Scorsese, "Kundun" (1997)
John O'Hagan, "Wonderland" (1997)
Ang Lee, "The Ice Storm" (1997)
Daniel Friedman and Sharon Grimberg, "Miss India Georgia" (1997)
Alain Bertiner, "My Life in Pink" (1997)
Gary Ross, "Pleasantville" (1998)
Mira Nair, "Salaam Bombay" (1998)
Edward Yang, "A One and A Two" (2000)
David and Laurie Shapiro, "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale" (2000)
Todd Haynes, "Far From Heaven" (2002)
Atom Egoyan, "Ararat" (2002)

Hoofing it on Screws.

Here lies the results of a night out in NYC. I wish I could say my metal heeled Italian boots are now trashed because I was walking for peace to the United Nations. But really, I was just cruising around.

Seriously, this damage was accrued in one evening. Those are bare screws on the point heels. The conditions are treacherous out there.

Rule #1: Broken.

I'm breaking a cardinal rule of this blog: never blog about something I haven't personally experienced. But since this topic beautifully complies with all other bloggular rules attached to this blog, I will make an exception.

Yesterday at 10am, members of the Rome-based research group Stalker Lab orchestrated the NY Peace Walk: In the Footsteps of Paul Auster. Starting at the Storefront for Architecture, participants walked to the United Nations Building spelling the word PEACE along the way.

So, 'great' you say. That's very clever, and pointed, and counter-cultural like a good public performance by an unfortunately named group of erudite Italian artists/architects who are nostalgic for the situationist movement of the 1960's by intellectualizing the simple act of walking. Although I enjoy their intent, I don't understand the accompanying manifesto. It seems to be just complex words about walking. Simple walking. (Mark, I hope you read this)

I'm more interested in this event for other reasons. Firstly, as an advocate for the use of the city's public landscape as interpretive space - open to anyone who wants to unfold their uncanny ideas upon it. Come one, come all. Do whatever you'd like. The stranger the better in my book. Secondly because after my most recent dalliance with the United Nations, I keep a close eye on it. And thirdly, because the name Paul Auster is one I haven't considered for years, and doing so gives me exciting things to ponder.

My undergrad at the U of Nebraska was peppered with Auster. His book The Music of Chance had just been released and some random college professor decided to spring it upon a bunch of 18 year olds from nowhere-Nebraska. I distinctly remember it's premise about the search for identity and personal meaning and the role of coincidence and random events. Or more succinctly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment. So of course, because I enjoy coincidence, and seem to be experiencing more of it than usual, I did a little research on the writing of Mr. Auster. I found this:

Two strong elements in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis. In short Lacan's theory describes that we constitute the world in words. We observe the world through our senses but they only enter our mind when we find the right words. Thus our subconscious is also structured in language.

Instances of coincidence can be found all over Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by all the consistent stories that surround them, that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives. - Wikipedia

I guess this little reminder of a piece of literature from over 10 years ago, via seemingly wordy Italian walkers, is confirmation to keep on looking. And to keep on blogging. And that perhaps, as I have loosely intuited, vibrant urbanity creates more coincidence in our lives because maybe it lessens the doldrum of consistency.

Bruce Mau and Finn Juhl Face Off In Omaha.

Ah Omaha, you are so humorous. I took this photo Friday morning at my favorite coffeehouse in Dundee which is right next door to my favorite Belgian bistro and beer house, which is across the street from my favorite falafel and kabob parlor, which is down the street from Urban Outfitters where I like to watch Saddle Creekers strut their stuff, which is next door to the art film theatre, which is down the street from both my favorite scotch tasting room and my favorite live music bar. Omaha friends reading this will be both shocked and relieved that I didn't mention Nomad Lounge, for the benefit of everyone's health. I realized that this new setup going between Omaha and New York City - which by the way is the easiest airplane commute ever at a direct 3 hours - affords me an enjoyable social situation. Since I'm there every two months, I can schedule back to back outings for a few solid days in order to see and chat with everyone, business and otherwise. Coffee/breakfast, lunch, coffee, shopping, dinner, drinks, film, drinks, music. Fantastic!




The weekend began with a wonderful lecture by Bruce Mau - the first speaker in a new series I've helped start with a group of other design minded people. The lecture was held at the Joslyn Art Museum, a postmodern kick in the pants of a building designed by Norman Foster. Despite the ambivalence of the horrific exterior form built with beautiful material, the interior courtyard is actually a grand party space. Bruce's talk was well presented to over 800 Omahans in attendance. Good thing we printed an extra 300 tickets at the last minute as backup. I finally understand Massive Change after all these years. It's not just an environmentalist guilt trip in the form of a museum exhibition, but rather an optimistic commentary on the current state of the globally accelerated design and building trends as an impetus to keep up with the global population explosion. I actually found this to be tremendously encouraging - to 'keep on keeping on' trying to make places and spaces better. It may not necessarily be that the United States is one big bloated, gentrified mess of urbanization that is done and ready to be flipped over and poked with the fork, but maybe simply in a transition period that we don't know how to properly scrutinize because we've never dealt with these population numbers. The question and answer period of the lecture was also encouraging with the best questions I've witnessed in a lecture of this kind. Every question was asked by women and the discussion grew more and more intelligent as it explored issues of design and population control. Bruce concluded with a statement that the only way to healthy population control is through a commitment to the education and liberation of women. A woman that is educated and liberated doesn't want 15 children, and will choose when, where, and if she gives birth. This led my mind on a tangent of the contemporary issues that can compromise the liberation of a woman, including sexual health. Interesting to ponder.

So beyond Bruce Mau the weekend was typical with a frenzy of nonprofit development and fundraising. And of course construction experimentation. I have a little house on my family's farm that I've been experimenting with for years. It was built in the 1920's by my grandfather as a home for the hired farm hand. He built the entire structure from salvaged building scraps of a demolished bomber plant at the nearby U.S. military base. Yes, I live in a reconstituted bomber plant. I try to complete a small construction task during every trip to Omaha. I've taken the house through tremendous transformations in the last 10 years, with a long negligent hiatus while in Vancouver. This weekend I finally finished the demolition of a wall and it's replacement with a wood beam. My little Finn Juhl chair finally has a corner all it's own.

Omaha Or Bust.

Yesterdays post was a strategic segue into my looming trip to Omaha today. I'm so excited. I enjoy going to Omaha like some people enjoy going to exotic, far away places. Omaha is a vacation for me. It happens to contain all my favorite things in concentration. Not to mention the abstract beauty of the place.

I'm making the trip this weekend for an exciting event. I helped begin a design speaker series there: daOMA (design alliance Omaha). It's obvious that architects are involved in an endeavor when the capitalization of letters are 'creatively' organized. Our first speaker is debuting on Thursday, October 4, Mr. Bruce Mau. He will be followed by Thom Mayne in the spring, which will fortunately warrant another plane ride for yours truly. I'm most looking forward to the opportunity to show Mr. Mau around the small but mighty City of Omaha. I have always believed that anyone who can set aside their preconceptions long enough to actually end up in Omaha are somehow 'special, chosen' people. That's how utterly cool I think the place is. And it's still a bit of a secret, except for the rather large New York Times article written awhile back by Omahan Kurt Andersen, purveyor of NPR's art radio show Studio 360. As a result, there has been a small flood of NYC fashion editors, artists, and musicians relocate to Omaha to get in on a piece of the action. This has some locals worried about things like gentrification and rent prices. I think it's exciting.

We believe this speaker series has the potential to take the Omaha design community to the next level, hopefully leaving behind a superficial and stylistic formalism that has plagued it for years. Hopefully the discourse created by the group is able to jump between scales and utimately lead the discussion surrounding it's future urbanism.

Resting From the Tempest.

The calm after the storm. Is there anything more satisfying, really? I wish I had the words to describe it properly. I remember numerous times while growing up when tornadoes threatened and often ravaged the farm. I strangely liked the whole process; the sirens, the gathering together of everyone you care about, descending into the cave accessed through the basement of the farmhouse with blankets and a battery operated radio, on the way there sneaking a glance out a window at the strangely silent green sky hoping for a glimpse of the notorious funnel cloud. My dad worried about the cattle. My mom worried about her family. All the while I would try to convince my dad to sneak me outside to see and experience just a few seconds of the event. These pleas were always tempting to him and a few times he succumbed until we both became too frightened by a force way bigger and more violent than ourselves and would run for shelter. I know exactly what his face looked like when he sensed that we overstayed our welcome in the presence of the storm. That look is one of the few things in life that makes my heart beat fast. I always envisioned the storm beautiful; a giant confluence of temperatures in the sky. Cold meets hot to create a whole new color uncharacteristic of the 180 degree horizon of the midwest. It was refreshing to see something as large as the midwest sky change so drastically. It was a reminder that everything can and does change.

As we sat in the cave, we listened through the air pipe leading above ground to the symphony occurring outside. I loved those sounds. Everything occurred rapidly and loudly. From alarming silence to total chaos and back to silence again. We would speculate about which roofs were being torn off what buildings and where they might be set back down by the storm. It seems twisted now to write that, but that was our way of participating as time passed in that small, musty, underground space surrounded by decades old canned tomatoes and such.

When all would quiet, we would carefully emerge and assess the damage. Without fail, every storm like this instantly produces a bright, sunny, beautiful day replete with chirping birds. As if nothing happened. The only sign that it wasn't a figment of our collective imaginations was the often scattered corrugated tin in the surrounding fields, sometimes gently residing on top of the corn plants, as if the storm had violently ripped them off and then carefully placed them down in a balancing act, perhaps to demonstrate how it did actually have the ability to be sensitive. For days after, neighbors would come and go, looking for pieces of their own farms that may have done some traveling and spend hours speculating which direction the wind blew from and the exact path of the storm, etc, etc. I liked these days. They were strangely calming.

Our presentation to head NYC planner occurred yesterday morning. It was fun. Completely enjoyable to see all that frenzy of hard work, not unlike a tornado, be summed up in 1/2 hour presentation. To an outsider, the product and process appeared effortless. There was nothing indicative of the several weeks worth of laborious all-nighters, stressful moments, and general hard work on behalf of many people.

I spent today cleaning, organizing, and recycling pounds worth of paper. And generally enjoying the calm after the storm.

Involuntarily Obsequious to Rats.

Condoms are hip and cool, like riding the subway everyday. Er. Um. Ok, that comparison doesn't work so well. Maybe the initiators of this NYC safe sex campaign haven't had the pleasure of experiencing a 4AM ride on the A or C line whereby one's greatest concern is being eaten/rushed by the thousands of rats who emerge onto the silence of the platform. If only our friend, Robert Moses, had been as invested in the development of the subway system as he was in the superblock and the highway. But seriously, all rats aside, even those who demolish old neighborhoods for new highways, and those who unnecessarily pass along std's to others, I will enthusiastically support the above campaign. Condom usage is humanitarian because it keeps you and your friends lives happy and well. What could honestly be more important than that? Not much.

Alphabet Soiree O'Rings.

The 26-day Z-A alphabet anniversary party at the storefront is already crazy, and we're only on day 'R'. There are often too many people to afford a good critical glimpse of the nightly programming occuring in the ring dome, but tonight Michael Sorkin and others will be discussing Eyal Weizman's new book, Hollow Land. Should be good.





Tomorrow: Q
Armin Linke screens the US premier of his award winning film-in-progress on the Alps realized in collaboration with architect Piero Zanini. Alpi, a synchronized projection onto 3 screens with surround sound, is a captivating visual investigation that debunks many of the myths surrounding the picturesque alpine landscape, exposing it as a hotbed for experimentation in social, economic and political relations. The film was awarded a Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Tuesday 2 October: P
CPH Experiments, five groundbreaking proposals for high-density living by BIG/Bjarke Ingels Group. I heard through the grapevine that the opening will be followed by Bjarke's Birthday Bash at Club 205 on Chrystie St. Probably not a birthday bash to miss, plus good times are usually had at Club 205 - one of my favorite hidden away haunts in Manhattan. It's so 'factory-esque' and there's something enticing about entering through the plastic curtain.








Btw, thanks for your positive emails about the blog. It's fun and cathartic and I'm glad people are enjoying my self-indulgent rambling. That's what blogs are really about, no?

Well Aged Controversy.

The New York ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) has what they call a 'bi-weekly happy hour'. This is basically a studio crawl twice a month to landscape architect offices around the city where the food and wine is for certain the best any attendees partake in during a typical work week. These Thursday night events are a highlight of the week for me. Great food, even better wine, 200+ young, hip landscape architects, and seeing the various work environments around the city.

Last weeks soiree was at Michael Van Valkenburgh's gorgeous Union Square studio. My office happens to have 3 spousal connetions at MVVA, so that made the night more entertaining than usual. And the fact that MVVA has their own in-house yoga instructor, who, much to my chagrin (I've always wanted to use that word) wasn't there for the party. I could use some help with this AutoCad crook neck.

It was a typical studio happy hour meeting new people. And somehow I found myself in the middle of a heated discussion about the work my firm is doing at Lincoln Center. In particular the alteration of Dan Kiley's mid-century urban bosque and reflecting pool. Most of the preservationist anger was directed towards Diller+ Scofidio rather than my peeps, but we're no doubt guilty by association. Perhaps more so because it's our responsibility.

Dan Kiley is one of the most well revered modernist landscape architects in the world. Kiley believed that geometry was an inherent part of man and the structure man could use to help comprehend her surroundings. He also believed that man was a part of nature, rather than being separate from it - a controversial belief during Kiley's time when the picturesque was the foremost landscape practice. Rather than copying and trying to imitate the curvilinear forms of nature he asserted mathematical order to the landscape. Kiley’s landscapes overstepped their boundaries rather than ending elements neatly on a suggested edge. He called this approach slippage, or an extension beyond the implied boundary, creating ambiguous relationships in the landscape.

Kiley's work at Lincoln Center, although not one of his most notable landscapes, is a geometric work of art. The design centers on "quartet" planters surrounded by a tightly spaced tree bosque. The combination of the two spatial elements produces a strong order to the complex as a whole. Kiley's signature use of minimalist and well proportioned planters creates spatial containment and a balanced relationship between the series of open plazas, courts and shaded bosque areas. "Quartets" of plane trees were planted in twenty-foot square travertine planters, which were partially recessed to minimize their scale. The mature trees today at Damrosch Park, which will be demolished in phase 2 of the redevelopment, are supremely healthy, and proof of the timelessness of Kiley's urban forest concept.

As the landscape architects on this project, it is difficult to approach such honorable work in a delicate and respectful manner. I don't know how the conversation I had tonight will affect anything, but I am grateful for such informed and concerned conversation with my fellow practitioners in the city. It contributes to my growth and transformation as a landscape architect. And that is very important.

Hearts.

Last night at 2AM, at the zenith of a full-on production frenzy, I was frazzled, tired, irritated, underslept, and still working to make designs, drawings, plans, and images better. I've learned that stints like this are required to create anything truly great. Maybe I'm a masochist of sorts in this regard, but I have yet to see fabulous human movements of any kind arise from either comfort or without great labor.

In the middle of all this work, I stumbled upon this aerial of Harlem and it made me stop for a moment. Funny? Cheesy? Peculiar? Doesn't matter because it made me smile.

Countdown.

The countdown begins. 72 hours until I must finish 15 giant color boards for presentation to New York City head city planner, Amanda Burden. I must convince her of many things regarding the streetscapes around Columbia's giant expansion into Harlem. I've had an absolute blast designing this thing and now to my favorite part........the race to the finish. This is the best part of the process. It's a game of speed and single focus concentration. I get to ignore everything else in my life and pour everything I have into a representation of 3-dimensional space in 2-dimensions. The office has given me several people to keep busy on graphics while I continue developing the design. I have already embedded a few little secrets in the design, as I always try to do. As the hours wear on the energy rises. As I said before, this is my Disney Land.........

Future You?

A few weeks ago, my friend Seng and I were talking about older people we know, their lives, what we respect, what their lives will be like when they face death, and how they've affected us, both positively and negatively. Seng then proceeded to speculate what I'll be like at age 55. Honestly, I can't wait to be 55. Women can be so amazing at that age. I hope to have the good fortune to live to 55. I can only imagine the things I could experience in the next 24 years.

The next morning I was watching my principal at work who is 55-60 years old, as the conversation from the night before was fresh in my mind. She has been building landscapes and teaching in NYC for over 30 years and is wildly ambitious, forthright, and dignifying, while strong, feminine, and not easily swayed by fashion or hype. She looks 10 years younger than she is, I think simply because of her high level of concerned social activity. For the first time in my life, I am working with a woman who is a mentor to me.

As most of my close friends know, I can easily be found on a Saturday night watching documentaries on figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt. I'm a nerd. But what an amazingly fabulous woman that few Americans know much about. She died with one of the largest CIA files of any American politician because of her continuously controversial involvement with social activism in the United States. Near the end of her life, after her husband and U.S. president died with his mistress instead of her at his side, she went on to arduously help establish the United Nations. As a friend at work says: nothing is ever created without painstaking labor.

Speaking of labor, there is my mom. A relatively simple woman who has devoted her life to her family, and the success and independence of her 3 female children. Paradoxically, she has some conservative ideas about the roles of women in the world, but at the same time she is deeply angered anytime the femininity of her children is compromised - to the degree that she would become violent if she knew how.

There is an older woman on my nonprofit's board of directors. Her husband was a land developer who died prematurely. She has since devoted her life to philanthropic activity in Omaha as she manages her husbands foundation. She is one of the most vibrant and interesting 60-something women I have ever met and often tells me how lucky she is to live a life where she gets to put money in places that make the world more beautiful.

Back to Seng's question of what I'll be like at age 55? I have some ideas of what I hope to be. How about you? Can you think of people you think are out of this world?

Coincidii.

Is coincidence sincere or is the world simply smaller than our minds perception? This has become a regularly occurring question since moving to NYC. I suppose because the city seems so huge, but more than anyplace I've lived, coincidence seems more active. Maybe it's not even coincidence, but rather a product of true urbanity. Or perhaps I give things more relevance than necessary. But it makes life more fun and meaningful.



Last night my dear friend Courtney and I met up after work at the kickoff anniversary party of the Storefront for Architecture. I have a loyalty to the storefront because it's the scene of my first real New York design experience that I'll never forget back in late May - the Postopolis conference. Anyway, last night was packed as usual, free beer as usual, and the typical New York design crowd spilling out of the perforated facade of the tiny sliver of a structure the storefront occupies. I coincidentally ran into one of the speakers from Postopolis who is a cronie of Michael Sorkin in starting the non-profit Terreform. Since I have an addiction with parity to methamphetamine regarding design nonprofits, I was of course interested in this new organization. It's been on my mind to swing by their office ever since. They occupy what I call the 'New York Design Ghetto' at 180 Varick. Everyone has an office in that building. If you're ever in New York, swing by and simply read the directory in the lobby. It's mindblowing the amount of design work and speculation that goes on in that building everyday. Terreform is a nonprofit devoted to both practical and theoretical projects at all scales with a special interest in the city. They're wacky, as one would suspect from anything Sorkin.



I don't particularly jive with the forms they derive, but I do like how huge and unconventionally they operate and the massive topics they take on through grants, private funders, etc. Most notable is their rendition of the future New York where the figure ground inverses as buildings colonize in what are now the streets and the building blocks become productive green and open spaces. It's out there, but what a fantastic image to ponder. It'll take your mind 10,000 other places in the process.

During my conversation with Mr. Terreform, he shared with me their agenda to produce a counter plan to the Columbia expansion into Harlem. I closed my eyes for a moment and then quietly laughed. I told him what I've been slaving away on and some of my experiences thus far. He gave me loads of info on the history of it all and we exchanged business cards.

As if that wasn't enough to give the evening some extra somethin' somethin', Courtney drug me to some random guys apartment for wine and sea bass. I had no clue who this guy is and she hadn't seen him for 3-4 years. We arrived to a beautiful Nolita apartment (with a piano!) and only 5-6 people, mostly San Francisco musicians and coincidentally a woman named Jamie who I worked with at the Van Alen Institute a couple months ago and haven't seen since.

We proceeded to cook a 12 pound fillet of sea bass from the Chelsea Fish Market and converse over the smallness of the world for the remainder of the evening. Paradoxical? Maybe........


Sorkin image credit Terreform website

Public Sublety.

This banner addressed to Columbia University appeared on my project site in Harlem today. I noticed it right after some black guy rushed me on the street while telling me to get out of his neighborhood, that I'm ruining it. How does he know I want to plant trees, put in street lights and do under lighting on the structure of the subway viaducts? I was non-descript in a black hoodie and ballcap just like him. What about Henry Vargas' 'Harlem Luxury Living' in the photo above? Is that ruining his neighborhood too?

Harlem Oh Harlem.

I've only been in New York City for 4 months now. Duing this time I've been given 3 projects to work on. Mitigating between Columbia's expansion into Harlem and the community (Renzo Piano project), Lincoln Center redevelopment (Diller+Scofidio project) and Cooper Union's new school near Union Square (Morphosis project). These are unbelievably fun projects. In fact, they're downright crazy. But here's the even crazier part: I love the Harlem project. Love it. The politics, the people, the physical space are a combination that is to die for in a landscape architecture project. To me it represents the purest form possible of landscape as social justice, which is the primary reason I practice landscape architecture.

We're working specifically on the public spaces of the streets surrounding the giant 17 acre demolition/expansion site and how that section of 125th Street connects with the rest of the Harlem corridor to the East and the new Harlem Piers to the West. If you remove the context of Harlem, it's really just another street project. But the fab part of the project is Harlem. My days are spent dealing with various players from the Harlem community and their differing agendas, various New York City economic development initiatives, and New York City Planning. I'm currently preparing for a giant presentation of my design thus far to the head city planner of New York, Ms. Amanda Burden. What a peculiarly interesting character in and of herself. A previous socialite once on the 'Best Dressed NYC' list who then attended Columbia's planning school, taught schoolkids in Harlem for awhile, and now dates Charlie Rose and is the head city planner. She's also a mentee of the late William Whyte, so has her own views on landscape and public project orchestration. I can't wait for the meeting/presentation. I can't wait. Like a kid waiting for a trip to Disney Land. This is my Disney Land.

Game On Nebraska!

Since I choose to live by the belief that there is no such thing as coincidence (or coincidii, in the plural) there has been yet another bloggerific moment. The day after attending Farm Aid, I received a letter from the U.S. Federal Government stating that they have granted the non-profit I started in Omaha, official 501(c)(3) status. It has been a full year of back and forth between me, our legal counsel, the board of directors, and the Internal Revenue Service - not at all painful, just a whole heckuva lot of work. Fun work though. What this means is that our grant applications, awards, and foundation contributions to date are now legit, and fully tax deductible. It means we're for real. So I suppose now is a good time to explain what we're doing, and why it's downright cool that this happened after attending Farm Aid.

As many of you know, I have a deep attachment to my hometown, Omaha. It's simply a very cool place. No cheesiness, gentrification is non-existent, fantastic arts, even more fantastic music, and most importantly, a rockus philanthropic scene. There is a certain understated saavy there that I haven't found anywhere else in the world just yet. I grew up with these things all the while farming with my dad. I drove tractors, putzed around the farm, and enjoyed watching and listening to him assess the land in ways a landscape architect would only hope to be able to do by the end of her career. As the years have gone on, I have consistently pursued landscape architecture as a profession, and the farm continues to be surrounded by absurd development. There are now 3 Super Wal-Marts in 3 cardinal directions not less than 5 miles from the original homestead - settled in the 1820's by my ancestors as they came to the midwest from Connecticut for free land.




Map of my family's land ownership in 1887, several decades after originally settling. At this point, some land had traded through marriages and small pox deaths. But check out the simplicity and regularity of that Jeffersonian grid. Relatively few incidences of subdivision of the original increment.




Current land division map, blue parcels have conventionally developed in the last decade.


My subconscious and intuition have been preparing me to eventually figure out what to do with 100's of acres in the middle of suburbia, directly adjacent to what I think is one of the most vibrant small cities in America. I have no idea what this may look like, but it seemed a good idea to start a non-profit to begin this pursuit, so I did it. We call ourselves an educational non-profit research and design collaborative with the mission of disseminating information to the public about the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape the built environment. We communicate with the public through exhibition, publication, and educational programming in order to establish a broad reaching forum for discussion.

We have 3 projects on the go right now. One is an international design competition for an enormous vacant grain elevator that sits near downtown Omaha. Holding such a competition and the ensuing public exhibition is one part of a discourse about the changing land use of the region as well as a suggestion of potential innovative future use for such derelict infrastructure of the past.






Another project is a giant scale print exhibition and built ground terrain in a vacant Wal-Mart. This is a complex project to describe here, so if you're really interested, email me. It's actually a rather shocking exposure of a whole separate underground economy that has been created by the commodification of high quality farmland for development. It's all quite shocking. We're working with a stellar aerial photographer out of Boston and another landuse arts nonprofit from San Francisco. It's actually rather fun working with Wal-Mart, calling their 'real estate' division and talking them into the use of their vacant structure for programming that ultimately talks about their affect on land culture, without ever having to overtly say it. They call it 'community contribution'.


Wal-Mart Exhibition with built ground terrain.


We are also preparing a large fundraising event called 'The Land Ball'. An evening of fab food under a big white tent in the middle of the farm with music. Should be fun.

My hope with these projects is that as I use them as means to slowly figure out what to ultimately do with land, I can simultaneously bring the community along by way of a proactive public involvement that isn't a stupid charette. So we'll see. Fun times the world has waiting for us all if we so desire to participate, no?

Americana with Cheese, Please.

I just experienced the most Americana possible in one day. Yesterday a multiple decades-long friend, James from San Francisco, flew into the city with two tickets to the first ever Farm Aid to be held in New York City. James also grew up on a farm in Nebraska - only his farm was really in the country. He attended Farm Aid #2 in 1986 held in Lincoln, Nebraska. So of course I wouldn't pass up a ticket to such an event 21 years later.


1986 Farm Aid in Lincoln, Nebraska


Nor did 80,000 other New Yorkers from all walks of life, apparently with one primary thing in common, rather than food, a dire hate of war and the current U.S. administration. This appeared to be the real underline of the concert, with a guise of interest in the family farm and the food we consume. I came to this conclusion after assessing the food options available during the 12 hour activist themed outdoor concert: belgian imported beer, french fries with cheese out of a pump, funnel cakes, hamburgers on white buns, etc. Of course there were signature booths set up with hay bales, and other farmy acoutrements, as well as a few token organic themed booths, but there were few food options even remotely reminiscent of the fresh from the earth, completely organic vittles I grew up on day in and day out on my parents family owned, 1820's homesteaded Midwest farm. I attribute this lifestyle to the fact that everyone in my family looks 10+ years younger than we really are. It's almost creepy.

So, not to dismiss the stellar entertainment provided by Neil Young and wife Pegi and their mild proselytizing about preservation of the family farm from corporate overtake; John Mellencamp and his boisterous good ol' American boy anti-war preaching; and Willie Nelson just being Willie--red bandanna, worn out guitar, songs about pot and beer drinking horses, patriotism, evil politicians, and social justice. Dave Matthews even suggested during his set that the audience go get a few organic corndogs. Organic corndogs? Are those next the the free samples of organic string cheese from Horizon - the company owned by Danon? Or are they next to the Chipotle tent - the chain restaurant previously owned by McDonalds? Corndogs and string cheese straight from the farm! And yes, the war is a greater atrocity than the state of food in America (maybe?), and major kudos to them for their proactive engagement through music rather than, say running away and living in another country while saying to hell with it all. But I think the Farm Aid attendees in New York City deserved the option of a fantastically good meal at their first ever Farm Aid. Don't you?


The Farm Aid Board: John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, and Neil Young. Photo taken at New York City Farm Aid, 2007.

Love Letter.

Fold This Turf. Now!

Have you ever tried to fold turf? It's not so easy. You see, when you fold turf, you end up with plant material, and soil, and whatever brave microorganisms hang around, at some weird angle - basically defying gravity. And if done improperly, the first rain storm will render said components into one big wet, moldy pile at the bottom of said angle. When it piles up like that, it doesn't really care that the turf is supposed to be on top. It's all quite 'versatile' at that point. Despite these odds, we're still tackling the challenge of folding turf at Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Center is a 16 acre development and home of 12 arts organizations: Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Juilliard School, Lincoln Center Theater, Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, School of American Ballet, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. It was built under the initiative of John Rockefeller during Robert Moses' urban renewal program in the 1960's. While I was at the Van Alen Institute a couple months ago, I ran across student work from most of the original architects: Max Abramovitz, Pietro Belluschi, Gordon Bunshaft, Wallace Harrison, Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen, all of whom at some time or another espoused belief in and practice of the 'International Style' of architecture. More importantly, the landscape is of the late, great, modernist landscape architect pioneer, Dan Kiley.

However, I suspect the only one who would approve of this strange folded turf plane is Mr. Saarinen. His variety of 'folding' was much more materially conducive to it's purpose.




Top image credit: Diller Scofidio Renfro

What the Hell?

2 days after the Atlantis post, I was involved in a real estate transaction with a man who's last name is 'Van Couvering'. That's right, a true descendant of Captain Vancouver. When I asked him if that was for real, he said "yup, I'm related to the guy who gave rats and goats to the Hawaiians, thus destroying their biodiversity and then proceeded to sail right on by something called San Francisco." I had to laugh, because only a cynical New Yorker would respond in such a manner.

The world is a strange and comical place, no?

Atlantis Heredity.

Last night at a party, my psychic friend from Brooklyn, Lester, had a premonition that I have past lives in Atlantis. Most likely those who built it. If this is true, then maybe Vancouver really is my place in the world. Or, that could help explain why the place made me uneasy. Utopia didn't pan out so well for my ancestors and hell if I was going to experience the giant catastrophic earthquake and be sucked into the ocean again. No way Jose!



Or maybe I need to go to Dubai and be a landscape architect on this project, which they really are building. It's called 'The Atlantis'. I hope the future inhabitants invest in homeowners insurance.

Rooftop Goodbye

I've never before been as sad about leaving a place as usually comes with leaving people and friends. But I am leaving my apartment on Charles Street very soon for other experiences and places. This rooftop has seen some fantastic summer nights and gatherings of people from the neighborhood. And is for certain one of the best views I've ever been privy to. I will take this view over one of the ocean anyday. So, I hearby invite everyone I know over for drinks, food, and great convo. May a private rooftop be public space one more time.

Tennis Mania

Last night Carlos talked me into trekking out to Flushing-Meadows, Queens to the U.S. Open. Probably not in the top 500 things I'd like to be doing in New York City, but hey, I'm open to new expansive experiences. I figured it may even be counter-cultural. Plus, I know several lifetime New Yorkers who are avid Central Park tennis players where the courts are more coveted even than affordable Manhattan rent. And, my secretary at work is a single mom, Jamaican immigrant to New York who's 12 year old daughter is a tennis prodigy. I've found a lot of pleasure in the excitement of her daughters potential stardom and dedication to hard work in getting there - definitely an American Dream type of story that is apt to move any American into a small fit of patriotism.

I had no idea the U.S. Open is such a sprawling campus of fountains and a boardwalk connecting it to the subway station, solely dedicated to tennis. Nothing else. Well, OK, tennis and $12 Heinekens, Ralph Lauren Polo clothing shops, and fans who look unlike any New Yorker I've ever seen - there was a very New-England-Estate exclusive air about the place. And at one point I even noticed fans handing ushers crisp $100 bills for showing them to their seats in the main Arthur Ashe Stadium. The contradictions here are way too fun, but I digress.

We watched Serena Williams in the women's and Roger Federer in men's category. Upon too loudly suggesting I would like to see a match between Williams and Federer where I would place a large sum of money on Williams kicking some northern European scrawny guy ass, I was hushed with icy stares from almost everyone around me. Oooops. I guess gender and maybe race are still big issues at The Open, or such flippancy is not appropriate whereby the matches lead to a $1.4 million dollar prize. What's wrong with matching a millionaire with a millionaire?

Also, I had no idea The Open dates back to 1881, only four years after the first championship at Wimbledon and has championed tennis greats such as Arthur Ashe, Richard Sears, Bill Tilden, Rene Lacoste (thank you for your fashion legacy), Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, Monica Seles, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova. And on and on. Still, race, gender, and nationality aside, I pick Serena Williams as the queen bee when it comes to brut force and total knock down potential.


My ghetto bootay is in awe.

Daily Pleasure

Each morning at exactly 8:30am, I stroll underneath Jean Dubuffet's sculpture Group of Four Trees at the Chase Plaza on Wall Street. During the first week of this daily work commute, I was mildly amused by the sculpture and it's absurdly stark contrast to the surrounding hyper-vertical building elements. But over time, I have found more than general amusement, rather a kind of preoccupation with the changes in the space as the season progresses. Light finds it's way through the sculpture in a slightly different way each day--a nuance that is a kind of reward for routine. I have been speculating what the space might be like in snow. And then in spring. And then again in the summer.

At the unveiling of the sculpture, commissioned by David Rockefeller in 1972, Dubuffet expressed pleasure at the location of his sculpture. He explained, "I do not believe that these four trees, which I hope will not be taken as representations of real trees, but as semblances of the thrust and fertility of human thought, bear contradiction in any way to the site upon which they now stand.... They give an impression of feverish intoxication. But they seem to me, by this same febrility, to manifest the ardent source of the enormous intellectual machinery of which this plaza is the core".

There is certainly no shame, however, in a sculpture that may represent more abstract ephemerality of a literal inspiration. Especially in a context where the mind has to concoct and interpret a natural world that seems so far away.

Just What the Dr. Ordered

Today was one of those days when I am so proud of my profession, I get a little teary eyed. This is one intervention we landscape architects propose for Manhattanville (referred to in Friday, August 17th blog Is This What Melted Ivory Looks Like? see below). I don't think it needs much explanation--simplicity and attention to the opportunities in what already exists.









Images by L’Observatoire International

A Brush with Aristocracy of the Past

On Friday morning I dressed in my favorite funeral attire - appropriately black, modestly hemmed at the knees, conservative scooped neck, small tie around the waist, but delicately detailed with a single open slit on each sleeve from the elbow cuff to the shoulder seam. This choice of attire was purely subconscious when later in the day I decided to sneak out of work to attend the funeral of 105 year old New York socialite philanthropist, Brooke Astor.

At 2pm I slid out the back door of work and hopped on the subway to St. Thomas Cathedral on 53rd and 5th Avenue. I arrived to a sea of star seeking citizens and camera donned paparazzi as 400+ Rockefelleresque invitees arrived, two by two to the church entrance. Mrs. Astor had been planning her funeral for over 10 years, and ceaslessly modifying the invite list. Having outlived the majority of her era and society, I suspect she crossed off more names than she added.

I stood among the onlookers for awhile before asking a woman next to me if they were allowing the public to attend. She looked me up and down and said my dress was appropriate but that Mrs. Astor would not approve of my flip flops. I responded by saying that Mrs. Astor probably didn't walk 40-50 city blocks a day, therefore wouldn't have much authority on the topic of my foot attire. The woman proceeded to point me to a side door where the general public could enter. At the door I was escorted to the balcony portion of the church where the public was being accommodated. I sat through the ceremony from the vantage point afforded by the 8 foot wide gothic column in front of me, with no view of anything accept during standing hymns when I obsessively scanned the crowd of a past era standing below. Women in Jackie O wide brimmed hats and large oval sunglasses accompanied by very attractive, well tailored older men. Whoopie Goldberg's rastafarian dreadlocks definitely stood out amongst the crowd.

The ceremony was strikingly beautiful, conducted directly from the Common Book of Prayer as specified by Mrs. Astor, and included a eulogy by Mayor Michael Bloomberg where he recited Mrs. Astors famous quote:

"Money is like manure, it needs to be spread around."

She gave more than $200 million dollars through all 5 boroughs to causes ranging from the public library to the Museum of Modern Art and social causes in Harlem, The Bronx, and Queens. Throughout the ceremony I couldn't help but muse about this single event signifying the end of an era--a socialite philanthropist era where the aristocracy gave their personal wealth to the cities where they lived in the name of arts, culture, and social justice while themselves demanding privileged, extravagant lives. Their dedication to this lifestyle is responsible for much of the joie de vivre that has underpinned New York City's for the last 50 years. At the very least, this era of American aristocracy was a double edged sword as they positively contributed to the prestige of America's culture. As this type of philanthropist lifestyle has faded and been replaced with a corporately controlled version of contribution, and contemporary socialites, such as Paris Hilton, who blatantly exhibit their narcissism, it could be said that so too has faded the quality of American culture. The newer aristocracy is hard pressed for even minimal accolade for positively contributing to the arts and culture of the nation. And many of the wealthiest--Warren Buffet, etc.--are known to contribute very little to the cities they inhabit.

Unfortunately my musings ended with the benediction of the ceremony. I proceeded to exit the balcony in search of a bathroom which I found on the other side of the divisionary rope separating the invited from the noninvited. I stepped over the rope and entered the bathroom. As I later exited the bathroom, I didn't realize I was now on the other side of this rope and was suddenly standing at the top of the large stairs exiting onto 5th Avenue. The stairs before me were lined with uniformed marines and at the bottom was vicious paparazzi. All I could think about were the frumpy flip flops on my feet. As I proceeded down the stairs the camera flashes increased with intensity. Having no idea what the hell was happening, I reached the bottom to discover I had descended the stairs side by side with Mr. Henry Kissinger.


For more on Mrs. Astor's Day of Remembrance:Here

Is This What Melted Ivory Looks Like?

Image: Columbia University Website, produced by Renzo Piano Building Workshop

For the first time in my life as a landscape architect, I am compromised by the work before me. I've been working on a project adjacent to Columbia University's 17 acre expansion into West Harlem; the 125th Street corridor that connects the expansion west to the Hudson River, so technically Manhattanville. The University's expansion will displace 3300 locals, brick-clad industry and tenements with a complex of steel and glass buildings by Renzo Piano. In the early stages, Columbia threatened the use of
eminent domain in the name of clearing blight to enormous protest from the neighborhood. Piano says the results will be worth the controversy because "the dirty functions--garbage, ramps, parking, and loading--will all be underground, and because cities are bound to change, we must accept it".

I have developed my own litmus test over the years regarding projects like this: 'would I be o.k. with this happening in Omaha'? I care deeply about Omaha, and when that is so, ultimate well being is foremost. In this case, I say N.O. for many reasons. For the sake of blogger brevity, simply because total hegemony rarely creates vibrancy, in any life context. Especially in the built condition of Harlem, which is undoubtedly one of Manhattan's last chances to retain some real fabric; dirty things still exist and Starbucks does not.

This is not to say that Harlem does not need improvements. But perhaps some type of coexistence with the local community, rather than displacement and singular scale development, would be a better point of departure in which to bring about the changes that Harlem would like for itself.

Feng Shui and Crystals at the United Nations

Today Reo and I attended a conference deep in the underbelly of the United Nations complex called Bio-Energetics: Panel Forum Discussion for Transformation, Spirituality and Wholeness. We sat in high backed chairs each with a microphone in front of us as experts on Feng Shui, Astrology, Crystals, Yoga, etc. spoke about their theories and practices and the potential for global application. The conference was arranged by the United Nations Staff Recreation Council Society for Enlightenment and Transformation; the folks who orchestrate extracurricular activities for UN staff. I suspect that a majority of large employers provide their staff with extracurricular opportunities like softball leagues, family bike ride days, fall hayrack rides, Christmas gift exchanges, and company picnics. Not at the UN apparently.

Designing a Space Station

Today at my side job at the Van Alen Institute, I stumbled upon a jewel: a competition program written in 1987 by Michael Sorkin for an international space station. This is one of the more democratic collection of words, in the context of design, I have had the pleasure of reading. The competition garnered over 50 entries from Russian designers, the only time in the history of the Van Alen or Society of Beaux-Arts that has attracted Russian participation. Here is the program Mr. Sorkin wrote............more to come.

Archiving 100 Years of the Van Alen Institute

I have started a side gig at the Van Alen Institute trying to make sense of over 100 years of student design competitions. I am doing this to feed my obsessive romanticism with the non-profit and philanthropic as it pertains to the design world. It seems safer and cheaper than a meth addiction. And as suspected, the experience thus far has only solidified my theory that non-profit is the sweet spot. In the United States, it can comfortably occupy the realm in between the theoretically overburdened constraints of the academy and the idea limiting affects of consumer driven design and it's power to privatize.

The Van Alen Institute began in 1894 as the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects when students upon returning from the Ecole were finding the American Academies insufficient in their instruction of the Beaux-Arts methods. The Society was originally composed of hundreds of smaller ateliers around the nation where practicing architects would give instruction to students at night. The overarching organization would then conduct ongoing competitions divided into Order, Class and Eqsuisse Problems, replicating the system of the Ecole. Of course this created tension with the universities at the time, namely Columbia because their instruction was being undermined.

Over time it morphed into the National Institute for Architectural Education and continued the previous mission, slowly abandoning the Beaux-Arts as new national influences arose, but continuing to award extensive travel and monetary scholarships. Perhaps over 1000 total.

In 1995, the organization decided to focus on the public realm, and to act as a catalyst and advocate for issues of public space, named after the architect of the Chrysler Building, William Van Alen.

The VAI currently has 2 storage facilities, one on Long Island and one in Queens, full of said competition entries. My job is to produce some type of historical narrative and/or documentation. It is the greatest history lesson to sift through these entries beginning at a time when there was no higher skill than what could be produced through intricate and disciplined drawing methods and before the advent of Modernism.

Leisurely Landfill Cycle.

Today Bruce and I biked from Manhattan, onto the Staten Island ferry, and 30 miles around the cesspool of Staten Island in search of the most killer views of Fresh Kills Landfill. Fresh Kills is the largest landfill in the world, can be seen from space, and was opened as an official police investigation site after 9-11 when hundreds of bodies/body parts were pulled from the landfill. The site is soon to become one of the most progressive parks in world. Our bike trip was instigated by a job interview I have with the firm that has designed the park, and actually the hopes of a job with this firm is the main reason for my relocation to NYC. The interview happens to be on my birthday. A very nice birthday gift, indeed. I hope a 12 hour bike ride gets me appropriately fired up. I'm exhausted and covered in Staten Island grime.


[Image: New York City Department of Planning]

Omaha and Vancouver at the MoMA

Tonight I attended a roundtable discussion at the MoMA facilitated by the Forum for Urban Design on the topic of 'Urban Designing the Global City's Financial Core'. The participating cities were New York, Toronto, London, Singapore, Boston, and Vancouver. At one point in the discussion, the moderator asked the roundtable if a city like Vancouver were located in a place like, say, Omaha Nebraska, would it be as successful of a city? I looked around at the crowd of over 500 people and decided that I was probably the only Omahan in the room. And moreso the only Omahan with an intimate knowledge of Vancouver's coming of age.

I tried to scribble down the dialogue as it occurred, and by no means is this the conversation in it's entirety. Of course I wrote down the points that grabbed me.

Panelists:
Amanda Burden is Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning
Robert Freedman is the Director of Urban Design for the City of Toronto.
Cheong Koon Hean is the Chief Executive Officer of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the national planning and conservation authority of Singapore.
Peter Rees has served as the City Planning Officer for the City of London since 1985, directing the Department of Planning & Transportation of the City of London Corporation.
Kairos Shen is the Director of Planning at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Boston's economic development and planning agency.
Brent Toderian was appointed in 2006 as the City of Vancouver's Director of Planning.

Moderator:
Paul Goldberger is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated 'Sky Line' column.




Moderator: Have some urban theories become a sacred cow that we are scared to challenge?

Toronto: Jane Jacobs has made it difficult in my city to build anything taller than 4 story. Yes, these conventions should be challenged, and that is what Toronto is striving for.

Vancouver: Every time we as designers and planners purposefully diverge from fundamental rules of urbanism, we fail. It's pure hubris to break from Urbanism 101.

Boston: The sacred cow is different to every player.

New York: We have to continually question our goals. Diversity of experience is #1.

Singapore: Process has to be a series of checks and balances. Template is never good. We are always looking for architects who will actively challenge the process.

London: If an architect doesn't interest me, I don't listen.




Moderator: Is design democratic?

New York: Design as democracy is the significant challenge. If it's truly groundbreaking, you can't involve the public sector.

London: Everyone hated the Gherkin. Now the public loves it. And now they want more. It's a good thing we didn't listen to them in the beginning.

Toronto: It's how the process is run. Will Alsop for example, engaged the public process early on with his OCAD project. Therefore, it got built, despite it's unconventionality.

Vancouver: There is a distinction between consultation and public process. No great city is built on consensus.

Boston: Public process does not address special sites and special programs.

London: Planning only creates mediocrity out of awfulness.

Toronto: Public process creates a floor but can't get you higher than that plane.

Vancouver: We leverage public benefits from developers - so height has actually become a benefit. Vancouver is the opposite of the Bilbao Effect. Now that we have built a consistent pattern of urbanism, we are starting to get more money and will now begin to add the punctuation.

Moderator: I have always assumed that Vancouver's context IS it's punctuation. If Vancouver's physical city were located in the place that say, Omaha Nebraska exists, would it be as successful?

No comment from panelists.
Insert Anne gasp here.

[Images: Omaha - me. Vancouver - Sengsack Tsoi]



Boston: It's really landscape architecture as the glue that gives us glue. Olmsted teased that glue out of the topography. I wonder how cities like London view their glue. Where is London's master plan?

London: The nonplanning of the city is it's success.

Vancouver: But icon building is easy. Weaving in successful public space is not easy.

New York: Rather than icon building, we are on the cusp of creating an invigorating iconic horizontal plane. We have identified that as our collective goal in New York.

Vancouver: We are on the cusp of building the most sustainable city on the planet. We would like our entire city to be LEED silver. How are the rest of your cities addressing their role in sustainability?

London: Cities already have a head start in sustainability. If you live in the country and you don't grow your own food you are being subsidized by the poor people in the city.




Moderator: Tell us what you think the best city/urban feature in the world is and why?

New York: Berlin's history and arts culture is beyond admirable.

London: The accidental removal of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. If only we all had earthquakes to perform urban natural selection for us.

Toronto: The foresight of Central Park.

Singapore: London's nightlife, Sydney's waterfront, Vancouver's beauty and livability.

Boston: Barcelona

Vancouver: Boston's Big Dig for it's ambitious vision. Montreal for it's young energetic design culture - something we in Vancouver are lacking.




Moderator: A commonality between several cities on this panel is the Olympics. Tell us how your city is dealing with the Olympics.

New York: We purposefully turned from an Olympic bid because it would compromise our resources for the 2030 Initiative and investing resources for the actual citizens of the city. Plus we simply do not have room to accommodate the venues.

London: We only wanted the games to keep the French from getting it.

Vancouver: We see the Olympics as a way to increase much needed urban infrastructure that will remain long past the Olympics. The games are also an impetus to take a good look at how our city is functioning.

And that's where my notes stopped, unfortunately. What an invigorating discussion nonetheless.