London Called

London. In this amazing city Americans can see their past and their future. I’m meeting tomorrow with my seminar group, one third of the 25 students we have here. I’m going to ask them what surprises them most about the city, how the real city aligned with their expectations, what confuses them. So how would I answer my own questions?

What surprises me, just as much this summer as last, is the joyful fearlessness of the architecture and the seamlessness of architecture and engineering. What US city would have built the Eye? It’s completely ridiculous and wonderful…literally, it is full of wonder. Can you imagine such a proposal for Washington, in the side yard of the National Mall, as the Eye is to Parliament? Opposition would ooze from the landscape itself to stop it, save the Mall, save us all, preserve the vistas, don’t be frivolous, don’t waste money, you’ll attract the wrong element, someone could put an eye out, call the lawyers! We’re like overly serious children, and the British like wickedly playful elders.

What also surprises me is the complete confidence, the Prince’s lamentations notwithstanding, of the modern to take its seat next to the old, the ancient even. The visitors’ entrance to Parliament is a perfect example. Visitors walk through an elegant glass, wood and stainless pavilion, down a ramp, and through another elegant security pavilion. The modern addition wasn’t hidden, like a laundry room, from the view of polite society for fear of offending. The entry performs a modern function, modernly. That seems to be a theme through the architecture of London: let the old continue to do what it does best, but new problems, new programs want new clothes. Corbusier told us that a century ago, and we all misunderstood.

Final surprise for today’s post? Congestion, despite congestion pricing. London traffic is sloooooow and heavy. The tall buses and the bendy buses lumber through narrow streets like herds of elephants and hippos with myriad taxis underfoot. It’s the nature of an ecosystem, in this case an urban ecosystem, to fill the niches available. The city abhors a vacuum. With private cars culled by the congestion fee, the taxis reproduced to fill the space. I don’t know that for a fact, so I’m interested in the numbers and licensing of taxis to know if in fact that’s what happened. I do know that more buses were put into service, and they certainly seem to be the alpha species here now, charismatic urban megafauna.

Today it’s off to the Transport Museum to see what I can discover!

A-

My 17^th spring at the WAAC came to a quiet close last week with one last thesis defense late on Wednesday and a Thursday of final grading. Now I’m hunkered down in my office hoping that no students come by to discuss their grades. Ooops…I spoke too soon. Here comes one…

Lem, the lone landscape student in Martin’s and my studio, wanted to have a “candid conversation” about his grade. We gave Lem an A-, so I wondered for a minute if there at been a grading malfunction, but no, he just wanted to know why he didn’t get an A. It’s not as petty as it might sound. The hardest working students are usually their own harshest critics and it’s not surprising that he would want to close that Xeno’s gap between the minus and the unadulterated A. We tend to be squeamish here at the WAAC about giving pure A’s, as if the attainment of that perfection leaves nothing to be done. There’s always something to be done; it could always be better. An A is granted when there is nothing more that we could reasonably expect from a student at that level. In Lem’s case, we reasonably expected a tiny bit more…but just a tiny bit.

Alas, perfection is the enemy of the good, or so they say. (“They” indeed…depending on which web source you trust it’s either Flaubert or Voltaire who said something like that. Perhaps it was Steve Colbert. Choose your own source.) I prefer a variation on that adage: perfection is the enemy of the real. Oddly, students who aim directly at perfection rarely finish anything at all because they can not reconcile their aspirations with the mess of reality, even reality as liberally defined in the design studio. They won’t make an ugly drawing; they prefer the preternatural non-place of the CAD-mosphere to the smudges and corrugations of the physical. They prefer that their architectural ideals never get entangled with money, people, air, or gravity. These are the ones I worry most about: the perfectionists. Not the mediocre well-intentioned, the slackers, or the good-enough--the profession, such as it is, will take care of them.

My former colleague Marco Frascari (with Livio Volpi Ghirardini) wrote an essay with the deliciously musical title “Contra Divinam Proportionem.”[1] Like so many of Marco’s writings it is slim but dense enough to have its own specific gravity. It is, as the title sings, an argument against the abstract pursuit of magic numbers in architecture and a defense of serrated, bent, beaten, stacked, paved, sanded, and dinged world of the made. It’s the world as made, not the world as computed, that we inhabit.

Perfection is the enemy of the real in more than just architecture. As the promised strong federal action on climate change gets whittled bit by bit—17% emissions cut by 2020, not 20%; coal and oil, you’re still our pals—nobody is really happy, me included. Pick an issue, any issue. Health care: Single payer is the only way! Socialist! Energy: Coal kills! Wind mills...just not in my backyard! Transportation funding: Car free is the only way to be! I’ll give up my car when they pry the steering wheel from my cold dead fingers!

Much has been made of Obama’s pragmatism, with equal parts condescension and praise. Ideologues are suspicious of pragmatists, more so than the reverse. Pragmatists don’t give much credence to suspicion anyway; it’s just not very productive in getting us a little bit closer to the real. Not the perfect, just the real. The better and the real. The really better. The A-. There’s always room for improvement.

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[1] Look, Marco, a footnote in a blog! Nexus II: Architecture an Mathematics, Kim Williams editor, 1998

the garden of urban

4 tomato plants and two bell peppers. That’s what I planted last weekend when summer came in for a preview. I could hear my mother’s voice, though: “not until after Mother’s Day!” That was her rule, always, from our years in north Jersey. But it’s all right Ma, the zones have shifted.

Well maybe it’s not alright, but it’s true and my roof-top microclimate—these are all container veggies—tends to be hotter than the ground. That’s one of the benefits of urban gardening, or “vertical farming” to use the more accurate description. Mine is kind of a tinker’s farms, cobbled together with 5 gallon drywall buckets, irrigation strung beneath the deck, and dirt hauled up in bags bit by heavy bit.

When my husband and I had just moved into Washington we lived in a 6 unit building in a converted rowhouse; ours was a tiny studio on the top back with one balcony over the alley and another doing double duty as the fire escape landing. Our neighbors, Richard and Eloise and baby, rattled around in a rowhouse the size of ours. Eloise was a chef and Richard had planted the most astonishing container garden on their roof: tomatoes, peppers, blueberry bushes, dwarf fruit trees, and a pumpkin vine that crawled across the roofs of at least 4 houses unbeknownst to their owners below. When they went on their many eating and drinking excursions we were invited to harvest at leisure, climbing up the fire escape to this wild, edible roofscape. Richard always claimed he didn’t want any more land than that.

Till no more land than you can carry to the roof yourself: that’s the urban farmer’s motto. When we finally got some roof ourselves, we aspired to Richard and Eloise status…minus the giant pumpkin vine.

I grow tomatoes and basil, but haven’t the space for the olive trees or the cow, so my insalata caprese still depends on purchased products. They come at least form California if not farther.

For all my desire to eat locally, I’m not a purist. And, for all my diligence at using reusable bags, my under counter cabinet hides a dirty secret: stuffed to the gills with Peapod bags. Peapod over-packages to a degree that confounds me. Dig down into the bottom of one bag…ah ha! A clove of garlic, wallowing in its own cavern of white plastic! Another…here’s the soap in blissful solitude, its aroma wasted on the void! I love the convenience of Peapod, but the bags, oh the bags. My constant penance is to keep one of those little nylon bags that cleverly fold up into themselves. It’s a self-bagged bag, a bright green singularity that threatens to swallow the contents of my purse over its event horizon. (It’s such a weird topological object; I wish I had a klein water bottle)

Every time I get a Peapod order the huffing and puffing delivery guy (three floors up, no elevator) dumps a heap of crinkling plastic at my door I wonder where it will all go. But away it goes, as if sucked into another dimension, like folding up one of those nylon singularities. If only we could store our excess and our waste in another dimension, but this one is the only one we have. To be an urban gardener is to feel physically the weight and material that makes our food, and to be reminded of the intimate relationship with have with the earth who feeds us. It should be in the Urban Dwellers’ Bill of Rights: everyone is entitled to enough space to grow a tomato.

Who Cares.

I preached to the choir yesterday. A gang of staffers from the USGBC, already card-carrying converts to green, came for a tour of Green Community yesterday and I struggled to think of what to offer them that they didn’t already know. Almost to a person they were extremely young, at least to my presbyopic eyes. So while I always emphasize that we are not the first generation to face the issue of living cooperatively with Mother Nature, for them personally it is a first.

The time-tube in the exhibition tends to sort visitors by age. People will tend to collect at those dates that mean something to them personally. Those of a certain age will inevitably pause at the early 70’s gas crisis and Carter’s installation of solar panels on the White House. Slightly grayer ones will pause in the early 60’s with Rachel Carson. The 20-somethings may have only a vague memory of the Exxon Valdez and probably think that ISTEA is a cold drink. USGBC’s LEED rating system is just over 10 years old. Young people, working for a young organization, on a young idea...with a very, very old context.

As I led the group through, pausing at whatever communities I thought would resonate, I found myself telling stories about my personal connections with a few of them. I had to offer the choir something more than just preaching. So I mused about being in Santa Monica years ago and wondering what that thing was with the pink parasol roofs--the SMURFF, Santa Monica Urban Runoff and Rainfall Facility. Or visiting Mississippi State and listening to students in the Carl Small Town Center talk about the miracle of sidewalks. Coming out of a post-transcontinental flight stupor and seeing the streets of Mendoza lined with acequias and huge trees. Meeting the matriarchs of Stella at the opening.

As I was reminiscing about Mendoza I noticed one of my own students standing nearby. Valeria is from Mendoza, studying here for a year. And she is, along with a growing number of her Mendocino predecessors, another stitch in an increasingly strong seam that binds me to that faraway place. Through my teaching at the WAAC (Virginia Tech’s Washington Alexandria Architecture Center) I am increasingly bound through my students to such places: Tallinn, London, Weimar, San Luis Obispo, Mexico City, Baton Rouge, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Santiago, Quito...

The opening interactive in Green Community is the slowly spinning globe where visitors can activate different representations of how we are all connected. Population, national boundaries, shipping channels...these never fail to awe our visitors. But there’s no layer that is "people I know" but in my mind’s eye I see it when I’m at the globe. It keeps the world’s condition from being an abstraction and renders it instead as a patchwork of social sustainability, and through that we start to care. The quilt may be an overused metaphor, but it is an accurate one. The swatches themselves aren’t sufficient. A quilt depends on the stitches, and sustainability depends on connectivity...personal connectivity. Mexico is in the news now, and I pay a different kind of attention because I know Maria, Eduardo, Gabriel and Tania are there. Ecuador is having an election, so I think of Patty, Pamela, Jose and David.

I always finish my tours by asking if anyone has any questions, but I’ve never turned the tables and asked if they would take questions from me. I should have started with this USGBC group. My first question would be: how did you come to care? About your neighbors? About far away places? About other species? About the buildt environment? About the very planet? Everything depends on caring. Without it, all the money, technology, cleverness, and innovation will be for naught. Next time, I’ll ask. And then I’ll ask if anyone has any answers.

Want to see my insulation?

I hear there was a big concert on the Mall on Sunday to celebrate Earth Day, with Flaming Lips and all. I wasn’t there. Instead my husband and I were adding insulation to the roof and walls of part of our condo. That seemed a more fitting way to honor Mom Earth, actually, with apologies to the Flaming Lips.

Adding insulation is not glamorous. In fact it is a nasty job, particularly if you need to remove the old stuff and in the process discover that your roof has probably been leaking since before they began numbering wars. The manufacturer assures us all that the fiberglass itself won’t mold, but…ick!...there’s definitely some funk up there. So, while my skin is irritated, my mind is righteous. The pathetic and slipshod job the original renovators did on our building is being remedied at last. R-30 in the roof. Rigid on the wall. Foil-faced R-max, baby. That’s right. Bring on the heat. We’re ready.

But no news crews came to film our Earth Day activities. It’s not photogenic, and neither am I buttoned up in full battle dress, gloves, N95 mask, goggles, every stray hair up in a bandana. No pictures please. And in the end, with the drywall up and painted there will be no sign of all that work, except the subtle difference in the ambient temperature and the not-so-subtle difference in our electric bill.

We hear over and over that the biggest difference we can make in energy use begins with conservation, and conservation begins with paying careful attention to our present situations: our houses, transportation, diets, consumption. The idea? Insulation before green bling. But the bling gets all the attention. PV panels! Hybrids! Trombe walls—they’re French! Flaming lips!

Insulation just isn’t sexy. Sure Brad Pitt is out there doing his darndest, but he’s focusing on cute new houses for areas that probably should be surrendered to the sea at this point. Why isn’t he pitching caulk? Or maybe George Clooney (the thinking woman’s Pitt) could replace that stupid pink panther. That’s pretty stale and the recent remakes haven’t helped. Can Victoria’s Secret make silicon thermal enhancements as desirable as silicone enhancements? I say, let’s put the stripping back into weatherstripping! Now, bring on the Flaming Lips!

Guardians and Merchants

I’m thinking again about guardians and merchants...and Jane Jacobs. But this time it’s not Death and Life of Great American Cities, it’s the slightly quirky Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. The title is a mouthful, and what’s between the covers is no easier to chew. I stumbled onto this book in a research ramble motivated by the recession of the early 90’s to understand why architecture, as both cultural product and practice, is such a hapless misfit in contemporary capitalism. The ramble—on closed track with professional driver; do not try this at home—led me to read Lewis Hyde, (The gift: imagination and the erotic life of property, and Trickster Makes this World) Garth Rockcastle, even Jacques Derrida (yikes! Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money) and finally Jane. One of these days I’ll tackle the guy who started the whole gift theory thing, Marcel Mauss.

My copy of Systems of Survival, which I bought brand new in 1992, still shows its price: $22.00 US, $27.50 Canada. The dust jacket is a little smudgy and nicked, the pages marked with pencil and post-its. It is probably no longer worth $22 or $27.50 to either a Usonian or a Canadian...or is it? It also happens to be autographed. I rarely seek autographs on books, but I do have a few, and Jane (why am I calling her by her first name? Perhaps I should be more respectful, but she did sign my book, so we’re close) wasn’t getting any younger when I saw her lecture so I got it while I could. So, what’s it worth now? More? Or, nothing at all because it is worth more to me than to anyone else?

That is the point exactly. By signing it for me, she initiated the transmogrification of this particular book from its life in an exchange economy into a gift economy. This book became different from all the others previously identical to it. It acquired worth, “achieved value,” and shed its market, or “ascribed, value.” Those are Hyde’s words to describe the different ways that we treasure things. Systems is written in the form of a dialogue. Taking on the entire guardian/merchant paradigm, her characters debate the merits of Hyde’s thesis that art is by definition a card-carrying part of the gift economy but come to no real conclusion except that it is, like medicine and agriculture, an anomaly. The battle of over the shape of health care is the apotheosis of this problematic. No money? Sorry, no kidney. Is this in any way acceptable?

We all know intuitively that certain things have a value that can not be sufficiently described by the market. When Teddy Roosevelt drew a line around a chunk of Wyoming, he excised Yellowstone from the box labeled “”real estate” and put it in the box labeled “treasure”…forever. This is the flip side of the tragedy of the commons: the beauty of the commons. Of course, the flora and fauna—charismatic mega- and others—to either side of that line remain indifferent and unmoved by Roosevelt’s line and it is the boundaries between those territories of the guardians and the merchants that are the most contested. Development at the edges of national parks throws reveals the friction in individual profiting from a commonly held treasure. As Hyde says, “one man’s gift must not be another man’s capital.”

A recent article in the Washington Post, “In Bill’s Big Idea: Save the Climate, Share the Wealth” Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets among other things, is treading that boundary in his proposal for a “cap and dividend” strategy for carbon emissions reduction. He’s quoted in the article: “The trouble is, markets have no appreciation for intrinsic value. They’re blind and dumb and stunningly mindless; they do what they’re programmed to with ruthless aplomb…”

Jane would say: of course they are. Like the joke about the frog and scorpion, it’s in their nature. It is no more viable to nudge all of human activity into the merchant syndrome (money grubbing swine, naming rights sold off for everything, privatization of government functions, mercenary armies) then to guilt everyone into being guardians (self-righteous tree huggers, don’t sell out, non-profits know best, money corrupts). The very phrase “sustainable development” hides the internal contradictions that Jane tries to detangle.

Jane summarizes their characteristics. Merchants: be open to inventiveness and novelty; use initiative and enterprise; be efficient. Guardians: adhere to tradition; dispense largesse; show fortitude. (the complete list is in the book) In its unique city fabric Washington reveals the character of a city shaped by both guardians and merchants. The sharp line between the commercial city and the national landscape is constantly debated, criticized, fiercely protected, and tested. It is the front line in the face off between the guardians and the merchants, but those lines proliferate in battles over open space, historic landmarks, water rights, resource management. But that is how it should be, as long as each side can understand the role the other plays.

Toyota Pious

I drove twice this week, in two different cars, for two different reasons. Although the Old Dominion has pledged to increase intercity rail, the service doesn't yet include Blacksburg, so once again I Metro-ed to National Airport and picked up a rental. Imagine my glee in seeing a patient Prius in the Emerald Aisle next to a line of SUV's looking like angry toasters. The Prius was green...really, not just metaphorically. My husband and I had rented one once before in California for a trip from San Francisco to Yosemite. We took to calling it our "Pious," so righteous did we feel silently and efficiently rolling through that precious landscape.

So, pious once more, I headed down 81. The Pius is great at positive feedback. I constantly glanced at my energy consumption performance as I dodged 18 wheel beasts. 53. That was my average mpg: 53! Yeah. That’s right. More than my age, less than my IQ, and a heck of a lot better than the various Pontiac products that usually dominate the rental choices. Still, I would have preferred the train.

Yesterday was Zip truck day. Sometimes one must haul mulch, and those times were made for Zip truck. My usual mulch-hauler is Tonya the Toyota; she lives on 18th Street in one of those challenging back-in-at-an-angle spaces. I felt very odd driving through the city in a truck, feeling oddly tall and wide. (Does this truck make me look fat?) Not only because I'm not a regular driver, I’m also not a truck driver. I found myself puzzled by one way streets, no left turns (surely either a subtle warning or an actual conservative plot on the District) and getting riled up by arrogant pedestrians acting like they own the place. Fortunately, I parked, tapped Tonya good bye on the windshield and with canvas bags in hand walked up to the grocery store. And my blood pressure returned to normal.

Acres of cars sit unsold and forlorn--buy me! buy me!--and our newly elected President and Congress have vowed that the US without an auto industry is like a day without orange juice…or whatever. Yet, I can't help but think that individual car ownership is just so 20th century and that we really need to think differently. I would never have bought both a Prius, for highway travel and a truck for mulch-hauling and a Mini for errands. Zip gives me all those options, tailored to suit each purpose.

The Big 3 are falling all over themselves and each other to get people to buy cars offering incentive after another. Maybe they’ll start to throw in chauffeurs next. But there is nothing, not one thing, that would entice me to buy a car. Nada. Zilch. Nihil. Why own when you can share?