Leading by the Nose

For humans, walkable neighborhoods and commercial hubs reward strolling with varied architecture, safe street crossings, and a mix of things to do and see on foot. For dogs, there is a much larger world of scent. Can our canine companions guide us to a richer walking experience?

Frank Edgerton Martin

Dogs and other animals understand sidewalks and parks not as visually ordered settings but as shifting islands and drifts of smells. When we humans step out the door, it’s basically the same outdoors we left behind. But for the dog with us on a leash, a street is like a flowing stream filled with the scent trails of passing people and dogs. It’s an ever-changing place.

In 2003, I adopted a yellow Labrador named Samson from the Hennepin County Humane Society. When I first saw him, he struck me as quiet and observant as he sat there upright, regarding the other dogs as they barked and whimpered. For years, Samson spent his days sitting Sphinx-like on the front steps, left paw crossed on right, surveying passersby. He became famous among the neighbors for wanting to sit outside even on the coldest January days.

Samson loved meeting people and other dogs. He was a natural greeter, but we found little social life along the roads and subdivisions of our Lake Minnetonka neighborhood. And because I myself was more interested in architecture than in exercise, I often found our walks boring. But Samson and I both needed exercise and to get outside for strolls. Over the years we developed a set of alternative suburban environments that made sense for both of us.

Instead of walking by lawns and large houses, we got in the car (a thrill for Samson) and drove to denser places where we could do the things we liked, such as: smelling other dogs, visiting antique shops, sniffing sidewalk trees, and sitting in outdoor cafés while greeting people and watching traffic. We often went to downtown Excelsior, a 19th-century town where we could do all of these things. But we also made new discoveries. For some reason, Samson loved outlet malls, perhaps because the long sidewalks afforded him the chance to meet a lot of people.

I took him to Tonkadale Greenhouse and other nurseries where we could walk among the plants in winter, admiring shoppers could pet him, and we could take in the fragrances and humidity. In summer, we went to public docks on Lake Minnetonka, where Samson greeted those departing from the tour boats. Seniors and teenage girls particularly loved him.

TALKING SCENTS

In her collection of essays On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz takes us along on eleven treks, mostly in Manhattan, with experts in a variety of different fields—graphic design, geology, entomology, and so on. Another one of the experts is her dog Flip, who reminds me of a more citified version of Samson.

Horowitz is a cognitive psychologist who writes extensively on dogs and how they perceive the world. In describing her walk with Flip, she notes that “smell, like memory, is entirely personal. It cannot be shared with the ease that an image, rendered in ink or oils, can be experienced by hundreds of millions of viewers.”

Smells are not easily communicated in words; we humans have only vague olfactory classifications such as “sweet,” “earthy,” or “pungent.” But dogs like Flip and Samson experience nuanced smells in thousands of variations. They may not have a word for each, but they have recognition all the same. For dogs, smells form an unfolding map of information about specific places and other animals and people. “Their world has a topography wrought of odors . . . the landscape is brightly colored with aromas,” writes Horowitz.

ARBY’S

When touring a neighborhood, we humans use visual classifications such as “late Victorian” or “New Urbanist.” Dogs, of course, could care less. From my walks with Samson, I learned more about the experiences that mattered to him, and, in doing so, I began to appreciate suburban landscapes in a different way.
I learned that busy places like Main Streets and public parks have a smell history. Huge parking lots can be bleak for all. Samson and I agreed that big-box stores and malls were the worst—visual and olfactory deserts unsuitable for a hike. But a parking lot at Arby’s could be a sacred place.

At least it was for Samson, who generally refused to leave after we sat on the grassy suburban berm and shared a bag of curly fries. After snacks, I would walk with him around the building—along the lane leading to the drive-thru, past the drive-thru window (with faster sniffing because much is dropped there), and around to the back where the exhaust fans are (a kind of climax). This circuit never tired him, and he would tug billy-goat-like on the leash when I tried to get him back into the car. Inevitably, I would have to pick him up, all 75 pounds, and dump him in the backseat.

A dog can sniff fast when there is much to take in, like at a drive-thru window—up to seven times per second. Humans can only take in a new scent about once every two seconds. We have about five million olfactory sense receptors; a bloodhound can have 300 million. A dog can gauge a smell’s strength by its variance between nostrils.

Samson and I had many kinds of walks, the hardest being the “process of elimination” at 7:00 on January mornings. When it was 20 degrees below zero, he always sniffed too long. But sometimes we both liked to linger in a place. We might sit in a park, Samson sniffing with darting nose the scents of other dogs flowing from upwind. With my eyes and ears, I observed things too—where people gathered, the shouts of children, and impromptu soccer games on an open patch of grass.

TAKING THE TIME

In an interview with the National Canine Research Council, Horowitz put into words what I intuited from Samson: We need to value our dogs’ “dogness.” This “means appreciating that they get bored, and working to give them things to do; it means celebrating their perceptual abilities, and letting them smell the well-marked spots at length,” she explained.

By following our canine companion’s lead, we two-legged animals can rediscover important things—the fragrances of childhood, so deeply implanted that they seem like they occurred only yesterday. From my walks with Samson, I recalled the smell of leaves burning on an October afternoon; the peonies in June that my mother floated in a crystal bowl; what a pumpkin smells like when you carve it. No matter how boring a place may seem, a dog can open up a new journey. If I’d never had my walks with Samson, I may never have lingered, pausing to discover scents and other creatures hidden in a world we mostly see.

http://www.aia-mn.org/leading-by-the-nose/

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes

 

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, by Louise A. Mozingo, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011. Hardback, 315 pages.

 
Frank Edgerton Martin

 An earlier version of this book review appeared in Landscape Architecture magazine in 2012.

 Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes explores the orgins of today’s corporate enclaves through three alluring Anglo-American landscape ideals: the “estate,” the “campus” and the “park.” In writing this new chapter in landscape history, Louise Mozingo, a professor in landscape architecture at Berkeley, offers fascinating insights into overlapping stories of technical research, the military-industrial complex, gender roles in the workplace, fear of the city during the 1960s, and fragmenting effect of the automobile.

 Landscape architects and planners should read this book for many reasons, not the least of which is that leaders of the profession—ranging from the Olmsted Brothers office to Peter Walker—played important roles in designing virtually every project discussed over six chapters. Suburban history is a relatively new field for research, but much has already been written on the rise of housing, manufacturing, and retail commerce outside the urban core. Mozingo tells the less known story of the rise of corporate workplaces outside traditional downtowns and in separation from the infrastructure of factories where many of today’s global corporations such as GE began. She argues that “pastoral capitalism” is a uniquely American invention that came into full force in the 1940s after years of suppressed investment in new building.

The Rise of Managerial Capitalism and the Corporate Campus

 One spark for this move to the countryside can be traced to the rise of managerial capitalism beginning in the 1920s. “Rather than conferring position based on ownership or nepotism,” Mozingo claims a the outset, “corporations awarded management authority to a meritocracy of salaried, professional managers.” Thus, talent attraction and retention mattered. Corporate leaders came to believe that with increasing traffic and pollution in core cities, white-collar workers, scientists, and executives might be happier in greener pastures. Yet there were deeper fears that drove leaders of such companies as General Foods and Connecticut General Life to the suburbs—including a desire to separate office workers from unionized locations, a sometimes not so subtle desire to exclude minorities from the mainline workforce, and even fear of nuclear attack focused on city cores.

 The corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park are three built responses that Mozingo investigates. The corporate campus was largely invented at the Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Designed by the Olmsted Brothers in the 1930s and early 1940s, the project evoked a fairly traditional campus model of connecting buildings surrounding a central open space. In terms of sheer numbers of discoveries, we might consider Bell Labs one of the most historically significant corporate landscapes of the twentieth century. “By 1948,” Mozingo explains, “Bell Labs produced discoveries that sealed the interlinked reputations of its management, scientists, and site. Its scientists invented the transistor and the bit (the basic mathematical unit of electronic information) and fundamentally revolutionized electronic technology and, arguably, human existence.” Not bad for just a few years of operation.

 Pastoral Modernism: The Illusion of Aradia and Natural Systems

 In terms of corporate design audacity, the real leap into the future came to fruition in 1956 when General Motors opened its new Technical Center near Detroit to centralize numerous advanced operations on one campus. Eero Saarinen developed five complexes of buildings housing styling, engineering, process development and research along with the Technical Center’s administrative offices. Landscape architect Thomas Church sited four weeping willow islands in a 22-acre lake at the center of the campus. He also set out a restrained palette of linear bosques, rectangular lawns, and a forest of trees encircling the site.

 Mozingo provides a fine description of how the landscape complemented the buildings with contrapuntal vegetative patterns and reflective water. In one of her best passages, she writes that the “design result was cinematic, more art direction than urban design, exhibiting a supremely dynamic sense of space. In the huge site, dramatic vistas were oblique and did not oriented to culminating axial viewpoints.” This was a new kind of campus meant to be seen from the window of a car (preferably a GM car), a new kind of research city with soaring fountains and a metallic exhibit pavilion dome serving, perhaps, as a new kind of temple. 

 From here, the story moves to the great “corporate estates” of the Connecticut General Life campus designed by SOM and the later John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois—a collaboration of Saarinen and Hideo Sasaki. Spanning a gentle ravine, the Deere headquarters completely hides surface parking and makes the landscape itself the star of the experience. Initially, Deere’s leaders feared that their farmer customers would see the new setting as overly opulent. But, as visitorship to the model exhibit center grew, it was obvious that Saarinen’s pioneering use of Cor-Ten steel in the buildings and Sasaki’s integration of building and site sent the perfect message: Deere is a growing, high-tech international company that has not forgotten its grounding in midwestern agriculture.

 Revisiting the Googleplex

Corporate office parks grew out of early experiments by Stanford and other universities to develop sites for research partnerships near their campuses. By the 1970s, Atlanta was ringed by 39 of them and, as with many regions, they were the sites of the greatest growth in white-collar employment. Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, began in an office park that it ultimately took over. The mighty Google’s “Googleplex” is also set in an office park in Mountain Lake California.

 Life and death come fast to today’s technology companies; and many new facilities are designed with “exit strategies” in mind. The oldest of Google’s buildings date to 1997 when they were built as research and development facilities for the late SGI (Silicon Graphics Incorporated). As I read this background and viewed the Terraserver photo in chapter 6, a flash of recognition struck me. I visited this former SGI campus with its sharp angled plazas designed by SWA shortly after it opened order to write a feature story for Landscape Architecture magazine. SGI was thriving then and “Google” was not even a popular word, let alone a verb.

 Mozingo’s lasting message is that even as corporations are merging, vanishing, and evolving ever more quickly, our paradigms for corporate site plans are largely unchanged over the last sixty years. From Sprint near Kansas City to Pepsico in Purchase, New York, both of which I have also covered for Landscape Architecture, buildings are sited around courts, ringed by parking, and set off from the thin suburban growth by open lawns and berms of trees.

 

Corporate Solipsism

 Most headquarters today are entirely closed to the public yet provide a tranquilizing sense of peace for their employees even as they sometimes manage environmentally-destructive operations around the world. Almost fully-reliant on car commuting and set in campuses the size of small colleges, they are also highly resource-consumptive. Mozingo believes that we have descended from the pastoral landscapes for community betterment proposed by Olmsted to a new kind of quiet illusion that she calls “corporate solipsism.” She argues that corporations might “ask themselves whether an unquestioned nineteen-century taste for retreat and verdant isolation applied to the workplace is the way forward on a planet of perilously compromised resources.”

 But, this sounds more like a landscape architect’s sensible plea for reason than one that makes bottom-line sense to stockholders. Pastoral Capitalism could be much more forceful in its conclusions and provocations. The forces of secrecy and isolation that drive corporations behind green lawns are also those that inflamed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lack of transparency and glaring social inequity cannot be concealed forever behind a nice façade, even if it is LEED certified.

 It has always been fairly easy to disparage suburban workplaces as “unsustainable” or “homogenous.” But a real critique can only happen when we begin to understand the interwoven stories of business and design innovation that created the pastoral capitalism we know today. Though far from complete, this book marks a beginning of such historic understanding.

 

 

The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature.

Posted below is Liam Heneghan’s review of William R. Jordan III’s: The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature.

The review recently appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books—one of the brightest new book discussion and commentary sites on the web. With reviews, essays, and author interviews, LARB’s site offers numerous ways to search genres, titles and author names.

LARB notes that: William R. Jordan III is director of the New Academy for Nature and Culture and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture. He was senior editor of Restoration Ecology: A Synthetic Approach to Ecological Research (1987) and was founding editor of the journal Ecological Restoration and a founding member of the Society for Ecological Restoration.

The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature. University of California Press; Reprint edition, 2012

Restoration Ecology and the Shame Thing: William Jordan III’s "The Sunflower Forest," 10 Years On, review by Liam Heneghan

LARB, April 12th, 2013

WHEN I FIRST BROUGHT a group of my undergraduate students to meet William Jordan III at Cafe Mozart in Evanston, Illinois, he told them that each year we should ritualistically destroy a small plot of virgin prairie, of which there is virtually none left in this state, in order to dramatize its importance to us. I assured them that he did not mean this sacrifice literally; he assured them that he did.

At that time, around the turn of the new millennium, William (Bill) Jordan was working on The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, which came out in 2003 (reissued in paperback 2012). More than any other writer I know, Bill rehearses his arguments in countless conversations and prepared talks before commuting them to the written word. I can trace remarks he made at a Christmas gathering years ago through several iterations until they became the fully formed ideas that made up his most recent book Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, written with George M. Lubick (2011). So, when Bill assured us he was serious about the ritualistic sacrifice of prairie a decade ago, it anticipated a theme that would emerge sometime later in The Sunflower Forest.

Several ecological restorationists with whom I have spoken over the years confess bewilderment with The Sunflower Forest; they read it hoping to get insights into the “how” of restoration, whereas the book focuses primarily on its performance, ritual and the creation of meaning. However, The Sunflower Forest and its companion Making Nature Whole were not written to appeal to the most immediate pragmatic needs of restoration. They were written to address questions about our troubling relationship with nature. In providing a new paradigm for relating to nature, Bill claimed to offer a “friendly critique” of contemporary environmental thought: of “wilderness” and of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, for example. The reception to this friendly criticism has been frosty.

It is a matter of pride among some of my humanist friends to point out that ecological restoration is vacuous for at least two related reasons. Firstly, nature is ever changing, and therefore there is no turning back the ecological clock. Secondly, because nature is in flux, determining a particular moment or time period to which to return an ecological system is necessarily arbitrary. In the United States, it has been common to discuss returning a system to “pre-settlement” times, though, as critics note, this is to underestimate the role of indigenous peoples in shaping the landscapes in which they lived. Should we not, in the interest of purity, return systems to early post-Pleistocene times in order to eliminate all human influence? Such cautioning was perhaps helpful a few decades ago when ecological restoration was in its infancy and some of its practitioners exercised a certain laxity in describing what they were up to.

Since Jordan is primarily concerned with the subjective experience of restoration as a relationship with nature, examining his definition of ecological restoration is a promising place to start a discussion of his work. Besides, it was Jordan who coined the term “ecological restoration.” In doing so, he named a practice that remarkably was unnamed before. Jordan had been working since 1977 at the University of Wisconsin’s Arboretum in Madison, where, 40 years earlier under the influence of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold, attempts were made to recreate ecological communities on several hundred acres of land near Madison. At the time, Jordan was in charge of public outreach at the Arboretum and it occurred to him that these projects, by then relatively neglected and regarded as irrelevant to conservation efforts, were an interesting way of telling the Arboretum’s story. He would later describe the Arboretum’s early work in habitat recreation as the “Kitty Hawk” of restoration. Initially, Jordan and his arboretum colleague Keith Wendt wanted to call such efforts “synthetic ecology,” but since this brought to mind chemistry rather than ecology, that term was later substituted with “restoration ecology.” The term “restoration,” in general, could then be applied retrospectively to the range of projects being undertaken globally that sought to return ecological systems to a former state.

Jordan is not insisting on the historical aspect of restoration because he is a purist; rather, he argues that it is this negotiation with the past condition of a site, and our role in altering it to its current state, that gives restoration its distinctive value. We restore because we are culpable, and not because we necessarily need more from a system. Despite this, Jordan’s definitions (there are more than one) are not, at first glance, especially promising. “Ecological restoration,” he wrote, “is the attempt, sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole.” The way to accomplish this is to do whatever is possible “to heal the scars and erase the signs of disturbance.” Restorationists may “rehabilitate soil, recontouring it, adding nutrients to promote growth of native plants, or in some cases finding ways of removing nutrients to discourage the growth of fast-growing, weedy species.” In other words, restoration activities may involve more than just a direct manipulation of species; restorationists may also alter ecosystems’ processes to achieve their results, recognizing in this that ecological systems are dynamic. A more accurate definition of restoration will, therefore, recognize the practice as being more than a simple return to an original condition. Restoration must include “everything we do to a landscape or an ecosystem in an ongoing attempt to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences on it in such a way that it can continue to behave or can resume behaving as if these were not present.”

Restoration therefore links an ecosystem’s past to a possible future by eliding the present and using any means available to the restorationist. It represents a deliberate erasure of the human component from the landscape. Jordan’s insistence on the restoration of “all” means that rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, and other creatures inimical to human welfare should be reintroduced to a restored system. Projects that don’t meet Jordan’s definition would include those that merely renew “natural capital” — that is, when such projects do not restore elements less inclined to be helpful to the human enterprise.

Jordan developed the idea of “ecocentric restoration” — his term for restoration directed at making nature whole — in tandem with his friendly critique of other categories of environmental thought. Those categories of thought, roughly speaking, are ones that regard our relationship with the natural landscapes as purely colonial, or alternatively in the wilderness tradition, as an encounter with the sacred. Finally, there are those environmental traditions that regard humans as simply one ecological entity among others. The first of the traditions gets expressed in resource exploitation, the second in wilderness preservation, the third in a kind of distress that we still have not fully connected with the natural community of which we are but one member among many.

For some restorationists, if we could merely see ourselves as plain members and citizens of this natural community, as Aldo Leopold would have us do, then our problems would be solved. However, in Jordan’s view, there is a limitation to this line of thinking. Community, at least in the manner used by environmentalists, is a notion that conjures up good feelings without typically confronting us with difficulties that accompany real community. Those of us who have sat down at the family dinner table — hopefully, all of us — will recognize that, with every slice of apple pie possibly comes a surly uncle’s remarks on how poorly it has been prepared. Missing from the community concept is an account of the negative elements of human experiences of community: envy, selfishness, fear, hatred, shame and so on, the neglect of which, Jordan claims, leads to “a sentimental, moralizing philosophy that […] insists on the naturalness of humans […] but that neglects or downplays the radical difficulty of achieving such a sense of self, and also downplays the role of culture and cultural institutions in carrying out this work.” As Jordan soberly comments, the “entirely positive conception of community has very little basis in actual experience.”

Not only does environmentalism generally fail to deal effectively with the unseemly in humans, it fails also to take productive account of the monstrous in nature. After all, the engine of evolutionary change in the Darwinian-Wallacean account is not afternoon tea; it is the often violent struggle for existence that stirs the evolutionary pot. As a consequence, Jordan claims “environmentalism has offered a story that is thin and sentimental and that fails to deal with our profoundest doubts about the world and our place in it.”

Since none of our environmentalisms has, he argues, dealt productively with “the scandal of creation,” he advocates pursuing a new way forward. Central to his thesis is the problem of shame.

As the circle of enthusiasts for Jordan’s work has grown over the past decade (and I count myself among them), the question of what to do with “the shame thing” has grown. Considering, once again, the problem of consumption concretizes the situation somewhat. Food sharing, breaking bread and so on, are the classic occasions for the creation and nurturing of community. Yet, in order to subsist, humans must kill and dine. Even the most scrupulous of vegetarians must be embroiled in the violence of agricultural production. Every nut and berry ingested is an infant flower unblossomed. Though nature may ultimately win the battle and have us moldering in the grave, every time we sup we have at least won that skirmish. At the very least, the contemplation of consumption makes the notion of community somewhat more challenging. To use Jordan’s terms for these complications, consumption is an occasion for shame. Shame, of course, is an old fashioned thing and most of us, I suppose, would elect to be rid of it. Though it is precisely because we have become shameless in our approach toward nature that, Jordan claims, contemporary environmentalism is so attenuated. He argues that none of our various environmentalisms provide the wherewithal to deal with these problematic aspects of our experience of nature in psychologically productive ways, and that this limits its value as a way of coming to terms with our array of “environmental problems.” It is not an exaggeration to say that contending with shame is one of the core issues of The Sunflower Forest.

Making shame central to his work creates, it seems, its own occasion for shame. Sympathizers have ransacked the thesauri looking for more palatable substitutes: limitation, humility, existential awareness, embarrassment, grief and so on. Though Jordan declares himself willing to drop the term, I think, in fact, that he is not likely to substitute it.

The treatment of shame in The Sunflower Forest builds upon the work of anthropologist James S. Hans, and on literary critic Frederick Turner who draws in turn upon the work on ritual of his parents, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner. Jordan repurposes their distinctive treatment of shame to think about the value of ecological restoration. However, shame is meant here in a very specific sense. The term generally denotes an emotion deriving from one’s awareness of being dishonored, ridiculous, or having behaved in an inappropriate fashion. Guilt seems to be related to shame, and in common usage indicates responsibility for an action, or having been at fault for a particular failure, crime, or other event. The emotional register for shame seems higher than that of guilt, though the latter may, of course, have considerable charge. Guilt can occasion shame, but one does not typically feel guilty for experiencing shame. Shame seems the more fundamental emotion.

Jordan sees guilt as responding to a consciousness of what one does, whereas shame is a consciousness of what we are. To give a very prosaic example: when, after a long days’ labor, you become aware of your own displeasing body odor, you experience shame, in Jordan’s sense: we are sweaty primates upon whom the perfumed veneer of civilization has but a temporary hold.

Jordan rightly argues with Turner and Hans that shame is a “universal and inescapable (though deniable) aspect of human experience.” Given its universality, it should surprise us little that restoration is an encounter with shame, in the face of our killing unwanted vegetation and exerting our control over the land. This is especially shameful when we assure ourselves we are engaging in restoration precisely in order to give life back to degraded systems, and that our intention is to relinquish control over the land. Restorationists cannot simply wave their divine hands, as a god might, and turn back the ecological clock. Restorationists have to address the very real limitations of their skills. But it is precisely by experiencing shame that restoration produces value. As Jordan puts it: “The great value of ecological restoration, I now believe, is that it provides an ideal, even unique context for negotiating […] the development of a relationship between ourselves and the classic landscape.”

In this way, Jordan has radically transformed the terms of the environmental debate. Other environmental ideologies posit either a fallen nature given to exploitation by a redeemed and therefore innocent humanity, or posit a pristine and inviolate nature immeasurably disturbed by an irretrievably wretched humanity. Since there is a little monstrousness — a certain loss of sentimental innocence — on both sides of the divide between humans and the rest of nature, this acknowledgment can generate a newer solidarity with nature. There is, Jordan says, a “continuity of shame” between humans and the rest of nature.

The acknowledgment of shame, of our mortification at our human limitations, and of the troubling brutality of nature, is not an end in itself. To merely stare across the gulf between us and the rest of nature is to court horror, not relationship. Relationship and its rewards come from dealing with shame. So, what is the recipe for developing true community with nature through restoration?

As we concluded, say, the last winter holiday season, several of us were probably relieved that the drama of gifting was over. Rarely is a gift just a simple offering — certainly not when it is wrapped and placed under a dying tree. There is more to gifts, as I think we all appreciate, than first meets the eye. The gift, etymologically, is at the root of community. According to Jordan, the gift is the “munus” in community. One can make too much of such roots, of course; after all, “munus” has a range of meanings, duty and service included. Using Marcel Mauss's essay "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies," Jordan makes the case that gift exchange, viewed in a serious way, plays a key role in thinking about the laborious task of community formation. Gifts, earnestly inspected, have some peculiar properties. They are often public, characteristically unnegotiated, and though obligatory in a sense, they should not appear to be offered under duress. A gift never leaves the matter settled, but is merely one exchange in an interminable round. Drawing from Turner’s book The Culture of Hope, Jordan concludes that “every exchange of gifts is fraught with uncertainty, which [Turner] expresses in terms of the shame or sense of unworthiness that is inseparable from an exchange of gifts.”

To offer a gift is in its own small but surprisingly vexatious way to take a risk; it creates an occasion for uncertainty that can’t be easily resolved. Will my gift be big (or modest) enough, appropriate to the occasion, sufficiently thoughtful? Restoration, then, is a risky gift given in acknowledgment of our debts to the natural world. It contains the recognition that the damage we inflict on the natural world is inevitable — it is the lot of humans to consume, metabolize, egest, and excrete. But “restoration as gift” also contains the recognition that it is small recompense for the magnitude of the debt. The bull in the proverbial china shop becomes disconcertingly aware of the fearful havoc he has caused and makes amends by offering afternoon tea served in the sundered cup. We are that bull.

Ecological restoration, meant in Jordan’s full sense, purportedly brings us into community with the rest of nature in a number of distinctive ways. The practice makes us aware of the repercussions of our ongoing involvement in sullying natural systems. It provides a means of direct engagement with nature since, in contrast to wilderness protection, for instance, it involves beneficent trammeling (the restorationist is armed with a bow-saw rather than binoculars). It is also redemptive insofar as it is “the first phase in the cycle of giving and taking back that is the ecological foundation for any relationship.” To be sure, the gift is inadequate and “unworthy.” If restoration culture enables us to figuratively but productively deal with shame and with transcending shame, then, arguably, we get to so-called higher values, including, Jordan argues, beauty.

One the thrills of a walk I took in a Chicago-area prairie shortly after my arrival there in 1998 was the discovery of Rattlesnake Master, Eryngium yuccifolium, a rare prairie plant associated with sites of exceptional quality. However, learning that it had been planted by Steven Packard, the site’s restoration steward, markedly lessened my pleasure. A restored ecosystem seems a disappointing thing — a fake, not at all the authentic article. The claim that restoration creates fakes is, in fact, the grounds for one of the most influential critiques of restoration by Australian philosopher Robert Elliot in his book Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration. Jordan, however, points to alternatives to associating value with authenticity or autonomy. For instance, he discusses traditions in which value is associated with relationship, such as the creation myths of “archaic” people (Mircea Eliade’s term) and anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s analysis of ritual performance that brings the universe to order. These enable Jordan to argue that “the restored ecosystem, to the extent that it has been implicated in the frontier of creation through engagement with humans, is not less but actually more natural, more real in this sense than its less self-aware ‘original’ counterpart.” Making this assertion may be strategically important — after all, restoration has been compared with forgery in art — but it doesn’t convince me on a gut level that a restoration site is more “natural” than a wilderness location. To say that they both have value seems good enough to me.

Even if one is not convinced that finding a planted rarity is heart-leaping, the point about performed or relational being is an important one. This is because it may convince us that doing things to ecosystems rather that setting them aside, as is the case in wilderness protection, produces value. Perhaps this should not be such a novelty considering that the products of human creativity are regarded as the pinnacle of the human enterprise, but environmentalists historically have esteemed most what they leave undone, even, oddly enough, when (as in the creation of a National Park) this forsaking requires monumental effort.

For the gift-exchange with nature to have value and to work as the basis for relationship, the asymmetry and ambiguity of the exchange must be resolved. Even if we regard an acre of restored prairie as having enhanced value by virtue of the attention, labor and care that went into its management, it is poor recompense for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of prairie acres. Restoration a la Jordan can only work “through the spiritual and psychological technologies of performance, ritual, and the arts.”

Drawing on varied literatures on ritual, performance, and liturgy, Jordan depicts the gift of restored habitat as a “ritual commutation” where a small offering is substituted for a larger one than might be called for. In the same spirit that Abraham substitutes a ram for his son Isaac, so a restored prairie fragment is offered back to Nature as something more than a gesture, but less than a full discharging of debt. A problem with environmentalism, from the perspective that Jordan develops here, is that it has been too eager to find literal compensations for the damage inflicted on nature. Ecological restoration, by contrast, has, the merit of being achievable and realistic.

What about outcomes? Although some restorations are very successful, we are still in the early days of this discipline. Jordan is suggesting that the process itself has a very distinctive, revolutionary, perhaps therapeutic value beyond the product. The process can serve as a model for emerging environmentalisms that seem at variance with those that are older and less friendly to the management of nature, and that, Jordan argues, may not be able to provide the same internal as well as external benefits. He once told me that he might have ended up with similar conclusions from any number of starting points that entail what he calls “strong engagement with nature.” I took him to be suggesting that there exist a range of practices — spiritual, artistic, therapeutic and so on — that all recognize the challenge in establishing how best to orient ourselves towards nature, yet which are nonetheless psychologically productive. The fact is that, for all of its claims to radicality, environmentalism is of a piece with the shame-denying aspects of the broader culture it critiques. Restoration ecology, by contrast, provides a new paradigm for thinking about humans and nature.

Despite Jordan’s insistence to my students more than a decade ago that a prairie sacrifice would be a useful thing, he has not, as far as I know, strenuously advocated for this. Rather, on occasions I have seen him replace this exercise with the burning of a few leaves of prairie grass — a fitting commutation for an immense sacrifice.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1572

The Puzzles of Preserving Historic Landscape Architecture

Frank Edgerton Martin

 In our work at Jeffrey L. Bruce on projects integrating historic landscape preservation with sustainble design, we often find that there are no simple or easy answers to such questions as:

What is the actual “period of significance” for an historic campus or estate landscape?

When is something just “out of date” and needing replacement and when has a landscape become “historic”?

In the last several years, the Cultural Landscape Foundation has led the fight to document and preserve many of the most threatened historic modern works of landscape architecture across the country. Designed by M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis is one of them.

This essay is an updated version of an original article that I wrote for Architecture Minnesota magazine in 2008. The future of Peavey Plaza is still uncertain.

For current updates, visit the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota who have  joined in legal action to preserve Friedberg’s design and the integrity of public review in a much-needed rehabilitation.

 Peavey Plaza: Riding out the Storm

 How do we know when to save a building or landscape that is currently out of fashion? Where’s the tipping point between rehabilitating a tired place and redoing it beyond recognition?

By Frank Edgerton Martin

 The cycles of fashion and the churning of time add to the perceived value of buildings and landscapes. The problem is that Americans don’t wait around for places to become “historic” and “in-style” again. We tear-down or redo civic landmarks (think of Ralph Rapson’s Guthrie or Lawrence Halprin’s Nicollet Mall) when they’re in their awkward “tween years”—old enough to be a bit dysfunctional and worn, but too young to be widely valued as seasoned and wise, as contributing members to society. Imagine if we did this to our children.

The 1976 film of the novel Logan’s Run poses a simple answer to this aging problem: willing execution at age 30. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing for a long time in Minneapolis to make more room for novelty. The problem is that our downtown looks increasingly like a shopping mall (albeit, a failing one) and a sterile office park with block-scale projects.

 The much beloved and mourned Metropolitan Building was doomed because it was in the wrong style and in the wrong place. In the 1960s, this mixed-use skyscraper (which now sounds pretty innovative) by architect Townsend Mix was the wrong style for the Space Age, and for the Gateway renewal project, and for prospective investors in coveted nearby projects like the Sheraton-Ritz Hotel (also recently torn down, age 30). Had the Metropolitan survived just another ten or fifteen years into the Victorian return to fashion in the 1970s, it would be our Brown Palace Hotel, our Wainwright Building, our Monadnock Building. This is not news.

What should be news is that we are still ripping out our landmarks during their awkward teen years. Today’s topic: Why are we even discussing a possible re-construction of Peavey Plaza, once (and surely 40 years from now) a nationally-recognized landmark of urban design by New York landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg? The answer is that we are stuck in the conundrum of not knowing how to recognize superb design from the recent past. What makes a nationally-significant work of modernism different from a drive-thru bank? What were the national an international influences of the time and how well were they interpreted at Peavey?

As to potential rehabs for Peavey, we face the second conundrum of not knowing how much “updating” this modern landscape can take before it becomes a different landscape. Because it is currently out-of-fashion and rundown, promoters of a total re-build see no hope in bringing humanity back to the place as it is. Perhaps they want a new Bryant Park with more grass, more visibility from the street, wrought iron gates. Perhaps, a jumbo flat video screen and stage jutting out from Orchestra Hall. Now, that’s pretty hip. So why bother trying to save Peavey’s concrete steps and staggered tree canopy, its “character-defining features?” They’re ugly and Brutalist (a pejorative term these days) anyhow. But, if you took any group of Orchestral Association Board members and city officials back to around 1980 when Peavey was new and sparkling and bursting with activities, they might see the quality of design that landscape architects and historians like myself see underneath the cheap recent landscape timbers and tar patches.

The challenge for preservationists is—through images and historic narrative that explains Peavey Plaza in the context of its era—to show how well-designed and innovative it was for its time and basically remains today. The bones of the cast concrete and the immersive sounds of falling water and sunken, quiet space are still there, though less inviting and actively used than it its youthful prime.

Somehow we have to make the annoying adolescent seem like that charming five-year old again; and we have to show how, with the right rehabilitation and guidance, we can help Peavey Plaza turn into a wonderful and multi-functional adult. This will not be easy because, as with many historic parks, Peavey suffers from deeply misguided (but fortunately reversible) city maintenance. Neighbors and city officials who see it as cold and uninviting have a firmly-established gestalt in their minds of concrete and hard surfaces. People like myself who remember what Peavey was and know a little bit about its history, see the architectural photos that appeared in this magazine thirty years ago.

As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said of people who speak in different languages, citizens who have different pictures of Peavey Plaza in their minds “live in different worlds.” That gulf in perception, as also happened in debates over the former Guthrie Theater and Lutheran Brotherhood Building, makes communication difficult between our two camps. But, not impossible.

The response should be a conversation in which contending parties don’t just throw out abstractions from their own language worlds such as (from preservationists), “historic, nationally-significant, and exceptional” and (from reconstructionists) “ugly, cold sterile, dangerous.” We should instead seek to bridge our cultural outlooks through visiting Peavey Plaza (and this is true for other contested sites) together. Rather than repeating assumptions, we should physically point to what we mean to explain our stands. The more specific—this stained pipe, this hiding place for crime, that sound of fountain water, this bland wall—the better. Sharing and pointing to such “ostensive” definitions is often the way that children communicate what they want before they know the words for things. 

Secondly, much has been learned since the 1960s and 1970s about plant materials, lighting and sustainability. We have more choices now to preserve Peavey’s essential character that preservationists defend while creating new color, activities and seasonal character. With a pending renovation of Orchestra Hall’s lobby and facility, the Minnesota Orchestral Association is, as seems appropriate, thinking of their downtown block as a whole. Indeed, that is the way the block was originally conceived in the early 1970s: an urban oasis for musical performance that could draw people from throughout the region.

Peavey Plaza’s early sketches and completion photographs show a place that is cared for, occupied, and programmed throughout the year. If a design team is hired to work with Peavey Plaza, either for the City (that owns it) or another client, they should be fully-versed in this history and The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties and the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes. These guidelines, if interpreted wisely, offer a great range of flexibility in materials and technologies while protecting the spatial patterns, views and sunken volumes that will one day make Peavey eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. As of this writing, the City of Minneapolis is considering local historic designation to protect Peavey Plaza from radical change.

In the Spring of this year, the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota announced its most “Endangered” list in a press conference right at Peavey Plaza. Peavey was included because of its poor maintenance and the swirl of rumors concerning its potential re-design. In a recent MinnPost.com article reporting the Endangered list: Bonnie McDonald, the Alliance’s executive director, argued that the preservationist’s task is to create a clear vision and guidelines for how to soften and improve Peavey without losing its essence. "Our challenge is to try to bring forth a vision of what that could look like. What would a renovation of that space look like that would be sensitive to the original design?"

No easy question. But it must be asked if Peavey Plaza is going to make it into adulthood and achieve the eventual consensus it deserves on its historic value. Landscape preservation is especially rich in puzzles. But, with the right balance of design and historical expertise, along with a mutually-respectful and specific conversation among all constituencies, Peavey Plaza may yet grow old, grow better, and richer in the temporal layers of its character.

 
Further Reading:
For further background on Peavey Plaza and its dilemmas, click here to see Frank Edgerton Martin’s article from the Spring 2008 issue of  _SCAPE:

Making Sense of an Historic Landscape - Stephen Rippon

London: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hardback, 416 pages
416 pages; 100 illus. 8 pp color plates; 9.2 x 6.1

by, Frank Edgerton Martin

Making Sense of an Historic Landscape is a broad geographic study of a relatively small English region. Author and landscape archaeologist Stephen Rippon’s overall goal is to study the balance between “environmental determinism” and human “social agency” in shaping a landscape. He explores this difficult question through the lens of a specific region divided by a geographic range called the Blackdown Hills that runs between Somerset and Devon in southwest England.

Is it the “luck” of settling on good farming soils with reliable water sources that adds up to a prosperous region? Does topography directly determine the location of roads and communities? Making Sense of an Historic Landscape argues that ecology and climate matter, but there are also other, less physical but equally important variables in regional character. The challenge is to understand the ecology, local culture, and human perception of landscapes as a whole.

Rippon studies the Blackdown Hills in southern England as a potentially decisive boundary in landscape character from prehistory onwards with a deep focus on the last 500 years. He sees this project as a specific case study that can be applied as a model for other regions, presumably far beyond the United Kingdom.

 After many centuries of habitation, the shape of fields, place-names, and styles of house design are noticeably different either side of the Blackdown Hills. Rippon suggests that these differences reflect a diversity of local cultures that somewhat surprisingly endure across much of southern England, even in the Internet Age. His approach to “making sense” of historic landscapes—their similarities, contrasts, and regional variations—borrows techniques from many geographic sub-specialties including: soils mapping, place names, and local comparisons of vernacular building forms. None of these techniques is new, yet rarely has someone applied them all together in such depth to study such a relatively small area.

 Rippon chose the Blackdown Hills and the lands on either side of them because their housing types, settlement patters, and village forms are so different. Dividing Devonshire from Somerset, the sparsely populated Blackdown Hills have been protected as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) since 1991. In contrast to the dense village network to the east, the western edge of Rippon’s study area is Dartmoor, a vast open wilderness home to one of Britain’s most famous national parks, novels of intrigue and romance, and a rich folklore tradition of supernatural spirits.

 In the first pages, Rippon expresses his goal “to expand on the traditional academic preoccupation of characterizing landscape in terms of their settlement patterns and field systems, and to try to understand the ways that people in the past have expressed their identities through standing buildings, the language of landscape (field- and place-names), agricultural practices, and the territorial structures within which they lived” (p. 3). 

 For most people outside academia, all this seems to make sense. Yet, such a multi-disciplinary approach is all too rare in British (and we might presume) American landscape studies. Rippon points out that scholars in each of these layers of landscape character tend to have their own journals and conferences and that one of the aims of this study is to break down these barriers.

 The book includes over fifty maps of the Blackdown Hills regions that document these many layers of cultural and ecological resources. The core chapters embrace: human perception, settlement patterns, house forms, fieldscapes, Roman and medieval cultivation and husbandry, and place names.  Building toward the greater whole that Rippon seeks, these sections are exhaustive and often exhausting to read unless one is directly engaged in the area discussed. Yet, for the purpose of testing the balance between environmental and social agency, their detail is a worthwhile effort.

 For landscape architects, long acquainted with regional mapping and “the overlay” technique dating back at least to Warren Manning, such a composite approach to landscape analysis is not new. What is somewhat new is Rippon’s full-spectrum approach. Beyond the ecology of soils, slopes, and vegetation—and beyond the cultural geography of human-made elements such as hedgerows and road patterns studied in W.G. Hoskins's masterful "The Making of the Landscape"(1955)—Rippon looks to a “conceptual” record of landscape. He seeks to document how people in the distant and more recent past perceived the locales on either side of the Blackdown Hills.

Many American readers may be somewhat limited in our understanding of Rippon’s field of landscape archaeology (largely taught in Britain) and the millennia of British history that he incorporates in this multi-disciplinary study. Yet, his perception of the field of landscape history is also very Anglo-centric with almost no mention of the remarkable 20^th century legacy of American cultural geographers beginning with Carl Sauer in the 1920s and leading up through the work of Yi-fu Tuan and J.B. Jackson whose interest in maps was deepened by his work with Allied Intelligence in World War II.

Because of this oversight, Rippon gives the mistaken impression that the field of cultural landscape preservation and history began only recently. “The term ‘historic landscape’,” he writes, “first came into use as recently as the early 1990s as a concept developed by archaeologists to advise planners and countryside managers of the historical depths present in the modern landscape (p. 54). For an American reader, this claim reads patently false given the fact that such academic groups as the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation was founded in the 1970s with the active participation of landscape architects. Their writings, like those of Tuan and others, explore the ideas of “place attachment”, vernacular landscapes, and the expressions immigrant cultures in the built landscape.

By Rippon’s inclusion of folklore and literature in his study, these geographic voices and those of such continental phenomenological writers as Gaston Bachelard are present at least in spirit. To capture the landscape of memory and its transmission through writing, Rippon cites travel accounts from writers such as Daniel Defoe to 19^th century Board of Agriculture reports.

He quotes a landscape description from the writer Celia Fiennes who, between 1682-1698, traveled the region and described its contrasts and vistas that survive to this day.  On the eastern fringes of the Blackdown Hills, she described the area around Chard as “such an enclosed country and narrow lanes you cannot see a bow shot before you.” After traveling through Somerset, she found a very different landscape when arriving into Devonshire over “a high ridge of hills which discovers a vast prospect on each side full of enclosures and lesser hills…you could see vast tracts of ground full of enclosures, good grass and corn beset with quicksets and hedge rows.” (p. 39)  Set probably at Maiden Down, a watershed line between two valleys, such an early description conveys how important watersheds were and are in creating regions of distinct local character.

Ultimately, Rippon concludes that both the natural environment and human agency matter in the long-term shaping of cultural landscapes. This finding seems hardly surprising even though it has long been a subject of debate. More surprising and largely unresolved in this study are the conundra: why do local areas throughout southern England continue to retain the same identities and variations that they have held for centuries? Why is change in perception and building forms so slow?

Rippon’s academic influence runs deep, if not far beyond the UK; and this study is documented with hundreds of footnotes and references that show the depth of his study. One wonders if the same sharp and enduring contrasts in local landscapes would apply to North America. For landscape architects and preservation historians, many of the analysis techniques are valid here, but practitioners must ask: are they really relevant for our work? Is the fine-grained mosaic of the English countryside an appropriate model for vast American spaces?

I believe that this detailed study is relevant if taken as a methodological model that can be adapted to specific projects. For the United States, these historic landscape planning subjects include: National Heritage Areas (NHAs), Scenic Byways, National Parks and Forests.

Covering much of two English counties, Rippon’s study area is somewhat similar to an American NHA in both its scale and its wealth of eras. There are now roughly fifty NHAs across the country; and because they emphasize grassroots participation, regional stories, conservation, preservation, and interpretation through networks of independent sites, they are at the forefront of American historic preservation. They also involve no federal land ownership, a key issue in these days of Property Rights debates.

I found Rippon’s study to be most relevant for my own historic landscape preservation work at this regional scale, especially for the Freedom’s Frontier NHA that extends over much of western Missouri and eastern Kansas. As the site of the Border Wars that led up to the Civil War, this region was divided not by a mountain range but by an arbitrary political boundary between slave and free states.

A few years ago, I worked with landscape architects from Jeffrey L. Bruce & Company to create a management plan that was one of the first to begin a management strategy for natural and human resources through understanding pre-settlement ecology. Like Rippon’s exploration of the roles of nature and human agency in shaping the Blackdown Hills region, National Heritage areas can become a crucible for such research.

By studying ecological systems and geology at the regional scale and asking why town sites, skirmishes, types of agriculture, and pioneer trails happened where they did, Freedom’s Frontier’s new management plan creates logical connections between natural and human history and why some Border War conflicts may have happened where they did. This type of integrated approach could not have happened without my collaboration as a historian with landscape architects who were able to document and visually convey overlapping natural and human systems. By connecting natural resources such as wetlands, soils, and streams with historic sites, planners can make stronger arguments and targeted strategies for protecting both.

 

Like the “nature versus nurture” debate in pedagogy, we may never know how much of the character of a specific historic landscape reflects a legacy of pre-settlement ecology and how much it is a direct expression of sheer human will and choices made. Perhaps, we never will have a full understanding of why some places change so slowly. But, for landscape architects and planners who often manage historic resources and fragile ecologies, these puzzles can enrich our study of why and how a landscape came to be what it is today.

 

 

 

Blue Systems: Toward a Better Campus Aesthetic

In Blue Systems: Toward a Better Campus Aesthetic, prolific authors Jeffrey L. Bruce and Frank Edgerton Martin utilize integrated water management planning case studies to draw a comprehensive picture of the value of such integration. The ...article is worthwhile aesthetically, practically, and also as an aid to vision. We especially like the phrase "blue and green design." Society for College and University Planning Journal.

http://www.scup.org/asset/62669/PHEV41N1_Article_Blue-Systems.pdf