With Nature and Justice for All

Researching simulated environmental imagery to improve prison life.

Credit: Randy Lyhus

When a new inmate is booked into jail, it can be a pretty dismal experience for everyone involved. The prisoner may be angry or despondent, suffering from acute mental stress or illness, or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. On-duty staff attending to prisoner intake may feel tired or threatened (or both). It’s a combustible atmosphere, to be sure, and in the early hours and days of a prisoner’s term, concepts such as “rehabilitation” and “redemption” may not take hold.

At a Northern California jail, however, a relatively simple intervention has already improved conditions for staff and inmates. Based on research that illustrates the calming effects of simulated nature views, with support from the Academy of Architecture for Justice (AAJ) and the National Institute of Corrections, the Sonoma County Main Adult Detention Facility now boasts a large-scale photo mural of bucolic grassland on one wall of the booking area. Just six weeks after the mural was installed, the team of researchers—led by Jay Farbstein, FAIA, Melissa Farling, AIA, and Polytechnic Institute of New York University environmental psychology professor Richard Wener, with assistance from arts and neuroscience researchers Upali Nanda and John Sollers—found measurable reductions in stress levels among both groups.

Since the 1980s, studies have shown that medical patients with views of nature—whether real (as in a garden) or simulated (as in a photographic mural)—experience accelerated recovery, lower blood pressure, and less anxiety. In the prison setting, at least one study has similarly demonstrated that prisoners with external views of nature have lower blood pressure than those who view only internal courtyards.

In October 2006, a group of architects, corrections administrators, and neuroscientists gathered to discuss the growing body of evidence that suggests that correctional environments affect inmates and staff. “We looked at several aspects of the prison environment and how they might affect the brain,” Farbstein says, “including the visual environment, the acoustic environment, the impact of light on circadian rhythms, crowding and social functions, and staff–inmate ratio.” The Sonoma County project grew out of that exercise.

Compared to most other jails, the Sonoma County detention center was already considered a next-generation facility that placed greater emphasis on human comfort. The intake space was bright and airy, with a waiting-room atmosphere in which most inmates are booked across an open counter rather than shuffled down dark corridors. “It already was a less stressful environment than 80 to 90 percent of intake areas,” Farbstein says. “There were a lot of things about it that already suggested a lower level of stress.”

It was an ideal environment in which to test their hypothesis. The team initially considered adding live houseplants to the space, which could have been a security risk (as pots and twigs could be used as weapons), and the idea was ultimately deemed less effective than a large-scale mural. Once they centered on that approach, the team chose a mural of savannah grassland that was previously used in a medical setting to positive effect. In addition to the main mural, which measures about 9 feet by 24 feet and was installed in the waiting room, an additional mural of the same image was mirrored to fill a longer and narrower 2-feet-by-38-feet space near the ceiling in the holding-cell area.

The depicted landscape has all the hallmarks of a calming nature scene, Farling says, including open views, enough trees to provide shade and shelter, and a still, nonturbulent water source. Again, the team pointed to previous research indicating humans’ primal connection to the savannah landscape. Architects may also appreciate that the mural simply represents the classic design principle of “prospect and refuge.”

To determine stress levels, the research team chose to record a particular measure of staff heart rates (inter-beat intervals), which was considered less invasive than, say, testing for levels of salivary cortisol—another stress indicator that would require users to chew on a piece of cotton. Comparing heart rates of staff pre- and post-mural showed a measurable reduction in stress at the end of their shifts after the mural was installed. There was also a marked reduction in the staff stress indicators from the beginning to end of their shifts from the pre-mural to the post-mural period.

Farbstein said they are intrigued by the implications that the research may have for the potential of such interventions to reduce stress levels in inmates and that, if stress and other factors are reduced, inmates may be better able to participate effectively in rehabilitation programs. He and his colleagues are seeking more funding to take their research further
.
“If you are in a jail that believes in rehabilitation and offers rehabilitation programs,” Farbstein says, “when you have inmates who are less stressed, getting more sleep, and are better able to learn, I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that they would ultimately have greater success.”
Learn more about the AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice at aia.org/aaj.

http://www.ecobuildingpulse.com/performance-metrics/with-nature-and-justice-for-all.aspx

Rumble in the Urban Jungle

New Urbanist Revives Battle with Landscape Urbanism.

By Michael Sorkin

The High Line in New York, designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is criticized by Andres Duany for being too expensive and over-designed.

It's hard to keep up with the musical deck chairs in the disciplines these days. The boundaries of architecture, city planning, urban design, landscape architecture, sustainability, computation, and other fields are shifting like crazy, and one result is endless hybridization–green urbanism begets landscape urbanism, which begets ecological urbanism, which begets agrarian urbanism–each “ism” claiming to have gotten things in just the right balance. While this discussion of the possible weighting and bounding of design's expanded field does keep the juices flowing, it also maintains the fiction that there are still three fixed territories–buildings, cities, and landscapes–that must constantly negotiate their alignment.

This has several consequences. The first is that the theoretical autonomy of the individual disciplines remains fundamentally uninfringed. The second is that new forms of a much-needed transdisciplinary practice are stymied by rigid intellectual bureaucracy. And finally, the opportunities for turf warfare are multiplied. A tiny skirmish has just been unleashed by the New Urbanists in the form of a book edited by Andres Duany and Emily Talen–Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City–which singles out that inoffensive school of thought for withering opprobrium.

But why? And why now? In their preface, the editors wistfully suggest that this was a book that should have been compiled 15 years ago. They're right: the project is pervaded by the sense that the nag being flogged long since passed through the glue factory. Their critique is antique: Landscape Urbanism is just the continuation of CIAM and its misguided principles by other means. The collection thus winds up as another–and completely unnecessary–iteration of that beloved chestnut, New Urbanism vs. Modernism. The current screed is obsessively focused yet again on what is seen as the leadership role in urbanism of a powerful and invidious cabal at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), an effete elite that just doesn't get it. This weirdly fetishistic animus has gnawed at Duany's craw for years. What's up with that? Give it a rest!

The anti-intellectual schtick–that those academics are fey and fashionable compromisers without real values–plays repeatedly throughout the book. There's an especially puerile riff by James Howard Kunstler, which reaches the startling conclusion that Harvard is a bulwark of the status quo! Talen bemoans the Landscape Urbanists for their reversion to misconstructions of post-structuralist, Marxist, and ecological discourses as gauzy camouflage for their designs for world domination and weird, uninhabitable cities. That academics would speak in the lingua franca of their own community is hardly more surprising than the New Urbanists' adopting the language of developers. Their book is, indeed, full of hard-nosed whinging about the bottom line, which, in the end, is the only substantial riposte offered to actual “Landscape Urbanist” projects. Duany particularly reviles the High Line, which he thinks would have been better–and cheaper–with Adirondack chairs from Home Depot instead of all that “design.”

Because there's no real case, there are more straw men in this book than at a casting call for The Wizard of Oz. The most cited include GSD professor Charles Waldheim, landscape architects James Corner and the late Ian McHarg, Frederick Law Olmsted, the University of Pennsylvania, and various fellow travelers in the promotion of … what exactly? The foundational offense is clearly Waldheim's statement in his 2006 book The Landscape Urbanism Reader that “Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently under way in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.” This is simply tendentious, another way of saying, “It's the environment, stupid.” But the Newbies rise to the bait. Let's get ready to rumble!

They've been preparing the battleground for years, insisting that they alone have found the one true condition of equipoise. New Urbanists defend their superior wisdom in three areas: the preferability of the “traditional” city of streets and squares to the universally discredited Corbusian model, a claim to special access to knowledge of sustainability, and a faux-populist derision of practices that are “avant-garde.” None of these arguments is interesting or particularly controversial. No designer of conscience (or consciousness) resists the idea of cities with streets built for people on foot or fails to pay at least lip service to a sustainable–even equitable–environment. Insisting otherwise is just disingenuous.

But there is something interesting going on in thinking about the design of cities, informed by questions of sea-level rise and climate change, massive pollution of air, earth, and water, and a broad realignment of public consciousness about the limited bearing capacity of the earth. Like virtually everyone in the disciplines, both Landscape Urbanists and New Urbanists recognize this and have produced projects that address it. It's the war over formulae that's a waste. The New Urbanists continue to dine out on the enervated notion of a regulating “transect,” a gradated wash of conditions from rural to urban, derived from Patrick Geddes, which they serve up with all the nuance of Creationism.

But “more or less urban” is only one of many ways in which the city can be discussed and the idealist structure of the transect has been thoroughly unpacked by many writers. One key deficit of the New Urbanists' model is that their picturesque conceit is both nonlinear on the ground and disrupted by exceptions in the form of special districts. Landscape Urbanists, though, are excited by such zones of difference, which include “traditional” parks, as well as the “dross-scape” of rail yards, industrial zones, edge-city squalor, and other areas not easily assimilated to the historic order of streets and squares. The recognition that such territories constitute a huge component of the built environment locates an urgent question for design.
 
While many of the usual New Urbanist suspects contribute to the book, there's a clear divide among them between the unabashed assailants and those with a more conciliatory position, who won't be provoked into a death match. It's entertaining to see how many of the book's essayists tiptoe away from the bluster. Duany wants the High Line and Freshkills Park in New York and Downsview Park in Toronto to be seen as pretentious, but his cohort is unconvinced. Dan Solomon wisely finds these projects not just praiseworthy as places but understands they are simply parks, not “urbanisms.”

Likewise, Jason Brody sees the valuable contribution of an evolving set of landscape practices, all of which are engaged in infusing city-making with our increased understanding of the planetary crisis.

If there's a bright spot in the schools and the professions nowadays, it rests in landscape architecture's ability to introduce the urgency of ecological analysis into design's atmosphere and to pioneer forms of representation and discourse that freshly depict territories and phenomena from microclimates to regions. While McHarg may have gotten it wrong in the end, with his overly anthropocentric schema, the ecological insights in his mappings were seminal. The beautiful work done by James Corner and others in bridging the gap between datascapes and landscapes has opened new approaches to planning and building, and been critical in establishing new forms of analysis. We all want to be the mother of the arts, but why can't we just get along?

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/critique/2013/1308-Rumble-in-the-Urban-Jungle.asp

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

Interstitial – Between Architecture and Landscape

Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre by Renzo Piano

The nexus between architecture and landscape – the interstitial space – is a fascinating place for a designer. It is the very edges of things; in nature, in objects and in buildings that are always the most interesting places to me. In the natural environment, it is that fuzzy boundary where the ocean meets the sand, the estuaries where freshwater meets saltwater or where the open forest turns to open grassland. In nature, edges are typically the most rich and fertile areas as resources are available from two different environments.

 

Similarly, edges in the built environment can offer a richness to the spaces adjacent by shaping the human experience through a variety of design ‘moves’ and/or architectural details such as a feathered edge, protection from the sun or a place to sit.

With this in mind, what I’d like to focus on is the interstitial both at the edges of buildings and site as well as the spaces immediately adjacent. Sometimes there’s a clear visual and physical delineation between the building and the related external space, in other projects they tend to overlap and combine, however most commonly we find they tend to inform each other.

Many years ago in a volume of the magazine Places – by the way, the archive is available to download – there was a great definition of these three approaches, or ‘modes’ as the author (Reuben Rainey) called them, in the relationship of architecture and landscape that captures a way of considering the interstitial space.

These modes are: Contrast, Merger and Reciprocity.

I’ll just briefly explain them and then you may want to consider these modes while viewing the selected buildings below. The first mode, Contrast, is fairly obvious and is considered where architecture is juxtaposed with the natural or cultural landscape. Acting as a counterpoint, the building exerts an visual and physical influence of the immediate context through a combination of scale, profile, colour and finishes. There is no transition into landscape at all so that the intrinsic qualities of each are accentuated via Contrast.

 

The next mode, Merger, is the polar opposite and is where architecture blends or appears integrated with the natural or cultural landscape. Reuben notes that in this mode the building form may reflect the surround topography or even be placed underground to entirely merge with the landscape.

 

Reciprocity is the third mode and most commonly found. Architecture influences, modifies and shapes the landscape and landscape influences, modifies and shapes the architecture. Each mutually benefits which tend to lead to richer, more complex buildings and spaces. The Reciprocity strategy may be as direct and formal as an extension of the building grid into the landscape or more subtle where the external space transitions into the building and interlocks the interior and exterior.

 

Of course, in the complexities of design there are contradictions. These three approaches often appear together in one building to accentuate each element in response to formal considerations or perhaps react to functional or climatic conditions. From the examples illustrated above, it could be argued that Fallingwater simultaneously merges and contrasts with the site context. Nevertheless, these modes are readily identifiable if you pause and look closely.

Further Reading

• For more on macro/meso/micro scale have a look at the classic book Responsive Environments (1985) by Ian Bentley et al. Here’s a recent video of Ian Bentley exploring parts of the Responsive Environments book.
• The macro/meso/micro concept equally applies to structures, chemistry, economics, and sociology (eg. Applying Sociology within Various Society Levels).
• Rainey, Reuben, 1998 Architecture and Landscape: Three Modes of Relationship (PDF), Places Vol. 4, No.4.

http://arkhitekton.net/2012/12/31/interstitial/

The Performative Ground: Rediscovering The Deep Section

Deep Urbanism is a reading of the city that acknowledges the complex ecological and biogeochemical processes taking place above, below and within the urban ground. In the city, nothing can simply be placed on the surface; the composition of the urban ground requires that structures inevitably extend deep into a complex mix of disturbed soil horizons, construction rubble, pipes, subways, utilities. The most innocent-looking walkway may sit on 30-foot piles driven deep into silty soil; small hillocks might be braced with highly engineered geotextiles. A simple meadow may require the complete reconstruction of a “natural” soil profile; a sunken garden may require drainage infrastructure and thousands of pounds of concrete to keep the water table at bay. Much of the action of landscape is deep underground, buried in space or time.

Read more: http://landscapeurbanism.com/article/the-performative-ground/">