Environmental Resilience
Took a boat ride on the lake last Saturday with friends we hadn’t seen in quite a while. Mid-September and it already felt like fall weather, cool and dry. Allan commented that living where we did wasn’t a bad way to be quarantined during Covid, and I had to agree with him.
We’d been living a couple houses up from the beach on Stoneybrae for years when we stumbled across (walking the dogs as usual) the for-sale sign for our present abode. A modest early 50s beach house that from the street appeared barely tied to land. Six years of design work, two years of construction for the initial renovation and another year to rebuild a disfunctional downstairs–all to make it into what it is today. And the carport still needs a renovation.
Last March I was reading New York Times articles written by on-the-edge writers hibernating from Covid in New York City studio apartments. Reading them, I felt fortunate to live where we do. I’m fortunate for my Irish ancestors’ decisions to leave the old sod and sail steerage class to America. I don’t believe D has much nostalgia for Egypt, interesting a country that it is. And I don’t feel compelled to squeeze into a Manhattan apartment just to say I lived there. I’ve never been a wannabe New Yorker, preferring more green and less concrete in my grazing–and a small spot of lake to help soothe the heart.
W. S. Merwin wrote a poem meditating on a late afternoon in New York City within view of the Hudson River. From an apartment, but with water in sight. Maybe, but you’d have to pay me an obscene amount of money, or at least provide free tickets to Broadway (whenever it comes back to life).
I’m often reminded that our houses outlive us as a rule. Outlive generations, even entire families. Yet we view where we live as ‘ours’ regardless of the time span. Layla likes to turn in circles before she settles in, which is akin to the same instinct. We’re the third family to live in this house. I’d like to think our stewardship has been good for the place–the windows are no longer fogged from failed vacuum seals and the front door is a nice shade of natural mahogany.
As we did a slow cruise of the lake, Allan asked if I’d seen the Washington Post Magazine article on modern house design. “I’d be curious what you might think of it, being an architect.” So I picked it up: A New Gold Standard for Green Architecture by David Walter. The Post does a yearly spread on house design that I flip through, checking out the photographs and scanning the script. Not too much better than a real estate blurb most years—design lite—but this year the editors reached a more serious plane–about planning for life in the oncoming climate crisis. Yes, it has arrived.
The article featured, to my surprise, two of my better known classmates from grad school, Andrés Duany and Liz Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife architectural couple who’ve spent their careers arguing for better planned communities, and I admire their work.
Liz and Andrés have been leaders in the New Urbanism movement for decades, traveling the country giving lectures, teaching and then demonstrating hands on with their own practice, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). The Seaside, Florida development is one of their best publicized works, and as the WP article notes, was the setting for the dystopian story, The Truman Show with Jim Carey. The writer failed to note the irony, though I’m sure Liz and Andrés were well aware.
Architectural collage of new urbanist Seaside, Florida photos by Shutter.chick, 2007
New Urbanism is shorthand for walkable communities, taming the intrusive automobiles and falling back on traditional town planning principals. Whereas Modernists displayed a disdain for towns of the past, looking to replace them, New Urbanism points to them as exemplars of well laid out communities.
The article’s feature photo has Liz and Andrés ensconced in a typical South Florida garden, lush and shady, dripping in humidity most of the year. Liz looks like she did in back in school and Andrés has his best ‘challenge me’ look on. The boy could lay down an argument—then and now.
Arguably, post-modernism’s infatuation with traditional architectural styles overtly influenced New Urbanism, but the underlying tenets of creating livable communities outlived the briefer fashionable post-modern style. What New Urbanism does hold in common with post-modernism is a certain nostalgia for simpler times.
“The Charter of the New Urbanism also covers issues such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the re-development of brownfield land.
“Architecturally, new urbanist developments are often accompanied by New Classical, postmodern, or vernacular styles, although that is not always the case.”
from Wikipedia article on New Urbanism
Other overlaps are also notable: human scale place-making verses goliath modernism’s ego strokes (such as seen in Howard Rourke skyscrapers–’out of scale, man, out of scale’), prioritizing pedestrians over vehicular traffic and parking lots, strategic placement of public loci such as post offices, libraries and churches…
Celebration, Florida became a poster child for post-modernism, and included projects by Charlie Moore among others. It’s so CUTE! Celebration is a close cousin to New Urbanism at least in appearance. Celebration, coincidentally or not, was developed by the Walt Disney Company. What was it about Florida in the 80s that brought out such a surge of nostalgia?
Market Street in Celebration, Florida photo by Simonhardt93
At Yale, I sat near Andrés, and only occasionally wandered to the far side of the Brutalist-Gothic space Paul Rudolf inflicted on impressionable young students to talk to Liz, who was studiously working on her projects. I had no idea they even knew each other. That I can recall, we never took the same studios. The one studio I remember Andrés took was under the tutelage of a neo-classicist architect named Allan Greenburg who taught, year after snoozing year, his course on courthouse design. Reading the course syllabus at the start of the year, I turned the page.
For those who might ask, why courthouses as a paradigm, another popular one is the ubiquitous fire station. There is a prescribed list of issues in designing either building type, and the discipline that comes from addressing these necessary functions is part of an architectural education. For fire stations it’s all about the trucks, the sleeping accommodations and getting from one to the other in an efficient manner. With courthouses, it’s the courtrooms, hearing rooms and the separate circulation systems–keeping judges safe, sequestering juries, and the less-talked about but necessary holding cells for the accused who’ve committed worse than traffic offenses.
It’s considered bad form for the Jack of Hearts to pass the hanging judge in a hallway—borrowing liberally from Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
I’d already done those exercises at Clemson; what I wanted most for my time at Yale was to satisfy a hunger for broader design themes–what was important about proportion verses what was rote tradition–how might non-rectilinear space be created without being chaotic–could a building ever truly be divorced from its site? All the while waiting on the Muse to feed me.
Allan Greenburg, I learned, was into the “semiotics of courthouse traditions,” i.e. Corinthian columns out front, and lots of crown moldings and mahogany furniture for each magisterially robed Judge Judy presiding.
Yale architectural professors loved misappropriating semiotics, which really is about language and words, vowel and things. Misappropriating words—oh, could I go on.
I don’t recall much of Andrés’s parti but do remember the precise, hard 2H pencil drawings he did for it. I wanted to tell him pen on board would have made a better presentation, just as precise but way more vivid, but I kept my mouth shut. The larger point being that, while Greenburg stayed frozen in the 1700s praying for Christopher Wren to rise from the dead, his students were getting on in the modern world.
My argument against again reviving classicism is that, irony of ironies, Neo-Classical was a frigging style back in Tom Jefferson’s day, so is it necessary to flog that dead horse any further? In this boy’s lifetime, Greenburg has made a career of it–and was smart enough to teach at Yale. OK, ‘style is everything,’ but showing a just a hint of creativity doesn’t hurt, does it?
I stood at the steps of the Parthenon and admired the peerless control of the Greeks’ style without the first urge to regurgitate it. What Charles Moore ‘borrowed’ was the Athenians’ seeming random placement of buildings on the Acropolis, forming one of the ancient world’s most unique urban spaces.
Andrés was gregarious in school, loquacious even. By contrast, Liz was a quieter, studious person who I enjoyed checking in with occasionally when I got fed up with staring at my half-baked designs as the project deadline was approaching. My single advantage was, having been put through the meat grinder of presentation drawing at Clemson, it took me less time to produce a presentation, though I doubt the accompanying words worked so well, certainly not like Andrés who was charming.
“Duany was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba until 1960. He attended The Choate School and Aiglon College and received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University (1971). After a year of study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he received a master's degree from the Yale School of Architecture (1974).”
From Wikipedia article on Andrés Duany
“Elizabeth Maria Plater-Zyberk was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Josaphat Plater-Zyberk (1906–1994), an architect, and his wife, Maria Meysztowski (1911–2000), a professor of French at Villanova University. Plater-Zyberk is an alumna of Sacred Heart Academy Bryn Mawr, and received her undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University (1972) and a master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture (1974).”
from Wikipedia article on Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
They had proper pedigrees unlike a boy from the Carolina swamps, and though I did graduate with these brilliant people, I still don’t have a Wikipedia page; I'm so deprived.
Nice Try; No Banana
Not too far from our house, a relatively recent development of eight single-family houses were erected maybe 10 years ago facing Columbia Pike directly, just past the shopping center mecca known as Bailey’s Crossroads. On first glance, they resemble the New Urbanism ideal–except they miss it by a country mile.
First, one needs to understand the context: a heavily traveled arterial with gas stations, empty lots, a Verizon maintenance yard, Mexican restaurant with crime problems, Salvadorian restaurant with a food truck for advertising, strip shopping… No one in their right mind would envision great potential for a real residential community being formed here, unless all of Bailey’s Crossroads were assembled into a larger block and reconstructed. Eight single-family houses won’t cut it, sad to say.
The 1960s urban renewal’s goals weren’t so much the problem, bad design was. And New Urbanism stands as a solid rebuttal.
It took guts or bad timing to invest in housing fronting one of Washington’s disaster evacuation routes (which is its own kind of urban planning myopia). Being near-clones of Charleston’s famous “single houses,” these eight houses with their traditional clapboard siding, front porches, white picket fences and all, completely miss the genius of the Charleston houses: if you live on a main avenue (or turnpike as Columbia Pike was once called), the only privacy one can derive lies in the garden spaces set to the side of each house. In Charleston, the neighboring house would have few windows overlooking their neighbor’s garden. The Columbia Pike houses have grass strips between them.
Nice try; no banana. And the white plastic fencing is already falling down.
“The single house is usually sited asymmetrically along or very near one side lot line devoting most of it’s unbuilt lot area to a single side yard. The house is “open” to its own side yard with facing porches and large windows. Conversely a single house is “closed” or hermetic with fewer and smaller windows on the side facing its neighbor’s side yard so that each house has privacy in its designated outdoor space even when houses are built very close together. Today side yards are often used for parking one car or two cars in tandem with the space sometimes doubling as a courtyard when the cars are removed.” [emphasis added]
The last sentence in the quote explains a lot about the intrusion of automobiles, and what we’ve lost.
Charles Graves House photo by ProfReader, 2013
“The Charles Graves House, at 123 Tradd Street in Charleston is a classic example of a single house, with its narrow end facing the street, a false front door screen, a piazza (aka porch), and a true front door halfway along the longer side of the house.”
from Wikipedia article on ‘single houses’
I had not considered it in this context before, but our own house, turned sideways on the lot, is a 'single' house with only the carport facing the street; the bulk of the property sits to the side of our house, and it’s given us a wonderful, sunken garden–in addition to the long views toward the lake.
News Flash: Global Warming Has Arrived
So I’ll get to the heart of this with a question: why do national newspapers let writers with evident weak backgrounds in a subject write about it as if they were authorities? It’s been decades since the Washington Post had a writer who could say boo about architecture and urban planning. I still miss Ben Forgey’s articles published on Saturdays; he’d know what to say about global warming.
Good intentions don’t make up for a lack of knowledge. Because you live in a community doesn’t elevate your opinion above the norm–and the norm in this country is fairly low when it comes to urban planning. Like having a body doesn’t make you a skilled internist. My recent blog, Age of the Automobile, was sparked by an economist’s opinion piece in the Post about the new Silver Line’s ruinating muck-up of Tysons Corner. The economist’s article was another that entirely missed the forest.
The gist of last Sunday’s WP story is that the so-called ‘green movement’ in architecture has missed a bigger issue. The writer misses the point about missing the point. Sir: the reason they’re called movements is because they morph over time, i.e. evolve. When asked, “Is the world now approaching ‘green’ design all wrong?” the writer grabs a quip from Andrés: “I call it gizmo architecture.”
The writer claims Andrés believes sustainable design as it’s practiced is:
“…minimizing carbon dioxide emissions and mitigating climate change–is naïve at best and a dereliction of duty at worst. Mitigation is fine, he says, but it cannot be architects’ main standard for greenness.”
from A New Gold Standard for Green Architecture, Washington Post article by David Walter
Don’t know, ‘cause I didn’t sit in on their discussion, however I seriously doubt that was Andrés’s main or only point. He’s way better grounded, even if he’s always enjoyed playing a provocateur’s role.
But OK, for argument’s sake, let’s say he agrees with the writer. First, Andrés has never been known as an environmental architect, i.e. one focusing primarily on saving the planet, so why, precious writer are you interviewing him? Just got lucky?
Andrés has been more about recovering what America lost when we let the automobile run amuck and what followed–and I’ve appreciated his work. He had caught—stuff—for infuriating some with his comments, but that’s show biz. It never pays to stick your head above the trenches.
However, saying ‘green architecture’ is about minimizing carbon dioxide and mitigating climate change is like saying Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead to espouse creativity. Yes, it’s true that making buildings more energy-efficient saves energy, and therefore pollutes less. However the writer might want to take a class on the LEED green system of evaluating building construction A to Z before writing further on the subject. Or better, apply for graduate work at a good school of architecture–say Yale.
Architects are generalists by training, if not by instinct, and the best of us don’t get wrapped around the axle over a single-minded issue. It’s all part and parcel of good design theory.
The ‘green movement’ in architecture is about preserving natural habitats, clean air and water, minimizing wastes and repurposing materials. It’s about getting down to zero carbon emissions. Zero, as in no use of fossil fuels. It’s about repurposing brownfield sites (as in the Shirlington Library project) and preserving wetlands (as in the Germantown Library project).
Olney Library–which is coming in next week’s blog–received Gold LEED certification in part for capturing rainwater coming from the roofs and diverting it into a sand filter disguised as a garden feature before releasing it into the stormwater system. Olney’s use of natural light instead of additional fluorescents was another.
And yes, the roofs were designed to a higher wind load than the original Olney Library built in the 80s, with tie downs and structural wood deck–wood because it’s less consumptive from the environment than aluminum or steel. The embedded carbon sequestered in Olney Library’s wood deck and beams will remain that way for the life of the building, and the recycled brick taken from the earlier library now wraps lovingly around parts of the library’s interior.
I’d argue that all Andrés was suggesting was if, as it seems, we’re waking up too late to divert damage wrought by global warming, we might want to pay more attention to surviving it. True that. He lives in South Florida, and they are seeing it now–king tides and Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, the Everglades drying out and the hideous developments planted with no better than palm trees since the 20s. Florida, in many ways, could be the poster child for global warming, along with the Outer Banks, sad to say.
You might also decide to just stand guard in front of your 50,000 square foot mega-mansion with the AR-15 and the little woman by your side with her pistol to keep the riff raff off the lawn.
There’s an expression that good design (name your movement) costs money. I suggest bad planning costs more–trailer life just isn’t what it’s chalked up to be, as witnessed by the folks in Louisiana–and now in Oregon. When you build in a floodplain, insurance or no, your home’s survivability is only guaranteed between major storms, whether your house sits pretty on the Gulf Coast, or in the Missouri River flood plains in Nebraska and South Dakota. When building in areas known for frequent seasonal fires, similarly sad stories are written about California.
But it’s as much about what is affordable to working class people as it might be about their politics.
When you build with cheap materials and slack builders (like in Miami before Hurricane Andrew), it may bring the cost down, but not enough to offset the downside of leaking plastic windows and poorly tied roofs being ripped off in high winds. For the wealthy who look at ‘green architecture’ as too expensive, at least they have the choice. People in trailer parks don’t have those options.
I find blind irony in a claim that we need to be building better fortresses against the coming deluge.
Resilience by itself won’t save our lazy butts. Particularly as we don’t live in Bangladesh, where a one inch rise in sea level means being that much closer to drowning, or in the Arun River valley in Tibet just below the Himalayas where they’ve denuded the slopes of all the trees to sell charcoal and are now being wiped clean off the land from the erosion and flooding.
We are fortunate to live where we do in America, but it will not protect us from our own myopia.
The scale of the problem is directly proportional to the engorging human populations covering the planet. In the good old days–say in medieval Europe–shitting in the river didn’t matter so long as the next village was far enough downstream. Now, because all the land in between is occupied, it’s more a life and death matter. If we humans can’t come to terms with constraining our baby-making, at least we should make an effort to leave leftovers for other species.
Either we work at fixing it, or we’ll be needing those colonies on Mars sooner than Elon Musk will have them ready.
Possibly it’s true we’ve waited too long to address global warming, but it strikes me as cowardly not to even make the attempt. And those retirees strolling their pretty little communities like Seaside, Florida will soon enough need rowboats and life preservers going to the post office. Providing they survive the Covid.
Coda
Seems the topic is topical (like that?) The cover of last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was a photo of a hillside on fire in a suburb of San Gabriel Canyon, California superimposed by the title of the lead article, How Climate Change Will Remap Where Americans Live, by Abrahm Lustgarten.
One quote gets to the heart of it:
“The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people [read: poor] will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.”
from How Climate Change Will Remap Where Americans Live, by Abrahm Lustgarten in NY Times Magazine
Reading the second article, I came away with the distinct impression that designing for resilience against global warming–which the WP article argues is of greater importance than mitigating it–is putting a band aid on a wound that won’t stop hemorrhaging. What we need is a tourniquet.