Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures 9781477325117

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Blue Architecture

Roger Fullington Series in Architecture

Blue Architecture Water, Design, and Environmental Futures

Brook Muller

University of Texas Press

Austin

Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from Roger Fullington and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu /rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Muller, Brook, author. Title: Blue architecture : water, design, and environmental futures / Brook Muller. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: Roger Fullington series in architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031936 (print) | LCCN 2021031937 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2510-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2511-7 (ebook PDF library) ISBN 978-1-4773-2512-4 (ebook ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Water and architecture—West (U.S.)—Case studies. | Water and architecture—Environmental aspects. | Architectural design—Environmental aspects. | Sustainable architecture. Classification: LCC NA2542.8 .M85 2022 (print) | LCC NA2542.8 (ebook) | DDC 720/.47—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021031936 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021031937 doi:10.7560/325100

This book is dedicated to Robert Young (1959–2018), friend, colleague, and provocateur, and a former professor of planning at the University of Oregon who later assumed an appointment at the University of Texas: a gifted man on a mission, Robert’s exhaustive historical knowledge filled the room with possibility as he envisioned greener and more just urban futures. This book attempts to channel his joy, generosity, and deep intelligence.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1. Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

11

2. Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings 3. Liquid-Shaped Space 4. In Concentrate

45

65

5. Reconstituting Architectural Horizons 6. Redrawing Waters

85

101

Epilogue: Reflections in Depths

119

Glossary of Terms for the Water-Conscious Designer Notes 133 References 147 Permissions 153 Index 155

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25

Preface

It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime and watery in the northern hemisphere of Earth. Earth was green and watery. The air of earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream. The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart. Earth was warm. The surface of the Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was. —Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan ( 1 959), 2 1 5 – 2 1 6

I walk the streets of Portland, Oregon, on an early January morning. Silent darkness envelops my world; curling fog twists around felt globes of overhead lights. Raindrop dashes arc in the cones of passing headlights. Mist glistens on every leafy surface. The slow and ceaseless drizzle pools and brings into horizontal relief the irregularities and micro-topographies of every roadway (if one is inclined to walk and to look). A narrow pool of standing water at the curb’s edge blinks as the stoplight above turns red, black, red. And where the street begins to slope gently downhill, pleats of water gather as complex embroideries, backing up and roiling at the leaf-choked drain. It drizzles now, as it so often does, and yet there are times when the rains fall freely and thump in icy droplets. And it can come sideways and violently. In December 2016, to the south in nearby Eugene, where I lived for some time, a rare combination of conditions led to a massive downpour during which the thermometer never wavered from 28 degrees. Driving my son to his afterschool music lesson, I thought: This cannot be good. The warmer precipitate of the sky smacked the cold earth, and layers of ice began to accumulate on

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every surface. Hours later, trees started to fall, power lines came crashing down, transformer boxes exploded, cars and roofs were crushed. Tiny microclimatic changes led to a weather event that brought an entire city to a standstill for weeks. As I walk, the bright expansiveness of summer feels unimaginably remote. For in Oregon, much to the disbelief of most Californians, summers are hot and dry, and it is not uncommon for no rain to fall from June to September, during which time the sun-starved northwesterners walk about with crazily joyous looks on their faces. While temperatures are typically in the 80s during the day, unusually hot spells have arrived the past several Julys, with daytime highs climbing to well above 100. And during the extreme dry heat of August and September 2017, the forest’s extra-thick undergrowth, the result of especially intense winter snows and rains, turned to tinder and led to a “flash drought” condition that fed massive forest fires throughout the region.1 As I walk I contemplate my personal and professional trajectory and the many privileges I have been afforded. After majoring in environmental studies and then pursuing a master’s in architecture, I had the great fortune of entering the profession and working with talented, gracious designers and thinkers at Behnisch and Partner Architects in Stuttgart; Blackbird Architects in Santa Barbara, where, among other projects, I contributed to the design of the Watershed Resources Center; and Michael Singer Studio. I realize that ideas and lessons that gathered and gained momentum during this time all flow toward water. And everywhere I travel these days, what presses upon me— hydrostatic pressure–style—is how essential it is that we pay more attention to water in architectural and urban design. Water is often overly abundant, with neighborhoods subject to flooding during increasingly severe rain events, and in so many other instances there is not enough. Arguably, however, “the most common condition is actually that the right kind of water is not where it should be,” notes Antoine Picon, and that “seems to be the case today more than ever before.”2 Or as Michael Stuhr, director of the Portland Water Bureau, claims of potable sources, “there is not a shortage problem, just a mal-distribution problem.”3 Often water supplies are polluted, whether in an arid environment like Egypt (a country that depends almost exclusively on the contaminated Nile River and that has seawater encroaching upon its fertile delta) or a more verdant climate like Minnesota (where nutrient loads from agricultural runoff impact the land of ten thousand lakes) or in cities like Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey (where unacceptable levels of lead in the drinking water impair health and threaten livelihoods). And a perfect storm is gathering in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia: water streams down from the mountains of the tropical island of Java and en-

Preface

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ters a city of many millions in polluted riverways, while a rising South Java Sea and land subsidence as a result of overpumping in order to secure decent water supplies in a context of rampant development suggest a perilous (near) future. What is water’s tomorrow for a city like Jakarta? Or Lagos, Dar es Salaam, or Seattle?4 How are we to work through the paradoxes of overabundance and scarcity of this most precious resource? The day brightens and traffic swells as I cross the streets of Portland’s Inner Eastside, and I think of what it has meant to dwell for fifteen years in the Pacific Northwest, the “upper left” at the edge of darkness, sea, and the known universe, a place of great luminous and hydrological contrasts. I reflect with gratitude on the many advantages of being in the milieu that I taught in for as long as I did, a place of intellectual abundance and courageousness, as well as plentiful rains. For decades, the great pulse of the University of Oregon Architecture Department has centered on commitments to a sustainable built environment, which can happen only by rejecting the bifurcation of architectural design and building technology such as exists in other programs where “Designers” (with a capital D) occupy the upper strata of faculty society and building technologists are relegated to second-class berths below. This conviction extends to the school’s origins: from the beginning, it has viewed design as allied with other domains of creative inquiry and predicated on interaction with those domains, and it has maintained a corresponding disinterest in dogma, for which we have little time.5 The list of those at the University of Oregon who enriched my experience and shaped my thinking would fill many pages. I thank you all and deeply for your dedication, passion, and collegiality. My appreciation extends as well to the many kindred academic spirits beyond Oregon: Josh Cerra at Cornell University; Leonard Yui at Roger Williams University; Frances Bronet, president of Pratt Institute; so many friends and former colleagues at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; Nabeel Elhady at Cairo University; Noelwah Netusil at Reed College; Ann Kelly at King’s College, London; Javier Lezaun at Oxford University; Courtney Crosson at the University of Arizona; Keith Diaz Moore and Sarah Hinners at the University of Utah; John Jacques, emeritus professor from Clemson, whose reflective insights know no bounds; and so many others. I have now embraced a new and exciting intellectual geography at the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—not to mention a fascinating landscape, climate, people, and culture with its own bountiful resources and urban and hydrological challenges. Numerous practitioners brought visionary pragmatism to this effort: so many treasured colleagues in the Portland architectural community; Matt Tierney with Snow Kreilich in Minneapolis, dedicated collaborator on writ-

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ings and drawings that serve as the basis for chapter 6; Brent Bucknum, founding principal of the cutting-edge shop Hyphae Design Laboratory in Oakland; former Hyphae environmental engineer Meg Prier; Rhys Roth, executive director of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure; May al-Ibrashy and her inspired team with the Megawra Built Environment Collective in Cairo; Leonardo Reis of the SPD, a force of a political party of the Madeira Island Autonomous Territory of Portugal; and Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce, to whom I am grateful for an unforgettable discussion during a March 2017 hike along Bryce Creek under a canopy of old-growth forest in Oregon. This project would not have been possible without the input of a great number of water experts who suffered through my naive questions. One thing I have learned is that people who work in fields that deal with water love to talk about it! So thank you, Dan Kent and other dedicated, talented folks at Salmon-Safe; Crystal Grinnell with Biohabitats; Maria Cahill of Recode; Mort Anoushiravani of Mercy Corps; Ryan Ruggiero with (Portland) metro; Torrey Lindbo with the City of Gresham; Roy Iwai with Multnomah County; Michael Willis of MWA Architects; Douglas Yoder, deputy director of the Miami-Wade Water and Sewer Department; Marie Walciewicz with the City of Portland; and so many others. I am also truly indebted to the many talented, mission-driven students I have had the good fortune of working with in exploring and developing ideas about water and architecture, beginning with a winter 2014 studio, “A Machine Is a Watershed for Living In,” and continuing on into the 2019 “HydroLogical Architecture for the Urban Watershed” studio. I have no compunction about sharing and celebrating their (award-winning) projects in this narrative. When you presume the intelligence of those with whom you work and facilitate a rigorous process, the rewards multiply. I have also gained much from the independent study efforts of (independent-minded) students like Erik Barth, Andrew Calnen, Josh Gabbard, Landon Goldberg, Ashley Kopetzky, Matt Loudermilk, Briana Meier, and others; as well as from fantastic graduate research assistants in Portland, including Catherine Earley, Colton Groves, Rachel Hall, Sabrina Ortiz Luna, and Isaac Wimer. And to those UO students involved in the Ecological Design Center who make the annual HOPES conference possible: I am greatly indebted. With these collaborators and others, I consider my efforts to be those of a bridge builder, linking design inquiry to a broader set of concerns. And here I will inevitably fall short, since I must admit to having a shallow understanding when it comes to certain matters like water chemistry, policy, and gover-

Preface

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nance. I share this work as a peace offering to those who might help me learn more. Lastly and gratefully: a special thanks to Brian Melton and Yianni Doulis for helping me see things through and to my son Calder, who to my delight prefers cloudy weather to clear skies.

Introduction

To wean cities from centralized systems and all their associated problems, we might simply have to find a way to make decentralized water supply and treatment practical at higher population densities. —David Sedlak, Water 4.0 (20 1 4), 244

Rapid urbanization, climate change, a growing population, racial and economic inequalities, and ecosystem degradation fuel our angst and suggest the value of new approaches to water infrastructures, ones that align the goals of resilience, equity, ecological responsiveness, and sufficient and suitable quality water for all. Building on this challenge, this book teases out the profound architectural and urban design consequences of emerging approaches to water supply and treatment, such as distributed systems, and considers the implications when architects engage in “bringing water into the creative ambit.”1 It endeavors to motivate a next generation of architects to embrace the complexities of water and water systems, excite the design and moral imaginary, and proactively contend with the many hydrological problems facing contemporary urban societies.2 A typical sequence in an architectural or urban design process may be described as “architects make space, engineers add water.” Water is a technical concern relegated to consultants and seldom seen as a formative agent of design expression and meaning. Adopting an alternative, more synergistic and environmentally attuned approach has profound implications for architects’ design processes, fostering as it does expansive thinking about broader hydrological conditions and the synergies between site-scale sustainable architectures and resilient urban landscapes. Such an approach also motivates designers to change the kinds of collaborative relationships that they see value in cultivating. And it implies a strong systems orientation in design—one that favors

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Blue Architecture

the interactions of elements and cascading effects over fixed and static forms (bathed in eternal light)—and a related goal that projects deliver net positive watershed impact. Are We Attending to Ancestral Springs? Environmental Justice / Social Injustice As water seeps more deeply into design consciousness, we see more clearly how our configurations of buildings, cities, and infrastructures have contributed to environmental calamities and social injustices, and how responses to water challenges throughout urban history have often led unwittingly to a next generation of problems. In Nature and the Crisis of Modernity, a trenchant critique of the very idea of “sustainable development,” Raymond Roger’s guides the reader through the successive waves of mourning to be found in literatures over the past one thousand years as writers have attempted to come to terms with the losses—of nature and biodiversity, of relationships to nature, and of relationships to one another—that accompany the onset of new economic, technical, and social orders.3 Along the lines of Rogers, what follows is a lament: we are destroying the foundations of life and what sustains it. We pollute our sacred springs. We fill our wetlands. We marginalize members of our community. The frenetic narrative driving contemporary culture brings design up short and curtails our ability to imagine beyond the profitable now into the landscapes, wetlands, and welfares of the future. Communities trying to make good a little place in the world find themselves continually confronting powers that diminish their agency and ability to steward their water and other resources properly. It may be negligence or perhaps it is cultural and infrastructural failings that put at risk the residents of Flint, agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley, the people of Standing Rock unified in defending the sacredness of their waters, or the residents of Newburgh, New York—a city dependent on a source containing disconcerting levels of perfluorooctanesulfonate, a firefighting foam that spilled in 1990 from a nearby Air National Guard base. Either way, those with power and ostensibly the ability to help these communities and protect their assets would risk not safeguarding water supplies so as to move fuel or make money or economize or otherwise proceed from a very narrow definition of the problem in need of solving.4 It is difficult not to be maddened by a society where incentives are in place to behave selfishly and where we witness daily a sad lack of commitment and imagination in ensuring adequate protections of public health, especially in economically marginalized communities.5 For if we

Introduction

3

designed things properly, we would not need to burn the fuel and contaminate the water in the first place. Or as Robert MacFarlane has said, “If we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act selfishly toward it.”6 A primary goal in the pages that follow is to retain a critical posture, attend more closely to urban waters, and work out the possibilities for an approach to design as a form of stewardship. While this is not a technical manual, it necessarily furnishes an outlook on the role of, and our reliance on, technology in architectural design and the making of cities. Although the book offers a lament and a critique, it is written with a profound sense of hopefulness and conviction that the potential of design to make a difference has never been greater and that opportunities for creative leadership in the water sector abound. It takes inspiration from Dr. Alisahah Cole’s observation that “we do not need great leaders of broken systems. We need engineers of new ones.”7 In our use of the term “Anthropocene” to describe a new geo-historical era we have entered, the environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen finds further evidence of our lack of critical reflection.8 For implicit in the notion of the Anthropocene is an assumption of the grave task of picking and choosing species worthy of saving; in this sixth mass extinction in the history of the world, humans have no choice but to play God and determine the survival prospects for nonhumans (so the story goes). And yet, as Jensen suggests, never for a moment would this same species see any choices needing to be made about which technologies should be saved and which jettisoned in an era when entire biotic communities have disappeared and ecological fabrics are unraveling. These very technologies that have so heavy an impact on nonhumans pervade and shape our own lives. In what he labels the “device paradigm,” the philosopher Albert Borgmann, in his groundbreaking work Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, describes a ubiquitous contemporary phenomenon: technological “surfaces” overwhelm us and lead to merely superficial interactions with the systems and processes, devised or natural, that support our lives and lifestyles. Of the many devices that saturate our experience, he claims: “What distinguishes technological life is . . . its division into surfaces, rough or pleasant, and concrete, inaccessible substructures.”9 The technologies and infrastructures that deliver our services, move our waters, treat our wastes, and operate our buildings, buried underground and embedded within ceiling cavities, register as only surface effects; we overlook their modes of being and eco-systemic impacts. (Maria Kaika would say that the modern home, “in a simultaneous act of need and denial, hosts in its guts everything it tries to keep outside.”10) Current discourse on high-tech sustainable architectures and smart, green cities suggests a future of ever-more sophisticated veneers crowding out lives

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and foreclosing the possible alternative futures to be found only in the depths. The late, great planning theorist Robert Young claimed that “smart cities utilize technologies that allow cities to do stupid things faster.”11 Or as Jensen says, “Every time this culture invents some way to become more energy efficient, the culture doesn’t use less energy, but uses that energy efficiency to produce more saleable stuff; in other words, to convert more of the living to the dead.”12 Will a next generation of intelligent, resource-saving devices and high-tech green buildings connect us to the things that truly matter and contribute to the productivity and diversity of natural systems upon which we depend? What prospects are opened up when we proceed from a different set of design premises and corresponding technological commitments—when we attend with great care to basics such as the value of wetlands and access to clean water for all? This project builds on a University of Oregon tradition that I inherited and embraced. It privileges passive approaches to the heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilating of buildings and rests on the conviction that rich and meaningful architectural expression follows when a project’s “sociability diagram,” how a building’s basic organization supports social life and the quality of the interactions of those who occupy it, is one and the same as its “environmental response diagram”—how it gathers energy and distributes heat, air, and light. We now bring water into the mix and consider how largely passive and more resilient hydrological approaches can complement other environmentally responsive, low-energy design strategies in positively shaping urban architectures. Why the Machine in an Era of Green? We are beginning to think of democracy not in terms of an idea or an emergence of a social movement, but as the assembling of machines. —Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (20 11 ), 1 09

With an emphasis on passive design approaches and ecological integrity, why does “architecture as machine,” a much-frowned-upon idea in the contemporary era of green, make its presence felt in this book? Allow me to begin to explain by going to the source, Le Corbusier, our poet laureate architect of the twentieth century: The problem of the house has not been stated. Nevertheless, there do exist standards for the dwelling house. Machinery consists in itself the factor of economy, which makes for selection. The house is a machine for living in.13

Introduction

5

Le Corbusier’s famous metaphorical characterization of a house as a machine heralded a staggeringly influential view of architectural impulse (you have to appreciate the audacity). For Le Corbusier, it was “not foolishness to hasten forward a clearing up of things” and to affirm the radically transformative possibilities for making architecture in full acknowledgment of the forces of industry.14 Architects were to embrace the logic and symbolic economy of the machine in order to guide the spirit and gather the forms of the emergent age. “Our external world has been enormously transformed in its outward appearance and in the use made of it,” Le Corbusier observed. “By reason of the machine, we have gained a new perspective and a new social life, but we have not yet adapted the house thereto.”15 Architectural theory in the last century offers continuous commentary on the world that Le Corbusier recognized with such brazen optimism. Successive generations of architects and theorists have been compelled to weigh in on the figuration of a machine, perhaps the most influential characterization of architecture in the twentieth century, and one applied to houses as well as other elements of the built environment: places for work, commerce, entertainment, and so on. Some commentators have affirmed, worked through, and extended its implications, while others have advanced “other modernisms” that align industrial modes of production and the machine aesthetic with traditional and/ or regional and national styles and manners of building. (The great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto assumed a central role in this effort to hybridize the vernacular and the modern.) Still others lament the sameness brought about by the new world order and rage against the machine: as the story goes, the creation of spare and efficient machinelike towers made of replicable parts gives city dwellers access to light and air at the expense of the heterogeneity and soul of the urban environment. The crisis of our day corresponds to the troubling effects of the built environment as an entropic machine of astonishing success in simplifying complex natural processes. We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-offs, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. We inhabit what restoration ecologists describe as novel ecosystems, those differing “in composition and/or function from present and past systems as a consequence of changing species distributions, alterations through climate and land use change and shifting values about nature and ecosystems.”16 Many novel ecosystems, of course, are urbanized, simplified, and lacking in biological integrity. The sociologist Ulrich Beck speaks to the ways in which we wrestle today with the side effects of yesterday’s successes. One of the reasons that previous

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successes—including those that manifest in the built environment—demand wrestling with later on is insufficient appreciation of the interdependence of the systems the designer is configuring (energy, water, information, material assemblies, and so on). An overly insular conceptualization of a system corresponds to an overly narrow definition of success and leads to conditions in which side effects are customary and externalities with detrimental impacts, environmental and otherwise, are permitted. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the Living Building Challenge, and many similar contemporary initiatives endeavor to fold these externalities into the system of design such that successes produce fewer side effects. A desirable short-circuiting occurs; electrical energy and water, for example, are collected on-site instead of arriving via the grid or by interbasin transfer. And yet, as promising as these initiatives are, there is a lingering tendency to view the building as the boundary of the system and therefore to undervalue potential contributions to (and impacts on) the “parent” system of which the building is a part. Thus, architects design sustainably certified buildings clad in zinc, and rain events produce runoff containing zinc particulates that devastate aquatic life downstream. Even with as laudable an example as the Living Building Challenge, the conceptual construct, the metaphor that a building is alive, may delimit emphasis on mutually beneficial transactions between a building and its surroundings. The building is attended to as that which is animated, and biological processes and life cycles occurring on the site may be deemphasized. Swept up in the idea of biomimcry, designers may unwittingly make high-performance buildings inspired by the morphology of bugs that in aggregate hasten the decline of macro-invertebrate populations.17 With such thoughts in mind, it may be both reasonable and unsurprising to say that the metaphorical pole has swung too far—that the machine, the paradigmatic metaphor for modern architecture now supplanted by the organism in an era of green, is not necessarily so sinister and life-threatening.18 If machines are simply devices that modify and transmit force in order to produce desired effects, the question becomes: What are we asking our machines to do and what inputs are necessary to make them run effectively, given an expanded definition of success? Lewis Mumford has suggested that “once in existence, the machine tended to justify itself by silently taking over departments of life neglected in its ideology.”19 Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, recognizing this onslaught on departments of life, urges us to place greater value on the many critical ecosystem services that support us and that represent an accumulated complexity of millions and millions of years of interactions of the organic and the inorganic. Astonishing

Introduction

7

rates of depletion and overconsumption need to give way, whether through concerted collective action or in the aftermath of fitful tumult, to a regenerative approach that begins with a commitment to replenishment. In the pages ahead, we will discuss specific strategies for replenishing in a systems-based, water-centric design approach. With this aim in sight, let us then retool Le Corbusier’s dictum, reappropriate the terms, rewire the machine, and enlist the hard in the cause of the soft. Let us build on the modernist project, yet turn its logic on its head and seek modest and lasting solutions that help overcome inherited shortsightedness. Replenished architectural machines can become prosthetics—systems assemblies that perpetuate transactions between the organic and the inorganic in support of human needs and dramatically improved (urban) ecosystem function. Interacting systems can perform the work of cleansing and of increasing flood storage capacity, not that of consuming energy and producing toxic runoff. And water, the fluid medium, is what makes these systems go. The Scope of This Undertaking While considering how various building water systems work and providing resources that address their technical dimensions in detail, a primary motivation is a cultural one: What is the meaning of water in contemporary society? What could it mean if designers attended to it with a greater sense of aesthetic and environmental concern? While we focus more on topics such as water supply and quality and wastewater treatment and less on important matters such as sea level rise and impacts on coastal cities, inevitably issues related to sea level rise and climate change creep into the arguments, given the interrelatedness of urban hydrological problems. In other words, focusing on the creative potentialities of working with water as opposed to water’s destructive capabilities is not to ignore that these impacts will command ever-greater attention—and incur ever-greater costs. Much of the focus of this project is on cities in the American West, a region replete with warning signals of impending water crises. While many of the strategies discussed will be specific to this context, the overall design approach—in effect, a hybridization of ecological infrastructure and architectural machines—translates to other locales. With this in mind, I take liberties in moving beyond the American West to consider other hydrological circumstances, recognizing water as a connective, border-dissolving medium. Finally, and as will be touched on in chapter 1, while the focus is on the building and the site, I recognize that the scale of the urban district proves

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in many instances to be optimal for decentralized water and wastewater systems.20 Yet whatever the scale and scope, the goal is to advance an integrated design process that leads to better architectures at all scales and that, in aggregate, strengthens the functional integrity of urban ecosystems. How This Book Is Organized The cyclical nature of the subject matter complicates efforts to devise an obvious, linear sequence of argument. Accepting this, the chapters that follow are offered aphoristically, bringing different perspectives and scales of analysis to the task of embedding water-related concerns in the design process. As such, each can be read independently. That said, the idea of loosely following water’s flow along the surfaces and through the landscapes and buildings of cities would seem to have merit. To that end: Chapter 1, “Hydraulic or Hydrologic?,” provides a context for the arguments and speculations in the chapters that follow by offering a brief overview of the multiple water crises that confront cities in the American West and numerous others around the world. It describes some of the profound cultural dimensions of these crises as well as the technical, environmental, and financial problems. Finally, and as one means of addressing these water crises proactively and holistically, the chapter argues for the benefits of decentralized or distributed (building- and district-scale) systems as part of a comprehensive approach to meeting urban water needs in a sustainable and equitable manner. Chapter 2, “Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings,” is the first in a series of chapters that entertain a redrawing of urban waters and reimagine relationships between buildings and urban landscapes. It considers the complexities and functional attributes of predevelopment hydrological and ecological systems and examines the current paths and states of the water coursing through cities. The chapter then imagines a reshaping of these very environments through the frontloading of water quality concerns. Here and in subsequent chapters, the projects discussed have value both in terms of their specific attributes and with respect to their stance toward the larger hydrological context out of which specific design decisions are arrived at. Chapter 3, “Liquid-Shaped Space,” explores the design aspects of buildingand site-scale water systems, addressing some of the architectural consequences of rainwater harvesting, storage, treatment, and use. It guides the reader through the process of developing a water budget in order to assess the relationship between (locally available) supply and (building/project) demand. It explains how to create a building water schematic—that is to say, a concep-

Introduction

9

tual diagram representing how water systems in a given project work. It then describes a series of projects in which such a schematic not only encourages identification of connections between elements that a designer might not ordinarily recognize but also informs questions of architectural organization, experience, and meaning. The chapter concludes by speaking to the value of conceptualizing projects as building-environment pairings, not just as buildings acting in isolation; thus conceived, individual interventions might support broader environmental conditions at the same time that these very conditions might positively inform and impact building performance. Human waste and other pollutants and contaminants and their impact on urban water bodies and urban environmental conditions overall are considered in chapter 4, “In Concentrate.” It builds on the influential work of the late philosopher Scott Cameron in prompting a reevaluation of the relationships between cities and natures in terms of degrees of concentration, in contrast to more typical metaphors for this relationship that are spatial in nature and concerned with degrees of proximity and levels of separation. The chapter focuses on the expressive design opportunities of on-site, biologically based wastewater treatment systems for projects in dense urban settings. It also speaks to the ways in which the liability of concentrations of poor-quality water that damage the built environment can be converted into the very resource that transforms the urban setting for the better. Chapter 5, “Reconstituting Architectural Horizons,” explores water and architecture through the notion of the horizon, which, it will be argued, can prompt new thinking about relationships between individuals, buildings, and watersheds when applied to urban architectures. Here as with the other chapters, water serves as a vehicle for interscalar connectivity. The final chapter, “Redrawing Waters,” speculates as to how lessons from the previous chapters might influence architectural design processes and modes of representation moving forward. A focus on water, chapter 6 argues, leads to design processes and consequent use of graphic mediums in which the privileging and setting up of the interactions of systems assume primacy, and where temporal concerns are given the same weight as spatial concerns. (It may seem ironic that, given the chapter’s focus on graphic representational strategies commensurate with an evolving attitude toward water and the built environment, few images are offered to reinforce the narrative. All of the illustrations in this project are my own or have been produced by close and dear collaborators; when discussing the graphic insights and innovations of those beyond my circle, I trust the reader to pair passages with images via the immediacy of the web). Lastly, the epilogue, “Reflections in Depths,” asks designers what kind of

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legacy they wish to strive for in relation to possible environmental futures; correspondingly, it interrogates how the attitudes toward time and progress latent in our current architectural culture, and in culture at large, motivate acts of design. It speaks to the value of revisiting vernacular approaches to water systems, as much for the values they embody as the technologies they employ. I close by offering a plea to the designer to engage in projects, however modest, that are replenishing and life-affirming, projects in which water commands attention and shapes and expands what is architecturally imaginable.

CHAPTER 1

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

It is estimated that almost a billion people lack basic, reliable drinking-water services. Is access to clean drinking water an inalienable human right, or will lack of it lead to its increasing utilization as a weapon and threat? Such a question places water at the intersection of economics, politics, ethics, design, and what constitutes the public good, and answers to it are revealing. In 2017, Peter Brayback-Letmathe, a former chairman and CEO of Nestlé, famously and controversially declared the idea of water as a human right extreme; by contrast, in its Sustainable Development Goal Number 6, the United Nations calls for “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.”1 Meanwhile, organizations such as the nonprofit We the People of Detroit make evident the patterns of injustice and historic and persistent racism that play out as legacy infrastructures fail and so many privatization schemes lead only to inadequate service to certain segments of urban populations.2 Critical debates have yet to settle who should pay for this access, who is responsible for ensuring it, what level of water quality people should expect, and how much it should cost. (The UN Assembly stated in 2012 that “water costs should not exceed 3 percent of household income”; given an overdrawn aquifer and the consequent intrusion of saltwater, many people living in the Gaza Strip spend 20 to 30 percent of their income on imported water.3) In a world of inequality, lack of access has its corollary in the prevalence of profligate overconsumption for many people throughout the world. In The Atlas of Water, Maggie Black describes the implications of the global aspirations of an industrially based lifestyle in which water use has outpaced population growth by a factor of two-to-one over the past century: this trajectory points to a precarious future in which “2030 global freshwater withdrawals will exceed reliable supplies by 40 percent, with the disparity in some places being more than 50 percent.”4 Developed societies with means and aspirations of

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affluence have harnessed resources such as water to propel tremendous economic expansion; explosive growth in turn has produced the very side effects, such as overuse and other water-related crises, that are our inheritance. Ulrich Beck argues that “it is not poverty, but wealth, not crisis, but economic growth, coupled with suppression of side effects, which are driving the metamorphosis of modern society.”5 That cities in regions such as the American West can expand so rapidly in a context of climatic unpredictability and recurring drought depends on a simultaneous valuing of water as a commodity to be exploited and its undervaluing as a precious, capricious substance. As with the famous case of so “many cities with straws in the [Colorado] river” and our constant problem of overallocation to meet urban, industrial, and agricultural demands, a false sense of security and assumption of plenty prevails until we near a breaking point.6 This lack of urgency is accompanied by a condition of estrangement—a state of disconnection from a substance at once ready to hand and yet suppressed in our consciousness. The presumption is that water is simply there and, unless service is ruptured, other matters deserve higher priority as we plan our cities and economies.7 Edward Campbell, director of resource protection and planning with the Portland (Oregon) Water Bureau, claims that “no one knows or cares where the resource comes from and how to deliver it safely.”8 Similarly, with a view of our commitments as custodians of resources that is characteristic of those living throughout the region, Rick Bastasch would say of Oregonians, “If a measure of caring is the degree to which society organizes its thinking and allocates resources to the future . . . roads trump water any day.”9 This inattention distinguishes the architectural subculture as well. When it comes to water and water systems, architects, consumed by a never-ending set of demands and issues to work through during the design process, typically “plug and play.” Rhys Roth, executive director of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, speaks to this unquestioned dependence on behind-the-scenes systems: “Architects historically just hook up to these systems: there will be energy, there will be water.”10 Even in an era when imperatives of sustainability have ushered in a design revolution, water, a visible, material substance, curiously manifests less in “green” design imaginaries, discourse, and practice than does the invisible presence of energy. And when present and foregrounded— for example, in Phaidon’s recent book Living on Water—it often serves to promote sumptuousness and luxury.11 This coffee-table edition reinforces a longstanding view of water as not that which sustains us (“living on water”) but that which brings delight to the eyes of the fortunate few (“living on water”).

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

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Norms of architectural education also pay little attention to this most precious substance, and it is telling that water was not once mentioned in the 2014 National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) Student Performance Criteria (SPC), which served for years as the basis for certifying that professional design programs meet uniform standards.12 Among the “Building Practices, Technical Skills and Knowledge” with which graduates of NAAB-accredited programs are expected to be familiar are those concerned with “Site Design” (“soil, topography, ecology and climate,” among other concerns [B.2]) and “Environmental Systems” (“heating and cooling” topics [B.6]). The SPC standards make no mention of water, however, beyond references in “Building Envelope Systems and Assemblies” to moisture transfer and “durability” [B.7] and in “Building Service Systems” to “plumbing” [B.9]. The criteria underscore both the insignificance of water as a design matter and the isolation of disciplinary responsibility. Architecture students learn about building enclosure details, flashings, brick veneers with their necessary weep holes, waterproof membranes, the prevention of moisture accumulation in building assemblies, and the need for only certain materials to come in contact with the ground. While these are critically important matters, students’ general lack of understanding of the larger hydrological and hydro-social realities that will shape urban futures remains unaddressed, nor is much effort made to expose them to perspectives on water that will excite design thinking. In the American West, unconcern and cultural amnesia trace in part to the region’s modern, highly engineered hydrology. Borrowing from and recasting Karl Wittfogel’s controversially framed argument, the environmental historian Donald Worster would describe the American West as a hydraulic society.13 That is to say, it is “a techno-economic order devised for the purpose of mastering a difficult environment,” one that relies heavily on a cadre of experts and keeps urban dwellers at a remove from the systems sustaining them.14 Worster examines the tight interrelationship between manners of appropriation of natural resources and the prevailing characteristics of a polity and culture. As in other arid environments throughout history, the American West is one in which capital-intensive impoundment, irrigation, and related water infrastructures have both allowed spectacular urban and industrial growth and required decidedly technocratic management of the system’s construction and maintenance. Such a regime of administration, as Andrew Biro and others claim, has not only controlled hydraulic flows but also concentrated social power, so while “the visible flow of civilizational development was toward increasing human mastery of the natural environment . . . its undercurrent was a growth in social hierarchy and domination.”15 Manners of appropriating resources,

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in other words, result from and perpetuate social orders that may be less than equitable. And yet the manner in which our society has harnessed water resources, as well as the cultural consequences of these choices, can also be explained by more benign motivations, ones having to do with the promotion of social good as opposed to subduing the wild and acquiring political control. Rhys Roth argues that “utilities represent one of the great social innovations of the twentieth century.”16 At a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other water-transmitted diseases were common, publicly funded urban water systems were critical to ensuring the health of the populace and the economic security of urban society.17 That these systems went unnoticed meant that they were operational. Whether an outcome of a domineering hydraulic society or a commitment to modern, centralized utilities as a form of public good (or both), these systems for capturing, storing, conserving, treating, and distributing water that have emerged in response to particular problems, and to meet certain standards for managing these problems, are by and large invisible. And because they lie beyond (and below) the daily urban experience, “few are aware of the origins of the water flowing out of their taps.”18 The architectural educator James Pettinari finds the reality that “there is no expression of urban infrastructure” problematic. “The physical environment,” he notes, “gives no indication of where things are and how they work.”19 He says further: “Although we say it rains a lot, we really do not have a cultural connection to water.” (Those who, like Pettinari, live in the Pacific Northwest and identify as inhabitants of Salmon Nation may find this statement ironic.)20 The many water-related predicaments that our urbanizing society confronts, with their interrelated environmental and cultural dimensions, present an incredible opportunity for a next generation of designers. By adopting a more proactive, synergistic manner of operating, utilizing creative thinking skills, reengaging infrastructure as a matter of design, and gaining deeper awareness of the numerous and growing water challenges cities now face, the architect can play an important role in a transition to more sustainable, resilient, culturally meaningful, community-oriented, and visibly expressive urban water systems. I offer the following very brief summary of some of these interrelated challenges, not to comprehensively catalog the many facets of the current water predicament but to make evident what a complicated puzzle it is that designers enter into when they take water matters seriously and embrace the need to think and work in a more integrated manner. Each of these challenges should be read as a kind of kernel speaking to a much larger, problematic reality.

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

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Climate Change The “biggest challenge of climate change is the level of uncertainty surrounding it,” an indeterminateness that lays bare the precariousness of our lives, societies, and constructs.21 Kenneth Vigil, a hydrologist and former vice president of Environmental Science Associates, claims that climate change “is the big one. How are we to deal with climate-related water issues confronting us now: water temperature, flood frequency, ocean acidification, species distribution, storm intensity and frequency?”22 One of the many consequences of a rapidly changing waterscape is that the aging water supply infrastructures in cities are increasingly out of sync with evolving hydrological regimes. Working in a region where climate change threatens to render cities uninhabitable, Douglas Yoder, deputy director of the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department, speaks to the need for new design standards and investment disciplines for wastewater systems and water management in the context of sea level rise and “clear sky flooding.”23 On the other side of the country, the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure summarizes the situation in the Pacific Northwest: “The region’s hydrological patterns of the past 100 years—around which utilities designed and sized their infrastructure—no longer serve as a reliable guide to future Northwest hydrology.”24 While climate change predictions about annual precipitation in the Pacific Northwest in the decades ahead seem friendly in relation to those for much of the American West, at issue in this context is not the quantity of precipitation but its phase; as Michael Stuhr, director of the Portland Water Bureau sees it, “Portland will always have water; its distribution will change.”25 For it is the diminished snowpack in the Cascades as well as the Sierra and Rocky Mountain ranges—this “crystalline,” natural “multi-layered water storing wonder” so critical for meeting summer water demand—that poses challenges to cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.26 As Rick Bastasch has noted, “Between 1950 and 1995, the snow-water equivalent of the snowpack in the Cascades decreased by about 50 percent, and peaked earlier in the year, increasing March, and reducing June, streamflows.”27 Simply filling up dams with the rains of winter and spring to meet summer demand would lead to reduced flood storage capacity; water managers must proceed cautiously. And even if storage was a good approach, some cities lack that option. Crystal Grinnell, a landscape architect and environmental engineer with Biohabitats, speaks of Seattle as a “snowmelt driven system with minimal storage”; in a shifting climate, the city will be compelled to consider other sources, such as groundwater.28 The flip side of lack of supply in an era of climate change is the ever-more

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severe rain event that threatens centralized water infrastructures with catastrophic failure and makes manifest the lack of resilience of the cities dependent on these systems. One example of the vulnerabilities involved is Seattle’s King County West Point Treatment Plant, where heavy rains and high tides in February 2017, a time of peak precipitation in a wet El Niño winter, led to equipment failure. With the entire facility under threat of flood, plant operators opted for bypass mode and dumped 235 million gallons of untreated wastewater and stormwater into Puget Sound.29 The Energy-Water Nexus Although it may be that “the industrial lifestyle is propped up by water even more than it is propped up by oil,” there is no question that it is supported by a mixture of water, oil, and other energy sources.30 And the very conjoining of centralized water systems and centralized energy infrastructures—“the energywater nexus”—fuels (sorry for the pun) our society’s vulnerabilities and resource inefficiencies. Simply put, most forms of conventional, nonrenewable energy production can dissipate rejected heat only by consuming incredible volumes of water to provide cooling; on average, two to three gallons of water are used to produce one kilowatt-hour of electricity. On the other side of the energy-water nexus, we use an incredible amount of energy to move water—for example, via interbasin transfer and the pumping of water over mountains to supply cities, or by extracting groundwater, also using pumps. The oft-cited California Energy Commission report of 2005 revealed that water-related energy uses account for 20 percent of all electrical consumption and one-third of non–power plant natural gas consumption in the state.31 Nevada finds itself in a similar situation; Jeff Roberts of SERA Architects contends that “the Southern Nevada Water Authority is the State’s number one consumer of electricity.”32 This energy-water interdependency plays out at the building scale as well (see chapter 3). Water Quality The watershed passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 led to the establishment of the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permit Program, which regulates point sources and associated pollutants entering US waters. Despite NPDES, health threats related to water supplies continue; for example, millions live in cities, such as Houston, where a significant por-

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

17

tion of the drinking water comes from the treated effluent of those living in communities upstream (“toilet to tap”). Compounds accumulate when water is recycled, and some are more problematic than others, such as the compounds that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) labels “contaminants of emerging concern” (CECs), or emerging toxic contaminants. These include pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PCPs), many of which persist in the environment and with exposure can lead to adverse human health effects. Most CECs are unregulated and industrially produced yet dispersed through domestic uses. Phthalates and per-polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs), for example, are chemicals found in everyday products such as packaging, nonstick products, and stain-repellent fabrics. These invisible threats frighten water supply and water chemistry experts. As Brent Bucknum, the founding principal of Hyphae Design Laboratory in Oakland and an ecological infrastructure designer, puts it: “Removing E. Coli is no problem; it is a relatively simple matter of chemistry and biology. What keeps me up at night are persistent chemicals.”33 Brent and others are frustrated by the common predicament of discovering that certain chemicals pose significant health threats only after they are prevalent in the environment. The EPA will produce a health advisory pertaining to a class of substances and evaluate new scientific evidence as it becomes available, and yet what often turns out to be threatening has already been dispersed. As Roy Iwai, a water resources specialist with Multnomah County (Oregon), claims of the manufacture and mass availability of a product in a consumerist society like ours, “the burden of proof is not on people making it.”34 Ulrich Beck describes this societal acceptance or burden in stark and scathing terms, claiming that “everything must take place in the context of the cosmetics of risk”; thus, “we have not a preventative but a symbolic industry and policy of eliminating the increase of risks.”35 Downstream Impacts on Aquatic Life In addition to the health impacts of contaminants discharged into waterways domestically and by industrial, energy, and other sectors, we also witness increasingly detrimental ecological consequences when a suite of non-point load sources enter urban waters during rain events. Motor oils, bitumen, heavy metals, and other “ultra-urban pollutants” that collect on roadways and other impervious urban surfaces—or that make up these very surfaces themselves— are conveyed in minutes to urban water bodies, with devastating impacts on aquatic life, such as salmonids.36 Under the prevailing weather condition of

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wet winters and dry summers in the American West, the first rain events of fall transport a particularly toxic elixir of pollutants to water bodies downhill and downstream. (The specifics of this problem and efforts to ameliorate it are discussed in chapter 2.) How to Pay? Municipalities are tasked with maintaining extensive distribution networks and aging water and wastewater plants, many of which are between fifty and one hundred years old and configured for a climate regime that no longer exists. Federal assistance to upgrade existing facilities and build new ones has shrunk, however, at the same time that federally underfunded mandates require municipalities to continue to provide adequate services and meet ever-more stringent standards. The estimated level of necessary investment is staggering, even as ratepayer costs in the United States continue to increase dramatically.37 According to Rick Bastasch, “A 2001 report by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Oregon needed over $2.7 billion to meet its twenty-year water infrastructure needs. Roughly half of that amount was for transmission and distribution systems, and over 20 percent for treatment facilities.”38 In Arizona, the EPA has estimated that an investment of $7.44 billion is needed to ensure the adequacy of transmission and distribution, source, treatment, storage, and other elements of water infrastructure.39 This is not an unusually high figure for a state in the American West. Where will the funding come from to fix and upgrade urban water infrastructures? Does a primary focus on centralized systems represent a wise investment discipline given that many of these plants and networks are near obsolescence? How are we to respond to Douglas Yoder’s suggestion that the wisest course may be to not allocate any additional funding beyond the useful life of current infrastructure, recognizing that next-generation approaches and technologies are on their way?40 What are we to do in cities where infrastructural demand is growing as a result of rapid urbanization and an influx of population? What approach should we take in regions such as the Rust Belt, where cities are shrinking and less affluent populations are left to shoulder the burden of maintaining and upgrading aging infrastructures? With these questions in mind, what kinds of investments might best achieve multiple goals—improving health, protecting the environment, increasing adaptability and resilience, and even quite possibly overcoming cultural estrangement? How can we steer disciplines and modes of inquiry not histori-

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

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cally focused on water infrastructures—architectural agendas, for example— toward solving these problems? These compound challenges speak to the value of exploring different manners of dwelling in and accounting for the (urban) watershed; of adopting a more holistic approach to investing in, configuring, and managing water systems; and of enlisting design and creative thinking as productive forces to address a growing, multifaceted crisis. One way to take a proactive stance in the face of intensifying problems and heightened vulnerabilities is to diversify assets, embracing what municipal water managers call a portfolio approach to meeting a city’s overall needs. As the authors of Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest argue in addressing reduced mountain snowpack in the region: “With lower summer flows, it is projected that diversification and development of water supplies . . . and increasing drought preparedness would be required.”41 Along these lines, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, recognizing the risk of continuing to rely for 85 percent of its water supply on the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir—an increasingly precarious source given the undependability of the Sierran snowmelt that fills it—has taken on the important task of identifying alternative sources, encouraging the use of potable water only where needed, and promoting conservation and recycling strategies that divert graywater to select end uses and away from supplies degraded by its introduction. As we transition from a hydraulic to a hydrological society in which we are no longer “looking for solutions to endemic problems outside the city,” site-scale and urban district–scale systems become key elements of a portfolio approach by offering a means to increase efficiency and ecological responsiveness.42 That said, such a decentralized or distributed focus requires not that we abandon existing infrastructures but rather that we piggyback nextgeneration systems on them in an evolutionary process. Rhys Roth of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure describes this relationship as “networks of micro-infrastructure optimally blended with legacy central infrastructures.”43 Whatever the specific configuration, the aggregate of these networks will help to define new performance parameters and forms of design expression for the urban watershed. A focus on site- and district-scale systems brings architects to the table and allows design teams to put into meaningful and tangible relation matters of supply and downstream effects—a very different process than the more typical “end-of-pipe” approach. Building water systems are choreographed with those of the landscape: designers devise micro-hydrological loops and nutrient flows that improve human comfort and experience while responding to and support-

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1.1. Footprint and presence of centralized versus decentralized infrastructural approaches

ing the functional integrity of the parent (eco)systems of which a building is a part. This approach represents a hybridization of architecture and an ecologically responsive infrastructure that is a form of space planning and a visible community asset. Architects grasp the idea that buildings can operate as thermal batteries, that in the right climate and with sufficient mass, a structure can absorb heat that builds up during the day and release that heat to the cooler night sky. This passive—or fan-assisted—means of providing comfort reduces cooling loads and energy consumption and allows for the downsizing of mechanical equipment, thereby significantly reducing up-front and operational costs. In a parallel way, we could imagine buildings as “hydrological batteries” that utilize passive means whenever possible, such as using the forces of gravity to harvest rainwater and intercept stormwater, put it to use in productive and multiple ways, and release it in a timely manner to support the ecological integrity of nearby urban water bodies. Before examining larger urban hydrological realities and distributed design approaches sensitive to them, a few caveats deserve mention. To begin, the sitescale, decentralized projects considered in what follows do not always prove to offer the most effective, resilient, and ecologically responsive approaches. Those who advance EcoDistricts and the Civic Ecology initiatives make persuasive arguments that emphasizing the district and neighborhood scales allows for a most productive reimagining and optimizing of urban systems.44 And there are those who argue that capturing and storing water locally may run counter to a city’s comprehensive storage goals and commitment to infiltrating aquifers.45 A site-scale emphasis could thus be viewed by critics as a form of loner sustainability—an ironic stance for cities, with their rich histories of mutual dependencies and efficient and shared distribution of resources, to be

Hydraulic or Hydrologic?

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1.2. Site-scale works of architecture as “hydrological batteries” that put into meaningful relation matters of supply and downstream impacts

taking. Scott Wolf, principal of Miller Hull in Seattle, describes the rightly famous Bullitt Center in Seattle, purportedly one of the greenest commercial buildings in the world, as “operating on its island.”46 While the Bullitt Center is a valuable experiment and significant achievement, perhaps its underlying logic takes decentralization as a primary means of rebuilding the city too far. And yet, given that architects are often commissioned to operate on individual lots, attending to site-scale approaches and ways of aggregating smallerscale moves so as to support the performance of larger-scale, interacting systems is certainly worthwhile. Having inherited the Jeffersonian individual holding as a primary means of apportioning land, we must ask: How can individual projects serve as catalysts in the cause of resiliency and environmental quality while also anticipating, supporting, and benefiting from the creation of networked infrastructures? How can designers operating at the scale of the site best account for flows and hydrological conditions that extend beyond any one site and outside the scope of their responsibility? Another caveat pertains to regulatory processes and standards for managing the risks that have built up around the norm of centralized infrastructures. In the event of a disease outbreak related to water quality, for example, public health protocols exist to determine where the system failed and who will assume responsibility. A decentralized approach to water supply and treatment

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introduces new complexities. Is every site- or district-scale project that incorporates “in-house” decentralized systems in effect its own water district?47 Who measures and monitors water quality, and what standards are in place to ensure that water and wastewater systems will be maintained adequately over time? Akin to regulatory inertia, the standard means of financing water infrastructure can hamper a transition to resilient decentralization. Water costs are low and often heavily subsidized in comparison to increasingly costly purchases of energy. Asset management costs and capital upgrades to centralized systems, spread among ratepayers or otherwise paid for by hook-up charges, supersede alternative investment regimes that focus on distributed systems. Inertia and slow change prevail. And yet disruptive meteorological events and environmental circumstances can swiftly transform economies and systems priorities. The “Millennium Drought” of the 2000s that so profoundly impacted Melbourne and other Australian cities and more recent crises in Cape Town, South Africa, and Chennai, India, have forced sudden behavioral shifts, and they also “radically change how we see our infrastructural investments and choices.”48 Many predict that climate change impacts will accelerate continued and rapid adjustments that include a shift to decentralized systems. Crystal Grinnell of Biohabitats states, “Scarcity issues in places like Los Angeles, Denver, and San Francisco will make distributed start to pencil”; in other words, shifting hydrological regimes will alter the economics of water, which will in turn drive innovation.49 This will hold especially true when we take a broad view of the benefits of alternative investment options in a context of rapid change as well as increasing costs of doing business as usual.50 In considering capital outlays for water infrastructure and nontraditional investment pathways, Rhys Roth claims: “The field of tool development is in its infancy; it’s like green building in 1992.”51 In other words, with water we are where we were at with energy a generation ago. Initiatives to usher in dramatic and novel approaches to water in the urban environment may echo the revolution in the professional design community when it committed to lowering energy consumption and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of buildings. Embracing a New Design Reality If designers are to contend meaningfully with the growing strains on urban water bodies and systems, they must have a thorough knowledge of hydrological conditions as well as water systems and technologies—both passive and active and both tried-and-true and next-generation—and apply these under-

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standings to arenas in which they have often proven effective, for example, in their engagement with communities. Michael Willis of MWA, an architectural practice that entered the realm of water and wastewater systems design some decades ago, recognized that if his firm “understood the treatment process, we could create a better architectural fit for the community.” Further, his firm gained expertise in “the process so as to be at the beginning of a project and . . . facilitate conversations with the community.” Designers can deliver value in collaborating on these projects, given that more and more infrastructural works will be situated in neighborhoods and otherwise dense and limited spatial settings where creative thinking and planning will be key. As Willis claims, “We no longer have the boondocks to design these projects in.”52 There is much to fathom in water’s reflections and depths. Rather than shedding water as quickly as possible and paying no heed to where it goes next, architects can respond to profound urban and environmental challenges by allowing water to linger, perform work, and elicit delight as they embrace an expansive, bioregional manner of design thinking. Water provides a means for designing that is resonant with Jacques Rancière’s advocacy for “suppressing the very distance between near and far, by bringing the distant closer by rendering what is close infinite.”53 And yet what are the spatial and urban morphological implications of a water-centric approach to the city? What select aspects of how water systems function would appear to have the profoundest design consequences? What historic and contemporary examples can help us build a palette to address contemporary water challenges as a design proposition? What are the ramifications for design procedures, and how might evolving manners of graphic representation capture complex flows? To begin to answer these questions, we look to historical hydrological functions, attending to ecological basics, such as stream channel dynamics, coefficient of friction, and other behaviors and concepts, and considering ways in which urbanization has altered these very conditions, to the detriment of the integrity of these systems. This foundation will serve as a basis for reworking urban forms and redrawing urban waters.

CHAPTER 2

Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings

We are constantly discovering that water is our best teacher.

—Herbert Dreiseitl and Dieter Grau, Waterscapes (200 1 ), 42

Follow the Medium of Water We learn water’s many lessons, pure and clear to Dreiseitl and Grau, when we pay careful, sustained attention to it, and as we allow it to settle and clarify, induce reflection, and make its mark on us. How might water, a medium for transporting beings, energy, and thoughts, guide us in imagining a more ecologically responsive city and reworked interactions between buildings and urban landscapes? David James Duncan’s My Story as Told by Water, a hydro-autobiography in which he reflects on plying the creeks of Portland as a child, reinforces Dreiseitl and Grau’s faith in water as our best teacher in its memorable offerings of stream-level perspectives on the city.1 My own lessons learned from water derive from ambling alongside and in the McKenzie River in the Cascades, crossing, waist-deep, the Owyhee River in the Great Basin, and tracing the UNESCO World Heritage Levadas on the mountainous island of Madeira in the Atlantic, runnels first constructed in the fifteenth century that transport water from the island’s mountainous spine to villages and farms. These courses, with their burbling and babbling, limpidity and turbulence, transmit great value. Whether a body of water is experienced naturally or is an artifact of humankind’s efforts to work with it responsively, it offers a source of rumination altogether different from the normal rush of urban affairs.

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2.1. Studying the urban watershed: aerial perspective of Johnson Creek in the Portland, Oregon, biome (courtesy of Sabrina Ortiz, University of Oregon master of architecture student, 2019)

Water Carrying Urban Meaning Following the journey of urban waterways and attending to the conditions and fates of the aquatic species dependent on them, we gain deeper appreciation of the critical importance of working toward better-functioning hydrological conditions. Fish populations such as salmon and other organisms that live in and by water have an enormous amount to teach designers about the criticality of ecological connections that we might otherwise overlook (and that we have consistently overlooked in recent history, as declining populations attest). This chapter begins by considering the fate of salmon, which is an anadromous species, that is, a species that migrates from fresh water to ocean water and back to fresh water to spawn. Salmon use this fluid medium to complete their great life circuit; their ability to survive these epic journeys is an indicator of the integrity of the larger ecosystem and of water quality from mountains to sea.2 This great pilgrimage informs a comparison between predevelopment hydrological conditions and current paths and states of water as it courses through the city and provides a script for reconceptualizing architectural and urban design undertakings as highly functional watershed contributors.3 Em-

Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings 27

ploying water as a carrier of meaning, we are better equipped to enlist the hard and the gray—that is to say, the currently toxic, impervious mediums of the city—in the cause of the soft and the blue for the benefit of life-forms of all kinds. A Long-Haul Carrier The environmental historian Richard White provides a helpful point of departure for these reflections. In The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, White enlists energy as a medium in which to frame and draw correspondences between human labor, human constructs (specifically dams such as the Bonneville), the power of the river, and the expenditures of salmon and other species that swim its swift waters. In the great metabolic exchange that defines the life-cycle history of salmon, nutrients that they spent years in the Pacific Ocean consuming are delivered to the upper tributaries where they once were born and where they return to spawn and die. As White says, “Salmon thus are virtually a free gift to the energy ledger of the Columbia. They bring energy garnered from outside the river back to the river.”4 When millions of Chum, Pink, Chinook, and Coho salmon make their way up the Pacific Northwest’s riverways, hungry bears preparing to hibernate await the plenty. The parts of salmon that bears do not consume and leave behind on the forest floor decompose and provide a critical source of nitrogen and other marine-rich nutrients for the trees growing tall in the region’s poor volcanic soils. In the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia, for example, it has been estimated that “eighty percent of the nitrogen in the forest’s trees comes from the salmon.”5 An incredible set of coevolutionary adaptions and transactions can be found here: salmon carry energy; water carries salmon; bears carry salmon from streams to banks; trees take up nutrients; trees cool streams so that they carry higher levels of dissolved oxygen to the benefit of salmon; and on it goes. As trees depend on salmon, salmon depend on trees. For example, before much of the landscape was converted to settlements and farms, thickly vegetated riparian corridors and Oregon White Oak prairie communities characterized much of the Willamette River Valley in the western part of the state. The rain landing on leaves would travel down rivulets of bark to leaf litter and then slowly make its way to the river, becoming cooler and more oxygen-rich along the way. Rivers and floodplains were connected, and wetland complexes furthered the processes of filtration and cleansing. Rivers overflowed their banks during the major rain events of winter. Side

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channels would form, with eddies or “refugia” that provided ideal spots for fish to wait out storms and surges. “Coarse woody debris”—fallen dead trees and the remains of large branches along the edges of rivers and side channels— helped establish favorable conditions for salmon spawning in gravel beds by contributing to reductions in streamflow velocities while allowing sufficient flow to deliver abundant oxygen. This woody debris also provided shade that kept water temperatures cooler and served as a critical component in the nutrient cycle. As the hydrologist Kenneth Vigil notes, “the food chain begins with bacteria” made available by this debris and other sources.6 Bart Johnson, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Oregon, maintains that, in a context of trees downed by storms, salmon were “not just adapting to but thriving off disturbance.”7 A complex spatial/habitat structure, characterized by “stream sinuosity” (meanders) and “natural hydrological shadows” (eddies and calm stream side channels) along with a landscape characterized by a high “coefficient of friction” (rough, vegetated, and variegated terrain that decelerates flows), supported diverse riparian biotic communities. It was a landscape both dynamic and indeterminate, with profoundly different seasonal conditions and everfluctuating boundaries supportive of specialized forms of life. Pulsing and coursing, stepping and bending, flooding and eroding, water was the medium making the system go. The Urbanized Watershed People almost always impact the hydrology first.

—Sarah Hinners, correspondence with the author, October 1 0, 20 1 78

This country’s waterways have been transformed by omission.

—Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History ( 1 996), 1 75

When waterways served as the primary conduits of travel, prior to the advent of trains and automobiles, many of our cities, unsurprisingly, were built up along riparian corridors, atop creeks and streams and on fill where wetland complexes once existed. Urbanization dramatically alters and simplifies hydrological conditions, with dire consequences for aquatic beings.9 Today we are left with the damaging legacy of “urbanized watershed response,” or what Walsh and his colleagues would characterize as the “The Urban Stream Syndrome.”10 According to Andrew Karvonen, we have “created impervious land-

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scapes of transportation networks and building rooftops, reorienting stormwater flows from predominately vertical to horizontal pathways.”11 Solving one significant urban problem—preventing flooding and damage to buildings by removing water as quickly as possible—created myriad others.12 Marc Leisenring, an engineer with the firm Geosyntec, breaks down the causes of loss of stream function as a result of urbanization: • • • • • • •

Modified hydrology Eroding banks and headcuts Channelization Floodplains and wetlands disconnected Limited upstream sediment supply Lack of vegetated buffers Nutrient enrichment13

By draping asphalt, concrete, and rubberized membranes over large portions of the urban landscape, we have ensured that rainwater flows much more quickly and at a higher temperature—and therefore with less oxygen—than in predevelopment circumstances. As it makes its way along hard surfaces where wetland complexes may have once existed, this water flows into riverways that have been channelized or “entrenched” to prevent flooding and promote more opportune and dependable conditions for settlement. With greater volumes of water entering a constrained river, the energy exchanges, loads, and demands of which Richard White speaks are dramatically altered.14 Perilous and energy-consuming to begin with, the journey for salmon swimming upstream through a city in a fast-flowing river with no refugia becomes life-threatening.15 And the stormwater is not only warm and oxygenpoor but toxic. The first fall rains in the Pacific Northwest pick up an elixir of heavy metals, motor oils, and other pollutants that have accumulated on surfaces during the dry summer months and deliver these to urban waterways at the very time when several salmon species, such as the highly sensitive Coho, are making their runs upstream. The impacts are deadly, as research by Jen McIntyre of Washington State University at Puyallup and Nat Scholz of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) so vividly demonstrates.16 Copper and zinc, commonly used materials in the building industry, are especially harmful. While copper is a nutrient for plants and animals, in higher concentrations it can lead to acute toxicity, chronic or long-term toxicity, diminished growth, decreased olfactory response (smell is a primary form of a salmon’s defense against predation, providing warning signals), impaired

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swimming capability, and organ and cell damage.17 With respect to runoff, Alan Fleming, an engineer and certified professional in stormwater quality with Kennedy/Jenks Consultants of Portland, Oregon, goes so far as to claim: “If you fix your zinc and copper problem, everything else is taken care of.”18 What Inheres in the Hard and the Gray? If we ever figure out how to make urban hydrology mimic predevelopment conditions, we are well over halfway there to restoring urban ecosystems. —Sarah Hinners, correspondence with the author, October 1 0, 20 1 7

What does it mean to mimic predevelopment conditions in an endeavor to remove pollutants and reintroduce functional ecological integrity in a dense urban context? For Maria Cahill, program manager of Recode—a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to advancing next-generation water infrastructures, with strong commitments to equity and sustainability at the heart of its mission—mimicking predevelopment conditions would recognize that “in Western Oregon, 50 percent of water [is] stored in the air” and that urban runoff has changed this dynamic and dramatically reduced infiltration and shallow base flows. For Cahill, then, we are called upon to “engage in practices that get 50 percent into the air and 50 percent into the ground.”19 Movements such as Green Infrastructure (GI), Low Impact Development (LID), and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) respond to the need to redirect the flows of urban waters and show the benefits of softening the urban landscape, increasing the coefficient of friction, reducing runoff volume, and improving water quality. As the researchers at NOAA and WSU–Puyallup have demonstrated, biofiltration features in the urban landscape such as green roofs, bioswales, raingardens, and in-flow through planters are highly effective mediums for increasing residence time for treatment, filtering out contaminants, and slowing down the rate of stormwater flows back into the system. Given the need to promote more ecologically responsive urban hydrological dynamics, how is it possible to aggressively accelerate positive ecological change in a context of rapid urbanization, ever-greater population densities, and rising real estate costs? How are we to reconcile competing demands for limited space? For example, it has become increasingly common for state departments of environmental quality to call for on-site stormwater infiltration (or reduced rates of flow if on-site treatment is not possible). Meanwhile, cities are implementing compact growth policies so as to meet affordability and transit-oriented development (TOD) goals; simply put, these efforts, one fo-

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cused on more porosity in the urban landscape and the other on higher levels of impermeability, operate at cross-purposes.20 In addressing goals that seem to be in conflict, in attempting to reconcile the pressures of development and the need for urban waterways to function in a manner akin to their predevelopment states, Randy Hester, in his great work Design for Ecological Democracy, would ask the architect to embrace this very tension; here, he argues, the greatest opportunities for creative action and exciting forms of design expression are to be found.21 What sorts of inflections and multidimensional synergies between buildings and landscapes might be derived by confronting the threedimensional puzzle of greater density and improved urban hydrology? China’s “Sponge City” initiative provides one innovative model for infrastructures of the blue and the green to assume key functions and important spatial presences in contemporary urban design alongside the customary gray. And yet, what of existing cities composed largely of gray, hard surfaces? How can urban environments be retrofitted to perform in a manner akin to landscapes prior to urbanization? What potential inheres in the gray such that it is less disruptive and might even contribute to the cause of the blue and the green? The basic geology and morphology of certain predevelopment landscapes hold clues. Declivities On a mild, sunny afternoon in the winter of 2001, my former wife Cathy and I boarded the Indian Pacific in Sydney, Australia. The train, beloved by railroad enthusiasts around the world, wound through the ridge of the Blue Mountains and climbed a gap before continuing west on the plateau toward the great dry interior. In the next morning’s bright light, we arrived at the mining town of Broken Hill, “Capital of the Outback,” in the westernmost portion of New South Wales.22 From Broken Hill, we proceeded northeast in a rented four-wheel vehicle along straight dirt roads amid flat terrain covered in graygreen scrub, passing flocks of strutting emus and periodically descending to cross dry creek beds where white posts with black tick marks had been placed to measure water levels during flash flood events. So works the desert. Given the flatness of the landscape, we could see from a great distance the low hills of our destination, Mutawintji National Park, a place of deep significance to Aboriginal peoples. After we arrived, we hiked up one of the hills—no higher than a couple of hundred feet above the plain—and looked in all directions to the distant arcing horizon of the great red Australian desert. Mutawintji is an island of ancient, uneroded geography in a sea of granular soils. In the presence of the pools of water we came upon in the shaded

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2.2. The hills of Mutawintji National Park appear on the distant horizon.

declivities of the smooth, red rocky hills, we found abundant vegetation, with some shrubs a deep, dark, shiny green and others a chalky gray. Where vegetation was found, we saw prints in the sand, evidence of fauna; as we listened at dawn the next day, a hungry kangaroo scratched at our tent, looking for a handout. People coming to the area inevitably followed these signs of life and found hospitable the combination of rocks and pools, plants and animals. They did not live here year-round—the desert demanded nomadism, continual adaptation, and the gathering of foodstuffs across a great expanse—but arrived seasonally from all directions to congregate and engage in rituals in this sacred rise of hills. Our journey bore some affinity, albeit vastly less perilous, to those of the eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino. In “Maps of Water Holes,” a chapter in his wonderful book The Secret Knowledge of Water, Craig Childs speaks of Kino’s ability to make sense of the hydrological reality of the landscape that surrounded him in his efforts to secure reliable sources of water as he traveled by foot and mule from the mission in Tucson where he was stationed to Los Angeles and other locations for the purposes of trade, exploration, and the securing of supplies. Making his way through the Cabeza Prieta in the Sonoran Desert, one of the most desolate, arid landscapes of North America,

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2.3. The cliffs of Mutawintji: where there is rock there is shade; where there is shade there is water; where there is water there is vegetation; where there is vegetation there are animals; where there are animals there are people.

Kino avoided the flats of the desert floor when possible and instead traveled along ridgetops, where he found shaded, water-filled, pocketlike depressions (called tinajas altas, or “high tanks”)—mediums of life amid arid, mountainous, hard-rock desolation.23 The Hard (Gray) Makes Possible the Soft (Blue)? Bart Johnson succinctly describes cities as geological formations of rock outcrops, not unlike Mutawintji or the mountains of the Cabeza Prieta.24 Hard urban surfaces configured for functions such as quick conveyance of water to storm drains (with significant downstream effects) can be reconfigured to intercept and decelerate flows for the purposes of floodplain storage and to perform other beneficial work (taking place before the water flows to bodies such as rivers and lakes or infiltrates the ground and eventually evaporates and returns to the sky to continue the great cycle). A city has the potential to be a geological structure of water-scooped hollows and cool, shady slot canyons, a structure that reinforces, rather than compromises, ecological integrity. In August 2018, while descending into the dusk of Cairo, 22 million inhabi-

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2.4. Enlisting the hard surfaces of the city to decelerate flows, put water to work, and cleanse it

tants strong, I looked from my airplane window through a dusty haze covering endless blocks of sand-colored buildings separated by narrow, cracklike street passages (not at all unlike the water-collecting slot-canyon geographies of deserts). Although Cairo’s water supplies are precarious—the Nile delivers significant upstream pollution loads to the city in the form of untreated sewage wastes, industrial wastes, and fertilizers and pesticides—it is nevertheless imaginable that the hard surfaces of this desert city could be enlisted in a movement toward a healthful, water-centric approach. With plentiful shade created by the rock outcrop–like morphology of its buildings, evaporative losses in Cairo could be minimized, and the losses that did occur could help to keep buildings, streets, and alleys cool. Through simple means—for example, sand filtration as a passive water treatment in a matrix of storage—water could be treated and reused. Taking a practical, ecologically wise, and water-centric approach, we could adapt and create vastly more livable and comfortable urban environments, even in extreme settings with changing climates such as Cairo’s. Such a city is potentially a geological structure that conditions a new ecology (a novel ecosystem). Likewise, cities in the American West could become surrogate mountain ranges in a time of reduced snowpack, with their buildings and urban landscapes forming at-grade storage depressions and above-grade declivities. Whether at the site or district scale, a goal would be to optimize the harvesting, use, recycling, and treatment of water and, in doing so, instantiate micro-

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2.5. The urban pipe-shed

hydrological loops that ultimately benefit the ecosystems in which projects are situated. An evolving nomenclature anticipates this urban conceptualization and material transformation and offers new ways of seeing water and the city. Water resources specialist Roy Iwai calls the urban environment “the pipe-shed.”25 Like a sub-watershed, a pipe-shed establishes a boundary, with a rooftop and gutter constituting the edge of a portion of catchment and the beginning of the tributary. Adopting a similar framing, Dr. Kevan Moffett, who runs the Moffett Research Lab with the Washington State University EcoHydrology Group, speaks of “streets as streams and street trees as BMPs [best management practices]”: “Each urban street acts like an ephemeral headwater stream, and the street trees serve as that stream’s riparian zone.”26 Similarly reimagining the urban environment, Thomas Debo, emeritus professor of city planning at Georgia Tech, encourages “urban design [to] mimic rural hydrology as much as possible” so as to “reduce the velocity of water when it is channelized” to minimize flooding, in part by “collecting water into cisterns for processing and reuse.”27 Proceeding from this reorientation, and recognizing the multiple demands on urban space, designers can seek in their proposed design interventions combinations of the hard (rocklike built

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structures) and soft (spongelike biological matrices) in the cause of greatly improved hydrological function and a city supportive of life. Hydro-Urban Formations Might urban spaces of water collection during major rain events become sites and stages of gathering during times of sunny, dry weather? Who would comprehend this better than the Dutch, who have learned over centuries to prosper in their watery landscape, a constructed, constrained, and densely populated space? De Urbanisten’s Water Square Benthemplein, built in Rotterdam in 2013, and other civic infrastructural design projects by the firm combine water storage with recreational spaces and other forms of civic amenity. Pickup basketball games and other shared public activities take place in sunken courts that at other times gather heavy rains. The temporal assumes a heightened role in urban place-making; with so little slack and competing pressures on limited space, a hollowed volume assumes stacked and sequenced function.28 This manner of thinking about the city guides Oakland-based Hyphae Design Laboratory’s groundbreaking approach and work. Hyphae analyzes flows of different water sources through a site and its environs to balance project demand with broader-scale hydrological surpluses and deficiencies. For its adaptive reuse of the Waterman Gardens multifamily residential complex, a postwar development in San Bernardino, California, Hyphae evaluated the city’s hydrological conditions, recognizing that paving over a floodplain to build its downtown had led to exceptionally high groundwater levels near the Santa Ana River, heightened flood risk, and liquefaction of soils. They also identified a corresponding lowering of groundwater at the base of the foothills several miles to the north.29 Instead of spending millions of dollars on an engineered solution that would involve pumping and work against the natural hydrology, Hyphae asked instead whether projects like Waterman Gardens up and down the watershed could in aggregate perform this work more resourcefully as part of a larger process of urban redevelopment, through a green and blue infrastructural approach that would capture rain and intercept and decelerate stormwater during storm events. Hillary Brown finds parallels between this approach and other elements of a sustainable hydro-centric urban design agenda, for “just as low-carbon energy strategies employ local renewableenergy flows . . . so can low-impact water management strategies exploit local water flows and natural landscapes.”30 Serving as an ecological design and water consultant for the Charles

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2.6. De Urbanisten’s Water Square Benthemplein

David Keeling Apartments Project, a LEED Platinum residential complex on the campus of the University of California at San Diego (designed by KieranTimberlake | Architecture, Planning, and Research and Spurlock Landscape Architects), Hyphae utilized such holistic thinking, in which builtscapes and landscapes are inflected. Because the complex was to be located in a floodplain and subject to flash floods, the city of La Jolla required the incorporation of enormous and expensive—on the order of millions of dollars— underground tanks to accommodate storm surcharge during major rain events. As an alternative, and as part of a larger Hyphae commitment to “move dollars from utilities to the landscape,” the design team lifted the building off the ground and created a series of shaded and sunny green spaces for students that would also provide storage and flood mitigation during infrequent and yet at times intense rains.31 The project established a dry creek riparian patch of landscape akin to predevelopment conditions in a dense urban setting. Hyphae demonstrates that an integrated approach to site planning, building massing, and configuration can lead to projects that connect people to broader hydrological functions. With this objective in mind, several years ago I taught an advanced-level architectural design studio focused on a mixed-use development on the shores of the Willamette River in Milwaukie, Oregon, immediately to the south of Portland (the current site of a wastewater treatment plant that will go off-line sometime in the future). We made our first visit to the site by boat, traveling upstream and south on the Willamette in the company of

2.7. Lift the building, add water: Keeling Apartments, University of California at San Diego (KieranTimberlake | Architecture, Planning, and Research and Spurlock Landscape Architects, with water consultant Hyphae Design Laboratory)

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Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper. The journey provided an opportunity for Travis to share his expertise on the current state of the river in comparison to what it might have been centuries ago, and for my students to gain the perspective of looking up at our site, not down upon a river from it. This initial approach prompted in the subsequent design investigations a sectional stance that emphasized systems, interactions, and flows, as opposed to a more conventional and commanding, plan-like orientation. For his proposal, Orrin Goldsby embraced the idea of improving riparian habitat and the need for a greater buffer between the river and the development. He concentrated construction along a “great street” at the eastern edge of the site paralleling and yet at a distance from the river. Goldsby incorporated ground-floor commercial uses, upper-level residential units, and an environmental education center anchoring the north edge. This compact site planning provided the open space necessary to soften and make more complex, variable, and benchlike the shore of the river and the strip of land immediately adjacent to it. In Goldby’s proposal, reintroduced riparian tree and shrub communities interlaced with seasonal side channels. Provocatively, lanternlike spaces on the upper levels of the residences, facing the reestablished riparian zone, jutted into the trees, in contrast to the more brightly lit portions of the dwellings fronting the great street. An idea of improved urban habitat and hydrology informed the making of architecture down to the placement of rooms, the design of facades—screenlike for the benefit of sensitive bird species—and lighting choices. The result: riparian lantern architectures. Opportunistic Ecologies Innovative thinkers seek to appropriate hard urban surfaces as hydrological and biological enablers, conceiving building construction processes as ecologically regenerative. The Portland-based urban ecologist Mark Wilson gives us some insight into how we might align sought-after ecological attributes with the desired characteristics of a project from a human-centric perspective. Wilson visits building sites near riparian corridors where historic wetlands have been largely obliterated and many are calling for their reintroduction. He observes the locations of staging areas, the movement patterns of construction equipment, and the reshaping of terrain. He then conducts percolation tests where soils have been compacted by trucks carrying loads of building materials and identifies locations where proper subsurface conditions for constructed wetlands have been established.

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Using this example of accidental regeneration—what Wilson calls “opportunistic ecologies”—designers and their collaborators might proceed with a greater level of intentionality, embedding natural and hydrological systems process goals in their problem definition statements for development projects, goals that will depend in great measure on where a particular project sits in the urban watershed.32 Given the aspirations of wetland complex restoration, it is within the realm of the possible that a building on a low-lying development site could release harvested, recycled, and treated water at critical times to newly constructed surface wetlands that are adjacent to and part of project development to ensure the adequacy of the hydroperiods (water levels) necessary for aquatic species to complete their life cycles. Hydroperiods become especially important given a changing climate, stretches of prolonged drought in many regions, and greater meteorological unpredictability. As Susanna Hamilton, an environmental educator with the Willamette Resources and Educational Network, said of the West Eugene, Oregon, wetlands in the winter of 2014: “Our wetlands are so very dry. Last spring, we lost an entire generation of macroinvertebrates, and I am concerned about what we may lose this year if we don’t get a good amount of rain soon.”33 With buildings configured to provide a greater level of seasonal hydrologic regularity, these macroinvertebrates, so essential to the food chain, might be better able to reproduce. A pollinator prey base could be reestablished, with cooled and oxygenated overflows released to nearby urban riverways for the benefit of aquatic species. Taking cues from the likes of Mark Wilson and Hyphae Design Laboratory, heightened awareness of hydrology and ecology and a correspondingly expanded role of the architect leads to a view of a design intervention as setting in motion micro-hydro loops embedded within and interacting with (eco)systems of greater magnitude. And yet, as indicated, the nature of the expanded role depends on its location. Josh Cerra, professor of landscape architecture at Cornell University, reflecting on his work with communities along the Hudson River in New York that are subject to climate change impacts, speaks to a goal of situating “water-dependent uses along waterways,” in contrast to so much that defines riverscapes in the United States.34 In this sense, hydrological design is not unlike a passive or natural approach to heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilating: a high degree of climatic responsiveness and environmental sensitivity results in buildings expressively attuned to their surroundings. And yet it can be argued that an emphasis on water systems requires an even finer-grained approach than passive low-energy design, as Hyphae’s analysis of variations in San Bernardino’s subsurface hydrological conditions attests.

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2.8. A project acquires particularity by virtue of where it sits in the urban watershed.

Hydrological Down to the Detail The trick will be whether Oregonians, living today on silicone and petroleum, can fashion our water future from the lessons of obsidian and cedar. —Rick Bastasch, The Oregon Water Handbook (2006), 1 67

Richard White helps us visualize the journey of salmon from tributaries to the ocean and back as a transference of enormous sums of energy made possible by the conduit of a river. As we have seen, to the great detriment of aqueous beings, the flows, currents, and overall metabolism of the system are dramatically altered by urbanization. A multiscalar understanding must be brought to efforts to reconfigure these flows, from the larger water and urban subwatershed view down to the way architects and their collaborators configure the minutest of assemblages and choose materials at the level of the building detail. Consider this straightforward architectural detail as indicative of a typical design approach: the “envelope” of a house is represented in relation to an attached wooden deck, with the “ledger” of the deck bolted to the framing of the house. Sound detailing calls for a “corrosion-resistant hanger,” a “peel-and-

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2.9. Ledger detail: all callouts pertain to repelling water or otherwise minimizing its ability to deteriorate and corrode (based on a drawing from Thallon, Graphic Guide to Frame Construction (1991), 57.

stick bituminous membrane,” a “gap for drainage,” and a “pressure-treated band joist.” Water motivates every decision, and the designer’s paramount concerns are halting decay, extending a building’s “life,” and preventing what threatens to rush in and instantiate processes of deterioration should the contractors build shoddily. Architects who are lawsuit-wary (very understandably so) concern themselves with not letting water in and care less about what goes out—that is to say, about the particulates and contaminates that slough off and affect downstream waters and their denizens.35 The late philosopher Scott Cameron spoke eloquently of this singleminded fixation on permanence and mastery of the universal solvent of water “by means of another Sisyphean aspiration—impermeability. Yet adopting this means to achieve our goals of permanence not only cuts us off from the cycles of the natural world, but creates temptations and new problems.”36 A meaningful design response to Cameron’s critique requires that we move away from a unidirectional approach to a cyclical and multipath orientation in which configurations of building systems are necessarily braced against the elements and also attend to the needs of numerous life-forms beyond.37 Like the bark of a tree and the moss that grows on it, providing both a form of protection and a filtering path for rivulets of water, the smallest building detail that the ecologically minded architect draws can harbor commitments to both human comfort and the safe passage of aqueous and other beings. The architect so at-

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tuned gives greater consideration to the toxicological impacts of materials, the beneficial environmental work that an assembly might perform, and the ways in which it channels, distributes, and diffuses what is suspended in water. If water is the medium connecting salmon, bears, and forests, perhaps we can view building materials and details—the surfaces that we make cities out of—as the medium linking people, urban water bodies, and a larger hydrologic reality. In viewing the architectural detail as an element in the urban pipeshed, designers are tasked to evolve construction systems beyond those dependent on rubberized membranes like EPDM and metals like copper and zinc and to embrace a back-to-the-future material reality of low- and no-toxicity, obsidian-like and cedar-like building skins.38 Following this path, designers become disciples like Dreiseitl and Grau, who initiated this chapter’s journey: let the wisdom and instructional prowess of the learned, well-traveled waters inform our studies of the substances, structures, and systems of the city.

CHAPTER 3

Liquid-Shaped Space

Water, for Iranians, is a material to be worked with as much as steel and concrete are for people in other places. —Terence O’Donnell, Garden of the Brave in War (20 1 3), 25

What new roles and meanings might site-scale urban architectural machines assume when designers give creative agency to water in a manner that is ecologically responsive, climatically adaptive, and supportive of civic life? What happens when water becomes, in our design culture, “a material to be worked with” in shaping space rather than an element that comes into play after other influences have guided unalterable decisions? The previous chapter focused on how localized works of architecture can assume positive stances relative to larger hydrological contexts, down to the designer’s focused attention on the details of a building envelope. This chapter considers the implications of harvesting and storing a significant volume of rain- and stormwater on-site and associated project design opportunities given a lingering presence of water—for example, working with graywater to derive functional synergies if the intent is to reuse it, as should increasingly be the case. As touched on earlier, a distributed approach may not be an optimal one given legacy infrastructures, settlement patterns, and limited funding. As Anthony Turton argues in his article “The Case against Rainwater Harvesting,” this approach may be unwarranted if it works at cross-purposes with what could prove to be more desirable alternatives.1 And yet many find Turton’s concern extreme and exaggerated and believe that many water experts tied to certain infrastructural outcomes too quickly eschew localized rainwater harvesting in discussions of what next-generation water systems might look like. These advocates argue that a focus on “prohibiting waste and demanding reasonable water use” would have a vastly greater impact on urban and regional water futures than prohibiting or deincentivizing harvesting.2

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While the debate persists, so does a consensus that the most prudent water management strategy is one attuned to the particularities of local and regional hydrological conditions and climate. For example, the continued access of the city of Miami and Dade County to the dependable, high-quality Biscayne Aquifer suggests, for now and for many, that investment in distributed water supply systems makes less sense compared to other options. On the other hand, experts disinclined to invest in centralized supply for the region see value in distributed wastewater so as to render obsolete septic systems that compromise water quality and pose associated health problems in a context of sea level rise and the increasingly common condition of “clear sky” flooding.3 Opposition aside, in many parts of the world rain, or “sky water,” is a promising, relatively high-quality, efficiently obtainable, and underutilized source in comparison with surface water, groundwater, and other potential sources (desalinization plants, for example).4 Recognizing the potential, many advocate for a return to past regimes in which “the rain was managed where rain fell,” as Maria Cahill of the nonprofit Recode describes the realities of pre-urban water systems in western Oregon.5 Mort Anoushiravani, director of infrastructure with the nonprofit Mercy Corps, has worked on water projects throughout the world, including ones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jordan, and nations in central Asia. He speaks to the enormous benefits of a decentralized approach as an antidote to centralized, capital-intensive systems in those locations suffering from political dysfunction and recovering from periods of strife. Decentralization is the “fastest way to provide high-quality water” to communities seeking to recover and rebuild in the aftermath of violence and upheaval—for example, cities in postwar Iraq.6 Yet it is not only in emergency and post-emergency circumstances that distributed systems make sense. Utilizing captured rainwater also provides a means to supplant sources that are naturally contaminated or have been degraded as a result of human activity. Rainwater can be a blessing, for instance, in cities in Bangladesh, which is subject to rising sea levels, salinization, pollution of surface waters with human and other wastes, and naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater sources that, with overexposure, can lead to cancer and pose other significant health risks. Or take the example the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: only 30 percent of the inhabitants of this rapidly growing metropolis have access to piped water.7 With few surface water sources to rely on, many in “Dar” depend on boreholes to access groundwater, and yet these are often dug near cesspits and so can expose urban dwellers to deadly diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Further, as is happening in many coastal cities, overdrawing fresh water from aquifers is leading to saltwater intrusion. With the plentiful rainfall characteristic of tropical climates, rainwater harvesting

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would seem to be one means of addressing the city’s need for a dependable, high-quality supply of water. Quickly changing circumstances in industrialized-world urban contexts also suggest the value of rainwater harvesting as part of a wise investment strategy for meeting future demand. Take, for example, the city of Seattle. The specter of inadequate supply in the dry summer months, owing to reduced snowpack in the Cascades to the east coupled with reservoirs of relatively small capacity for a city its size, suggests that harvesting could be included in an emerging, resilience-oriented policy and investment discipline. The growing challenges presented by Tucson’s more water-stressed climate are proactively addressed by University of Arizona professor Courtney Crosson, who leads architecture and urban design studios focused on this problem. Using systems models and remote sensing techniques, Crosson tasks student teams to investigate the exciting prospect of water independence for Tucson in the coming decades through urban- and landscape-scale harvesting of winter and summer monsoonal rains combined with aquifer recharge. Crosson and her students’ efforts speak to the value that designers can deliver in devising creative solutions to urban water futures; specifically, her studios create a space of civic dialogue to consider alternatives to the Arizona Water Project and the estimated investment of billions of dollars necessary to maintain and upgrade a far-flung system of distribution. A Water Budget as a Design Informant Assuming the strong potential and rationale for harvesting rainwater on a given site in a dense urban setting, and perhaps the ability to intercept stormwater as well, what parameters can inform decision-making, and what challenges need to be overcome, such that the design consequences are as positive as they can be? A critical tool that offers initial answers to these questions is a water budget, which, in the formative early phases of design, enables monthly comparisons of available supply—how much water is available to a site—and building occupant demand. The case-study water budget described and illustrated in the pages that follow indicates how the straightforward task of developing a budget opens up spaces of design inquiry that architects seldom devote attention to in contemporary practice, and yet these spaces have important consequences for the future of the city with respect to water. The case-study project in question, located in Portland, Oregon, is a typical “podium” building: it has four stories of residential units of light frame construction sitting atop a commercial space with a concrete structure on the

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ground level.8 The project occupies a 100′ x 100′ lot on the inner east side, a common footprint occupying one-quarter of one of Portland’s ubiquitous 200′ × 200′ square blocks.9 This case study assumes 100 full-time residents. With laundry, cooking, showering, and other water-consuming functions as part of daily life in the multi-unit residential complex, water demand exceeds that of many other building types, for example, most commercial and institutional projects. To that end, this project makes an interesting test case for evaluating the potential of rainwater harvesting. Basic Water Budget Inputs The water supply budget relies on local data and thirty-year historic averages of monthly rainfall. The calculation accounts for evapotranspiration (ETO), the sum of the evaporation and plant transpiration of rainwater, which factors into the amount of rainwater and stormwater that can be collected. A next step is calculating collection area sizes and specifying collection surface types. The latter calculation is critical, as the material makeup and configuration of a given surface will have its own runoff coefficient—in other words, the amount of runoff collected relative to the amount of precipitation received. A larger coefficient indicates an area of low infiltration and high runoff (pavement, steep roofs, and so on); a lower value corresponds to a permeable surface with high infiltration (vegetated roofs, flat surfaces, porous pavement, and so on). Ultimately, the estimate of the supply of harvested rainwater is a function of monthly average rainfall, collection area, and runoff coefficients for each collection surface. Next, water use is assumed and calculated based on estimates of average daily use per resident as measured in gallons of water per person per day.10 Multiple resources offer tools for estimating demand, including LEED, the Living Building Challenge, and the latest edition of Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings. The budget allows for quick and easy substitutions of numbers based on informed estimates and assessments of the volume of demand, the types of fixtures, the extent and type of irrigation for landscaping, and so on. Numbers in the demand portion of the budget require scrutiny, as these result from informed assumptions—some might call it guesswork—about a great number of factors: standards of living (as this bears on what types of fixtures are acceptable and how many are required), market demand, regulatory flexibility or inflexibility, and level of cultural homogeneity. (A budget assumes a standard when in fact individuals with diverse backgrounds who occupy the same complex may have altogether different attitudes toward and uses for

3.1. Water supply table: the volume of rainwater that can be harvested monthly for the case-study project (courtesy of Rachel Hall, University of Oregon master of architecture graduate student, 2017, using a template provided by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

3.2. Water supply graph: the volume of rainwater that can be harvested monthly for the case-study project (courtesy of Rachel Hall, University of Oregon master of architecture graduate student, 2017, using a template provided by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

3.3. Water demand table: assumptions for the case-study project (courtesy of Rachel Hall, University of Oregon master of architecture graduate student, 2017, using a template provided by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

3.4. Water demand graph: estimate of monthly need for the case-study project (courtesy of Rachel Hall, University of Oregon master of architecture graduate student, 2017, using a template provided by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

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3.5. Superimposition of water supply and demand graphs for the case-study project (courtesy of Rachel Hall, University of Oregon master of architecture graduate student, 2017, using a template provided by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

water.) The water budget illustrated in figure 3.3 assumes an incremental approach to reducing dependence on municipal water sources, in comparison to the more aggressive position of calling for buildings to achieve “net zero water.” To this end, this water budget specifies low-flush versus composting toilets, efficient dishwashers versus residents’ hand-washing of dishes, and daily (albeit short) showers. With a goal of reducing building occupants’ water demands, each of these elements deserves to be questioned, as do other relevant factors such as cultural acceptance of various uses for graywater or other forms of nonpotable water, or the question of whether people in the (near) future will be willing to share kitchens, let alone laundry facilities. These are more than matters of plumbing and fixture type and instead speak to larger societal expectations in the growing city moving into the future. Are we to become more individualistic or communal in how we think about this precious resource? Are we to demand more or less water? Following upon site, climate, and building use assumptions, charts can be created that map supply relative to demand. With these, rainwater and graywater are calculated for each month as supply, the latter being a constant given the assumption that a resident’s water consumption does not vary seasonally (yet another assumption warranting scrutiny). Meanwhile, demand is separated between potable and nonpotable uses. For the Portland, Oregon, project and site, annual water supply and demand do not synchronize over the course of

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the year, as would be expected. While overall annual demand matches supply almost to the gallon(!), the discrepancy derives from an overabundance of rainwater relative to demand during the winter months and a lack of rainwater in the summertime; it is not at all uncommon for Portland to experience little to no rain from June to early October. The “gap” widens with yet another assumption—once again perhaps an overly conservative one—that a multiunit residential project like this one depends on significant volumes of water to meet summer landscape irrigation needs. How Do We Reconcile Multiple Project Goals? For this theoretical project and for others, how aggressively should a designer and the client push for sustainable performance and strive for a goal of achieving net zero water? Given a variety of stances that could be adopted, Hyphae Design Laboratory advocates for nuance in reconciling multiple project goals and considering water systems in relation to other building systems. Studying possible water systems for the multi-unit “Coliseum Place” affordable housing project in Oakland—a city with a wet winter / dry summer climate comparable to Portland’s yet with less precipitation—Hyphae came to realize that a net-zero-water project would necessitate installation of a membrane bioreactor in the basement in order to convert wastewater to potable water, despite all efforts to reduce potable demand. As a bioreactor is both energy-consuming and expensive, achieving net zero water for such a project would require compromising both affordability and net-zero-energy goals. Which performance metric assumes primacy? Balancing opportunities and costs, one defensible position would be to tap into the municipal potable supply in summer when needed so as to reduce the size and cost of the project’s storage features. A still more pragmatic strategy would be to rely on the municipal supply of potable water year-round, while at the same time working to minimize its consumption and to minimize piping by combining harvested rainwater and graywater. Mixing rainwater with graywater also results in a lower pH than graywater alone, obviating the need to desalinate to make the water suitable for next uses. To piggyback on centralized systems while working to decrease dependence on potable supply is to adhere to the portfolio approach discussed previously. It provides a means of helping a city address the challenges of meeting peak demands and creates a path for a city to grow without increasing its water footprint. This approach also recognizes the fast pace of technological innovation in decentralized systems and embraces design that invites adaptability over

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time. For example, the future incorporation of emerging technologies—such as those that transform wastewater to potable water and do not incur the same costs or energy expenditures of membrane bioreactors, the most commonly available technology today—could be “designed into” the system.11 Piggybacking also offers a means of moving beyond the “loner sustainability” model that calls for each urban project to shoulder the burden of resourcefulness and environmental responsiveness on its own. For instance, in an EcoDistricts approach to thinking about water systems, a commercial building could utilize the steady flow of graywater from a residential project nearby.12 Above all, synergistic design, no matter the scale, begins with a supply-side commitment to identifying available sources and the potential combinations and segregations of flows that make the most sense. The Bertschi School Living Science Building in Seattle, for example, couples a reliable source of graywater supply with the constant demand of a living wall in an atrium space where temperature and water requirements do not alter seasonally. This is a very different approach from fixating on desired outcomes without first having inventoried readily available resources, whether recycled or otherwise. Storage and . . . ? Assuming a significant commitment to rainwater harvesting and associated storage, and recognizing, as does Brent Bucknum of Hyphae Design Laboratory, that “above 100,000 gallons, it gets expensive,” what are multiple benefits that might be derived from the presence on-site of significant quantities of stored water?13 For example, GBD Architects designed a 22,000-gallon cistern that serves as a fire suppression reserve for the Oregon Health Sciences University Center for Health and Healing in Portland. Similarly, stored water might contribute to seismic dampening, be used for sound attenuation, or serve as thermal mass to reduce cooling loads. It might also be possible to incorporate filtration into the storage matrix—for example, sand as a preliminary treatment for rainwater or in-line planters that store graywater while improving its quality. In helping to identify these synergies, the water budget elevates water as a topic worthy of discussion in the early conceptual and schematic design stages, prompting as it does attention to unexamined preconceptions and the life of any one project over time. It also allows for the devising of a water schematic that is both a description of systems elements and their interactions and a narrative about the role of water in distilling architectural meaning. With water now an on-site resource, what spatial, experiential, and social opportunities

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might arise in architectural or urban design propositions? What are key themes around which the designer might build out a suitably poetic water schematic? Architecture as Poetic Analogue to the Dynamism of the Landscape As with so many projects that the Pritzker Prize–winning Australian architect Glenn Murcutt has realized, the Riversdale Boyd Education Centre (1996– 1999), designed in collaboration with Reg Lark and Wendy Lewin, is a hydrologically poetic analogue to the landscape in which it nestles. This off-grid project in rural West Cambewarra, New South Wales, consists of two main program elements: a shared meeting space with kitchen, and sleeping quarters with shared baths. These are adjoined, yet offset, and each is afforded protection with its own elaborated shed roof. The two roofs meet at a low point, or valley, and then rise on either side, like butterfly wings. Rainwater gathers in the valley where the roofs join and then flows to a celebrated downspout, a Murcutt trademark, to an underground cistern. Rainwater meets 100 percent of building occupant needs. Each of the sleeping quarters opens to a commanding view of the Shoalhaven River, the river valley, and the surrounding hills. And what are the hills but elaborated shed roofs that meet in a (river) valley where water collects? The building not only offers visual ties to the landscape but behaves in a manner akin to it: abstracting its most salient qualities, the building encapsulates a landscape hydrology within a formatively expressive architectural system and, as with so many Murcutt projects, accommodates environmental complexity in a deceptively straightforward way. Riversdale affirms a stance that a “parti” (a basic conceptual/organizational diagram) for a project is incomplete if it is not extended outward and does not offer evidence of an intentional relationship between building and setting. For Murcutt, the diagram the designer executes pairs architecture and environment and couples project identity and dynamic environmental processes. Such pairings are also achievable in more dense urban contexts, and yet, given the pervasiveness of tall buildings and the importance of following vertical flows and taking advantage of gravity, the axis shifts to “z.” Stacked Water Precincts Instead of taking the more conventional approach of delivering harvested rainwater to underground cisterns and then pumping it back up when and where

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3.6. A building that is a poetically hydrological analogue to the landscape in which it sits: Riversdale Boyd Education Centre (by Glenn Murcutt, Reg Lark, and Wendy Lewin, West Cambewarra, New South Wales [1996–1999])

needed, the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park in New York City, designed by CookFox Architects, features a system of water storage tanks distributed on different levels throughout the building. Although they are buried deep within the building’s interior and lack a strong architectural presence, these elements hint at the possibility of forming vertically staggered “precincts” where water storage defines space and contributes to architectural meaning. In his famed Thermal Baths at Vals, Switzerland, completed in 1996, Peter Zumthor deployed “hollowed-out stones”—rectangular volumes housing contained and more private bath spaces—in a patternlike array that in coordination with light monitors above give definition to the resultant, more open and public bath spaces. What would occur if such water containers were deployed along the “z” axis to give order, cadence, and character to multistory urban buildings? The thickened apertures (made of thin materials) that ornament Behnisch Architects’ City Hall in Bad Aibling (2012) operate in dialogue with the Baroque urban context and allow the open spaces of the city to flow into the public spaces of the building. The contiguous fold that is the white guardrail/ stair assembly in the atrium space expands the contemporary commentary on the Baroque, extends public access to the upper levels, and optimizes the distribution of natural light to the recessed spaces below. The stair as a sculptural and practical piece of equipment is a theater of ascent, a shaper of available resources (light), and a unifier of the citizenry and its servants. The example of Bad Aibling suggests the value of thinking along the lines of the sustain-

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3.7. Water shapes space: Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths at Vals

able Baroque, where inner urban landscapes are riotously expansive in terms of both the perception of generosity produced through the manipulation of surfaces and light and the acknowledgment of and connections to broader environmental—and cultural—conditions. Building on these examples, what if water storage tanks in an atrium space were clad with light-reflective materials to help distribute daylight admitted through skylights to the darker, recessed spaces below? If we hybridize One Bryant Park, Vals, and Bad Aibling, might exposed “plumbing” activate and define spaces of ascent and gathering? How might architectural pockets and folds holding water in slot canyons of vertical circulation also establish selective portals and frame perspectives on what lies above and beyond, setting up new horizons of urban architectural experience spirited toward leafier heights? (The notion of architectural horizons drives the narrative in chapter 6.) Recognizing the value of working in section and stressing vertical relationships, as befits a water-wise approach to urban buildings, even for low-rise projects, Samantha Rusek adopted a suitably hydrological approach in her university thesis proposal for a multi-unit residential project in Milwaukie, Oregon. Sam deployed parallel wings of residential units perpendicular to the

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3.8. The value of a water schematic that depicts the basics of systems elements and their interactions and that articulates a bulleted sequence of steps in the hydrologic design cycle

adjacent, south-to-north-flowing Willamette River, with permeable alleys between the wings. This allows for optimal solar access for dwellings as well as an elongation of the path of water from the roofs to the river. Rainwater harvested from the roof is directed to large cisterns located under the exterior stairways that provide access to upper-level units. This water is then treated and made available to the project’s inhabitants. During major storm events when volume exceeds the capacity of cisterns, water overflows to the permeable alleys, where a sinuous and filtering journey to the Willamette begins, heading first to the east and away from the river before turning 180 degrees west and continuing its slow, inexorable trip. In the process, the water is cooled, cleansed, and oxygenated, in dramatic contrast to the sheet flow characterizing the hydrology of the site at present. Another speculative project, an outcome of a water-focused architectural design studio at the University of Oregon, expands understandings of how a water budget and schematic can lead to a meshing of architectural and landscape horizons. For their design of a mixed-use building in Portland, Oregon, Joel Bohlmeyer, Amy Santimauro, and Katelynn Smith developed a scheme that includes a ground-level production space dedicated to making bamboo

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3.9. The Bamboo project (diagram based on a design by Joel Bohlmeyer, Amy Santimauro, and Katelynn Smith)

flooring and other products and several stories of residential units above.14 As part of the proposal, non-invasive bamboo is planted underneath a nearby highway to improve air quality. (Bamboo is one of the most effective plants for filtering out pollutants suspended in air.) This bamboo is then harvested for use in the production space, with furnishings, flooring, and the like, then delivered to market. At the top of the building, a photovoltaic array forms a sunscreen/trellis for the roof deck; the array would also collect rainwater to be used in the residential units below. Graywater from these units would be treated by subsurface wetland planters descending in parallel with a stairway within a multistory atrium. It would then be directed to a shallow, second-floor pond above the production spaces that would provide an acoustic barrier between the noisy industrial activity below and the residential units above. Through evaporation processes in combination with stack (natural) ventilation in the atrium, the pond would form an integral part of the cooling system for the residential units. It would also enable the formation of a second-level bamboo “forest park” interspersed with wellness spaces for massage, yoga, and fitness. The pond would serve as the final step in treating graywater, which could be used to run machinery in the production spaces below. Finally, excess cleansed water would be delivered by in-flow planters in the streets to the nearby Willamette River.

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This project suggests the value of an approach to design that reverses what is typical in architecture and instead begins with the configuration of systems, the devising of processes, and the harvesting, use, reuse, and treatment of water. From this approach, spatial and formal opportunities arise. Captured and recycled water provides comfort, makes possible the formation of lush gardens (both interior and exterior), serves as the basis for functional reciprocities between different uses and spaces, and facilitates connections between individual buildings (and the inhabitants of those buildings) and the larger urban environment. A work of architecture is not an object sitting in isolation but a confluence of nature and culture, a nexus of visual and functional linkages. People inhabit architecture as ecological infrastructure. One other example lays the groundwork for a better path for water in the hyperdense city. With his “urban courtyardism” projects, Hong Kong–based architect Weijen Wang subtracts volumes out of dense, high-story urban buildings; these spaces in the sky thus created are deployed every few stories so that dwellers have equitable access to the light and air they provide.15 Inhabitants of the city now typically move from subway and street to lobby and elevator to upper-story units slotted in like shoeboxes. Wang believes that his multistory green spaces, open to the elements, can serve as the “middle ground” so needed to form community in the contemporary high-rise city. These spaces can also incorporate water and serve as inflection points of the gray, green, and blue. It would be possible, for example, to direct harvested rainwater to cisterns associated with these “sky parks.” Vertical neighborhood sub–water districts provide social and ecological critical mass within today’s megacity. The Languages of Water and Architecture These projects speak to the potential of linking resourceful hydrology and spaces of sociability through urban architecture. They also highlight the reality that contemporary design culture’s engagement with water is in its infancy and point to the benefits to be derived by looking at historical traditions for managing water, necessarily passive and gravity-based as they are. Indian step wells such as Chand Baori in Rajasthan from the ninth century, the qanats of Iran, the aflaj of Oman, or the levadas of the island of Madeira furnish spectacular examples, as do centuries-old rainwater-harvesting systems in the water-scarce city of Valletta in Malta, where the Order of the Knights of Saint John decreed in the sixteenth century that each new building incorporate a cistern so as to reduce dependence on the island’s parched aquifers. The sabils found in cities throughout the Islamic world also impress as elevated works of hydro-social

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3.10. Sabil-Kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda in Cairo (1744), from the mid-

eighteenth-century Ottoman period

design. Lending prestige to its benefactor, a sabil stores water in underground cisterns and provides street-level access for its charitable dispensation. In the city of Cairo, a unique, hybrid building type developed in which an elementary Quran school, or kuttab, sits atop the sabil. This stacking of cultural, spiritual, and water infrastructure provides city dwellers with sustenance and replenishment in multiple forms. Designers should pay heed to Malta and Cairo in their efforts to formalize an architectural language appropriate to our times. With his garden works, the artist Michael Singer has developed typologies that can be expanded upon. “Sunken garden” and “emerging well” speak to the collecting, merging, and revealing of water and people’s experiences of it in its various guises along its path.16 With his memorial garden for Holocaust survivors in Killesberg Park in Stuttgart, Germany, water flowing from a fountain in a wooded area leads to a runnel that also intercepts stormwater. These sources combine and flow into a pool of planar and textured concrete and stone at the center of a courtyard

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outlined by screened wooden walls. Water and dappled light form a space of solitude and shadows, reflections, and depths.17 The Michael Singer Studio’s water system art installations for the IBN/ Alterra Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature in Wageningen, the Netherlands (by Behnisch and Partners Architects, 1996–1999), speak to the lyricism of water serving important functional roles while eliciting delight.18 Stormwater is collected in an exterior retention pond and constructed wetlands. It combines with rainwater gathered from the moss-sedum roofs of the three office wings and the adjacent greenhouse roofs that sit atop the building’s two atrium gardens. This water is then delivered to features in the gardens that are also places of gathering. A seating area perches atop a sculpted pool with a patterned concrete lid where final cleansing occurs. “The water slowly overtops the pool and drips into a deep cistern for storage and recycling in the building’s irrigation system and toilets.”19 The irrigation system allows for a high rate of evapotranspiration of plants, producing a cooling effect and keeping the greenhouse atria comfortable, for there is no air-conditioning for this portion of the building; only the laboratory wings to the north require a high level of mechanical climate conditioning. Where people collect, water collects; as advocated for earlier, the sociability diagram and the environmental response diagram coincide, with equipment, envelope, and environment driving continuities of experience and performance. The material palette of these garden installations sets up a dialogue with that of the building proper. The hefty, textured concrete and stone water features, murmurings and reflectance and still surfaces, and a surrounding riot of green ground a project otherwise consisting of glass roofs and walls, light wooden facades, and hemp net guardrails. It is as if Singer’s oases, shaped by materials comfortable in their contact with moisture and the earth, occupied the site centuries prior to the arrival of a higher-tech, tectonically light architecture that dropped into place and rationally and efficiently transferred its loads downward. Pairings as Hinges Examining the work of Michael Singer and Glenn Murcutt, and thinking back to discussions of systems and externalities in chapter 2, water’s capacity to invigorate sustainable architectural discourse pertains to its ability to establish a dialogue between elements and systems in a building, as with the “conversation” of materials in the IBN/Alterra project, as well as a different order of pairing, that between a building and that which lies beyond, a meeting

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3.11. West atrium with reflecting and stormwater collection pond, IBN/Alterra Institute in Wageningen, the Netherlands (by Behnisch & Partners Architects and Michael Singer Studio [1993–1996])

between the proximate and the distant, a circumscribed space and the flows moving through it, including the rains falling from the heavens above. On the one hand, a project that relies on captured rainwater offers a more independent, resilient, off-grid approach than one plugged into a centralized system; on the other, to go this route is to honor a fundamental precariousness and a great dependency on a wider world, to recognize the fragility of our constructs and endeavors absent those generous resources falling from the skies and saturating our ground. Lines of support become visible and depend greatly on laws of gravity as opposed to those removed from day-to-day experience and made functional by laterals and pumps. In this sense, a work of architecture is no longer a microcosmic, totalized

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symbol of the great chain of being that served as the basis of architectural meaning during the Renaissance, and one that continues to influence greatly our image of a building today. Instead of a fixed, immutable summation of worldly reality, bathed in never-failing light, a work of architecture as microurban intervention is an enabling hinge, where selective tendrils of the material and hydrologic gather to shape an immediate reality that is endlessly expansive in its ripple effects. The temporal dimension assumes a heightened design role and involves a willingness to invite water as a shaping force and dynamic medium, what Gaston Bachelard calls “this liquid substance of time,” into the process.20 Collection, flow and overflow, inundation, suspension, and concentration—terms that tell of lastingness, latency, and span assume importance in the emergent nomenclature of hydro-architectures.

CHAPTER 4

In Concentrate

Measures of Distance or Degrees of Concentration? In his essay “Wilderness and the City: Not Such a Long Drive After All,” the philosopher Scott Cameron problematizes the terms “wilderness” and “the city” and considers their fraught relationship. “We have too long suffered the effects of their abstract opposition,” he argues, and therefore “our challenge . . . is to develop resources rich enough to show that they must stand in constructive tension.”1 In “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful? Reflections Grounding Two Apparently Oxymoronic Aspirations,” Cameron builds on this argument and maintains that “we must transvalue our ideals of urban success” and “reflect on the possibility of developing a new, more organic model of the relations between cities and the ground on which they stand.”2 Although Cameron’s use of the term “wilderness” warrants critique as we reflect upon the multi-millennium occupation by humans of the kinds of places he describes—in recognition of which I will substitute the term “nature” in its stead—his essays offer valuable insights.3 Cameron’s discernment of the usefulness of water as a medium for thinking anew about the city-nature relationship proves valuable. He speaks of the negligence demonstrated when “the run-off from acre upon acre of impermeable structures and roads immediately transmogrifies life-giving rain into waste water.”4 And he exhorts “that we cannot constrain, but must learn to live with vast hydrological forces, since the city is too part of the hydrological cycle.”5 With the aim of complementing Cameron’s thinking, this chapter examines further the potential of hydrologically responsive urban architectures. For it is the case that water-centric design thinking prompts consideration of how nature impacts the city, how the city impacts nature, where opposition between the two breaks down, and where we would be wise to consider more deeply

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the tensions between them. Innovative approaches to water and wastewater infrastructure as a concern of design steer us toward learning from vast hydrological forces, redistributing flows, and devising different stewardship models than what currently obtain. Extending Cameron’s construct, we proceed here down a slightly altered conceptual path, mindful of water’s ability to suspend, absorb, and dilute. By productively employing spatial constructs such as “not such a long walk,” “outside,” and “beyond,” terms denoting spans and physical separation, Cameron teases out with nuance ways of thinking about nature in relation to the city. These observations seem particularly relevant given how the ever-expanding metropolis distances urban dwellers more and more from the broader hydrological and ecological realities upon which they depend. That said, an emphasis on water and wastewater allows an inventive evaluation of the city-nature relationship less in terms of remove and more in terms of degrees of concentration and diffusion. Several benefits obtain from this conceptual orientation and strategy: • Distinctions between nature and the city will be predicated on degrees of concentration of substances and entities not normally found in nature (contaminants and pollutants, including human waste) that we would be wise to deal with locally before they enter the larger hydrological system. As the landscape architect and environmental engineer Crystal Grinnell claims, “It is the concentration of so many substances that causes problems.”6 Attending to concentrations enables designers to think along a continuum and encourages them to put into meaningful relation the many types of water often thought of in isolation (even if these sources ultimately need to be separated): from rain and stormwater to recycled and graywater to waste and stormwater and many other waters in between. • Pollutants are not necessarily something to be rid of and are instead resources in the wrong location and concentration. A beginning step in a design process therefore is to identify what is causing harm and consider ways of converting it into an asset that can contribute to the functioning of high-performance, sustainable systems. • Designers are encouraged to configure water and wastewater systems as links between sustainable architectures and climate-adaptive urban landscapes, which allow for greater concentrations of nonhuman species than would ordinarily be found in urban environments, and which strengthen the integrity of the broader-scale ecological and hydrological systems in which cities are situated. In this manner, urban design interventions will consist of living infrastructures, in addition to or in lieu of gray ones,

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characterized by biological complexity, self-organization, degrees of selfmaintenance, and an ability to support life.7 • For optimal systems function in an urbanized context, and given the resources at hand, converting pollutants to resources may entail working with new ecologies or novel ecosystems and with different assemblages and communities than might be found in pre-development environments.

Several recent and innovative projects, some realized and some theoretical, some focused on recycled water and others on wastewater, assert the multiplelevel benefits that obtain from this conceptual approach focused on addressing unprecedented concentrations. Collectively, they offer an avenue for dealing with continued growth, increased density, and a changing climate in resourceful, resilient, and visible ways. Using What Is Present In serving as the water consultant on the Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, California, a project led by CO Architects of Los Angeles, Brent Bucknum of Hyphae Design Laboratory proposed a green or “living roof ” for the project that challenged the city’s requirement that drought-tolerant native plantings be used in such an application. The municipality’s expectation would seem reasonable given the water conservation goals in a hot arid climate and given that a rooftop is the part of a building most exposed to the sun. The issue for Hyphae was that drought-tolerant natives, with their sometimes rubbery and sometimes chalky leaves and stalks and their low surface-to-volume ratios, have evolved to minimize evapotranspiration losses. Such an application, not unlike the near-ubiquitous use of moss sedum vegetation in “extensive” green roofs (roofs with extensive vegetative coverage, shallow soils, and usually little in the way of species diversity) takes insufficient advantage of freely available water resources that could serve as the basis for establishing habitat, improving microclimate, and minimizing building energy demand. Instead of reducing water consumption, Hyphae proposed to utilize recycled water, the “blowdown” of rooftop cooling towers, to irrigate more intensive living roofs, establish more complex plant communities, reduce building cooling demand dramatically (a “wet” roof insulates, absorbs heat, and reduces solar gain, with evaporation also producing a cooling effect), and decelerate stormwater flows, all to the benefit of a broader hydrological reality. This water is brackish or somewhat salty and typically considered a form of waste by engineers, who are tasked with getting rid of it. Instead, Hyphae proposed working

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4.1. Supply-side design: green roof of Palomar Medical Center, Escondido, California (CO Architects, with water consultant Hyphae Design Laboratory)

with this water by utilizing plants with high evapotranspiration rates, such as those found in nearby estuarine ecosystems, that can also tolerate concentrations of salt in the water.8 Reinforcing the path-of-least-resistance logic to this approach, more cooling tower blowdown is available in the summer, precisely when irrigation demand peaks. Brent Bucknum says of the Palomar project, “You have to adapt systems to the conditions that we have.”9 And such would seem to be a truly eco- and hydrological, supply-side approach to design in urban settings that “adapts ecology to the chemistry,” not unlike the Bertschi living wall project in Seattle discussed in the previous chapter.10 Hyphae operates from a simple recognition that humans in cities have introduced water in volumes not historically present in such locations; for this project in particular they proceeded from an awareness that “a hospital is a water hub.”11 Hyphae seeks to take advantage of this resource in combination with building surfaces and systems in order to redirect flows and attract species drawn to plant communities that have adapted to conditions not dissimilar to wet rooftops: shallow soggy soils and high degrees of solar exposure. At the same time, dependence on the electrical grid and ecologically problematic stormwater infrastructure is reduced, and the potential for the flourishing of nonhuman species in places well beyond the site is increased.12 The challenge and opportunity for the designer, one that Hyphae embraces, is to establish such ecologies in tight urban quarters while accommodating competing demands for the use of space. Operating under the constraint and expectation of the construction of a large hospital where one did not exist pre-

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viously, Hyphae inventively enlists those very constraints to generate something of greater value than a hospital alone. Human Physiology as Part of the Landscape Solution While he harbored healthy skepticism about green or living walls, being mindful of the significant water, energy, and technology inputs required to keep them alive and thriving, Brent Bucknum understood the civic value of such an installation for the courtyard of Snøhetta’s high-profile iconic addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010–2016).13 Serving as water consultants on the project, Hyphae investigated what supply-side sources might be directed to the 5,000-square-foot wall and discovered that air conditioner condensate—the sweat and exhalation of occupants(!)—was readily available. Hyphae calculated that on a typical visitation day in the summer, 1,200 gallons of such condensate build-up would be available if captured in trays located under air-conditioning units. Coupled with harvested rainwater, the level of supply of air conditioner condensate was high enough to ensure the wall’s longterm viability.14 Given San Francisco’s climate of rainy winters, which provides a plentiful supply of collectable water for about half the year, and cloudy, humid summers, which yield an abundance of condensate from May to October, this solution elevated supply-side design to a new level. Further, such an approach makes human physiology part of the landscape solution! Water, once seen as the great liability that the architect and engineer are trained to get rid of as quickly as possible, settles and becomes integral to building and landscape performance and design expression. Form Follows Physiology The Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce, another highly innovative designer who capitalizes on the “waste” at hand and often works on projects in hot climates, proceeds from an understanding of the benefits of what he calls “fractal cooling.” Like a tree’s leafy canopy, whose high surface-to-volume ratio enables the rapid and efficient transfer of heat, a “prickly exterior” of toothed-edged concrete columns, beams, and trellises delivers thermal and aesthetic benefits to his Eastgate office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe.15 Pearce’s designs also gain advantage by concentrating on cooling interior surfaces as opposed to cooling spaces and by recognizing that water, which has a higher specific heat than air, is a more efficient medium for thermal transfer. With the celebrated Council House 2 project in Melbourne, Australia

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(2004–2006), Pearce elaborated on the advantages of employing fractal cooling and the assets available. In this project, rooftop cooling tower blowdown is directed to the multistory, sock-like “shower towers” gracing the building’s south facade and intriguing passersby by on Collins Street. It then drops through the towers and “pre-cools” by evaporation before being directed to chilled ceiling panels in the building’s interior, thus reducing mechanical cooling demand. The outcomes of a design process where “form follows physiology,” Pearce’s architectural works become passive, hydro-cooled machines that rely on basic physical principles such as gravity, vaporization, and convection.16 Rewatering to Reclaim Environmental Heritage The Megawra Built Environment Collective is an NGO and architectural and urban design practice founded in 2012 and led by the architect and preservationist May al-Ibrashy. It leads projects as part of the Athar Lina participatory conservation initiative in Cairo’s al-Khalifa neighborhood, which works to preserve heritage sites and historic buildings and foster community empowerment and ownership of the neighborhood’s many assets. In 2014, Athar Lina focused its efforts on a twenty-feddan (just over twenty-acre) zone in al-Khalifa, an area stretching from the ninth-century Ibn Tulun Mosque in the north to the al-Sayyida Nafisa Shrine in the south, a part of the city where twenty thousand inhabitants live and work. Of the many infrastructural problems identified as impediments to enhanced neighborhood quality and heritage restoration, most pressing was that of rising groundwater. Not a natural phenomenon, groundwater was present because of leakage from the water supply and sewerage networks of nearby, uphill tenement complexes. While the obvious, comprehensive solution would have been to fix these networks, such costly interventions require political will and investment, both of which were in short supply. An alternative approach was to advance micro-urban design interventions that would convert a problem that was impacting the well-being of the community and damaging heritage conservation sites into the very resource that could drive urban redevelopment. As a result of deteriorated legacy infrastructures, the ironic circumstance in the al-Khalifa neighborhood was an excess of water in a desert environment, what the geographer Jessica Barnes characterizes as “abundance side-by-side with scarcity,” a phenomenon surprisingly common in Cairo and other cities throughout Egypt.17 In al-Khalifa, large volumes of high groundwater trapped above bedrock not far below grade threatened the structural integrity of the al-Ashraf Khalil and Fatima Khatun domes, two significant heritage sites built

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in the thirteenth century. Rising damp laden with salt was disintegrating lower courses of stone masonry, threatening the collapse of walls due to differential settlement. Linking the future of the domes with community development goals, Athar Lina proposed the al-Khalifa Environment and Heritage Park as a means of simultaneously addressing heritage conservation, enhancements to urban environmental quality, and the needs of al-Khalifa residents. The park would occupy a narrow, vacant strip of land at the southern gateway to the al-Khalifa neighborhood, across the street from and three to six meters above the domes. It was to be brought to life by intercepting groundwater and rerouting it for the irrigation of plantings, thereby dewatering the heritage sites.18 By focusing on decentralized, place-adapted, and neighborhood-scale infrastructure, this initiative focused on a step in the journey of water in the city often neglected and addressed its abnormally high concentration in a particularly creative way.19 Hosted by Megawra and held in March and April 2017, an “International Groundwater School” attracted students and young professionals from around the world, representing a range of disciplines, to help design the park.20 The school tasked students of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, engineering, product design, and heritage conservation to develop a series of design proposals for the park that would foreground the complexity of the issues that would ultimately need to be addressed in any successful final scheme. The school’s structure encouraged teams to pull together the diverse park program elements: green open spaces, places of respite for women and children, areas of environmental and heritage interpretation, commercial uses, and means of improved access to the site, perched as it was above the adjacent street. Rotating Design Investigations around Water and Heritage The International Groundwater School inverted a conventional design sequence and frontloaded water, combined with heritage, as the basis for meaningful, functional urban place-making. Four teams were assigned the task of developing alternative design proposals for the park, while a fifth team focused on water and a sixth on cultural heritage. These latter two teams were tasked to operate in close communication with the four design teams to ensure that their schematic design proposals celebrated these domains of concern. As “the park is a pretext for what is around it,” the heritage team speculated about possible design and interpretive features given the many significant sites, folklore histories, and intangible assets of the neighborhood and

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4.2. Al-Khalifa Park water schematic for groundwater interception and treatment (based on a drawing by students and other participants in the International Groundwater School)

city.21 Meanwhile, the water team explored various technical options for the extraction, transport, and treatment of groundwater to meet various park and neighborhood needs, evaluating options in terms of feasibility, size and space requirements, up-front and long-term cost, safety, maintenance and resilience to changing climates, and unpredictable water volumes and qualities. They analyzed the volume of water needed and the spatial requirements for various types of proposed treatment. The teams developed schematic proposals that met performance requirements while celebrating expressively metaphorical and literal hydrological processes. The water team explored how to embed flexibility into the park project in response to variations in water flow over the course of the day, future increases or decreases in flow, and variation in quality. Since the volume of available groundwater greatly exceeded the demand of plantings in the park, they also decided on the short-term solution of drilling a gravity well through bedrock to return excess water to the aquifer, with the long-term goal of identifying water needs in the larger community, including local businesses that might benefit from a source of free or very inexpensive water.22

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4.3. The “trickling filter” scheme (produced by students and other participants in the International Groundwater School)

The four preliminary design schemes that emerged incorporate water and heritage in a manner integral to the park’s design. One particularly clever scheme utilizes trickling filters, a preliminary step in the treatment of water, as gateway “beacons” at the entrance to the park at the transitional zone between the al-Khalifa and Zaynhum neighborhoods. After passing through the trickling filters, water is directed to constructed wetlands, then to a children’s play feature. Excess water is delivered to a tank “plaza.” Standing atop the tank, one appreciates the view of the dome of al-Ashraf Khalil across the street. Relationships between water, history, culture, charitable dispensation, and education recall qualities of the sabil-kuttab mentioned in chapter 3.23 An Integrated Approach to Infrastructural Challenges While centralized, “modern” infrastructures contributed to the rapid growth of urban populations, at present these same systems, as in the case of al-Khalifa, often prove to be overstressed, inflexible, and incapable of meeting needs and adapting to change over time. And from the beginning they were only partial solutions at best. As the geographer Matthew Gandy has written of Mumbai, if water infrastructure is an instance of the social production of nature, it becomes necessary to examine “how specific manifestations of this ‘second nature’ relate to the majority experience of the city as a space in which access to basic necessities is brutally circumscribed.”24 The efforts of Athar Lina and the International Groundwater School represent a response to this second nature by

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addressing urban infrastructural challenges at the neighborhood level and by offering a syncretic approach to one part of the city that marries cultural, economic, and environmental concerns. It acknowledges a past of both privilege and marginalization and the possibility of a more hopeful future for residents of the neighborhood. While a project as circumscribed as al-Khalifa Park cannot eliminate or offset the risks of climate change, it aspires to create a microclimatic refuge within an urban heat island by introducing vegetative shade to limit solar exposure in high-activity areas, enhancing evapotranspiration to dissipate heat, and placing cascades and other water-based features in strategic locations to reduce temperature gradients.25 These design interventions will have a physical impact, and their potential to increase community awareness of a changing climate also delivers an important social benefit. The cultural heritage of the site and its environmental future are linked within a temporal narrative that, threaded by water, invites reflection on the need for the evolution of interlinked urban systems, both social and ecological, as cities respond to change. The International Groundwater School and park project represent Athar Lina’s overall commitment to helping a next generation of designers, engineers, conservationists, and others reclaim and do meaningful work in the cities where they reside. As Clarisa Bencomo of the Ford Foundation claims, “The Egyptian educational system is geared toward upward mobility. There is great need to challenge this system by incubating different ways of engaging youth and exposing them to other pipelines for socially relevant work.”26 Water redefines approaches to architecture and urban design interventions in the city and ways of engaging a next generation facing an uncertain future. Wastewater Treatment Systems as Wetland Alleys If mountain snowpack is “a multi-layered water storing wonder,” wetlands and associated water bodies work wonders in filtering out impurities and cleaning water, providing floodplain storage, and serving numerous other functions.27 Humans have relied on these complexes to perform and deliver essential, highlevel ecosystem services at low or no cost. And yet the population density of cities, with the consequent unnatural concentrations of human waste, has gone hand in hand with the obliteration of wetland complexes. Located as they so often are along navigable waterways, wetlands are prime sites for development, which fragments and isolates them relative to the floodplains to which they were once connected. Among the many impacts of human waste entering water ways, these nutrient inputs lead to algal blooms and reduced oxygen as

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well as high carbon dioxide levels, which, by lowering pH levels, result in acidity that is harmful to wildlife. Urban communities find themselves in a situation where, as Alice Outwater claims, “water is no longer able to clean itself naturally.” She explains that, “by tampering with (and in some cases eliminating) the ecological niches where water cleanses itself, we have simplified the pathways that water takes through the American landscape.”28 Lacking natural systems with integrity and the ability to purify, cities now depend on the conveyance of wastewater to centralized municipal treatment facilities, a solution that brings with it several problems, not the least of which is that “the wastewater treatment industry is itself a major polluter.”29 As but one example, disinfection by-products, particularly from chlorine, are often carcinogenic, and the EPA is left with the task of defining the concentration limits necessary to protect public health. The surprisingly gigantic volumes of wastewater treated by centralized systems pose another concern. Alice Outwater tells of the enormousness of “the main that brings the raw sewage into a wastewater treatment plant;” in the city of Boston, “it’s greater than the combined flow of the three rivers—the Charles, the Mystic, and the Neponset.”30 Considering issues of both water quality and wastewater quantity, we can rightfully ask how resilient such centralized systems are and how long should our urbanizing society depend on them to the extent that it does. While construction of the centralized systems on which we rely has offered a logical and, in many respects, effective response to the problem of concentrations of human populations, it has also brought about those side effects that the sociologist Ulrich Beck describes and that a next generation is now tasked with confronting. Biologically driven, decentralized treatment systems offer an alternative approach to urban wastewater infrastructure that more comprehensively addresses the environmental and economic problems as well as the cultural costs of disconnection from nature. These systems can assist in depressurizing water bodies such as precious wetlands, allowing them to function as they did in their predevelopment condition. The numerous potential benefits of dealing with wastewater concentrations in such a way span across a continuum from the civic to the ecological and hydrological. And with this commitment, the design process assumes a new guise. Wastewater Treatment as Urban Design Strategy The Natural Organic Recycling Machine (NORM), part of the Hassalo on Eighth development project in the Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon, fur-

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nishes a spectacular example of the privileging of biological systems. NORM is an innovative partnership between American Assets (the developer and a holding company), GBD Architects, Place Landscape Architects, Biohabitats (a regenerative design practice), and Puttman Infrastructure (a firm that develops financial models and manages ecologically responsive, decentralized energy and water systems). With the district wastewater pipe network at capacity, the city was poised to assess the developers millions of dollars in systems development charges in order to make the necessary upgrades to accommodate more residents. As an alternative, the designer-developer team came up with NORM, a system that reduces water consumption by over 50 percent, or seven million gallons annually, by treating all wastewater generated in the project onsite. This treated wastewater is then used to flush toilets, irrigate landscaping, and serve as cooling water for building mechanical systems.31 Following a classic nitrification-denitrification pathway, an initial step in the system is the reduction by an anoxic reactor of the nutrient loads and toxic ammonia present in the waste. Trickling filters extend this process—taking advantage of a newer, plastic medium rather than the typical application of gravel—to increase surface area. The wastewater is then directed to horizontal subsurfaces, the reciprocating or “tidal” area wetlands contained in concrete “cells” that host naturally occurring microbial organisms that form a biofilm in a matrix of gravel. Utilizing a fill-and-drain process, these wetland cells are employed to “feed the bugs, then starve the bugs, then feed the bugs, then starve, a process that occurs thirty times per day.”32 The water is then directed to a wood-chip well to continue the denitrification process. At the end of the treatment sequence, and after several rounds of reuse for toilets, cooling towers, and landscape irrigation, the remaining water infiltrates to the ground. This highly visible, exposed approach, one that Tom Puttman of Puttman Infrastructure claims would have been “unimaginable” ten years ago given municipalities’ health and safety concerns, compares favorably from the standpoint of operational expense, energy consumption, and aesthetic expression with more typical approaches to decentralized wastewater treatment, such as membrane bioreactors and aqua-cell technologies.33 A further advantage of this system in comparison with more conventional approaches, according to Crystal Grinnell of Biohabitats, is that “constructed treatment wetlands have been shown to reduce contaminants of emerging concern due to longer residence time and more diverse microbial communities.”34 That such interventions require a significant spatial footprint on-site calls once again on the creative capacities of collaborative teams, which are in full evidence with NORM, occupying as it does a portion of a public plaza that replaced a vehicle-dominated street as part of the project development. Wastewater—and stormwater—

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4.4. Aerial view of the Natural Organic Recycling Machine (NORM), part of the Hassalo on Eighth development in Portland, Oregon

systems are not only present but integral to the urban design strategy. For example, stormwater basins down the street from the tidal wetlands provide a spatial buffer between the public domain (the pedestrian plaza) and groundlevel residential units. Additionally, the wastewater system’s trickling filters are housed in large cylinders that are lit brightly at night and serve as entry beacons to this portion of the urban district. With NORM, water infrastructure becomes an urban design asset. Didactic Urban Wastewater Landscapes The choice of an on-site wastewater treatment system depends on many factors, including building type, program, and scale, as well as site conditions and opportunities. In a project by KieranTimberlake (architects) and Andropogon Associates (landscape architects) at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, wastewater is treated “through a terraced, subsurface-flow constructed wetland designed into the site landscape,” and students monitor this wetland as part of the curriculum.35 This becomes a didactic device and a central site feature that operates in combination with the channeling of harvested rainwater from roofs through wetlands, down falls for aeration, and into a biol-

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ogy pond where it infiltrates to recharge groundwater. Some of this rainwater making its way from building to landscape returns to the building for use in the wastewater system; the wastewater in turn enters the landscape in a codependent, multi-loop flow. As stepping increases the surface area for treatment and oxygenation, the water undergoes filtration as it cascades downwards and is given the needed time for progressive treatment.36 Concentrations at the Ecotone between Land and Sea The island of Madeira, an autonomous territory of Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, benefits from the centuries-old levada system of water conveyance. This spectacular, largely intact, and world-class infrastructure consists of over six hundred miles of runnels that deliver high-quality water supply for agriculture, drinking, and other uses from the steep and relatively wet north end of the island and uplands to the stepped terrace farms and more populated areas of the south. Passing underneath stands of rare laurisilva forests of laurel, bay, juniper, and ironwood, these conveyance structures have permitted highly productive and sustainable agricultural practices over centuries. As with Hyphae’s Waterman Gardens or Wang’s urban courtyardism projects, the levada system is most productively studied in section—that is to say, with an understanding of vertical relationships and the tracing of the journey of water from the sixthousand-foot peaks along the island’s ridge to the azure waters of the Atlantic. Tourism dominates Madeira’s increasingly globally connected economy, with large-scale resort development in recent decades expanding along the water’s edge. This is an island biogeography under pressure: there is no end in sight to growth and increased density. And while Madeira’s extraordinary water supply infrastructure is adequate to meet these demands, the wastewater infrastructure is not a similar source of pride: during storm events treatment plants and pump stations become overwhelmed, and untreated or minimally treated wastewater combined with stormwater dumps into the sea. We might characterize this as yet another “novel” ecological condition, in that concentrations of people (staying in resorts) and nutrient and contaminant loads (delivered to treatment facilities) alter both the terrestrial and the aquatic ecology. Herein lies both a problem and an opportunity, and the Reis Magos site in the city of Santa Cruz provides an ideal and representative place to take advantage of these concentrations. As elsewhere on Madeira, rainstorms and large volumes of wastewater and stormwater frequently overwhelm the pump station at Reis Magos on the southeastern part of the island; during major storm events this water is piped

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to the sea with minimal filtration prior to release. The outfall is immediately adjacent to a pier frequented by sunbathers, swimmers, and divers, a site popular with tourists and native Madeirans alike, with terraces, flourishing cafés, and several good-sized major resorts nearby. As part of a 2016 comprehensive action plan with a goal of Madeira assuming a global leadership role in sustainable development, a study of Reis Magos’s wastewater situation led to a proposal to transform the site in such a way as to deliver cultural and ecological benefits.37 A primary goal was to intercept wastewater and stormwater during rain events before it bypassed the pump station and entered the sea by directing it to a hollow of land between hills immediately to the northwest of an abandoned homestead and adjacent to restaurants and terraces. As with NORM, rainwater would then make its way through trickling filters to terraced subsurface treatment wetlands. Treated water would next be directed to the sea or made available for low-quality uses: toilets, irrigation of resort landscapes, cooling towers, and the like. Treated water and nutrients could also be used for coastal agriculture and native vegetation demonstration plots adjacent to wetlands. With all of the above, and taking advantage of the sloping topography from mountains to the sea, passive means of moving water would be maximized so as to lower the energy consumption and maintenance costs of using pumps. While this focus on small-scale water infrastructure improvements in the transformation of the Reis Magos is consistent with the larger goals of the action plan, it could also be one of many such initiatives in a distributed approach that could create a new form of island biogeography for Madeira aligning nature and culture. The holistic and synergistic framework encourages an economy of means—a minimal number of design and planning moves—in order to achieve the maximum possible effect and bring economic, ecological, and social goals into fruitful relation. A project such as this, which at first glance may look like an engineering exercise (in pipe sizing), offers an alternative stance and significance. To quote Pat Lando, a landscape architect and executive director of the nonprofit Recode, it would serve as an example of “infrastructure as community development.”38 This approach takes full advantage of the captive audience of islanders and tourists and also of the nutrients present that need a different pathway. An abandoned, traditional Madeiran homestead immediately to the south of the site would be repurposed as an environmental education center; linked to the day-lit wastewater treatment system, the center would house exhibits and offices for environmental nonprofits and other organizations. The building occupies an ideal site, poised as it is between the restaurants at the water’s edge and the hollow, a nexus between land and sea. A terrace to the north of

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4.5. Proposed environmental education center and demonstration wastewater treatment garden plan, Santa Cruz, Madeira Island, Portugal

the homestead would lead to the paths that wind through the wetlands and demonstration plots. Not unlike the al-Khalifa Park in Cairo, the project would represent an amalgam of civic design and place-making, ecologically responsive infrastructure, heritage conservation, ecotourism, and environmental education. Such an ecologically responsive “coastal perch infrastructure” would be a place of gathering and knowledge dissemination, one that brings into conspicuous connection humans and environment, the mountains and the sea. Stitching the Metabolic Rift The wastewater projects described here represent an antidote to modern society’s narcissistic denial of the animality of humans—a view that somehow sees bodily functions as removed from the ecological processes upon which we depend and of which we are part. In his early writings, Karl Marx described the material consequences of “metabolic rift”: the concentrations of nutrients available in the foodstuffs coming into a city such as London, where he lived from 1849 to 1883, made their way through the bodies of the city’s residents, then were flushed into the Thames River and whether swept downstream or left to stagnate, not allowed to return to the land and complete an essential circuit.39

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Responding to Marx’s call while working to meet the goals of net zero energy and net zero water, some now speak to the critical importance of “net zero nutrients” and the benefits of capitalizing on the reality that wastewater provides “a nice balance of nutrients.”40 A “net zero nutrients” approach would, for example, tackle the problem of “peak phosphorus,” a crisis that may be only decades away as this essential yet finite nutrient is lost owing both to mining and to the fact that it does not pass through a gas phase. Plentiful in urban environments, thanks to concentrations of humans, phosphate recovered from urine could be harnessed as “struvite,” or magnesium potassium phosphate, to provide “food grade fertilizer right from building footprint.”41 Going a step further, some innovators, such as the University of Oregon environmental engineer Kory Russel, hope for a future in which the very term “wastewater” ceases to have meaning. Kory and his colleagues champion lowcost, “containerized” sanitation technologies as a water-free approach to nutrient recovery that would allow for the safe handling of waste, promote resource efficiency and close the metabolic rift that Marx wrote about with such urgency many decades ago. Cascading Biological Interactions Having devised “living machines”—biologically driven wastewater treatment systems comparable to NORM—Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd have found that, “given the right conditions, purification cycles which are measured in centuries in the wild can be speeded up so that purification can be achieved in weeks and months.”42 Addressing the material reality of unusual degrees of concentration hinges on the design team setting up cascading biological interactions and engaging in an experimental process that “throws kingdoms of biology at an issue and sees what happens,” in the words of the environmental activist Kevin Scribner. Such a reciprocal manner of designing proceeds with openness to “what organisms tell you” and involves learning from systems and intervening in them sensitively over time.43 Some years ago, editors Brenda Brown, Terry Harkness, and Douglas Johnston dedicated a special issue of Landscape Journal to the emerging practice of “eco-revelatory” design, an approach that harnesses the creative process in bringing critical eco-systemic processes to people’s attention.44 By localizing the problem of unnatural concentrations of human waste, giving primacy to living entities in increasing concentrations of oxygen and decreasing concen-

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trations of nutrients and pollutants, and making these conditions central to urban design expression, projects such as NORM and the proposed project at Reis Magos can not only reveal ecological processes but make manifest our role, impact, and shaping influence in an ongoing process of nature-culture coconstruction. A heightened level of artfulness is brought to bear in an emerging green infrastructural design paradigm, a form of expression that honors interplay and adaptive response and that concentrates within it a commitment to local conditions as well as to the watershed. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has said, “All encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event.”45 New Modalities of Stewardship Emphasis on the unfinished and localized necessitates new forms and scales of stewardship. These are only now being worked out, and yet they have strong parallels with the models for which Bryan Norton advocates in his important work Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management.46 A system that emphasizes the acceleration of biological function, denitrification, and water cleansing at a local level, as opposed to one that has treatment occurring on a massive scale somewhere downstream, requires attuned management and subtle adjustment depending on weather conditions, nutrient loads, and other factors. As Mercy Corps’ Mort Anoushiravani claims, “The engineering part (‘Buck Rogers’ solutions) is not the hardest. The issue is not the science but how to sustain systems.” There is not only the question of how to design the system itself but also, more broadly, “how to make the value chain work” such that organic-inorganic hybrids function and are managed over time.47 Unsurprisingly, municipalities now grappling with these alternative, decentralized systems often require a “belt and suspenders” design approach out of concern for health and safety and as a means of contending with uncertainty. For example, Crystal Grinnell of Biohabitats argues that in the NORM project the “moving bed reactor piece (tank-based nitrate removal) is redundant given the woodchip wetland.”48 Further, the configuration of an underground parking lot constrained the design of the wetlands and necessitated their greater depth (fourteen feet) and therefore the installation of expensive “super monster pumps” to ensure proper function.49 With the realization of more and more such systems, and through an integrated design process that gives equal weight to the parameters for parking lots and wetlands, “what was once an elite green building tool is now accessible,” claims Pete Muñoz, senior engineer and practice leader with Biohabitats.50

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Incentivizing Creative Capacities by Devising Common Languages All of the projects described here speak to the value of operating at the microurban scale in a manner mindful of larger flows and ever-denser built contexts.51 As Doug Saunders argues in his important work on “arrival cities,” “I believe these transitional urban spaces offer a solution. It is here, rather than at the ‘macro’ state or ‘micro’ household level, that serious and sustainable investments from governments and agencies are most likely to create lasting benefits.”52 These projects also speak to the value of incentivizing creative capacities through the adoption of more outcome- and performance-based regulations that do not prescribe particular technologies but instead focus on end results.53 Designers become reenlisted as infrastructural collaborators. When disciplines are crossed and shared languages are devised in this way, mutual, hybrid representational strategies must be adopted to better capture water and wastewater flows in their fullness and dynamism. It is to questions of representation that we will turn in chapter 6. But first, we explore the construct of the horizon as a way to derive new understandings about the relationships between human experience and perception, water, and urban architectures.

CHAPTER 5

Reconstituting Architectural Horizons

horizon noun ho·ri·zon \hə-ˈrī-zən\ : the line where the earth or sea seems to meet the sky : the limit or range of a person’s knowledge, understanding, or experience : the limit of what is possible in a particular field or activity — Merriam- Webster Online Dictionary

Of the many conceptual constructs that might allow designers to proactively contend with urban water concerns, the notion of the horizon proves productive in reimagining the task of architecture in a new and dewy light. In Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, the philosopher Edward Casey explores several dimensions of the notion of the horizon, for example, that we perceive a horizon as having volume and therefore shape: As uncontainable in any simple definition, the horizon is a boundary, not a limit. The “horizon line” is a fiction foisted upon perceptual experience by the graphic requirements of depicting recession in depth. In fact, we experience the horizon of the far sphere not as a line but as itself a sphere (or more exactly, as the inner surface of a sphere).1

Perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that a horizon is not perfectly spherical, that its inner surfaces are irregular, and that these irregularities— tufts, billows, undulations, and folds—help to give each horizon its distinct perceptual imprint. And if horizons have volume and shape, they necessarily have depth, as Casey well recognizes: “The horizon itself, through an intrinsic feature of the far sphere, may present to me a near and a far aspect.”2 Topographical (vertical) relief would seem to reinforce this depth; even a monolithic

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5.1. Horizon as a convergence of the celestial and terrestrial

or perceptually contiguous element that helps form a horizon reveals this, for example, a mountain range with its snowy ridgeline in the distance and purplegray subridges in the foreground. More horizontal landscapes would then seem to establish a different depth, one more compressed and flattened. In his early work, Piet Mondrian explored amalgams of this flattened depth in his quasiabstract depictions of the level Dutch landscape where elements with any kind of vertical orientation—spires and hedgerows, for example—appear as pop-up figures, slightly raised in relief, caught within a convergence of earthly and celestial planes. A horizon’s particular manner of arcing and delineating a range, through its shape and depth, inevitably opens up the possibility of discovering others in quick succession. Horizons expand and contract as our attention drifts, as our vantage changes, or as atmospheric shifts mark a new range (“the clouds closed in,” “the sky lifted,” “the sun dropped below the horizon”). This is the dynamic at the heart of the notion of horizon: what marks its boundaries is also what gives way—gives out—and allows passage to others. As Jacques Derrida claims, “A horizon is always virtually present in every experience; for it is at once the unity and the incompletion of that experience—the anticipated unity in every incompletion.”3 Incompletion is the very ground upon which other horizons enter our perceptions and upon which we imagine what lies beyond. Consistent with qualities of unity and indetermination, distinctiveness and incompleteness, is another aspect of a horizon, one that is obvious and yet of great importance for our purposes: a horizon refers simultaneously to the

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marking of an environmental boundary as the convergence of earth and sky and to the range of one’s perceptual field. The notion of horizon thus presupposes the inseparability of environment and experience. It may be said to be a set of discernible physical relationships captured as a viewshed for a moment in time (and perhaps imprinted in our memories forever).4 The Three Architectural Horizons That a horizon has shape and depth and combines materials, atmospheres, and perceptions makes it an apt architectural descriptor. And yet what becomes of our understanding of horizons when we turn to settings, beyond expansive landscapes, where built elements are present or densely settled contexts where human constructs predominate? To what extent do built elements modify existing horizons, and to what extent do they establish new ones? David Leatherbarrow’s idea of “three” horizons is one of several topographic speculations on architectural practice elaborated upon in his highly influential book Uncommon Ground.5 In his characteristically penetrating manner, Leatherbarrow examines the environmental structures of our experience as “instruments of continuity, levels, which I will also call horizons, meaning planes of reference, or, more fundamentally, of existence.”6 In a passage of the book concerning the work of the midcentury modernist architect Richard Neutra, Leatherbarrow describes the three horizons as follows: We begin to see that this corporeal schema is enmeshed within an expanding range of distances, a structured topography that includes where I am, which is to say where the things I now need are within reach, a middle distance, and an expansion towards the clear blue horizon; an equipmental, practical and environmental horizon. Not one of these can be separated from the others, hence the lateral spread of the ensemble that integrates these “rings” into one field, terrain or topography—the dining room, the street, and the town or landscape—differentiated but reciprocating.7

We are engaged in our immediate affairs, surrounded by and caught up with our belongings—furnishings, utensils, outfittings, and the like, what Leatherbarrow describes as “the apparatus of topographical modulation” that constitutes our equipmental horizon.8 The roof over our head, the walls and windows at our side, and the platforms upon which we reside (what constitutes our practical horizon) provide comfort and accommodating support and condition our connections to the external world. This dynamic milieu beyond is the third

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5.2. The three architectural horizons: image from Richard Neutra’s Bucerius House, Brione, Switzerland (1966)

horizon, the enveloping environmental horizon. Described in these terms, horizons are the interrelated yet distinct spatial profiles that support the breadth of our inhabitation. They not only have obvious physical dimensions but also serve as encompassing conceptual structures that speak to levels of scale, immediacy, and degree of containment that help us make meaning of our world.9 The boundaries of the three architectural horizons are convergences: we might, for example, visualize a darkened room where a wooden table absorbs the light of the pendant above and marks intimacy’s range (equipmental horizon), or snow-capped peaks we see from afar pushing the rolling platinum skies up and over (environmental horizon). As for the practical horizon, Richard Neutra and the other designers examined by Leatherbarrow manipulate architectural profiles—eaves and walls, for example—to form spatial “thicknesses” such that the enclosure of a building acts as a convergence of sufficient depth and shapeliness to truly form a horizon (allowing for the passage of light, the admittance of a breeze, and so on). Leatherbarrow elaborates on the notion of horizons latent in the work of certain midcentury modernist designers as a response to the industrial nature of architectural production. Lamenting the trade catalog’s domination over contemporary architectural practice, he claims that “it is no wonder that craftwork has disappeared. When architects specify more and more premade products, creative thinking in construction becomes less and less.”10 In response to this situation, Leatherbarrow looks to Neutra, Antonin and Noémi Raymond,

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Aris Konstantinidis, and other architects of their generation who reasserted the essentiality of inventiveness and craft in the era of the machine. Ultimately, in examining projects by these architects, Leatherbarrow decides: “Creativity can exist in practices that make use of elements that have been mass-produced and were intended for systematic application.”11 Again, a primary means of exercising this creativity is to elaborate meaningful correspondences between horizons, that is, to conceive of design as a process of negotiating relationships between the pregiven and the constructed, between buildings and landscapes, between arrangements of elements immediately at hand and those more distant. As Leatherbarrow describes it: “The consequence of these more concrete continuities between the interiors and their landscape setting was that architectural design was discovered to be an art of articulating topography, its continuities, reciprocities, and displacements.”12 Through examination of the work and writings of this midcentury generation of moderns, Leatherbarrow draws out a rich, complex, and shared sensibility, a spirit of the age, one dedicated to the particularization of stock components through their configuration on and as a site. Constructed architectural landscapes gain composure when set against the salient features of the surrounding terrain; dynamic and sometimes indeterminate significances in the landscape call upon the geometries of architecture to concretize their presence. The language of horizons lends to the activities of the architect in the era of the machine a place-saturated landscape focus. While this orientation exudes optimism and offers the promise that skillful artisanry can overcome the homogeneity of standardization and industrialization, it is also disconcertingly ambivalent, as acknowledged by Leatherbarrow, about the nature of the spaces realized and the manners of dwelling they engender. This view of architecture as constituting and making manifest a particular set of horizons privileges a beholding of the world and its enduringly dynamic processes from a contemplative remove. As Leatherbarrow argues: “The tendency toward the horizontal also represents a dedication to the kind of freedom or openness that promises individuality but also gives one the strong sense of isolation and resignation.”13 In a characteristically modern manner with deep enlightenment roots, the designer delineates contours upon which occupants repose passively and take measure of an external reality. While “differentiated but reciprocating,” the three architectural horizons encourage an understanding of the body and its devices as operating in relative and comforted autonomy. The equipmental, practical, and environmental horizons also make intuitive sense in the leafy suburbs or at the farmhouse on the hill. Outfitted handsomely with our devices, congenially ensconced in our practical horizons, we

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take in the beauty and tempestuousness of the outer world. And yet this conception of architectural horizons becomes increasingly inadequate in a context of urbanization, climate change, and other related imperatives. It is here that things get interesting as designers continue to grapple with a shift toward more sustainable approaches, shaping the built environment accordingly; these commitments raise several interrelated shortcomings of Leatherbarrow’s way of conceptualizing horizons. For one, the enclosures of buildings are becoming so practical in their efficiency that inner (equipmental) and outer (environmental) horizons are increasingly distinct and cut off from one another. The profiles of the current genre of sustainable architecture—for example, the Passivhaus initiative (“the world’s leading fabric first approach to low energy buildings”)—exacerbate this passivity and isolation by increasingly separating interiors and exteriors and pursuing the overall simplification of form necessary to achieve aggressive standards of energy efficiency.14 The practical horizon collapses into a sharply demarcated, taut-skinned, high-performance envelope such that the designer is more and more challenged to seek architectural expression in the mediation of inner and outer worlds. The practical horizon becomes an arrangement of ingeniously coordinated, tightly interlocked parts that negotiate equipmental and environmental horizons in an increasingly machinelike manner; as a consequence, we occupy evermore intelligent volumes that contain and constrict our perspectives on a wider reality. As buildings become increasingly taut, configured to minimize heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer, green architecture is further weakening our ties to the environment it is intended to safeguard. That our buildings as machines interface with the environment in such a curiously distant manner reinforces insularity, pulling in resources as they do while magically eliminating wastes. Maria Kaika describes this condition in City of Flows: “The more human activities transform nature, the more the intervention of technology” becomes “necessary in order to cancel the effects of this transformation.”15 A modernist architecture that relies on extractive technical systems—for example, mechanical thermal control systems that allow large fields of glass through which to view the landscape—ironically cloaks a fuller measure of building-environment relations. A related inadequacy of the idea of the three horizons as conventionally construed and increasingly distinct pertains to their presence in the densifying and ever-more vertical city. We stack and replicate arrays of practical horizons—volumes of multistory housing units, office space, shopping centers, and so on—to such a degree that urban dwellers are seldom afforded the suite of landscape-building relationships that architecture is tasked to accommodate and mediate. Spacing our garden towers too closely, we catch only glimpses of

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5.3. Transformation of the practical horizon as a consequence of urbanization: (left) the traditional practical horizon (the envelope of a building) in relation to the environment; (center) stacking practical horizons in an urbanizing context; (right) arrays of stacked practical horizons defining the urban condition

increasingly distant environmental horizons within a visual field dominated by the (backsides of the) practical horizons of others. The aggregate of practical horizons leads to sight lines that are infringed upon or cut off and whose futures are ever more in doubt. We no longer behold a richly variegated world as something that absorbs our attention and is worthy of our care. However “green” a city and its buildings may be from the standpoint of energy use and carbon neutrality, it is increasingly devoid of life and interconnectedness. Kenneth Frampton, in Megaform as Urban Landscape, and Steven Holl, in Edge of a City, offer parallel strategies for contending with the environmenteffacing ubiquity of the growing megalopolis.16 Frampton examines certain large architectural projects that, as a function of their landscape-like mass and form, offer topographically iconic legibility within a sprawling, undifferentiated urban setting. And in his theoretical design speculations, Holl places such megaprojects on the exurban fringe such that they serve as concretized urban growth boundaries and gateways into the city. Both build from Kevin Lynch’s examinations of mental maps and image-ability in advocating for design interventions as surrogate landscapes, that is to say, constructed horizons that counter the disorientation of contemporary urban experience by fusing the practical and environmental.17 And yet the strategy of forming a horizon—or becoming a prominent feature of one—out of a large-scale architectural intervention in an urban context confronts limits. How long does a megaproject serve as marker and horizon before subsequent projects crowd it out? When will this process of topographic one-upmanship ever cease? At what point are sought-after vantages compromised by the latest large building project? Perhaps a more ecologically wise strategy for urban legibility gains purchase through attention to other livability-related concerns, such that the designer turns outward to acknowledge broader ecological realities and then folds these inward to devise the workings of buildings and their systems. Such a conceptual alteration, what

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5.4. Megaform as horizon: image of Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Sola Morales’s L’Illa Block, Barcelona (1997)

the sociologist Ulrich Beck would describe as a “transformation of the reference horizon,” draws out new relations between architectural and landscape contours, depths, and shapes.18 The Horizon of the Watershed watershed noun wa·ter·shed \ˈwȯ -tər-ˌshed, ˈwä-\ : a time when an important change happens : a line of hills or mountains from which rivers drain: a ridge between two rivers : the area of land that includes a particular river or lake and all the rivers, streams, etc., that flow into it — Merriam- Webster Online Dictionary

What of the prospect of reassigning the practical horizon to the scale of the watershed or sub-watershed, a landscape-scale, communal envelope of inhabitation within an urban region? What are the implications of conceiving the

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5.5. Transformation of the practical horizon from the building to the watershed

watershed as our primary and practical dwelling in which designers situate architectural machines that in turn operate in good care of the watershed? “A line of hills” forms a horizon and the boundaries of a watershed, that area of land where water drains to a common location and upstream activities (all along the line) have downstream impacts. In places where water infrastructures are vast—in California, for example, where urban dwellers depend on interbasin transfer and the pumping of water up and over mountains—the connections are severed, urban inhabitants are no longer attuned to sources, and downstream effects become overlooked. To counteract this ecological forgetfulness, a design approach that reasserts the primacy of the watershed as a practical horizon alters what Paul Ricoeur would call our “horizon of expectation” and shifts attention to bioregional and hydrological-scale performance, as was encouraged in chapter 2.19 There are several ways to secure such a perspective on the contemporary city. One approach gains inspiration from the pioneering Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes and the remarkable Outlook Tower he created in the 1890s out of a disused seven-story observatory in Edinburgh.20 The Outlook Tower housed exhibits of the history of the relationship of the city and region culminating in a rooftop promontory that offered a view of Edinburgh and its surroundings. If with Frampton we can look up from the street to a built megaform to orient ourselves, with Geddes we can also occupy a megaform (or a tower at least) in order to more fully comprehend the watershed-as-practical horizon in relation to our immediate setting. It needs to be said that any encouragement to (re)turn our attention to the watershed is not intended naively; in fact, given the disorienting forces of urbanization and the densifying fabric of cities, there is much to be gained from Andrew Biro’s counsel to nurture a “watershed mind” that does not assign fixed spatial scales and that promotes instead “watershed” as “a profoundly unsettled, hybridized concept, with watersheds existing in nested and overlapping scales, ranging from the interiority of individual bodies to the planetary hydrological

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cycle.”21 A watershed mind thinks in nested and overlapping scales, resets and expands the boundary of practical concern, and encourages attention to flows between scales, what Ricoeur would describe as a “fusion of horizons.”22 This imaginary traces the path of water through the city all along its way, identifying pressure points and confluences, sites of biological impoverishment and those of ecological integrity, with the aim of heightening consciousness of a watershed’s standing. It then gauges the hydrological potential of the city and the catalytic impact of site-by-site, micro-urban design interventions with ecological significance and functionality all out of proportion to their size. For it is precisely through making the water systems of the city more localized, multifunctional, expressive, and interconnected, in creating buildings that have net zero if not net positive water and ecosystem impact, and in fortifying links between architecture and urban landscapes that we take an important step in the ultimate goal of fusing horizons, where a fluid geographic notion (a watershed) channels ecological wisdom and situates human meaning. As laudable as Geddes’s Outlook Tower is for enabling a “look beyond,” perhaps an internalization, a drawing inward from the practical as a means of restitching the local, might instantiate a swifter and more consequential urban transformation. Hybridizing Equipmental and Environmental Horizons What ensues is a reconfiguration of individual projects and their inner workings in a manner cognizant of the encompassing horizon of the watershed and synchronized with distributed infrastructures as an important means of contributing to the functional integrity of the practical. As opposed to the nesting of horizons that Leatherbarrow describes or the construction of mega-scale topographies that Frampton encourages, the environmental horizon in this conceptual operation is (re)introduced at the project scale and meshed with the equipmental. In other words, the functional hydrological elements of the parent ecosystem inform the configuration and expression of—and are in turn supported by—the systems of a building and its immediate surroundings. Within the practical horizon, designers are to arrange architectures as lifeenhancing equipmental-environmental machines, hybrid entities that in aggregate define the practical performance of the (urban) watershed. Le Corbusier claimed that “the exterior is a result of the interior,” that is to say, that the facades of buildings are expressively revealing of functions within; current circumstances call for a different resultant: embedding the presence of and links to the environment within constructed settings brings new and ecologically

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5.6. Fashioning urban architectures as environmental equipment: (1) from the typical condition, a box for mechanical equipment sitting atop a box that is a building, (2) lift boxes, (3) insert environmental systems that shape space while supporting larger ecological and hydrological processes, and (4) add water

relevant dimensions to our daily attentions and leads us to comprehend new significances when we redirect our gaze outward. Certain contemporary projects hint at the potential of this architectural involution—for instance, the Park Tower Prototypical American City and other works by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects; Mecanoo Architects’ second-prize entry for the Kaohsiung Public Library in Taiwan; or several recent projects by Behnisch Architekten of Stuttgart, Germany. And to be sure, notable architects of previous generations gathered and concentrated environmental horizons and meshed these with the equipmental—for example, Charles Correa in his Kanchanjunga Apartments in Mumbai (1970–1974) and Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet with their housing project in Ivry-surSeine (1969–1975). A central atrium organizes Behnisch’s John and Frances Angelos Law Center at the University of Baltimore (2009–2013). The atrium is flanked by a vertical array of inhabitable activity platforms made of thin planes of “intelligent” concrete that circulate air and heat and, combined with facade-integrated heat exchangers, obviate the need for large and expensive mechanical heating, cooling, and ventilating systems, including ductwork. Highly economical configurations of architectural equipment establish a landscape-like plurality of

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space. Students and scholars occupy spaces ordinarily taken up by air distribution networks and, in this lightened architecture with minimized mechanical systems, gain oblique views in multiple directions, toward innerscapes and outerscapes. The shape of the architecture, the arrangement of the platforms of furnishings, and the structural layout also operate as the passive cooling, lighting, and stormwater management systems. These examples and others—such as the Powerhouse projects by the Norwegian architectural practice Snøhetta—reveal the potential of green hypermodernisms that rely on the extravagance of fewer elements in an assemblage assuming a greater number of roles and in which the dimensions of efficient building performance are inseparable from the provisioning of airy and lightfilled accommodation (such that qualitatively significant features are allowed to enter in and escape elimination during cost-cutting exercises). In green architectural discourse, there is much talk of the expression of performance: a project is designed as a didactic tool demonstrating its resourcefulness in conserving energy, water, and materials. The projects described here begin to speak to a complementary approach focused on the performance of expression: design begins at the conceptually connective level, where a basic physical organizational schema empowers the architect to fold dimensions of building efficiency seamlessly within experiential, aesthetic, ecological, and symbolic concerns. Further, these projects speak to the continued relevance of horizons, yet horizons combined, arrayed, and bounded differently, where the weight of the city’s constraints are pressed into service to generate atmospheric expanse and continuity. In an increasingly urban world, healthier and more richly rewarding working and living environments develop from a conception of architecture as more than plastic forms bathed in Le Corbusier’s favored, evenly brilliant Mediterranean light; instead, in this world we trace a precipitous hydrological and luminous journey through stratigraphic horizons of environmental equipment. Vertical gardens and living roofs adorning green towers in the iconic renderings of contemporary architecture periodicals, while often troubling in their insularity, may, in a more sympathetic view, indicate an earnest endeavor to translate urban realities and environmental concerns into hybrid conceptual and spatial propositions that take fuller advantage of the plentiful resources of the sky. Architects are poised to seize on the expressive opportunities associated with a design approach that begins with water (systems) and then adds space, a process described in chapter 3 with the introduction of the notion of a water schematic. There will continue to be building envelopes, of course, and yet these are now configured in part to articulate and reveal linkages between interiors and associated urban ecological realms. New and synergistic horizons

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5.7. Jørn Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church as a gatherer and radiator of environmental phenomena and a luminous analogue to the Scandinavian sky

open up. Consider the sculptural concrete vaulting in Jørn Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church on the northern outskirts of Copenhagen (1968–1976). Its moderation and reflection of light intimates a brooding Scandinavian sky and suggests horizons beyond. Manipulation of apertures in relation to sculpted interior volumes transforms an interior space enclosed within a rectilinear volume into a Scandinavian seashore under the vast and enveloping firmament. We now add water. Adjustments of these machines-as-horizons, these shifts in the application of force, can alter boundary states within the “marked space/boundary/ unmarked space” dynamics that the sociologist Niklas Luhmann describes.23 “It is always the difference, the boundary,” Luhmann observes, “that makes a difference and is turned into information by the work of art.”24 On the one hand, the boundary of a site-scale architectural intervention radiates outward, not through physical expansion but by its responsiveness, its potential to attract, and its influence and exchange, all of which lead to an overall urban system that is more adaptable, more structurally complex, and more biologically diverse. On the other hand, there is a contraction of the boundary with distinct material effects precipitated by the drawing in of environmental processes. The

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folding of hydrology and ecology within individual projects subjects architecture to metamorphosis: catchment, reuse, cleansing, and living systems become part of one’s visual, tactile, and sonic terrain. By reconstituting horizons, designers are, as Lee Rust Brown offers, “shifting the vantage point from a place outside the spectacle to a central place within it, and remembering its elements in a newly conceived prospect or project of the whole.”25 To be within the spectacle of a truly sustainable and hydrological architecture is to hold within the horizon of one’s experience the understanding that our inhabitable equipment is modified by ecological circumstances and that the urban environment is shaped by and composed of our gear. It is to be immersed in the performance of exchanges between watersheds and buildings. One is reminded here of the natatorium by Williams and Tsien at Cranbrook Academy, where the celestial meets the material and the painted night-sky-constellation ceiling converses with the aqueous depression that is the pool. Horizons beyond Horizons, Depths beyond Depths The horizon presents itself as something to be passed without ever fully being reached. —Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative ( 1 988), 220

Our environment—not excluding the built environment—can be viewed as a continuum of endlessly unfolding horizons. The notion of architectural horizons is useful in encouraging designers to concentrate on convergences of the material and atmospheric. Reconstituting horizons and grafting elements of the environment to projects in ultra-urban contexts shifts understandings of sustainability and the city. Architectural horizons fashioned from ecological and hydrological equipment can foster beneficial relationships between architectures and surrounding landscapes. As Ulrich Beck states, “At the end of the twentieth century, nature is neither given nor ascribed, but instead has become a historical product, the interior furnishings of the civilizational world, destroyed or engendered in the natural conditions of its reproduction.”26 The designer’s job today is to engender. The philosopher John Dewey argued that “functions and habits are ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former.”27 This perspective resonates with our earlier discussion of a horizon as “presuppos[ing] inseparability of environment and experience.” Linking these claims, we might say a horizon is a habit; in other words, the en-

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vironments we recognize and are surrounded by reinforce our preoccupations and the range, depth, and shape of our ecological imagination. Following from this assertion, we lament that the horizons in which we are absorbed in our everyday (urban) experiences are increasingly composed of what the philosopher Albert Borgmann labels technological objects, which he in turn characterizes as “surface effects.” Because they lack depth, Borgmann believes, “they fail to gather our world and radiate its central meaning into ordinary life.”28 Surfaces fall flat and are inadequate for the formation of environments that enable expansive awareness. They lack depth in great part because they fail to impart to us the meaning and significance of the natural processes upon which we depend. They discourage, for example, a habit of patient and reflective appreciation of the wonder of water that makes its neglect unimaginable. Learning from water, paying attention to it, and treating it with the care that it deserves prompts the reshaping of the contours of building-environment systems, which are not back-of-house but integral to the spaces we inhabit and the landscapes beyond. By giving primacy to water as a means to link scales and fuse horizons, urban architectures as ecological infrastructures can reinstill habits of higher appreciation of what is most precious. A next generation of sustainable architectures can remake assemblies and move past surfaces in order to sway hydrological habits and engender awareness of the ultimate practicality of our shared biological home.

CHAPTER 6

Redrawing Waters

The fluidity of the resource confounds the process of forming a community around it. —Jessica Barnes, Cultivating the Nile (20 1 4), 7 7

Habitual practices, the traditional delegation of roles, and norms of communication fragment our obligations for provisioning and treating water and impede opportunities to address synergistically the multiple, interrelated urban water challenges under discussion. The California Energy Commission recognizes the inability to achieve a meaningful integration of water infrastructures at the state and regional levels given a governing reality in which “water utilities value only the cost of acquisition, conveyance, treatment, and delivery,” while “wastewater utilities value only the cost of collection, treatment, and disposal.”1 Polities, agencies, and utilities typically plan, implement, and manage water projects separately through bodies such as flood control districts and water supply agencies. Further, definitions of current conditions and problems and the systems design processes that follow from these definitions often fail to engage communities that represent important sources of knowledge about the meaning and uses of urban waters. As entities such as the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure argue, approaches to water innovation that deliver benefits to large numbers of diverse stakeholders in a time of scarcity, poor-quality supply, aging systems, and climate change must invite decision-making processes that build from wide consensus and overcome limitations by straddling multiple jurisdictions and agencies.2 Incongruent priorities and segmented responsibilities shape the design and realization of site- and building-scale water systems as well. Hyphae Design Laboratory speaks of the shortcomings of a process in which the civil engi-

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neer is tasked to move storm- and rainwater away from a building and site while the mechanical-electrical-plumbing (MEP) engineer on the very same project concentrates attention on the building’s internal systems.3 In a similar vein, Crystal Grinnell of Biohabitats claims: “The civil is the quantity person; the landscape architect concentrates on human interaction, social qualities, and habitat opportunities. How do we establish more meaningful overlaps?”4 Working under splintered authority, consultants compete for space and resources instead of working toward highly integrated design outcomes. In our litigious society, liability concerns circumscribe roles. Brian Stuhr of Mayer Reed Landscape Architecture and Visual Communications of Portland, Oregon, speaks of the reality of his profession “drawing a hard line at waterproofing.”5 In the case of “landscape over structure,” as with a green roof, landscape architects do not secure the kinds of contracts and fee structures sufficient to cover their liability in the event that water leaks into the building— for example, if an irrigation line breaks in the winter. Better to delineate areas of responsibility cleanly, the thinking goes, and treat systems separately, letting architects assume the risk. Different professional and disciplinary languages reflect and exacerbate the lack of synchronization. Michael Willis, a longtime partner with MWA Architects, reports that when his firm entered the “water market” decades ago and began collaborating with engineers on the design of water and wastewater plants, “we had to learn the 1,200-word engineering Esperanto.”6 Graphic languages are no different from the spoken and written word in this regard. Drawing conventions focused on water and the built environment exhibit tremendous variety as a function of the scale of attention, points of use, where water exists in a sequence of flows, and who assumes responsibility for its conveyance and quality. This variety reflects the fact that numerous professionals deal with water and yet have different motivations, responsibilities, and end uses in mind in their depictions of it. To ensure communicative effectiveness, the graphic conventions developed by the different disciplines that contend with this complex liquid substance exhibit a necessary abstraction. Abstraction is fundamentally an act of pulling out and away, as with drawing water from a well. As an indication of water’s peripheral status in the profession, architects seldom represent water in the consequential, formative stages of design and usually introduce it only in later phases, when precision is essential.7 And very rarely is water drawn—and therefore understood—in a manner commensurate with the contemporary hydrological challenges described in previous chapters. Unlike space or systems of construction, architects do not tend to view water as an actant lending cohesiveness and setting building systems in patterned alignment.

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With a view to challenging normative practices, and given the central role of graphic mediums in visualizing and making the built environment, how architects and those in related disciplines draw and draw upon water, and how the designer’s graphic attentions may abet or foreclose synergies and water’s ability to wield influence, warrant scrutiny. With a goal of reconstituting architectural horizons, the representational strategies and conventions for water developed in other fields also warrant consideration. What follows therefore is a cataloging of select graphics from a range of professions and scales, with a focus on the qualities of water they elicit, the intentions underlying their use, the perspectives they lend, and the advantages they might deliver. Taking cues from this limited survey, and as part of an overall goal of frontloading water in design so as to marry the technical and the aesthetic, a next step is to borrow salient characteristics of these graphics in developing, at a range of scales, speculative hybrid representations that might prompt architects to cast water as a protagonist in the building of the hydrological city. Bioregional Thinking before “Bioregionalism” Existed In the aftermath of his storied explorations of the American West in the late 1800s, the geologist John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) produced a remarkable bioregionalist map in 1869, “Arid Region of the United States,” one among many that he drew as a result of his travels.8 This map illustrates Powell’s argument that the lower levels of precipitation west of the 100th meridian should guide decisions of political geography and the boundary setting of states and that efficient water management should dictate settlement patterns in an arid region so different from the rain-plenty East. Powell’s map served as advocacy to convince legislators back in Washington that polities in the West should be organized with acute sensitivity to topography and hydrology and ultimately the contours of watersheds. Painting Sinuosity Produced in parallel with US Army Corps of Engineers maps documenting the Mississippi River and its flood potential, Harold Fisk’s stunning 1944 map of the river’s historical meanders complements the inventiveness and insightfulness of Powell’s cartography and delights in its own palimpsest-like visual complexity. With its intense spatial specificity (it was documented using the Mississippi River Commission’s quadrangles as a base map) and robust variety

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of coloration and hatchure (twenty-eight color/hatches), Fisk’s map captures the unruly aesthetics of hydrologic meandering and the shaping of the landscape by water over time. Cuts in an embankment lead to depositions elsewhere; changing volumes and pressures and often sudden reroutings assemble new topographies. Revealing What Water Hides Cartographic devices make manifest aspects of our environment whose immediate presence may not be visible or may otherwise elude us and yet may also prove to have great agency in guiding our movements and altering our paths. Exemplars in this regard are nautical sounding or bathymetric contour maps, both of which use contour and spot elevations to reveal a veiled subsurface topography rendered “visible” in relation to the horizontal datum of the water level to aid seafarers in the safe navigation of perilous waterscapes. A nautical chart offers value by indicating the depths of features that we cannot see and by outlining the contours of a liquid body through the delineation of landforms at its edges. The City as Catchment In response to the unprecedented, thirteen-year “Millennium” drought in the 2000s, and as part of a goal to “become one of the world’s most sustainable cities,” the city of Melbourne, Australia, embarked upon an ambitious plan to dramatically alter its water use.9 The “City as Catchment” program (“Creating a Healthy City in a Healthy Catchment”) offers both a means of reconceptualizing water and the city and a representation of this relationship that is understandable to all members of the community.10 From the nineteenth century into the future, a time line describes the evolving definitions of the societal and environmental benefits of water and water systems that drive infrastructure planning and investment. Icons depict factors that impact water management such as overconsumption, salinity, and “decreased health of open spaces.”11 These icons are superimposed on catchment-scale systems diagrams that communicate the complex set of water flows and systems interactions from reservoirs upstream to the sea at Port Phillip Bay. By graphically linking systems, flows, and physical features in the urban landscape (sporting fields, buildings, bays), as well as water types (potable, gray, ground), the diagram enables the public to visualize localized hydrological events as interconnected and part of a larger whole.

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6.1. Hydrograph of a river during a rain event

Peaks and Trickles Among other applications, a hydrograph depicts the variety of flow conditions that a river exhibits before, during, and after a rain event. Key markers in the hydrograph’s bell-like curve—such as peak discharge, lag time, rising limb, falling limb, and base flow—enable swift registration of the intensity of an event. The hydrograph depicts the dynamism of water over time and shows the aggregate effects of multiple water behaviors and features such as precipitation, transpiration and infiltration, transport, sewer outfalls, and temperature and dew point in a single view. By omitting references to the physical aspects of the environment that orchestrate peaks, limbs, and flows, the hydrograph captures in a comprehensible manner water’s changing conditions over time in ways that are useful to multiple disciplines both prospectively and retrospectively. Regulating the Flow of Urban Water Innovation Recode, the Portland, Oregon, nonprofit with a mission to “ensure access to and accelerate adoption of equitable and sustainable business practices,” has created a diagram convention not dissimilar to a plumbing riser diagram (see the section on riser diagrams to follow) and yet extends it to link potential sources (condensate, rainwater, stormwater, surface water, shallow groundwater) to end uses (kitchen sink, fire suppression, and so on).12 A diagram for Oregon, one of many that Recode has produced, indicates allowable connections between source and use, locations where permits are not required, and those where po-

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tentially innovative pathways are blocked by current water policies. By linking use, reuse, disposal, and transfer systems in the urban environment to the rules governing which systems are permissible, the Recode diagram highlights instances where policy change can foster innovative design approaches in a context in which higher levels of resourcefulness and integration are needed. Mapping Project-Environment Flows The work of Hyphae Design Laboratory indicates the tremendous potential of harnessing flows that extend beyond the boundaries of any one site— for example, freely available stormwater and rainwater—and, if captured, can resourcefully elevate building performance before returning to the project’s parent ecosystem. The “Sankey-esque” diagram for the Harmony project in Louisville, Kentucky, conflates graphic types (section, isometric, and diagram); illustrates multiple-source flows from rooftops, cisterns, and streets; depicts the paths and destinations of these sources in the building for purposes of watering vegetation, cooling, and other functions; and shows the routings of water treated in the project as it works its way toward aquifers and other bodies for recharge.13 In a similar manner, Hillary Brown’s diagrams in her 2014 book Next Generation Infrastructure depict systems interactions such as those for the Croton Water Filtration Plant in the Bronx. The plant features a nine-acre green roof used as a public driving range and site-collected stormwater that is delivered to a constructed wetland and irrigation pond for use by the golf course.14 Here, water serves as a medium for de-isolating the project and prompts exploration of resourceful ways to organize and co-locate uses; an economy of means produces richness of effect. Architecture, Landscape, and Water as Co-constitutive Steven Holl’s famous isometric drawing of the Stretto House in Dallas, Texas (1989–1991) illustrates a conceptual logic in which a syncopated patterning of water features and rectilinear site foundation elements prefigure a rhythmic alternating of landscape rooms and interior spaces.15 Sail-like roof elements and gauze-like interstitial facades hover at the top of the drawing, ready to collapse into place to complete a water-shaped architectural ordering. While Holl abstracted from another medium (the 1936 composition Music for Strings,

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6.2. A mapping of water flows through the Harmony Project and its environs (drawing based on one by Hyphae Design Laboratory)

Percussion, and Celesta, by Béla Bartók), the exploded axonometric makes manifest a design process that embraces the co-constitution of water elements, architecture, landscape construction, and site work. Coded Conventions as a Manual of Application A plumbing riser diagram maps water transport, point-of-use, and waste streams through a building. The complex configuration and routing of a system’s pipes and fixtures are depicted using a simple palette: solid lines, dashed lines, and callouts. The graphic abstraction and uniformity that inhere in the convention and its isolating of the pertinent assemblage, cropping it out of a more expansive systems horizon, allow for more efficient handling of the network of building water systems in acts of design, estimating, and construction. While recognizing its utility as a stand-alone graphic artifact, given contemporary water challenges and the need for many cities to move to a “portfolio”

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(multiple-source) approach to meeting future demand that includes water recycling and takes advantage of the dramatic changes in water and wastewater technology—including viable, ecologically based, and decentralized treatment with its sequence of steps—there would be value in evolving this convention and extending its reach to those systems and settings that lie beyond. Speculations on water graphics could run the length of a mighty river and occupy our reflections endlessly. What might we draw from Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Water of 1566, a late Renaissance Mannerist painting that collapses imagery of creatures who live in water in the countenance of an elderly woman? Or perhaps David Hockney’s hyper-real paintings of Los Angeles pools, with the sun’s rays playing on the water’s surface and the effects of a physical body coming into contact with it, such as his A Bigger Splash of 1967? And what of David Macaulay’s remarkable illustrations in his book Underground (1976), which give us a worm’s-eye view looking up from the earth, with soil rendered invisible so as to reveal the spaghetti of infrastructural systems under the surface of our buildings and streets delivering essential services and making our cities function?16 How might the myriad ways of drawing water inform our thinking about representing the city, watershed, urban landscape, district, and building, as well as their relations? How best to strike a balance between representational clarity and systems complexity in giving the connective potency of water its due? Might acts of drawing instigate proactively the effective programming and structuring of urban water systems to deliver multiple benefits in response to climatic, ecological, and other contemporary pressures? How might values of depiction in the case study examples described here inspire suitably integrative graphics at a range of scales? Situating Projects and Events within the Urban Sub-Watershed As touched on in chapter 2, an urban environment seen through a hydrologic lens appears as a landscape morphology of rocklike masses that are buildings, defiles that are streets, and remnants of predevelopment landscape features, compromised and so often neglected, in the form of urban rivers and streams. Looking at the city this way, a watershed mind takes heed from Powell’s work of boundary-setting as governed by water catchments; urban districts are mapped in plan as pipe-sheds structured in turn by topography, land use, the physiography of built constructs, and stormwater infrastructures. Conceiving

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the city as a conglomeration of hydro-districts, with water acting as a formshaper, prompts design inquiry on smaller-scale interventions in a manner cognizant and anticipatory of a larger urban ecological condition. A next step in an ascension of value might involve borrowing the “City as Catchment” notion from the city of Melbourne and diagramming urban water flows and volumes associated with a range of uses in the urbanized landscape. Hyphae Design Laboratory’s work on the Waterman Gardens residential project in San Bernardino, California, described in chapter 2, inspires this effort, motivated as it is by the seeking of higher levels of resilience and ecological functionality in increasingly limited urban space. By representing an area vastly greater than the scope of the project—drawing a section extending miles past the project site, from the foothills to the Santa Ana River—Hyphae demonstrates the promise of an urban design strategy that aggregates the effects of efficient water management of individual sites. It would next be possible to introduce hydrograph-like representations as complements to maps of pipe-sheds that show current and desired states of water and nutrients coursing their way through the city and that reveal the influence of blue-green infrastructures and other ecological features when introduced in the urban landscape. While the city has been configured to remove water quickly to reduce flooding, with consequent downstream peaks and environmental impacts, envisioning and drawing an improved condition motivates the introduction of systems resulting in a greatly increased coefficient of friction. Hydrologically Interconnected Urban Districts The water squares by the Rotterdam-based firm De Urbanisten demonstrate the value of water infrastructure as a forethought in the urban design imaginary rather than an invisible entity. In a similar manner, the Hassalo on Eighth mixed-use development project in Portland, Oregon, introduces living stormwater machines as integral to the formal expression of the urban design proposition. Might we imagine the drawing of urban squares as ecological infrastructures that assume blue-green identities and changing capacities during major rain events? That they swell, expand, and assume new forms shaped by both the hard-edged and the sinuous and inspired by Fisk’s illustration of the dynamic meanderings of the Mississippi? That this is a contemporary civic aesthetic, where urban space adapts and alters dramatically as a function of severity of event, and where the life of the city—whether kids playing a pickup game of basketball in front of a crowd or pedestrians bracing their umbrellas against

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6.3. Situating projects and events within the urban sub-watershed (courtesy of Matthew Tierney)

the wind and rain while sidestepping puddles—is a response to dynamic climatic presences rendered visible by design? As with plaques on the buildings of Rome commemorating peak levels of historic flood events, might design proposals illustrate urban features that mark the depths of former floods in ways akin to readings from nautical charts?17 Might the act of design be a suggestive depicting of past events that exist only in the recesses of people’s memories? Could a drawing of flows, peaks, and valleys prompt the making of urban

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6.4. Hydro-socially interconnected urban districts: water plazas combine with connected, floodable “wadi” systems, blue-green street systems, and micro-urban treatment stations (courtesy of Matthew Tierney).

spaces that accept, divert, filter, store, or slow water? Do design offerings have potential as markers enabling a higher level of awareness of the environment within which urban dwellers are immersed? The Ground-Work and Sky-Work of Buildings and Their Interstitial Landscapes The Stretto House’s exploded isometric drawing conveys the importance of water and ground-work as the compositional substructure for the development of a site. A speculative axonometric drawing that describes a patterning

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of interrelated wetland gardens, storage features, building foundations, civic spaces, and streets synthesizes aesthetic and technical influences and serves as an expressive prefiguration, as with Holl’s rendering of pools and cores. A simultaneous “sky-work,” in the manner of Hyphae Design Laboratory, follows the journey of rainfall and intercepted stormwater from neighboring roofs, streets, and landscapes. Such a graphic viewshed, blurring the boundaries between the constructed and the natural, reveals the manner by which architecture, landscape structure, and highly visible and ecologically responsive water features are co-constitutive. It speaks to the value of working in systems in which projects are viewed as “nodes along networks” where what is designed and built reacts to the elemental forces enveloping it.18 A riser diagram set adjacent to the axonometric and extending well beyond the building proper links interior water systems to larger systems, captures the movement of flows from sources to end destinations, and indicates where water is to linger and perform beneficial work (while undergoing treatment); such a representation could even indicate (borrowing from Recode) the pathways and pinch points where regulatory innovation is required and where conversations across domains of design, policy, and law can be focused. Representational Interdependencies A suitably hydrological graphic design approach that is commensurate with the evolving complexities of our understandings of water in urban contexts proceeds from heightened, intentional manners of selection, combination, and abstraction that honor the incompleteness of any one depiction. This approach invites awareness that no one representation is an island and that important information and behaviors lie beyond any one drawing or page. It encourages a trafficking across drawing types in order to devise and communicate richer and more comprehensive stories and for the drawings’ readers to develop a more complex awareness of the opportunities and forces at play. An “open invitational” graphic approach contrasts with the preponderance of visionary architectural and urban design proposals that are so notable in contemporary green design culture and that make their predictable appearance in design journals. Emphasizing self-contained, “biospheric,” buildingcentered qualities, these sustainable architectures appear to be autonomous, cut off and cut out from the environment. Water-conscious designers are called upon to offer an alternative to these crisply delineated figures that have as their antecedents the perspectival drawings of midcentury modernist towers, absorbing or negating in their sculptural singularity the complexity of environmental concerns that now demand the architect’s attention.

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6.5. Ground-work and sky-work of buildings and their interstitial landscape (courtesy of Matthew Tierney)

A focus on graphic aggregates and hybridizations as opposed to singularities reinforces a point of emphasis in chapter 3: what is proposed and created necessarily pairs with the parent environment in a manner that capitalizes on the resources available and responds productively in turn. A design team that invites this conceptualization engages the requisite strategies of visualization to seize upon opportunities that would otherwise be overlooked. This manner of design-seeking reaches upward and extends to the depths. As argued by Marie Walkiewicz, senior city planner for the city of Portland and a member of the Water Resources Eastside Watersheds Team with the Bureau of Environmental Services: “We have to think three-dimensionally and consider surface and subsurface conditions simultaneously.”19 Along these lines, in their article “The Performative Underground: Rediscovering the Deep Section,” Stephanie

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Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner demonstrate the value of representing what lies underneath our feet as positive grounding for decisions made on and about the surface.20 If the earlier example of a nautical chart reveals conditions and hazards hidden by water, Carlisle and Pevzner lend a counterpoint by rendering visible flows of water hidden by—and saturated in—the land. Drawing in Aphorisms Architectural imagery that moves beyond convention involves an aphoristic approach that engages water centrally while embracing complex layering and conscious absence. While a designer might stimulate newfound awareness by representing something present but not visible, a valuable, discerning approach invites acts of conscious omission: architectural graphics that facilitate hydrological refamiliarization may begin, ironically, with selective deemphasis and strategic discrimination. The removal of content in the middle ground puts distant yet interrelated processes in sudden proximity and calls attention to codependencies between systems and atmospheres, buildings, and surroundings not otherwise perceived. Such editing, which enables the telling of powerful stories in which water is a lead actor, contrasts with more evenhanded representational approaches that may encourage the execution of projects with weakly connected parts. Graphic discernment involves trafficking between the conceptual and theoretical, the physical and material, and inviting play through exaggeration. This begs the question of whether a sustainable form of architecture and its representations lend themselves inherently to the didactic and the teachable, as touched on in chapter 5 and as is customary in sustainable design. As an alternative to the prevailing, efficiency-oriented green discourse, a “mannerist” bluegreen design ethos overstresses proportions, traffics in possibilities other than those that are purely performative, and invites compositional tension combined with florid depiction. Smout Allen’s aerial perspective diagram for their Grand Egyptian Museum competition entry illustrates this point by collapsing a distant source and water’s presence in the project into one rendering. The manner of visualization acquires meaning by expressing absence, transmitting precious resources across desolation, and pulling the figure of the “building” apart to establish new speculative ground. Displacement provides the basis for new affinities and forms of recognition. Adding a ribbon of water to the graphic field allows for the delineation of the museum itself as a delta-like, water-cooled thermoregulatory device: a condenser, distributor, mister, and micro-climatic phase changer. Arrays of ecological gear wash over point, line, and plane.

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Designing in Systems Narratives In working with water as an integral part of the design process, Crystal Grinnell speaks to the reality that it is “always challenging to pull together so many moving parts.”21 It has long been the case—and will always be the case—that effective narration as a critical skill helps the designer cohere and prioritize the many influences demanding reconciliation; in the end, architectural meaning results from the poetic collapsing of innumerable functions. If we allow it, water can abet the process, and this necessitates, as Brent Bucknum encourages us to do, gaining a strong technical understanding of water systems, chemistry, thermal properties, and the like and then folding this knowledge into compelling design-motivated stories at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and ecology. A product of a more conventional, albeit transformative, design education, I assumed as a young practitioner that the highest responsibility of the architect was to position elements such as walls and roofs and systems of construction in a rhythmically ordered and conceptually grounded manner supportive of human activity and declarative of cultural and symbolic meaning. While this remains a critical design operation, I have come to understand that a primary activity of the architect, in thoughtful and empathetic collaboration with others, is conceptualizing desired sequences of organic and inorganic processes and attending to their interactions. The urban designer Tim Smith, principal with SERA Architects in Portland and the lead creative thinker behind the Civic Ecology framework, promotes a process of first inventorying water, waste, energy, food, and other systems, emphasizing “soft” (social) hardware as formative, and “designing to reduce flows before designing technology and infrastructure.”22 A thoughtful mapping of flows and speculations as to their rerouting guides design decision-making, disclosing in the process new aesthetic possibilities of a highly interactive nature. To follow flows as a formative act, to conceptualize ecological architectural machines as synchronizations of building and landscape operations, to reimagine the journey of water, and to refashion the urban environment as conduit and decelerator is to emphasize design as a means to identifying concentrations and setting in motion and putting in sequence desired hydrological processes. To furnish an excellent example, in the design of a parking garage and associated constructed wetlands as part of a university-level design studio investigation, students Lore Burbano, Andrea Detweiler, and Nicki Ghiseli began their process by considering water, the many life-forms dependent on it, and threats to ecological integrity before devising a particularly novel sequence that contended aggressively with a highly problematic building type from the stand-

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6.6. In the design of a parking garage adjacent to a constructed wetland, Lore Burbano, Andrea Detweiler and Nicki Ghiseli devised this water schematic to address the presence of contaminants by establishing systems synergies in the building and landscape: (1) the owner drops off the car; (2) the car is given a shower (is washed); (3) a mechanical lift hoists the car to a drying rack (parking space); (4) polluted water is directed to the facade to grow algae; (5) algae cleans the water; (6) excess water is sent to adjacent constructed wetlands; and (7) algae is used to produce biofuels.

point of environmental quality. A design (and associated graphic) approach begins by attending to the ecological degradations of daily urban reality and then communicating a sequence of flows that endeavor to instantiate a procedure for resolving this conflict. Meaning Inheres and Leaps Emerging modes of design representation at once pay homage to and challenge a rich history of ideas as to what constitutes architectural meaning. Forging new commitments, a graphically integrative, water-conscious process, in contrast to what frequently obtains in architectural production, seeks meaning by identifying resonances between the scope of any one undertaking and broader social and environmental conditions. If visualizations are in so many ways the designer’s bread and butter, laying bare what is to be valued, a move toward representations focused on the responsiveness of systems challenges

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more traditional, formalist approaches and strives for deeper and broader connectivity. Drawing as an act of great consequence, as a form of covenant to care for the environment, parallels the seeking of new working relationships, interdisciplinary partnerships out of which desirably attuned architectures might be derived.23 Crystal Grinnell argues for “the need for a framework for disciplines to work together.”24 A proactive, charitable stance toward water and the built environment relies on water-saturated graphics whose value derives from their ability to leap off the page, offer arresting cues, suggest a unity that is continually deferred, intimate new urban topographies and horizons of influence, and invite self-critical reflection about sought-after design legacies in an everunfolding cultural and ecological situation.

6.7. Three Forks of the Owyhee River, Oregon

Epilogue: Reflections in Depths

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. —Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed ( 1 974), 335

To follow the flow of urban waters with care, address unnatural concentrations, and reconstitute architectural horizons is to usher in new processes of design and alter the legacies that architects strive for as they anticipate future generations finding accommodation in their work.1 What do we wish people to say decades from now about this era’s culture of design as a material bequest and signifier of values? Might those in the future take umbrage at a design culture having reinforced our affluent modern society’s environmental neglect and cultural impoverishment, lack of will and preparedness for a changing climate, and passivity with respect to global diasporas, inequality, and ecosystem degradation, despite the promise of radical technological innovation, smart cities, and big data? Will they be dismayed that we played out our lives with a collective unwillingness to adapt in the face of ecosystem deterioration and social unrest in what was both a geologic lightning flash and the slow horizon of our lives? Will future generations lament the legacy of our inability to contribute to the project of attending to basic human needs and dignities and replenishing biotic communities? Or will amnesia and inhabitation of screen-surfaced automated global cities disable curiosity and our collective historical and ecological imaginary? Will it be the case, as Lewis Mumford claims, that “our relapse into barbarism will go on at a speed directly proportional to the complication and refinement of our present technological inheritance”?2 With hope that future generations will wonder about the past, will survive however many pandemics, scarcities, and climate extremes, will have access

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to sufficient clean water, and will have reconciled economies with the natural processes upon which they depend, we can ask: How will people in the future reflect on the decisions and lifeways of today’s society? Will they recoil with saddened hearts as they reflect on our individualism gone astray, unparalleled greed, withered empathy, and inability to see substances in context? Will they excoriate those in our generation who stockpiled and squandered resources in the face of the deprivations of others and who worked to undermine the integrity of a shared civic realm? Or will they sympathize with those who resisted discourse aimed at the triumph of the commons and not its tragedy, viewing the very conversation about the commons as compromising basic liberties? The philosopher Albert Borgmann questions a deeply held creed of Western liberal societies that conversations as to what constitutes the collective good life are to be avoided. Relying on varying means, Borgmann observes, each of us pursues our ends unchecked.3 To challenge this sacred belief and convene a shared conversation about the collective good correlates to valuing design and creative problem-solving as fundamental to the future of our cities as we determine who has access to what, how we move about, how we continue to transform the land, and how we ensure the quality of the air we breathe and the purity of our urban waters. With design, as with other domains, at stake is the scale of our attention and concern, our manner of co-inhabiting the city, and our notions of temporality and purposefulness.4 Timothy Mitchell offers a pithy summary of the great transformation in governing the commons, exercised through a typical modernist undertaking: “The site of control and calculation [has] been transplanted.”5 In the modern hydraulic society, control relocates to the rim of the dam and the point of discharge in the plant. Lines on paper prefigure vast infrastructural interventions in the landscape meant to control and direct the flow of water, whether perpendicular to primary currents, motivated by the goal of containment (impoundment as with a dam), or parallel to these currents in order to absorb or redirect water’s energy, prevent its lateral spread, and move it more quickly on its way (constraining and channeling as with a revetment).6 Concentrated in space—harnessing power and converting kinetic to potential energy only to unleash new forms of work—and believed to herald a more prosperous future, modern forms for handling water are said to warrant the investment and also the displacement of Native American fishing communities on the Columbia River, of farmers along the Nile, and of so many millions of others. As the political scientist James C. Scott claims, what inheres in these heroic modernist projects, what allows for unlimited transformations of the landscape and impacts on communities, is a particular view of the march of people and time in

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which “the certainty of a better future justifies the many short-term sacrifices required to get there.”7 In his magisterial work Time and Narrative, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur challenges a logic of temporality and progress represented by these calculable sites and their many externalizations.8 Contesting the widely held belief that the future is “open and contingent in every respect” and the past is fixed, “unequivocally closed and necessary,” he encourages an alternative temporal disposition in which we have to make future expectations more settled and modest and investigations of the past more open and availing of speculative reimagining of how to live our lives today.9 Encouraging us to let responsible commitments guide how we think and act, Ricoeur asks that we “keep our horizon of expectation from running away from us” and that we connect our longing for the future “to the present by a series of intermediary projects that we may act upon.”10 Otherwise, he intimates, we suffer a great relational impoverishment by discounting the here and now. Alternative dreamed-of futures as antidotes to the heady promises of modernism require different notions of time and progress than those currently propelling us (if propulsion is the force we choose to believe we are subject to). This commitment to not allowing expectations to run away from us has many advocates who attract our attention, each with their own terms for marking this time of transition: Mick Pearce’s idea of Architecture in Sustainable Retreat, Paul Hawken’s Drawdown, Tsing’s Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, the degrowth movement, and the emerging field of reconciliation ecology.11 With these and similar conceptual reframings, creative impulse bends the collective will and calls for a revisiting of our relationship to material basics, including water. With more determinate expectations, we can work toward a future in which the experience-able and environmentally responsive—versus the buried, invisible, and damaging—characterizes our infrastructures and architectures. What are the implications for the designer guided by determinate expectations, responsible commitments, and intermediary projects? For one, perhaps we should assume a longer, multigenerational outlook with respect to our investment disciplines, design education, and design decision-making. Kenneth Vigil, author of Clean Water, exhorts us to “take the long view.”12 He offers this perspective relative to ecological restoration projects he has led and the corresponding recognition that “federal regulation has been really important in my career, driven especially by the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, occasionally the Safe Drinking Water Act.” Further, “federal regulations are the underpinnings of the work we do” and have guided and safeguarded society from the 1970s to the present. Let us hope that our public

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servants have the capability, generosity, and unselfishness to allow these protections to continue. Mort Anoushiravani of Mercy Corps adopts the long view as he considers the many water projects he has been engaged in around the world. “Water systems are centuries-long investments,” so it is truly the case that we are the beneficiaries of the foresight of our predecessors. Further, “intergenerational investments are what make us a decent and coherent society.”13 What will constitute these intergenerational investments and who are the beneficiaries? An intermediary project becomes a centuries-long investment when we build the present through an integrated approach that empowers communities and pushes dollars away from utilities to the landscape in anticipation of more sustainable futures. Intermediary projects as responsible commitments also require revisiting vernacular traditions of the past, those diverse modes of managing resources and fabricating our settlements. By returning to these examples, we open up to the possibility of forming new habits and horizons that may prove more consequential than those currently motivating us. Like modernist projects, the creation of vernacular forms of water infrastructure such as the sabils of Cairo, Venice’s rainwater-harvesting courtyards, and the levadas of Madeira required sacrifice in blood, sweat, and tears. And yet, despite the reprehensible labor practices that may have factored into their realization, we also see less concentrated and centrally controlled water infrastructure strategies embedded in these works that in the end benefit many. Such approaches follow the laws of gravity, link people intimately and tangibly to precious resources and systems upon which they depend, and entail a less extractive relationship between societies and their physical environments. By retrieving hydro-infrastructural histories, learning from premodern and passive projects that offer correctives to the ruinous side effects of hydraulic society, and coupling these approaches with equitable labor practices, new technologies, novel ecosystems, and emerging knowledges (in the natural sciences, for example), we can create the necessary systems for today. Linking design approaches from the past to those of the present allows for interventions that offer multiple, visible benefits in resilient, socially relevant, and climateadaptive ways. Retrieving past practices can help us see beyond the cusp of the moment so as to better situate our experience and to recognize forms of efficient stewardship as the norm and periods of explosive growth and power as small punctuation marks in the stream of human history.14 The “Community Ablution Blocks” championed by the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, South Africa (City of Durban), which dispense water and provide sanitation to hundreds of thousands living in unplanned communities, represent a prime example of efficient and dedicated stewardship as

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distributed supply meets determined civic leadership. In contrast with, and as a consequence of, the failed infrastructural dreams of the moderns, the Blocks represent an achievable redrawing that betters human lives in a teeming city. To approach work in this way means listening and learning from water, as encouraged by Herbert Dreiseitl and Dieter Grau. Our sustained attention and concentrated view of water as imbued with multiple presences, as a source of comfort, protection, sustenance, and hygiene, prompts a different calculus. A deep dive into site- and district-based approaches to urban water systems expands our concern over our common dwelling place and the larger water predicament in which contemporary society finds itself. This approach to temporal horizons suggests an understanding of value as something that accrues and is sustained with patience and care. Service in the cause of replenishment and ongoing rehabilitation presents itself as the highest form of ambition. Such mission-driven attention can bring about a sense of satisfaction and enchantment, the kind of unexpected joy that someone like John Todd, pioneer of ecological design and living machines, expresses as he reflects upon his storied career, hoping for a better future. An outwardly extended concern combined with lack of dogmatism leads to an openness to things outside our current kinships that might exert some positive influence on us and bring “a pleasure at moving with the world and being swept along in its rhythms rather than sweeping it along with us.”15 An ecologically oriented emphasis on the built environment, one manifestation of which is, in effect, a hybridization of water infrastructure and architecture, leads designers to circulate across scales, erode distinctions among systems, and dissolve boundaries between buildings and landscapes, ecologies, and cities. Architects can expand the horizons of their practice through modest procedural reframings that expand outward by folding inward to the light, life, and matters found there. Sites of attention and concern are not lines but ripples; projects become enabling hinges and pathways, biological replenishing devices in space and time. Our machines are simple, robust, passive, minimal, and life-affirming. Within the vertical reaches of the city, architects’ new laterals branch out, from the garden in the machine to the watershed of the dwelling. To Le Corbusier I say: The house of the problem has been expanded. Nevertheless, there do exist ancient dwellers in the standing house. Machinery contains within itself the scaffold of biology, which makes for difference. The machine is a watershed for living in.

Glossary of Terms for the Water-Conscious Designer

Ablution: The washing of one’s body, usually for the purpose of ritual purification or cleansing. Activated glass filtration media: Used to replace traditional sand media in the filtration of water. Negatively charged recycled glass particles with high surface area filter water and remove organics and small particulates through electrostatic attraction. Aerobic: Relating to the presence of free oxygen. Anadromous: Fish species that migrate to the sea and spend a portion of their lives there before returning to rivers and streams to spawn. Anaerobic: Relating to the absence of free oxygen. Anoxic: Relating to the depletion of free oxygen. Anoxic reactor: A system that combines wastewater with a carbon source in order to remove nitrogen from it. Atmospheric rivers: Corridors of highly concentrated water vapor in the atmosphere that move with the weather. Benthic: Relating to the lowest level of a water body, such as an ocean or lake. Biofilm: A resistant film of microorganisms that coats a surface. Biofiltration: The process of removal of harmful pollutants, particulates, and sedimentation in water through the use of living organic material. Biological oxidation: A process in which bacteria and microorganisms consume dissolved oxygen and organic substances in wastewater and in which carbon is converted into carbon dioxide. Biological (biochemical) oxygen demand: The amount of dissolved oxygen needed for aerobic microorganisms to decompose organic matter in water. Bioretention: The process of removing contaminants and sedimentation from stormwater runoff by using soil and plants as a filter.

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Bioswale: A vegetated depression in the landscape that slows stormwater runoff and filters pollutants and particulates before the stormwater enters the watershed. Blackwater: Nonpotable water contaminated with organic matter such as human waste. It should be noted that this term has been subject to recent and necessary critique. Those who prefer terms such as “alternative water sources,” “sewage,” or “domestic sewage” claim that the term “blackwater” lacks sufficient precision. They also speak to the racial bias inherent in the term: the dominant culture associates light and white with that which is positive and pure, and dark and black with that which is negative and dirty. Brackish: A quality of water that is somewhat salty, produced, for example, through the mixture of seawater and fresh water in estuarine environments. Capillary action: A process in which the surface of water is pulled up through or along a solid material as a result of the relative attraction of molecules. Capillary wick ropes: A passive technology by which water is lifted by capillary action. Chemical oxygen demand: A measure of the capacity of oxygen to oxidize all organic matter in a defined volume of water. Clear sky flooding: Flooding during favorable weather conditions as a result of tidal influence and sea level rise. Closed-loop system: A system that circulates water in a closed loop so as to allow for the transfer of heat. Coefficient of runoff: The proportion of runoff relative to the amount of precipitation that has fallen. (For a highly permeable area favorable to infiltration, the coefficient will be low; for hard-surfaced urban environments, the coefficient will be high.) Colloid, colloidal: A substance containing a mixture of dispersed, microscopically insoluble particles. Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs): Contaminants such as traces of pharmaceuticals and personal care products that enter water bodies and supplies, harm aquatic life, and adversely affect human health. Cryosphere: The frozen portion of the planet’s water that is fresh water locked away in the form of glaciers, sea ice, and snow cover. Dead zone: That portion of a water body that lacks dissolved oxygen and is incapable of supporting most forms of marine life; also known as hypoxia. Decant: The gradual transference of a liquid without disturbing its lower layers. Decentralized systems: Systems, such as water and wastewater systems, that are distributed as opposed to concentrated.

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Desalination: The process of removing salt and other minerals from a substance such as water or soil. Desiccation: The process of thoroughly removing moisture from a substance. Dissolved air flotation: A process of removing oil and suspended solids from wastewater. Distill, distillation: The process of purifying a liquid through evaporation and condensation. Dry well: A hole or tank in the ground that stores large amounts of water and allows it to percolate slowly into nearby soils. Dual-filter media: A filtration system used in sand filters consisting of one layer of anthracite coal and another layer of fine sand. Dual-water supply systems: A method where potable water and nonpotable water are separated into two separate distribution networks. Ecotoxicology: The study of toxic substances and their effects on organisms and ecosystems. Effluent: Liquid discharge or outflow, for example, water that leaves a treatment plant after being processed. Endocrine disruptors: Commonly found in everyday products and sometimes in water, these chemicals affect the body’s endocrine system and related developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune processes. Energy intensity: The total energy consumed per unit of water during water management processes such as pumping, conveyance, and treatment. Eutrophication: The process by which nutrients enrich a body of water and stimulate aquatic plant growth that results in a decrease in dissolved oxygen. Evapotranspiration: The process by which water returns from plants and soils to the atmosphere in the form of vapor. Extensive green roof: A roof system with shallow soils; extensive green roofs are often unoccupied and feature grasses and succulents. Flash drought: An event in which surface temperatures become very high and soil moisture very low. A flash drought also refers to a process whereby extensive winter and spring snow and rain stimulate extensive forest understory growth, followed by an extended period of hot and dry weather that dries out the understory growth and increases the risk of severe fire. Flocculation: The process by which small flakes and particles (of contaminants, for example) collect together in a liquid. Floodplain: Flat, low-lying land prone to flooding and often formed through processes of stream deposition. Forebay (in a constructed wetland): Channelized structure located at the in-flow of wetlands that removes coarse sediments, debris, and trash.

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Freshet: A large influx of stormwater into a stream as a result of heavy rains and/or snowmelt. Graywater: Household wastewater that does not contain harmful contaminants and can be reused for irrigation and other nonpotable purposes. Headwaters: The source or beginning of a stream. Hexavalent chromium: A cancer-causing chemical compound, used in industrial processes, that contains the element chromium. Hydrograph: A chart that records the fluctuation of water levels in a body of water over a set period of time. Hydrologic cycle: The process by which vapor in the atmosphere turns into precipitation that falls on land and water bodies and then turns again into vapor through evaporation and transpiration. Hydrologic shadow: The part of a moving body of water, such as a stream, that remains relatively still—for example, an eddy or a calm side channel of a river. Hydroperiod: The length of time during which a wetland is covered by water or soil is waterlogged. Hydrosocial cycle: A geographical term referring to the ways in which water cycles and systems are co-constitutive with societal constructs. Hydrosphere: The combined presence of water on earth: water in the atmosphere, water bodies, groundwater, and so on. Hyporheic zone: The porous space that exists below and alongside a stream where shallow groundwater and surface (stream) water mix. Hypoxic: Lacking adequate oxygen supply. Impound: To confine water within an area, as with a reservoir. Infiltration: To cause a liquid to permeate and pass into another substance. In-flow planter: A stormwater planter that uses biofiltration to filter runoff. Influent: The water that flows into a water body or enters into a water process. Integrated water resource management (IWRM): Coordinated and sustainable water management and development that maximizes water uses without compromising vital ecosystems. Intensive green roof: A roof system with deep soils that is often occupiable; many intensive green roofs feature a variety of plantings, sometimes including trees and shrubs. Interbasin transfer: The transfer of water from one water basin to another. Interception: Precipitation that is captured or diverted before reaching the soil. Interflow: Water that moves along or near the surface without merging with groundwater below.

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Laws of hydrodynamics: The study of the motion of fluids and their behavior as a result of and as influenced by objects around them. Limnology: The study of freshwater bodies. Limpid: Marked by transparency; serene and untroubled; water that is still, clear, and transparent. Macroinvertebrate: Organisms without backbones that are visible to the eye and that may occupy the bottom of water bodies for a portion or the duration of their lives. Media filter: A type of filter that uses granular materials to filter out particulates from water. Membrane bioreactor: A water filtration device that utilizes membranes and suspended biological growth as a form of treatment to separate solids from a liquid. MEP: Refers to the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems that are an essential component of building design. Nutrient recovery: The process of removing nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from wastewater systems and reusing them for fertilization and other purposes. Opportunistic ecologies: A process by which portions of urban environments not configured with habitat goals in mind have sufficient form and structure to be repurposed to create favorable conditions for nonhuman species. Orographic effect: A change in atmospheric and rainfall conditions caused by mountains that leads to precipitation on their windward side. Orthophosphates: Singular phosphate minerals used in fertilizers. Paleoclimate: Past climatic conditions. Passive: The use of natural processes—for example, to heat and cool buildings or to convey water—to perform in a manner comparable to those requiring mechanical assistance. Persistent chemicals: Toxic chemicals that persist for long periods of time, impact human health and the environment, and can be transported through water and air. Pervaporation (“permeation” plus “evaporation”): An innovative, low-energy, and relatively environmentally friendly approach to water desalinization involving the transfer of vapor through a semipermeable membrane. Pluvial: Pertaining to rainfall and the abundance of rain. Point of use: Water treatment systems treating potable water at a single source and intended for direct consumption.

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Portfolio approach: An approach to water planning that identifies and utilizes a multiplicity of sources. Potable: Referring to water suitable for consumption. Prior appropriation: A doctrine characteristic of water law in the American West that gives to the first person to use water from a given source the right to continue to use it for purposes deemed beneficial. Raingarden: A depression in the landscape and associated plantings, often native, that acts as a filter and temporary storage for stormwater runoff. Rainscreen: A building envelope system that separates the outer, watershedding surface from internal layers of the enclosure to create a depressurized gap that water cannot traverse. Residence time: The amount of time that water will remain in a reservoir, such as a subsurface wetland, according to its rate of addition versus its rate of loss. Reverse osmosis: The most common process of desalinization, reverse osmosis pushes water through a porous membrane under hydrostatic pressure in order to remove unwanted particles and molecules from it. Revetment: A constructed embankment meant to contain and absorb the energy of incoming water. Riffle: A wave or succession of small waves, typically referring to wave action over a shallow streambed. Riparian: Pertaining to the banks of a watercourse and the relationships between land and water along those banks. Riparian principle: A doctrine that those who own land next to watercourses have the privilege of using that water. Sankey diagram: A diagram of water or other liquid flows in which the width of the arrows corresponds to the amount of flow. Scalping plant: A decentralized wastewater treatment facility that provides secondary and tertiary filtration. Sewer mining: The process of extracting nutrients from wastewater systems for reuse. Static head: The energy in a quantity of water calculated as a function of its volume and vertical drop. Stream sinuosity: The ratio of the length of a stream to the length of a valley, or of a stream slope to a valley slope. Struvite: A resource rich in phosphates and ammonia that can be recovered from wastewater through crystallization and precipitation. Subsurface wetland: A type of constructed wetland system where water flows and is treated below grade in order to prevent contact, reduce odor, and avoid attracting insects.

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Surface flow (SF) treatment wetlands: A type of constructed wetland system that treats water naturally and allows it to flow freely on the surface. Surface tension: The tendency for liquid surfaces to shrink to the minimum surface area allowable, enabling resistance to external forces. Suspended solids: Solids suspended in sewage and often removed through sedimentation. Tertiary treatment: A final phase of water treatment involving the removal of remaining inorganic compounds, such as nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as bacteria; tertiary treatment typically increases the level of dissolved oxygen in water. Tidal wetland: The dynamic zone where land meets the sea that is subject to tidal fluctuations and periodic flooding. Tinaja: A large porous jar that relies on evaporation to cool water; also refers to surface pockets in rock formations containing water. Total suspended solids (TSS): The total amount of solids suspended in a solution. Transpiration: The movement of water through plants and its subsequent evaporation. Tributary: A body of water, such as a stream, that flows into a larger body of water, such as a river. Trickling filter: An aerobic, biologically based wastewater treatment system that uses rocks and biological growth to break down organic matter. Turbid, turbidity: Refers to the thick or opaque and divided insoluble impurities that affect the clarity of water. Vapor condensation: The water in the form of a gas that collects on a surface owing to a change in temperature. Water footprint: The total amount of water used to produce and supply the goods and services used by a particular person, group, or industry.

Notes

Preface 1. The language of climate change is making its way into everyday parlance: in addition to “flash drought,” we now speak of “bomb cyclones,” such as the storm that hit the East Coast in January 2018. 2. Picon 2015, 31. One example of water being in the wrong form at the wrong time is the great ice storm of 2016, mentioned in the preface. There is some irony in the fact that downed trees and power lines prevented me from leaving Oregon to participate in the development of a water infrastructure project in water-scarce Cairo. 3. Michael Stuhr, correspondence with the author, May 29, 2019. 4. I am of the conviction that desperate water challenges in cities such as Dar es Salaam (“Dar”), Tanzania, will lead to a dramatic leapfrogging of distributed water systems and technologies such as rainwater harvesting (see chapter 3). Moreover, I believe that these advancements will in time and out of necessity make their way into industrial world urban contexts like our own. This is one of the major themes of this book. 5. The College of Design was originally known as the School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Introduction 1. Sebastian Guivernau, Portland-based architect and experience designer, correspondence with the author, September 7, 2017. If energy-related concerns motivated a first generation of sustainability-minded practitioners, a new generation is called upon to address water-related concerns. 2. My former colleague in landscape architecture, Dave Hulse, naturally takes the landscape (deep-time) view as he asks students of design: “What do you want your personal and professional contribution to end up doing over a thirty-year window?” Remarks during the “Thirsty: Politics of Water” panel discussion, HOPES Ecological Design Conference, University of Oregon, April 14, 2017. 3. See Rogers 1994. With respect to lament, we might take a cue from Dante, who described infernal rivers fed by tears of human suffering.

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4. And now we add the plight of Texans in the winter of 2021. 5. Greed and lack of imagination: two sides of the same coin. 6. MacFarlane 2015, 211. 7. Dr. Cole of Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, shared these words during a “Community Partner Panel” discussion at UNC Charlotte’s Community Engagement Orientation, August 12, 2019. 8. See Jensen 2016; see also Yusoff 2018, for her critique of the Anthropocene and the term’s convenient overlooking of a brutal racial history of extractive geology (mining and associated activity). 9. Borgmann 1984, 135. 10. Kaika 2005, 66. 11. Robert Young, correspondence with the author, November 18, 2016. 12. Jensen 2016, 321. 13. Le Corbusier 1946, 10. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. Ibid., 21. 16. Hobbs, Higgs, and Hall 2013, 4. 17. In a similar way, Gandy 2017 pushes back against the organism metaphor that is commonly applied at the urban scale. The city-as-organism implies that urban systems that distribute resources and process waste are the invisible organs that make possible attractive exterior appearances. This very hiddenness is one reason why our infrastructures are functionally and culturally problematic, a topic I discuss in chapter 1. 18. Seemingly a new and exciting metaphorical species, the building-as-organism finds as its inheritance the rich conceptual legacy (corpus?) of the building-as-body. For a penetratingly original study of the operative function of the building-as-body, one focused on Alberti’s treatise De re aedificatoria, see Choay 1997. 19. Mumford 2010, 54–55. 20. Scott Wolf, architect and principal with the Miller Hull Partnership in Seattle, offers this informed speculation: “District solutions are where we will likely end up landing.” Correspondence with the author, March 9, 2017. Chapter 1: Hydraulic or Hydrologic? 1. Black 2016, 98. 2. See the We the People of Detroit website at wethepeopleofdetroit.com. 3. Black 2016, 72. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. Beck 2016, 48. 6. The Colorado River as described by the landscape architectural theorist Leslie Ryan during the “Thirsty: Politics of Water” panel discussion, HOPES Ecological Design Conference, University of Oregon, April 14, 2017. With the Colorado and so many other examples in the United States, there is a mismatch between watersheds and political boundaries. Where political units reflect geographical realities, a river often separates states; for example, the Colorado forms the boundary between Arizona and California. Such boundaries fuel political divisiveness as resources become contested. Where political units do not adhere to geographical realities, rivers often

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flow through multiple jurisdictions. Both conditions hamper an integrated, watershed, or sub-watershed approach to systems and ecologically based planning. Had we only heeded the geographer and surveyor John Wesley Powell’s advice and created watershed-based polities in the American West! 7. T. S. Eliot well recognizes the gross overlooking of water in his 1941 poem “The Dry Salvages”: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

8. Edward Campbell, correspondence with the author, June 12, 2019. 9. Bastasch 2006, 281. 10. Rhys Roth, correspondence with the author, August 9, 2017. 11. See a description of the volume at Phaidon’s online catalog: phaidon.com /store /architecture/living-on-water-9780714875729. 12. NAAB’s newest (2019) accreditation standards are more open and focus on design integration and the ability of professional programs to articulate their own, distinct approaches to preparing a next generation of architectural design professionals. It remains to be seen whether programs will front-load water-related concerns in more integrated design curricula to any significant extent. 13. Worster 1985. Wittfogel’s (1957) Oriental despotism thesis has been subject to a recent and unsparing critique by the contemporary environmental philosopher Alan Mikhail (2017). 14. Worster 1985, 6. Warren Viessman and his colleagues (2015) in their work Water Supply and Pollution Control articulate the distinction between hydrology and hydraulics: “Hydrology should not be confused with hydraulics. Most simply, hydrology is the study of the many physical, chemical and biological factors involved in water’s interaction with natural and manmade elements” (121). By contrast, “Hydraulics is the study of mechanical properties of fluids and is a common subdiscipline within many types of engineering” (122). 15. Biro 2013, 168. 16. Rhys Roth, correspondence with the author, April 6, 2018. 17. In example after example, large-scale, centralized water infrastructures constructed with good intentions led to unintended side effects and problems accumulating “downstream.” The Aswan Dam, built by the Soviets on the Nile in Egypt in the 1960s, did extend the growing season and expand the area of land under irrigation. But it also allowed the population to grow dramatically while preventing nutrients from reaching agricultural lands, setting up dependence on petrochemicals. With the population continuing to grow (by as much as 80 percent between now and 2100, according

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to estimates), and given other factors such as climate change, Mediterranean Sea level rise, and salinization of soils, the future is worrisome for this region. 18. Ingram and Malamud-Roam 2013, 212. 19. James Pettinari, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2017. 20. James Pettinari, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2017. Our mental images of the watersheds in which we dwell—or the lack of such images—speak to the deficits in ecological and geographic literacy in our culture. When I asked a mix of graduate and undergraduate students in my “Architectural Contexts: Place and Culture” lecture class at the University of Oregon to shout out what they saw when I showed them a simple black-and-white figure ground image on a screen, a chorus of more than a hundred students belted out in unison “Oregon!!” I asked them to do the same for the next image, and a scattered handful mumbled, “Willamette Valley.” At least they knew some geography, but a political geography of state boundaries superimposed abstractedly upon the landscape as opposed to one defined by natural features. 21. Edward Campbell, correspondence with the author, June 12, 2019. 22. Kenneth Vigil, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2017. 23. Douglas Yoder, correspondence with the author, June 7, 2019. 24. Roth and Mazza 2017, 5. 25. Michael Stuhr, correspondence with the author, May 29, 2019. 26. Bastasch 2006, 5. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, February 15, 2017. 29. Another vulnerability is the manner in which a plant is operated: newer plants frequently rely on sophisticated and expensive computerized control systems—for example, supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA systems—and they may have insufficient manual overrides or other adequate means of backup. 30. Black 2016, 10. 31. California Energy Commission 2005, 139. 32. Jeff Roberts, correspondence with the author, August 2, 2017. 33. Brent Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 18, 2016. 34. Roy Iwai, correspondence with the author, May 16, 2018. 35. Beck 1992, 57. There are numerous dimensions to this challenge. Wastewater treatment plants, for example, were not designed to remove microplastics from packaging and clothing, and as a result, these contaminants are released into our waterways. And then there is the matter of hexavalent chromium; used in a number of industrial processes and by the electric power industry, this chemical has been linked to cancer. 36. For “ultra-urban pollutants,” see Salmon-Safe 2016. 37. In its recent analysis of twelve US cities, The Guardian found that “the combined price of water and sewage increased by an average of 80 percent between 2010 and 2018, with more than two-fifths of residents in some cities living in neighbourhoods with unaffordable bills.” See Lakhani 2020. 38. Bastasch 2006, 202 (emphasis added). 39. See US Environmental Protection Agency 2013, 18. 40. Douglas Yoder, correspondence with the author, June 7, 2019. 41. Dalton, Mote, and Snover 2013, 49. 42. Kaika 2005, 140. 43. Rhys Roth, correspondence with the author, April 6, 2018. See also Roth and Mazza 2017, 4. This transition will involve significant adaptive reuse of existing infra-

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structures. The city of Seattle, for example, has repurposed smaller-scale wastewater treatment facilities that do not meet current standards into stormwater facilities. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, October 25, 2017. 44. See the EcoDistricts website at ecodistricts.org, and the Civic Ecology Institute website at civicecologyinstitute.org. 45. See Turton 2018, 8. 46. Scott Wolf, correspondence with the author, March 9, 2017. 47. The Portland-based nonprofit Recode works to address these questions by advancing innovative, more sustainable approaches to water urban infrastructure policy (see chapter 6). 48. Remarks during the “Design, Resilient Infrastructures, and Urban Futures” panel discussion, HOPES Ecological Design Conference, University of Oregon, April 15, 2018. 49. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, October 18, 2017. 50. The Portland Water Bureau “Again” project anticipates an increase of 5 to 6 percent in water costs. 51. Rhys Roth, correspondence with the author, August 9, 2017. 52. Michael Willis, correspondence with the author, February 22, 2019. 53. Rancière 2019, 70. Chapter 2: Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings 1. Duncan 2001. 2. In her book Water: A Natural History, Alice Outwater (1996) describes species other than salmon that are worthy of study for their indicator (and intrinsic) value and that perform similarly constructive roles in different regions and watersheds; builderengineers like alligators and prairie dogs, for example, perform work to good hydrological effect. 3. The term “net positive watershed impact” was coined by the nonprofit SalmonSafe, based in Portland, Oregon (salmonsafe.org). 4. White 1995, 15. 5. See Rahr, n.d. 6. Kenneth Vigil, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2017. 7. Bart Johnson, keynote talk, Association for Pacific Rim Universities Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub Conference, Portland, OR, September 15, 2017. Ronald Pulliam and Bart Johnson (2002) speak to the value of intermediate disturbance regimes—events that may cause damage and yet instantiate productive and regenerative ecological processes. 8. Hinners is director of the Center for Ecological Planning and Design in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. 9. By contrast, for millennia indigenous peoples of the region we call the Pacific Northwest had a very different form of settlement, economy, and relationship to water and salmon; their cultural values enmeshed with those ecological values in a fashion that could not be given a strictly economic accounting. 10. Walsh et al. 2005. 11. Karvonen 2001, vii. 12. While beyond the scope of this project, we could also speak to the impacts of

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a hydraulic commitment to damming and impoundment that was sold on false “too cheap to meter” promises (described so well by Richard White 1996): declines in native fish populations; reductions of in-flow and higher concentrations of nutrients; methane off-gassing; and alteration of millennia-old lifeways and a long-standing sustainable relationship between humans and fish. 13. Marc Leisenring, presentation at the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies Annual Summit, Lane Community College, Eugene, May 9, 2018. 14. These alterations can be expensive in addition to being ecologically destructive: “A recent survey of 37 US treatment plants by the nonprofit American Water Works Association (AWWA) found that the conversion of 10 percent of a watershed from forest to housing or other devegetated uses increases water treatment costs by an average of 8.7 percent.” Postel 2017, 62. 15. The landscape architect and emeritus professor Randy Hester would encourage architects to choose and save a species over the course of their career! 16. McIntyre is an aquatic toxicologist with Washington State University at Puyallup’s Salmon Toxicology Lab. Scholz is a marine biologist, zoologist, and manager of the multidisciplinary Ecotoxicology Program at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. McIntyre, Scholz, and other leading scientists studying the impacts of urban runoff on Coho salmon and other forms of aquatic life have recently isolated the chemical 6PPD-quinone, a hardening agent used in the production of car tires, as a major cause of lethal eco-toxicological effects. Unfortunately, the reaction products of this chemical were not tested before the tires went to market. 17. See Salmon-Safe’s white paper “Negative Impacts of Metallic Building Materials and Alternatives to Their Use” (2017): Zinc and copper are highly toxic to salmon, other fish, and aquatic invertebrates serving as fish food sources (although still toxic, they pose less problems to humans and other mammals). Both are also quite soluble relative to other metals. It is not unusual to find 50 percent or more of the zinc and copper in a water sample to be dissolved. Zinc coming from galvanizing is particularly soluble and measured as much as nearly 100 percent. The soluble forms are much more toxic to aquatic life than the same metals in particulate forms, because they can enter and circulate through the body via respiration and digestion. And yet particulate zinc and copper are also physiologically damaging, since they produce harmful biochemical reactions when contacting sensitive gill tissues with the suspended particulates to which they are attached.

Beyond these short-term effects, zinc and copper are also agents of longer-term aquatic ecological harm. Metal-bearing particulates eventually deposit in bottom sediments, and dissolved metals can be taken into the sediments through chemical processes. There, they threaten bottom-dwelling life. They can also be remobilized back into the water column to harm pelagic organisms, like salmon, through “biomagnify”: prey organisms accumulate some quantity without excretion; they are then consumed by predators at the top of the food chain that are subject to the aggregation of metals throughout the web. 18. Alan Fleming, presentation at the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies Annual Summit, Lane Community College, Eugene, May 9, 2018.

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19. Maria Cahill, presentation in my “Practices of the Futures of the City” architecture seminar, University of Oregon, October 9, 2018. 20. One approach may be to keep building envelopes relatively simple in the interests of cost while developing more complex relationships between building skins, rainscreens, vegetative layers, and the landscape. 21. See Hester 2006. 22. Miners actually broke the top of the hill to access the great quantities of silver to be found there. You have to appreciate the candor. 23. See Childs 2000. 24. A city and its buildings can be conceived as rock outcrops that provide habitat for shelf-nesting birds such as peregrine falcons; for most other avian species, as well as those aquatic and terrestrial, such environments prove vastly less suitable. 25. Roy Iwai, correspondence with the author, May 16, 2018. 26. Kevan Moffett, “Streets as Streams and Street Trees as BMPs,” presentation at the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies Annual Summit, Lane Community College, Eugene, May 9, 2018. 27. Bogost 2017. 28. GHB Landscape Architects furnishes us with another innovative urban example of flood control as civic place-making with the firm’s Tasinge Plads project, installed in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2014. 29. It should be noted that both overabundance of groundwater in the floodplain and underabundance near the foothills are problematic in a context of inevitable seismic activity. 30. Brown 2014, 94. 31. Brent Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 19, 2019. 32. Perhaps not unlike Lewis, Tsurumkai, and Lewis’s Opportunistic Architecture (2008) but with an ecological twist. 33. Susanna Hamilton, correspondence with the author, January 14, 2014. The “good amount of rain” needed in 2014 never came. 34. Josh Cerra, presentation at Design Week Portland’s “Creative Design Solutions for Community, Infrastructure, and Environment: An Evening with Michael Singer and Friends,” University of Oregon, Portland, April 8, 2019. Cities that design “waterdependent uses along waterways” no longer turn their backs to rivers and other water bodies, to the benefit of aquatic species and to the delight of urban dwellers. 35. As Crystal Grinnell of Biohabitats claims: “The materials we use to treat wood are anti-life by design.” Grinnell, correspondence with the author, November 8, 2017. 36. Cameron 2012, 43. 37. While they may not have been concerned about aquatic habitat, there have been architects who developed a more “transactional” and environmentally aware approach to building profiles and details. In their important book On Weathering, Moshen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow examine the work of the Viennese Secessionists, Carlo Scarpa, and other architects who manipulated the profiles of building skins with an eye to patina and the ways in which buildings could, through the action of water, ice, and wind, age gracefully and acquire beauty and stateliness over time. These “other modernisms” contrast with the more dominant international style of the age. See Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow 1993; see also Loomis 1998 for a thoughtful consideration of “other modernisms.” The work of Bruno Taut also warrants attention here, inspired

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as he was by traditional Japanese architecture and the idea of sacrificial building elements, such as rainscreens, and the elemental forces working away on building skins. With Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung (“Horseshoe Estate”), a multi-story housing project in Berlin of 1925–1933, the balconies of each unit, perceived as volumes subtracted from a blocklike overall mass, are primary mediators between dwellings and adjoining garden spaces. Each of the framed openings is edged in brick; Taut lavishes attention on the charged moment when the hand comes into contact with textured and weathered material. Within a large array of repetitive dwelling units, a distinct haptic event occurs: the warmth of the sun is taken up by the brick, and the brick is “taken in” by the hand. 38. Ethylene propylene diene terpolymer (EPDM) is a durable, synthetic rubber roofing membrane. Chapter 3: Liquid-Shaped Space 1. See Turton 2018. 2. See Amos 2015. 3. Douglas Yoder offered this perspective in correspondence with the author, June 7, 2019. 4. Water experts rightfully express concern about quality and potential health risks of harvesting rainwater, especially if that water is intended for potable uses. Microbial and chemical contamination, for example, have been tied to atmospheric pollution, the type of construction materials, and the level of maintenance of the rainwater-harvesting system. For a summary of research on the public health risks associated with rainwater harvesting, see Gwenzi et al. 2015. See also Gould, n.d. 5. Maria Cahill, presentation in my “Practices of the Futures of the City” architecture seminar, University of Oregon, October 9, 2018. 6. Mort Anoushiravani, correspondence with the author, June 25, 2019. 7. See Kjellén 2006 for a description of Dar es Salaam’s water supply situation. 8. I am indebted to Megan Prier, formerly of Hyphae Design Laboratory, for providing the Excel template that is the basis for the assumptions that follow. I am also grateful to my graduate research assistant Rachel Hall for building out the graphs and further clarifying and teasing out the assumptions. 9. Portland is said to have the smallest blocks of any major city in the United States, and many urbanists claim that the city’s vitality and the many “interactions per intersection” follow from this unusual pattern. The downside is that there are more impervious surfaces in Portland than in most US cities. The Green Loop park project, integrated into Portland’s 2035 Central City Vision Plan, offers one bold means to address this. 10. It should be noted that for the purposes of this exercise, the water budget does not make assumptions about consumption in the building’s commercial spaces. 11. Developments in desalinization technology promise more economical and environmentally responsive means of water provisioning at multiple scales, from the individual household to entire communities. For example, the Egyptian engineer Dr. Ahmed el-Shakei is developing an energy-efficient alternative to the predominant system of reverse osmosis, which requires many pretreatment steps so as not to degrade expensive membranes. Dr. el-Shakei’s “pervaporation” system uses hydrophilic membranes

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that can be composted when they have run their course. Further, the brine by-product can be recycled a thousand times and ends up as crystalline salt. The pervaporation system uses one-sixteenth of the energy consumption of a typical reverse osmosis system. Notes from my meeting with Dr. Ahmed el-Shakei in Cairo, March 29, 2018. 12. According to its website (ecodistricts.org), EcoDistricts is “a new model of urban development to empower just, sustainable, and resilient neighborhoods.” 13. Brent Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 18, 2016. 14. Their “Fabricating Wellness” scheme received a 2018 American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment AIA/COTE Top Ten for Students Prize in the Innovation 2030 Competition. 15. “Urban Courtyardism” was the title of the lecture Wang delivered at the University of Oregon at Portland, October 2, 2018. 16. Such a typology might find parallels to what the designer Richard Kelly devised for light as described in his 1952 College Art Journal essay “Lighting as an Integral Part of Architecture.” The terms “play of brilliants,” “focal glow,” and “ambient luminescence” combine succinctness with indelibility. 17. See the website for Michael Singer’s studio at michaelsinger.com /project /stuttgart-memorial-garden. 18. I had the good fortune of serving as co–project leader with Behnisch Architects on the design of IBN/Alterra. Following completion of the construction documents and my subsequent return to the United States, Michael hired me to collaborate on the design of these installations. 19. See illustrations at Michael Singer Studio, michaelsinger.com /project /alterra -atria-gardens-2. 20. Bachelard 1983, 40. Chapter 4: In Concentrate 1. Cameron 2006, 28. 2. Cameron 2012, 27. 3. “Nature” is also a fraught term, its problematization the subject of countless books, and yet, for our purposes, it is arguably less loaded than “wilderness.” 4. Cameron 2012, 44. 5. Cameron 2006, 32. 6. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2018. 7. “Biological complexity,” “self-organization,” “degrees of self-maintenance,” and “ability to support life” are terms borrowed from Crystal Grinnell; they come from her presentation during the “Design, Resilient Infrastructures, and Urban Futures” panel discussion, HOPES Ecological Design Conference, University of Oregon, April 15, 2018. 8. Josh Cerra offers another advantage of using “water-loving plants as evapotranspiration machines”: plants that consume high quantities of water are highly effective at treating it. Josh Cerra, correspondence with the author, April 4, 2017. 9. Brent Bucknum, presentation at the “Salmon in the City” public outreach event, Portland, Oregon, January 25, 2017 (organized by the nonprofit Salmon-Safe). 10. Brent Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 19, 2019.

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11. Ibid. 12. As the California Energy Commission discusses in its 2005 report, “In the commercial sector, the major water-related end uses that use electricity are cooling and water heating. Cooling towers for air conditioning are large water users.” Utilizing cooling tower blowdown to abet processes of evapotranspiration results in a decrease in the size of the cooling towers! California Energy Commission 2005, 15. 13. Brent employs the term ICUs (intensive care units) to describe living walls. His shop, Hyphae Design Laboratory, prefers an alternative, lower-maintenance strategy for introducing living materials in close proximity to building envelopes. This strategy uses “extensive” trellises to support vegetation that is planted and watered at grade and brings a strong aesthetic presence to a project while assisting with cooling and pretreating air. Brent Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 18, 2016. Blackbird Architects’ Casa Nueva office building project for the Air Pollution Control District of Santa Barbara County furnishes an excellent example of this low-cost approach to thickening facades. See Blackbird Architects, “Casa Nueva,” 2004, bbird.com /projects /casa-nueva. 14. Hyphae investigated the use of brackish graywater as another source but realized that plants found in shady canyons—what in effect they were mimicking in this slotlike urban space—could not tolerate the salt present in the harvested water. 15. Mick Pearce, lecture at the University of Oregon, Portland, February 14, 2017. 16. Mick Pearce, correspondence with the author, March 19, 2017. 17. Barnes 2014, 35. 18. Removing groundwater below and next to structures is no simple matter. As the engineer Dr. Mohamed Sheta of the firm Ardaman-ACE makes clear, removal can take away the fines in the soil and thus cause subsidence and damage to buildings. 19. As discussed in chapter 2, the issue of water quality in Cairo is as serious as it is multidimensional. 20. Made possible with funding from the American Research Center in Egypt, the US Embassy in Cairo, and the Barakat Trust in the United Kingdom. 21. Kareem Ibrahim, urban designer with Takween Integrated Community Development, correspondence with the author, March 31, 2017. 22. In another kind of project conceived and configured to support broader communities, Andrew Cusack, former head of camp management and coordination with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, sought to “capitalize on emerging funding.” In building refugee camps near host communities, his team deployed new water systems and other infrastructures that supplied both the camps and the settlements nearby. Andrew Cusack, lecture at the HOPES Ecological Design Conference, University of Oregon, April 14, 2017. 23. It should be noted that ultimately, through systemic analysis of al-Khalifa’s groundwater in consultation with professionals, the Megawra team decided to forgo treatment and use untreated groundwater to water plants and trees with high salinity tolerances. 24. Gandy 2017, 124. 25. For more information about design and urban microclimates, see Lenzholzer 2015. 26. Clarisa Bencomo, correspondence with the author, November 17, 2017. 27. Bastasch 2006, 5. 28. Outwater 1996, xii.

Notes to Pages 75–85 143

29. Todd and Todd 1993, xvi. 30. Outwater 1996, 168. 31. See Puttman Infrastructure 2016. 32. Tom Puttman, correspondence with the author, January 27, 2017. 33. Ibid. 34. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2018. 35. Sisolak and Spataro 2011, 99. 36. Stepped water terraces also provided a basis for ancient irrigated agriculture techniques, for example, the stepped rice paddies of Balinese Indonesia. This elaborate system used for farming also provides at-grade—and therefore occupiable—social and spiritual gathering subspaces within a larger topographical condition characterized by stark relief. 37. See the University of Texas School of Architecture 2017. 38. Pat Lando, presentation at the American Institute of Architects Portland Chapter as part of Sustainable Building Week, Portland, Oregon, October 11, 2018. 39. For an extended treatment of Marx’s concern about the consequences of metabolic rift, see John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000). 40. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, January 25, 2017. Pete Munoz of Biohabitats and Pat Lando of Lando and Associates Landscape Architecture are credited with coining the term “net zero nutrients.” 41. From a presentation at the International Living Future Institute Achieving Net Positive Water Symposium, Portland, Oregon, February 22, 2018. 42. Todd and Todd 1994, xxi. 43. Kevin Scribner, correspondence with the author, January 18, 2017. 44. Brown, Harkness, and Johnston 1998, ix. 45. Gadamer 2004, 85. 46. See Norton 2005. 47. Mort Anoushiravani, correspondence with the author, June 13, 2019. 48. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2018. Grinnell readily admits that a woodchip wetland works less effectively in colder temperatures. 49. Ibid. 50. Pete Munoz, presentation at the International Living Future Institute Achieving Net Positive Water Symposium, Portland, Oregon, February 22, 2018. 51. Crystal Grinnell has speculated that, in a passive approach to wastewater treatment for taller buildings with greater density and limited space, treatment could take place along vertical pathways that take advantage of height and gravity. Such an approach would be yet another opportunity for innovation when architects and engineers operate in a more seamless manner. 52. Saunders 2010, 3. 53. Rhys Roth of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure speaks to the need to modernize regulatory approaches to incentivize more smart, affordable, and sustainable strategies. Chapter 5: Reconstituting Architectural Horizons 1. Casey 1993, 61. 2. Ibid.

144

Notes to Pages 86–102

3. Derrida 1978, 117. 4. In writing about the eighteenth-century explorer, geographer, and astronomer Carsten Niebuhr, the Danish author Thorkild Hansen captures the notion of the horizon thusly: “It is to be seen at sea and in the desert, and also in the flat marshy districts of Denmark where one is also circumscribed by this clean distant line where earth and heaven meet, a tremendous circle of silence at whose centre one continually finds oneself, no matter how far or in what direction one goes.” Hansen 2017, 266. 5. See Leatherbarrow 2000. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Ibid., 66. 8. Ibid., 160. 9. Georges Didi-Huberman (2018, 61) asserts that “seeing the horizon, the beyond, means not seeing the images that come and brush against us.” Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (2004, 304) perspective would seem more resonant with Leatherbarrow’s in his claim that “to acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand— not in order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion.” 10. Leatherbarrow 2000, 125. 11. Ibid., 130. 12. Ibid., 176. 13. Ibid., 69. 14. See the Passive House Institute website at passivehouse.com. 15. Kaika 2005, 64. 16. See Frampton 1999 and Holl 1991. 17. See Lynch 1960. 18. Beck 2016, 17. 19. Ricoeur 1988, 220. 20. See Geddes 1950. 21. Biro 2013, 175. 22. Ricoeur 1988, 178. 23. Luhmann 1995, 46. 24. Ibid., 114. 25. Brown 1997, 141. 26. Beck 1992, 80. 27. Dewey 1922, 15. 28. Borgmann 1984, 160. Chapter 6: Redrawing Waters 1. California Energy Commission 2005, 1. The passage continues: “Electric utilities value only saved electricity; and natural gas utilities value only saved natural gas.” 2. See Roth and Mazza 2017. 3. Hyphae endeavors to break down and explicate the various waters it is tasked to deal with so as to identify the right mixtures and synergies. These are: graywater (GW), rainwater (RW), groundwater (GRW), mechanical water (MW), reclaimed water (RCW), blackwater (BW), and potable water (PW). Brent Bucknum, presentation at the “Salmon in the City” public outreach event, Portland, Oregon, January 25, 2017.

Notes to Pages 102–117 145

4. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, November 8, 2017. 5. Brian Stuhr, correspondence with the author, February 20, 2019. Stuhr also notes that landscape architects are “not allowed to design hardscape in the public right of way,” as that is the domain of civil engineers. 6. Michael Willis, correspondence with the author, February 23, 2019. 7. A common instance of water registering in later design phases, and in a highly circumscribed way, occurs when the MEP engineer and architect agree on wall thicknesses to accommodate plumbing, and the architect draws plans accordingly. Fixtures such as sinks and toilets appear in the design development and construction documents phases of the architectural design process in plans and interior elevations. Other conditions—and opportunities—are left unaccounted for. 8. One example is Powell’s rain chart of 1872, which communicates an argument similar to that of his “Arid Region of the United States.” Unfortunately, these compelling mappings never wielded the kind of influence he wished for; consider the four corners where the boundaries of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet, their straight, intersecting lines representing the ultimate hydrological indifference. 9. City of Melbourne 2014, 2. It deserves mention that Singapore has attempted something similarly ambitious with its Active Clear Water Beautiful Program, a longterm initiative that links water quality and urban livability and is led by the Public Utilities Board (PUB), the nation’s national water agency. While the Singapore program is as impressive as it is forward-thinking, a great advantage of Melbourne’s “City as Catchment” program for the purposes of this investigation is its graphic positioning of actions and behaviors within a complex, comprehensive system in space and over time. 10. See City of Melbourne 2014. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. See the Recode Now website (“Recoding Solutions for Sustainability”) at recodenow.org (accessed November 2019). 13. In a Sankey diagram, the width of the arrows is proportional to the volume and/ or rate of flow. 14. See Brown 2014. 15. See Holl, Pallasmaa, and Perez-Gomez 1994, 146. 16. See Macaulay 1976. 17. For an excellent description of the commemoration of peak levels of historic flood events in the form of signage on buildings, see Rinne 2011. 18. “Nodes along networks” is a term coined by Brent Bucknum of Hyphae Design Laboratory. Bucknum, correspondence with the author, July 19, 2019. 19. Marie Walkiewicz, correspondence with the author, March 29, 2019. 20. See Carlisle and Pevzner 2012. 21. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2018. 22. Tim Smith, talk on the proposed Green Loop contiguous park project, Design Week Portland, April 24, 2017. 23. Is the architect the lead, or do these new partnerships require a different and more equitable arrangement? Casey Hagerman of MWA Architects is interested in advancing a process in which the “architect adds value as a facilitator to get people to talk across systems.” Casey Hagerman, correspondence with the author, February 23, 2017. 24. Crystal Grinnell, correspondence with the author, November 8, 2017.

146

Notes to Pages 119–123

Epilogue 1. Jacques Rancière (2019, 14) offers inspiration in this regard: History thus signifies a form of coexistence between those who inhabit a place together, those who draw blueprints for collective buildings, those who cut their stones for these buildings, those who preside over ceremonies, and those who participate in them. Art thus becomes an autonomous reality, with the idea of history as the relation between a milieu, a collective form of life, and possibilities of individual invention.

2. Mumford 2010, 211. 3. Along the lines of Borgmann, Walter Armbrust (2019, 1) offers that “the individualized desire for the good life acts as an impediment to achieving it.” 4. At the AIA Charlotte Women in Architecture Annual Breakfast on October 10, 2019, former mayor Harvey Gantt described his dream that the city would “become a living laboratory for how people can learn to live together.” Strong encouragement for a city with a troubled social and racial history. 5. Mitchell 2002, 114. 6. John Barry (1997, 166) says of the Mississippi River: “The greater the force applied in an effort to block water from its natural flow, the greater will grow the mass blocked, and the greater will become the potential power of its energy.” 7. Scott 1998, 95. Marshall Berman (1988, 243) suggests “a fundamental distinction between different modes of modernization: modernization as adventure vs. modernization as routine.” These hydraulic projects would seem to embrace both, where reckless adventure has become routine. 8. The geographer David Harvey argues that “the reduction of space to a contingent category is implied in the notion of progress itself.” The calculable site, the space of intervention, owes its transformation in the cause of progress to dynamic forces beyond it, to an emphasis on “the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place.” Harvey 1990, 205. 9. Ricoeur 1988, 216. 10. Ibid., 215. 11. See Pearce 2017; Hawken 2017; Tsing 2015. 12. Kenneth Vigil, correspondence with the author, March 15, 2017. 13. Mort Anoushiravani, correspondence with the author, June 25, 2019. 14. See David Stuart’s (1997) argument about “power and efficiency.” 15. MacFarlane 2015, 6.

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Permissions

All illustrations by the author unless noted otherwise. Portions of chapter 4 are excerpted from “Blue Architecture (The City and the Wild in Concentrate),” Environmental Philosophy (special issue in memory of W. S. K. “Scott” Cameron) 15 (1, 2018): 59–75. Portions of chapter 4 are excerpted from Brook Muller, May al-Ibrashy, Josh Cerra, and Megan Prier, “Rewatering as Community Development: Reclaiming Environmental Heritage,” presented at the 16th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, Coimbra, Portugal, October 4–7, 2018. Portions of chapter 5 are excerpted from Joshua F. Cerra, Brook Weld Muller, and Robert F. Young, “A Transformative Outlook on the Twenty-First Century City: Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower Revisited,” Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning (special issue on the work and influence of Sir Patrick Geddes) 166 (2017): 90–96. Portions of chapter 5 are excerpted from “New Horizons for Sustainable Architecture: Hydro-Logical Design for the Ecologically Responsive City,” Nature + Culture (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research) 13 (2, 2018). Portions of chapters 5 and the epilogue are excerpted from “A Machine Is a Watershed for Living In (Reconstituting Architectural Horizons),” The Pluralist: Official Journal of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 2 (1, 2016). Portions of chapter 6 are excerpted from “Graphic Ecologies,” Enquiry: The ARCC Journal of Architectural Research 11 (1, 2014). Portions of chapter 6 are excerpted from Brook Muller and Matthew Tierney, “Redrawing Water: Making Fluid Graphics,” presented at the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) and Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) International Conference, “The Architect and the City,” Valencia, Spain, November 11–14, 2020.

Index

Aalto, Alvar, 5 abstraction, 102, 107, 112 acoustic barrier, 58 aflaj (Oman), 59 agriculture, 77, 79 air, ix, 4, 5, 30, 58, 59, 69, 95, 96, 120 air conditioning, 61, 69 algae, algal blooms, 74, 116 alley(s), 34, 57, 74 American West, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 34, 103 anadromous, 8, 25, 26 Andropogon Associates (landscape architects), 77 Anoushiravani, Mort, xii, 46, 82, 122 anoxic reactor, 76 Anthropocene, 3 aperture(s), 55, 97 aqua cell technology, 76 aquatic life/ecology, 6, 78, 17, 26, 38, 40, 78 aqueous, 8, 25, 41, 42, 98 aquifer(s), 11, 20, 46, 47, 59, 72, 106 architect(s), x, xi, xii, 1, 4, 5, 6, 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 31, 38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 76, 77, 87, 88, 89, 95, 96, 102, 103, 112, 115, 119 architecture/architectural, xi, 1, 3, 7, 14, 19, 20, 25, 39, 40, 47, 49, 50, 62–63, 68, 91, 92, 97, 114, 117; culture, 10, 12; design, 9, 37, 57, 89; detail, 41–43; discourse, 61, 96; as ecological infrastructure, 69; education, 13; equipment, 95, 97; expression, 4, 90; horizon(s), 9, 56, 57, 85, 87–90, 95, 98, 103, 119; hydrological, xii, 63, 98; and landscape, 28, 89, 92, 94, 98, 106, 107, 112, 115; language, 60; as machine, 4–7, 45, 70, 93, 115; meaning,

53, 55, 115, 116; modernist, 90; as organism, 6; practice, 23, 87–88, 96; production, 88, 116; students, 13, 26, 71; sustainable, 61, 90, 99, 112, 121; theory, 5; urban, 4, 8, 9, 25, 59, 65, 83, 95, 99; and water, xii, 9, 106, 107, 112, 123 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe (Water), 108 Arizona, 18 Arizona Water Project, 47 al-Ashraf Khalil dome, 70–73 assemblage(s), 41, 67, 96, 107 Athar Lina, 70–40 Atlantic Ocean, 78 atmosphere(s), 87, 114 atrium, 53, 55–56, 58, 61, 62, 95 Australia, 31–32, 54 axonometric, 107, 111, 112 Bachelard, Gaston, 63 Bad Aibling Town Hall (Germany), 55–56 Bagsvaerd Church (Denmark), 97 bamboo, 57–58 Bangladesh, 46 Bank of America Tower (New York City), 55 barbarism, 119 Barnes, Jessica, 70; Cultivating the Nile, 101 Baroque, 55–56 Bartók, Béla, 107 Bastasch, Rick, 12, 15, 18; The Oregon Water Handbook, 41 bear(s), 27, 43 Beck, Ulrich, 6, 12, 17, 75, 92, 99 bedrock, 70, 72 Behnisch and Partner Architects, x; Bad Aibling Town Hall, 55–56; IBN/Alterra

156

Index

Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature, 61–62; John and Frances Angelos Law Center (Baltimore), 95 Bencomo, Clarisa, 74 Bertschi School Living Science Building (Seattle), 53 best management practices (BMPs), 35 big data, 119 biodiversity, 2 biofilm, 76 biofiltration, 30 biofuels, 116 Biohabitats, xii, 15, 82, 102; Hassalo on Eighth, 75, 109 biomimicry, 6 bioregional, 23, 93, 103 bioswale, 30 Biro, Andrew, 13, 93 Biscayne Aquifer (Florida), 46 Blackbird Architects: Watershed Resources Center (Santa Barbara), x Black, Maggie (The Atlas of Water), 11 blowdown, 67–68, 70 Blue Mountains (Australia), 31 Bohlmeyer, Joel, 57–58 Bonneville Dam (Oregon), 27 Borgmann, Albert, 99, 120; Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 3 Boston (Massachusetts), 75 boundary/boundaries, 28, 88, 93, 96, 97, 103, 106, 108, 112, 123 Brayback-Letmathe, Peter, 11 Broken Hill (New South Wales), 31 Brown, Brenda, 81 Brown, Hillary, 36, 106; Next Generation Infrastructure, 106 Brown, Lee Rust, 98 Bucknum, Brent, xii, 17, 53, 67–68, 69, 115 building(s), xii, 2, 4–6, 10, 16, 20–21, 25, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 51, 53–55, 57–59, 63, 67, 70, 78, 79, 82, 93, 97, 103–104, 108, 110–111, 113; detail, 41, 42; enclosure/ envelope/skin, 13, 43, 45, 88, 90, 91, 96; equipment, 48, 95; footprint, 81; landscape and, 89, 90, 115, 116, 123; Living Building Challenge, 6, 48; as machines, 90; performance, 9, 69, 96, 106; systems, 13, 42, 52, 61, 68, 76, 91, 94, 99, 101, 102, 107, 112, 114; type(s), 48, 60, 77, 115; urban, 55, 56, 59; water schematic/systems, 7, 9, 19; watersheds and, 9, 98

Bullitt Center (Seattle), 21 Burbano, Lore, 115–116 Cabeza Prieta (Sonoran Desert), 32–33 Cahill, Maria, xii, 30, 46 Cairo (Egypt), xii, 33–34, 59–60, 70–74, 80, 122 California, 93 California Energy Commission, 16, 102 Cameron, Scott, 9, 42, 66; “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful?” 65; “Wilderness and the City,” 65 Campbell, Edward, 12 Cape Town (South Africa), 22 car(s), x, 116 carbon dioxide, 75 Carlisle, Stephanie, and Pevzner, Nicholas: “The Performative Underground,” 113–114 cartographic, 104 Cascades mountains (Washington), 15, 25, 47 Casey, Edward (Getting Back into Place), 85 catchment(s), 35, 98, 104, 108, 109 celestial, 86, 98 Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, xii, 12, 15, 19, 101 centralized infrastructures/systems, 1, 16, 18, 20–22, 46, 52, 62, 73, 75 Central Valley (California), 2 Cerra, Josh, 20, 23, 40 Chand Baori (Indian step well in Rajasthan), 59 charity, charitable dispensation, 60, 73, 117 Charles David Keeling Apartments. See Keeling Apartments Charles River (Massachusetts), 75 Chennai (India), 22 Childs, Craig (The Secret Knowledge of Water), 32 chlorine, 75 cholera, 14, 46 cistern, 55, 59, 60, 61, 105 city, 1, 12, 14, 20–21, 25, 27–28, 30, 35, 43, 51, 68, 92, 96, 120, 123; “arrival” cities, 83; Australian, 22; Bangladeshi, 46; “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful?” 65; “City as Catchment,” 104, 109; City of Flows, 90; coastal, 7, 46; densifying fabric of, 93; desert, 5, 34; dwellers, 5, 60; Egyptian, 70; Edge of a City, 91; folklore histories, 71–72; gateways into, 91; global,

Index 119; green, 3, 91; healthy, 104; hydro/ hydrological, 36, 65, 94, 103, 109; hyperdense, 59; megacity, 59; nature and, 9, 65–66; Park Tower Prototypical American City, 95; portfolio approach, 19, 107; postwar Iraqi, 46; rock outcrops/rocklike, 33, 108; shrinking, 18; smart, 3, 4, 119; “Sponge City,” 31; sustainable, 98, 104; water and the, 8, 23, 26, 94, 104, 108–109; “Wilderness and the City,” 65. See various cities Civic Ecology Institute, 20, 115 civic leadership, 123 Clean Water Act (1972), 16, 17, 121 clear sky flooding, 15, 46 climate(s), x, xi, 13, 15, 18, 20, 35, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72, 119, 122 climate change, 1, 5, 7, 15, 19, 22, 40, 74, 90, 101, 119 CO Architects, 67–68 coarse woody debris, 28 coefficient of friction, 23, 28, 30, 109 Cole, Alisahah, 3 Coliseum Place project, Oakland, 52 Colorado River (Southwestern US), 12 Columbia River (Pacific Northwestern US), 27, 120 community/communities, 23, 70, 72, 79, 101, 104, 119, 120, 122 Community Ablution Blocks, 122–123 concentrate, concentrations, 9, 29, 63, 65–68, 71, 74–75, 78, 80–82, 115, 119 concrete, 29, 45, 47, 60, 61, 69, 76, 95, 97 condensate, 69, 105 construction, 13, 39, 42, 43, 47, 68, 75, 82, 88, 94, 102, 107, 115 containerized sanitation, 81 contaminants, 9, 17, 30, 55, 66, 78, 116 CookFox Architects, 55 cooling, 4, 13, 16, 20, 40, 53, 58, 61, 68, 76, 95, 96, 106; “fractal cooling,” 69–70; towers, 67, 76, 79 Copenhagen (Denmark), 97 copper, 29, 30, 43 Cornell University, 40 Correa, Charles: Kanchanjunga Apartments, 95 Council House 2 (Melbourne), 69–70 craft, 88–89 Cranbrook Academy, 98 Crosson, Courtney, 47 Croton Water Filtration Plant (New York), 106

157

courtyard(s), 60, 68, 122 culture, xi, 4, 13, 73; architectural, 10, 12; contemporary, 2; design culture, 45, 112, 119; nature and, 59, 79, 82 Dade County (Florida), 46 Dalton, Meghan, et. al. (Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest), 19 dam(s), 15, 27, 120 Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), xi, 46 Debo, Thomas, 35 declivities, 31–32, 34 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 46 denitrification, 76, 82 Denver (Colorado), 22 depth, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99 Derrida, Jacques, 86 desalinization plant(s), 46 desert, 33–34, 70; Australian, 31; Sonoran, 32 design, x, 2, 15, 22, 26, 38, 43, 55, 58, 60, 63, 73, 79, 83, 85, 88, 98, 102, 111, 116–117, 120; approach(es), 7, 20, 41, 93, 96, 106, 112, 122; architectural, xi, 3, 89; civic, 36, 80; culture, 45, 59, 112, 119; decision-making, 8, 115, 121; Design for Ecological Democracy, 31; ecological, 36, 68, 123; Ecological Design Center, xii; “eco-revelatory,” 81; education, 115, 121; expression, 1, 19, 31, 69, 82, 96; green, 82, 114; hydrological, 40, 57, 68, 112; Hyphae Design Laboratory, xii, 17, 36, 38, 40, 49–53, 67–69, 101, 106–107, 109, 112; imaginary/imaginaries, 12, 109; inquiry, xii, 47, 109; interventions, 35, 40, 66, 70, 74, 91, 94; Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), 6; passive, 4, 40; practice, 70, 76; process(es), 1, 8, 9, 12, 36, 66, 70, 75, 82, 101, 107, 115, 119; product design, 71; proposals, 71, 110, 112; proposition(s), 23, 54, 109; “Site Design,” 13; strategy/strategies, 4, 75, 77, 109; studio(s), 37, 47, 57, 115; supplyside, 68–69; team(s), 19, 37, 71, 76, 81, 113; thinking, 13, 23, 65; water and, 23, 45, 53, 103, 112; Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), 30 Detweiler, Andrea, 115–116 De Urbanisten (Netherlands), 109; Water Square Benthemplein, 36 development, xi, 13, 19, 22, 31, 39, 40, 71, 74–76, 111; community, 79; Low Impact Development (LID), 30; mixed-use, 37, 109; post-

158

Index

war, 36; pre-development, 67, 108; resort, 78; sustainable, 2, 79; systems development charges, 76; transit-oriented development (TOD), 30; United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Number 6, 12 diagram, 4, 9, 54, 58, 61, 104–107, 112, 114 disease(s), 14, 21, 46 distributed (or decentralized) systems, 19, 20, 52, 71, 94; “belt and suspenders” approach, 82; wastewater, 1, 8, 46, 75–76, 79, 82, 108; water, 1, 8, 21, 22, 45–46, 71, 76, 108, 123 district, 7, 8, 19, 20, 22, 34, 59, 75, 76, 77, 101, 108, 109, 111, 123 downstream impacts, 6, 17–19, 21, 33, 42, 80, 82, 93, 109 drawing(s), 42, 72, 114, 117; axonometric, 111; convention(s), 102; perspectival, 112; isometric, 106; a section, 109 Dreiseitl, Herbert, and Grau, Dieter, 43, 123; Waterscapes, 25 drought, 12, 19, 22, 40, 67, 104 Duncan, David James (My Story as Told by Water), 25 dwelling(s), 19, 39, 57, 89, 93, 123 Eastgate office complex (Harare), 69 EcoDistricts, 20, 53 ecology/ecological, 3, 13, 17, 23, 26, 34, 36, 39, 40, 74, 77, 79, 91, 96, 109, 116–117, 122; aquatic, 78; Civic Ecology, 20, 115; design, 36, 123; Design for Ecological Democracy, 31; ecological architectural machines, 115; Ecological Design Center, xii; equipment, 98, 112; forgetfulness, 93; gear, 114; imaginary/imagination, 99, 113, 119; infrastructure(s), 7, 17, 30, 59, 68, 80, 99, 108; integrity, 4, 19, 33, 94, 115; niches, 75; processes, 80, 82, 95, 97; reconciliation ecology, 121; responsive/responsiveness, 1, 76, 80; restoration, 121; systems, 8, 66; wisdom, 94 economy/economies, 4, 5, 22, 78, 106, 120 ecosystem(s), 1, 7, 8, 30, 35, 68, 82, 94, 106, 120; integrity of, 26, 66; novel ecosystem(s), 5, 34, 67, 122; services, 6, 74 ecotone, 78 Edinburgh (Scotland), 93 effluent, 17 Egypt, x; Egyptian education system, 74 El Niño, 16 embankment, 104 enabling hinges, 63, 123

enchantment, 123 end of pipe approach, 19 energy, 12, 17, 22, 26, 36, 41, 53, 67, 69, 91, 96, 102, 115, 121; California Energy Commission (CEC), 16, 101; consumption, 7, 20, 52, 76, 79; Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), 6, 37, 48; low-energy design, 4, 40, 90; net zero energy, 52, 81; salmon and, 27, 29; energywater nexus, 16, 120 engineer(s), xii, 1, 3, 15, 29, 30, 66, 67, 69, 74, 81, 82, 102, 103 Enlightenment, 89 environment(s)/environmental, x, 1, 7–8, 22, 23, 43, 67, 75, 97, 104, 106, 109, 111, 113, 119; activist, 87; architecture and, 54; arid/ desert, x, 13, 70; building-environment relations/systems, 90, 99; built, 5–6, 9, 90, 98, 102–103, 117, 123; Bureau of Environmental Services (Portland), 112; concerns, 74, 96, 112; conditions, 9, 56, 116; covenant, 114; education/educator, 39, 40, 79–80; engineer, xii, 15, 66, 81; Environmental Science Associates, 15; equipment, 95–96; future(s), 10, 70, 74; heritage, 70; historian, 13, 27; horizon, 87–91, 94–95; justice, 2; al-Khalifa Environment and Heritage Park, 71; Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), 6; Megawra Built Environment Collective, xii, 70; National Environmental Policy Act, 121; nonprofit, 79; philosopher, 3; physical, 14, 105, 122; processes, 54, 98; quality, 30, 71, 116; response/responsiveness, 4, 53, 61, 121; systems, 13, 95; urban, 5, 31, 34–35, 59, 66, 81, 98, 106, 108, 115 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 17–18, 75 equity/equitable, 1, 8, 14, 30, 59, 105, 122 Escondido (California), 67 eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality (City of Durban) “Community Ablution Blocks,” 122 ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM), 43 evaporation, 48, 58, 67, 70 evapotranspiration, 48, 61, 67–68, 74 Eugene (Oregon), ix, 40 extinction, 3 façade(s), 39, 61, 70, 94, 95, 106, 116 Fatima Khatun dome (Cairo), 70–73

Index filtration, 27, 34, 53, 78, 79, 106 fire, 53, 105 firmament, 97 Fisk, Harold, 103–104, 109 flash drought, x Fleming, Alan, 30 Flint (Michigan), x, 2 flood(s), x, 7, 15, 16, 28, 29, 31, 35–37, 46, 101, 103, 109–111 floodplain, 27, 29, 34, 74 flow(s), 21, 23, 33, 39, 41, 55, 60, 62–63, 66, 68, 77–78, 90, 92, 94, 104, 110, 112; base, 30, 105; combined, 75; energy, 36; graywater, 53; mapping, 107, 115; nutrient, 19; rainwater, 29, 54; river, 29, 105; sequence of, 102, 116; sheet, 57; stormwater and, 29–30, 67; stream, 28; summer, 19; wastewater, 83; water, 29, 30, 33, 36, 72, 104, 107, 109, 114, 119, 120 Ford Foundation, 74, 43, 58, 78 “form follows physiology,” 69–70 Frampton, Kenneth, 94; Megaform as Urban Landscape, 91 furnishings, 58, 87, 96, 98 future(s), xi, 2–4, 10–13, 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 53, 74, 81, 104, 108, 119–123 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 82 Gandy, Matthew, 73 garden(s), 30, 45, 59, 60–61, 80, 90, 96, 112, 123 Gaza Strip, 11 GBD Architects, 53, 76 Geddes, Patrick, 93–94 Georgia Tech University, 35 Ghiseli, Nicki, 115–116 global diasporas, 119 Goldsby, Orrin, 39 Grand Egyptian Museum, 114 graphic(s), 9, 23, 85, 103, 111, 113, 116; abstraction, 107; architectural, 114; conventions, 102; Graphic Guide to Frame Construction, 42; languages, 102; types, 106; viewshed, 112; water, 108, 117 gravity, 54, 59, 62, 122 graywater, 19, 45, 51–53, 58–59, 66, 104 Great Basin (North America), 25 Great Bear Rainforest (British Columbia), 27 Great Chain of Being, 63 Green Infrastructure (GI), 30 grid, 6, 68 Grinnell, Crystal, xii, 15, 22, 66, 76, 82, 102, 115, 117

159

groundwater, 15, 16, 36, 46, 78, 105; International Groundwater School, 71–74; recharge, 78; rising, 70 growth, 11–13, 30, 52, 67, 73, 78, 122 habit(s), 99, 122 habitat, 28, 39, 67, 102, 122 Haken, Paul (Drawdown), 121 Hamilton, Susanna, 40 Harare (Zimbabwe), 69 hard and the gray, 27, 30, 31, 35–36, 59 Harkness, Terry, 81 Harmony project, (Louisville), 106 Hassalo on Eighth (Portland), 75, 109 heat, heating, x, 4, 13, 16, 20, 40, 67, 69, 74, 90; facade-integrated heat exchangers, 95 heritage, 26, 80; heritage conservation, 70–74 Hester, Randy (Design for Ecological Democracy), 31 Hetch Hetchy Reservoir (California), 19 Hinners, Sarah, 28, 30 history/histories, 13, 20, 73, 93, 116; folklore, 71; human, 122; infrastructural, 122; lifecycle history of salmon, 26, 27; mass extinction, 3; urban, 2; Water, 28 Hockney, David (A Bigger Splash), 108 Holl, Steven, 112; Stretto House, 106 Holocaust Survival Memorial Garden (Stuttgart), 60–61 Hong Kong, 59 horizon(s), 9, 31–32, 83, 107, 117, 121–122; architectural, 56–57, 85–94, 98, 103, 119; clear blue, 87; definition of, 85; environmental, 86–96; equipmental, 86–96; fusion of, 94, 99; as habit, 99; machines as, 97; practical, 86–94; reference, 92; stratigraphic, 96; temporal, 123; of the watershed, 92–93 house, 4–5, 22, 41, 69, 88, 99, 106, 111, 123 Houston (Texas), 16–17 Hudson River (New York), 40 hydraulic society, 11, 13–14, 19, 120, 122 hydrograph, 105, 109 hydrologic, 8, 40, 43, 57, 63, 104, 108 hydrology/hydrological, 4, 13, 15, 19, 22, 26, 29–32, 35, 39, 41, 45–46, 54–55, 56, 60, 66– 67, 75, 93–94, 97, 103, 109, 115, 122; architecture(s), 59, 63, 65, 98; “batteries,” 20–21; challenges/problems, xi, 1, 7, 102; city, 94, 103; conditions, 1, 21–22, 26, 28, 36, 40, 46; cycle, 65, 93–94; design, 40, 59–60, 68, 112; equipment, 98; function(s), 23, 36, 37; hab-

160

Index

its, 99; “natural hydrological shadows,” 28; processes, 72, 95, 98, 115; rural, 35; society, 19; system(s), 8, 40, 66; urban, 31, 39 hydroperiod(s), 40 hygiene, 123 Hyphae Design Laboratory, xii, 17, 37, 38, 40, 49–51 53, 101; Coliseum Place project, 52; Harmony project (Louisville), 106; Keeling Apartments, 37; “move dollars from utilities to the landscape,” 37; Palomar Medical Center, 67–68; “supply-side design,” 68, 69; Waterman Gardens, 36, 109 IBN/Alterra Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature Research (Netherlands), 61–62 Ibn Tulun Mosque (Cairo), 70 Ibrashy, May al-, xii ice, ix imaginary, 1, 94, 109, 119 impermeable/impermeability, 31, 42, 65 impervious, 17, 27, 28 impoundment, 13, 120 impoverishment, 94, 119, 121 infiltration, 30, 48, 105 infrastructure(s), 1–3, 46, 59, 104, 115, 121; blue-green, 31, 109; Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, xii, 12, 15, 19, 101; centralized, 16, 19, 21, 73, 122; and climate change, 15; design, 14, 82; distributed/ decentralized, 71, 94; ecological, 7, 17, 20, 59, 80, 99, 109; energy, 16; Green Infrastructure (GI), 30; hydro-infrastructural histories, 122; “infrastructure as community development,” 79; legacy/aging, 11, 18–19, 45, 70, 101; living, 66; microinfrastructure, 19; Next Generation Infrastructure, 106; Puttman Infrastructure, 76; stormwater, 68, 108; urban, 14; wastewater, 66, 75, 78; water, 13, 15–16, 18–22, 30, 60, 66, 73, 77, 78, 93, 101, 109, 122–123 inhabitation, 88, 92, 119 interbasin transfer, 6, 16, 93 interdisciplinary partnerships, 117 International Groundwater School, 71–74 investment(s) 18, 46–47, 70, 104, 120, 122; discipline, 15, 21, 121; pathways, 22 Iran, 45, 59 Iraq (postwar), 46 irrigation, 61, 68, 76, 79, 102, 105 island biogeography, 78–79 isometric, 106, 111

Ivry-sur-Seine (France), 95 Iwai, Roy, xii, 17, 35 Jakarta (Indonesia), x, xi Jeffersonian landholding, 21 Jensen, Derrick, 3, 4 John and Frances Angelos Law Center (Baltimore), 95 Johnson, Bart, 28, 34 Johnston, Douglas, 81 Jordan, 46 Kaika, Maria, 3; (City of Flows), 90 Kanchanjunga Apartments (Mumbai), 95 Kaohsiung Public Library (Taiwan), 95 Karvonen, Andrew, 28–29 Keeling Apartments (San Diego), 36–37 al-Khalifa Heritage and Environment Park (Cairo), 70–74 al-Khalifa neighborhood (Cairo), 70–74, 80 KieranTimberlake | Architecture, Planning, and Research: Keeling Apartments, 37; Sidwell Friends School, 77 Killesberg Park (Stuttgart), 60–61 King County West Point Treatment Plant (Seattle), 16 Kino, Eusebio, 32–33 Konstantinidis, Aris, 89 labor practices, 122 Lagos (Nigeria), xi lag time, 105 La Jolla (California), 37 Lando, Pat, 79 landscape(s), xi, 19, 27, 32, 37, 55, 78, 87, 112– 113, 119–120, 122; American, 75; buildings and, 90–92, 95–96, 107–108, 115–116, 123; design expression, 69; Dutch, 86; horizon(s), 57; hydrology, 54; indeterminate, 28, 89; irrigation, 52, 76; Landscape Journal, 81; “landscape over structure,” 102; Megaform as Urban Landscape, 91; rooms, 106; scale, 47, 92; surrogate, 91; urban, 29–31, 91, 104, 108–109; wastewater, 77; watery/ shaped by water, 36, 104, 106–107 landscape architect/architecture, 15, 28, 37–38, 40, 66, 71, 76, 77, 79, 102 Landscape Journal, 81 Lark, Reg, 54 Laurisilva forests (Madeira Island), 78 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), 6, 37, 48

Index Leatherbarrow, David, 94; Uncommon Ground, 87–90 Le Corbusier, 4, 5, 7, 94, 96, 123 legacy, 5, 10, 11, 19, 28, 45, 70, 119 Le Guin, Ursula (The Dispossessed), 119 Leisenring, Marc, 29 Levadas (Madeira Island), 25, 59, 78, 122 Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects: Park Tower Prototypical American City, 95 Lewis, Wendy, 54 liability, 9, 69, 102 life, 2–5, 26, 28, 32–33, 36, 42, 45, 48, 53, 67, 71, 91, 99, 109, 120, 122–123 light/lighting, ix, 2, 4–5, 31, 39, 40, 55, 59, 61, 63, 85, 88, 97, 123; Mediterranean, 96; monitors, 55 limb (rising and falling), 105 liquefaction of soils, 36 Living Building Challenge, 6, 48 Lloyd District (Portland), 75 London (England), 80 Los Angeles (California), 22, 32, 67, 108 Louisville (Kentucky), 106 Low Impact Development (LID), 30 Luhmann, Niklas, 97 Lynch, Kevin, 91 Macaulay, David (Underground), 108 MacFarlane, Robert, 3 machine(s), xii, 90; architectural, 4–7, 45, 70, 89, 93, 94, 115; garden in the, 123; as horizons, 97; living, 81, 109, 123; Natural Organic Recycling Machine (NORM), 75–77; The Organic Machine, 27; watershed for living in, 123 macroinvertebrates, 40 Madeira Island (Portugal), xii, 25, 59, 78–79, 122 Mannerist, 108, 114 map(s), 31, 51, 91, 103–104, 106–107, 109 Marx, Karl, 80–81 material, 6, 12, 13, 29, 35, 39, 41, 43, 45, 48, 55, 56, 61, 62, 80, 81, 87, 96, 98, 114, 119, 121 Mayer Reed Landscape Architecture and Visual Communications, 102 McIntyre, Jen, 29 McKenzie River (Oregon), 25 Mecanoo Architects: Kaohsiung Public Library, 95 Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings (Grondzik et. al.), 48 Mediterranean Sea, 96

161

medium(s), 30, 76, 106; aqueous, 8; energy, 27; graphic, 9, 103; life of, 33; water, 7, 25–26, 28, 43, 63, 65, 69 megaform, 92–93; Megaform as Urban Landscape, 91 megalopolis, 91 megaproject(s), 91 Megawra Built Environment Collective, xii; al-Khalifa Park, 70–74; International Groundwater School, 71–74 Melbourne (Australia), 22, 69, 104, 109 membrane bioreactor, 52–53, 76 Mercy Corps Northwest, xii, 46, 82, 122 meridian, 103 metabolic rift, 80–81 metaphor(s), 5, 6, 9, 72 Miami (Florida), 46 Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department, xii, 15 microbial communities/organisms, 76 Millennium Drought, 22, 104 Miller Hull Partnership: Bullitt Center, 21 Milwaukie (Oregon), 37, 57 Minnesota, x Mississippi River, 104, 109 Mississippi River Commission, 104 Mitchell, Timothy, 120; Carbon Democracy, 3 Moffett, Kevan, 35 modernism, 90; green hyper-modernisms, 96; mid-century modern, 87, 112; modernist project(s), 7, 120, 122; “other modernisms,” 5 moisture, 13, 61 Mondrian, Piet, 86 mountain(s), x, 16, 26, 31, 33, 79, 80, 92, 93 Mumbai (India), 95 Mumford, Lewis, 6, 119 municipalities, 18, 76, 82 Munoz, Pete, 82 Murcutt, Glenn, 54 Mutawintji National Park (Australia), 31–32 MWA Architects, xii, 23, 102 Mystic River (Massachusetts), 75 National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), 13 National Environmental Policy Act, 121 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 29, 30 National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), 16 Native American fishing communities, 120

162

Index

Natural Organic Recycling Machine (NORM), (Portland), 75–77, 79, 81–82 nature(s)/natural, 3, 13, 15–17, 42, 58, 73, 90, 98, 112, 122; “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful?” 55; city and, 9, 65–66; culture and, 59, 79, 82; hydrology/hydrological, 28, 36, 40; IBN/Alterra Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature, 61; landscapes, 36; Natural Organic Recycling Machine (NORM), 76–77; Nature and the Crisis of Modernity, 2; processes, 5, 99, 120; resources, 13; sciences, 122; systems, 4, 75 nautical chart, 104, 110, 114 neighborhood(s), x, 20, 23, 59, 70–74 Neponset River (Massachusetts), 75 net positive watershed impact, 2, 94 net zero nutrients, 81 net zero water, 51–52, 81 Neutra, Richard, 87–88 Newburgh (New York), 2 Newark (New Jersey), x New South Wales (Australia), 31–32, 54 New York City, 55 Nile River, x, 34, 120 nitrification, 76 nitrate, 82 nitrogen, 27 “nodes along networks,” 112 Norton, Bryan (Sustainability), 82 nutrient(s), 19, 27, 74, 109; concentrations of, 80, 81–82; cycle, 28; enrichment, 29; loads, x, 76, 78, 82; net zero nutrients, 81; recovery, 81 Oakland (California), xii, 17, 36, 52 O’Donnell, Terence (Garden of the Brave in War), 45 off-grid, 54, 62 opportunistic ecologies (regenerative design), 39–40 Order of the Knights of Saint John, 59 Oregon, x, 46, 57 Oregon Health Sciences University, 53 Oregon White Oak prairie communities, 27 Outlook Tower (Edinburgh), 93–94 Outwater, Alice, 75; Water, 28 Owyhee River (Oregon), 25, 117 oxygen, 28, 74, 81; oxygenation, 78; oxygenrich (water), 27, 29 Pacific Northwest, xi, 14, 15, 19, 27, 29 Pacific Ocean, 27

palette, 23, 61, 107 Palomar Medical Center (Escondido), 67–68 pandemics, 119 park, 70–74, 80, 95 parking garage, 115–116 Park Tower Prototypical American City, 95 passive design, 59, 122; building as thermal battery, 20; comfort, 20; heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilating, 4, 40; hydrological, 4; low-energy, 20, 40; stormwater management, 96; and water, 22, 34, 70, 79 Passivhaus initiative, 90 past, 74, 119, 121, 122 peak discharge, 105 peak phosphorous, 81 Pearce, Mick, xii; “Architecture of Sustainable Retreat,” 121; Council House 2, 69–70; Eastgate office complex, 69; “fractal cooling,” 69–70 pedestrians, 109 percolation tests, 39 persistent chemicals, 17 personal care products (PCPs), 17 Pettinari, James, 14 Phaidon (Living on Water), 12 phosphate, 81 photovoltaic array, 58 pipe-shed, 35, 108 Place Landscape Architects, 77 plaza(s), 73, 76–77, 111 policy, xii, 17, 30, 47, 106, 112, 121 pollinator prey base, 40 pollutants, 9, 16, 18, 29, 30, 58, 66–67, 75, 82; pollution loads (Nile River), 34; “ultraurban pollutants,” 17; wastewater industry, 75 polyfluoroalkyl substances, perfluorooctanesulfonate, 2, 17 pond(s), 58, 61, 77–78, 105 pool(s), 32, 61–62, 98, 108, 112 porosity, 31 portfolio approach, 19, 107–108 Portland (Oregon), ix, xi, 25, 30, 37, 47–52, 53, 57–58, 75–77, 102, 105, 109, 113, 115 Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, 113 Portland (Oregon) Water Bureau, x, 12, 15, 30 Port Phillip Bay (Australia), 104 potable/non-potable, x, 19, 51, 52–53, 104 Powell, John Wesley, 103, 108

Index Powerhouse projects (Snøhetta), 96 precipitation, 15, 16, 48, 52, 103, 105 present, 5, 12, 57, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 85, 86, 87, 114, 121–122 process(es), xii, 3, 19, 21, 39, 40, 42, 59, 63, 80, 81, 89, 96, 101, 107, 114, 116, 119; biological, 6; cleansing, 23; denitrification, 76; design, 1, 8–9, 12, 66, 70, 75, 82, 89, 101, 107, 115, 119; ecological, 80, 82; environmental, 54, 98; evaporation, 57; filtration, 27; hydrological, 72, 95, 115; natural, 5, 99, 120; treatment, 23; urban redevelopment, 36 project(s), x, xii, 2, 4, 9, 10, 21, 23, 35, 37, 39–41, 45–47, 54, 56, 57–58, 61–62, 67–70, 74–80, 82, 83, 89, 94–96, 98, 101, 102, 106–110, 112, 114, 119, 123; case study, 49–52; decentralized, 20; district-scale, 22; infrastructural, 36; intermediary, 121–122; megaprojects, 91; modernist, 7, 120, 122; residential, 53; site-scale, 22; urban, 53; “urban courtyardism,” 59, 78; wastewater, 80 public health, 2, 21, 75 Puget Sound (Washington), 16 pump station(s), 78 Puttman Infrastructure, 77 Qanats of Iran, 59 rain(s)/rainwater, ix–xi, 14, 15, 20, 29, 40, 46–49, 51–54, 65, 66, 102, 110; “The Case against Rainwater Harvesting,” 45; event(s)/storm(s), x, 6, 16–18, 27, 36, 37, 78–79, 105, 109, 110; Great Bear Rainforest, 27; harvested/captured, 8, 20, 36, 45–49, 51–53, 54, 57–59, 61–62, 69, 77, 106, 122; raindrops, ix; rainfall, 46, 48, 112; raingardens, 30; rain-plenty East, 103; storage, 8, 45; treatment, 8 Rancière, Jacques, 1 Raymond, Antonin and Noemi, 88 Recode (nonprofit), xii, 30, 105–106, 112; infrastructure as community development, 79; mimicking predevelopment conditions and systems, 30, 46 reflection(s), 3, 9, 23, 25, 27, 61, 65, 74, 97, 108, 117, 119 refugia, 28, 29 regulations/regulatory, 121; flexibility, 48; inertia, 22; innovation, 112; performancebased, 83; processes and standards, 21 Reis Magos (Madeira Island), 78–79, 82 Renaissance, 63, 108

163

Renaudie, Jean, and Gailhoustet, René: housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine, 95 replenishing/replenishment, 7, 10, 60, 119, 123 representation, 9, 23, 104, 112, 116; hybrid representational strategies, 83 reservoir, 19, 47, 74, 104 residence time, 30, 76 resilience/resiliency/resilient, 1, 4, 14, 16, 18, 21, 67, 72, 109, 122; centralized systems and, 75; distributed/decentralized systems and, 20; off-grid approach, 62; resilient decentralization, 22; resilience-oriented policy, 47 resource(s), x, 7, 16, 17, 20, 35, 48, 55, 65, 68, 90, 102, 113, 114, 120, 122; efficiency, 81; natural, 13; protection, 12; resource-saving devices, 4; scarcities, 5; water, xi, 2, 9, 12, 14, 51, 53, 62, 67, 68, 70, 96, 101; Watershed Resources Center, x; Willamette Resources and Educational Network, 40 revetment, 120 Ricoeur, Paul, 93–94, 98, 121; Time and Narrative, 98, 121 riparian, 27, 28, 35, 37, 39 ripples, 123 river(s)/riverway(s), xi, 28–29, 33, 41, 92, 105; The Organic Machine, 27; urban, 40, 108. See various rivers Riversdale Boyd Education Centre (Australia), 54 Roberts, Jeff, 16 Rocky Mountains, 15 Rogers, Raymond (Nature and the Crisis of Modernity), 2 Rome (Italy), 110 roof(s), x, 48, 54, 57, 77, 87, 112, 115; cooling towers, 67; deck, 58; extensive, 67; green, 30, 67, 68, 96, 102, 106; greenhouse/glass roof, 61; moss-sedum, 61, 67; rooftop(s), 29, 35, 67–68, 70, 93, 106; sail-like, 106; wet, 67–68 Ross, Rhys, xii, 12, 14, 19 Rotterdam (Netherlands), 36, 109 runnel(s), 60, 78 runoff, x, 6, 7, 30, 48, 65 Russel, Kory, 81 Rust Belt cities, 18 Sabil/Sabil-Kuttab, 59–60, 73 Sabil-Kuttab of Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda (Cairo), 60 Safe Drinking Water Act, 121

164

Index

Salmon-Safe (non-profit), xii salmon, salmonids, 17, 26, 28, 41, 43; life cycle history, 27; nitrogen and, 27; Salmon Nation, 14; types, 27, 29 San Bernardino (California), 36, 40, 109 San Francisco (California), 15, 69 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 69 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, 19, 22 sanitation, 11, 81, 122 Sankey diagram, 106 Santa Ana River (California), 36, 109 Santa Cruz (Madeira Island), 78 Santimauro, Amy, 57–58 Saunders, Doug, 83 al-Sayyida Nafisa Shrine, Cairo, 70 scarcity/scarcities, xi, 5, 22, 70, 101, 119 Scholz, Nat, 29 Scott, James C., 120 Scribner, Kevin, 81 Seattle (Washington), xi, 15, 21, 47, 53 Sedlak, David (Water 4.0), 1 SERA Architects, 115 settlement(s), 27, 29, 71, 122; patterns, 45, 103 Shoalhaven River (New South Wales), 54 “shower towers,” 70 side channel(s), 28, 39 side effects, 5, 6, 12, 75, 122 Sidwell Friends School (Washington, DC), 77–78 Sierra Mountains, 15, 19 Singer, Michael, x; garden typologies, 60; Holocaust Survival Memorial Garden, 60–61; IBN/Alterra Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature Research, 60–61 sites(s), 7, 36, 38–39, 40, 47, 51, 57, 61, 68, 71, 74, 78–79, 89, 94, 102, 106, 109, 111, 120, 123; calculable, 121; design, 13; on-site, 6, 9, 30, 45, 53, 76, 77; planning, 37; sitescale, 1, 8, 19–22, 34, 45, 97, 101; work, 107 sky, ix, 15, 20, 33, 46, 59, 85, 86, 87, 96, 97, 98, 111–113 Smith, Katelynn, 57–58 Smith, Tim: Civic Ecology framework, 115 Smout Allen: Grand Egyptian Museum, 114 Snøhetta: Powerhouse projects, 96; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 69 snowpack, 15, 19, 34, 74 society, xi, 2, 13, 75, 102, 121; consumerist, 17; contemporary, 7, 123; hydraulic, 13, 14,

120, 122; hydrological, 19; modern, 12; urban, 14 soft and the blue, 27, 31, 35–36, 57 soil, 13, 27, 31, 36, 39, 67, 108 Southern Nevada Water Authority, 16 species, 3, 66, 68; anadromous, 26; aquatic, 26, 40; bird, 39; die-offs, 5; distribution(s), 5, 15; diversity, 67; salmon, 26–27, 29 “Sponge City” initiative, 31 Spurlock Landscape Architects: Keeling Apartments, 37 stair/stairway(s), 55, 57, 58 Standing Rock Nation, 2 Steiner, Frederick, 6–7 stewardship, 3, 66, 82, 122 stone(s), 61, 71 stories, 47, 58, 59, 112, 114, 115 storm, x, 15, 28, 33, 36, 37, 57, 78, 102 stormwater, 16, 29, 36, 45, 62, 66, 67, 78, 96, 105, 106; basins, 77; infiltration, 30; intercept/capture (to), 20, 47, 48, 60, 61, 79, 106, 112; machines, 109; quality, 30; warm and oxygen poor, 29 stream(s), 27, 35; channels/channelization, 23, 28–29; function, 29; sinuosity (meanders), 28; stream-level perspectives on the city, 26; “The Urban Stream Syndrome,” 28 street(s), ix, xi, 34–35, 39, 58, 59, 60, 70–71, 73, 76–77, 87, 93, 106, 108, 111–112 Stretto House (Dallas), 106, 111 Struvite (magnesium potassium phosphate), 81 Stuhr, Brian, 102 Stuhr, Michael, x, 15 Stuttgart (Germany), 60–61 surface-to-volume ratio, 67, 69 sustainable/sustainability, xi, 8, 19, 51; agriculture, 78; architecture(s), 1, 3, 61, 66, 90, 98, 112, 114; business practices, 105; Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, xii, 12, 15, 19, 101; city/cities, 98, 104; design, 114; development, 2, 11, 79; investments, 83; “loner” sustainability, 20, 53; Retreat, 121; United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 11 Switzerland, 55 Sydney (Australia), 31 synergies/synergistic, 45, 79; between architectures/buildings and landscapes, 1, 31, 103; design, 5; horizons, 96; water, 53, 103 system(s), 3, 5–6, 21, 30, 39, 41, 43, 67, 77, 102,

Index 114, 116; adaptive, 68; architectural, 54; biologically-based, 75–76, 81; blue-green street, 111; building, 1–2, 7, 19, 42, 52, 68, 76, 90–91, 94–96, 99, 107; Building Envelope Systems and Assemblies (NAAB), 13; Building Service Systems (NAAB), 13; centralized, 1, 16, 18, 22, 46, 62, 75; cooling, 58; development charges, 76; distributed/ decentralized, 1, 8, 22, 46, 75, 82; districtscale, 19; ecological, 8; ecosystem, 20, 40; educational, 74; environmental, 95, 99; Environmental Systems (NAAB), 13; hydrological, 40, 66; irrigation, 61; living, 98; National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), 16; natural, 4, 75; next generation, 19; snowmelt driven, 15; sustainable, 66, 82; urban, 20, 74, 123; “wadi,” 111; wastewater, 8–9, 15, 22–23, 66, 74–79, 81–82,; water, 1, 7, 8–10, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 22–23, 28, 40, 45–46, 47, 52–53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 66, 76, 78–79, 94, 96, 101, 104, 106, 108–109, 112, 115, 122–123 Taiwan, 95 technology, xi, 53, 69, 90, 115; Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 3; wastewater, 108; water, 108 temperature(s), 15, 29, 53, 74, 105 Thallon, Rob (Graphic Guide to Frame Construction), 42 Thames River (England), 80 Thermal Baths at Vals (Switzerland), 55 Tierney, Matthew, xi time(s), xi, 4, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 22, 29, 34, 36, 37, 40, 53, 60, 68, 74, 78, 81, 82, 87, 92, 101, 120, 123; daytime, x; full-time, 48; lag time, 105; “liquid substance of time,” 63; residence time, 30, 76; springtime, ix; summertime, 52; Time and Narrative, 98, 121; time line, 104 tinajas altas or “high tanks,” 33 Todd, John, 81, 123 Todd, Nancy Jack, 81 Tod Williams Bille Tsien Architects | Partners: Natatorium at Cranbrook Academy, 98 toilet to tap, 17 topography/topographic, 13, 87, 89, 91, 92, 103, 104, 108 tower(s), 5, 90, 93–94, 96, 112; cooling towers, 67, 76, 79; “shower towers,” 70

165

toxicity, 29 transit-oriented development (TOD), 30 tree(s), x, 27–28, 35, 39, 42, 69 tricking filter, 73, 76–77, 79 triumph of the commons, 120 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins), 121 Tucson (Arizona), 32, 47 Turton, Anthony, “The Case against Rainwater Harvesting,” 45 typhoid, 14, 46 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 25 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal(s), 11 United States Army Corps of Engineers, 103 University of Arizona, 47 University of Baltimore, 95 University of North Carolina at Charlotte, xi University of Oregon, xi, 4, 57, 81 urban/urbanism/urbanization, xi, 11–12, 33, 53, 55, 63, 65, 67, 90, 95–96, 116; architecture(s)/architectural horizons/ machines, 4, 8–9, 25, 45, 56, 59, 65, 67–68, 83, 95, 99; De Urbanisten, 36–37, 109; district(s), 7, 19, 77, 93, 108, 109, 111; dwellers, 13, 46, 66, 90, 111; ecosystem(s), 7–8, 30; environment(s), 5, 22, 31, 34–35, 59, 66, 71, 81, 98, 106, 108, 115; futures, v, 13, 45, 47; growth boundaries, 91; habitat, 39; heat island effect, 74; history, 2; hydrology, 30–31; infrastructure(s), 14, 18, 74–75; inhabitants, 93; landscape(s), 1, 8, 25, 29–31, 34, 56, 66, 77, 94, 104, 108, 109; Megaform as Urban Landscape, 91; micro-urban, 70, 94, 111; place-making, 36, 71; populations, 73; quarters, 68; rapid, 1, 18, 30, 73; redevelopment, 36, 70; region, 92; rivers/riverways, 40, 108; setting(s), 37, 47, 68, 91; space(s), 35–36, 83, 109–111; squares, 109; system(s), 19–20, 46, 74, 98; topographies, 117; ultraurban, 98; “ultra-urban pollutants,” 17; “urban courtyardism,” 59, 78; “The Urban Stream Syndrome,” 28; waters, 3–4, 8–9, 14, 17, 19–20, 22–23, 26, 29–31, 43, 85, 101, 105, 108–109, 119–120, 123; Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), 30; watershed, xii, 19, 26, 28, 40–41, 94, 108, 110; urban design, x, 1, 26, 35, 36, 47, 54, 66, 74, 75, 82, 109, 112; micro-urban design inter-

166

Index

ventions, 70, 94; wastewater and, 76–77; Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), 30 Urban Stream Syndrome, 28 urine, 81 Utzon, Jørn: Bagsvaerd Church (Copenhagen), 97 Valletta (Malta), 59–60 Venice (Italy), 122 ventilation, 58 vernacular, 5, 10, 122 Vigil, Kenneth, 15, 28; Clean Water, 121 “wadi,” 111 Wageningen (Netherlands), 61–62 Walkiewicz, Marie, 113 wall(s), 61, 71, 87–88, 115; living, 53, 68, 69 Walsh, Christopher, et. al.: “Urban Stream Syndrome,” 28 Wang, Weijen, 59, 78 Washington, DC, 76, 103 Washington State University, 29, 30, 35 wastewater, 8, 16, 52–53, 67, 83, 108; plant(s), 18, 37, 102; systems, 15, 22–23, 46, 66, 74– 81; tidal wetlands and, 76–77; treatment, 7, 9, 37, 88, 74–81; as urban design strategy, 89; utilities, 101; Wastewater Treatment Systems as Wetland Alleys, 74 water, 6, 27, 38, 42, 63, 68, 77, 80, 93, 99, 110, 117; and architecture, xii, 59, 106; Arizona Water Project, 47; The Atlas of Water, 11; bodies, 9, 17–18, 20, 22, 43, 74–75; brackish, 67; budget, 8, 47–53, 57; challenges, 2, 14, 23, 101, 107; chemistry, xii, 17, 115; clean/cleansed, 4, 58, 74, 75, 82, 116, 120; Clean Water, 121; Clean Water Act, 16, 121; conservation, 67; consumption, 51, 67, 76, 104; cooling/cooled, 76, 114; costs, 11, 22; crises, 8, 12; Croton Water Filtration Plant (Bronx), 106; demand, 15, 48, 50–51; dewatering, 71; diseases, 14; distributed/ decentralized, 1, 46; district(s), 22, 59; drawing/redrawing, 102–103; drinking, x, 11, 17; feature(s), 61, 74, 105, 106, 112; flow(s), 33, 36, 60, 72, 104, 109, 120; fresh, 26, 46; future(s), 41, 45, 47; hub, 68; independence, 47; infrastructure(s), 1, 13, 15–16, 18–19, 22, 30, 60, 73, 77, 79, 93, 101–102, 109, 122, 123; level(s), 31, 40, 104; Living on Water, 12; management, 15, 36, 46, 59,

103, 104, 109; “Maps of Water Holes,” 32; market, 102; medium, 25, 28, 43, 65, 69; Miami-Wade Water and Sewer Department, xii, 15; My Story as Told by Water, 23; net zero water, 51–52, 81, 94; nonpotable, 51; ocean, 26; The Oregon Water Handbook, 41; piped, 46, 78; plazas, 111; pleats, ix; policies, 106; Portland Water Bureau, x, 12, 15; potable, 19, 52–53, 104; quality, 1, 5, 8–9, 11, 21–22, 26, 30, 46, 53, 72, 75, 78; resources, 14, 67; reuse/recycle, 19, 34, 40, 59, 66–67, 108; Safe Drinking Water Act, 121; salinity, 104; schematic, 8, 53–54, 57, 96, 116; The Secret Knowledge of Water, 32; sector, 3; “sky water,” 46; snow-water equivalent, 15; Southern Nevada Water Authority, 16; squares, 109; storage, 20, 36, 53, 55–56, 60, 74, 111; sources/supply, x–xi, 1–2, 7–8, 15– 17, 19, 21, 32, 34, 36, 46–47, 49, 51, 70, 78, 93, 101; surface, 46, 105; systems, 1, 7–10, 12–14, 16, 19, 22–23, 40, 45–46, 49, 52–53, 61, 66, 76, 94, 96, 101, 104, 107, 108, 112, 115, 122–123; temperature(s), 15, 28; treatment, 1, 21, 34, 40, 57, 58, 73, 79, 101; urban, 85, 105, 108, 109, 112, 119; use(s), 11, 40, 45, 48, 104; utilities, 101; Water, 28; Water (Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566), 108; Water 4.0, 1; water-centric, 7, 23, 34, 65; Water Resources Eastside Watersheds Team, 113; Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), 30; Water Square Benthemplein, 36–37; waterways, 74; water-wise, 56 Waterman Gardens (San Bernardino), 36, 78, 109 Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), 30 watershed, x, xii, 2, 9, 19, 26, 28, 36, 40, 82, 98, 103, 123; definition, 92; horizon of, 92–94; sub-watershed, 35, 41, 92, 110; watershed mind, 93–94, 108 Water Square Benthemplein (Rotterdam), 36–37 waterways, 17, 26, 28, 29, 31, 40, 74 weather, xiii, 36; condition(s), 17, 82; event, x well(s), 59, 60, 72, 76, 102 West Cambewarra (New South Wales), 54 Western liberal societies, 120 We the People of Detroit (nonprofit), 11 wetland(s), 2, 4, 75, 80, 112; alleys, 74; cells, 76; complexes, 27–29, 40, 74; constructed, 39–40, 58, 61, 73, 76, 77, 106, 115–116; hydroperiod, 40; subsurface, 58, 77; West

Index Eugene, 40; tidal, 76–77; treatment, 76, 79; wood chip, 82 White, Richard, 29, 41; The Organic Machine, 27 wildlife, 75 Willamette River (Oregon), 37, 57–58; Willamette Resources and Educational Network, 40; Willamette River Keeper, 39; Willamette River Valley Oregon White Oak prairie, 27 Williams, Travis, 39 Willis, Michael, xii, 23, 102

167

Wilson, Mark, 39–40 wind, 80, 110 Wittfogel, Karl, 13 Wolf, Scott, 21 Worster, Donald, 13 Yoder, Douglas, xii, 15, 18 Young, Robert, 4 Zaynhum neighborhood (Cairo), 73 zinc, 6, 29, 43 Zumthor, Peter: Thermal Baths at Vals, 55

The skyline as reflected in the Nile in the city of Rashid (Rosetta), Egypt