Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty Through Planning and Design [2 ed.] 9780367194390, 9780367194406, 9780429202384

Citation preview

“Site Matters is serious scholarship on an urgent topic. Site is so much more than landscape—it is a concept loaded with social and political meaning, imbued with narrative that needs to be revealed and understood if we are to address climate change—and now global pandemics—in a resourceful way. This reader provides an essential and plausible foundation for tapping that intelligence.” Emily Talen, University of Chicago “This innovative and now fully updated set of short essays invites reflection on the meaning of the site as a focal point for the design imagination. The collection provides a uniquely fine-grained and polyphonic vantage point for the enrichment of urban discourse in uncertain times.” Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge “Site Matters predicted a relational and contingent trajectory for architecture. Its assertive wake-up call implied that design disciplines, including my own, had insufficiently theorized how site circumstances shape project outcomes. The authors were right. I welcome this new work for its even broader transdisciplinary reach and its frank embrace of earth-bound realities we dare not overlook.” Gary Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Harvard GSD, Principal, Reed Hilderbrand “The original edition of Site Matters was pioneering in its multidisciplinary approach. This new edition further widens the lens, reflecting the complexity and uncertainty of the times in which we live, and the scale of the challenges we face, particularly the climate crisis. Kahn and Burns, and their diverse roster of contributors, are again ahead of the curve, searching—with deliberation and urgency—for the way forward.” Deborah Berke, Dean, Yale School of Architecture

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Site Matters

In the era of the Anthropocene, site matters are more pressing than ever. Building on the concepts, theories, and multidisciplinary approaches raised in the first edition, this publication strives to address the changes that have taken place over the last 15 years with new material to complement and re-position the initial volume. Reaching across design disciplines, this highly illustrated anthology assembles essays from architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, historians, and artists to explore ways to physically and conceptually engage site. Thoughtful discourse and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory to contextualize the meanings of site in the built environment. The increasingly complex hybridity of constructed environments today demands new tools for thinking about and working with site. Drawing contributions from outside and within the traditional design disciplines, this edition will trace important developments in site thinking with new essays on topics such as climate change, landscape as infrastructure, shifts from global to planetary urbanization debates, and the proliferation of participatory site transformation practices. Edited by two leading practitioners and academics, Site Matters juxtaposes timeless contributions from individuals including Elizabeth Meyer, Robert Beauregard, and Robin Dripps with original new writings from Peter Marcuse, Jane Wolff, Neil Brenner, and Thaïsa Way, amongst others, to recontextualize and reignite the debate around site. An ideal text for students, academics, and researchers interested in site and design theory. Andrea Kahn is a professor of site thinking in research and practice at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp/Malmö, where she facilitates SLU Landscape, a research and teaching collaboration initiative. She is founder of designCONTENT, a consultancy offering strategic and communicative process support for complex design, planning, research, writing, curatorial and editorial projects. She has taught architecture, urban design, planning, and landscape extensively in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Her current research interest revolves around collaboration, communication, and synthetic, transdisciplinary knowledge creation.

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Carol J. Burns, FAIA, an educator and principal with Taylor & Burns Architects, has taught at Harvard GSD, MIT, UVA, Yale, and Wentworth Institute of Technology. She pioneered the founding of the AIA Women’s Leadership Summit, as well as the BSA Research Grants program, which spurred the AIA Upjohn and Small Project grant programs. Her research has resulted in books, articles, competitions, and design studios. Integrating education and practice within a culture of research, she has with her firm designed buildings, spaces, and theoretical projects recognized with awards, including the national Honor Award for Excellence from the Society of College and University Planners.

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Site Matters Strategies for Uncertainty Through Planning and Design Second Edition

Edited by Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns

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Second edition published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2004 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-19439-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-19440-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-20238-4 (ebk) Typeset in Univers by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

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Contents

Preface to the Second Edition ix Acknowledgments xiv   1. Why Site Matters Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns   2. Claiming the Site: Ever Evolving Social-Legal Conceptions of Ownership and Property Harvey M. Jacobs

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  3. Reclaiming Context: Between Autonomy and Engagement Esin Komez Daglioglu

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  4. Site Citations: The Grounds of Modern Landscape Architecture Elizabeth Meyer

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  5. Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

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 6. Groundwork Robin Dripps

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  7. Landscape Processes as Site Context Simon Dixon

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  8. In the Anthropocene, Site Matters in Four Ways Dirk Sijmons

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  9. Shifting Sites: Everything Is Different Now Kristina Hill

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10. Adaptive Systems: Environment, Site, and Building Carol J. Burns

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11. Translating Sites: A Plea for Radicant Design Lisa Diedrich

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12. Defining Urban Sites: Toward Ecotone-Thinking for an Urbanizing World Andrea Kahn

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13. Portfolio: Sites, Stories, Representations, Citizens Jane Wolff

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14. Urban Site as Collective Knowledge Thaïsa Way

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15. From Place to Site: Negotiating Narrative Complexity Robert A. Beauregard

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16. Neighborhoods Apart: Site/Non-Sight and Suburban Apartments Paul M. Hess

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17. From Gerrymandering to Co-Mandering: Redrawing the Lines Peter Marcuse

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Afterwords: What does site look like to… Neil Brenner, Naomi Darling, Anne Gatling Haynes, Claudia Herasme, Natalie Mahowald, Jim Musser, Judith Nitsch, Jeremy Till, and Janet Echelman

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List of Contributors 278 Figure Credits 282 Index 284

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On 5 December 2019, a full-page article in the first section of the New York Times appeared under the headline “A World Speeding ’Dangerously Close’ to a Tipping Point,” qualified by a subheading, “Climate Change and Its Effects Are Accelerating, Scientists Say.” As if that was not alarming enough, the accompanying pull-out quote from the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, stated, “It’s more urgent than ever to proceed with mitigation.” Each day the newspaper devotes more space to climate emergency stories, confirming how the site of human existence seems to elude every attempt at design control or planning mastery. On the cusp of the second decade of the 21st century, perceptions of this global situation and its impacts have changed significantly since Site Matters was first published 15 years ago. Research for this second edition, as well as teaching and practice experience gleaned in the intervening years, confirms that the 2005 collection retains relevance and readership. Most likely, this reflects the reality that site matters are so much more pressing in 2020. Now more than ever, we need tools for thinking about and working with the complex hybridity and dynamism of our constructed environment. There is a practical urgency to address not just concepts and constructs but systems and actions: interlinked, constantly changing, unpredictable, hyper-relational. At the same time, even with the Anthropocene as inescapable backdrop, much concerning site remains the same. The term still embraces substantial objects and epistemological subjects. It still points to constructs at once ephemeral, empirical, and experiential. As subject matter, site continues to beg for attention because it straddles so many disciplinary and practice domains. Making sense of site, a thick concept (possibly even a boundary concept, common to yet flexible in meaning among various fields) remains an exercise of continual crossing and recrossing of knowledge categories. The first edition of Site Matters assembled scholarly insight from architectural theory, history, and practice, as well as contemporary art, urban planning, landscape architecture, and urban design. At the time of publication, the volume was distinguished for its multidisciplinary approach. Bringing into focus then-current thinking on the subject, it sought to examine a fundamental component of physical design

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that had previously been almost totally ignored as a subject for serious theoretical or historical consideration. The book was conceived to fill a gap in existing literature; at the time, the design fields lacked studies addressing site, either in focused terms or, more generally, as a complex array of conditions and conditioning forces. Examining narrow and broad definitions of site to explore their differences and clarify their relative meaning, Site Matters argued for site as a relational construct that acquires definition through circumstances and conditions of interface and interchange, suggesting great breadth and potential in site thinking. As noted in the first edition’s Editor’s Introduction (republished here as Chapter 1), the collection only began to deal with the full range of ideas and things that might rightfully be deemed site matters for design. By shaping an identifiable discourse pertinent to the physical design disciplines, the first edition helped create a new vocabulary to elucidate and qualify the many meanings of site, elevating it to a new level of visibility and scholarly interest. To that end, this second edition introduces new material to complement and reposition essays from the earlier collection. It traces and tracks important developments, shaping site thinking since the early 2000s. These include growing attention to transdisciplinary research and practice, landscape as infrastructure, participatory design and planning processes, the advent and impacts of big data, an escalating climate crisis, heightened awareness of the Anthropocene, and a concomitant reorientation away from viewing the Earth as an operational sphere of human thought and action and toward recognizing in its stead as a lively Earth system – comprising interacting physical, chemical, and biological processes, consisting of land, oceans, atmosphere, and poles, and including the planet’s natural cycles, as well as deep Earth processes. In this radically reconfigured context, the question of what counts as site matters opens out to new realms of inquiry. Criteria for selecting and commissioning authors for this volume were various. Revising a first edition affords the chance to gain some insight on its legacy. It also carries the editorial responsibility to discern whether essays penned at an earlier moment, under different practical circumstances and in other discursive contexts, remain pertinent. Leaving behind select original works hardly diminishes their importance. Rather, it allows the 2005 collection to retain its unique value while creating space to give voice to new writers for whom that collection served as an intellectual springboard to hone new concepts and theories that continue to enrich site thinking in discourse and practice. Some original contributors brought forward in this edition have opted to examine how recent trajectories in their thinking rest on the foundation of their earlier work. Returning to a subject after 15 years also allows for its reframing. This edition draws from outside traditional design and planning disciplines, as well as from within. Prompted by the scope and complexity of earth system challenges, it echoes a shift on many fronts toward desiloing knowledge, reimagining practice domains, and fostering integrative perspectives. Resource scarcity, mass migrations, weather weirding, coastal rise, drought, decreasing biodiversity: no sole discipline or profession can tackle these and similar forces reshaping physical environments today. Wicked problems, those that

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elude simple solutions and call for constant reframing, necessitate transdisciplinary alliances and interdisciplinary approaches. Many of the new contributions derive insights from crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries rather than settling down within the confines of a single field. A new edition also provides occasion for critical reflection. In 2004, as Carol J. Burns and I were preparing the Site Matters manuscript for publication, we had to confront the challenging task of sequencing 12 specially commissioned scholarly essays. To help navigate the thickness of our subject, we invented a tool we dubbed the didactic table of contents, or DTOC for short. Working with concepts, terminologies, and disciplinary positions that emerged as powerful shapers of perception, representation, and methods of engagement, the DTOC led us to identify a set of “site constructs” used to theorize or treat site. The 2004 list included social, material, experiential, historiographical, ecological, representational, analytic, and relational constructs. Reflecting back to look forward, that list and the very notion of site constructs merit reconsideration. In 2020, inhabiting what Indian writer Amitav Ghosh calls a “lively planet,” the once valuable theoretical conceit of “site as x construct” now comes across as overly formal and static. Many of the new works, as well as some of the revised 2005 essays, consider and view site in decidedly more fluid terms. That site as political construct did not appear on the original DTOC matrix also suggests a striking omission. This volume aims to address that oversight through revised and new materials that reveal how politics weave into site thinking of every ilk. Acknowledging broadening views regarding what counts as scholarly writing, this edition differs from the first in assembling more diverse voices and writing styles, with conventional essayistic works set beside interviews and portfolio-like pieces. It positions writers who hew close to long-established standards for academic paper writing alongside scholars who adopt more activist (less neutral) tones. This intentional mix at once conveys the seriousness and the urgency of the matters at hand.

The Essays: A Roadmap A simple editorial strategy underpins this edition of Site Matters: rather than append a separate new section, newly commissioned works interleaf with content carried forward from 2005. Not only does augmenting first-edition essays reveal developments in site thinking, but this juxtapositional structure reinforces the editorial position elaborated in “Why Site Matters” about the relationality of site. New writings recontextualize original essays, resituate ideas, and invite new readings of the previous work. This edition carries ten voices forward and introduces sixteen new ones. Those new contributors count six essayists, one interviewee, and nine writers who generously agreed to pen brief texts for a multivocal Afterword(s). Of the ten authors from 2005, two chose to reprint their earlier essays unchanged, two delivered wholly new texts thematically aligned with their prior contributions, and the remainder lightly revised and updated earlier writing. Although thematized along different lines, like the first edition, this one is loosely organized around three overlapping clusters, where

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the final pair of essays in one might equally be read as belonging to the next. Each cluster – groundwork, site as state of change, and site stories – counts seven chapters, overlaps included. The first cluster, groundwork, offers foundational and contextualizing insights. Beginning with the 2005 Editor’s Introduction, now Chapter 1, it includes three 2005 authors (Harvey Jacobs, Elizabeth Meyer, and Robin Dripps), who situate site thinking in historical terms, and three new contributors (Esin Komez Daglioglu, Denise Markonish, and Simon Dixon). Architectural historian Komez Daglioglu proposes a fresh definition of context to reinforce architectural practice and discourse as at once critical and engaged. An interview with curator Markonish considers the museum as site, drawing a distinction between site-responsive and site-specific contemporary artistic practices. Dixon, a geomorphologist interested in urban morphology, focuses on the dynamic processes and forceful human activities that substantially reshape the Earth’s surface, suggesting an expanded perspective on site temporalities, past, present, and future. The work of Dripps, like that of Dixon, foregrounds site flows; as such, both essays fit equally well in the second thematic grouping, site as state of change. A portfolio by Dirk Sijmons combines image and text to claim that waking up in the Anthropocene must spur a search for new professional attitudes, responsibilities, and a renewed look at the ethics of design. Kristina Hill’s revised essay shares with Sijmons a tone of great urgency, arguing that climate change and its secondary and tertiary impacts requires conceiving of sites as a nexus within systems of flows. In a new essay by Carol J. Burns, even architecture, long considered a static frame for human activity, shifts, changes, transforms, degrades, breaks down, and evolves. Lisa Diedrich (to whom we owe the expression “site as state of change”) also addresses transformations, positing a new conceptual framework for bringing transient site aspects to the fore. Lisa’s contribution – as well as my essay, with a new postscript on ecotone thinking, enlarging upon the original five urban site concepts – bring forward site representation, making these two chapters equally part of the third cluster, site stories. That last thematic cluster concerns who gets to tell stories of site and how these stories get told. The portfolio by Jane Wolff proposes methods that translate rigorous site information into widely accessible terms, offering representational strategies to acknowledge and document a site’s plural stories. Thaïsa Way expands further upon site plurality in her discussion of the transdisciplinary research platform Urban@UW and how it works to reshape not only the ways scholars discern, understand, and imagine the urban site, but how the academy itself gets defined. Three 2005 authors (Robert Beauregard, Paul Hess, and Peter Marcuse) close the last thematic grouping. Beauregard’s lightly revised piece on the narrative saturation of site acquires new resonance bracketed by Way and by Hess, who, in paying close attention to mappings of suburbia, expose how representational means and methods just as easily obscure site qualities, as reveal them. Lastly, Marcuse revisits his original subject, areas of concern, and the challenge of drawing boundary lines around study areas in planning, with a timely new work on gerrymandering, showing the unavoidably political condition of all planning and design.

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The multivocal Afterword(s) complete the collection. Unlike the first edition postscript, these short texts serve less as a wrap-up than an opening up. Brief provocations, they indicate only a few of the many routes site thinking and practice may follow. Understanding site will always depend on where one stands. In our 2005 Editor’s Introduction, Carol J. Burns and I identified three distinct viewpoints on site: area of control, area of influence, and area of effect. That language captures the complexity of site as layered situation, and this second edition retains it for good reason. Yet as I conclude this preface to the second edition in this time of great uncertainty, I also feel compelled to question that earlier terminology and to offer up a critically nuanced alternative formulation: area of alleged control, area of assumed influence, and area of projected effect. With these qualifiers, I aim on one hand to highlight the inexorable unpredictability of all relationality (whether of the most intensely personal or the most profoundly global sort) and, on the other, to embrace, rather than lament, the associated loss of control, since the unknowns that characterize unpredictability bring with them as yet unexplored sites, full of power and of hope. Andrea Kahn, December 2019

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Acknowledgments

As editors, we are grateful for assistance from many involved with Site Matters. We are thankful to all the contributors to both editions for thoughtful content and collaboration. We are indebted to Rhonda Postrel for early guidance and to Matt Cusick for the cover art. We appreciate that our circle of contacts was expanded by Neil Brenner, Nancy Levinson, Bob Beauregard, and Jane Wolff. We had the gift of technical support from Harold Marcuse. For concrete help with the preparation of this book, we thank Melinda Rankin and Nancy Eklund, as well as our editors at Routledge, Grace Harrison and Julia Pollacco. And to our patient and loving families.

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1. Why Site Matters Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns

As part of a bid by New York City to host the 2012 Olympic Games, five multidisciplinary teams of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers and planners were invited to offer design ideas for an Olympic Village. One team was led by a New York firm, three by European designers, and one by a firm from Los Angeles.1 Proposals were requested for a particular parcel of land at the southern tip of Queens West, a waterfront area (formerly Hunter’s Point) with unimpeded views across the East River to mid-town Manhattan. Publicly exhibited in the spring of 2004, all five designs were presented similarly, in three-dimensional models with graphic panels including images and text. Each team conformed to established presentation requirements, yet each nonetheless depicted their project and its urban surroundings in notably different ways. Despite common constraints regarding scale and size, the models varied widely in extent and character. One team focused on local edge conditions, conceiving the site in terms of immediate physical surroundings. In contrast, another treated the site strictly as conceptual terrain, using the proposals to engage the history of ideas about the area.2 Some teams viewed it as belonging to the city at large, “opening the site as a New York City attraction” or “creating the largest urban waterfront park in New York City.”3 Two teams opted to construct additional models. One focused on the design of a cluster of buildings to show the proposal in greater architectural detail. The other depicted a large swath of Manhattan Island, from the East River to the Hudson, situating the Olympic Village in relation to midtown. The different physical areas identified as relevant to each project and the distinct strategies used to see and understand these areas prompt a question: what constitutes a site in design? For the disciplines and professions concerned with design of the physical environment, site matters. Not only are physical design projects always located in a specific place, the work of physical design also necessarily depends on notional understandings about the relationships between a project and a locale. Given that design reconfigures the environment using physical and conceptual means, articulate comprehension of site in physical and conceptual terms should be fundamental. Surprisingly, however, the design field overall has a history of scanty literature directly addressing the subject. The first edition of this volume began to correct that striking omission, and this current edition aims to follow suit.

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As exemplified by the Olympic Village proposals, a specific locale provides the material ground for action in design practice, and ideas about site provide a theoretical background against which such actions are taken. Such received understandings of the subject – even if unnoticed, unexamined, or inarticulate – inevitably precede design action. The word site is actually quite simple; in common parlance, it refers to the ground chosen for something and to the location of some set of activities or practices. Each specialized area of physical design – architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning – nevertheless construes the location of its activities and practices overtly and tacitly through its own normative approaches. For example, landscape architecture treats site explicitly as material terrain. Architecture’s traditional focus on buildings has led to a tacit focus on the lot as the ground for design intervention. Urban planning, given its concerns beyond the purely physical, tends to construe location more broadly, incorporating social, economic, and political concerns. Urban design, more recently established as a field, tends to borrow notions about site from the other areas of design, drawing upon the material specificity associated with landscape architecture and architecture, as well as the broader, less physical concerns of planning. The multiplicity of comprehensions about the subject of site has rarely been made explicit. Within each of the design specialty areas can be found literature on specific locales and projects. However, even internally, none of the design areas has systematically treated “thinking about sites” in a disciplinary sense, and certainly not in reference to allied areas or to other disciplines, which also comprehend this fundamental topic in different ways. Too little has changed in the years since Amos Rapoport noted the absence of this subject in design theory: “I am not certain that any consistent theory of site as a form determinant has ever been proposed.”4 Without making claim for consistent theory, this anthology ushers the subject of site out of its theoretical and historiographical obscurity. While consistent in its avoidance of site-related issues, in the 30 years that elapsed between Rapoport’s observation and the first edition of Site Matters, the direction of design theory discourse changed substantially. Architectural theory in particular, through the early aughts (2000s), became ever more disassociated from the consideration of physical conditions, veering toward a progressively abstract array of concerns. This shift – due in part to increased contact with other disciplines, including philosophy and literary theory – has both enriched and impoverished architectural thinking. In joining, and at times initiating, a shift from modernist to postmodernist thought, architectural discourse has become more rigorous, broad, and inclusive. But at the same time, the fundamental unity between theory and practice has been discounted. Theory specialists have emerged seeking status as distinct from professional practitioners, and design discourse has suffered from contention born of hardening the line between theorizing and practicing.5 Stressing the fundamental integration of theory and practice, this volume engages in and promotes thinking through practices themselves. As editors, we conceive of theorizing in general as “both an abstraction from, and an enrichment of, concrete experience.”6 Methodologically, concrete theorizing recognizes theoretical activity as itself a practice and considers any reflective practice to

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be necessarily informed by theory. Though concrete theory might derive from (or criticize) canonical texts, it can also rise from questions posed by practical activity. Concrete theory can begin by elucidating design ideas and exploring their manifestations in practice, or it might begin in the articulation of that which practice has already appropriated in reality, or it can find its sources in abstraction in order to arrive at the “reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”7 In this approach, design action and design philosophy take place in the same realm, one not dissociable from the realm of political thought and political action. We agree with Antonio Gramsci that the philosophy of each person “is contained in its entirety in [her] political action.”8 This book explores and critically discerns how sites are engaged by, and conceptualized through, design. As editors, our overall intention is twofold: to lay out what we think site means and to explore how these meanings inform thinking about specific sites as places for design action and activism. We tie thinking about site as a conceptual construct – site thinking – to the grounded site as a physical condition – thinking about a site.

What Is a Site? In design discourse, a site too often is taken as a straightforward entity contained by boundaries that delimit it from the surroundings. This oversimplified understanding has arguable basis, as every work of physical design focuses on spatially finite places. The great majority of professional commissions begin not only with a client, but also with a predesignated lot owned or controlled by that client. In this sense, designers often receive a site as a delimited given entity. Design pedagogy traditionally has mirrored this aspect of practice. A majority of design studio courses, even those working with hypothetical problems, assign specific locations to students as fixed constraints so that the locale for academic projects also seems delimited and predetermined. Practice and pedagogy reinforce similar tacit understandings of site as a circumscribed physical area given a priori. Though generally accepted, perhaps for reasons of expediency, such an approach to the site in design misses much. It suggests that designers have no role to play in determining sites and, conversely, that the determination of a site does not bear on matters of design consideration. By implication, it minimizes the consequentiality of factors that inform site choice. By association, it similarly brackets out the set of design concerns conventionally and misleadingly referred to as predesign issues, including also program, financing, and other strategic factors that shape and structure a project. More profoundly still, it occludes the fact that a site is defined by those holding the power to do so. Indeed, all other discussions of site follow from that structural certainty. At the same time, existing physical conditions have an enormous influence on ensuing design proposals – both academic and professional – and the final form of built works. Landform and land itself can become the focus of design. Some projects – such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water or the Quinta da Conceiçao Swimming Pool by Alvaro Siza – gain renown for forceful, direct engagement with geological and hydrological

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Figure 1.1  Enric Miralles/Carme Pinos, “Tiro con Arco Competition,” Archery Range, Barcelona. Plan and section of entry ramp and earth berming. (Courtesy of Carme Pinos)

conditions. Such features, along with orientation, topography, and drainage, connect to larger systems that operate in various ways at multiple scales: the solar system, geomorphology, and the water cycle. Any place registers tangible certain aspects of many larger, more spatially extensive patterns, orders, and systems. Design can modify site features in relation to larger patterns: vegetation can shade the sun, topographies might be altered, and watercourses might be channeled, buried, or unearthed. Cities – such as New Orleans, Prague, and Boston – reshape the edge between land and water. Channeled watercourses in the Florida Everglades create sinkholes. The Grands Projets in Paris, located to spur development, affect urban growth. Each built project creates

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Why Site Matters

new forces within its own area and also modifies and influences systems that both reach beyond the site and operate within it. Conceived over time this way, the site has three distinct areas. The first, most obvious one is the area of control, easy to trace in the property lines designating legal metes and bounds. The second, encompassing forces that act upon a plot without being confined to it, can be called the area of influence. Third is the area of effect – the domains impacted following design action. These three territories overlap despite their different geographies and temporalities. The area of control – most commonly referred to in design discourse with the term site – describes the most limited field spatially and temporally. Forces within it predate design action. Lying outside direct design control, the areas of influence and effect situate design actions in relation to wider processes, including the often-unpredictable change propelled by design intervention. All three areas exist squarely within the domain of design concerns. To be controlled or owned, the physical site needs delimitation; however, to be understood in design, it must be considered extensively in reference to its setting. No particular locale can be experienced in isolation. Embedded in comprehension of a contained parcel is contact with something tangibly much greater. The concept of site, then, simultaneously refers to seemingly opposite ideas: a physically specific place and a spatially and temporally expansive surround. Incorporating three distinct geographic areas, two divergent spatial ideas, and past, present, and future timeframes, sites are complex. Language reflects this inherent complexity. A variety of closely associated terms address different aspects of physical location. Place, property, ground, setting, context, situation, landscape: the idea of site might embrace each of these. Though often used interchangeably, none of them are exactly equivalent.9 Neither mutually exclusive nor simply commensurate, each term invokes an identifiable region in the conceptual territory of site. With temporal, cultural, ideological, perceptual, scalar, and ontological dimensions, this territory is a culturally rich construct. Its abundant associative meanings – sponsored by many applications in design discourse, synonyms, and denotations – remain tightly interwoven. Site resonates on multiple registers, and its multivalence yields varied outcomes. On a practical level, discourse on the subject evolves independently within disciplines and their areas. The first edition noted that writings on landscape architecture had recently begun to open it to new depths of theoretical inquiry. The social sciences Figure 1.2  Glenn Murcutt, Meagher House, New South Wales, Australia. Sketch showing siting of house in relation to prevailing winds, topography, and seasonal changes in sun shading requirements.

have abundant literature, particularly in urban geography, on the contested concept of place. In architecture and urban design, notions of context had received substantial

(Courtesy of Glenn Murcutt)

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critical attention since gaining currency in the late 1960s. These efforts shed light on the subject of site, but only obliquely, as a secondary or corollary concern arising out of lines of investigation into other, already inherently complex design concepts or practices. Important site issues likewise remain unearthed in design movements. Though rarely framed as site matters per se, these movements nevertheless revolve around concerns relating to locale. Initiatives in smart growth, sustainable design, generic urbanism, or neo- traditional urbanism all draw upon and propose notions of place-making. Grappling with site-based issues evokes the analogy of seven blind men describing an elephant: each depicts vivid aspects within reach but none correlates to another, and altogether they miss the sense of the overall object of study. In taking much for granted, each one leaves a great deal of knowledge unarticulated. To shape an identifiable discourse that stakes out the site as an object of design concern and a subject of theoretical study requires that site knowledge and its sources become more explicit. This call for site knowledge echoes similar calls in other fields. In science, debate and critique of scientific objectivity have led to lengthy explorations of standpoint theories, which argue that knowledge articulated from the standpoint of those excluded from ruling relations of power is particularly important, especially as a source of potential assessment, change, and renewal. In politics, critiques of the curious doubleness of the autonomous but universalist man constructed by the liberal-democratic social contract point out that the necessary isolation of such an entity obscures the situated condition of its existence. In philosophy, value-free assumptions in both empiricism and idealism come under critique because the notion of “value-free” denies history. In the social science debate regarding quantitative and qualitative methodology, the latter argues that verisimilitude, repeatability, and enumeration evade the contextual pressures of living. In each case, the obscured, evaded, denied, excluded, or situated knowledge has no authority and, indeed, often has no words. The critiques delineate tacit knowledge of various kinds, and all recognize the need to work on words to bring those unspoken understandings into communication.10

Shaping an Identifiable Discourse An inquiry into tacit knowledge about site in design, this anthology brings into evidence received ideas, embedded assumptions, and implied formulations. Creating a framework for thinking and designing begins here by foregrounding the unexamined background knowledge on which thought figures out. For example, architects know that the surrounding physical context impacts on a site; landscape architects know that ecology cannot be ignored; planners know that sites are socially produced. But have they always known these things? When and why do concerns become site matters? Three premises inform this book. First, site knowledge, even if unspoken, exerts a powerful force in design that theoretical inquiry should acknowledge and critically assess. Second, historiography has sanctioned particular ways of engaging with site matters, and the deleterious effects of these sanctions should be recognized and

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countered. Third, modes of representation construe sites, and their formative role in the production of site knowledge should be revealed and expressed. Design does not simply impose on a place. Site and designer engage in dialogic interaction. At once extrinsic and intrinsic, a site exists out there in the world but acquires design meaning only through its apprehension, intellectually and experientially. Therefore, we claim the site as a relational construct that acquires meaning and value through situational interaction and exchange. This relational condition of the site derives from uninterrupted exchange between the real and the representational, the extrinsic and the intrinsic, the world and the world-as-known.11 Site thinking provides the means whereby these exchanges are construed and comprehended. As a form of knowing, site thinking is concretely situated, more interactive than abstract, and less concerned with the semantic content of knowledge than with a concern for relationships among knowers and known. The site provides for a situation that guides what knowers do and how the known responds and can be understood. Site thinking understands knowledge as embedded within specific ways of engaging the world. This collection does more than simply address subject matter related to site. Each essay herein treats thinking about site as integral to the design process, each provides insights on how ideas about site have developed historiographically or theoretically, based on where and when they arose. The various perspectives included here invite comparative reading. Some focus on formal and physical constructs, some address discursive material, and others examine processes and practices, including design strategies. All deal with examples of the ways that site knowledge arises from, and applies to, physical conditions confronted in design. In so doing, they demonstrate the ways that site knowledge is derived and concretized. Theorizing site thinking involves critically examining ideological, historical, and disciplinary frameworks to discern the sources of unarticulated knowledge and the ends to which it is put. We begin with basic questions. How are sites defined? How is value assigned to a site? How do meanings accumulate around the notion of site? Where do they come from, how are they applied, and how are they derived? Pursuing these questions opens up and legitimizes to serious inquiry both site thinking and thinking about sites. It elevates site (long kept out of the picture, literally) to a new level of visibility. Tracing the web of constructed relationships that ties ideas to things, this critical process scrutinizes the intertwining of conceptual and material dimensions of site. At issue is the concerted operation of concepts, instruments, and methodologies that influence design disciplines and practices. Which ideas associate with the concept of site? What projects enter the historical record? How do property laws evolve? In which ways do professionals establish their expertise? How is data collected and graphically represented? The accepted meanings of site and its perceived design value depend on the answers to such questions – on the sources that produce definitions of site. In design terms, site definition is process driven. It involves detailing physical particulars (e.g., itemizing material conditions, characterizing experiential qualities, and surveying topography). It also demands specifying spatial locations – delimiting the exact

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areas where design activity will take place and deciding upon the contexts within which actions will be considered relevant (referred to earlier as areas of influence and effect and by Peter Marcuse in the first edition of this volume as the physical area of concerns). This definitional work can occur through various means. Those explored here derive from instrumental influences that shape design ideas about site: discourse, instruments of representation, physical material contact, and forms of professional practices. Discourse provides concepts that help shape thought. The invention – or discarding – of words in any language transforms the way speakers perceive, conceptualize, and engage their world. Language related to site continually evolves. Terminology falls out of use (as Robin Dripps points out about the beaux arts term tirer parti) or enters the design lexicon (Kristina Hill gives the example of resilience, a term borrowed from ecology), marking changes in the very process of defining and therefore thinking about sites. Instruments of representation allow developments in techniques of description. Graphic tools inform and bracket how designers think. Thought is both allowed and constrained by formats (plans, sections, maps, photography, video, digital platforms and use schedules), scale and scope, and informational frames of reference (types and choices of data). When a model, drawing, or diagram includes information from outside the bounds of the plot (adjacent structures), temporal phenomena (100-year flood lines), or otherwise hidden factors (subterranean toxic plumes) it assimilates situational influences to the site to support relational understandings. Omitting such information has the opposite effect. Physical material contact delivers experience and perception. Direct material physical encounters with sights, sounds, smells, and textures yield yet another body of site knowledge (haecceity, as Elizabeth Meyer calls it) bracketed through subjective experiences of phenomena. Recording seasonal or daily changes in light quality, for example, introduces into site thinking a temporal dimension. The professionalized and disciplined practices of architects, planners, landscape architects, and urbanists (techniques of analysis, data collection processes, etc.) also lends identity to a site, since design actions are themselves definitive acts. Forms of professional practice establish horizons of operation. Working knowledge of a particular place derives from abstract concepts, material conditions, and structuring practices, which are always intercalated, inflecting on and infecting one another rather than remaining separate or distinct. For a design professional, what matters about a locale slated for design action – what will be considered useful or valuable about a site – depends on how knowledge of site is framed. Developers might apply financial models, analyzing a parcel’s potential to provide profitable returns in an economically construed context (the site defined in fiscal terms). Landscape architects might consider ecological measures (the site defined in terms of resilience or sustainability). Architects might focus on physical forms and built patterns (the site defined in morphological terms). Each engages in different forms of site knowledge that yield site readings. In design theory and practice, the range and variety of possible readings too rarely has been made clear.

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The different perspectives these essays impart on the constructedness of site, and the challenges that its relational condition poses for design, reflect differences in the various disciplinary frameworks within the broad field of physical and environmental design. A complex interplay of forces (natural and physical, discursive and narrative, and social and cultural) brings site knowledge into being. Foregrounding this interplay underscores the constructedness of site. Opening a window onto some of the other things (places, times, instruments, and concepts) that structure the relational condition of site situates the process of site thinking itself. Connecting sites and settings not only bears upon the consideration of physical locales, it applies equally to theorizing genres of site thinking. That ideas regarding site come from many sources provides motive for a multidisciplinary approach. Site thinking, like thinking in general, is necessarily situationally bound. Different stocks of site knowledge derive from recognized disciplinary settings that attribute value to ideas, practices, and things based on internalized measures. Different disciplinary backgrounds ascribe significance to specific limited perspectives, bracketing thinking according to their own interests. The placement of these brackets, in turn, signals the existence of habits of mind, those horizons – or limitations – of imagination that discipline thought. This collection reaches beyond individual disciplinary confines, because the subject of site is not bound to any one area but in fact provides literal and conceptual common ground across the entire design field.

Strands of Site Thinking The range of issues and topics touched on in this anthology reconfirms the multivalence of the concept of site. Nevertheless, three identifiable strands of site thinking stand out. The first concerns vocabulary: the terms and concepts normally drawn upon to talk about site. The second deals with history: how site-oriented issues, design processes, and the siting of specific projects are treated by the historiographical record. The third strand investigates the manifestation and derivation of site-related design practices.

Concepts, Terms, and Vocabulary For the most part, we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.12 While site discourse would appear at first glance to consist of a rich set of terms, in fact, this vocabulary has not been sufficiently examined. The idea itself commands a wide lexical domain inhabited by synonyms that are not actually synonymous. In this sense, site discourse is largely terra incognita since it offers few options to qualify site study approaches or name design strategies.

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Our interest in defining site does not presume to attach fixed meanings to words. The focus on language strives instead to clarify how the idea derives its meaning in combination with a host of other concepts, each of which singly suggests a region within a larger conceptual territory. This territory, long perceived primarily in terms of obvious similarities, is in fact replete with subtle distinctions that, charted out, have the potential to order new levels of theoretical understanding and new approaches to design practices. Examining the language of site can open up existing vocabulary and add to this vocabulary. It is more than simply a linguistic exercise. The work of unpacking received terms and parsing out their different meanings forms a crucial part of a broader endeavor to nuance the conceptual foundations of design. Historical and contemporary connotations of frequently associated terms – such as property, landscape, and context – vary widely; as potent and distinct frames of reference influencing design practices, these variations beg closer examination. New vocabulary suggests new directions for future site thinking. Terms such as area of concern, site reach, and urban constellation – challenge the very possibility of a site fully under design control. Qualifiers (stealthy versus opportunistic site strategies; site as framework, armature, figure, or fragment) add precision to accounts of specific design projects, site reading, and design practices. Inventive language enriches site discourse and, at times, promises a wider impact. New descriptors applied to existing built conditions (the inside-out site and site-sequencing, for example, coined by Paul Hess in his discussion of suburban settlement patterns) make it possible to identify features of the built environment previously left unrecognized for lack of adequate language. The notion of site suppression (proposed by Wendy Redfield in her contribution to the first edition, to evoke a repressive role of modern design historiography with respect to site matters) has potentially profound implications not only for the reassessment of specific modernist works of design, but for a broad critical reappraisal of modern design practice and theory as a whole.

The Subject of Site Historically Considered The politics of disciplinization, conceived as all disciplinization must be, as a set of negations, consists in what it marks out for repression for those who wish to claim the authority of discipline itself for their learning.13 Modernist design history, and in particular that of modern architecture, is remarkable for its sustained disregard of site-related issues.14 The written record of individual works presents countless examples in texts and graphics confined almost exclusively to the project itself or, at best, to its directly adjacent physical context. Through this extremely bracketed approach, modernist design history conveys the strong, albeit tacit, conviction that sites are simple, bounded entities. In design history, the site has been denatured (engaged as a formal surface), mythologized (emptied of meaning), and colonized (subjected to the singular authority of design controls). This history offers few images, few tools, and few models for capturing the relationship between a project and its locale.

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Such accounting – or, more accurately, discounting – amounts to a long-standing repression of site matters. A close look at the canon in design history shows that it largely excludes tendencies toward site thinking. A link exists between modernist design history’s distaste for engaging with tradition and the omission of site-related ideas from the modern historiographical record. Revisiting projects in situ demonstrates that, in fact, the relationship between a project and its locale lies within the actual – if not historically authorized – array of modernist design concerns. Exposing the kind of data, methods, and analytic tools that instigate specific ways of seeing (or not seeing) sites allows those methods to be recalibrated, making more accurate descriptions possible. New histories focused expressly on site analysis and site design practices bring to light long-overlooked but crucial aspects of the design process. The received historical record puts forward a well-worn narrative that casts modernist design as predisposed to treat specific sites as idealized and universal; it consistently eschews the subject’s cultural thickness and conceptual intricacy. By effectively eliminating the complexity of the subject from view, this version of history suggests that positive value adheres to sites only when they can be made amenable to simple classification and control. This predilection arises not from within design disciplines, but more broadly out of post-Enlightenment thought. Site thinking throws down a powerful challenge to a modern epistemological framework that privileges clear categorization.15 At once a real construct (of nature), a narrated construct (of discourse), and a collective construct (socially constituted), site presents a potent example of hybridity. Any attempt to meaningfully address its many registers of significance demands a constant crossing of knowledge categories. Site thinking must continually oscillate between material and conceptual, abstract and physical, discursive and experiential, and general and specific points of view.

Between the Particular and the Universal Local uniqueness matters … Spatial differentiation, geographical variety, is not just an outcome; it is integral to the reproduction of society and its dominant social relations. The challenge is to hold the two sides together; to understand the general underlying causes while at the same time recognizing and appreciating the importance of the specific and unique.16 Twentieth-century views on modernity drew on arguments whose basic forms were established during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the encounter between the Enlightenment conception of a human science and its critics. Enlightenment scholars described historical (and geographical) diversity via a decentered, universalistic view of human nature. Critics of the Enlightenment characterized this variation in a centered, particularistic manner, emphasizing the individuality of cultural communities. Aspects of both views were interwoven in late 19th-century and early 20th-century social thought. (For example, German liberal theorists associated with the “return to Kant” sought, in part, to accommodate the provincialism of national culture groups to the cosmopolitanism of Kant.) The tension between a decentered universalism

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and a centered particularism appears in the epistemological discussions of the historical (and situated) individual. In fact, Enlightenment scholars, including Voltaire and Hume, expressed concern that the historical individuality of cultures went overlooked – obscured, in their view, by tendencies to cast the universalism of Enlightenment thought and the particularism associated with its critics in dichotomous terms. The methodological problem is to account for individuality in terms of universal concepts. Nineteenth-century critics (as well as Enlightenment scholars) failed to resolve how “historical particulars” were “to be placed within a conceptual order without violating their individuality.”17 This same problem arises in the study of physical particulars of place, site, or region. Geographers have sought to create a science of place that recognizes both the diversity and the particularity of the way in which different cultures adapt to their environments. Geographers – as well as theorists and many designers – have valued the local and made it an object of scientific study, but generally from the cosmopolitan perspective of modern science. This neat metalevel distinction between the form and the content of investigations belies a confused relation between the universalizing and the particularizing discourses that characterize the study of places. The scientific search for universals seems to trivialize the interest in the particularity of specific sites, and the demand for universal ethical principles appears to undermine the significance of the moral particularity associated with the individual’s attachment to locale and community. Nevertheless, as agents, individuals are always “situated” in the world. The significance of place in modern life is associated with this fact of situatedness and the closely allied issues of identity and action. This aspect of human existence cannot be fully appreciated from the distant and detached viewpoint associated with scientific theorizing. To do so requires generalizing the specificity of place into a set of generic categories or reducing the richness of specific milieus as context or setting to the more limited sense of place as locations. But to understand site as context or setting forces recognition that, from the objective viewpoint of the theorist, no essence or universal site structure exists to be uncovered or discovered. Understanding site must draw on both an objective reality and a subjective perception. From the decentered vantage point of the theoretical scientist, site becomes either location or a set of generic relations and thereby loses much of its significance for human action. From the centered viewpoint of the subject, site has meaning in relation to an individual’s (or a group’s) basic worldview and social situation. The specificity of site is understood from a point of view, and for this reason a student of site must rely upon forms of analysis that lie between the centered and decentered views. Such forms might be described as situated knowledges or as narrativelike syntheses. Such a stance is less detached than that of the theoretical scientist and more detached than experiential or cognitive description. These distinct positions, which blend together in experience, illustrate the relative differences in the representation of site that result from the process of seeking a decentered perspective versus one that attempts to mediate the views of the (anthropological) insider and the outsider. Site is best viewed from points in between.

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Notes 1

The five exhibited teams were led by Henning Larsens Tegnestue A/S (Denmark); Morphosis (Los Angeles); MVRDV (the Netherlands); Smith-Miller + Hawkinson (New York City); and Zaha Hadid Architects (London). 2 See Herbert Muschamp, “Let the Design Sprint Begin,” New York Times, 11 March 2004, http://www.nyc2012.com/village_ finalists/zaha.html. 3 Descriptions from the official NYC 2012 website, http://www.nyc2012.com/ village_finalists. 4 Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 28. 5 Separation of theory and practice may also be accompanied by classism, even if perhaps unconscious: “It is essential to educate the educator himself. [Their] doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts one of which is superior to society.” Karl Marx, “Theses of Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 121. 6 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion and Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Rowe, 1987), 9. 7 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, tr. M. Nicolaus (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973), 100–101. 8 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, tr. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 324. 9 See Carol J. Burns, “On Site,” in Drawing/Building/Text, ed. A. Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). 10 Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. 11 This idea of uninterrupted exchange comes from Bakhtin’s work on the dialogic imagination: “However forcefully the real and the represented world resist fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction, uninterrupted exchange goes on between them.” M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 254. 12 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922); as cited in Stanley Aronowitz, “Is a Democracy Possible?,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. B. Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 78. 13 Hayden White, “Historical Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 119. 14 For a clear omission of site as a design concept, see the “Index of Concepts,” in Sigfried Giedion, The Eternal Present Volume II: The Beginnings of Architecture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964). 15 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. 16 Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (New York: Methuen, 1984), 299–300. 17 Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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2. Claiming the Site: Ever Evolving SocialLegal Conceptions of Ownership and Property Harvey M. Jacobs When we think and talk about “the site,” allowing the concept to form in our minds, we associate it with two ideas. First, an isolatable site is “owned,” and ownership is identifiable. Whether the ownership unit is a private or public entity is immaterial; what matters is that a legal someone has control over the site. Second, the owner of a site has a set of rights that may be freely exercised as a function of ownership – for example, the right to keep others off the site, the right to use the site for their own enjoyment, the right to develop the site, the right to extract profit from the site, and so on. Commonly understood to be static, these two base ideas have in fact always been issues of intense social contention in the United States. What it means to own and what comprises the rights of ownership have evolved in response to changes in technology and changes in social values over the course of the nation’s existence. This essay explicates how we, as owners of, neighbors to, and people concerned about a site, claim it, given changing ideas about ownership and rights. It starts with the debates over ownership and rights during the time of the American revolution. Despite a popular rhetoric that often seeks to simplify this history, it goes on to show that the country’s founding national documents encapsulate contemporary ambiguities about ownership and rights. Tracing the ebb and flow of our national social-legal dialogue about ownership and rights through to the present day, the essay closes with some speculations as to how this debate might unfold in the future. Our ability to claim a site – to act on and toward it – is conditioned on resolving conflicting stakes upon it. Claims are proxies for expressions of ownership and understandings about rights. As ownership and rights become more fragmented, more social, with more claims by more parties, the ability to act becomes ever more compromised. Ownership and control of a site, an issue deeply embedded in the American psyche, has helped shape and define our national character. The early history of the US is often portrayed as migrations spurred by the issues captured in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights – a search by oppressed peoples for civil freedoms (of speech and assembly) and religious freedom. These issues were key to colonial immigrations, but it is equally true that migration was spurred by a desire

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for access to freehold land unavailable in Europe. The US was settled by people, first Europeans but continuing through to today, searching for religious and civil freedom and for access to land.1 In America’s early years, Western European countries were still structured under the vestiges of feudalism. America was a place where any white male immigrant had the potential to own land. America was the land of opportunity. To be an American was to own and control private property. As the revolutionary period took shape, influential framers argued that it was as much for the right to own and control land as anything else that the new political experiment – American democracy – was coming into being. For example, James Madison writing in Federalist Paper No. 54, during the debate about the ratification of the US Constitution, argued that “government is instituted no less for the protection of property than of the persons of individuals.”2 Others, including Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, concurred.3 Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the yeoman farmer drew from these ideas. According to Jefferson, the family farmer who owned and controlled his own land was the foundation and bastion of the new American democracy. Ownership of land gave the owner economic and thus political liberty.4 But this view of the relationship of property to democracy, and the fact of asserting property’s primacy, was challenged during this period, most notably by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin noted with force that “private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society whenever its necessities require it, even to the last farthing.”5 Franklin was not alone in these sentiments; he shared them with others. When we look at this issue closely, we see that the meaning of land and private property and their relationship to citizenship and democratic structure were contentious issues.6 The country’s founding national documents reflect this lack of consensus. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence promised Americans “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson drew this idea from political philosopher John Locke, who called for life, liberty, and property. Jefferson wanted to copy Locke’s phrase. Jefferson’s idea was to create the nation of yeoman farmers. But in its final form, the declaration’s language reflected disagreements about what was being promised to citizens of the new country. In 1787, the US Constitution was adopted without any specific mention of land-related property. It was not until the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791 that the disagreements among the framers found a degree of consensus in the wording for the so-called takings clause, the final 12 words of the Fifth Amendment: “nor shall private property by taken for public use, without just compensation.” Here the founders formally recognized the existence of private property, an action denoted as taken, a realm of activity that is public use, and a form of payment specified as just compensation. When private property exists, it may be taken by government, but only for a denoted public use and when just compensation is provided. This provision allows for condemnation of private land for public highways, schools, parks,

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Figure 2.1  Private property markers.

and other public activities but requires that the owner be paid fairly for the land taken. But the exact meaning of this phrase to those who crafted it is unclear.7 We don’t know when a taking has occurred, what defines a public use, what constitutes just compensation, or what is considered private property.

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Despite these controversies and ambiguities through the 18th and 19th centuries, most landowners were free to use their land as they pleased. Real change to the status of property in America came in the 20th century, the period when new technological developments altered how Americans lived their lives and held and used property. In the early 20th century, America went from a rural to an urban nation. The mass immigrations from Europe combined with the explosion of industrialization to bring waves of new citizens to the cities. As this occurred, ideas about land and ownership – management of the site – began to change. Under the definition of private property, long taught to first-year law students throughout the Western world, ownership means cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et usque ad inferos: whoever owns the soil owns all the way to heaven and all the way to the depths. Broadly understood, this articulates how the idea of mineral rights, water rights, and air rights gets associated with physical ownership of the land. For the purposes of the law and the economy, ownership means the possession of a recognizable, fungible bundle of rights. If an owner owns all the rights in the bundle, they are said to hold the property free of obligation, to have fee-simple ownership or freehold property. However, no owner ever has all of the rights in the bundle. Society, as government, always reserves some of these rights or some portion of these rights. For example, wildlife ownership and harvesting seasons have long been a right reserved to and regulated by the government. Government also reserves the right to enter onto property (to violate the right to control access) to carry out necessary social functions. In spite of these reservations, private property ownership has long been thought of as consisting of a robust bundle of rights, relatively free of obligations to the state or others. In 1903, the Wright brothers invented mechanical flight. Within a very few years, the airplane went from a novelty to commercial development. If I owned air rights to the heavens above, then every time an airplane flew over my property it was guilty of trespass. The airplane had entered my property as surely as if the pilot had jumped over my fence and kept walking. A technological change made a pre-20th-century definition of private property no longer socially functional. If individual landowners could claim trespass of and demand compensation for their property by airplanes, air travel would become either too cumbersome or too expensive. What happened? During the first half of the 20th century, the US courts solved this problem by “publicizing” air rights above a certain elevation without requiring compensation under the Fifth Amendment.8 The courts reappropriated airspace to the public sphere so that individual owners no longer owned est usque ad coelum, all the way to heaven. In effect, the courts created a new commons where one had not existed before. The creation of this new commons responded to changing social needs pushed by changing technology. Continuing through the 20th century, landowners saw the very definition of property change – bend and flex – in response to new inventions and changing social values. As society understood the impact of individual land use decisions upon neighbors

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and society at large, and as new ideas about ourselves and others developed, Americans continued to reconfigure the foundational property rights bundle.9 Many examples of this can be given; I offer just one. In the 1960s, changes in race relations impacted private property. In the popular mind, a focus of the civil rights movement was the practice of white lunch counter owners in the American South. These owners, reflecting their understanding of their private property rights, decided who they would serve and who they wouldn’t, generally refusing service to African Americans. Despite the racism of these actions, these owners acted no differently than anyone does in deciding who may come into his or her home. These owners said, in effect, “it’s my business, I built it with my capital and my labor, I get to decide who to serve!” But during the 1960s, as a result of social struggle, owners of commercial establishments lost their private property right to choose who they would serve or not serve.10 Reflecting changing social attitudes on race and human relations, Americans decided that the greater social interest was better served by taking this right away and doing so without compensation to the owner. This dialogue between changing social values and the changing nature of what is in the property rights bundle continues through to today. In addition to the 20th century bringing forth a substantial reconfiguration of the property rights bundle itself, this was also the period of modern land use and environmental regulation, which themselves impacted significantly on the options for a site owner to exercise their property rights. In 1920, for the first time, the US Census recorded more people living in cities than in the countryside. The rapid growth of American cities caused significant land use problems as individual site owners sought to maximize the potential of their site, while the city found itself pressured to exercise its traditional authority to protect public health, safety, and welfare. This was the period of muckraking journalism, which chronicled the poverty of immigrants crowded into tenements in New York City neighborhoods with densities exceeding even that of Calcutta, India, often absent access to sanitation facilities, clean water, light, and air.11 Out of these conflicts grew zoning. Today, zoning is common. But at the time of its invention, it was revolutionary. It established a public sector framework for land use that proscribed the property rights of site owners absent compensation, and it did so by treating site owners differently (the very idea of establishing residential, commercial, and industrial zones).12 New York City is generally credited with inventing zoning in its modern form in 1916. Within a decade, it had spread across the US because it fulfilled a need of cities to rationalize land use management. Until the second half of the 20th century, most land use regulations looked similar to zoning in its initial form. But then things changed again. As America began to suburbanize, zoning was stretched to fit new land use circumstances, and new forms of site management came into being to reflect changing social values about land and natural and environmental resources. This became especially pronounced with the rise of the modern environmental movement.

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Conceptually, land use and environmental planning, policy, and management (through devices such as zoning) are premised on the need for individual property rights to yield to a collective definition of the public interest. Such planning and policy argues that an unfettered right to exercise individual property rights does not serve the greater public good. As some environmentalists articulate it, land use and environmental problems arise precisely because the site and property rights inherent to it are privately held and managed. Individuals make land use management decisions that do not take into account the broader public interest and a more expansive economic calculus; that is, their arguments update and restate those that led to the very invention of zoning. A litany of common land use and environmental issues – farmland loss in the urban fringe, suburban sprawl, destruction of historic buildings, downtown deterioration, to name just a few – have all been depicted as issues that arise from a version of Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons.13 In these instances, the tragedy arises when individual landowners make decisions that are economically and socially sensible to them but are not judged to be as sensible to the broader public. To put the same point in the terms of classical economics, each individual pursuing their own self-interest does not yield the greater social interest. Critics of this evolution of social control of the site ask us to take a deep breath and step back.14 They argue that the fallacy in seeing modern society as a series of Garrett Hardin–style tragedy of the commons situations is that society (government) can continually justify a restriction/removal of property rights every time a new land use and environmental problem gets identified. Government can reconfigure who has a claim on and to the site with no reasonable end in sight. Critics identify at least two problems with this formulation: does private property really exist if what I own and control is only what the government says I control? And what about the literal and figurative property-democracy social contract that forged and underlies the nation?15 The continuous expansion of parties with claim to a site provides another way to understand the reconfiguration of property rights in response to changing technology and changing social values and the continuous expansion of regulation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the site was largely the purview of the owner to do with as they pleased; in the 20th century, the story has a variety of interests laying claim to the site, arguing that the owner’s traditional rights have to be reshuffled to include their interests and claims. Most obviously, this expansion includes government (in its various forms and layers) asserting its claim upon the site through the need to protect public health, safety, and welfare. But this is not a one-sided story. Early in the 20th century, at the same time zoning was being affirmed as a legitimate exercise of governmental control, the US Supreme Court took up a related issue: is there a limit to how much the government can regulate private land? In 1922 in the case of Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “The general rule is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.”16

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This sentiment would seem to support the concern of the critics of the social control over private land. Unfortunately, the court did not specify the precise place where the unacceptable limits of the regulation occurred. And political, policy, and judicial practice since then has been largely (though not completely) to back public regulatory activity as not crossing the line identified by Justice Holmes. As the 21st century began, the US Supreme Court recognized the legitimate and important role of public regulation over sites where conflicting claims exist among owners, neighbors, environmentalists, and the government.17 Property is a complex social institution. People and communities have strong emotional attachments to particular places, and for many people the ownership of private property remains one of the (if not the) primary economic assets acquired and managed in a lifetime. As such, individuals tend to have strong interest in the integrity of their property rights bundle. At the same time, many people seem to have an inherent understanding of the need to limit the exercise of property rights through the use of public mechanisms. How will these tendencies be balanced? I believe that the differences of policy and political opinion about the integrity versus malleability of property rights will deepen, rather than heal; fighting over the site will be intensified, rather than lessened. One reason concerns the polarization in America over political and social values and social and economic circumstances. While property matters to us all, it does not matter equally. As an individual gets wealthier, the component of that person’s financial profile directly tied to property decreases. So while for the middle and lower-middle class, property ownership (of a house and lot) is the primary form of wealth, for the upper-middle class and wealthy, property represents only one part of how they own and invest to secure their wealth. This profoundly impacts all claims upon the site. If a proposed land use or environmental program will affect property rights, the relative importance of those property rights matters. The wealthier classes can, quite literally, absorb the impact; it matters less to them. If those being affected own only landed property, then land use regulations which propose to take the value of that property for larger social values becomes more important to the individual. These individuals have a significant incentive to resist regulatory efforts and work to preserve the integrity of their property rights bundle. Social scientists have long noted that property owners who tend to support the development and implementation of land use and environmental policies and programs are those who can, quite literally, afford them. Further, they have noted that an upward shift in economic circumstances brings a shift in focus to the promotion of a set of quality of life values, which can become translated into regulatory efforts to shape the use of other people’s private property in the interest of pursuing larger social values such as those of environmental protection, growth management, and smart growth.18 We can expect ever more social conflict over property rights as one group with ample resources seeks to secure more quality of life values (controlled growth, undivided farmland, pure trout streams, vibrant downtowns) and one group with more marginal resources seeks to protect their sliver of investment in the American dream through property ownership (whether these be farmland owners, ranchers, wetland

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owners, or the owners of “blighted” downtown neighborhoods slated for redevelopment even when these neighborhoods and homes may be socially and economically viable).19 An era of intensified social conflict over claims to the site is upon us, and one of its expressions will be heightened conflict over property rights. During the 20th century, the property rights bundle experienced waves of assault. At first the assault was a function of new technology and rapid urbanization. These phenomena continued through the century and were then joined in the century’s last half by an assault borne of changing social values, rooted in new attitudes about racial, gender, and then environmental relationships. With each wave of assault, the property rights bundle diminished. Each of these assaults represents a change driven by a threat. In the early 20th century, city spaces were changing as a function of inter- and intranational immigration; traditional ideas about property did not seem to work as these changes occurred. By midcentury, property seemed to be a barrier to ever-mounting calls for legal and social change in racial relationships. In the late century, claims to property’s integrity appear to clash with new scientific findings about ecosystem functioning and maintenance. Will there be new challenges to property? Yes. As technology continues to develop, it will present continuing challenges to our way of living and our concepts of property. As society continues to develop, we will continue insisting that property be reshaped as we discover ways in which old conceptions of property hold back the liberation and social integration of peoples and others once deemed invisible or irrelevant, or at least less deserving than property itself. But as a broad set of predictions, these prove problematic. They seem to suggest no logical end to the reshaping of property, implying instead that property remains always subservient to technology and social values. If true, how then can the promise of property, as an establisher and enabler of the individual in a democracy, be realized? If technology and social values always trump property (and do so absent compensation), then what is property’s value as a bastion against the arbitrary power of the state? How does one prevent the tyranny of the majority? Do inviolate first principles exist? These questions have no easy answers. Instead we see continued intense social conflict over claims to the site. Some contemporary advocates suggest that the American concept of strong private property rights is not only appropriate for the US but should be internationalized. In so doing, issues bedeviling the planet – such as massive informal settlements that are the site of massive urban poverty in global megacities – could be successfully addressed.20 Other contemporary advocates argue that strong private property rights actually produce large-scale land use problems, and the only way to solve these problems is through a radical restructuring of what it means to own and control a site. As I prepared this essay, an article appeared in the New York Times that captured this conflict. Titled “Legal Rights for Lake Erie?” it posed the question of whether “a body of water [should] be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person?” The proposal, in Toledo, Ohio, joins similar ones adopted in Pennsylvania,

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California, and Minnesota, which in one way or another recognize the right of nature “to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.” The issue is whose lake? Opponents of the proposal include area farmers worried about being liable for lake pollution and being “driven out of business.”21 These pronature municipal actions draw from both legal opinions and ethical writings born from the post-1970 environmental movement. For example, in a dissent in a 1972 US Supreme Court decision, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own protection.” Also in 1972, the Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded that “an owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the essential natural character of his land so as to use it for a purpose for which it was unsuited in its natural state and which injures the rights of others.”22 These legal actions draw from an ecological and ethical literature that calls for a new, less commodity based and more community based view of land, which gives to the land a right to existence on its own terms.23 Is there a future for private property in America? Yes. Private property is central to the very essence of the American experience, and it will continue to hold an important place in American economics, politics, law, and social debate. The desire to own and control a site seems to be a nearly universal human motivation. For many reasons, conflicts over site management have been and will continue to be central to our dialogues – as neighbors, as members of special interest communities, as part of the larger community to which we belong, proximately, socially, and legally. Whose site is it? It turns out that this is not an easy question to answer. If the site was ever the purview of the owner, it is no longer. In modern times, the site belongs to the owner of record and it also belongs to all of us. When we look at the legacy of the founding fathers and the documents they left us, we see a confusion about land and property, a confusion still with us and even more acute today. Site ownership is more fragmented than we commonly acknowledge. The site has more claims upon it, and we, society, have ever more difficulty sorting out the legitimacy of conflicting claims. The only way we have learned to answer questions about claims to a site is to continually come together and argue them through – to use a social, dialogical, democratic process to address an issue with complex legal, economic, and cultural roots. There is no simple economic or legal formula to which we can turn. Each community in each generation decides on the balance point that respects the rights of the site owner and those of other claimants to the site. Is this a messy process? Yes. Does it guarantee that everyone will be satisfied? No. Is there any other alternative? There does not appear to be. We do know something about the future: private property will not stagnate. It never has, and it will not now. Private property will continue to evolve in America; it has to.24 As it does, so too will claims upon the site. Private property represents a social contract. It establishes the rights of the individual and it binds society. The balance point between individual and social rights in property will continually be renegotiated. Each time it is renegotiated, the claimants to a site will be reshuffled.

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As Americans continue to reinvent their concept of freedom, of what it means to have liberty, they will come to understand anew what it means to hold private property while living in a democratic society. Claims upon the site become one of the most obvious expressions of this ever-changing dialogue.25

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11

12

13

James W. Ely Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Mentor Books, 1961 [1788]), 339. During the colonial period, the founders took the position that rights to land ownership accrued through use, and freely constituted governments (i.e., democracies) existed for the protection of individual liberties, including the liberty to own and use land. They utilized this idea of active use to provide the justification for taking land from America’s native inhabitants. From their point of view, they did not understand the American natives to be using land in the European sense of active agricultural and forest management. See William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). James Gilreath, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999). Benjamin Franklin, “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 10, ed. A. H. Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907 [1789]), 59. Ely, The Guardian; Harvey M. Jacobs, “Fighting Over Land: America’s Legacy … America’s Future,” Journal of the American Planning Association 65, no. 2 (1999): 141–149. For example, Fred Bosselman, David Callies, and John Banta, The Taking Issue: An Analysis of the Constitutional Limits of Land Use Control (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1973); Richard A. Epstein, Takings, Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Ely, The Guardian; William Michael Treanor, “The Original Understanding of the Takings Clause and the Political Process,” Columbia Law Review 95, no. 4 (1995): 782–887; Jacobs, “Fighting.” Laird Bell, “Air Rights,” Illinois Law Review 23, no. 3 (1928–1929): 250–264; D.H.N. Johnson, Rights in Air Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Bosselman, Callies, and Banta, The Taking Issue. Neil Hecht, “From Seisin to Sit-In: Evolving Property Concepts,” Boston University Law Review 44, no. 4 (1964): 435–466. Jacob. A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1890). This work is often credited with galvanizing the public sentiment that led, several decades later, to zoning and related land reform adoptions. “Euclid v. Ambler Realty, Co” 272 US 365 (1926). See also Keith D. Revell, “The Road to Euclid v. Ambler: City Planning, State-Building, and the Changing Scope of the Police Power,” Studies in American Political Development 13, no. 1 (1999): 50–145, and Sonya Hirt, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2015). Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968): 1243– 1248. Hardin himself advocates private property as a solution to the tragedy of the commons. Others, however, argue that this approach is fallacious. See, for example,

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14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21

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4 2 25

Amy Sinden, “The Tragedy of the Commons and the Myth of a Private Property Solution,” University of Colorado Law Review 78, no. 2 (2007): 533–612. Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Epstein, Takings. Harvey M. Jacobs, “Social Conflict Over Property Rights: The End, A New Beginning or a Continuing Conversation?,” Housing Policy Debate 20, no. 3 (2010): 329–349. 260 US 393 (1922) at 415. Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 535 US 302 (2002). One set of examples focusing on a set of cases in New York State is laid out in Michael K. Heiman, The Quiet Evolution: Power, Planning and Profits in New York State (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988). The phenomenon of displacement for reinvestment received a great deal of international attention in the early 2000s, when the US Supreme Court allowed for the condemnation of a neighborhood for the purpose of economic redevelopment; see Kelo v. City of New London, 545 US 469 (2005). The court’s actions were loudly condemned by political conservatives as an unjustified assault upon private property rights. Yet in the early 1980s, the Michigan Supreme Court had allowed for the same type of action to occur in Detroit; see Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit, 410 Mich. 616, 304 N.W.2d 455, 1981. In this instance, the court’s action was condemned by political progressives. For more on Kelo, see Jeff Benedict, Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009); and Ilya Somin, The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For Poletown, see Jeanie Wylie, Poletown: A Community Betrayed (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). The most prominent proponent of this approach is Hernando de Soto. See de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). His ideas have had substantial influence at the World Bank and in other international fora. Timothy Williams, “Legal Rights for Lake Erie? Voters in Ohio City Will Decide,” New York Times, 19 February 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/us/lake-erie-legalrights.html. Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 US 727 (1972); Just v. Marinette County, 56 Wis.2d 7 (1972); 201 N.W.2d 761 (1972). The Wisconsin case, and its radical implications for concepts of property, is discussed in Donald W. Large, “This Land is Whose Land? Changing Concepts of Land as Property,” Wisconsin Law Review no. 4 (1973): 1041–1083. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (London: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1949]). Especially Leopold’s essay titled “The Land Ethic” is credited by many with initiating the modern discourse about these matters. See also Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: W. Kaufmann, 1974); Gregory S. Alexander, Commodity & Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Harvey M. Jacobs, “Eighteenth-century Property Rights for Twenty-first-century Environmental Conditions?,” in Property Rights and Climate Change: Land-Use Under Changing Environmental Conditions, ed. F. van der Straalen et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 41–51. Harvey M. Jacobs, “Private Property in the 22nd Century,” Planning 75, no. 5 (2009): 24. The interpretation of American history presented here, including the forces that shape property’s form, would be characterized as “liberal” by those with a differing point of view. These opponents, self-described “conservatives,” view property as the foundational base of American democracy. From this point of view, property is not subject to reshaping as a function of technological and social changes. Instead, property is a

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priori and immutable, and any challenges to or assaults upon it by society and government must be compensated, under the provisions of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. From this “conservative” point of view, the regulatory takings doctrine articulated in Penn Coal should be understood as requiring compensation, except under the most extreme of conditions. The leading scholar of this position is Epstein (see Takings); for similar arguments, see also Bethell, The Noblest Triumph; Bernard H. Siegan, Property Rights: From Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001); and Timothy Sandefur and Christina Sandefur, Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st Century America (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2015).

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3. Reclaiming Context: Between Autonomy and Engagement1 Esin Komez Daglioglu Architectural discourse over the last century has oscillated between debates of autonomy and engagement with the works of architecture. To begin with the present, the current governing paradigm of architectural pragmatism endorses an understanding of architecture as one of “force and effect” rather than “autonomy and process,” challenging the “critical project” of K. Michael Hays and Peter Eisenman.2 The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, founded by Eisenman and supported by its journal Oppositions, contributed to the dissemination of architectural autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s. Defining context as extrinsic to the architectural design process, Eisenman’s disciplinary autonomy framed critical architecture as resistant to “external forces.”3 Architectural historian and theoretician Hays expanded this argument by holding a more in-between position. Hays rejected, on the one hand, understanding of context as the immediate forces acting upon architectural form and, on the other hand, understanding of form as disengaged from the worldly situation.4 New architectural pragmatists such as Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting take a contrasting position by referring to Koolhaas as opposed to Eisenman and claim an engaged architectural practice that accepts context as various forces that encompass the design process.5 With the “fuck context” proclamation of their protagonist Koolhaas, however, it became apparent that contextual concerns could easily be disregarded, allowing (value-)free operation in different territories under diverse social, physical, and cultural conditions.6 The autonomy project of the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as an attack on the emerging popular approaches of the time, postmodernism and contextualism. Many architectural anthologies introduced contextualism in reference to the urban design method developed by Colin Rowe in his Cornell studio in the 1960s and 1970s.7 Rowe’s approach, originally named contexturalism, necessitated a formal analysis of the urban texture through figure-ground drawings.8 Rowe proposed the design of buildings as composite forms, a collage of ideal types and their distortion according to the exigencies of context. Following Rowe’s approach, architects such as James Stirling linked contextualism to an eclectic formal language in the 1970s known as heterostylism.9 In the 1980s, preservationists and conservationists in the United States co-opted contextualism by endorsing a definition of context that called for visual compatibility and continuity with the surrounding built environment.10 Neo-avant-garde architects such

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as Eisenman criticized this rather reductive and blinkered understanding of contextualism as uniformity and conformity.11 Unlike the contextualists, these so-called critical architects sought to codify architecture as a self-contained discipline with its own intrinsic formal principles. In fact, various architects, theoreticians, and teachers introduced context in the 1950s and 1960s to heal the ill effects of orthodox modern architecture and to attack the destructive postwar reconstructions taking place in the United States and Europe. The postwar period witnessed a growing loss of trust in the ideals of modernist architecture, especially in its tabula rasa approach to urbanism, its object fixation, and its break with tradition. Among others, Alison and Peter Smithson’s as found approach, Gordon Cullen’s townscape, Ernesto N. Rogers’ le preesistenze ambientali, and Rossi’s locus offered distinct, sometimes contradictory, yet rich perspectives on how contextual thinking may entail new sensibilities toward the built environment.12 To be sure, these authors did not use the word context in their writings; Robert Venturi’s master’s thesis entitled “Context in Architectural Composition,” completed at Princeton in 1950, is one of the first sources to introduce context as a notion within architectural discourse. Venturi is a significant figure for this discussion on context, not only as the person to coin the term, but also as the one to later reinforce postmodern associations of the notion, together with Denise Scott Brown. Overlooked material from the early periods of Venturi and Scott Brown clearly highlight the shift from a more critical understanding of context to a stylistic one.13

From Spatial to Iconographic: Context in the Works of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Venturi graduated from Princeton University School of Architecture in 1947 and completed his master’s at the same university in 1950 under the supervision of Jean Labatut.14 The title of his thesis was “Context in Architectural Composition.” Its original title was “In Architectural Composition: Spatial Context,” as evidenced in the draft pages of the thesis. Although omitted from the final title, the word spatial remained pertinent throughout the entire study. The top corner of the draft was marked “Space, Time and Context.” Referring implicitly to Sigfried Giedion’s canonical book Space, Time and Architecture, Venturi replaced architecture with context since his thesis argued that meaning is derived not from the object itself, but from its relationships with its context. Influenced by gestalt psychology, the thesis criticized the understanding of architecture as a self-contained entity, emphasizing instead the larger wholes composed by smaller units. The gestalt psychology developed in the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology at the turn of the last century focuses not on fragments themselves, but on the relationships between them. For Venturi, this theory was instrumental in criticizing the object-fixation of orthodox modern architecture and in proposing a reciprocal relationship between architecture and its urban setting.

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Figure 3.1  Robert Venturi, draft paper for MFA thesis, “A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy.” Ca. 1949–1950. The architectural archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. (Courtesy of The Architectural Archives. University of Pennsylvania)

Venturi structured his thesis in three parts: the main argument, the case studies, and the final design proposal. The main argument was twofold: first, he proposed that “its context gives a building expression, its meaning,” stating that “a building is not a self-contained object but a part in a whole composition relative to other parts and the whole”; second, he claimed that “change in context causes change in expression,” which he explained further by noting that a “change of a part (addition or alteration) causes a change in the other parts and in the whole.”15 Explaining these two key statements through abstract diagrams derived from gestalt psychology, Venturi showed how spatial and formal context could inform the objects’ position

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Figure 3.2  Robert Venturi, MFA thesis drawing, “A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy.” Spring 1950. Abstract gestalt diagrams. The architectural archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. (Courtesy of The Architectural Archives. University of Pennsylvania)

and form, while the object could, in turn, affect the expression and perception of its context. After introducing the main thesis argument, he presented various architectural precedents with site plans, perspective drawings, and photographs, providing a clear demonstration of their position and form.16 He then went on to compare the original project designs with their changed contexts, or with similar projects in different contexts. In the final part of his thesis, Venturi presented a proposed chapel design for the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania, based on an articulation of the reasoning behind its position and form. The spatial aspects of architecture and its context were the main point of interest in Venturi’s student years and spanning into his early career. He made his first European trip in the summer of 1948, visiting the United Kingdom, France, and Italy during a nine-week tour. On the first page of the report of his summer trip, Venturi wrote, “I did little diagramming because spatial affects which I was interested in more than decorative detail per se is difficult to indicate two-dimensionally.”17 In his first published article, “The Campidoglio: A Case Study,” Venturi argued that Michelangelo’s design enhanced the spatial context of the Campidoglio, while the erection of the Victor Emmanuel Monument and the constructions made in the surrounding area during the Mussolini era destroyed the perception of Campidoglio, though leaving it physically untouched.18 Later, in his 1962 funding application to the Graham Foundation, Venturi explained his project of Complexity and Contradiction as “a point of view about architecture; one which considers the essential spatial meaning of building over the technological function which is today’s emphasis. I have tentatively referred to this series of ideas as reconciliation in spatial composition.”19 The “difficult whole” was the underlying theme of the book, referring to a spatial-perceptual whole obtained by way of a difficult formal unity of fragments. This subtly demonstrates Venturi’s understanding of contextual architecture as an urbanistic one that aims to achieve spatial formal complexity in the built environment. Venturi shifted his emphasis from spatiality to iconography in his later works, among which Learning from Las Vegas is usually regarded as one of the first revelations of his interests in signs, symbols, and everyday life.20 Scott Brown’s influence on this shift

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cannot be underestimated, and she actually confessed, with some irony: “I ‘corrupted’ him (as he says) by inviting him to visit Las Vegas in 1966.”21 Born in Zambia, Scott Brown started her journey in architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. In 1952, during her fourth year of architectural study, she traveled to London for an internship and stayed to complete her architectural education in the Architectural Association, where she engaged with the cultural and intellectual context of postwar Britain. There, she became acquainted with the precursors of the British Pop Art movement, as well as the Independent Group and its architect members Alison and Peter Smithson, who cultivated her interest in existing environments and pop culture. She later moved to the United States to earn a master’s degree in the planning department of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), where her sympathy for everyday life and social praxis were increased. She says that in the urban sociology course of Herbert Gans she learned to

Figure 3.3  Robert Venturi, MFA thesis drawing, “A Chapel for the Episcopal Academy.” Spring 1950. Case studies from Rome. The architectural archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. (Courtesy of The Architectural Archives. University of Pennsylvania)

be nonjudgmental, while David Crane showed how a city communicates through the symbolism of its form.22 She started teaching in the planning department of UPenn at the time Venturi was lecturing in the architecture department. Their collaboration at the university between 1960 and 1965 would leave significant traces on their private and professional lives. Social, political, and professional developments triggered Venturi’s emerging emphasis on the iconographic over the spatial. On 15 October 1964, Venturi received a letter from Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and Thomas Vreeland inviting him to join a meeting at Princeton. The same letter had been sent to some of the most well-known American scholars and architects of the time, including Stanford Anderson, Kenneth Frampton, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe, and Vincent Scully, criticizing the “lack of critical apparatus for discussion of issues crucial to the development

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of a future architecture.”23 Venturi attended the first meeting in Princeton and disputed the invitation letter, arguing that the problem of young architects was not the lack of a critical apparatus, but rather the lack of work.24 Consequentially, he withdrew from the organization, later renamed the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE).25 In this period, Venturi penned his first article on pop architecture, announcing that as a young practicing architect he simply accepted the conditions and aesthetics of society and its economic regimes.26 As the article suggests, Venturi justified pop architecture not (only) for aesthetic but (also) for economic reasons. According to him, pop architecture expressed the values of its society, which he criticized for directing its money and technology elsewhere, such as to the arms industry.27 It was consequently in the mid-1960s that Venturi acknowledged pop architecture as a fundamental strategy in his newly established practice.28 Venturi taught a Theories of Architecture course at UPenn from 1961 to 1965, and his lecture notes from that time offer clear evidence of a shift in understanding of context from the spatial to the iconographic. The curriculum divided architecture into elements such as site; mechanical equipment; light, space, movement; unity, balance, rhythm; and so on. Each week, Venturi lectured on these topics, while Scott Brown contributed to the course seminars. “Site and Context” was the title of the first lecture in the course after the introduction. In his lecture notes on site and context dating back to 1961, Venturi emphasized the greater whole that architects are obliged to consider in the design of their buildings.29 Mentioning gestalt psychology when defining context at a perceptual level, Venturi referred to position and form as essential elements in the definition of context and meaning, echoing the argument put forward in his master’s thesis more than a decade earlier. A year later, Venturi briefly expanded his lecture notes, which Figure 3.4  Venturi’s lecture notes on site and context, 1965. Venturi added sign as a new category in addition to position and form, which he previously introduced as the two main aspects of contextual architecture. The architectural archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. File 225.XI.27. (Courtesy of The Architectural Archives. University of Pennsylvania)

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remained more or less unchanged until 1965. In the lecture notes for the 1962 to 1964 period, Venturi again introduced the perceptual level of context as a central topic. He further elaborated context and meaning in relation to position and form, providing more detailed discussions on the “setting as form and texture” and the “setting as space.”30 In 1965, Venturi made a striking change to his lecture notes related to the definition of context that he would never express so explicitly in any of his publications. He repeated his description of position and form as the most significant aspects of context but added a third dimension: sign.31 He defined the characteristics of the new category of sign as representational, formal, and verbal, under which iconological architecture and pop architecture were also noted. From that time on, the new category of sign altered Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s spatial understanding of context, placing emphasis in the language(s) of architecture, in which vocabularies became symbols in communication. As Venturi later proclaimed, “viva variety of vocabularies for context’s sake: architectures, not architecture.”32 Venturi thus suggested that the language of architecture embraced different vocabularies and that representing these vocabularies through iconography was a contextual act. Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s aim, however, was neither to reappropriate the forms or rules of classical architecture nor to search for historical accuracy but rather to represent the classical vocabulary. In the article “Talking about Context,” Scott Brown later elaborated, “In our opinion, contextual borrowings should never deceive; you should know what the real building consists of beneath the skin. For this reason, our allusions are representations rather than copies of historic precedents. The deceit is only skin deep.”33 Their insistence on sign and symbolism led Venturi and Scott Brown to the separation of iconographic and spatial content, and this gave prominence to the façade, as expressed in their famous “duck versus decorated shed” analogy, the main lesson of the Las Vegas study. The decorated shed suggests engaging with context, not as a spatial phenomenon experienced through perception, but as a matter of communication conducted through iconography. This leads to the design of the façade as a billboard – a skin accommodating signs and symbols – and the building as a basic shelter, a generic box that responds to functional needs. The façade thus becomes an autonomous element in design, detached from space and identified as a message carrier that provides communication between a building and the public. A building relates to its social and cultural context by referring to the tastes of its society through the iconographic content of the facade. Consequently, this easy and direct communication replaced Venturi’s initial search for the difficult whole in conjunction with the spatial context. Cultural contextualism – as the contextualism of signs that evoke associations with the public through the representation of past forms – became one of the most prominent strategies in postmodern architecture. This limiting stylistic and formal profile led many architects, theoreticians, and teachers to contest context after the 1980s.34 This blinkered understanding of context influences comprehension of the term today.

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Possibility of a Critically Engaged Architecture Many architects today use and understand context only in a limited fashion. Triggered by neoliberal globalization, architecture has increasingly become a commodity.35 This has led more than ever to the celebration of iconic buildings that mostly ignore their physical, social, and cultural contexts.36 The design of buildings detached from contextual concerns as freestanding objects has been misinterpreted as an autonomous design act, as in reality they may be considered surrendering to market forces. At the same time, an exaggerated expression of local traditional architectural styles and authentic values in the built environment may be seen as contextual design under the impact of neoconservative politics.37 The resurrection of old forms and styles does indeed abuse context by ignoring the spatial and social specificities of the contemporary city and urban life. These issues demand new definitions of context that shun conformity and homogeneity in the built environment, along with revivalist, thematic, or picturesque place-making strategies. Accordingly, consideration of context does not mean fitting into the cityscape or responding to the style, height, materials, or other specific aspects of neighboring buildings. As a study of the early years of Venturi and Scott Brown exemplifies, contextual thinking could support an exploration of the potentials of architectural design in creating greater wholes by reflecting upon the collective construction of cities. In his book The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli argues “for the autonomy of the project, for the possibility of architectural thought to propose an alternative idea of the city rather than simply confirming its existing conditions.”38 Going against the understanding of context as something to be slavishly followed, or as something dictating that form follows “external forces,” Aureli proposes absolute architecture as a finite form that resists violent urbanization. In other words, Aureli introduces form as a precondition for both the autonomy and engagement of works of architecture. In fact, context could have a critical function in this discussion if framed as an apparatus in the construction of a vital dialogue between architecture and the city. Including the notion of context within the realm of the discipline of architecture accordingly has a decisive influence beyond the extrapolation of what has already been found on an existing site. The foremost significance of context arises in its immanent capacity to foster strong positions toward the spatial aspects of the city and the quality of the urban life it triggers, rather than in focus on the individual structure. Such an understanding of context could enforce an architectural practice that is both critical and engaged: one that does not comply with the immediate forces acting upon it but projects an idea of the city as its constituent element.

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Figure 3.5  Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts (YKKS) in İstanbul by TEGET architectural office, 2017. Photography by the author.

The building considers context as an apparatus for the projection of an idea of the city rather than as the immediate forces that act upon the works of architecture. It responds to its urban surrounding not in terms of style or proportion, but in its engagement with the public spaces in front. It is also critical in not complying with the popular cultural tastes of the public, but rather reflecting on the architecture of the city through its definitive form. In this regard, the building could be a great example of what Pier Vittorio Aureli suggested as “the possibility of absolute architecture”: being simultaneously radically autonomous and radically engaged.

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

14

15 16

This essay is derived from the author’s unpublished PhD dissertation titled “Reclaiming Context: Architectural Theory, Pedagogy and Practice since 1950” (PhD diss., Delft University of Technology, 2017) and the postdoctoral research titled “A Comparative Assessment on the Definition of Context in the Architectural Practices in Turkey since 1950,” supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” in The New Architectural Pragmatism, ed. William S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 22–33. See Alejandro Zaera, “Eisenman’s Machine of Infinite Resistance,” El Croquis 83 (1997): 50–63. K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 14–29. Somol and Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect.” Koolhaas, when discussing large buildings, stated: “Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.” Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Hans Werlemann, SMLXL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 502. See Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); and K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Rowe’s urban design method was highly elaborated and disseminated in the 1970s by the writings of his students. See Tom Schumacher, “Contextualism: Urban Ideals and Deformations,” Casabella 359–360 (1971): 79–86; Stuart Cohen, “Physical Context/ Cultural Context: Including it All,” Oppositions 2 (1974): 1–39; and William Ellis, “Type and Context in Urbanism: Colin Rowe’s Contextualism,” Oppositions 18 (1979): 3–27. See Kenneth Frampton, “Stirling in Context: Buildings and Projects 1950-1975,” RIBA Journal 83 (1976): 102–104; and Charles Jencks, “Towards Radical Eclecticism,” in The Presence of the Past, First International Exhibition of Architecture, ed. Gabriella Borsano (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1980), 30–37. See Keith Ray, Contextual Architecture: Responding to Existing Style (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980); Brent Brolin, Architecture in Context: Fitting New Buildings with Old (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980); Linda Groat, “Measuring the Fit of New to Old,” Architecture 72 (1983): 58–61; and Linda Groat, “Public Opinions of Contextual Fit,” Architecture 73 (1984): 72–75. See Peter Eisenman’s “Introduction” to Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City; and Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson’s text published in the catalogue of the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MOMA. For a broader mapping of the context discussion, see Esin Komez Daglioglu, “The Context Debate: An Archaeology,” Architectural Theory Review 20, no. 2 (2015): 266–279. For an alternative reading of context in the works of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, see Deborah Fausch, “The Context of Meaning is Everyday Life: Venturi and Scott Brown’s Theories of Architecture and Urbanism” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1999). For a brief history of the founding of the Princeton University School of Architecture and the impacts of Beaux-Arts education, see David van Zanten, “The ‘Princeton System’ and the Founding of the School of Architecture, 1915–1920,” in The Architecture of Robert Venturi, ed. Christopher Mead (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 34–44. Robert Venturi, Master Thesis, Sheet 2. Venturi’s interest in history and architectural precedents was in fact cultivated by Donald Drew Egbert, who was teaching a course on the History of Modern Architecture at

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17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26 27

28

29 30

31

Princeton. See Robert Venturi, “Donald Drew Egbert-A Tribute,” in The Beaux Arts Tradition in French Architecture, ed. David van Zanten (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), xiii–xiv. Robert Venturi, “Summer Activities: Report and Some Impressions, 1948,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.RV.34, Summer Activity: Report and Some Impressions (1948). This article was derived from Venturi’s master thesis and was published in Architectural Review in May 1953 under the heading of “Townscape.” Robert Venturi, “The Campidoglio: A Case Study,” Architectural Review 113, no. 677 (1953): 333–334. Robert Venturi, “Letter to Graham Foundation, 15 February, 1962,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.XI.54, Graham Foundation, Grant Application and Resume (1962). For an extensive study on Learning from Las Vegas, see Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: the City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013). Denise Scott Brown, “Preface,” in Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time, ed. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), ix. Denise Scott Brown, “Some Ideas and Their History,” in Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time, ed. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 105–119. Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and Thomas Vreeland, “Letter to Robert Venturi, 15 October, 1964,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.RV.115, Princeton Conference (1964). Robert Venturi, “Untitled manuscript, 15 January, 1965,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.RV.115, Princeton Conference (1964). For further information on CASE, see Stanford O. Anderson, “CASE and MIT Engagement,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture and the “Techno-Social” Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 578–651. Robert Venturi, “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” Arts and Architecture 82 (1965): 22. The draft of the article was written at the end of 1964. The mid-1960s was a turbulent time in the Unites States. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson became president in 1963, and a set of programs for the Great Society heralded the peak of modern liberalism in the United States. Johnson’s program, however, failed to fulfill its social promises and consequentially faced opposition from leftists, hippies, and the antiwar movement opposing the Vietnam War. See Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009) and Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). In 1958, Venturi entered practice with Cope and Lippincott; in 1961, he became partners with William Short; and in 1964, he established his own firm with John Rauch, which Denise Scott Brown joined a couple years later. Robert Venturi, “Lecture II: The Site,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.XI.1. Robert Venturi, “Site and Context, 1963–64,” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.XI.7, ARCH 512 – Course Materials (Spring 1964). Robert Venturi, “ARCH 512 – Lecture II: Site and Context, the Inside versus the Outside (1/26/1965),” the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, file 225.XI.27.

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32

33 34 35 6 3 37

38

Robert Venturi, “Mal Mots: Aphorisms-Sweet and Sour-By an Anti-Hero Architect,” in Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room, ed. Robert Venturi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 316. Denise Scott Brown, “Talking About Context,” Lotus 74 (1992): 128. This issue of Lotus was specifically dedicated to contextualism. Sandy Isenstadt, “Contested Contexts,” in Site Matters, ed. Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 157–183. See William S. Saunders, ed., Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). See Leslie Sklair, “Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization,” City 10 (2006): 21–47. Sociologist John Urry argues that globalization cannot be defined as an opposition to localization. On the contrary, it often increases local distinctiveness. John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995). Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), xiii. Emphasis in the original.

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4. Site Citations: The Grounds of Modern Landscape Architecture Elizabeth Meyer Introduction Site works, site specific, site-inflected, site-readings, site-seeing, site response, site conditioned, site interpretation. Contemporary landscape architecture is replete with such phrases. For many, a site’s characteristics are not simply circumstances to be accommodated or mitigated. Instead, a site’s physical and sensual properties are sources for design expression. Site concerns permeate the design process, leaving their compartmentalized role in preconceptual design analysis. These repositioned site concerns challenge the modern divide between rational site analysis and intuitive, creative conceptual design: design as site interpretation, and site as program, not surface for program. Landscape architects introduced to writings and works by Carol J. Burns, Julia Czerniak, Robert Irwin, George Descombes, Sébastien Marot, or Peter Latz cannot imagine a design process without site immersion. How could one design for a site seen only in photographs taken by someone else? Impossible. Site analysis, at a large scale and recorded through detached rational mappings, has given way to site-readings and interpretations drawn from first-hand experience and from a specific site’s social and ecological histories.1 These site-readings form a strong conceptual beginning for a design response and are registered in memorable drawings and mappings conveying a site’s physical properties, operations, and sensual impressions. Recent reemphasis on site intersects with other interests and developments in the design fields, from sustainability to phenomenology, regionalism to smart growth, feminist critiques of modernization to green politics, as well as postmodern skepticism about metanarratives such as master planning to site-specific art. Given the pervasiveness of contemporary writing about site, curiously little reflection exists on the history of site in modern landscape architecture. Granted, there has been significant scholarship on the importance of site in pre-19th-century landscape theory.2 This essay, part of a larger project of recovering modern landscape architecture theory, extends such site stories into the 19th and 20th centuries in America. Site-reading and editing were central to establishing landscape architecture as a discipline separate from architecture, engineering, and horticulture. Counter to the historical narratives that reduce landscape practice to stylistic debates about the picturesque and the beautiful or the formal and informal, I have found the written record of park reports, treatises, journal

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articles, monographs, and design primers replete with designers’ positions about site.3 These sources substantiate the significance of site in modern landscape design theory and, as such, in differentiating landscape architecture from other disciplines. Awareness of this history provides a lens for contextualizing contemporary practice, understanding how landscape architecture emerged as a new profession, and partially explaining why landscape architecture struggled to maintain recognition as a fine art. In a 19th-century culture in which site specificity resonated at several levels – as an index of cultural and political identity as well as a source for artistic inspiration – site matters established landscape architecture as a central activity. Conversely, site matters marginalized landscape architecture a half-century later when a contrasting set of criteria such as abstraction, objecthood, uniqueness, and universality characterized modern art and design. In brief, site matters defined the core of landscape architecture, but they did not always contribute to its perceived artfulness by others.4

Nineteenth-Century Landscape Gardening Practice and Theory: Site and Professional Identity One detects in both the writings and works of 19th-century landscape practitioners in North America that the act of visiting a site and interpreting its essential character was fundamental to their conceptual design processes. Site structure joined, and at times supplanted, building structure as the armature of the designed landscape. Site concentration differentiated the nascent profession of landscape architecture from other fields: There is a large spirit of inquiry and a lively interest in rural taste … but the great mistake made by most novices is that they study gardens too much, and nature too little … the fields and woods are full of instruction … And yet it is not any portion of the woods and fields that we wish our finest pleasure-ground scenery precisely to resemble. We rather wish to select from the finest sylvan features of nature, and to recompose the materials in a choicer manner. … Let us take it then as the type of all true art in landscape gardening – which selects from natural materials that abound in any country, its best sylvan features, and by giving them a better opportunity than they could otherwise obtain, brings about a higher beauty of development and a more perfect expression than nature itself offers.5 A. J. Downing identified the fundamental skills required of the landscape designer: the eye of a connoisseur who discerns, as well as the hand of an improver who alters the best features of a site. This connoisseur-as-creator preserved desirable features but also arranged and recombined those features, sometimes editing out or destroying others, to reveal found natural beauty. Landscape design, for Downing, required an astute ability to read and interpret found sites before creating sites. This attitude toward the found site permeated the design literature accompanying the inception of landscape gardening and, later, landscape architecture as a profession in 19th-century America.

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If in researching the history of site one only reviewed landscape design theory book titles, it would be apparent that site, at various scales, figured prominently. For instance, Downing’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), called “probably the most famous American nineteenth-century treatise on garden design,” suggested that European landscape gardening theories must be modified for a new nation’s sociopolitical values as well as a different continent’s physical geography and climate.6 Among the first texts to define the role of a professional landscape architect in American town design was Horace W. S. Cleveland’s Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West (1873), which framed site more narrowly than Downing at the scale of region.7 Cleveland addressed developers, speculators, and public officials who were building new towns in a region made accessible by rail. Appealing to their sense of profit, he argued that the existing terrain – wooded ridges and stream valleys – could be a public armature around which the developer’s speculative grid was arranged and from which it gained value. Later, Wilhelm Miller’s The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (1915), building on new scientific theory about plant ecology while appealing to regional pride, called for specifying native Midwestern plant communities instead of imported horticultural species and hybrids.8 American Plants for American Gardens (1929), coauthored by Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann, described 11 garden types based on plant communities found on eastern sites, from Maine to Georgia.9 Their explicitly ecological perspective explained the relationship between soils, moisture, light, plants, and time in the creation of sites, underscoring their successional nature. Miller’s and Roberts’s and Rehmann’s sites were not stable spaces, but dynamic systems. These four texts, representatives of a genre, demonstrate how varied site scales and concerns were – from the social and economic to the geological and ecological, from the scale of the city, region, and continent to the specification of plant species, from the spatial to the temporal.

The Centrality of Site Theories in 19th-Century American Culture Nineteenth-century landscape architects gleaned much of their design theory from that of 18th-century European practitioners such as Thomas Whately, Uvedale Price, and William Gilpin. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. encouraged his apprentices to read these original sources in addition to Downing, who translated that European theory into an American idiom. All these theorists described and admired landscapes characterized by site structure and experienced sequentially through unfolding, layered, veiled, and atmospheric spaces; they were less concerned with extending a building’s geometry into the designed landscape than with amplifying the site’s latent character. The translation of these site-nuanced theories to another continent, another century, and into an urbanizing society, raised fascinating questions. What did it mean to transpose a site aesthetic from one place to another?10 Were the designers who read Gilpin, Price, and Whately looking to make landscapes reminiscent of the ones they described? Or were they learning to read a site, and to appreciate its particularities, in the manner of Gilpin, Price, and Whately?

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These questions were examined in American art criticism familiar to landscape architects, such as that of John Ruskin, Asher Durand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horacio Greenough. For instance, Ruskin’s admonition that landscape painters capture “the specific, distinct and perfect beauty” of elements in a site, and suggestion that “the highest art is that which seizes this specific character, which develops and illustrates it, which assigns to it its proper place in the landscape” resonated with landscape architects as well.11 Asher Durand’s essay on landscape painting in The Crayon expounded both site-specificity and site editing as part of the artistic process: I would urge any young student in landscape painting, the importance of painting direct from Nature as soon as he shall have acquired the rudiments of Art … Let him scrupulously accept whatever she presents him, until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity, and then he may approach her on more familiar terms, even venturing to choose and reject some portions of her unbounded wealth.12 Thus, ideas about particularity and specific sites filtered into landscape architecture practices. One approach interpreted known aesthetic theories, such as the pastoral or beautiful and the picturesque, as lenses for finding whatever was particular on a site and amplifying it through design. Another sought existing sites with the proper ground forms and woodlands/meadows to support these known aesthetic categories; the existing site was an armature or frame upon which to drape or construct known aesthetic characters. Deciding how particular or general it should be, or how much of the site to preserve or alter, varied from practitioner to practitioner, but the range of debate was narrow. How did landscape architecture reveal the site? Which site was revealed: the one at hand, or the ideal one? These questions came into increased focus concomitant with the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War and with the rise of the modernized city as specific sites, rather than transposed idealized landscape types, came to be associated with specific cultural, national, and regional identities. The shift away from transposed landscapes, as exemplified by Olmsted Sr.’s early works, to specific regional sites, such as those valued by Jens Jensen or Horace W. S. Cleveland, was partially explained by the meaning of specific sites to different generations and regional communities. Gradually, landscape architects weaned away from an English form of Picturesque aesthetics as they invented another, more contaminated by, or intermingled with, cultural, scientific, and artistic trends of their own time and place.13 Through the lens of site, one can demonstrate how landscape architecture intersected with broader cultural themes and how this clustering of shared interests situated landscape architecture in a central place within American cultural production. Critics of the day underscored the prominent role of landscape design. For example, consider Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in lecturing on the relationship of landscape and national identity in 1844, described landscape design as “the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape” and the “fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture, painting, and religious and civil architecture have become effete, and have passed into second childhood.”14

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New languages and techniques for describing sites in maps, diagrams, and paintings reinforced this cultural currency and influenced how landscape architects and their clients valued particular plots of land. Landscape painters, scientists, and cartographers produced new images that altered and, at times made more particular, the site-reading capacity of landscape architects, their consultants, and their clients. Painters, aware of the public’s knowledge of natural history, especially geology, rendered individual plants, rocks, and terrain – Ruskin’s vital truths and beauties – with great precision, while at the same time taking artistic liberties to reassemble, distill, compress, or intensify those elements to improve on the overall composition.15 If landscape painters provided landscape architects with clues to the relationship between site-reading and creativity, then geologists’ studies of land formation processes such as glaciation, erosion, and deposition provided both artists and landscape architects with additional lenses for appreciating and understanding specific sites. A geological cross-section, such as one included in the 1861 Central Park report, depicted deep structure below the surface. These theories and representations offered landscape architects, especially those in the northern states shaped by glacial processes, new vocabularies for understanding their canvas and medium: the earth’s surface. Previously valued for its visual, surface qualities in texts such as Downing, these geological sites had sectional form, structure, depth, and content, which a designer such as Frederick Olmsted Jr. could reveal through design subtractions or additions.16 The intermingling of aesthetic discourses and conventions with geological knowledge reinvigorated and at times transcended aesthetic categories such as the picturesque, pastoral, and sublime. This disciplinary contamination also enabled the translation of those 18th-century European design codes into American design dialects that valued particular local regional sites for their aesthetic beauty, geological uniqueness, and historical associations. Geological descriptions underscored the vastness of North American natural history. Such associations imbued sites with cultural and historical significance that undergirded regional and national identity. While the public’s geological literacy persisted, this scientific lens enriched the site-readings and practices of both designers and their clients.17 Later, ecology as well as geology enriched landscape architects’ ability to read and alter a site. For Miller, Jens Jensen, O. C. Simonds, Rehmann, and Marjorie Cautley, plant ecology was to vegetation what glaciation theory was to rocks.18 It gave landscape architects a different vocabulary for composing plants – and for understanding their relationship to one another and the environment – than the language of natural, irregular, and informal.19 Unlike the taxonomic disciplines of botany and horticulture, ecological thinking emphasized relationships, not parts. One knew plant communities, and spatial layering and strata, in relationship to particular soil types, moisture gradients, topographic settings, and orientations. Documentation of such plant groupings was often photographic, emphasizing plants’ massing, spacing, and texture. Accompanied by lists of indicator plants characterizing certain communities, these photographs enabled the translation of scientific fact into design vocabulary. The ecological lens for site-reading entered public consciousness and the profession in the early 20th century when popular interest in geology was waning.

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One should not underestimate the importance of a literate audience in the reception of designed landscapes. Landscape architecture was at once a design practice and a cultural practice that projected Americans’ desires for cultural identity into designed landscape form. The site-reading skills and interests of politicians and cultural critics, as well as geologists, ecologists, poets, cartographers, and painters, propelled landscape architecture into prominence as much as the talents and tenacity of its practitioners. These nondesigners appreciated landscape art and design in relationship to particular sites made legible through art, science, myth, and literature. They understood the landscape’s particularity as meaningful in relationship to urbanization and industrialization. Site appreciation was born of a cross-disciplinary perspective, the likes of which were not matched until the “blurring of boundaries” in late-20th-century cultural practices. That a similar intersection of art, science, and politics recently propelled landscape architecture out of the margins of design practice suggests that this reassessment might be a source for contemporary as well as historical reflection.

Differentiating Landscape and Site Growing interest in site-specificity challenged early-19th-century idealized conceptions of landscape. The former valued the particular and the unique, while the latter valued the general and repeatable.20 A comparison of two parklike settings, one described by Olmsted Sr. and the other by Cleveland, illuminates the distinction between the terms landscape and site for 19th-century landscape designers.21 In his 1872 entry on public parks in a popular encyclopedia, Olmsted Sr. traced their aesthetic and spatial origins to private English hunting parks that were managed, in large part, by deer grazing and eliminating the forest/meadow edge of its understory and shrub layer.22 The park’s spatial condition, then, was characterized by the meadow’s ground plane slipping under the high woodland canopy. The manipulated forest edge appealed to Olmsted Sr. It allowed the pastoral landscape of the meadow to appear both continuous, as the trees did not bound its surface, and mysterious, as its edges were not visible in the deep shadows under the canopy. Olmsted Sr. valued this park scenery because he believed it aroused certain universal human emotions.23 When transposed to new locales, such as North America, this English park scenery became an idealized landscape type. Writing in Garden and Forest (1890), Cleveland recounted a densely layered forest/meadow edge that couldn’t be more different from that described by Olmsted.24 The spatial edge Cleveland described was not based on an idealized type or a distant site, but the actual forest/meadow edges in the various regions in which he lived and worked. His preference for the richly layered ecotone of impenetrable perennials, shrubs, and small trees along the fringe of a forest was more than one cultivated by travel or regional identity, however. Cleveland gleaned his advocacy of the found site and commitment to finding beauty in the actual site without abstraction from the ideas of Horacio Greenough and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These two critics shared a belief in the potential of American art forms not derivative of European models, but grounded in specific, not idealized, nature and in fitting responses to utility or function. Their writings appealed to Cleveland,

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who taught his readers and clients to see regional sites as worthy sources of landscape beauty and design form.25 Both Olmsted Sr. and Cleveland believed certain landscapes engendered aesthetic experiences and restored the spirit as well as the body; but the actual landscapes they described are very different. Olmsted Sr. idealized English landscapes with a priori formal relationships and transposed those scenes to new sites. Olmsted Sr. relied on aesthetic theories imported from Europe to see and structure the landscape.26 A plot was valued in relationship to the degree to which it possessed woods, meadows, and vales that approximated characteristics associated with idealized scenic tropes of the pastoral and picturesque. A design response revealed those latent characteristics in the actual through design tactics of amplification and subtraction or clearing. Cleveland valued found sites as indices of regional identity and American uniqueness. Relying more on Emerson and Greenough than on Gilpin, Price, and Ruskin, he appreciated sites for their idiosyncrasies, not their generalities. His design response was more about distilling or condensing a site’s essence into design forms and spaces. This comparison underscores the fundamentally site-inflected and reception-focused bias of early modern American landscape theories. Landscapes meant something because of not only their appearance, but also the associations they aroused.

Site-Reading Strategies and Site Design Tactics If site mattered, how did designers actually work on a site? For, unlike other landscape devotees, landscape architects were not simply connoisseurs or recorders of the landscape; they were simultaneously site readers and editors. The site’s character was to be revealed through design. That editing – through amplification, subtraction, distillation, or compression – brought the found site’s latent qualities and phenomena into clearer focus.27 In addition to changing sites, landscape architects transposed sites.28 They created designed landscape forms that evoked the memory of other culturally meaningful sites, such as distant prairies or fens. They abstracted the essential characteristic of other sites – in the form of a fragments or synecdoches – and transported them to new places. Although the entirety of site approaches uncovered in the first century of American modern landscape architecture cannot be thoroughly examined in the confines of this essay, I have chosen a representative group of site-reading strategies and sitedesign tactics to discuss.29 They are site as armature or framework; site as geomorphological figure; site as ecosystem or geological fragment; and site as temporal phenomenon, haecceity, and subjective experience. These lenses for site-reading and making assume that plots are not empty canvases, but full spaces, full of nature and history, whose latent forms and meanings can be surfaced, and made palpable, through design.30

Site as Armature or Framework In 1849, Downing published an editorial in The Horticulturist: Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste on the landscape beauty of new cemeteries that suggested how the existing

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site could be a framework upon which to build landscape art. He wrote, “The true secret of the attraction lies in the natural beauty of these sites, and in the tasteful and harmonious embellishment of these sites by art … Hence, to an inhabitant of the town, a visit to one of these spots has the united charm of nature and art,—the double wealth of rural and moral associations.”31 According to Downing, the site’s natural beauty – in its landform, plant groupings, and varied spaces – provided the framework or armature for the arrangement of the cemeteries’ roads, walks, and crypts. The idea that the site was not an empty canvas but an articulated field, or a textile with recognizable warp and woof, was a dominant site-reading in much of the early Calvert Vaux and Olmsted Sr. practice. Their plan for Prospect Park is an excellent example of this site-reading strategy. Vaux and Olmsted Sr. conceived of a sequence of pastoral meadows and lakes and picturesque wooded hills and vales connected by multiple circuits for promenading and driving in carriages through the urban park. But the arrangement of these aesthetic categories or idealized landscape types, the picturesque and the pastoral or beautiful, was site-inflected. Existing glacial landforms were read as an armature or framework for creating picturesque and beautiful scenery.32 As evident in their reports to the Brooklyn Park Commissioners, Vaux and Olmsted Sr. understood that this landform armature contained latent qualities needing amplification and editing to reach the site’s potential beauty, charm, and effect. They wrote, “A mere imitation of nature, however successful, is not art, and the purpose to imitate nature, or to produce an effect which shall seem to be natural and interesting, is not sufficient for the duty before us.”33 Later, Vaux and Olmsted Sr. explained how they applied this design principle by magnifying and making “more distinct” the natural features and by deepening and heightening existing depressions and hills.34 There were norms in picturesque and pastoral theory about the character and effect of its scenery, but nothing explicit about how those individual scenes were combined. Vaux and Olmsted Sr. arranged spaces in relationship to the parcel’s latent structure, not according to fixed compositional principles. The park’s plan was based on the overlay of idealized landscape types transposed onto a particular landform armature. As evident in a diagram of the park plan inserted into an 1844 topographic map of Brooklyn, the resulting form was a composite of the general and the particular, idealized nature, and this specific site’s topographic peculiarities. One can find similar site sensibilities in other designers’ works, such as Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. There, Beatrix Farrand overlaid a sequence of interdigitated terraced geometric rooms and sloping paths amidst planting drifts onto the ridges and swales of a Rock Creek Park tributary. For Farrand, this Piedmont topography was a framework for the plan and section of the terraced architectural gardens and the sloping wild gardens. Farrand explained this concept in a 1922 letter to her client: “The whole scheme for the north slopes of the property should properly be studied from the ground itself rather from any plan, as the contours and expressions of the ground will control the plantations more strongly than any other feature.”35 An interdigitated reading of the Dumbarton Oaks plan – ground as one part geometrical terrace and one part textured surface – counters the usual description of the

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Figure 4.1  Context map. Olmsted Sr. and Vaux’s Prospect Park plan inserted into the 1844 Hassler Map of New York Bay and Harbour, demonstrating the overlap of the park’s picturesque areas with the topographic ridge running along the center of Brooklyn and Long Island. (Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection, composite image by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar)

plan as a transition from architecture to nature, from order to the wild. Rather, there are two systems of order, two frameworks or armatures: one the geometry of the house and the other the geography of the site. These two fields of order intermingle, creating a complex tapestry of landscape form and experience that covers the parcel from wood to house. Cleveland’s town planning proposals contribute to this site-reading tradition. In Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West, he proposed that forested ravines form a city park framework within and around which to arrange town

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Figure 4.2  Analytical model. Farrand’s Dumbarton Oaks garden depicting the interdigitation of two ordering frameworks— the geometry of the house and architectural gardens with the geography of the land and wild gardens. (Model by Elizabeth Meyer and Katie Towson)

streets and blocks.36 He criticized the practice of plotting a town grid on flat land, siting the back of private lots along perimeter ravines, and relegating the steep wooded slopes to marginal roles in the city. Rather, he imagined the ravines as town planning armatures, as central parks lined by public streets, as sources of civic identity. As in the work of Olmsted Sr., Vaux, and Farrand, one discerns in Cleveland a design practice wherein the site is not circumstantial, but a topographic framework or scaffold for assembling designed landscape forms and spaces.

Figuring the Site With increased knowledge of glacial processes came more refined lenses for reading topography as figure as well as surface framework. This was especially true in New England, where geologists Louis Agassiz and Nathaniel Shaler’s scholarship on land formation was popularized in public lectures and magazines.37 Through their work, one could read the land’s surface as both a continuous undulating surface and an articulated field with thickened conditions, glaciated moments, or figures that could be named and delineated. Such ability to read the landscape’s surface geologically influenced landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who hired Shaler to teach courses in the Harvard landscape architecture curriculum.38 Agassiz and Shaler’s influence can be discerned in the geological references made by Olmsted Jr. when describing the Wellesley College campus. In 1902, Olmsted, Jr. advised President Caroline Hazard on campus expansion scenarios. His report began with a confession: “for I must admit that the exceedingly intricate and complex topography and peculiarly scattered arrangement of buildings

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somewhat baffled me and that I came away with a less clear and comprehensive grasp of the whole situation than I could wish.”39 One imagines that, for this young designer who was then involved in the planning for the monumental core of Washington, DC, Wellesley College might have appeared disordered and informal. But Olmsted Jr. was fluent in multiple form languages, as his site description demonstrates: Wellesley College has in its grounds a peculiar endowment … the landscape beauty which often attaches itself to the type of glaciated topography there presented when it is fortunately accentuated by the distribution of trees. It is a landscape not merely beautiful, but with a marked individual character not represented so far as I know on the ground of any other college in the country … acre after acre it is being defaced and altered by man’s occupation, until at last in its perfection it will be very rare indeed … And so this type of landscape with its peculiar kind of intricate beauty and significant expression of geological history must under ordinary occupancy be a vanishing type.40 Olmsted Jr.’s letter described the various landforms on the campus and suggested how building construction could amplify the site’s existing character and figure its topographic forms rather than erase them.41 The 1910s Norembega Quad by Cram, Day, and Klauder and the 1921 Arthur Shurtleff (aka Shurcliff), Olmsted Jr., and Cram campus master plan applied this site tactic. They both figured select geological formations through the siting of building clusters around specific topographic figures. Olmsted Jr.’s site description illuminates how geological knowledge led to new ways of both reading and designing the site. It demonstrated that increased scientific knowledge about site reinforced and supplemented aesthetic preferences. Additionally, this case study reveals that complex, curvilinear, and irregular forms were not seen as informal counterpoints or foils to architectural forms and order. Rather, new hybrid orders of architectural geometry and site topography/geology were evident at multiple scales, as framework guidelines, master plans, site plans, and building massing.42 Figure 4.3  Analytical model. Wellesley College Campus, explaining how buildings figure the landform through placement, massing, and alignment. (Model by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar)

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Site Fragments Olmsted Jr. valued the site of the Wellesley campus as an endangered, regional landscape type. Through preservation – paradoxically ensured through construction – its glaciated landforms could stand for a larger regional landscape that was encroached upon by suburbanization. This notion of one landscape element signifying the whole, or broader, site is a third site-reading strategy and site-making tactic, one that occurs when development threatens to erase regional sites. Utilizing a site fragment to refer to a distant whole was not a new idea in the nineteenth century.43 What was different, however, were the ways that geological and ecological sciences altered and informed how a site fragment was found, defined, and valued, and then how that fragment was grafted onto a designed landscape. The impact of these sciences on the site vocabulary and meanings of landscape architecture can be elucidated by comparing sections of two parks: Central Park, by Vaux and Olmsted Sr., and Columbus Park, Chicago, by Jens Jensen. The primary public sequence into Central Park from the south through the Mall and Bethesda Terrace culminates in a vista across a lake to the most rustic place in the park, the Rambles. As one enters the upper terrace along the flanking stairs, the close-up profile of a large rock outcrop looms in the foreground. The sequence transforms a circumstantial element into a significant figural event.44 When the park was designed, the designers had access to geological cross-section maps of Manhattan; these enabled them to expose rock through a process of subtraction to reveal even more of the site’s deep structure.45 Since the outcrop was by its very definition incomplete, a mere glimpse of the deep structure below, it was understood as a fragment of the larger site structure. Framing and foregrounding the outcrop also highlighted its surface striations, formed by glacial grinding. A touch of the sublime was injected into the landscape through both the outcrop’s actual size and its grain, which registered the processes of its formation.46 Appreciation of the rock fragment tapped into aesthetic (picturesque, pastoral, and sublime) as well as scientific categories. From the Bethesda Terrace, two site references were juxtaposed.47 A foreground outcrop, a revelation of the site’s actual subsurface geology, was juxtaposed with a transposed idealized landscape background.48 A park visitor was transported and grounded at the same time. Geological mapping enabled Vaux and Olmsted Sr.’s regional references within Central Park (1857) through the device of the outcrop fragment. Fifty years later, plant ecology fieldwork provided Jensen an analogous opportunity at Columbus Park (1916). Fascinated with the regional landscape of his adopted home, Jens Jensen learned to read it from University of Chicago Henry Cowles, a scholar of plant communities.49 Jensen read the Midwestern landscape as a mosaic of plant communities from which a designer could extract fragments to represent the whole.50 Within Columbus Park, Jensen assembled a prairie landscape mosaic of meadow, woodland edge, and prairie river, each part of which was distilled into its essence and conveyed in fragmentary form.51 Distillation and fragmentation of site types resisted and acknowledged the scale of the transposed prairie, a vastness threatened by the spread of cities and industrial agriculture.52

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Figure 4.4  Context map. Jensen’s Columbus Park plan inserted into geology map of Chicago, demonstrating the location of the beach ridge along which the prairie river and eastern terrace were constructed. (Arial Geology Map, Illinois Riverside Quadrangle, April 1902, Geologic Atlas of the United States. Department of Interior. US Geologic Survey. Chicago folio #81, 1894. Scale 1:62,500.) (Composite image by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar)

In Jensen’s design, the wooded rise in the northeast corner of the park was the source of two springs and a rill that flowed into a constructed prairie river, recalling the slow-moving waterways that meandered through gently sloping prairie meadows while cutting deep into their limestone substrata.53 The siting of this river fragment provides clues to Jensen’s site-reading and site-making design strategy. From this west-facing bluff, park visitors would look to the horizontal expanse of a central prairie meadow illuminated by the setting sun. This western prospect, framed by woods with

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a detailed foreground of wetland grasses and perennials, was a key component of many of Jensen’s landscapes. For him, it captured the repetition of the horizontal line and the vastness of the sky that characterized the Midwestern American landscape.54 Jensen’s commitment to creating a design practice that evoked, distilled, and compressed regional site qualities through an array of plant communities and habitats was not unique. Similar positions were taken by others, such as Wilhelm Miller in The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (1915), Frank Waugh in The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening (1917), and O. C. Simonds in Landscape Gardening (1920); Elsa Rehmann and Edith Roberts in American Plants for American Gardens (1929); and Marjorie Cautley in “Planting at Radburn” (1930). Their ecological knowledge allowed them to see a mosaic of sites within the region. These plant communities and their habitats were categorized into types that could be distilled, compressed, and fragmented through design. In categorizing plant communities by site types, these publications translated scientific theories into site practices applicable to the scale of gardens and parks.55

Site as Haecceity or Phenomenal, Temporal Experience Site as framework, site as figure, and site as fragment: each of these design strategies attends to the physical characteristics of a site. What about other aspects, such as the effect of early morning light on undulating surfaces? Or consideration for the emergence of a wildflower color field that quickly disappears into the background of a meadow? These temporal moments, episodic contrasts, or haecceities56 – individual, singular events that intersect with the places and things where they occur – are often site-specific. Two identically shaped and dimensioned spaces, built in different regions, have very different qualities given temperature, wind, light, and resultant microclimates. The importance of these nonphysical, phenomenal characteristics in the landscape has always been noticed. How could they be ignored?57 Capturing, distilling, and condensing a site’s temporal qualities is another way that site-readings lead to site-makings. Throughout Siftings (1939), Jensen wrote eloquently about the nonvisual experience of the Midwestern landscape. One passage recounted a haecceity at his home: It was early morning when he called me to the open door … There was a peculiar light over this little sun opening, caused by the reflection of the sunrise. The clearing was bordered by a simple composition of hardwoods with a few hawthorns, crab-apples, and gray dogwood scattered on the edge. The light had added an enchantment to this simple composition … Many years have gone by since then, many mornings and many evenings, and I have watched the clearing. I have seen it on cloudy days and in full sunlight, in the starry evenings and on dark nights and moonlight nights, but I have never seen it the same.58 Columbus Park’s bluff commanded a prospect of the big western sky. Such symbolic, phenomenal events were organizing tools in Jensen’s residential gardens, as well as his

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public parks. Significant rooms, activities, and spaces oriented toward a sunset, a sunrise, or a moonrise. In a 1930 interview, Jensen relayed that these phenomena were as much the “raw materials of the garden” as topography and vegetation.59 When Jensen planted red maples and sumac between a terrace and the setting sun to capture the intense glow of their backlit autumn leaves or noted the deep shadows cast by a grove of red cedars in moonlight, he was reading and making sites.60 Unable to recreate the physical scale of a prairie meadow, Jensen created a language of fragments and phenomena as a means to “portray its soul.”61 Granted, Jensen’s view west should be appreciated for its cultural meanings as well as its formal and phenomenal qualities. The western sky and prairie were symbols of regional identity and indicators of national expansion. Again, site meanings and matters intermingle cultural, historical, and ecological references. Subjective and experienced mix with the scientific and observed. Jensen’s built work and writings offer, perhaps, the best early-20thcentury example of a site practice wherein phenomenal, temporal moments are consistently distilled into significant landscape places and experiences.62 His work demonstrates spatial strategies that are in the service of manifesting time.63 Once again, considering the designed landscape through the lens of site-reading and siteresponding practices is a more effective mechanism for surfacing richer languages of landscape form and space than the terms formal and informal. Through the distillation and condensation of a site’s ephemeral phenomena, landscape architects expand site-reading strategies from the formal to the experiential, away from the landscape object to the landscape subject, expanding the spatial to include the temporal. It is perhaps not until works such as Sea Ranch by Lawrence Halprin, Robert Irwin’s site-specific art, and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s gardens in the latter half of the 20th century that this type of designed landscape as site-reading reemerges in such a powerful, yet subtle form.

Generalizations About Late-19th-Century to Early-20th-Century Site-Reading Practices Although not exhaustive, the site-reading practices outlined here do suggest that reading and altering sites were central issues for landscape architects during the period of intense modernization of the American landscape. Individual attitudes varied about how much of a site should be edited or altered, but one can discern a site-inflected bias in the most prominent modern landscape practitioners. These individuals were knowledgeable of their collective identity as a discipline that represented site through design. They contemporized this identity through their translation of the writings about art and the found landscape by Gilpin, Ruskin, Durand, Greenough, and Emerson. They enriched the meaning of their designed landscapes by intermingling these aesthetic codes with new scientific theories for reading sites, such as glaciation and plant ecology, which appealed to societies seeking cultural forms that reinforced desires for unique regional and national identity. These lenses allow site meaning to be created as much through the enactment of social rituals or the experience of temporal moments within them as

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in design forms themselves. In other words, these modern, designed landscapes were sites of immersion and subjectivity. They required reciprocity between a viewer’s experience and the apprehension of their artfulness. As these strategies demonstrate, unlike other fine art disciplines, the art of landscape design did not reside solely in the object; this characteristic was a source of disciplinary uniqueness and an obstacle to the recognition of the discipline’s formal invention and compositional codes. I believe this, among other factors, marginalized landscape architecture during the second half-century of its existence as a profession in the United States.

Twentieth-Century Challenges and Changes: From Site Practices to Stylistic Choices Despite the varied site-based design practices that flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, written criticism often described the landscape through reductive stylistic codes. Throughout the 1890s, essays in Garden and Forest advocated for more complex thinking about the aesthetic debates concerning the “best style” of garden and landscape design. Rejecting the simplification of design to a choice between formal and informal, writers from editor Henry Stiles to Charles Eliot Jr. presented alternative terms for describing landscape forms and spaces. In fact, after reading the articles and reports written by designers, in contrast to historians’ writing about the period, one realizes that, for American landscape architects, the terms formal or informal were not the dominant categories for describing design landscapes before the 1890s.64 Site concerns such as how to interpret, edit, amplify, or transpose sites were more pressing design concerns than were issues of style. Still, outside the readership of this small but influential magazine, the audience for landscape appreciation was changing. Influential books such as Reginald Blomfield’s The Formal Garden in England (1892), a treatise on the garden as an outdoor room predicated on the plan geometry of architecture, reduced landscape design to one of two styles: geometric or formless. It is not until the so-called formal-informal or architectural garden – wild garden debates between William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield during the 1890s – that style became such a highly charged landscape design issue, wrapped up as it was in matters of both nationalism and professionalism. These debates, carried out in books and journal articles, exemplify a shift in aesthetic preferences, but they were not solely responsible for the turn of events. As landscape criticism and garden history became more limited by the formal and informal nomenclature, site-inflected works were less likely to be seen and appreciated. Concurrently, landscape architecture as a discipline was viewed as less of a modern design practice. For those versed in visual arts vocabularies, complex, fragmented, overlaid forms and figures resulting from the intermingling of the natural sciences such as ecology and geology with art were construed as irregular, informal, and inconsequential. Arrangements resulting from reading and interpreting site clues through editing, amplifying, distilling, and condensing were rendered invisible, arbitrary, and lacking by other artists, designers, and some of the public. Style matters replaced site matters.65

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Site practices were also limited by influential exhibitions and publications associated with changing architectural trends. When Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s The International Style (1932) took up the issue of site, it reduced landscape design to less than a choice of style: Natural surroundings are at once a contrast and a background emphasizing the artificial values created by architects. Choice of site, and the arrangement of buildings upon the site: these are the prime problems of the international style in relation to natural surroundings. As far as possible the original beauties of the site should be preserved. Mere open spaces are not enough for repose; something of the ease and grace of untouched nature is needed as well.66 This extraordinarily influential book, more manifesto than catalog, reduced site-reading and editing to site selection, nature preservation, and functional site planning. Site was in service of architecture.67

Twentieth-Century Landscape Architectural Modernism and Site Theories One treatise associated with mid-20th-century landscape architectural modernism, Garrett Eckbo’s Landscape for Living (1950), responded directly to the marginalization of landscape architecture implicit in contemporary architectural theories. His book connected site practices directly to architectural practice and in doing so repositioned landscape architecture in a collaborative role with architecture. For Eckbo, the site did not exist prior to human occupation and need. Rather, “the site only exists, in its visual and spatial relation to people, through the introduction of the building which establishes a permanent relation between people and site. The building and site are one in fact and in use.”68 Eckbo’s site theories were quite different from 19th-century landscape architectural writings that often emphasized the differences, not the connections, between architectural and landscape design. Eckbo suggested that site strategies connected buildings and their inhabitants to nature. He made a profound and prescient criticism of contemporary architectural practices: that they often preclude this connective or mediating act by reducing the parcel to a visual landscape, a detached, albeit pleasant scene. Eckbo contextualized his arguments with a reference to a James Marston Fitch article: The Architectural Forum in November 1948 gives us perhaps the most recent summary of advanced architectural thinking on the esthetics of a building technology which, while it increasingly opens up the building to the landscape with the open structure and the glass wall, at the same time seems to increase the gap between man and nature by its increasingly precise and complete control of climate and habitat indoors. Never before in history has there been such a contrast between this potentially absolute control over

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interior climate, and the potentially complete transparency of glass walls and doors separating indoors from outdoors.69 Eckbo redefined landscape architecture as site-space design or land-and-building design, a mediating practice between architecture and nature. Instead of reducing the outdoors to an image framed through a ceiling-to-floor picture window, he advocated for indooroutdoor spaces that created a site. His site-space strategy was primarily a means to connect architecture to its place, not so much a reading of place as a vehicle for the generating design forms or experiences. In Landscape for Living, the term site planning enters into our site discourse.70 Unlike the reductive and instrumental functionalist associations that this term has today, for Eckbo, site planning would overcome the divide between engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture: We are on the threshold of realizing that our concepts of architecture (including creative engineering) and of landscape design (or landscape architecture) are in reality two halves, or two sides, of a greater art. This is, or will be, site-space organization, of spatial continuity at the truly functional scale of site, neighborhood, and community. … The bridge from the three formally separated spatial arts that exist, to the expanded concept of site-space form which is implicit in our thinking, is site planning as it is beginning to be understood today.71 Eckbo believed that space relations were the medium that connected the lived experience and the physical form of indoors and outdoors. Despite passages about the ground, plants, rock, and water, it is apparent that Eckbo’s site language was primarily spatial. Eckbo’s site vocabularies, like those of his predecessors, were inflected by the ways that the land was described in related disciplines. Geological and ecological vocabularies evident in earlier site-readings were replaced in Eckbo’s text with a spatial vocabulary that entered into architecture and landscape architecture discourse through German art-historical writings and then entered mainstream discussions of these design fields after the 1920s.72 Site-space planning, while nominally connected to the site-as-framework strategy, differed in one key aspect from pre–World War II site practices. Eckbo’s sitespace planning surfaced during a period when multidisciplinary design practices – such as the Architects Collaborative: Skidmore Owings and Merrill; Perkins and Will; EDAW; and Sasaki Associates – increasingly tackled large, complex suburban housing, commercial headquarters, and shopping centers.73 Site-space planning created a common vocabulary for such hybrid practices. It attempted to reduce, not reinforce, distinctions between the two design professions. In doing so, it substituted a temporal, geological, and ecological site framework with a spatial, environmental, and functional one. Later books, such as John Simonds’ Landscape Architecture (1961) and Kevin Lynch’s Site Planning (1962), extend this functional and structural sense of site planning. And while both Simonds and Lynch also address more artistic and intuitive site tactics, such as “reading and amplifying the site” and “this unsystematic, almost unconscious, reconnaissance,”

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they have been primarily remembered for their clear, rational approaches to problem solving, site analysis, and site planning.74

Frameworks, Figures, Fragments, Phenomena, and the Recognition of Modern and Postmodern Art The vocabulary and criteria of architecture were not the only obstacles to recognizing site practices as artistic and design activities. For, unlike the 19th century – when landscape and site issues were central to artistic production – 20th-century art criticism and production placed less value on site and the particular. Instead, a range of other concerns, such as abstraction and invention, the autonomy of the art object, mechanistic and technological metaphors, and standardization and mass production, served to marginalize site practices as nostalgic or instrumental. By the mid-20th century, an emphasis on site as a marked canvas no longer positioned landscape architecture as a new and promising modern art practice. Whether construed as overly nostalgic or merely analytical, site concerns no longer resonated as strongly as the subject matter of art. Within this context, as landscape architectural theory such as Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) and Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles (1969) reasserted the dynamic, fluctuating characteristics of site relative to new ecological thought, landscape architecture was increasingly located outside the boundaries of art. Site practices favored systems and fields over objects, engaged experience over detached contemplation, embeddedness versus boundedness. Site concerns challenged the very definition of abstract modern art. Building a conceptual strategy on a found condition weakened the designer’s role as a creative genius, an individual with a unique, idiosyncratic voice. The use of site materials to build a site work on-site versus in a representation one step removed, such as a painting or photograph, proved problematic for landscape architecture’s recognition as art. Since Quatremère de Quincy, J. C. Loudon, and Mariana Van Rensselaer, critics have noted the difficulty of recognizing the designed landscape as art given that its medium, subject, and canvas are so intertwined.75 Yet, more recent scholars, such as Rosalind Krauss, Mara Miller, Kim Michasiw, and Miwon Kwon, have suggested that art critics’ and historians’ biases hampered not only the recognition of landscape design, criticism, and history, but the history of art itself. Object-biased modern art and design criticism marginalized site practices from the early 1900s until the 1960s, when artists began moving out of the gallery, working in site materials, and creating embedded works that did not fit the criteria of modern art.76 Yet these individuals called themselves artists and their work art. Eventually critics adapted to include these site works, and when they did, many of the criteria by which landscape architecture had been denied the status of art were called into question. When the autonomy of the art or designed object was no longer considered one of the major criteria for artistic appreciation, site-based practices flourished (and vice versa). Given the ambiguous condition that early modern site works found themselves in – of being neither hierarchical figure nor simply existing ground, but a kind of figured ground, or edited/amplified ground – the lukewarm reception bestowed upon landscape

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design by the fine arts gatekeepers is not surprising.77 As Miwon Kwon has argued, postmodern site works challenged the objecthood of modern aesthetic theory and criticism: autonomy, self-referentiality, transportability, and placelessness.78 The centrality of these issues to a postmodern anti-aesthetic suggests that this essay is more than a historical recovery of site practices. It is a reaction against a limited perspective of what was construed to be mainstream modernity and a call for a new history of modern art, architecture, and landscape architecture. Reframing the history of the modern designed landscape through the lens of site provides perspective on the influential and widespread theories of site specificity in late-20th-century art, landscape architecture, and architecture.

Beyond Site Citations This essay represents the beginning of a larger enterprise. We need a more complete account of site in 20th-century design texts of all kinds: articles, reports, and books. We look for more landscape histories that include descriptions and analyses of the actual sites where construction occurred, as well as the strategies that different designers invented to read and alter those sites. Such stories can underscore the multivalent lenses through which site was found, represented, construed, and constructed. They can uncover the order and intention behind the seemingly contingent and fragmentary forms previously deemed merely informal, open, natural, or soft. This rethinking of the relationship of figure to field, thing to this-ness, object to void, building to landscape, and form to formlessness, provides a counterpoint to the impoverished narratives of landscape architecture that began in the latter part of the 19th century and continue, to some degree, today.79 Such endeavors will alter how we view the past and present, for they can enrich contemporary site-based practices by more firmly grounding ecological and scientific analytical methods within a cultural and historical dimension. During the last quarter-century, diverse groups of artists and designers have gathered around site practices. The very issue that defined landscape architecture as a separate design discipline, and later estranged it from the fine and modern arts, is now central to contemporary discourse. We might well ask, why is this so? How long will it last? As is evident in the texts discussed here, the history of site practices has ebbed and flowed. I would suggest that there is a reason for this, beyond the vagaries of stylistic preferences and professional differences. Site practices ebb and flow because of the reciprocity between the milieu and conceptions of the relationship of humanity to the natural world, between the designed landscape and the reception of the work by others. It is not a coincidence that a profession committed to site-reading and editing emerged within an urbanizing social formation when its audience understood that certain sites were indices of regional identity and that art, history, and science were intermingled in aesthetic appreciation of landscapes. Similarly, it is not a coincidence that the recent interest in site practices parallels public interest in environmentalism and sustainability and concern about the numbing homogeneity inherent in standard development practices.

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Despite this revival of site practices, it is surprising how professionally compartmentalized they remain. Landscape architects read and write sites anew, hybridizing ecological processes with human experiences on marginal urban lands. They combine biofiltration strips with parking surfaces, producing new human/nonhuman habitats; apply bioremediation and phytoremediation to industrial landscapes, creating temporary and transitional landscapes that allow neighbors to witness site cleansing; and program urban renewal’s infrastructural gashes, its vague terrain, with the stuff of everyday life. Sites permeate architects’ thinking and making of buildings as well. But too often their concerns begin where the landscape architects’ end. They apply green technologies to roofs and walls, transforming these water- and air-repelling surfaces into porous membranes that filter, cleanse, and store wild energies. They refer to site forms and operations, often made visible through digital media, to imagine new morphologies of space and structure. Site frameworks, fields, figures, and processes have dematerialized the very divide that Eckbo found in Fitch’s 1948 article. The transparent curtain wall’s “increasingly precise and complete control of climate and habitat indoors” has been replaced by a thickened zone of air and moisture exchange that responds to, and harnesses, the fluctuations between inside and outside. It has been transgressed by folded surfaces that defy emphatic boundary-making between in and out. Contemporary buildings as well as designed landscapes are site-full.80 So, if the boundaries between shelter and site have been renegotiated, and if the boundaries between designed landscapes and sites have been reconceptualized, why are the boundaries between architecture and landscape architecture still so parochially defined? And won’t this DMZ of professional colonization and appropriation – without acknowledgement or collaboration – thwart the potential of site-based practices, not to mention the reception of those practices by a public that lives across and between inside and outside? Could Eckbo’s 1950s conception of architecture and landscape architecture as “two halves, or two sides, of a greater art” suggest a bridge between?81 What would it mean to practice site-space design, or land-building design, that does not limit site-readings to generative strategies for designing landscape forms, processes, and spaces, or technical detailing of the two to five feet of space and (infra)structure between interior and exterior? As we chronicle, and at times even celebrate, the recovery of historic and contemporary site practices in late-20th- and early-21st-century design culture, we might probe deeper and consider unraveled paths such as those sketched out by Eckbo. And we might ponder how it is that we have come to expect so little from our languages of landscape description and designed landscape creation, especially from a prior generation of designers such as Downing, Olmsted Sr., Vaux, Cleveland, Eliot, Olmsted Jr., Farrand, and Jensen, who fought so hard to craft a new discipline a century and more ago. We might consider how those low expectations of formal and informal, soft and open, green and good, have contributed to the dumbing-down and sitelessness of both landscape history and much contemporary landscape design practice. And we might ask why a current generation of designers that has embraced site systems as analogs for architectural thinking, that has moved beyond formalism and object making in so many other areas of cultural discourse, and that has reveled in the hybrid operations

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and processes of ecotechnological processes, continues to expect so little of the actual designed and inhabited site space between their (formless) building and the larger territory? My inquiry focuses on past site practices, but it invites interrogation of our contemporary condition. Sites are found as well as invented. New directions for site practice might look less at new tools for how to read sites and more at finding spaces within which to imagine sites. For those spaces might be as much between disciplines as they are between surfaces, membranes, and operations.

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See Joan Nassauer, “Ecological Science and Landscape Design,” in Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning, ed. Bart Johnson and Kristina Hill (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 219, for a discussion of this shift. For a contemporary account demonstrating the importance of mapping as an interpretative, versus analytic, act, see James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 213–252. The best, and most recent, example of this is John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). See Thierry Mariage, The World of LeNotre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 53, regarding Boyceau and site. I owe considerable thanks to Michel Conan, director of landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks, for his questions regarding this topic during my 1999 Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship. They prompted me to initiate the research leading to this article and refining and revising the scope of my book manuscript. On the irony that the concept of landscape, itself the product of modernity, “disappeared from avant-garde art early in the twentieth century,” see Augustin Berque, “Beyond the Modern Landscape,” AA Files 25 (Summer 1993): 33. A. J. Downing, “A Few Hints on Landscape Gardening,” The Horticulturist: Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (November 1851), editorial reprinted in Rural Essays, ed. George William Curtis (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1858), 122. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Jack Becker, American Garden Literature in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks and Trustees for Harvard University, 1998), 93. For discussion of how Downing translated English design theory for an American audience and context, see Judith K. Major, To Live in the New World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). H. W. S. Cleveland, Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg and Co., 1873). Wilhelm Miller, The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1915). Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann, American Plants for American Gardens: Plant Ecology—the Study of Plants in Relation to Their Environment (New York: MacMillan, 1929). For a definition of transposed sites, see Mirka Benes, “Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. 1, pp. 33, 36), cited in Anne Helmrich’s “Representing Nature: Ideology, Art and Science in William Robinson’s Wild Garden,”

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in Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997), 97. For an account of Ruskin’s landscape painting criteria and criticism, see John Dixon Hunt, “Ruskin, Turnerian Topography, and Genius Loci,” Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 215–239. Asher Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” The Crayon 1:1 (3 January 1855): 2. See Dora Wiebeson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), as a model for understanding the picturesque as not a national style, but an aesthetic category that takes on different forms and meanings in different conditions. See also my 1992 essay, “Situating Modern Landscape Architecture,” in Theory in Landscape Architecture, ed. Simon Swaffield (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 21–31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 367, 369, originally delivered in Boston and published in Dial (April 1844). See Daniel Nadenicek, “Emerson’s Aesthetic and Natural Design: A Theoretical Foundation for the Work of Horace William Shaler Cleveland,” in WolschkeBulmahn, Nature and Ideology (1997), 58–80. Ruskin’s writings were popularized in American art circles through the publication The Crayon. Laura Wood Roper notes that Olmsted Sr. read Ruskin for the first time in the mid-1840s, a decade before his first landscape design project, Central Park. Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1973), 40. Downing writes of the aesthetic quality of the undulating surface of the earth. See A. J. Downing, “The Beautiful in the Ground,” The Horticulturist (March 1852), reprinted in Rural Essays (1858), ed. George William Curtis, 106–109. See Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 150, on how the “popularity of geology” informed the works of six American painters. Landscape appreciation and geology seem connected for a few more decades, as evidenced in books such as Edward Everett Hale’s Picturesque and Architectural New England: Picturesque Massachusetts, vol. 2 (Boston: D. H. Hurd and Co., 1899). The word ecology (oecologie) was coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866. On the history of ecology, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See Henry Cowles, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan” (1899), as well as Frederick Clements, “Plant Succession” (1916) and “Nature and Structure of the Climax” (1936), in Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown, Fundamentals of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). This tension between landscape and site is intrinsic to an understanding of the picturesque debates. Recent critics have argued that it is also key to understanding the relationship between copies and originals and, in my reading, the difficulties in recognizing landscape practices as modern art. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the AvantGarde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 151–172; and Kim Ian Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque,” Representations 38 (Spring 1992): 76–100. See Carol J. Burns, “On Site,” in Drawing/Building/Text, ed. Andrea Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 148–149. See J. B. Jackson, “The Word Itself,” in his Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 1–8. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Parks,” in The New American Cyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, ed. George Ripley and Charles A. Dana (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 768–775. For example, see Charles E. Beveridge, “The Art of Landscape Design” in his Frederick Law Olmsted. Designing the American Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 32–44.

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H. W. S. Cleveland, “Shrubs on Tree Borders,” Garden and Forest 3 (17 September 1890): 459. On the historical significance of this magazine, see Ethan Carr, “Garden and Forest and Landscape Art,” Arnoldia 60, no. 3 (2000): 4–7. For details on Cleveland’s relationship with Greenough and Emerson, see Nadenicek, “Emerson’s Aesthetic and Natural Design” (1997); also Lance Neckar, “Fast-Tracking Culture and Landscape: Horace William Shaler Cleveland and the Garden in the Midwest,” in Regional Garden Design in the United States, ed. Therese O’Malley and Marc Treib (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995). Olmsted Sr. scholar Charles Beveridge similarly argues that Olmsted Sr. was not a regionalist. Charles E. Beveridge, “Regionalism in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Social Thought and Landscape Design Practice,” in Regional Garden Design, ed. O’Malley and Treib (1995), 241. In The Languages of Landscape (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), Mark Roskill discusses how landscape paintings convey meaning via distillation and compression. Benes and Harris, Villas and Gardens (2001), 103. I am bracketing the modern landscape period in America from the 1840s, and the publication of A. J. Downing’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening to the 1969 publication of McHarg’s Design with Nature; A. J. Downing, Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam; Boston: C. C. Little & Co., 1841); Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press, 1969). Granted, Downing’s is not the first American book to examine topics of interest to landscape gardening. But, as Wolschke-Bulmahn asserts, “It was the first book devoted entirely to landscape gardening in the United States and probably the most influential treatise on the subject.” Wolschke-Bulmahn and Becker, American Garden Literature (1998), 95. McHarg’s manifesto simultaneously exemplifies the modern mastery of nature through a rational method of site analysis and acts as a catalyst for the next generation of postmodern landscape practitioners and theorists. For an examination of the ways that natural processes and social routines are inscribed in space, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 translation), especially ch. 2, “Social Space,” 117. A. J. Downing, “Public Cemeteries and Public Gardens,” in The Horticulturist 4, no. 1 (July 1849): 1, 10. This sense of site as armature draws on the OED definition of site as “a framework of timber for forming the foundation or basis for a piece of scaffolding.” Oxford English Dictionary, online edition (Oxford University Press, 2001), site, definition 4. “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds” (24 January 1866), in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Supplemental Series, Volume I, Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems, ed. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn Hoffmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), 89–90. “Report of the Landscape Architects and Superintendents to the Brooklyn Park Commissioners” (January 1871), in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume VI, The Years of Olmsted, Vaux, and Co 1865–1874, ed. David Schuyler and Jane Turner Censer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 401. Correspondence from Beatrix Farrand to Mrs. Robert Bliss, “The Oaks” (24–25 June 1922). See Maureen Joseph, Kay Fanning, and Mark Davison, Cultural Landscape Report Dumbarton Oaks Park, Rocke Creek Park (Washington, DC: National Park Service Cultural Landscape Program, 2000), 98 and footnote 262. Farrand’s varied influences included Charles Sprague Sargeant, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Jekyll, and Thomas Mawson; each of them reinforced her site sensibilities.

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Cleveland, Landscape Architecture (1873), 54–56. Both Louis Agassiz and Nathaniel Shaler wrote for the Atlantic. For an account of Agassiz’s effect on regional landscape painting, see Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature (2001), 118. Nathaniel Shaler, Harvard professor of geology, taught a required course in the first professional landscape architecture curriculum in the United States. Shaler’s article, “Landscape as a Means to Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 82 (1898): 777–785, calls for a new academic discipline focused on landscape appreciation from an aesthetic and cultural perspective. One can see the genesis of a landscape architecture curriculum in this writing. See Melanie Simo, The Coalescing of Different Forces and Ideas: A History of Landscape Architecture at Harvard 1900–1999 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2000). Letter from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to Miss Caroline Hazard (24 March 1902), 1. Copy in Wellesley College Archives. Original in Library of Congress: Olmsted Associates Archives: Series B: Job Files. Job File #250: Welles- ley College: Correspondence (28 February–13 November 1902). Letter from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to Miss Caroline Hazard (24 March 1902), 1–2. Letter from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to Miss Caroline Hazard (24 March 1902), 3, 8. My research on Wellesley College campus is published in Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Wellesley College Landscape Master Plan (1999). Jean Glasscock, Wellesley College 1875–1975. A Century of Women (Wellesley: Wellesley College, 1975); and Peter Fergusson, James O’Gorman, and John Rhodes, The Landscape and Architecture of Wellesley College (Wellesley: Wellesley College, 2000) are excellent histories of this college campus. See Benes and Harris, Villas and Gardens (2001); and Hunt, Greater Perfections (2000) for histories of such garden and landscape designs in 19th-century societies. These large, rocky masses that heave out of the grassy meadows and line the entrance drive were noted in 1852 by a group evaluating the site’s future potential as a park: “There is no section on our island … so diversified in surface, abounding so much in hill and dale, and intersected by so many natural streams … The great and many points abrupt, difference of level of the surface, and the projecting points of rock, render these grounds peculiarly adapted to the construction of the most beautiful and varied roads.” Elizabeth Barlow, The Central Park Book (New York: Central Park Task Force, 1977), 52. A copy of the geological cross-section was published in the 1861 Central Park Annual Report (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Landscape Studies Rare Book Collection). See Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature (2001), 121, for similar analysis of Haseltine’s Nahant rock outcrop paintings. “These forces of rock formation – volcanic heavings and glacial action – that Haseltine’s contemporaries apprehended in his pictures lend a sublime edge to taut canvases.” Ibid., 102. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1856), 419, advised painters to include foreground details “which appear peculiar to the place.” Worster, Nature’s Economy (1977), ch. 11, “Clements and the Climax Community,” describes the intellectual contributions of Frederick Clements and Henry Cowles to ecological theory. The Library of Congress American Memory website has an informative account of Cowles’s role within the community of ecological scholars: http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/icuhtml/aespsp.html. In 1915, Wilhelm Miller published a manifesto on this regional landscape design movement, in the unlikely guise of Illinois Cooperative Extension Circular #184, entitled The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening. Wilhelm Miller, The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, reprint). I am indebted to Breck Gastinger, M. Arch. student, for his research on Columbus Park for a course I teach, LAR 514: Theories of Modern Landscape Architecture (2001).

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As Christopher Vernon has written, the native landscape that was the source for this Prairie Spirit was “the actual and remembered grove and prairie checkerboard of the native landscape of the Midwest.” Vernon’s use of the term checkerboard refers, of course, to the impact of the Land Ordinance Grid on the American Midwestern and Western land uses and landforms. Christopher Vernon, “Wilhelm Miller and the Prairie Spirit,” in Regional Garden Design, ed. O’Malley and Treib (1995), 273. Robert Grese, Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 80–82. Jens Jensen, Siftings (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1939), 80–84. See also Grese, Jens Jensen (1992). As Wilhelm Miller wrote, “The prairie horizon has been called ‘the strongest line in the western hemisphere’ … the prairie is the most characteristic scenery over the American continent … the essence of the prairie’s beauty lies in all these horizontal lines, no two of which are at the same elevation, but all of which repeat in soft and gentle ways the great story of the horizon.” Wilhelm Miller, The Prairie Spirit (1915), 19. Marjorie Cautley, “Planting at Radburn,” Landscape Architecture 21, no. 1 (October 1930): 23–29; Frank A. Waugh, The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1917), 51–73; O. C. Simonds, Landscape Gardening (New York: MacMillan, 1920); and Roberts and Rehmann, American Plants for American Gardens (1929). See Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 263, for discussion of haecceities. For a discussion of episodic contrasts and temporal moments, see Kevin Lynch, What Time Is this Place? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 173 ff. One of the first landscape design treatises to discuss changing seasonal effects, such as light, shadow, and atmosphere, as sources of aesthetic delight was Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Landscape Gardening (London: T. Payne, 1770). This fourth design strategy builds on the sensibility found in Whately. Jensen, Siftings (1939), 61. “Jensen’s raw materials of the garden … ‘the contours of the earth, the vegetation that covers it, the changing seasons, the rays of the setting sun and the afterglow, and the light of the moon.’” Robert Grese, “The Prairie Gardens of O. C. Simonds and Jens Jensen,” in Regional Garden Design, ed. O’Malley and Treib (1995), 14. Grese quotes an article by Jensen and Eskil, “Natural Gardens,” Saturday Evening Post 202, no. 36 (8 March 1930). Jensen, Siftings (1939), 44, 40, 49. Given Jensen’s interest in these ephemeral landscape qualities, it is not surprising that he admired the paintings of George Innes, who donated a number of his works to the Chicago Art Institute. Grese, “The Prairie Gardens,” Regional Garden Design, ed. O’Malley and Treib (1995), 118. Again, Grese, quoting Jensen and Eskil, 169. But he was not alone. He and others such as Beatrix Farrand were working within earlier design traditions of the wild garden, defined by William Robinson in the 1870s, as well as within the landscape garden design discourse begun in 18th-century England. Both these traditions celebrated the unique medium of the landscape – its dynamic, temporal qualities – as an agent of subjective experience. See Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), for a philosophical account of how temporality accounts for landscape design’s distinction from architecture. Here, I disagree with John Dixon Hunt’s assessment that “in garden writing generally, the nineteenth century was interpreted as a debate between ‘formal’ and ‘informal,’ undistracted by any understand about other ideas of the garden.” Hunt, Greater Perfections (2000), 212. That these debates were occurring during the same decade that the first university degree program in landscape architecture was created at Harvard and a national

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professional organization for landscape architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), was founded is curious and worthy of interrogation. See Henry V. Hubbard and Theodora Kimball, An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (New York: MacMillan Co., 1935, reprint), 32–34, for a Harvard landscape architecture professor’s account of formal and informal garden and landscape designs: “It is so evident that the negative term informal is so general that it is of very little value in naming a style, and should certainly not be used as the designation of the principle of organization of naturalistic design.” Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 76–77. Although significant, The International Style was only one of many architectural texts that address site. For another exhibition catalog, see Contemporary Landscape Architecture and Its Sources (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1937), especially essays by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Richard Neutra. For a more recent example of scholarship that examines the site concerns of several modern architects, see David Leatherbarrow, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Garrett Eckbo, Landscape for Living (New York: Dodge, 1950), 238. Ibid., 37. This passage resonates with late-20th-century critiques of the visual biases of landscape by Beatrice Colomina, James Corner, Denis Cosgrove, and Gina Crandell. More research is necessary to ascertain where and how Eckbo adopted this term. Concurrent with the book’s publication, landscape architect Hideo Sasaki worked in the site planning division within the multidisciplinary architecture firm Skidmore Owings Merrill (SOM), so one can surmise the term was in common use by the mid-1940s. Peter Walker and Melanie Simo, Invisible Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 225. Eckbo, Landscape for Living (1950), 234, 236. One early-20th-century writing about space as a landscape is Charles Downing Lay, “Space Composition in Landscape Design,” Landscape Architecture 8, no. 2 (January 1918), 77–86. See Peter Collins “New Concepts of Space,” in his Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture: 1750–1950 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984), 42–60, 285–294. Sasaki opened his office in 1953, according to Walker and Simo, Invisible Gardens (1994), 224. John Simonds, Landscape Architecture: The Shaping of Man’s Natural Environment (New York: Dodge, 1961) 47–48, 56; and Kevin Lynch, Site Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 62. See Melanie Simo, Loudon and the Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); and Mrs. Schuyler (Mariana) Van Rensselaer, Art Out-of-Doors: Hints on Good Taste in Gardening (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 4–8. For a sense of the critics’ responses to this new art, see Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art Forum (June 1967): 12–23; and Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetic,” Art Forum (September 1968): 144–156. See Miller, “The Garden as an Art” (1993), for an account of how shifts in art practices over the last quarter-century have altered the reception of the garden and designed landscapes within aesthetic theory. See Miller, “The Garden as an Art” (1993); and Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site-Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85–110. On haecceitas/thisness, see John Dixon Hunt, “Ruskin, Turnerian Topography, and Genius Loci,” in Gardens and the Picturesque (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 218. Eckbo, Landscape for Living (1950), 37. Ibid., 234, 236.

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5. Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

Among the arts, sculpture has had a particular connection to site. Artists, curators, and critics have made diverse and ranging contributions, especially since the emergence of modernism, to exploring and expanding the potential of site for sculpture. Artists engaged with the site as a medium inspired many (including me personally) and, through that form of site thinking and thinking about a site, led to the essay by Lucy Lippard in the first edition of Site Matters. As works of sculpture have taken increasingly large scale, new opportunities have emerged to understand the museum in a new way, as a work of architecture for exhibiting site-based sculpture. This interview shows sculptors and curators expanding the potential of site, in working evermore closely with the medium of architecture. —Carol J. Burns Carol J. Burns (CB):  Denise, I am delighted to talk with you, as a senior curator and a managing director of exhibitions at MASS MoCA, to discuss your views about site as a location and as a space. Denise Markonish (DM):  Unlike traditional white cube galleries, MASS MoCA’s buildings are sometimes-silent and sometimes-not-just-silent collaborators. The museum is housed in a series of repurposed mill buildings that once held a textile mill, Arnold Printworks, and an electronics factory, Sprague Electric. Museum founding and current director Joe Thompson made a conscious early decision to let the buildings speak their history, rather than neutralizing them. One thing that draws people here is the buildings themselves and, as a museum, we offer a whole new way of experiencing them through art. As a curator, a big part of my job is to not fight the location, to embrace the crooked floors, brick walls, and meandering pathways. That’s not to say that we don’t put up white walls on occasion, but more often we encourage artists to respond to the unique qualities that the space offers – multistory galleries, wooden beams, or metal trusses that can serve as hanging points. The space has a character that becomes a talking point. When working on shows, we talk a lot with artists about how people move through the space. Building 5, our

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football field-sized gallery, is long and relatively narrow. This turns the space into a very processional experience; psychologically, if people can see the end, they want to get to the end. So, we frequently discuss ways we can use the architecture and the art within it to slow people down, to notice things, to have an experience. CB: In what ways do you encourage people to explore the buildings? DM: Over the years we have added more wayfinding signage, knowing that sometimes people just want to find the bathroom. But we also want MASS MoCA to be a place that gives people permission to get lost, to wander and wonder around. All the buildings now connect, but occasionally somebody still ends up lost in the basement. We try to remedy that, to ride a fine line between wayfinding and discovery. Also, our galleries shift in scale from very human-sized spaces to vast cavernous spaces, making the Museum feel both awe-inspiring and human. That said, as producers of performances and artwork that we hope will have lives beyond this place, we often think about what site specificity means to our work. As a curator, I believe very few things are truly site specific, in the sense that they could only belong in one site. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is such a work; it is about material relationship with the Great Salt Lake in Utah, built into that landscape, and immovable. Rather, most of what we do at MASS MoCA is “site responsive” or “site sensitive.” As I mentioned before, we encourage our artists to work with the buildings but not to have the work always be specific to this site (though sometimes it is). That gives us and the artists leeway, opening up the possibility to see what happens when a work moves to another gallery/museum, or how it changes and mutates over its life as an artwork, which we always hope will be longer than one performance or exhibition. CB: Can you give some examples of works that have shifted sites? DM: Sure, here are two recent examples from both our performing and visual arts departments. In performing arts, we do a lot of residencies. We invite people to spend time here, using our space and expertise to help develop new works. This often results in some kind of “works-in-progress” presentation to the public, before the work officially premieres at its slated venue. In 2018, we worked with South African artist William Kentridge on a new theatrical piece called The Head & the Load which would be staged at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City later that year. Our teams in performing and visual art worked with him on set building, staging, and so on, essentially providing space for Kentridge to work on the piece. Strangely enough, and this happens to us rarely, our theater was too small, compared to the Armory. However, it was just as great to see the final stretched-out performance as to have had the privilege of experiencing it as a work in progress. I believe that latter experience is a great gift to our audience who, especially in theater, so rarely see behind the curtain.

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Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

On the visual art side is Nick Cave’s exhibition Until. In 2013, I invited Nick to tackle our Building 5 space (the football field-sized gallery). Nick was inspired by the processional architecture, the windows lining the space, and the history of exhibitions that came before his. Yet, early on in the process of working on the piece we acquired co-producers: Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia; the new Crystal Bridges venue, the Momentary, in Bentonville, Arkansas; as well as a travel venue at Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. The piece needed to be constructed to travel, but also had to be malleable enough to feel as if it were made specifically for each space. Adaptability is the hallmark of site-sensitive artworks. The show has traveled to Sydney and Glasgow and will travel to the Momentary in summer 2020. With each iteration the show feels radically different. A series of beaded curtains turned into mountains at MASS MoCA, became walkways in Sydney, and appeared as shrouds in Glasgow. It was a really interesting experience for me, as a curator who had spent so much time with the work here. Every time I see the show reconfigured, it’s like reconnecting with familiar friends who I still recognized even though they somehow look different – like getting a new haircut. Familiar strangeness is so fascinating, and this site responsiveness, allowing a work to be about more than one location, affords artists necessary fluidity in their work. CB: This raises the special case of re-siting an artwork. You have done this a number of times, as you mentioned, and are currently working with New York–based artist Sarah Oppenheimer on another form of re-siting. Do you have general ways of thinking about it, or do you immediately focus on the specific art piece? DM: I always allow the artwork to dictate its parameters. Working with Sarah has been an interesting process. We began the conversation about working together back in 2012. Initially, I was interested in including her in a group show I was curating about wonder because her works, which subvert how we experience architecture, produce a not-knowing space that I feel is key to wonder. I quickly realized that it was far more interesting to ask Sarah to engage with our building in a lasting way. So, we started to look at Building 6, which at that point was an unrenovated space. We at MASS MoCA knew that this building would be the next one slated for development, so Sarah and I started taking walks through the space, talking with the architects Bruner Cott, and imagining ways she could insert her work within this site. It has been a long process involving many proposals. Originally, we thought it would be a work that would cut into the building, but that was difficult in terms of architecture, budget, and time. About one year before Building 6 opened in 2017, Sarah and I mutually decided that her work would not to be part of the opening. We postponed the project, which will now open in the fall of 2019. This shift of timeline allowed us to understand how the building functions, how bodies move through it, how the long processional walkways with windows on the outer perimeter of the space interact with the world outside. This extra time also afforded Sarah a continued period of research and development in her studio to work on what she calls “switches,” architectural glass and steel volumes that rotate at 45-degree angles as activated by visitors.

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Figure 5.1  Top left: Nick Cave, Until installation view, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland. Photo © Denise Markonish. (Courtesy of Denise Markonish) Top Right: Nick Cave Until installation view, MASS MoCA, 2016. Photo © Grace Clark. (Courtesy of Grace Clark) Bottom: Nick Cave, Until installation view, Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia. Photo © Denise Markonish. (Courtesy of Denise Markonish)

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Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

In early 2017, Sarah opened S-337473 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. She came to me with a question-as-proposal: what would it mean to re-site this work from a modern building designed by Peter Eisenman to a repurposed mill building designed by Bruner Cott? This concept really stemmed from our years of conversations about architecture and site-specificity as opposed to site-sensitivity. I remember her asking, and I paraphrase here: “There’s no reason you couldn’t take the actual physical elements of one of my works and move them somewhere else to ask the question: Is it the same work? Is a siteresponsive piece a different work because it’s responding to a different site? What does that mean?” I loved the idea, so we decided to do that. Of course, even when a piece is site-sensitive as opposed to specific, Sarah’s work is fabricated with minimal tolerance. So, we are essentially refabricating many of the elements to test this hypothesis. We are in the final stages of fabrication now and start installation in mid-September. CB: Did the conceptualization for the Wexner piece already have the seed germ of an idea to re-site the elements? DM: Sarah had already conceived of the Wexner piece when we had our idea, so it wasn’t part of the initial conception. However, this re-siting is emblematic of how Sarah’s thinking had shifted – from architectural intervention in specific sites to modalities of thinking about how volumes of sculpture can interact and change ways of experiencing built environments. So, when we had the idea to move/ re-site the work, it directly aligned with her interests. CB: Even the internal dynamism of the switch method itself could begin to suggest that move. DM: Exactly. Also, the glass volumes are reflective. At the Wexner, they reflected that architecture and some windows, while at MASS MoCA the work will be situated on the second-floor north-facing hallway. As I mentioned before, Building 6 has inner galleries and a processional space in an envelope with many windows that provide long views through the length of the building and also locate the viewer in relationship to the outside world. So, reflecting the building at the Wexner creates a kind of internal loop, while the volumes at MASS MoCA will reflect both the building as well as the town outside the windows. In this sense, though the elements – glass and steel volumes and pivot mechanisms – remain the same, the work becomes sitesensitive in the way that it interacts with, and reflects, each environment it inhabits. CB: Have you sorted out how you’re going to work on re-siting this particular piece? DM: Yes, we are refabricating the elements, as I mentioned above, to fit the site Sarah chose at MASS MoCA. Also, Sarah and her team have been studying the buildings, doing site work, constructing physical and digital models to determine the exact location. She has had a team on site a number of times to tape out all the locations and figure out the tolerances and the structure. Also, architects and engineers have helped figure out the capacity of the structure. We had to drill holes into the walls and ceilings to understand structural implications of the piece. The siting of the work at MASS MoCA depends on the tension between the volumes and the

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surrounding columns, typical of MASS MoCA. So, Sarah has to determine how close she can get to the column without having the work crash into the architecture – that is what creates the tension, this near miss. It’s a very intensive process. CB: This piece is titled S-3374373. I am curious about her naming conventions. DM: Most of Sarah’s titles have a letter, which references the series. “S” is for switch. The numbering, I think, keeps the work in the realm of malleability rather than making it too specific; the work is not for the Wexner. Getting ready to install the work right now, Sarah is considering whether to keep the same title for MASS MoCA or to modify it in some way to speak about the mutability of the site. CB: It’s not identified except in abstraction. DM: Right. I think that this titling construct also allows meaning to lie in experiencing the work, rather than its name. We have talked not so much about architecture but about how people move through space, or what it would mean to have choreographers engage with this piece. Also, the pivot mechanism will be visible on the floor above, so what does it mean to encounter that? How does it make you think about the space between the ceiling and the floor? And do you think about the perimeter that wraps around the building and is mirrored on the floor above you? Ultimately the work becomes a passageway, a new way of navigating MASS MoCA. CB: So you are thinking about how people move through space, how the work is an element in that space, and that the work itself moves. Is it architecture? is it sculpture? How does it interact with people as they move through space? I’m curious if you see this in terms of performance. DM: Sarah and I have been talking about this piece as one that is performed. When dormant, it can rest in either a horizontal or vertical position. It is activated when somebody touches it; you slightly pull at a corner and that initiates the movement. When the volumes are vertical, they nestle within our column, a sort of foreign body architecture, and when they’re horizontal they block passage. Over the years we talked a lot about choreography and the way people can move with and around this piece. I consider all her work performative, but the moving elements realize that in a more apparent way. Since the work will be on long-term view, it will also afford the opportunity to have actual performers engage with it as well. CB: Does having both visual art and performing arts at MASS MoCA create a sort of liminal in-between space for your audience? DM: Absolutely, and over the years we have endeavored to increasingly blur or merge those boundaries. For example, we have pop-up concerts and performances in our galleries. Additionally, the visual arts curators work collaboratively with performing arts curators to find interesting areas of overlap where we can invite performers in to respond to artworks on view. This gives our audience a much more holistic approach to how art gets made and experienced. Sarah and I have been discussing that, after her piece is installed, we want to find a dancer or a performing artist to do some kind of mobile performance in this space. So, we are definitely thinking about ways to merge different facets of what MASS MoCA does and also push the boundaries of what Sarah’s work can do.

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Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

Figure 5.2  Sarah Oppenheimer, S-337473, 2017 installation view, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University. Photo © Serge Hasenböhler. (Courtesy of Serge Hasenböhler)

Figure 5.3  Sarah Oppenheimer, S-334473, 2019 installation view, MASS MoCA. Photo © Richard Barnes. (Courtesy of Richard Barnes)

CB: Fascinating. You must be having fun. DM: Oh, it is so great. CB: I am curious about your writing. Have you spent time or ink on the subject of the site, or site-responsiveness, or the issues that we’re talking about today? DM: Not exclusively, though it does naturally come up in relation to certain projects. One that perhaps gets closest to these ideas is a project I curated in 2004 along the Main Line outside Philadelphia. I commissioned four artists – Bob Braine, Mark Dion, Kelly Kaczinski, and Nari Ward – to create new outdoor works responding

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to the history of that region. Almost every project had to be re-sited at one point, a frequent woe of public art, so I was glad that the artists chose to concentrate on broader ideas of the region’s history rather than ultra-specific examples. Mark Dion’s piece, Memento Mori, was originally conceived to be an octagonal structure that would have been an archive of the graves in the county. He was going to do grave rubbings, but the county historian wouldn’t allow that. So, instead, he decided to build his own graveyard dedicated to the late great naturalists who would have made their way through the Philadelphia region at some point. We had headstones carved and we built a stone wall outside the library in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Since the piece was not physically tied to a space, it could travel (not often you get to travel a graveyard). First, the work went to the Aldrich Museum in Richfield, Connecticut, where it was outdoors behind the museum. Then for many years it was at Mildred’s Lane, a property Dion owns with artist J. Morgan Puett in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania. Though Mildred’s Lane was once Dion’s home and Puett still lives there, it has been turned into a site for interdisciplinary residencies, inviting artists to engage in summer sessions with students from all over. Memento Mori was located on this property alongside artworks by Dion, Puett, and other artists, which have variously been repurposed, allowed to age, or laid to rest. In 2019, a retrospective of Mark’s work called Follies opened at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York. A very interesting show given our discussion, it re-sites a number of Mark’s outdoor sculptural follies, including Memento Mori. Stumbling upon this graveyard deep in the woods of Storm King, it looked like it had always been there. Amazingly, because it has been outside all these years, the patina just keeps growing. Now it looks like an actual old graveyard. CB: I’m curious about how you see changes in siting sculpture in recent history. For example, sculpture transformed since artists moved it off the pedestal and, later, outdoors and even into using the earth itself as a medium. DM: I think there will always be cycles in how artists consider sculpture, just as with painting. Some artists will resist the pedestal, others will embrace it. Installation has turned sculpture into experience and environment. Can we actually consider works made into landscape as sculpture? I am not sure. But I am also not sure these are such interesting questions to ask, rather we should just let the artists do what feels right for the project at hand. I am always weary of trends, labels, and named movements! At MASS MoCA we like to remind artists that having a lot of space doesn’t mean it needs to be filled with “stuff.” One example is the 2017 exhibition called Radical Small by Richmond, Virginia-based artist Elizabeth King. Liz’s show included classical tropes of traditional sculpture – pedestals, cases, and cabinets – for her sculptures, meticulously carved half-scale precisely movable figurative sculptures in bronze, porcelain, and wood. Liz uses some of these to create stop-motion animations as well. I gave her a big two-story space and she said, “My work is going to be dwarfed in here.” And I said, “No, your work is going to actually feel as

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Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

Figure 5.4  Mark Dion, Memento Mori, 2019 installation view, Storm King, New York. Photo © Andrea Kahn. (Courtesy of Andrea Kahn)

large as it can.” She had previously shown in dark small spaces where the figures became sort of fetishistic objects. But here you could see them looking at you from across the room, full of animation. Their small scale grew before your eyes as these works figuratively rather than literally filled the gallery. Our space afforded her the ability to explore this shift in scale and presentation. CB: How do artists respond to your pushing their work into new territory and interpretation? DM: I love pushing artists to subvert expectations – their own, those of the audience and of the art world. I did that with Liz and also with Nick Cave. In the majority of his work before Until, he had worked at the scale of the human body, melding art, dance, and fashion. When I invited him to do the show, I told him he couldn’t make any of his signature artworks, sound suits. He liked the challenge to expand his practice. Quite soon, he and I both wondered: what would it be like to walk inside the belly of a sound suit? That’s when Until became an inhabitable environment. CB: Are there other aspects of sculpture that you are excited about at the moment? DM: I am really excited by a returning to making. A return to craft and materiality is, in my view, bringing us back to the object in many ways. My colleague Susan Cross

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is working on a show about ceramics, including work by Nicole Cherubini, whose studio is based in Hudson, New York. Nicole plays with the notion of ceramics by building giant vessels and consciously having the pedestals be part of the pieces, or not pedestals at all but other parts in ceramic that hold up these vessels. For years I have been deeply embedded in conversations around the unnecessary divisions between “craft” and “art.” I regularly teach at the Rhode Island School of Designs Glass Department, which is the most conceptual sculpture department I have ever encountered. I have also had the pleasure of spending time at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Deer Isle, Maine, and the conversations there around craft, sculpture, and concept are fascinating. I am excited to see artists muddy these boundaries more and more, to get us to the point of removing the labels all together. CB: I enjoy learning that, as a curator, your thinking is through the artists and their, let’s say, projecting into the space of the site. DM: I think that’s right. I always let the artists guide how the work is situated, but I also realize that it is a collaborative effort. I have worked at MASS MoCA for12 years now, I know this space, and I hold a memory of what works here, what’s behind a wall, what interesting things have not been explored yet. And that kind of information can make or break an exhibition, so it is important that while the art and artist must primarily guide the process, the curatorial input often creates new ways of seeing the work. A recent example of this is in the exhibition Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass by Houston, Texas, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. The exhibition, originally conceived for our second-floor double-high space, was moved to Building 5 following its opening. Trent’s work centers around a series of characters he has developed over decades whose narratives are played out predominantly through painting and drawing. For his MASS MoCA show, we worked with Trent to build some of his characters – the Mounds – life-sized. These towering black-and-whitestriped animal plant heaps are inhabitable and with interior installations. One he had planned for the original gallery was, for lack of better term, a conjoined Mound, that one would enter in one room, then walk through a wall, and end up in another Mound in the adjoining gallery. When we moved the show, we lost that because we could not cut through the masonry wall in Building 5. As Trent and I were walking through Building 5 figuring out how to resituate the exhibition, he decided that this double Mound would need to become two separate works, one freestanding and the other functioning as a diorama. He asked, “How do we do that?” I said, “Here, come with me,” and we walked around the corner into Building 7 which houses our Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing retrospective. In Building 7 across from a bank of Sol’s drawings is a small lounge with four chairs in it and windows looking into Building 5. I said, “What if we built your Mound up against these windows? So, from inside Building 5, you would see only the outside. But if you were in the LeWitt you would have this surprise discovery of a whole other aspect of the piece on the inside.” We ended up doing that, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the show.

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Site Specific or Site Responsive? Interview with Denise Markonish

I don’t know that Trent could have keyed into that nuance of the space because he’s coming into the gallery new and, therefore, drawing on my knowledge of how it functions. It was a beautiful collaborative moment that ended up making us both so happy. I am certain half our visitors miss it, but the ones who find it are quite delighted by it. Though it may be an unpopular viewpoint, I think that it is fine to reward intrepid viewers, to give them something others might miss. There is so much in art that we worry that if you don’t tick off the boxes, seeing and experiencing everything in the museum, your time is somehow lacking. I think the opposite happens, that the intrigue of not quite knowing if you’ve gotten it all can keep you in the museum longer, can give you a deeper sense of wonder rather than a task list. Again, that permission to get lost is a favorite aspect about MASS MoCA. CB: I understand MASS MoCA as a site, a complicated three-dimensional environment, that can itself support a series of complicated, three-dimensional environments within it. DM: Yes. I think for us and for the artists, MASS MoCA is ultimately a site of making and with that, a site of discovery. Things have long been made in these buildings, and it’s no different now – from textiles to electronics to art. The question at the heart of everything we do is: How can we continue to honor this site and its history by helping artists make works that tell that story in the world? And in that, site absolutely matters.

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6. Groundwork Robin Dripps

The purpose of this essay is to develop an awareness and understanding of the structure of the ground so that its potential for making connection can become a part of any architecture that engages it.1 The term ground will be used in a literal sense to describe the structure and processes of the earth, but also as metaphor. Metaphorically, ground refers to the various patterns of physical, intellectual, poetic, and political structure that intersect, overlap, and weave together to become the context for human thought and action. As J.B. Jackson notes, “If background seems inappropriately modest, we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our history.”2 Unfortunately, things operating in the background – including the earth – have not always been well understood or valued. It is easy to understand how the earth’s rough and bumpy surfaces, its uncertain and shifting fixity and its damp porosity, could be considered qualities that would destabilize physical, political, and even psychological equilibrium. But it is not only the intense earthiness of the earth that proves problematic, but also the whole question of how humans ground their thoughts, actions, and structures so that effective hypotheses can be made about relationships among things. As humans become more confident in the capacity for will to shape the world, the preexisting background contexts that support these acts of will become less compelling. The consequence of an indifference to the ground is an almost terminal insensitivity to the rich subtleties of the teeming wild, the variegated forms and materials of the landscape, the nuanced patterns of urban texture, and the rituals of the every day. This is the very stuff from which special moments emerge and distinguish themselves. It also provides the necessary complexity to promote an almost endless variety of relationships among things.

What Constitutes Ground? One could imagine that the term site might encompass the network of social, political, and environmental connections in operation beyond the confines of a building. Yet this is not the case. Though understanding of site and ground tend to conflate, they have distinctly different meanings. A site, in contrast to a ground, is quite simple. This is undoubtedly why the idea of a site becomes so appealing to architects and planners.

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Groundwork

Figure 6.1  Scarperia, Italy. The structure of agricultural fields merges with and informs the political structure of the city.

A site possesses a reassuring degree of certainty, whereas the ground is always in flux. A site’s edges are known and a center can always be found. Connections to the world beyond are limited and tightly controlled. Sites can be owned. In other words, the site takes on many of the qualities of an institution. As such, it reduces the complexity of both human and natural interactions to guide with assurance the polity it has gathered within. It has become a figure and has thereby reduced the potential for accommodating the fullest range of human possibility.

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The spatial circumscription of ground into the more simply understood gestalt of site removes the context required to see and understand how the site is a part of something larger, and therefore limits or alters the scope of its meaning similar to the temporal circumscription of events that takes place within modern historical reporting. Comparing modern historical methodology with vernacular history offers a useful analogy to elucidate the nature of ground relative to site. Within modern history, the duration chosen to circumscribe a particular historical event has typically been short. The consequence of this limited temporal duration has been an emphasis on describing catastrophe, war, and destruction because these are bounded events that take very little time. These slices of life are objectified as autonomous events, making them difficult to reattach to the ongoing unfolding of existence beyond their limited artificial boundaries. In contrast to modern history, vernacular history has a different view of temporal duration. Here, stories of everyday life record typical events and recurring themes whose smooth running is noticed only when disrupted. The emphasis on repeating pattern and process requires a large enough temporal context to be certain that phenomena are in fact recurring.3 When actions repeat, they are not objectified or taken out of context, but instead become something continually taking on new meaning through participation in a larger pattern of recurrences whose cyclical nature has no discernible beginning or end. As a consequence, vernacular history gives greater weight to the background. What the modern historian would consider as a proper historical event is nothing more than the interruption or disturbance of the smoothly running background machinery of everyday life. These exceptions understandably command more attention, but as they continue to be further distinguished from their normative supporting context, they become increasingly isolated, objectified, and disengaged from everything that has given them meaning. As a further consequence, genuinely significant events become difficult to recognize as being special when removed from the background field that served to register their difference from the typical. Comprehension of these temporal cycles can be found in Greek mythology. Homer understood the stabilizing importance of a background of recurring temporal cycles. The heroic episodes of the Odyssey are measured against a background ordered by the repeating patterns of external phenomena – the cycle of sunrise and sunset, the action of wind on waves and on leaves, the relationship of heavenly bodies, the movement of birds and animals, the annual cycle of change. Human life and activity are thus brought into the orbit of these natural events. The repeating patterns of simile within his poetry reveal human order by finding a correspondence between this and the order of nature. Modern poetry more typically works in the opposite way by projecting human order onto nature and then abstracting this back to human order.4 The valuation of the ground as part of a larger cultural proposition was an essential characteristic within Native American tradition. Speaking to a class of environmental design students, Oren Lyons, the faith keeper of the Onondaga Nation explained his tribe’s attitude about the earth: “What you call resources we call our relatives.” His comment puts a different perspective on how to value the ground. There is little or no distance between the ground and human artifice so that the theoretical opposition

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Figure 6.2  Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Arcadia or the Pastoral State, 1836.

separating natural and human systems that was initiated in the Renaissance and still persists would be unthinkable. The analogy between the ground and the structure of human relationships implies a similarly intelligible pattern of relationships within the ground. It is interesting to think about the increased particularity and character that the earth must assume when imagined with such anthropomorphic qualities. This metaphorical extended family would immediately have a structure that would connect all its members in a recognizable and understandable way, making the ground an intrinsic part of the human condition. Primitive societies were not alone in valuing the ground as part of a larger cultural construct. The painters of the Hudson River School in late-19th-century America worked within a similar idea to that seen in the Onondaga Nation. Their paintings reveal their interest in representing the structure, texture, and meaning of the geomorphology and the natural history of the Hudson Valley, where a background, temporal substrate mattered more than idealized, decontextualized landscape figures. For Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and other 19th-century American landscape painters, it was the emerging understanding of the geological structure of the earth that would ground a contemporary culture. But instead of remaining in the background, the earth, seen in its literal geological sense, took on a transcendent meaning. As such, it was thought to be a work capable of rivaling and possibly even exceeding the value of the cultural production of Europe. The continuing presence of such a powerful, evocative, and wild nature, something long vanished from European consciousness, became a legitimizing cultural asset with a temporal reach extending beyond history: Geology was the Great Myth of the nineteenth century. If offered Americans a past at once more recent and more remote: the wilderness, ever new in its virginity, also stretched back into primordial time. That past was crucial

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in establishing an American sense of identity—sought nowhere more than in landscape painting. By augmenting science with inspiration, the artist could get closer to the elusive enigmas of Creation, and also approach solutions that might confirm American’s providential destiny.5 When valued as a cultural product as well as a natural resource, the processes, connections, stories, and meanings of the ground take on a different cast. The more readily grasped social, political, and physical structures that give a culture its unique particularity are brought into relationship with the immense and less comprehensible scale of natural process. The discontinuous and fragmented intentions that always compete for cultural authority can also possess a degree of coherence by virtue of being allied with the continuous structure of systems operating over much larger spatial and temporal territory. In turn, the structure of the ground is brought into contact with human artifice and made intelligible as part of this world. The import of understanding the ground in cultural terms is evident in ancient Greece with its earth-based system of belief. Ancient Greek faith, with its focus on ancestors as the object of worship, has been characterized as a religion of the dead.6 The souls of the dead did not depart for a foreign world; they continued to exist underground in close proximity to the living, from whom they required regular attention. This gave to the soil a meaning of considerable personal import, suggesting an unexpected vitality. The advice to bury the dead near the front entrance of the house to facilitate consultation with one’s ancestors when leaving or returning reveals much about this vitality and the grounding anticipated from generational continuity. This was not land to be easily abandoned. In fact, a man could not quit his dwelling place without taking with him his soil, or in other words, his ancestors. Another crucial place in the Greek domestic environment, the hearth, also connects to the ground. As the central focus of the Greek house, this symbol of domesticity was also part of a familial connection to the land. The hearth was engaged in the veneration of ancestors, with its sacred fire representing their constant presence. Hearth and ground are thus intertwined in an intense relationship. The hearth’s vertical extension is its most obvious visible attribute. This totem pointing to the sky gives the hearth its initial sense of figural autonomy. But its foundation tells a different story. The material of its massive structure seems to grow directly from the earth, giving the hearth its contradictory aspect of being both figure and extension of the web of relationships intrinsic to the ground. The fire within is just as ambiguous, being at once the means by which humans have kept the wildness of nature at bay, and yet a very part of that same nature.7 The hearth also finds special charge and connection to ground within modern history. Writing in the mid-19th century, Gottfried Semper shows the same equivocal relationship between the figural hearth and its situation as part of the earth that the ancient Greeks understood. The hearth, according to Semper in The Four Elements of Architecture, was the catalyst and focus for the foundation of political and religious culture. It was the moral element of architecture. Protecting the hearth and mediating its

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relationships to nature were the remaining three elements: the mound, the enclosure, and the roof. Although few in number, these elements intersect and engage one another in an unexpectedly complex manner. The mound, a part of the earth, serves as the base for the hearth, increasing its figural autonomy but also connecting it to a context of infinite possibilities. Extensive topographic, geomorphic, political, and ecological structures are all brought into focus as they converge on the hearth and provide a substantial grounding for the humans who dwell there. The potential complexity of the ensuing interactions produces an equivalently complex response among the elements within Semper’s dwelling. They change the balance between figure and ground that had been the basis for most prior hypotheses on the origins of architecture. As each of the elements become more independent, each can respond to a different aspect of nature and a wider range of human desire. Both woven mat and masonry wall handle the tasks of enclosure, but in different ways. The mat, loaded with all the connective metaphors derived from weaving, defines the social space of the dwelling, while the masonry wall provides protection and a sense of permanence. Unlike the lightweight mat, with its greater spatial freedoms, the wall is part of the ground. It grows from the making of terraces and thus reveals the underlying topographical structure of its earthen context and grounds local place in a larger world. A curious note by Semper explains how the human being “most probably arose from the plains as the last mud-creation, so to speak.”8 Is Semper hinting that the basis for his elemental architecture is in the relationships that the ultimate figure, the human, engages in with the earth? If the muddy ground can quicken into life, then there must be more to the earth than is currently understood to enable the level of complexity, ambiguity, and poetic profundity expected of human relationships. When humans enter into a relationship with the ground, they engage more than its extensive physical network of connections. The structure and materiality of the ground has figured prominently in literary works as a metaphor for aspects of human consciousness that escape simple description. By reading closely from a wide variety of poetic and literary works, the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has proposed a set of spatial relationships common to both, enabling spatial structure and poetic content to be compared. The ground plays an important part in his conclusions. It forms one pole in a spatial construct linking earth to sky that he considers one of the fundamental relationships guiding human thought and action. The attic, with its clearly articulated structure exposed to view, its removal from the particularity of the ground, which gives it its greater sense of perspective on things, and its mnemonic capacity coming from the contents typically stored within, is considered the rational part of the house. The cellar, with walls just barely holding back the vast and formless extent of the earth beyond, is both physically and poetically the dark entity of the house. Bachelard proposes that within the cellar thoughts turn to the irrational.9 Irrationality, however, must not be understood as negative, but instead as the source of other intuitions about our relationship to the world that complement and amplify those that come from the more transparent processes of reasoning.10

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The special condition of the cellar, a place in and of the ground that humans can occupy, makes its structure and its unique qualities worth study. Properties of the cellar reveal much about the structure and potential of the ground itself. Equating the spatial disposition of the cellar and its loaded poetic content to the unique structure of the ground further demonstrates how architecture can engage this ground. The cellar is only experienced from within. Without the light of day, its vague and shifting contours, its partial completion, and its many twisting passages contribute to its sense of being boundless, extending beyond easy comprehension. Without boundary, there can be no discernible form and consequently no figure. The cellar, with its actual and implied extensions into the ground, becomes the perfect counter to the figures placed upon it. Its single-sided walls hold back the earth but also make us constantly aware of the ground’s immediacy. Actually, and metaphorically, this ground becomes a powerful part of the cellar’s territory, further extending and complicating its closure. The cellar contrasts with a site’s simple autonomy and provides the antidote to its inhabitant’s estrangement with the world. Its depth(s) confound the flat, twodimensional constraints of the platted site with its defined political and economic limits. “If the dreamer’s house is in the city it is not unusual that the dream is one of dominating in depth the surrounding cellars. His abode wants the undergrounds of legendary fortified castles, where mysterious passages that run under the enclosing walls, the ramparts and the moat put the heart of the castle into communication with the distant forest.”11 The heart of the castle requires these enclosing walls, ramparts, and moat for protection, to distinguish it from its context and give it the figural form needed to operate as an autonomous political center. But the security of human artifice is short-lived unless it is capable of responding effectively to the unpredictable changes inevitably taking place outside its control. Forest and ground are just those places that tend to destabilize the authority of human artifice so that these subterranean passages connecting to the distant forest become the necessary complement to a premature foreclosing of political and personal inquiry. Concentration and extension coexist to make this complex whole. Thus, the section cutting through the castle from sky to earth extends the closed figure of the plan and connects it to possibilities not yet imagined.

Where Is the Ground? Techniques for translating the entanglement of the ground into the cellar appear in the layered archaeological sites common in places built over a long period of time – as in Rome, for example. Successive layers of ground having distinct properties of geometry, dimension, and alignment, representing successive political and cultural moments, coexist in a dense sectional collage. The ground here, however, does not provide a stable datum. Moving across these sites, the shifting section of the terrain reveals its multiple ground planes intersecting, reinforcing, or else contradicting one another to produce a new set of volumes, linking these fragments of the past to conditions of the present. What once was the network of public life – the streets, courtyards, gardens, and squares – is now part of a vast and not easily grasped underground world that on

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occasion disrupts the certainty of the ground above to participate in this life as well. Contemporary scaffolding, erected as an additional layer to stabilize ancient walls and protect workers and artifacts, often becomes legible as another form of architecture – a more ambiguous set of porches, trellises, and porticos that further intersect with this other architecture of the ground. Recurring physical and political structures operating in the background are crucial components of the urban matrix. Patterns of streets, alleys, and other urban pathways have a structure, hierarchy, and political and social coding that become a powerful stabilizing datum. The way a section of the city is platted – and the patterns, dimensions, and alignments of this – reveals relationships between public and private property. This often provides clues to conventional modes of construction, such as the repetitive pattern of masonry-bearing walls, that describe a scale of development common to many smaller American cities. The history of changes that this platting has undergone tells a story of constant negotiation between a place, its people, and the political intentions that bear on it from the outside. Not so obvious, but no less crucial, is the structure of public works that supports and determines the scope and pattern of development. While these are mostly considered in instrumental terms, this has not always been the case. Many American and European cities have revealed rather than hidden their systems of water supply and celebrated this at critical moments through fountains and other public displays. Aside from the obvious potential for this to be a place of public gathering, this visual reminder of the source of water might extend into the private realm. Turning on the faucet might activate, with the water, an understanding of the connection to the watershed and the consequence of water usage.12 The pattern of manhole, gas, and water valve covers dotting streets and sidewalks often tells a story about what is there and what has disappeared. Even when obsolete, they remain witness to buildings and people who once were part of a place. The topographical structure of many urban places is all but invisible, having undergone centuries of change as part of the process of urbanization. Being aware of the topographic past and its history of alteration provides a much broader temporal background to make effective and imaginative decisions in the present. When Egbert Viele made his topographical map of the city of New York in 1865, his purpose was to show the extent of the underground water system that was rapidly disappearing from public view as a result of leveling and filling to assist development.13 Although Viele was primarily concerned with stopping the spread of plague, which he believed to be a consequence of the trapped water beneath the city, his recommendation to open these sources and allow them to flow again suggests a far more ambitious strategy. Using his maps, which are still the most reliable source for anticipating subsurface problems, it would now be possible to take advantage of, or make the best of, these evocative watercourses by bringing them into the design of the city as something with intrinsic value. The meandering streams running mostly diagonally through the city have a logic and pattern of connection different from the rigors of the orthogonal, cellular grid imposed over them. The conjunction of the political, which operates locally, with the extensive pattern of the hydrological structure, offers opportunities to open the bounded

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Figure 6.3  Egbert Viele, Topographical Map of the City of New York Showing Original Water Courses and Made Land, 1865.

site to places far beyond. Along with this comes the ability to use the natural system to create local microclimates as part of a larger project of environmental control. The movement of animals and humans is another part of the urban ground that needs to be made visible so that its patterns can be effectively engaged. These patterns extend well beyond the boundaries of the site and signal connections to other resources that merit awareness. Animals move with respect to water source, vegetation, and other crucial aspects of habitat that operate at a large scale and require continuity. The local manifestation of this will be subtle and not readily noticed but provides access to a vital source of potential ecological support. The systematic flow of information that is a by-product of human movement is another opportunity needing to be incorporated within the site. These less visible patterns need to be mapped to become part of design thinking. Outside the city, actual and vestigial agricultural structures create a pattern of fields, hedgerows, and farm roads. This pattern can often be found in older maps and traced in current aerial photographs. When these images are compared with a present condition that has taken a different developmental turn, it is often possible to understand how many planning decisions were unacknowledged responses to these older patterns.

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It is clear that the original patterns were the result of very acute observations about local topographical, hydrological, and climatic structures and were modified by consequent movements of people and animals. The scale and orientation of these former agricultural patterns become reliable guides to contemporary development, connecting this to the ecological sensitivity that was a part of the prior life of the land.

General Qualities of Ground The vast diversity and unlimited combinatorial and connective potential of the ground suggests an expansive account of the site. Perhaps rather than limiting the site to its artificial political and economic boundaries, the site ought to be considered more as a special repository of clues – an opening to more extensive and varied grounds. Here are indications of complex ecological systems too immense to be contained in so small a place. Here is provocative evidence of human purpose, often in conflict and filled with new potential. Also, here are the diverse fragments of individual stories still waiting completion. The potential of these clues lies in the suggestive possibilities that these seemingly incomplete artifacts offer and in their ability to be combined, reconfigured, or hybridized without the formal or intellectual compromises suffered by a more complete and closed entity. In this way, multiple relationships and even contrary interpretations are promoted as a means to engage a broadly diverse audience. Grounds operate with great nuance. They resist hierarchy. There are no axes, centers, or other obviously explicit means of providing orientation. Single, uncomplicated meanings are rare. Instead, there are open networks, partial fields, radical repetition, and suggestive fragments that overlap, weave together, and constantly transform. Within this textural density, edges, seams, junctures, and other gaps reveal moments of fertile discontinuity where new relationships might grow. Relationships among grounds are multiple, shifting, and inclusive. They engage the particular and the concrete rather than the abstract and the general. The rich and even contradictory context needed to enlarge our understanding of self and world resides in the elaborative potential of individual hypotheses about how to put all these pieces together.14 In other words, discoveries made within the ground are likely to offer profound and rewarding challenges to the human intellect.

Formal Potential: How Architecture Can Engage These Structures Despite a continuing project to open architecture to the world beyond, modern architecture has remained obstinately self-contained. Although effective in housing institutions, architecture has been less successful in connecting these to the life of a place and its people through a fabric of relationships. It is not as if architecture is itself unable to make these connections. On the contrary, there have been many promising strategies to extend the interior domain of the building beyond its walled enclosure. Wright’s effective breaking open of the box, the neoplastic propositions of Van de Veldt, Rietveldt,

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and Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier’s purist explorations into phenomenal transparency are a few examples of inventive ways to defy the closure of conventional rooms. Recent architects have shown even more complex fractured and folded planes that claim to abolish distinctions between inside and out- side. And if the modern project has legitimate parentage well before its conventional historic boundaries, then the Mannerist work of Romano, Michelangelo, and Peruzzi all demonstrate the degree to which architectural limits can be successfully breeched. But to what end? The absence of any substantial theory regarding the ground makes all of these efforts incomplete. In other words, any theory for opening up, fragmenting, or blurring distinction between inside and out must have a better grasp on the nature of what is outside. Outside, the ground already exists as part of a broad network of political, social, and ecological systems. If these systems were able to be part of the architectural whole, then the social, political, and environmental alienation that characterizes modern life might be effectively ameliorated. The difficulty, however, is that this ground is multilayered, multivalent, open, and unburdened by the overall consistency and coherency that is the basis for institutional stability. Although an unmediated engagement of this would be problematically chaotic, its current exclusion is just as problematically reductive. For architecture to substantially engage the ground, there needs to be effective ways to make this ground as visible and compelling as buildings. Within architecture, the most common graphic for showing a building in a larger context is the figure ground drawing. In this simple black-and-white graphic, buildings are black and all else is white. Its original intent, coming from Gestalt psychology, was to show how the vestigial space around buildings could itself be formed into a figure just as recognizable as that of the surrounding buildings. The puzzling graphic of the profile of two faces framing a void that also can be read as the figure of a classical Greek vase is a familiar example that convincingly demonstrates how the composition of figures in relationship to one another can reveal a place of value in between that was not previously recognized. The new place, in turn, grounds these same figures. Unfortunately, the common use of this graphic has strayed far from its origins and now represents little more than an unrelated aggregation of objects floating aimlessly within a void. Since this is typically rendered on standard white paper, the black buildings are not just the only thing represented but in fact the only things that are actually ever drawn. The empty white space is not a pregnant silence waiting to take on meaning from what surrounds it, but instead a space so devoid of character that even the surrounding figures seem to lose a degree of their own quality. At best, it has value as a future building opportunity: a void waiting for its architectural life. What was initially meant to demonstrate reciprocity between figure and ground now serves only to remove the building from its physical context. The ground displaced by the building can hardly be missed because it is shown as having nothing to contribute in the first place. It is easy to see why the empty spaces surrounding much of the built environment become filled with paved parking lots. The fault here lies not necessarily with what is made visible (those black buildings) but with a widespread myopia that

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Figure 6.4  Figure ground drawing.

makes so much else invisible, including so crucial a presence as the drawing medium itself, for, as Henri Foccilon has observed, although a text is invariably indifferent to the paper it is written on, paper is an essential element of life for a drawing. As buildings accommodate human purpose, they take on enormous weight. Through these projections of individual and collective human will it is possible to take a stand against the indifference of nature to define what it means to be human. The task is so improbably difficult that when something comes of it, this is certainly worthy of notice and celebration. But returning to the pale account of the figural “other” – the missing ground – it seems that this stand (which, of course, is the original meaning of the term object) is hollow. When shown without substance, the ground will be easily displaced rather than offering the necessary resistance that produces constructive dialogue. For architecture to remain a significant part of human existence, it must take up the challenge of entering into a dialogue with the ground. In so doing, architecture would then be capable of poetically and pragmatically mediating the heroic aspirations of human intent and the shadowy outlines of natural process, the shifting and uncertain structures of social formations, and the traces of inherited rituals that show earlier attempts to make sense of everyday life. But the empty, open space surrounding thoughts, actions, and places leaves these ungrounded, unconnected, and at odds with

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one another. Their random accumulation fails to make substantial contribution to the understanding of the human condition. It seems as though figures of all kinds have been let down, and, as a consequence, human existence diminished. The intense interest with figures in contemporary architecture can be seen as a direct outcome of internal debate within the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at a time when long-standing conventions of putting things together were being codified into a system of composition that has overtly and covertly influenced almost all subsequent thinking about the topic. The point of friction at the Ecole arose when considering whether the figure ought to exist on its own, free of contingency, and therefore completely under the control of its author, or else give up some of this autonomy by engaging the intellectual and physical context to such a degree that both figure and ground are significantly transformed. But if the architect was to cede ground to a preexisting context over which little control could be expected, was this too great a loss? The contested positions are revealed in the course notes of Quatremère de Quincy, where he clearly equivocated on the exact values that might initiate the process of design.15 Quatremère uses two distinct but related terms in his discussion of the design process: prendre parti and tirer parti. Prendre parti, from which the more common architectural term parti derives, means to take a stand. As such, it becomes the starting point or fundamental premise on which a design is based. The successful parti must be clear, easily grasped, unambiguous, and unencumbered by attachments that might compromise its formal authority. The figural object standing apart from its messy context perfectly fits this description. But Quatremère also mentions tirer parti as the foundation for design thinking. Tirer parti means to take advantage of or make the best from what you find. This is a very different proposition. It shifts attention away from the architectural object as an autonomous, abstract formal ideal and privileges the existing physical and political context that a design would have to engage. Le Pautre’s Hotel de Beauvais, built in Paris in the mid-17th century, is an inventive example of this. Its site could hardly be more irregular, being made up of leftover fragments of other properties built at different times. Below ground are medieval foundations of substantial size and evocative configuration. Although a regular figure, the central court of the hotel is surrounded by a fantastic variety of rooms with alignments to at least four primary systems of order. Multiple entries respond to two streets of very different character. The typical garden has been displaced to an upper level, giving views onto yet another part of the city so that even the certainty of the ground plane is called into doubt. Although a residence for a single family, its stables and other supporting services – along with its included group of small shops – further confound the sense of clear boundary or simple divisions of public and private activity. Le Pautre did indeed make the best of what he found. The result is a building with the programmatic complexity of a piece of the city. Its architecture reveals to its inhabitants the competing histories of all that surrounds. At the same time, multiple connections, both literal and implied, are established with different parts of a large and varied neighborhood. This was accomplished with no loss to the figure, whose presence remains in the form of the principle courtyard.

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Figure 6.5  Antoine Le Pautre, Hotel de Beauvais, Paris, 1752.

Over a century later, the issue of what was to be the basis of design was just beginning to be resolved, as evidenced by Ledoux’s presentation of his design for the Hotel d’Evry. In plan this too makes the most of its impacted, complex site. Yet, when Ledoux renders the building in elevation, it is depicted as a simple ideal object with no site encumbrances whatsoever. The structure appears as a freestanding pavilion in a park. Prendre parti was clearly becoming the dominant mode of operation. With modern education in architecture being an outgrowth of teaching within the latter years of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, it is not surprising that the figural object has continued its ascendancy while the ground has become mute. The rise of a theory of composition that emphasizes the independence of the building from its physical, political, and environmental context parallels a change in the understanding and valuation of the term to invent. With designers freed from contextual constraint, their building could now be assessed in terms of how inventive they were. To be inventive typically describes a condition of novelty or newness and places the most value on things not seen before. The consequence for architecture is an aggregation of unrelated buildings vying for attention by virtue of how they stand out from one another and from the cities and landscapes that surround them. Although this is the common understanding of the phrase to invent, historically the term means to come upon and implies a process of discovery in which new relationships are found for things and ideas that already exist. This is remarkably similar to tirer parti. There is yet another term that should be brought to this convergence, and that is to represent, which literally means to reveal or to make present something that, although always there, has remained obscure or hidden. In other words, the fundamental activity of representing the world and the place of humans within it, the inventive

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relationships that underlie creative making, and the inventive opportunities that derive from making the best of what is found, are remarkably entangled. The common ground here is just that – the ground out of which all these relationships emerge. Think of common ground, or being grounded, as revealed by J. B. Jackson when he describes the landscape serving as the background for collective human existence.

Figuring Ground The consequences of our blindness to the rich and subtle structures of the ground extend to the figure. When the ground becomes abstract, general, and less articulate, there is less incentive to find subtle nuance within the figure in order for this to stand out. When so reduced, the figure loses much of its capacity to participate in the multiple conversations of which it is capable. This loss is apparent when considering the many ways figure enters into human thought. The geometrical figure, the human figure, the musical figure, and the figure of speech each have such particular and different characteristics that reliance on any one meaning fails to capture the potential of their commingled and overlapped coexistence. Instead, this expanded field of meaning can enlarge an understanding of the figure and its operations and then take advantage of the complex and multiple strategies by which figure and ground can engage one another. When the figure opens literally and metaphorically to so many forms of connection, its autonomy will obviously be diminished, but the benefits are substantial. As the junctures, seams, fissures, and gaps in the figure are revealed, these become significant moments of discontinuity, small hooks grabbing onto the world beyond. As figures become more porous and pricklier, they begin to take on many properties of the ground. A more accessible figure, in turn, promotes comparison with the ground to reveal properties there that would have been thought more the province of the figure. As distinctions involving figure and ground become ambiguous and shifting, the limitations of an antagonistic juxtaposition become apparent. An alternative set of relationships between figure and ground is found within the Confucian yin-yang diagram, where the two are engaged and mutually dependent. If the black shape is the hierarchically privileged figure, then it ought to be found significantly distinguished from its supporting ground, and yet it is the same shape as the remaining ground, only rendered in white, giving figure and ground a shared value. The S curve separating black from white confounds the reading of either shape as unequivocally figural. As it switches seamlessly from concave to convex to both include and exclude, the curve further compromises a simple reading. Which figure might the curve belong to? Might it belong to neither and be constituted from the juxtaposition of the two? Tracing the contour of the S curve reveals even more troubling uncertainties. It seamlessly flows into the line demarking the circumference of the circle containing the two figures so that what once separated figures now contains them. In making hypotheses about how this diagram might have been put together, it is necessary to ask whether the black shape, for instance, was superimposed over the white ground within the original large circle or whether the ground was always black before the white shape

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Figure 6.6  Juan Gris, Still Life with Bottle, 1912. (Courtesy of KrollerMuller Museum, The Netherlands)

was placed on top. Those two smaller circles residing at the center points of each part of the S curve begin to suggest just this sort of an overlap. Are these apertures into a substrate that reveal the presence of a contrary ground existing immediately below the two shapes that by now seem much less like figures? The point of this interrogation is to show how this simple structure can establish a framework for looking at relationships that is far richer than a reductive juxtaposition of supposed opposites. The complex ambiguity of the yin-yang diagram and the particular properties of its construction that open the figure to engage the ground are critical components of the intellectual intentions and formal structure of the Cubist painters, poets, musicians, and filmmakers who wanted to make figures more accessible while giving a voice to pictorial, textual, and musical grounds previously operating in silence. Figures of all kinds were carefully taken apart just to the point at which the resulting fragments were the most open to external relationships but not so far that reference to the original whole

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was lost. The basis for this process of decomposing was the assumption that objects were articulate and assembled from recognizable elements held together by an understandable internal structure; they are not inherently closed. The violins, bottles, and stemware so prevalent in these paintings are all composed of a complex combination of the S curves found in the yin-yang diagram and gridded rectilinear components, and thus already contain structures inherent to both figure and ground. The Cubists perceived the figure as having a life animated by a level of complexity and ambiguity well beyond the static formal, social, and political hierarchies present around the turn of the century. This hidden life is revealed when the figure’s constituent pieces are unfastened and displaced to engage the ground on their own terms. This decomposition, displacement, and recomposition shifts attention from an object to a relational view. The primary relationship was to the object’s supporting ground or fields. Now valued as an articulate entity in its own right, the dense mosaic of the ground could engage the disarticulated pieces of the figure on equal terms and significantly extend the number and type of relationships among all these parts. Ground was no longer a neutral datum to display the hegemony of the figure, but a textured and meaningful construct able to direct relationships with authority equal to that of the figure. Within this context, fragmentation becomes an optimistic and expansive process that can include a broad array of pieces – a set of open hypotheses about how things might go together. Architecture might well draw on some of the explorations of the Cubist theorists to reconsider the closed form of the building.16 In so doing, architecture would engage in a process of revaluing ground by opening to it. It would find not only an immensely vital realm but also processes, structure, and relationships that, if applied to architecture, would significantly transform the way it engages all that is within and around it. A revalued ground would demand much in return. Similar to the way Cubist painters tested the hold of figural closure on both object and subject while exploring open networks of relationships, architects might question assumptions about a priori hierarchies and other forms of premature closure that suppress legitimately dissenting voices within the program, composition, and materiality of their work. When the ground becomes a part of the architectural project, the resultant open structure will be a more effective mechanism for increasing choices within an inevitably open program than the prior collection of closed figures and attached corridors, stairs, and circulation shafts. As the ground is understood as much more than a simple, thin, two-dimensional plane, the opportunities its multilayered structure offers for architecture become more obvious. The interweaving of different thickening and thinning layers that gives the ground such sectional complexity provides far more effective a structure for expanding the three-dimensional connective potential among places and activities than the now-common stack of undifferentiated floor plates with point connection by the elevator and fire stair. Within a structure of overlapping and intersecting differential ribbons of space, the limitations of the singular ground plane no longer hold. Multiple ground planes increase the opportunity for more parts of the architectural project to be grounded in the particularity of the larger world. Furthermore, the ground’s impressive

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capacity to extend beyond arbitrary boundaries and its mutable and open structure give it a far greater porosity to surrounding natural and political structure. Many assumptions about architecture need to be reconsidered when the ground becomes so much a part of its constitution. A building so limits the breadth of architectural potential that it no longer can be considered its most effective product. The increasing size and hermetically sealed situation of buildings preclude relationships with ground other than displacement and erasure. As institutional programs become more complicated and densely variegated, with more autonomy and authority for the individual, the bounding envelope of a building seems a crude mediator between institution and world. The active or verb form of building is more promising. Rather than the static and finished product of a building, there is a continuing open-ended and inclusive process much closer to the processes of the ground and to life itself. An even better term would be constructing, with its double meaning of fitting things together and, coming from the same Latin root construere, its more ambitious task: “to interpret, put a meaning on, to explain.”17 At least one of the things expected from this process of constructing would be a compelling interpretation of the relationship between human action and the structure of the ground. One of the crucial pieces that will need to be “fit together” within the process of constructing is the room. The room most closely accommodates the presence of the human figure within and thus claims a considerable figural legitimacy. Its interior is a refuge, yet also the means to understand and orient oneself in the world. Its own parts, such as window, door, hearth, ceiling, and floor, are the means by which rooms mediate relationships among humans and between humans and the natural world, and therefore are the pieces that will directly engage the ground. When this articulate figure opens to and takes on properties of the ground, while simultaneously imparting its own figural identity to the relational structures of the ground, then the human can truly feel connected to the world. A remarkable representation of the human figure evocatively incised in a room that is also fully engaged in urban life and natural process is Messina’s painting of St. Jerome in His Study. Here is a room so responsive to its inhabitant’s particular physical and intellectual needs that it seems more like a protective garment. Each surface registers the physical presence of the saint, and even without him indicates the special character of its intended task. The room is elevated above the ground and focused inward. Jerome’s most explicit contact with his world would seem to be the book that is both part of the room and an extension of his body. Even the title of the painting suggests a place removed from the world to promote reflection. And yet it is just as apparent that this room is only a fragment of something larger. Its autonomy is mostly a consequence of implied, rather than actual, closure. A carefully calibrated incompleteness situates the study within an implied urban context just in front of the picture plane while connecting this to a landscape framed and ordered by multiple fields of columns, windows, and the scarcely visible network of gridding that ties everything together. To further link the study to its multiple supporting fields, the strongly felt order running in the background is eloquently revealed in the structure of the study

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Figure 6.7  Antonella da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study, 1475.

fragment itself. The surrounding context deserves further comment. Many qualities of the ground are in evidence here. The dark presentation and obscure edges lend a sense of this space being formless, a ground that extends far into both urban and natural worlds beyond. The intense patterning of the floor, the proliferation of treelike columns in the background, and the exotic animals roaming about all contribute to a reading of this space as some form of ground. All of this lends an air of ambiguity to Jerome’s situation. Is his study a fragment of the city, displaced to a landscape outside? Or, perhaps the ground itself has returned to its preurban condition? Within this rich contradictory setting, the actions of St. Jerome put figure and ground, and city and landscape into their multiple relationships.

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The raw natural setting of the North American continent was a revelation to the first Europeans. Coming from a continent that had long ago lost its forests, where land was cultivated more as an extension of the urban field or else completely acculturated as a garden, their descriptions of the new land are telling. Writing in The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx finds America praised as a bountiful garden of plenty where nothing is wanting and yet at the same time as a hideous wilderness.18 Marx argues that the tensions within these contrasting accounts have been crucial to the formations of American culture and, by extension, American patterns of settlement. Ground would certainly be expected to have a profound presence. Early examples of architecture and urbanism demonstrate means of representation and strategies of engaging the ground of the New World that differ markedly from what had been known in Europe. A particularly compelling representation of city structure effectively engaging the ground can be seen in a late mid-18th-century map of Williamsburg by Alexandre Berthier. Instead of the autonomous figure of the European walled city existing in a void, Berthier shows an urban pattern open to the land outside. In fact, the idea of outside seems completely inappropriate. The natural world so permeates the urban order that to refer to it as outside fails to account for just how strongly the ground has been Figure 6.8  Alexandre Berthier, Map of Williamsburg, 1781.

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assimilated into this new democratic order. Although there are gardens and cultivated lots, the intense presence of the natural process weaving through human intent stands out. Berthier has blurred distinctions in the way he represents political order and landform. The structure of the watershed with its articulated pattern of streams, creeks, swales, and ridges is rendered equivalent to the spatial structure of streets, alleys, public squares, and gardens that represent the then-current political and cultural aspirations. The complex interweaving of these multiple systems describes a context in which nature and culture are far more engaged than opposed, and each must be maintained for the others’ good. The same interdependent weaving together of political and ecological structure can be seen at the domestic scale of architecture. The Wythe house, built in Williamsburg around 1752, depicts a rapprochement between ground and constructed form similar to that found in Berthier’s map of the same city. The house is typically photographed in a tight composition that decontextualizes it and emphasizes its objectness, but this is more the outcome of a predilection within architectural history to focus on buildings and not their settings. Rather than being contained within the confines of the colonial house, the domestic program here is parsed out and distributed over the entire site, and in some instances even beyond. Kitchen, smokehouse, well, stable, gardens, pavilions, along with fences, hedges, trees, pergolas, porches, and other liminal pieces are deployed so that the ground itself – with its swales, ridges, and other topographical features – is engaged as an active part of a larger construct. Conventional distinctions between inside and out or nature and artifice fail to capture the complexity of this place. Equally challenging is trying to understand differences between public and private activity. With the domestic program no longer constrained to a singular structure, much of the domestic enterprise becomes porous and open to public engagement. The eight separate points of entry to the site allow individual pieces of the domestic program to form their own separate relationship with one another and the town beyond. These examples show the importance that edges play in mediating relationships with the ground. Whether made by adjacency, juxtaposition, overlap, or by things brought together by seam, the edge registers and responds to similarity and difference. Once architecture or any other figure becomes open to the ground, attention shifts away from the center and toward an increasing number and variety of edges. A less commanding center gives parity to these edges, which in turn are free to engage in their own relationships with grounds. Edge, margin, fringe, verge, and rim are a few of the words qualifying ground. These terms, however, carry a semantic power well beyond their portrayal of the ground’s physical structure. The marginal notes necessary to a critical reading, the cutting edge of new thought, or the alternate forms of community proposed by fringe groups are obvious examples of the rich critical potential inherent to existence at the boundary. The view from the edge is almost by definition a critical one. From this liminal vantage point, it is possible to look outward and inward and more easily recognize and assess problems at the center.

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But this is not just the metaphorical construct of critical thought and action. In nature, edges are never thin and unambiguous, but instead thick, overlapping, and even generative. For instance, the ecotone where two ecosystems meet combines qualities of each system. The niches and sanctuaries within this thick boundary make it one of the richest locations for finding a broad diversity of organisms.19 The edge’s inherently contrary quality of simultaneously separating and bringing together gives it a physical as well as an intellectual thickening at the same time that it is porous. With the edge so involved in the process of engaging ground, it will prompt a substantial reconsideration of the walls, ceilings, roofs, and even floors that define the room so that they too can participate in the expanded network of linkages revealed within the site. At this point, it seems that the long-standing desire to erase boundaries separating inside and out might be reconsidered and reframed. Inside and out describe more than simple climatic distinctions. Intuition, which is essentially a mysterious process interior to the mind, differs markedly from the externalization needed to rationalize actions. Intimacy itself is an interior condition made powerful by comparison to the vastness outside. Finally, feelings are another part of the interior life of the human that require protection from the outside. In other words, the brain itself would seem to be structured to promote, protect, and mediate relationships between inside and out, making the desire to erase such an inherently important condition a questionable one. So instead of making boundaries disappear or nearly so in the case of the glass curtain wall, it would be logical to make the boundary even thicker. The thick edge is more able to effectively respond to the differing pressures and needs of inside and outside. And as soon as inside and outside edges become entities in their own right, this sponsors a new place in between, capable of its own special form of occupation. The dense matrix of liminal space within the thick walls of the French Hotel, the urban house of a member of the royal court, is an evocative example of a different form of existence that contrasts with that led within the public figural rooms that these surround. The highly particular labyrinthine network of connectivity in both plan and section encourages relationships both licit and otherwise to be more freely entered into than do the limited and controlling axial routes within the public realm.20 The configurations within these thick walls speak to a freedom of choice and consequent vitality that could never be present in those limited figures. Martin Heidegger noted the catalytic potential of these edges when he wrote, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.”21 Much of the same literal and metaphorical ambiguity is also present in the more ephemeral structure of the porch. Is this part of the landscape, an extension of the room, or a place all its own? As the porch oscillates between interior and exterior as well as between figure and ground, it further explains the nature of the edge. Edges separate things and yet they also bring things together. Thus, the apparent contradictory constructs of continuity and discontinuity are able to be present at the same time and place. With this comes the ability for the human to be part of the larger network of political, social, and ecological systems while at the same time being removed and protected

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from this excess complexity to reflect on how best to engage it. Are there other forms of porch, and might other constructed edges perform similarly? Like the boundaries found in nature, these thick edges of architecture bring together the different ecologies of human artifice and nature to produce a third system: a liminal microclimatic place capable of mediating inside and exterior environments. Perhaps this form of the edge finally provides the unrestricted passage linking inside and out that has been an elusive goal of architecture for so long. Now, however, it is possible to imagine a richer and more equal relationship between human artifice and natural process as humans freely move physically and imaginatively between their own intentions and the conflicting environmental, political, social, and psychological matrix.

Conclusion Ground has always been a crucial part of human existence. In almost every discipline, in different form, it is the common reference among people and the world that makes shared thought and action possible. The ability to connect to a larger world is a direct consequence of the ability to effectively engage the ground and bring this within human comprehension and action. Ground is where human artifice and natural process commingle for the benefit of both. Our myopia and misrepresentation of something so essential seems inexplicable. The reductive representation of ground within architecture, urban planning, and even landscape architecture representation is just as strange. Possible explanation for the suppression of ground is complex and mostly beyond the scope of this essay. However, our ability to contend with one of the inescapable facts of being human, our mortality, tells much about how the ground is valued. When intellectually and emotionally capable of acknowledging their finitude, humans have looked to the ground for solace and support. Its patterns of repetition go on forever and thus contrast with any form of figure that, already having reached a state of conclusion, resists significant intervention and growth. But when culture is unable or unwilling to reach a productive rapprochement with its mortality, then ground, in all its manifestations, becomes an unwelcome reminder of the problematically short span of individual human existence.22 Irrespective of causes for this difficult relationship to ground, humans cannot continue to be blind to its opportunities. By questioning assumptions about the relationship of ground to human existence such as those embedded within the figure ground drawing that polarizes a relationship between things that are mutually dependent, it is possible to come to a better understanding of the value of the ground in human terms. By finding imaginative means to represent what has been invisible for so long, humans can at least bring the ground to attention as something worthy of consideration. Within architecture, once the ground is revealed and its structure made visible, it is possible to give the ground a voice equal to that of the products of human artifice. At this point architecture can open to and take into its domain a rich world that can augment what architecture is capable of. In being open to the ground, architecture will also discover a wealth of means to deal with intractable problems of its own. The consequence of this intense engagement is the effective reattachment of humans to the many worlds that support them.

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Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14

This essay is an extension of material covered in my earlier book, R. D. Dripps, The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997). Mostly, I am developing ideas that were introduced in the epilogue, where I proposed a reevaluation of the Vitruvian Myth of the first dwelling. This myth, which has been repeated in various forms in almost every treatise of architecture, describes people driven from the forest by a fire and into a clearing where they subsequently gather around the fire’s dying embers to initiate speech, political structure, and architecture. Language began here as people communicated the pleasure they found in the warm fire and signaled to others to bring logs to keep it burning. Written at a time when the forest was the predominant ground in Europe, this tale seems benign. But from our perspective, it is clear that to maintain the public realm, the forest will ultimately be consumed. I proposed an inversion of the myth where the vitality of a living forest could hold that crucial central position instead of the consuming fire. John B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 8. See Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, “The Oral Heritage of Written Narrative,” in The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Norman Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s “Odyssey” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 116. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49. Numa Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City; A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, tr. Willard Small (1873) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956, reprint), 22–33. “What better proof is there that the contemplation of fire brings us back to the very origins of philosophic thought? If fire, which after all, is quite an exceptional and rare phenomenon, was taken to be a constituent element of the Universe, is it not because it is an element of human thought, the prime element of reverie?” Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, tr. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 18. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1851), tr. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Hermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, reprint), 102. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 18. Dante captured the intensely paradoxical nature of this background while writing about Hell in The Divine Comedy: “Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. O how hard it is to tell what it was like, that wild and mighty and unfriendly forest, the very thought of which renews my fear! So bitter was it that death could be no worse. But, to reveal what benefit it brought me, I shall tell of the other things I found.” So beginning with a place dark and labyrinthine, a place that made death seem promising, Dante’s protagonist finds within this chaotic state of multiple orientations the means for his own spiritual redemption. Dante Alighieri, “Hell,” in The Divine Comedy (1314), tr. Louis Biancolli (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968, reprint), 3. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 20. Italo Calvino, “The Call of Water,” in Numbers in the Dark (New York: Vintage, 1996). Robert Augustyn and Paul Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 136. Actually, and metaphorically, forest and ground are dark. This is not only the darkness that contrasts with the clear light of rationality, but a quality essential for our most important creative actions. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that the

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15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

privacy of the house ultimately makes public life legitimate: “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes … shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, nonobjective sense.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 71. David Van Zanten, “Architectural Composition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier,” in The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Arthur Drexler (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 506, n 46. Architects might also look at the parallel strategies of the musicians who challenged the hegemony of a controlling tonal structure to reveal the musical potential of common sounds, rhythmic patterns, and other more open-ended structures that connected the piece to the everyday world. See Dripps, “Constructing the Paradigm,” in The First House, 65–75. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 43. Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Tyalgum: Tagari Publications, 1988), 76. In the play performed within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare introduces the character Wall: “This man, with lime and rough-cast doth present Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder; and through Wall’s chink, poor souls, they are content to whisper.” The wall is the device that separates the two lovers yet is also the agency by which they reestablish their relationship on even more solid ground. It is notable that what we might have anticipated as an inert piece of building becomes quite literally animated as its own implicit inside is played by one of the characters and is even given a speaking role. During this brief scene the Wall is alternately hailed as sweet and lovely and then as vile, thus demonstrating the wall’s double capacity to separate and bring together. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), in Shakespeare’s Twenty-Three Plays and the Sonnets, ed. Thomas Marc Parrot (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, reprint), 159. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 154. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,18–19. See also Robert Harrison, Forests: Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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7. Landscape Processes as Site Context Simon Dixon

Geomorphology, the study of landscapes and the processes that shape and reshape them, historically was considered a branch of geology. Since the mid-20th century, it has emerged as a diverse and vibrant discipline in its own right. Geomorphology differs from geology in that it studies not only features on or under the Earth’s surface, but also the processes that produce such features. It focuses on an active zone of erosion and deposition, that part of the Earth made of sediments and rocks that weather to form new sediments. In seeking to understand and quantify the processes at work within landscapes, geomorphology also distinguishes itself from landscape architecture. Fundamentally, a geomorphological viewpoint considers the object of study in four dimensions: three spatial dimensions plus time. A geomorphologist searches to understand the form and processes acting in a study area and, in so doing, forms a picture both reflecting historical changes and projecting likely future transformations. As its disciplinary standpoint, geomorphology considers the form of a landscape and its emergence historically, recognizing every landscape as in continuous flux. The term landscape, defined here in a geomorphological sense, means a geographical area consisting of characteristic landforms or processes. Geomorphologists, and geographers more widely, appropriated the term from art as referring to that part of the Earth’s surface viewed from one time and place. However, geographers use a broader conceptual definition of view as encompassing maps, and more recently aerial and satellite imagery, so landscape transcends what a person can see from a given physical location. In geomorphology, the term refers simply to the physical extent of the Earth currently under consideration or study. Historically, geomorphological research mainly focused on pristine or nearpristine environments. More recently the discipline has begun to consider human-modified landscapes in the context of the Anthropocene – specifically, how human-modified landforms differ from natural analogues and how human activities alter the rates and spatial distribution of erosion and deposition. This shift has seen an increasing range of interdisciplinary work involving geomorphologists, within both geography and the social sciences more broadly. Geomorphology can make useful contributions to

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interdisciplinary studies as it addresses how ongoing processes formed the present situation and will inform the future. In terms of site matters, it provides an additional set of lenses through which to examine context and invites speculation about the future of the site in itself and within the wider landscape. Considering the urban environment, geomorphology can situate present-day urban form in a temporal context, examining how natural processes have played a role in shaping the landscape and will influence and reshape the ground as well as the infrastructure imposed upon it. This line of thinking can be taken further, to consider urban fabric as landform, opening up interesting interdisciplinary lines of inquiry on the implications of the city as a landform in its own right. Notwithstanding obvious overlaps, significant distinctions between geomorphology and landscape architecture include, most importantly, each discipline’s primary lens for engaging with a landscape. As designers, landscape architects typically view through the lens of reading and appreciating the site “as found,” treating the present physical form as a framework for site design and development. A geomorphological viewpoint holds that whenever humans engage with a given landscape, or place within a landscape, as a site, they will perceive only a snapshot within an evolutionary journey. Before being conceived as a site, any area on the Earth’s surface will have been reshaped from another form and, crucially, it will continue to be reshaped after, or during, the time humans interact with it. A set of fundamental forces act across the Earth’s surface to form and reshape landscapes, including flowing water, wind, glaciers, waves, temperature changes, chemical reactions, plate tectonics, landslides and other hillslope movement, and human activities. In general, these processes operate slowly, producing gradual changes often difficult to perceive. However, more rapid and dramatic changes also occur, such as those caused by earthquakes, landslides, or floods. All these fundamental forces have strong geographical relationships; they are more common or have greater effects in some parts of the planet than others. For example, high latitudes experience a greater range of temperatures than the equator, and earthquakes typically have greatest strength near plate boundaries. Increasingly, the term Anthropocene has been used to describe the current period in the Earth’s history, when, it is contended, humanity has become the dominant environmental force. Great debate has been conducted about whether this might be possible to identify in the future rock record.1 Regardless of its geological merits, however, the Anthropocene provides an interesting lens through which to frame thoughts about landscapes. Dramatic historical examples of human imprint on geographical areas include extensive open-cast mining that moves vast quantities of earth, creation of artificial islands (as in Dubai), or widespread agricultural terracing that reshapes hillslopes. Recently, arguments that the whole urban fabric can be considered an Anthropocene landscape extends this notion across the planet.2 Human capacity to reshape the landscape is undeniable. However, humanity has had less effect on the aforementioned fundamental forces that continuously reshape natural and anthropogenically modified landscapes; generally, human activities simply alter (purposely or indirectly) the rates at which these processes operate. For example, dam building can reduce the supply of sediment in rivers, leading to faster

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Figure 7.1  World War 2 bunker in Normandy being slowly enfolded into the landscape by drifting sand.

rates of erosion as sediment-starved waters eat into the beds and banks of rivers.3 Human-induced climate change will change rates of erosion around the globe, not least due to greater frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events.4 However, underlying physical laws such as gravity and thermodynamics, which underpin the shaping of landscapes, remain indifferent to humanity’s activities. This implies an expectation that natural forces will slowly reshape anthropogenic landscape modifications and creations. Writer Paul Virilio anticipated this cycle in descriptions of monolithic World War II coastal bunkers becoming enfolded into the landscape and influencing local patterns of sediment erosion and deposition to eventually become the landscape itself.5 Whether this geomorphological reshaping would take the form of a gradual softening of angles and redistribution of sediment or produce more dramatic changes over shorter timeframes would depend on the nature of the anthropogenic landscape, the local setting, and prevailing conditions. This essay seeks to provoke reflection on how consideration of geomorphological processes feeds into the narrative complexity of site matters and the construction of a site. A geomorphological lens can not only illuminate processes that occurred in the past to shape the site and wider landscape, but furthermore force consideration of how the urban fabric may be subtly reshaped over time. It also prompts asking whether this reshaping should be resisted or embraced.

The Geomorphological Past as Context A geomorphological perspective informs site matters by taking up the consequence of landscape history in the creation of a site, including how the history of past landscape dynamism or instability is preserved or rendered evident in the current landscape. In

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“On Site,” Burns discussed the conception of cleared and constructed sites.6 The cleared site seeks to create a space empty of context, whereas the constructed site recognizes the site has been shaped by a lineage of processes over time. Clearly, an Anthropocene geomorphological lens challenges the concept of a cleared site; to physically divorce space from forces that shaped it requires anthropogenic geomorphological work. The conception of a constructed site implicitly recognizes the role of physical processes in shaping the landscape, but conceives of these as (pre)historic, a framework upon which to layer subsequent human occupation. From a geomorphological viewpoint, landscape processes are not only a framework; they also dictate how, where, and in what form the preservation or layering of human occupation will take place in the future. Many settlements develop near rivers, and a riverine floodplain consists of sediment deposited over hundreds, even thousands, of years. Rivers naturally migrate and shift courses over time, in some cases over large areas, as sediment from flood

Figure 7.2  Digital elevation model of the Willamette River, Oregon. Lowest elevations are displayed in white, fading to higher elevations in darker colors. The current course of the river corresponds to the white area, with abandoned and filled in historical channels shown in gray. The dynamism of the river within the landscape is clearly shown by the range of old channel features.

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deposits gradually builds up on floodplains.7 As the river course meanders, sediment carried by flowing water fills abandoned channels, and the size and quality of this filling sediment differs from floodplain sediment. Ancient and modern fluvial sediments therefore reflect considerable heterogeneity in deposition patterns. It often is possible to look back in time and see evidence of past river channels buried within sediments.8 Similarly, beds of dried lakes can be identified by layers of fine sediment deposited in standing water over time. By location, a site perhaps distant from modern water bodies might contain ghosts of past lakes or rivers beneath the surface of the ground.9 In addition to preserving evidence of gradual changes, landscapes occasionally offer evidence of discrete catastrophic environmental events.10 Very large flood events often carry unusually large sediments in their flow: particle size in absolute terms, including large rocks (“cobbles”) and even boulders, sheer volume of sediment, and areal extent. As large floods reach a wider lowland part of the landscape or begin to recede, this large transportation of sediment decreases, and huge volumes of coarse sediment can be deposited. Thick layers of coarse river sediments preserved in the floodplain provide evidence of these catastrophic events. Similarly, sedimentary evidence attests to events such as tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and landslides. The concept of a site as a discrete spatial entity is widely recognized as a human construct, often lacking physical basis in landscape. From a geomorphological viewpoint, the site nests within larger-scale sets of geographical units and continually operating processes, from the hillslope to the river catchment to the regional setting. Although local topographic context can be reshaped, the ability of designers to divorce the site from wider geomorphological context is quite limited. The rich geomorphological contexts that exist above and below ground and from the most local to the regional scales can all inform the visual and the conceptual narrative of the site.

Framing the Present To date, the concept of the Anthropocene in natural science has focused predominantly on the effects of anthropogenic activity on the natural world, and geomorphologists have examined humans as agents for landscape change in terms of creating new landforms and in modifying landscape processes.11 Although landscape processes are harder to influence, human activities in one part of a landscape can change processes and landforms elsewhere; perhaps most obviously, dam structures on rivers regulate the transfer of water and sediment from one part of the landscape to another.12 Human modification of landscapes, intentional and accidental, dates back to prehistory with the early clearance of forests and construction of landscape monuments.13 Therefore, any area with a history of human habitation will be a hybrid landscape made of up a series of overlapping and subsumed landscape modifications, which in turn have been progressively reshaped by natural processes. Such a view complements the broad idea of a constructed site, but crucially demonstrates that landscape processes are not confined to the prehuman period: they exist throughout time, acting on all phases of landscape and site change from the prehistoric to the present.

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Landscape processes often operate over timescales longer than those considered in human management, making it difficult to appreciate them. Furthermore, landscape change is generally viewed as fundamentally unstable or even unnatural; that natural forces operate beyond human control can be challenging and frightening to confront. In river management, for example, bank erosion is understood less as a natural and inevitable process but instead as a sign the river is “out of control” or dangerous; river channels are actively managed to prevent them from migrating in the landscape.14 Such management might be desirable if infrastructure risks costly damage, but the prevailing view holds that rivers should be tamed and controlled even with little financial or social imperative to do so. Also, an underappreciation for the dynamism of landscapes historically has led to placing infrastructure in vulnerable locations. As a result, contemporary management often needs to include remedial solutions to arrest landscape processes, such as river migration, in order to protect human-emplaced assets.

Incorporating the Future The desire to impose a fixed design upon the landscape presents a potential conflict with the recognition that natural processes drive change. This raises two important issues: the first concerns what changes might manifest in urban areas over time; the second considers the desirability, or even possibility, of incorporating dynamism within designs. A recent fascinating process in urban environments involves the creation of stalactite-type formations from dissolved concrete on buildings and within subterranean chambers and tunnels.15 Water running over the surface of concrete or percolating through microscopic cracks can dissolve calcium carbonate in the cement; in water dripping off overhanging surfaces or concentrating into flow pathways, the dissolved calcium carbonate precipitates out into concrete stalactites or sheets of precipitated material called flowstone. These processes are similar (although not chemically identical) to those occurring in formation of natural cave systems and stalactites/stalagmites called speleothems. Typically, deposits created outside the cave environment, classified as calthemites, are associated with concrete degradation and, seen as undesirable, removed from buildings. In neglected buildings, unseen places, or little-used subterranean areas, extensive stalactite development has been documented.16 In some cases, stalactites on a human-made substrate have grown extensively, almost masking the original materials and form, and inviting a different view of calthemite processes. Rather than undesirable, they may present potential within a design so that, over time, a concrete structure could develop deposits – softening edges, enfolding the site/structure into the natural environment, and blurring the definition of the natural and constructed. The effects of weathering and time can inform design in various ways. Anticipating effects of chemical weathering upon metal has a long history in design; typically, natural oxidation occurs over several years so that bright metal develops a natural patina, such as copper developing verdigris. Similarly, designers specify wood that naturally changes color as it ages over time. Incorporating the natural weathering of stone into design could be more well-considered. Weathering of rocks, a fundamental

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geomorphological process, breaks rock surfaces down into small sediment particles, typically fairly slowly.17 From a geomorphological viewpoint, the urban environment can be considered as an Anthropocene geological formation, with concrete and stone structures acting in the same way as rock outcrops or cliff faces in the natural environment. The same weathering processes that occur in natural environments act on anthropogenic rock formations; over time, without any intervention, they will develop extensively reworked surfaces and a build-up of weathered sediment. Examples of the results of such processes can be found in abandoned sites, such as Hashima Island in Japan. Urban greening – design or retrofit of infrastructure to include plants, particularly green roofs, green walls, and other sustainable urban drainage features – shows that urban fabric acts as an alternative geology, hosting a range of biogeomorphological forms and processes.18 Geomorphological processes obviously occur within geographical areas that do not respect the division of land into sites or plots. However, at the same time, the built urban environment can inadvertently influence its own reshaping by geomorphological forces. Structures imposed above and below ground can influence the location and strength of erosional forces such as, for example, the redirection and concentration of flowing water pathways. The configuration of the above-ground urban environment influences flooding and air temperature; the influence on subsurface flow pathways is less well studied.19 Within areas dominated by limestone geology, such as Florida, urban drainage can concentrate flowing water, lead to the dissolution of bedrock and the formation of sinkholes, or, with high tides and full moons, create pressure-driven geysers backflowing from the sea to flood homes and subdivisions. Is it possible to take a different view of dynamic landscape processes and incorporate landscape-scale dynamism into sites? The question merits serious

Figure 7.3  Crumbling concrete structures on the abandoned Hashima Island, Japan. The edges of structures are being softened by erosion, and material weathered from the concrete is being reshaped and redistributed into mounds, gullies, and drifts of material, which mimic natural formations.

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consideration. Increasingly, impacts of climate change have led to recognizing the need for different approaches to development, making features more responsive to environmental changes rather than imposed within the landscape. A recent Dutch example, the Room for the River program, allows watercourses to reconnect with the wider floodplain, a marked contrast to the past practice of heavily managed and constrained waterways similar to the Army Corps of Engineers management of the Mississippi River. As part of this program, buildings at risk of flooding are designed to “float” within their foundations, allowing them to rise in floodwaters to help mitigate damage. Braided river landscapes offer an example of how a new approach to development could be taken. A braided river is characterized by multiple channels divided by small islands or bars of sediment. As these bars migrate and get reshaped, often from year to year, the individual river channels shift their course accordingly. Historically, development in such landscape has been restricted, or there have been attempts to arrest the dynamism of the river channels. Although potentially challenging, rather than seeking to tame or constrain processes, it may be possible to incorporate sites that embrace this dynamic landscape, where the anthropogenic and natural coexist in harmony, where the natural landscape shifts and reforms around and within the site.

Notes 1

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J. Zalasiewicz, C. N. Waters, M. J. Head, C. Poirier, C. P. Summerhayes, R. Leinfelder, and A. Cearreta, “A Formal Anthropocene Is Compatible with but Distinct from Its Diachronous Anthropogenic Counterparts: A Response to W.F. Ruddiman’s ‘Three Flaws in Defining a Formal Anthropocene,’” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 43, no. 3 (2019): 319–333, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309133319832607. S. J. Dixon, H. A. Viles, and B. L. Garrett, “Ozymandias in the Anthropocene: The City as an Emerging Landform,” Area 50, no. 1 (2018): 117–125. J. P. M. Syvitski, C. J. Vörösmarty, A. J. Kettner, and P. Green, “Impact of Humans on the Flux of Terrestrial Sediment to the Global Coastal Ocean,” Science 308 (2005): 376–380; S. Yang, J. Milliman, K. Xu, B. Deng, X. Zhang, and X. Luo, “Downstream Sedimentary and Geomorphic Impacts of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River,” Earth-Science Reviews 138 (2014): 469–486. K. Zhang, B. C. Douglas, and S. P. Leatherman, “Global Warming and Coastal Erosion,” Climatic Change 64 (2004): 41; and M. Nearing, F. Pruski, and M. O’Neal, “Expected Climate Change Impacts on Soil Erosion Rates: A Review,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 59 (2004): 43–50. P. Virilio, Bunker Archeology (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 215. C. Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations” in Drawing/Building/Text: essays in architectural theory, ed. Andrea Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991). 146-167 S. J. Dixon, G. H. Sambrook Smith, A. Nicholas, J. L. Best, J. M. Bull, M. E. Vardy, S. L. Goodbred Jr., and M. H. Sarker, “The Planform Mobility of River Channel Confluences: Insights from Analysis of Remotely Sensed Imagery,” Earth Science Reviews 176 (2017): 1–18. M. R. Gibling and N. S. Davies, “Palaeozoic Landscapes Shaped by Plant Evolution,” Nature Geoscience 5 (2012): 99–105.

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9

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One notable example to visually trace the historic river channels in the landscape is the mapping of Harold Fisk for a 1944 US Army Corps of Engineers report, The Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. R. Chiverrell, D. A. Sear, J. Warburton, N. Macdonald, D. Schillereff, J. Dearing, I. Croudace, J. Brown, and J. Bradley, “Using Lake Sediment Archives to Improve Understanding of Flood Magnitude and Frequency: Recent Extreme Flooding in Northwest UK,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/ esp.4650. There are numerous examples of this work, including P. Tarolli and G. Sofia, “Human Topographic Signatures and Derived Geomorphic Processes across Landscapes,” Geomorphology 255 (2016): 140–161; A. S. Goudie and H. A. Viles, Geomorphology in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 380; and S. J. Price, J. R. Ford, A. H. Cooper, and C. Neal, “Humans as Major Geological and Geomorphological Agents in the Anthropocene: The Significance of Artificial Ground in Great Britain,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A 369 (2011): 1056–1084. Yang et al., “Downstream Sedimentary and Geomorphic Impacts.” A. G. Brown, S. Tooth, J. E. Bullard, D. S. G. Thomas, R. C. Chiverrell, A. J. Plater, J. Murton, V. R. Thorndycraft, P. Tarolli, J. Rose, J. Wainwright, P. W. Downs, and R. E. Aalto, “The Geomorphology of The Anthropocene: Emergence, Status and Implications,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 42 (2017): 71–90. J. S. Alexander, R. C. Wilson, and W. R. Green, A Brief History and Summary of the Effects of River Engineering and Dams on the Mississippi River System and Delta (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey, 2012). G. K. Smith, “Calcite Straw Stalactites Growing from Concrete Structures,” Cave and Karst Science 43 (2016): 4–10. Dixon et al., “Ozymandias in the Anthropocene.” A. Turkington, E. Martin, H. A. Viles, and B. Smith, “Surface Change and Decay of Sandstone Samples Exposed to a Polluted Urban Atmosphere over a Six-Year Period: Belfast, Northern Ireland,” Building and Environment 38 (2003): 1205–1216. Dixon et al., “Ozymandias in the Anthropocene.” D. Butler and J. Davies, Urban Drainage (London: Spon Press, 2017); and A. J. Arnfield, “Two Decades of Urban Climate Research: A Review of Turbulence, Exchanges of Energy and Water, and the Urban Heat Island,” International Journal of Climatology 23 (2003): 1–26.

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8. In the Anthropocene, Site Matters in Four Ways Dirk Sijmons

In 2000, climate scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer made the observation that humankind had become a global force.1 The far-reaching influence of humans had been recognized earlier,2 but, in an original contribution, Crutzen and Stoermer observed that human impact on the earth – understood as a total functioning single integrated system3 or earth system – had reached the level of system-wide disruption. We not only influence the climate, but also disrupt geochemical cycles: the sediment flows of rivers dammed for electricity production, the changing acidity of the oceans, landcover dramatically altered by reclamation for agriculture and urbanization. We are eroding biodiversity to such an extent that specialists are talking about the sixth mass extinction. This represents a rupture with earlier views, in which the growing influence was seen as gradual and thought to be restricted to ecosystems or landscape scales. Crutzen and Stoermer suggested that the time had come to recognize the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era, a split from the Holocene, generally recognized until then as the current geological epoch and as having begun after the last glacial period approximately 12,000 years ago. Mixed reception to that new term engendered fierce debates, providing a glimpse of the far-reaching practical and philosophical implications of proclaiming this the Age of Mankind. In geological and paleoecological circles, discussions about when this so-called new era originated offer insight into the different views on the matter. Three lines of reasoning clash in this scientific dispute. The first line, old school, proposes two options; it either traces the influence of humans on global systems back to the migration out of Africa (beginning the hunt to extinction of large vertebrates and predators on every continent across the globe) or to the somewhat more recent start of agriculture, around 10,000 years ago. The second line, more pragmatic, asserts that the era began in 1769 when James Watt was granted the steam engine patent, initiating massive-scale use of fossil fuels. The third school of thought, gaining ascendance, traces the logical beginning of the Anthropocene to the mid-20th century. This claim is based on thousands of near-synchronous geological signatures in the stratigraphic record during the Great Acceleration that marked a global increase

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in population, industrial activity, energy use, emission of greenhouse gasses, and, as a golden spike, the radioactive isotopes of atomic bomb detonations as a geologic marker. It does not much matter if the International Commission on Stratigraphy agrees on an officially formalized geological Anthropocene. The concept has already made its way into many scientific publications, as well as the minds of the general public fed by the popular press. Without doubt, humankind must be reckoned with as a geologic force. Influences are measurable (and at times disruptive) on many fronts: ocean acidification; the erosion of biodiversity; reduction of sediment flows in most river systems; most of the world’s geochemical cycles; and – important for the subject of this book – large-scale land use changes caused by reclamation for agriculture and urbanization. Once the Anthropocene idea of humankind as a geological force sinks in, it will not let go. The insight that human and planetary histories are interconnected proves groundbreaking. It requires acknowledgement that human history and earth history have converged, and the domains of free will and of necessity have more to do with each other than once presumed.4 Seeing human intervention as a force of nature that affects earth systems undermines the pseudo-opposition between nature and humankind. This opposition – like that of body and mind – has for centuries dominated thinking and hampered focus on real problems. We humans thought that we existed outside nature, and nature outside us. Nature was either made sacrosanct and remote or seen as “other,” the domain where we could withdraw unlimited resources and upon which we could dump waste forever. The Anthropocene postulates human and natural processes as linked together in a complex new whole, with no imaginary natural equilibrium to fall upon. For members of the design and planning fields, waking up in the Anthropocene unsettles previous thinking about relations between humankind and the sites and planet they inhabit. The Anthropocene must spur a new search for professional attitudes, responsibilities, and even a new look at the ethics of the design disciplines. Since reflecting on perspectives for action on the environmental conundrum of today demands a more distant view, a good theory provides assistance. Borrowing from the Australian philosopher and science writer Clive Hamilton, a set of four distinct philosophical views – or attitudes – may help designers and planners to navigate in the new era. This chapter draws on these philosophical positions toward the Anthropocene as instrumental in this quest. Presented in a quadrant, four ideal/typical positions emerge.5 The first pair, denialism and ecomodernism, dominate the current environmental debate and can be described in terms familiar to the design field. The other two, posthumanism and Anthropocentrism 2.0, each demand a paradigm shift in thinking about the world; both remain largely terra incognita for the design community. Hamilton’s philosophical formulation operates on the plane of a worldview, and its stratospheric level of abstraction cannot be translated literally to attitudes held by designers or to what designers themselves would call design philosophies. This chapter asks if site could be a meaningful interface to bridge that gap between

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abstract formulation and grounded design concerns. Keenly aware that understandings of site always will be a complex interaction between characteristics and the eye of the beholder, the following four concise sketches elaborate on this moving target, recognizing that four worldviews will necessarily produce four different angles on site. Each sketch summarizes the philosophical background of one position, considers the ideological energy involved, and speculates on how site will or could be seen from that specific worldview. Further, each sketch uses (land-)ethical considerations as a stepping-stone to make a link to the design profession.6 Ecologically, an ethic defines a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. Philosophically, an ethic differentiates between social and antisocial conduct. Both aspects help to give examples of (future) design and planning projects that might typify the four positions on the Anthropocene.

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Figure 8.1  Typology of philosophical positions toward the Anthropocene. Adapted from Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth, the Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). The vertical axis, representing the ways one could look at the position of humankind in relation to the Earth system, arrays the potential of human power: at one end, a powerless humankind as a futile species impotent in changing the course of planetary systems; and at the other extreme, a powerful humankind able to deeply influence Earth systems. The horizontal line depicts different understandings of the active/passive role of the planet: on the left, the world is seen as a passive unchanging backdrop, an inexhaustible resource and trash pit where projects land and utopias get projected; on the right, we see a living and mightier planet that can cause unpredictable troubles when its systems are disrupted. These axes depict sliding scales and thus allow for a myriad of finer-grain positions.

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Denialist It is possible that the majority of the earth’s inhabitants who today still remain uninformed of the notion of the Anthropocene and its likely implications, such as climate change, might be reached by information and education, while others might willingly choose to remain in a blissful state of oblivion. But a hard core of malicious ignorance also exists: people denying that humankind has any impact on global systems, let alone on climate. These denialists frame the Anthropocene as the next new metaphor adopted by environmentalists to raise alarm, presenting it as part of a leftist elite, or even communist conspiracy, to end “our way of life” and the well-deserved wealth (Western) society attained through its ingenuity. They describe the Anthropocene as a hoax designed to gradually bring civilization, curtailed by too much self-reflection from living up to its true potential, to a grinding halt. A strong growing political movement seemingly pivots around climate denial. While it may be convenient to point to the (alt) right as the source, we must admit that the movement might be gaining strength because of the denier found in each of us, even the anxious. The voice that evokes “our politicians must act now” also whispers “I hope they do not have to; I would hate to give up my privileges.” As George H. W. Bush stated during the Kyoto deliberations, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”7 Denialism is the position of the anxious, as well as the only attitude of those wishing, with dry eyes and no shame, to continue the fossil fuel party until the last drop: it legitimizes interconnected inequity and greed. Denialism gains strength through a kind of cognitive dissonance that leads some adherents, when confronted with unwanted facts, to get ever more deeply entrenched in their own position. In this ideological haze, the denialists find themselves in an everlasting present longing for a nonexistent past. Denialists who come face to face with disasters, like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, might insist that they live in the best possible of all worlds.8 With a small minority of “scientists” and a strong tailwind of journalistic ethos to air both sides, further boosted by social media, the denialist world view has been able to confuse and sabotage debate with fake facts that in turn feed the denialist position.9 Its weakness is that real facts will emerge, as people will learn the hard way. In the climate change debate, for example, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a denialist stance in the face of extreme weather – extended droughts, storms, floods, heatwaves, wildfires – as well as melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Holding the denialist stance in the face of these observable conditions depends on believing in an externalized solution, a deus ex machina, like nuking hurricanes and disrupting their course before they make landfall. Science and technology will help if things really go wrong. Considering the land ethic that best fits the denialist position, the ideal of the farmer and the farm – as mediating between society and nature – takes center stage. The farmer is the intermediary between society and nature. Biodiversity is a side effect of farming. Farming holds a central role in the ascent-of-man myth in monotheist religions (such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), in which the invention of agriculture elevates humankind out of its wild barbaric stage, subsequently producing enough

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 Crisis? What Crisis? Supertramp Album Cover. Cover design by Paul Wakefield, A&M, 1972. + (Courtesy of Universal Music Group)  Professional Attitude: Golf Course Designer. Photograph by REUTERS/Jose Palazon, 2014. + (Courtesy of Thomson Reuters) +S  tacked Identity: Hotel in Zaandam Holland. Photograph by Paul Backaert, architect: Wilfried van Winden, 2015. (Courtesy of R.R.S. Backaert)  armers are key to the land ethic. Detail of American Gothic, Grant Wood, 1930, Art +F Institute of Chicago.

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surplus value for urbanization and, in an even later stage, spurring state formation.10 In this worldview, all civilization evolves from farming. An essentially libertarian position, it considers property rights (of farmers) as natural rights that should not be regulated, even when farming itself turns destructive to the environment. In the engagement with space and site, from spatial planning to architecture, conservative notions dominate the denialist quadrant. Appreciation for the rooted and local stands against raging powers of globalization. Identity is the keyword. Outspoken (landscape) architectural views have no place here; new artifacts must blend in with their environment. Adopting this attitude toward the Anthropocene leaves site to be considered as an objective attribute of a place, guarded by the genius of the place, not something in the eye of the beholder. By making it almost sacrosanct, site will be fixed and lose its power of expression. A metaphor for the professional attitude that fits this position might be something akin to golf course design. Representing a small niche, adhering to strict rules of the game and dominant – international – preconditions, golf course design produces the same results everywhere in the world, independent of the availability of water and other prerequisites: the illusion of the Irish or Scottish meadows where the sport originated.

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Modernist/Ecomodernist In ecomodernism, the modernist ideal of everlasting​​progress is kept alive. In this worldview, economic growth can coexist with reducing the ecological footprint. Should growth produce problems, rational solutions will be found. The vector of modernism is emancipation. Predicated on the notion that modernism promises a way to break loose from the chains of nature, progressive modernist politicians and designers formulate ideals in utopian terms. Ecomodernism, a recent radically optimistic strand of the environmental movement, originates in the US and finds its most vocal champion in the Breakthrough Institute.11 It emerged in an attempt to reunite the narrative of progress with an adapted form of environmentalism. To come up with answers to the problems of the Anthropocene, or at least construct qualifying stories that the consequences of human actions will not be too bad, the ecomodernist worldview assumes that clearly defined problems exist that can be solved one by one, as a bullet list, in a rational way. Do we influence the geochemical cycles? We can solve that by shifting toward a circular economy. Eroding biodiversity? If novel ecosystems consisting of nonindigenous and non-co-evolved species cannot deliver the same ecosystem services, then surely de-extinction programs will once DNA technology develops further. This in not simply a matter of putting trust in technology. Ecomodernists live in a technosphere identified as an extra layer of culture; here, the global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around gains its own momentum and autonomy. This worldview encourages development of each new invention toward the inherent good, to align it in the same progressive direction in which all life is presumably headed.12 The technosphere turbocharges evolution. Former Exxon CEO and minister of foreign affairs in the Trump administration Rex Tillerson aptly expresses how this mentality translates into the climate problem: “Climate change is just an engineering problem.” Geoengineering, adding sulfate particles, Olivine beaches, or iron to oceans, could solve the problem. For ecomodernists considering the energy transition, nuclear energy offers the best bet. By giving environmentalism a PR boost and linking it to mainstream economics, ecomodernism proves a close ally to vested market interests. Ecomodernism offers one of the hopes for prolonging the system. The land ethic that emerges from ecomodernism, the most technologically oriented of the four positions, might be a utilitarian-inspired view that morally right action produces the maximum good for people. This land ethic can be useful in deciding how to optimize land use. For example, it can form the foundation for industrial farming; an increase in yield will increase the number of people able to receive goods from farmed land, judged a good approach from the ecomodernist point of view. This land ethic will also economize the ratio between yield and fertilizer/pest use. In this ethic, the agricultural engineer as planner becomes the intermediary between society and the land (use). The spatial planning and architecture fields have long championed modernism. For much of the 20th century, urbanism has been almost synonymous with

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(social) engineering. Utopian visions were projected on space or had spatial expression. In this sense, spatial planning has been ally to and spokesperson for modernism, while landscape architecture played a much more modest role. Traditional ways of representing nature in landscape plans – the wilderness, the garden, and the landscape – all but disappeared during the height of modernism.13 Modernist horticultural planting schemes, treated as purely formal, became a mere backdrop for program (e.g., leisure). The specific role site would take in ecomodernism aligns with this concern for utility. Site characteristics are expressed in quantitative measures and terms of fitness for different kinds of human use. The designer evaluates site in relation to the demands of program; a site is either suitable or not. If not, the site needs to be improved or optimized. The matching professional attitude in ecomodernism is the engineering ethos.

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+ Frontier of modernism: GM Pavilion preparing for mass mobility. Norman Bell Geddes (1939). + N  ewest frontier of modernism: technology in us, technology between us, technology as us, technology over us. (Courtesy of Alissa van Asseldonk) + E  ngineering ethos: Climate problem? Stratospheric sulfate aerosols for that quick climate fix!  olutionism: well-defined problems will be solved one by one in a rational, technical, way. + S

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Posthumanism/Ontological Pluralism After a half-century of critical social science studies – on race, gender, faith, capitalism – critical studies reached its logical conclusion in posthumanism. This philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species. In posthumanism, humans are supposed to take a few steps back and acknowledge their place as but a small cog in the web of life spanning the whole living planet. Like Lovelock’s Gaia, the system is seen as a self-regulating superorganism. Because different definitions of posthumanism abound, adding ontological pluralism as a qualifier reinforces the idea that multiple ways of being may, and must, coexist. The ways of Western culture are equal to other cultures and the ways of being of indigenous peoples. Humans must not feel superior to other living creatures forming part of the web of life. Post-humanism crumbles the once-solid border between culture and nature. In this view of the Anthropocene, problems are diagnosed as the twinning of natural and anthropogenic processes. We lack language for hybrids forming on this new frontier. From this standpoint, even the climate becomes a hybrid, perhaps an even-larger artefact than the endless urban landscapes we build. Humans once considered the earth and nature as a stage, an immobile backdrop to the continuous history of civilization; more and more people now believe that other living beings play a role in the human story, seeing the stage itself as starting to move and participate in the performance. The land ethic that would accompany this worldview might be an ecocentric one, sympathetic to nomadism and akin to the light treading on the earth associated with indigenous peoples. It would find arguments of deep ecology overarching, even overriding, most other cultural aspirations. In the words of Leopold: “Culture is a state of awareness of the land’s collective functioning. A culture premised on the destructive dominance of a single species can have but short duration.”14 Ontological pluralism stands in a complex relationship with agriculture. Deconstructing the ascent-of-man myth (perhaps even asking, “What went wrong when?”), posthumanists expose the old Biblical controversy between sedentary Cain and nomadic Abel as an example of dominant monotheist religions propagating the view of sedentary agricultural life as superior to its supposedly savage, primitive, wild, nomadic alternative. The counterintuitive result, after ten millennia of agriculture, is that archeology and paleobotany now conclude that nomadic hunter-gatherers had (and have) a better diet, better health, and more leisure time than modern humans.15 Site in ontological pluralism will be described as a knot in an ultracomplex network of living, human, nonhuman, and even dead (abiotic) actants and, at the same time, the forever changing resultant of that network: site as snapshot of one moment of a myriad of processes. Mercurial site cannot easily be read. Designers assisted by all their senses are aware of the embodied character of experience.16 Here, genius of the process (not genius of the place) gives specific meaning to site. The tendency to accord landscapes, or landscape elements, their own legal status, such as the recognition of the Whanganui River in New Zealand (after 140 years of negotiations by the Maori) shows

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+Ego, Man as the pinnacle of creation is being replaced by: +Eco, Man as an equal cog, embedded in the web of life; +Nature is no longer the backcloth of the human show (photo: Ilkka Halso, 2008); (Courtesy of Ilkka Halso) +A vacation from being human, artist Thomas Twaithes in his project Goat Man (photo by Tim Bowditch, 2016). (Courtesy of Tim Bowditch)

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the growing influence of this position. Not coincidentally, the emergence of ontological pluralism played a part in this unique lawmaking process. Role-playing provides a practical entrée to this world. Actants, dead or alive, can be represented by actors or other cocreators; Bruno Latour suggests a “parliament of things.”17 Such enactment works to give a role to the voiceless. In the Dutch debate on offshore wind parks, for example, the Embassy of the North Sea in The Hague was established to represent the North Sea, in all its diversity, as a full political player. The professional attitude connected to posthumanism mirrors the extreme sensitivity and empathy for all human and nonhuman aspects of a given site. That may take radical form: enriching one’s experience and design practice to allow “a holiday from being human,” like artist Thomas Thwaites transforming himself into goat-man for a couple of weeks, or the literally embedded journalist Charles Foster living like a badger, swift, red deer, and otter.18 Posthumanism comes quite close to shamanism in this respect. In a more technological guise, biomimicry design practice can be greatly enhanced by means of 3-D virtual reality simulations.19 The closest (landscape) architectural school of thought to this worldview might be critical regionalism, with its rejection of generic modernism and its efforts to mediate between global and local languages of architecture and its materials.

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Anthropocentrism 2.0 Anthropocentrism, a long-established concept, is reintroduced by Clive Hamilton with an extension 2.0 to resituate the anthropos from the center of domination over nature to the center of responsibility, as a powerful agent capable of changing the geological evolution of the earth. The changes humankind induced, far from gradual, have forced a rupture by influencing the earth system itself. Anthropocentrism 2.0 diverges from posthumanism with the notion that humans have caused a catastrophe with unimaginable impact and must be made accountable. In ontological pluralism, humankind tries to make itself small, diminishing itself as just one among many, an equal in the web of life. If ecomodernism lives by the credo, “The best is always yet to come,” Anthropocentrism 2.0 stands by the belief, “The worst might still be avoided.” It considers the hope that “all’s going to end well” to be sublimated denialism. When the earth turns out to be an active party, Modernism must swallow any promised emancipation; the neoliberal claim that the economy can still grow while the environmental footprint simultaneously shrinks becomes more nonsensical by the day. Freedom and detachment turn into their opposites: humankind becomes, in a philosophical sense, an embedded subject, connected via a web with other living and dead actors (a position shared with ontological pluralism); but Anthropocentrism 2.0 rejects the vision that man is “just another species” by pointing to the physical dominance of our species. Anthropocentrism 2.0 offers a gloomier but likely more realistic diagnosis of the situation than a posthumanist stance. All hybrids enter the dance floor together with humanity. Given current knowledge of complex systems – they act in fundamentally unpredictable nonlinear ways and never return to their starting point – the arrow of time points relentlessly in one direction. Having grown up with concepts like natural balance, humanity thinks it only had to take a few steps back to restore that balance. Now we have to conclude that even with technical interventions, there is no going back to the calm and stable Holocene. The era of simple solutions to well-defined problems seems over. There might be a direction to move, a vector to follow, but with all these unpredictable events we have to teach ourselves to ride the tiger of complexity. We are muddling through in dialogue with the ecosystems we work in and on. A land ethics emerging from Anthropocentrism 2.0, the most scienceoriented of the positions, would be solidly based on scientific knowledge from disciplines like ecology and geology. Understanding human communities founded on the surrounding ecosystems helps us find our place and identify our responsibilities as a dominant species. This ethic is marked by a certain humility and cautious agency. Looking at the agricultural question, one might argue that agroecology will come close to meeting its standards. Agroecology studies and learns from traditional agricultural systems and develops strategies and technologies to scale up its findings. Its adherents are confident that agroecology can be productive and profitable for most farmers around the world without polluting the environment or compromising biodiversity. The often-heard critique that this strategy will not support the world population is delivered with the taunt that the Green Revolution already has proven unable to do just that for half a century.20

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Site is defined in a space-time continuum as a floating point. Reading the site in this worldview is a complex interaction between characteristics of the place and the designer (or beholder). The site informs the program and might be described in historic terms of cumulative damage as a brownfield. In Anthropocentrism 2.0, designers, no longer a faithful accessory to modernism, choose to be a counterforce bound together by the notion that if humankind acts as a plague organism, it is a reflective one capable of responding to situations.21 Key words for the perspective for action could include abandon action, undo, mitigate, repair, reverse engineer, and work with natural processes. Typical projects include reforestation, coastal defense based on sand transport sedimentation and erosion, rewilding, removing superfluous dams from rivers to re-establish routes for migrating fish, adding green-blue infrastructure to cities, correcting engineering failures. The professional attitude might be somewhere between acting ecologist and selfappointed, over-responsible planet repairman. Don’t misunderstand: this Anthropocentrism 2.0 is not anti-technological like posthumanism, nor starry-eyed like ecomodernism. Technology is considered in a Goethean sense: a blessing or a possible downfall.22 In this view, science and technology dominate the ethical discussion, as not everything that is possible should be allowed to happen. Technology must be domesticated. Yet that might be hard to do since technology seems to have already taken an autonomous course.23

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+Technology: a blessing or a curse. Goethe’s doctor Faustus (Alexander von Krefeld, 1806). +Through unpredictable bifurcations, complex systems never return to their starting point (Prigogine, Stengers, 1984). (Courtesy of Isabelle Stengers)  iagnosis: a perfect storm building up: different crises in interference (Marius Watz, + D Trajectories, 2008). +Typical project: working with natural forces to attain human goals (RWS, 2012–2015, Sand Engine, NL).

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Discussion This chapter, a first exploration into the possible implications for professional attitudes, responsibilities, and ethics in light of the Anthropocene, uses site as an interface. These implications are not autonomously conceived by reflective practitioners but driven by societal problems brought on by the Anthropocene and the ideological tidal movements and political reactions to these shifts. I am convinced that the fourfold typology of attitudes toward the shock of the Anthropocene presented here will serve as a motherboard for environmental debates over coming decades, delineating the myriad ideological positions taken in. Tremendous potential political energy exists between the different attitudes. We cannot forget that most – perhaps up to 90 percent – of the environmental discourse resides in the two domains in which people view the planet as an unmoving backdrop behind human endeavors. A strong barrier exists between mainstream discourse and accepting the inconvenient truth that the earth has become an actor in its own right. This barrier derives strength from two sources. It closely coincides with a reductionist/holist divide and it aligns closely with mainstream economic thinking and the continuation of business as usual. Complexity theory could offer a more exacting basis for the kind of thinking required today, but it has yet to do so effectively. Thus, claims of a powerful earth system can be too easily downplayed as modern superstition or bad science. Support is growing, however, for an attitude that reflects awareness of the planet as a living system. Scientists on the side of this paradigm shift would see mainstream environmentalists as naïve reductionists who, at best, try to solve problems with the very means that caused those same problems in the first place. When held in the extreme, all four ideal positions contain flaws or weak points that prevent adherents from organizing a complete and coherent perspective for action. The denialist position cannot be sustained once physical disasters can no longer be downplayed, although cognitive dissonance can extend the resistance for some time. The ecomodernists will become aware that rushing forward into technical solutions produces uncontrollable side effects and can be exposed as hubris. Posthumanism seems to lack practical tools needed to scale up solutions. Anthropocentrism 2.0 will constantly be overtaken by events as developments on the scientific shop floor bypass ongoing ethical discussion on the role of technique. Given this hasty diagnosis, the flaw of the new Anthropocentrism seems most easy to repair. All four positions, recognizable in society, have a certain legitimacy; this means persistent debate (a healthy thing) and shifting coalitions will guide a way forward. We will have to embrace pluralism. The time of simple univocal solutions is over; going forward will be a muddling through, in a constant dialogue with our defiant earth. In the slowly unfolding catastrophe, deep adaptation might be the outcome of this dialogue.24 The hopeful message is that this confrontation with our biosphere can be seen as a kind of adolescence, the awakening of the adulthood of mankind. In the Anthropocene, the grown adolescent bumps into the limits of prior unrestrained behavior. The earth reacts in an unwelcoming, even hostile way.25

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Figure 8.2  Site matters in four ways projected on the quadrant of philosophical positions toward the Anthropocene.

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Viewed this way, embracing the Anthropocene is not an idle stance, nor some sort of a post-Christian complex in which humans place themselves improperly in the center; rather, it is a decisive step toward maturity. Earth and mankind now stand as two competing superpowers facing each other. This might revive the role of the sublime, the fundamental experience of a nature at once awe inspiring and beautiful.26 Although culture already prepared our collective unconscious for this situation, it is not easy to see it this way.27 Those who are religious people consider it hubris to make humans so important. Defenders of the Green Belief recognize that humankind wreaked havoc on earth but, not wanting to make humans so important, they argue that humankind should change its tune. As Hamilton argues, humankind is more important than had been known, and to deny that is to evade responsibility as a member of humankind.

Site Revisited In the Anthropocene, site will matter in a new way. New Anthropocene-aware programs and challenges are emerging, ranging from post-disaster recovery to the undoing of former mistakes and the societal transitions needed to address these problems at their roots. Nature conservation and nature development projects, reforestation, climate change adaptation, energy transition, farming sanitation, mobility transitions, and circular economy will drive changes not only in the design world but in all kinds of bottom-up and top-down societal initiatives as well. All these lines will meet in the spatial domain. And bringing back a more central role for the spatial will not only develop it into the central battlefield between interests but will form the cradle of a new synthesis and the stage for societal action. Reading the site in the Anthropocene will also mean reading the myriad of processes involved. Diverging tendencies might develop in this process, including new specializations and divisions of tasks among architecture, urbanism, planning, and landscape architecture. We can no longer ignore the fact that the standard (eco)modernist repertoire does not deliver the answers we need in the Anthropocene. Speculating on these tendencies, an educated guess would be that landscape architecture will gradually develop a different perspective. Like urbanism, landscape architecture is accustomed to working with social processes, but landscape adds a strong link to the life sciences, a tradition of representing nature, and even a mediating role between man and nature. Landscape architecture will gradually have to develop strategies informed by posthumanism and Anthropocentrism 2.0. We face unprecedented challenges ahead. Our discipline cannot stand on the sideline anymore and hide behind some sort of pseudo professional neutrality. As practitioners, we have to take sides in the fierce debates inside, and between, the four schools of thought on the practical challenges connected to the Anthropocene condition.28 Note: The author would like to thank Clive Hamilton and Albrecht Kwast for commenting on earlier versions of this text and Andrea Kahn for suggesting linking Leopold’s land ethics to this discourse.

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Notes 1 2

3 4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14

15

P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletters 41 (2000): 17; and P. J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. The influence of mankind on a global scale (as distinct from the Earth system) was recognized earlier. See, for instance, Fairfield Osborne, Our Plundered Planet (London: Faber and Faber, 1948); or the impressive proceedings of the world conference in Princeton in 1955, William L. Thomas Jr., ed Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). For a more elaborate deep historical dissection of the history of environmentalism, see Christophe Bonneuil and JeanBaptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2016). Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009) The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222 and an elegant overview by the same author on the difference between a name and a geological concept stating that we should allow ourselves to zoom in on a historical time-scale where colonialism and capitalism matter and zoom out to the geological time scale to see mankind in the deep history perspective, see: Dipesh Chakrabarty (2016) The Human Significance of the Anthropocene. In: Bruno Latour & Christophe Leclercq Reset Modernity! ZKM | Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/ MIT Press London. Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (London: Earth Scan, 2010) and see also: Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Ethical considerations in the spirit of Aldo Leopold’s (1949) “Land Ethics”: a land ethic is a philosophy or theoretical framework about how, ethically, humans should regard the land. From A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). George H. W. Bush at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Voltaire’s 1759 classic, Candide, was a satiric comment on the optimistic philosophy of Karle Leibnitz, who promoted the idea that because God is perfect in every way, all disasters, diseases, and setbacks are all part of His grand plan. From this it logically follows that we live in the best possible of all worlds. This stance was defended in the book by Candide’s philosophy teacher, Dr. Pangloss. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). James C. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). The Breakthrough Institute tagline is “Technological Solutions to Environmental Challenges.” See https://thebreakthrough.org/ (accessed November 2019). The technium was coined in Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Penguin Press, 2010). The term didn’t stick, so we use technosphere here as an alternative. John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Aldo Leopold, “Land Use and Democracy,” lecture, 1942. Quoted in Stacey L. Matrazzo, “The Democratic Landscape: Envisioning Democracy through Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.” (2013). Master of Liberal Studies Theses. 45, http://scholarship.rollins.edu/mls/45. James C. Scott, Against the Grain, a Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). The book amasses recent archeologic and paleo-botanic evidence that the linear succession of the ascent of man myth (a wild stage-invention of agriculture-city forming-state formation) is seriously flawed and ideology-driven on almost all points.

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16 17 18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27

28

Francesco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and the Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Thomas Twaithes, Goat Man: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) and Charles Foster, Being a Beast (London: Profile Books, 2016). Such as the 3-D simulation We Live in an Ocean of Air by Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), shown in the Saatchi Gallery in London (2019), where visitors are immersed in a forest ecosystem and their metabolism becomes twinned with that of the giant Sequoya trees. Pablo A. Tittonell, “Towards Ecological Intensification of World Agriculture,” inaugural lecture at the Wageningen University, Wageningen, 2013. Dirk Sijmons, “A Reflective Plague Organism,” the 2009 Dan Urban Kiley lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage Publishing, 2017). Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, IFLAS Occasional Paper (2), University of Cumbria, 2018. Florentijn van Rootselaar, “Interview with Clive Hamilton for Filosofie Magazine,” in Marc van Dijk, Raspessimist zet de mens centraal Trouw Newspaper (16 October 2018), 10–11 It is no coincidence perhaps that the “sublime” – Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2008) seems to get more attention from designers these days. See Paul A. Roncken, “Shades of Sublime: A Design for Landscape Experiences as an Instrument in the Making of Meaning” (PhD thesis, Wageningen, 2018). A wide range of books, photographs, and films seems to have prepared us for the Anthropocene condition, including animations like Wall-E (Pixar, 2008); “world enders” like Doctor Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1965); climate disaster movies from the overthe-top The Day after Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) to the subtle way of intimating the effects of climate change in Beast of the Southern Wild; and psychological end-of-the-world dramas like Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011). Even movies in completely different genres, like Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie movie The Dead Don’t Die, seem to be immersed in Anthropocene themes. Dirk Sijmons, “Landscape Architecture: Turning Problems into Parks?,” keynote of the World Design Summit 2017, Montreal.

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9. Shifting Sites: Everything Is Different Now Kristina Hill

When I wrote the original version of this essay in 2004, most scientists and ecological designers were focused on the expansion of urban areas as the primary cause of ecological damage. We knew we were approaching a threshold in the state of the systems that support life. It was like teetering on a sled, atop a mountain of snow, knowing we could slide out of control in any of several directions. Now, as global climate change impacts become apparent in extreme weather events and future impacts can be predicted with increasingly detailed modeling, our sled is speeding down the hill. We know the direction of these system changes, we know why they are happening, and we know what has to be done to slow them down and adapt. Sites and flows still matter, but for a more urgent purpose. Everything is different now. Over the last several decades, the evolving notion of the natural world as a dynamic ecosystem has slowly but radically altered the ways ecologists talk about the patterns and dynamics of a site. Many of these changes in theory have led to shifts in the natural sciences as dramatic as transitions initiated by the Modern Movement in design. In short, a wholesale reevaluation of boundaries and predictability has occurred, posing special challenges for professions that propose site designs. Indeed, recent work in the ecological sciences seeks to envision landscapes as composed of shifting nodes of interaction, driven by dynamic temporal relationships. This includes the very recent, devastating awareness that climate change and habitat losses are causing ripple effects that threaten global biodiversity and human communities. From an academic perspective, we could think of this as reflecting new ontological assumptions in the theories of ecology and design. As new paradigms develop and preconceived boundaries dissolve, fields such as design and science may find themselves in an altered relationship. From a fundamentally human perspective, we are facing an emergency. We need strategies that prepare cities for flooding, forests for fire, and food and water supply systems for scarcity. The time for speculation is over; we must mobilize and act. I hope this essay will serve as a review of how we got here and draw us into the new reality we face at the site scale.

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Figure 9.1  Composite sequence of an avalanche flow. Impacts of global climate change are increasingly apparent in extreme weather events.

What Is the Site Now? Mapping disciplines such as geology and geography, among others, typically define sites as places bounded by some degree of internal homogeneity. This definition implies that sites exist as a function of our human ability to perceive and reify contrasts and similarities in the features around us, such as topographic landforms, subsurface geology, typical associations of plants, or typical patterns of human use. Scientific theories can structure these expectations and function as lenses, influencing human perceptions and preconceptions just as art does, although they originate in different epistemologies. Theoretical metaphors from the sciences can cross disciplinary boundaries and inform an emergent zeitgeist. Diversity, regime shifts, even the fundamental idea of a landscape: all are metaphors that express changing values in society, as well as changing theories in the environmental sciences.1 These metaphors can become even more influential if we take them for granted and forget their origins. The nonequilibrium paradigm that dominates contemporary ecological theories of change allows us to perceive and represent the evidence that many ecosystem trends now have a definite direction, driven by an ever-warmer atmosphere and ocean.2 Although no model can predict all of the future feedbacks and effects of a warming atmosphere and ocean, we know that this larger trend exists. Continued warming will produce impacts on human and nonhuman communities and drive new theories about the future behavior of nonequilibrium systems.3 In contrast, the historical idea of place implies fixity. The first reason to reconsider sites as “places” is that this provides an opening to juxtapose past thinking about fixity with a dynamic alternative that represents the future of landscape theory. It creates an opportunity to recenter design and planning ideas around observed flows and relationships, rather than inherited value structures or spatial concepts based on false assumptions.4 A second reason is the need for new theoretical and aesthetic representations of both place and dynamics. The epistemological gulf between science and design has made this difficult, given the complexity of the quantitative models used to represent

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observations and predict future climate dynamics and their likely impacts.5 At the precise moment when coherent strategies are needed to respond to change, confusing gaps can open up in popular descriptions of expert understanding or of representations that aspire to be read as art. By reflecting now, we may be better prepared for these moments of disorientation. Third, a focus on sites evokes the tension between cultural aspirations that can convey a sense of shared meaning to a broad audience (such as the symbolism of owning a home or of a location where significant events occurred) and conclusions drawn by specialists (i.e., that the land under the house or the historic location will be permanently flooded). Landscapes form the basis for all the other physical characteristics of a city, and the future of a landscape first becomes recognizable as a set of potential outcomes on a specific site. Even the most widespread expressions of cultural aspiration and conflict began in specific places. Flood and fire disasters occur in specific places. In this sense, sites present a preview of what may become the standard cultural references of the future. For these three reasons, sites are and will continue to be flashpoints in science and design theory.

The Nature of an Unbounded Place As a reflection on how quickly our understanding of sites is likely to change, I first present the major theoretical shifts in ecology over the past several decades, with attention to their origins in earlier ideas about landscapes and biophysical systems. The history of these ideas provides an essential theoretical point of view for dealing with the concept of site and place, precisely because everything is beginning to change. Over the past 30 to 50 years, theories in the science of ecology have been reconsidered in at least three major areas: first, with regard to whether local ecosystems can be considered “closed” to larger-scale material and energy flows or whether the influences of these larger flows should be considered integral to local systems (I will refer to this as the spatial scale paradigm shift); second, the influence of local and regional history on contemporary ecosystem dynamics (i.e., the temporal scale shift); and third, physical landscape patterns as a critical mediating influence on ecosystem functions (i.e., the pattern shift). Simply put, only a few years after ecological scientists replaced their expectations for determinism and predictability with expectations of greater complexity in the form of nonequilibrium systems, ecology has had to become radically anticipatory.6 Like climatologists, ecologists use climate change models to predict the direction and magnitude of environmental trends over the next century and longer.7 These theoretical changes in ecology have clear implications for design theory and practice. Collaborations between designers and scientists will now be focused on establishing procedures for conservation by triage; some species will be lost as local climatic changes exceed their capacity to adapt. Ecosystem reconstruction will increasingly rely on strategic human interventions as humans assist in the regional migration of species. Engineering interventions such as walls, levees, and firebreaks may work against ecological migrations. If old metaphors that describe sites as bounded spaces persist, the

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design professions may forget to work with environmental change. Property boundaries exist in law, but not in the real world of natural processes. To prevent the reification of conceptual perimeters, we urgently need to re-examine the history of the metaphors we use about place, site, and boundaries.

The Spatial Scale Shift: Organism Versus System, Boundary Versus Node Cognitive research shows that metaphors are fundamental to human thinking in everyday situations, as well as in formal theory building.8 Our ability to form meaningful expectations about relationships and patterns depends on these abstractions. Metaphors do not exist in a vacuum but in the richly physical world of embodied experience. Our lived experience affects the fundamental categories we use to describe the world, as research on cognition and language has shown.9 In the world of metaphors, the experience of living in a body that appears to be separated from its surroundings by a skin has deeply influenced the development of ideas about ecological relationships. Historically, scientists have used two dominant metaphors to describe these relationships. The first refers to these interactions as forming a “superorganism,” as if the interactions among species can be compared to the interactions among individual organs within a body; the second describes them as a system of energy flows and exchanges, as if comparable to the mechanical and electrical systems designed by humans. Each has implications for how a scientist might make sense of new observations obtained in the field, and each influences the hypotheses adopted to express new expectations. Indeed, the competition between these two metaphors has dominated a significant debate in ecological theory over the last few decades. As ecology enters an era in which the system metaphor has become dominant, I argue that the origin of this debate lies in the human experience of embodiment and that this origin has influenced the development of theories that describe the ecology of sites. Proposals by 19th- and early-20th-century biologists that “communities” of plants and animals could be identified by their close interrelationships, and further, that these communities behaved like a kind of superorganism, emphasized physical and biological boundaries observed between groups of organisms.10 They extended the metaphor of embodiment to groups of interacting species, proposing a sort of conceptual “skin” that united some species in closer relationships and divided them from others. In the 1920s, Henry Gleason proposed a competing theory that plant species responded individualistically to environmental gradients.11 This idea was promptly rejected without significant debate, but it resurfaced in the work of Robert Whittaker and Margaret Davis during the 1940s and 1950s.12 Davis checked to see whether plant communities migrated as a cohesive group during the last era of rapid climate change, in postglacial millennia, using the laborious methods of pollen analysis on soil cores from bogs. She found that plant species returned to formerly ice-covered regions as individuals, not as intact communities. Geological theory had already wrestled with defining the nature of time, describing processes such as glaciation as recurring cycles that

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produced different regional landscape mosaics depending on the depth of ice and the directions of its flow. The very idea of naming something that took thousands of years to move a “flow” required an audacious act of imagination. The theoretical hegemony of the superorganism metaphor began to unravel as scientists learned more about the environmental gradients generated by changing climates. As the mechanical or electrical system metaphor became more common in ecological theory, the significance of organisms and species was increasingly described through maps of the energy flows or exchanges in which they were seen to participate. Boundaries between these systems of flows were described more abstractly, on the basis of the amounts of energy exchanged rather than the physical co-occurrence of different species.13 The idea of the site as a distinct, bounded space in a landscape became less relevant because in this system-based concept of biological relationships, graph theory was used to describe energy flows that had no geographic dimensions. Instead of using geographic space, the system metaphor suggested that nodes exist where more numerous interactions occur. Sites can be thought of as nodes of interaction among flows, in the language of ecosystem ecology. This conceptual shift placed greater emphasis on the processes of exchange and movement than on the definition of bounded spaces. Human settlements have also been conceived as systems of flows. Patrick Geddes, a multidisciplinary thinker trained in the sciences as well as social theories, helped call attention to energy flows and dynamic systems in his studies of cities and towns. Geddes, formally trained as a botanist in Scotland during the late 19th century, worked as a professional urban planner in the early 20th century. In 1884, he spoke about the need to conceive of human societies as energy systems; later, he described cities in terms of both their biological and social energy flows.14 When Jane Jacobs took up the subject of cities in 1961, she echoed some of Geddes’s thoughts while adding her own synthesis of early complexity theory.15 Her emphasis on cities as systems and her argument that urban sites should be conceived as problems of organized complexity introduced an epistemological issue that ecologists took up in the 1970s. This crossover strongly suggests that the evolution of thinking in ecology and the other environmental sciences did not occur in isolation; similar developments were taking place in different fields at approximately the same time. Some key proponents of the system metaphor in ecology over the past several decades maintained a kind of conceptual ambivalence about the importance of boundary concepts in describing biological relationships. Eugene Odum returned to the metaphor of the superorganism in his later writing, despite the fact that he was a prominent popularizer of the ecosystem concept. G. M. Weinberg has described the recurrence of the organism metaphor as an epistemological problem related to the representation of complexity.16 In part, this metaphor persists because of a tendency to conceive of our own bodies as a strictly bounded “interior space” – in spite of epidemiological evidence to the contrary – and to project that concept onto other biological relationships.17 Epidemiology and other fields of medicine have revealed that our human skin, once considered a significant boundary, is not so discrete. The work of Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist who has written about cancer and the environment, provides a case in point. Her reconsideration of the human body’s boundary with landscape has been both poetic and radical. Steingraber

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emphasizes that humans actually incorporate into their bodies the molecules of landscapes where their food is grown. She argues that Americans have incorporated the Midwestern prairie, given the amount of corn syrup we have consumed in prepared foods, literally transforming and embodying that prairie.18 Steingraber has applied ecological thinking to study the strength of interactions between body and landscape in contemporary American culture, and found that the boundary between geographic sites and the internal functions of the human body is in many ways an insignificant fiction. The body, much like what was once conceived as a geographically discrete site, functions as a node in a system of flows rather than a distinct entity.19 Generally, with a shift in spatial scales of perception, boundaries in any mosaic – of living cells or landscape sites – realign or disappear. As theories shift to emphasize the open nature of flows across space, the related notions of bounded sites and bounded bodies are de-emphasized. New conceptions of demarcation in space can then be defined by the density (and intensity) of biological and physical interactions that occur over time. Adopting density, frequency, and intensity as the basis for demarcation and delineation would require a major shift in thinking for designers and theorists; to date, most have relied heavily on static geographic features as their primary means of recognizing and reproducing important spatial relationships.20 Adaptation to climate change will require this shift in thinking because changes will occur, both in the probability of extreme events and a gradual change in baselines, such as mean high tide lines.

The Temporal Shift: Historical and Projected Rates of Change For students of human culture, the relevance of historical events to contemporary patterns of human settlement and human interactions might seem self-evident. But science has not always recognized changes in temporal patterns as significant to the development of explanatory theory. In part, this was because the natural sciences have been influenced by ontological assumptions from the science of geology, such as the Law of Uniformitarianism.21 This law simply states that geological processes operating today, such as weathering and soil formation, also operated in the past. By establishing stable theoretical ground for hypotheses about the formation of geologic landforms over millions of years, this law allowed scientists to estimate how long it took for water to carve out an ancient canyon based on current measurements of erosion rates. The assumption that processes observable today also operated in the past was key to the development of 18th- and 19th-century scientific theory, in part because it established the power of contemporary tests and observations to explain the past and predict the future. The effort to make deterministic generalizations about system behavior was often treated as more important than other scientific activities (such as descriptions of historical observations, seen as the purview of “natural history”) because it might allow scientists to predict future trends or events. But in the 1970s, ecologists found increasing evidence that deterministic concepts of ecosystem functioning based on “steady state” assumptions were insufficient to explain observed energy inputs and losses. New evidence suggested that ecosystems were in fact “open systems,” with active flows of

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energy and materials in and out.22 The ecologist Steward Pickett has referred to this insight as the nonequilibrium paradigm.23 Research produced at a network of US ecological research sites has revealed that historical events can produce an enduring temporal legacy in ecosystems.24 The most obvious current example is that today’s climate crisis is the legacy of two centuries of mining and burning large quantities of coal, destabilizing the thermodynamics of heat energy all over the world. Decisions about how much more carbon dioxide will be released in this decade and the next will leave an enormous temporal legacy, determining our planet’s climate and ecosystem for thousands of years.25 Steward Pickett, Mary Cadenasso, and their colleagues at the Baltimore Urban Long-Term Ecological Research (Urban LTER) site developed unusually localized, heterogeneous models to encapsulate lessons learned about the ecology of urban ecosystems. They summarized their insights using the phrase cities of resilience. As they described it, “resilience is the ability of a system to adapt and adjust to changing internal or external processes … The emphasis is not on reaching or maintaining a certain end point or terminal condition, but on staying in the game.”26 In this paradigm, sustaining a particular set of conditions means less than the capacity to adapt to a fluctuating set of contextual variables. The theory of nonequilibrium dynamics holds that a stable state does not exist in living systems; instead, a “metastable” set of conditions constantly disappears and reappears, making multiple stable states possible. A single system state may not be sustained for very long. This theory offered an alternative to the idea that regional vegetation has a “climax state,” or that it changes along predictable successional pathways. The concept of metastability does not preclude the existence of directional trends as external drivers of change, however. In the case of the current climate crisis, global and local systems are expected pass through temporary states of metastability even as the global climate continues to warm, transitioning gradually or catastrophically from one to the next like a ball rolling down a bumpy hillside. The speed of the ball may vary – but the direction of its movement will always be driven by a warming climate.27 In 1935, C. H. Waddington used a landscape analogy to describe the epigenetic evolution of a species over time.28 Today, comparisons of system states in many disciplines use the landscape analogy. Research on system change has begun to study the statistical behavior of key variables in ecosystems to identify signs of imminent change known as “early warning signals,” that indicate a major state change is coming. The overall trends in a system may be clear, but complex feedback loops within or among systems may still produce surprises. To identify these feedback loops, ecologists and other environmental scientists have begun to use flows to define operational landscape units. These units contain a set of linked nodes with especially strong flow connections. For example, a wetland mosaic at the headwaters of two rivers has subtle interconnections that send more water to one river system or the other in a given season. Environmental planners and designers can study these spatial units, defined by flows, to identify strategies for adaptation to climate change.29 In coastal systems, for example, sediment flow along the shoreline supports most beaches and intertidal wetlands. If that sediment flow is interrupted, the beach or wetland will gradually disappear. The wetland or beach site was always the

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Figure 9.2  In dynamic systems, small differences of energy input and system character can produce big differences in outcome. Landforms are used as metaphors for potential system trajectories. Imagine a grooved and warped pool table: even small inputs of energy can “tap” a system from a flat zone into a groove. More energy would be needed to shift the system back out of that trajectory. Moving to a deeper groove represents an increase in resilience. Moving to a flatter part of the surface represents a loss of resilience. System A maintains its relative value over time, while increasing its resilience to perturbations (A1 to A2). A small perturbation of System B could tip it into a less valuable state that is very resilient (B1 to B2), or its performance might vary a lot over time and become less resilient at a condition of higher value (B1 to B3).

temporary expression of a flow, even if it appeared to be a discretely bounded space. The nonequilibrium paradigm of ecology, combined with a knowledge of climate trends, now conceives of sites as something more like sandbars – that is, expressions of changes in flows at larger scales. Building a wall or levee around a sandbar or tidal marsh makes no sense; it simply cuts off the source of renewal, interrupting the flow of material over time. In order to grapple with this paradigm of flows, designers and planners should be prepared to recognize the temporary nature of spatial features and the greater permanence of the flows that create them. As flows of heat energy become supercharged by a warming climate, the increasing frequency and magnitude of secondary flows in and through the context of a site, such as water or fire, can overwhelm the illusion of a bounded space, literally destroying many of the boundary features people have constructed. In our current era, it is no longer reasonable to treat boundaries as fixed phenomena. Instead, we are challenged to understand them as porous, perforated, and varying in thickness across multiple landscape scales. These edge zones are dynamic, like shifting weather patterns. There may be no functional reason to shore up historical boundaries or defend the territories they once created. Legal boundaries may still

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Figure 9.3  Increasing resilience means increasing the speed at which a system returns to an initial state after a disturbance. An undesirable system state can also be resilient. Sequence A1–A2 shows a system increasing in resilience that is of low value. B1–B2 shows a system increasing in resilience but decreasing in value. B1–B3 is increasing in value but decreasing in resilience. Loss of resilience is an early warning sign that can predict a major change in system state, as in B1–B3. Increased variability in system behavior can also warn that change is coming, shown in the curving trajectory toward B3. The vertical axes in these diagrams represent values for a metric of system performance, such as species richness or tons of sequestered carbon.

matter, but even those boundaries are likely to be weakened, removed, or consolidated by policy negotiations as flows change around them. Overemphasizing boundaries as fixed structures may inadvertently drive these structures toward brittle failures. Rigid structures are likely to be a poor fit for the increasing frequency and intensity of flows associated with a new climate.30

The Spatial Pattern Shift: Landscapes as Dynamic Mosaics Over the last 30 years, the theoretical perspective of landscape ecology had a major impact on design and planning because it provided a language for the integration of spatial and temporal patterns. Maps of spatial habitat patterns, combined with evidence of flows, reconnected the graphs of ecosystem dynamics to the Cartesian dimensions of

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geography. By defining landscape ecology as the study of flows of organisms, energy, and materials through spatial patterns, ecological theorists created a new conceptual bridge connecting the contemporary paradigms of ecology to the theoretical and practical concerns of landscape architecture and urbanism.31 The metaphor that came to dominate landscape ecological conceptualizations of landscapes was that of a shifting mosaic, a pattern consisting of sporadic, repeated emergences and disappearances of different ecosystem types over time (vegetation or hydrologic features like wetlands, for example). Landscape ecologist Richard Forman explained this metaphor by comparing it to looking down at a major city at night from an airplane and perceiving the illusion of continuous light, even though many of the individual lights are in fact switching on and off at the spatial scale of individual windows and individual sites. This conceptualization of dynamics within a spatial framework suggests that component sites or elements may appear and disappear from a resilient overall form. In the context of the climate crisis, the same fundamental metaphor allows ecologists to consider the perspective that while local sites and species may change, a larger landscape may retain its overall functions, if not all of its characteristic species.32 The shifting mosaic metaphor relies on a probabilistic representation of change. In Forman’s analogy, it would be impossible to know for certain which light in a city would be the next to go on or off. But a reasonable probability could be established based on a record of many such events or, less reliably, by using carefully validated models of interacting processes. Over time, landscape types and species can appear and disappear yet still support the dispersal and reproductive success of new groups of animals and plants. This model of stability within change still requires, however, that the overall mosaic continue to perform within critical limits. For example, the shifting mosaic must offer shelter from predators, an appropriate degree of connectivity for movement, access to reproductive sites, access to mates, pollinators, and so forth. Timing is critical in this ecological performance; at specific sites, for specific organisms, getting the timing wrong would make the difference between life and death.33 The different ecosystems within this mosaic are often described as including a range of grain sizes (usually a reference to typical patch sizes), from coarse- to finegrained. They may also exist in dendritic patterns, grids, or ladders. An almost infinite number of descriptive metaphors for observable spatial patterns could be applied at different geographic scales.34 The significance of these patterns varies for specific species of animals and plants. While some species can be grouped by characteristics such as mobility or vulnerability to predators, anticipating the effects of pattern dynamics on species abundance and geographic distribution can only produce maps of probability and possibility.35 Actual species distributions may be quite different from both historical conditions and model predictions. These species distributions could provide a diversity of valuable traits (such as an unusual ability to rapidly sequester carbon) while losing the historical diversity of species themselves. Spatial boundaries must be relevant to the size and type of movement or dispersal characteristic of an individual species, or they may not have any effect. Landscape ecologists have to understand the bodies and movements of a set of organisms to

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represent and understand the landscape. They use functional metaphors like filter, barrier, and conduit to describe landscape structures that affect the specific mobility and size of an organism or the behavior of a material such as water or an energy flow such as wind. The key insight for design is that embodiment has implications. The landscape structures that influence the movement of a beetle may be very different from those that influence a snake, a bird, or an airborne seed. In this multispecies sense, a single site-as-node contains a very large variety of landscape patterns at different scales. Over time, these overlapping flows of energy, organisms and materials produce an ecological version of “thick description.”36 The steep decline of global biodiversity over the past few decades indicates that the almost incomprehensible variety of life is thinning and that the impacts of human land use and climate change are pervasive. Converting undeveloped ecosystems to agriculture and urban land has been the long-term cause of biodiversity loss, along with overharvesting of wild animals and plants, but the climate crisis is likely to catch up and drive even more extinctions. Linked in a negative cycle, those losses of biodiversity will eventually undermine agriculture and aquaculture, along with all the other ecosystem services that biodiversity supports (air and water filtration, carbon sequestration, etc.).37 With declining diversity of embodied lives and experiences, the invisible buffer that plants and animals create between humans and more extreme flows will thin, leaving us exposed. Human communities and economies have always produced shifting mosaics. Figure 9.4  A shifting mosaic of building footprints in downtown Oakland, California, resulting from predicted permanent flooding by seawater rise and the rising groundwater driven by rising seas: (a) existing building footprints around Lake Merritt, an arm of the San Francisco Bay; (b) existing buildings with the former saltwater shoreline in white; and (c) buildings that will be flooded by saltwater at six feet of sea level rise are shown in gray, and areas with buildings that will be flooded by groundwater at that same point are shown in white.

While very few cities have lost territory in the past, today’s changing environment will punch holes in urban mosaics at the district scale. Coastal erosion, floods, and fires will cause recurring losses in urban neighborhoods and small towns. A warming atmosphere acts as an accelerator for many kinds of flows. Planned, rational adaptation takes time. New shifting mosaics will be driven by losses of property value, post-disaster real estate speculation, and territorial conflicts over water resources. Large-scale public infrastructure investments will be needed quickly but be strictly limited by political movements that advocate small government philosophies.

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Drastically reducing carbon and methane emissions might avoid the worst impacts. Some economists who study flows of capital in isolation from other flows worry that slowing the rate of emissions will trigger a destabilizing economic skid in the immediate future. Others who look at the situation more holistically argue that refusing to limit our emissions drastically will produce economic failure (and the failure of ecosystems that sustain human life) within as little as a century or two.38 From the perspective of landscape flows, the current trend of increasing emissions is pushing us directly into a worst-case scenario. In this critical moment, sites matter for whatever contribution they can make to decarbonizing our energy flows. Sites will also matter as places to prototype and pilot adaptation strategies that work and inspire hope. By taking a systems perspective, successful prototypes developed at the site scale can be designed to propagate through municipal, state and federal codes and standards as new norms.

Flashpoints In the original version of this essay, I made a case for flexibility in how we think about boundaries and flows because of the rigidity I saw in the way designers think about sites. Viewed through an ecological lens, many designers were insufficiently aware of the significance of biophysical flows that cross site boundaries. Our understanding of sites has also been shaped by an ecosystem of persistent ideas from other historic periods that embody different beliefs about who we are in a larger world. I chose the metaphor of a flashpoint because conceptions of site can reveal a moment of change in the history of ideas. Looking back, emphasizing sites as a nexus of flows was the right concept for unexpected reasons. I feel as if I chose the right suitcase for this journey and packed the right clothes, but then unzipped the suitcase 15 years later and found my argument on fire, its implications too hot to handle. In 2004, it seemed possible that the dangers of climate change would be prevented by policy change. This view overlooked the critical interaction between heat (the most fundamental flow in thermodynamics) and capital (the most fundamental flow in economics). To date, no global policy structure has been able to break the link between corporate profits and carbon-based fuels. Now it is evident that financial and thermodynamic flows underlie all other flows and that our planet has been fundamentally altered by the unprecedented amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere and oceans. Concentrations measured today are more than double the highest levels of the last 400,000 years and exceed any level in the last two or three million years. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this change. All the 39

Figure 9.5  Composite sequence of views from fire evacuation routes. The combination of extreme dryness, high winds, and a flashpoint can generate firestorms that are impossible to escape.

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Figure 9.6  This figure shows how much CO2 and methane emissions must be reduced to limit average global temperature increases to a range of target values. Credit: Le Quéré et al., Earth System Science Data 2018, https://www. earth-syst-sci-data. net/10/2141/2018/. (Courtesy of Dr. Pep Canadell, Global Carbon Project)

relatively easy options for reducing the rate of emissions are now insufficient to prevent catastrophic changes. The remaining drastic strategies rely on technologies to achieve negative emissions that do not exist yet.40 In this context of altered and augmented flows, any residual conception of sites as “bounded” poses an existential liability in our efforts to adapt. As Marx and Engels predicted in their critique of unrestricted capital flows, “All that is solid melts into air.”41 Sites on or near steep slopes will be vulnerable to landslides as hydrologic flows change. In forested areas, sites will be susceptible to catastrophic fire. Coastal sites will see repeated and eventually permanent inundation by saltwater and groundwater. Riverside development in many regions will see more extreme temporary flooding. Everywhere else will be vulnerable to heat, new disease vectors, changes in infrastructure services, political instability, supply chain disruptions, and housing displacement as people try to move away from coasts and forests seeking stability.42 Even worse, these conditions actually represent the bestcase scenario. If the global economy is not completely decarbonized in about 30 years, and if we do not figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we will see even more significant changes in the following decades. It is difficult – even for people who work with these projections every day – to truly perceive the magnitude of what is coming. Given the utter seriousness of this environmental crisis, the concept of site matters in several critical ways. First, sites are a locus of human efforts for social control. Owners and managers of legally defined sites will exert political influence to keep their properties relatively stable in a changing context. They will try to influence public infrastructure investments (levees, fire breaks, new pipelines) to protect those legally

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defined spaces from damage. Their economic interest will be to maintain orderly flows to and from their sites by influencing investments in road access, water supply, and sanitary sewers. These prioritized sites will function as anchors for political and financial investments in an increasingly unstable economy. They will be used to declare certain areas “safe,” increasing their investment value. While such sites will not stay safe forever, speculative real estate investments bet on risk associated with moves in shortterm markets, and markets have already begun to monetize that risk so they can bear it for a limited period of time. Second, sites will matter as cautionary tales. Highly visible failures on both public and private sites will be blamed on their owners, and photogenic “disaster porn” will conceal systemic problems like a changing climate behind the critique of poor strategic management.43 Many sites will actually experience some kind of failure due to overwhelming systemic forces or because their owners did not control enough capital to influence public agencies. Already, many communities use public funds to build artificially nourished beaches and seawalls, designed to protect expensive waterfront properties owned by private individuals and corporations. Finally, sites will matter as prototypes for adaptation strategies. Public agencies can promote new typologies and propagate them through codes and design manuals that shape buildings, streets, and underground infrastructure. This kind of systemic change may turn out to be the only genuinely successful form of adaptation over the long term. Systemic, intentional change can only occur under stable governance systems, in which institutions direct flows of capital into the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Without stable governance systems, innovative adaptation ideas will stop at the edges of their prototypical sites, even in cases of genuinely valuable innovation. Designs that succeed as new models will need to be radically anticipatory, just like ecological theory itself. These designs will need to anticipate climate trends. They will also need to cost less than the price to shore up conventional designs. And they will have to resolve multiple functional and social challenges using a relatively small number of comprehensible strategies. For example, adapting to larger, more frequent, and fast-moving fires in urban areas will push future design strategies toward shelter-in-place structures rather than evacuation.44 Adapting to floods that continually increase in depth as sea levels rise will eventually push design strategies toward earthwork instead of concrete walls, because landforms can be raised or moved incrementally while the foundations of walls remain fixed. For coastal areas with rising groundwater pushed upward by rising seas, pumping will seem necessary even though it can accelerate subsidence. Over the long term, the safest strategies will be those that accommodate flooding by building with superdikes, terraces, canals, and ponds, again tilting adaptation options toward landforms and floating structures.45 Groundwater may also remobilize legacy soil contaminants and will certainly destabilize conventional foundations. Understanding these underground flows is likely to be the crucial insight driving designs for coastal sites, as both Dutch and American designers have begun to anticipate.46

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The most important challenge for conceiving sites is to incorporate time. We are living in the last two or three decades of a relatively stable 10,000-year period. That stable 10,000-year run allowed us to build complex delta megacities and allowed cities to emerge as the primary way human beings live. The future will be increasingly unstable, leaving relatively little time to anticipate and adapt to all the secondary and tertiary impacts of the climate crisis. Many important historical sites that have served as significant touchstones for associations among ecology, culture, and place will be unrecognizable several decades from now. Long-standing policies may be reversed, and accepted scales or materials for structures will change.

Replacing the Idea of Moral “Progress” with Dialectical Beliefs With the stunning scope of the climate crisis now clear, this essay addresses the need to conceptualize flows and temporality as more “real” than the traditional notion of sites as fixed locations bounded by physical forms and legal restrictions. Sites are more than a nexus of biophysical flows. Sites are also flashpoints within changing ecosystems of ideas, which also “flow” and are exchanged over time. As our biophysical environment becomes more volatile, our ways of talking about change with clients and the public may rely increasingly on how we knit together a collage of beliefs that may or may not privilege the metanarrative of science. While scientific methods and models will always be critical to understanding function and change, designers may increasingly be confronted with beliefs that have no scientific basis. Understanding persistent beliefs from the past will allow us to anticipate patterns. Sites function as flashpoints in the history of ideas, as well as in biophysical processes. With so much in flux, it may be useful for design and planning theory to reflect on this history of ideas relating climate and culture because it remains relatively constant. In the Euro-American literature, several pairs of opposing beliefs (laid out in Table 9.1) have been the building blocks of normative theories about relationships between climate and place. Looking at normative theory through these opposing pairs offers an alternative to the long-standing narrative that the human relationship to the planet has improved over time as a story of moral “progress.”47 Given their staying power, these paired beliefs are likely to mark the poles of future thinking, particularly for people who reject a scientific narrative for change. The first pair considers human capacity and responsibility; the second concerns the question of externalities; and the third takes up the relationship between what might be called enchanted and evidence-based worldviews.48 In the history of rationales for human capacity and responsibility, one belief holds that climate changes and/or extreme weather events are a consequence of human transgressions. The opposing belief views humans as unable to affect the weather or climate. These paired beliefs date back to 16th-century Euro-American witch hunts, in which thousands of women and men were killed because their neighbors believed they served some kind of devil. Recent scholarship reveals that this era of blame for unnatural

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Table 9.1  Opposite beliefs that co-exist can fuel cultural tensions and obscure scientific insights Belief pairs

Belief statements

Descriptions

1: Responsibility Climate and weather are vs. Capacity punishment for human sins

16th-century European witch hysteria coincided with the Little Ice Age, which produced famine. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans coincided with the first same-sex civil marriages in the US.

Humans are incapable of influencing climate and weather

Religious institutions helped to end the witch hysteria by announcing that only God has the power to control climate. Some US evangelicals make this claim about climate change today, rejecting human influence.

Humans can master extreme climates using advanced technology

This belief animated historical European efforts to colonize territories in tropical climates, and the present-day ambition to colonize other planets. Also underpins technocratic geoengineering proposals.

Humans and natural processes co-create climate; complexity of this can’t be reduced

Some traditional societies and many ecologists have long argued that natural systems are too complex for humans to treat them as a controllable machine. Proposals to engineer nature are unacceptable to people who hold this belief.

2: Mastery vs. Co-creation

3: Enchantment Life animates and Some traditional societies share this belief, along vs. Evidence enchants a complex web with some religious groups (Quaker theology, of relationships that can’t for example). Recently, indigenous groups have brought forward this concept at the UN, as a always be perceived proposed global environmental ethic. through scientific observations Observable evidence is the basis for identifying relationships between humans and natural processes

The Enlightenment project to define science as a fact-based investigation of nature questioned assumed relationships. This disrupted traditional connections, but also opened doors to selfdetermination for women and people from ethnic, sexual or religious minorities.

transgressions coincided with the Little Ice Age in Europe, when recurring seasons of extreme weather caused famines. Euro-American Christians of that period blamed human actions for the change in climate. The era of killing “witches” for their presumed behavior didn’t end until the Christian church began to preach that only God could control the weather. Some American evangelical Christians continue to blame extreme weather events on “sin,” while others claim that the climate can’t possibly be changing as a result of human activities because God is more powerful than humans. The unresolved tension between the two beliefs continues into the present day. Whether climate can be mastered as an externality or is co-created by the interactions of human culture and nonhuman processes lies at the root of the second pair of beliefs. One belief holds that extreme climates can be conquered, like foreign territories, by using technology to overcome limits (adopting the historic language of colonization). Plans to colonize Mars or to reach the South Pole or to mine a natural resource

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in difficult terrain often express this belief while relying on a technological solution. Geoengineering uses similar language, advocating new technology as the way to “fight” climate change. The opposite belief, that humans and natural processes co-create climate, depends on accepting subtle, multilayered cause-and-effect relationships almost too complex to specify. If a society emphasizes the belief that the cause-and-effect relationships between human actions and climate are too complex to predict, its institutions would be unlikely to accept or engage in geoengineering. Finally, the last pair addresses a transition from a sacred worldview to an evidence-based, secular, and scientific conception of our human relationship to the environment and to living things. On the one hand, believing in a world of interconnected living things animates and enchants that world. It establishes complexly interwoven ethical relationships of all kinds. The concept of buen vivir, proposed as a global environmental ethic, exemplifies this belief in the value of re-enchantment and fundamental relationships. Yet this same ethic has been criticized for establishing normative roles (by gender, for example) that limit opportunity for individual self-determination. Its opposite belief holds that in a secular world, people of all genders and races can be liberated from definitions of what were once considered “natural” roles or behaviors. For its part, this belief in individual freedom has been criticized as inextricably linked to neoliberalism in politics and economics because it has sometimes decoupled traditional community roles from traditional landscapes.49 This pairing elicits deeply political conflicts. Designers and planners who try to reason from a strictly scientific worldview may neutralize cultural identities and cosmologies in an unintentional act of erasure, replacing them with a singular metanarrative. That “neutralized” scientific view has never been sufficient to structure the normative theories of design, since by necessity design manipulates values, as well as forms and functions. Reasoning about values stands beyond the scope of scientific methods, but reasoning about function relies on them. Given the increasing rate of change and the value-driven choices we face in the climate crisis, policymakers and opinion leaders are more likely to reason using normative theories that follow erratic orbits around these irreducible pairs of beliefs. Planners and designers should anticipate the resurgence of these beliefs in proposals for mitigation and adaptation strategies and in subsequent critiques of those proposals. Our theory needs to develop in ways that can generate insights about these persistent beliefs, studying them as an ecosystem of ideas. Using new theoretical insights, designers may be able to develop a “double sight” that allows them to pay close attention to science-based observations of change, as well as shifting cultural norms. Perhaps ambiguity itself can be used to imbue both cultural meaning and science-based performance strategies into our conceptions of the site. How will site-scale interventions and representation support cultural as well as physical adaptation? Will our designs inspire compassion and resourcefulness across social differences, or conceal the need for change and support inequality? Cultural and political interpretations that become pegged to the scale of the site could influence the way we conceptualize our relationships to each other and to the nonhuman world for centuries.

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Notes 1

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As another example, see R. Rozzi, E. Hargrove, J. Armesto, S. Pickett, and J. Silander, “‘Natural Drift’ as a Post-modern Evolutionary Metaphor,” Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 71 (1998): 5–17. For a more extensive discussion of these changes in theory from an ecological perspective, see R. Pulliam and B. Johnson, “Ecology’s New Paradigm: What Does It Offer Designers and Planners?” in Ecology and Design, ed. B. Johnson and K. Hill (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 51–84. In a nonequilibrium theoretical context, ecologists sometimes describe a system as having “multiple stable states.” This means the system could change in the future and that it could assume more than one possible state or condition with resilience, making it stable in the face of disturbances. For example, a forest could change to a resilient state with lower characteristic biodiversity. This state would not be desirable for conservation but could be very stable. Or the same forest could change to include many new species and also be in a stable (resilient) condition. Two possible outcomes, both occurring as stable states of the system. K. Hill et al., “In Expectation of Relationships: Centering Theories around Ecological Understanding,” in Ecology and Design, ed. B. Johnson and K. Hill (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 271–303. Works such as Projective Ecologies, edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2014), begin to address this problem of representing dynamic processes, along with work by Julie Bargmann, Danika Cooper, Tacita Dean, and other contemporary artists. The term radically anticipatory was first used by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner to describe queer theory as a theoretical lens that reframes theories about the future as a process of becoming. See “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?,” PMLA 110, no. 3 (1995): 343–349. See, for example, S. Flanagan et al., “Potential Vegetation and Carbon Redistribution in Northern North America from Climate Change,” Climate 4 (2016): 2–13. See G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and E. Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (London: Routledge, 1992). F. Varela, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). M. Barbour, J. Burk, and W. Pitts, Terrestrial Plant Ecology (Amsterdam: Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1987), 20. H. Gleason, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53 (1926): 1–20. R. Whittaker, “A Consideration of Climax Theory: The Climax as a Population and Pattern,” Ecological Monographs 32 (1953): 41–78; and M. Davis, “Phytogeography and Palynology of the Northeastern United States,” in Quaternary of the United States, ed. H. E. Wright Jr. and D. G. Frey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 377–401. Edgar Transeau, a student of Henry Cowles, produced one of the first energy studies in ecology when he described the energy budget of a cornfield in 1926; Arthur Tansley coined the term ecosystem in 1935; and Odum popularized it in the United States in the 1950s. For more on the history of these ideas, see R. Ricklefs, Ecology (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990). The talk titled “An Analysis of the Principles of Economics” was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1884. See M. Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 17. See also P. Geddes, Cities in Evolution, edited by the Outlook Tower Association, Edinburgh, and

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the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction, London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). See ch. 13 in J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). G. M. Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1975). K. Hill et al., “In Expectation of Relationships,” in Ecology and Design, ed. B. Johnson and K. Hill (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 271–303. S. Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997). Czech playwright and politician Vaclav Havel described a human being as just a particularly busy intersection of molecules in Vaclav Havel, or Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Material flow analysis developed as a method in industrial engineering, geography, and urban planning to emphasize the flow of materials (typically through trade or industrial processes) in and around an urban district, metropolitan region, or global system. Designers use visually oriented versions of this representation and analysis tool in map-based diagrams of travel volumes between airports, for example. Uniformitarianism, with its contention that contemporary processes could be used as models for understanding change in the geological past, was proposed in 1832 when most geologists still ascribed to the doctrine of catastrophism, in which the earth was seen to have been formed primarily by drastic events. Contemporary geology recognizes that both events and gradual processes have been influential. For a discussion, see Stephen J. Gould’s book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987). G. Likens and H. Bormann, Biogeochemistry of a Forested Ecosystem (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995). S. Pickett, M. Cadenasso, and J. Grove, “Resilient Cities: Meaning, Models, and Metaphor for Integrating the Ecological, Socio-Economic, and Planning Realms,” Landscape and Urban Planning 69, no. 4 (October 2004): 369–384. W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); and C. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of Chapel Hill Press, 1989). P. Clark et al., “Consequences of Twenty-First-Century Policy for Multi-Millennial Climate and Sea-Level Change,” Nature Climate Change 6 (April 2016): 360–369. Pickett, Cadenasso, and Grove, “Resilient Cities.” Waddington developed this landscape metaphor in the 1930s to describe epigenetic adaptation in living organisms. The same underlying metaphor was later used in ecosystem studies as a simplified sectional representation of a landscape known as a “Russian Hills model” or “ball and cup model.” A. D. Goldberg, C. D. Allis, and E. Bernstein, “Epigenetics: A Landscape Takes Shape,” Cell 128 (2007): 635–638. Matthew Allen, “Compelled by the Diagram: Thinking through C. H. Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape,” Contemporaneity 4 (2015): 119–142. The concept of an operational landscape unit was first developed in J. Verhoeven et al., “An Operational Landscape Unit Approach for Identifying Key Landscape Connections for Wetland Restoration,” Journal of Applied Ecology 45 (2008): 1496–1503. Now, regional adaptation planning for sea level rise is using the concept in the San Francisco Bay area, in the Adaptation Atlas produced by the San Francisco Estuary Institute in 2018 (see https://www.sfei.org/adaptationatlas). New Orleans faced this type of brittle failure in Hurricane Katrina. Current strategies recommended by the Greater New Orleans Water Plan (2013) reflect an approach that tries to limit the potential for sudden failures by accommodating more water in urban space. The Dutch program “Room for the Rivers” established this approach in the early 2000s.

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In the literature of American design and ecology, two books in particular created this impact: R. Forman and M. Godron, Landscape Ecology (New York: Wiley, 1986); and R. Forman, Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See, for example, M. Palmer et al., “Ecological Restoration of Streams and Rivers: Shifting Strategies and Shifting Goals,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45 (2014): 247–269. 33 The Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) approved a statement at its May 2019 meeting asserting that the rate of decline of global biodiversity is now “unparalleled” in human history, as three-quarters of the world’s natural areas have been directly influenced by human land uses and a million species are on the edge of extinction, as reported by D. Fears, “One Million Species Face Extinction, U.N. Report Says: And Humans Will Suffer as a Result,” Washington Post, 6 May 2019. R. Forman, “The Role of Spatial Configuration in Environmental Sustainability,” in Changing Landscapes, ed. I. Zonneveld and R. Forman (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990). New techniques that designers and planners could use for representation include fuzzy sets for gradients in space and fuzzy logic to address uncertainty in systems, as in D. Diaz-Gomez et al., “Measuring the Insecurity Index of Species in Networks of Protected Areas Using Species Distribution Modeling and Fuzzy Logic: The Case of Raptors in Andalusia,” Ecological Indicators 26 (2013): 174–182; and K. Hill and M. Binford, “The Role of Category Definition in Habitat Models: Practical and Logical Limitations of Using Boolean, Indexed, Probabilistic, and Fuzzy Categories,” ch. 7 in Predicting Species Occurrences: Issues of Accuracy and Scale, ed. M. Scott (Washington DC: Island Press, 2002). Gilbert Ryle introduced this concept in 1949, although it was later popularized by Clifford Geertz. For history of the term, see Daniel A. Yon, “Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 411–429. M.J. Clement et al., “Partitioning Global Change: Assessing the Relative Importance of Changes in Climate and Land Cover for Changes in Avian Distribution,” Ecology and Evolution 9 (2018): 1985–2003. See, for example, W. D. Nordhaus, “A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate,” Journal of Economic Literature 45 (2007): 686–702. As I wrote this, the Bloomberg Carbon Clock registered 412.91 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. See https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/ carbon-clock/. Some technologies for carbon capture do exist, but none are available yet as technologies that could rapidly scale up to produce global net-negative emissions. The Blue Planet company in Los Gatos, California, has developed a technology that scrubs carbon dioxide emissions from a power plant stack and converts it to artificial limestone. But it has become an increasingly common policy proposal to try to scale these technologies up. See J. Corbett, “Pete Buttigieg Calls for Carbon Capture and Tax – Climate Proposals Backed by the Fossil Fuel Industry,” Common Dreams, May 19, 2019, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/19/petebuttigieg-calls-carbon-capture-and-tax-climate-proposals-backed-fossil-fuel. K. Marx, F. Engels, S. Moore, and D. McLellan, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The definitive description of observed climate changes and predictions for the United States is USGCRP, Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II, ed. D. R. Reidmiller, C. W. Avery, D. R. Easterling, K. E. Kunkel, K. L. M. Lewis, T. K. Maycock, and B. C. Stewart (Washington, DC: US Global Change Research Program, 2018).

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For example, after a series of significant urban wildfires in Northern California, President Trump blamed the state for mismanagement, as quoted in T. Byrne and K. Alexander, “Trump on California’s Wildfires: ‘Forest Management Is So Poor,’” San Francisco Chronicle, 10 November 2018. In the recent deadly fires in Paradise, California, people had practiced evacuation, but the problem was that the fire came too fast. For high-intensity, fast-moving fires, sheltering in place may make more sense. D. Arthur, “Many Fire-Prone California Towns Don’t Plan for Evacuation,” Associated Press, 25 April 2019. See, for example, K. Hill, “Coastal Infrastructure: A Typology for the Next Century of Sea Level Rise,” Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 13 (2015): 468–476; and K. Hill, “Armatures for Coastal Resilience,” ch. 24 in Sustainable Coastal Design and Planning, ed. E. Mossop (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2019), 415–435. The Vinex development in the Dutch neighborhood of Nesselande, part of Rotterdam, offers an example of living with a high groundwater condition. An artificial pond was excavated, and houses were built on levees that connect mounds for house sites. The ponds provide some stormwater storage for the surrounding area as well, acting as part of the stormwater infrastructure while providing luxury private homes. See Hill, “Armatures for Coastal Resilience.” C. Hamilton, “Moral Collapse in a Warming World,” Ethics & International Affairs 28 (2014): 335–342. These pairs of beliefs are described individually, but not paired, by W. Behringer, “Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities,” Climatic Change 43 (1999): 335–351; M. Hulme, “The Conquering of Climate: Discourses of Fear and Their Dissolution,” Geographical Journal 174 (March 2008): 5–16; R. Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Toward a Feminist Critical Philosophy of Climate Justice,” Hypatia 29 (Summer 2014): 576–598; and S. Haberle and A. Lusty, “Can Climate Influence Cultural Development? A View through Time,” Environment and History 6 (2000): 349–369. Cochrane (“Climate Change”) has pointed to the role of women as agricultural laborers and nurturing parents as an example of a traditional role that may be altered by women’s pursuit of education and self-determination in a broader social and economic context.

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10. Adaptive Systems: Environment, Site, and Building Carol J. Burns

Since the first edition of Site Matters in 2005, the site has more than ever to say to designers and others concerned with environments, built and natural. Climate change has produced more extreme weather around the globe, drowning some sites and creating new ones. Recognition of the Anthropocene as a formal unit in the Geological Time Scale now under consideration by regional geological societies across the world holds promise of inserting a new substrate under every site. The COVID-19 pandemic currently underway has transformed practices related to workplace, home, and public sites. To address the emergence of complex problems that go beyond conventional boundaries – of property, authority, expertise, and jurisdiction – new ways of thinking and new conceptual tools are needed.

Underpinnings The evolving challenge of anthropogenic climate change and design of buildings on sites today can be addressed in a wide array of possible directions: using renewable energy sources (trash to methane, along with wind, geothermal, solar panels, wind turbines); minimizing reliance on particular elements (CO2 or, simply, carbon); specifying materials (sequestration, material reuse and adaptable deconstruction, thermally active surfaces, biodegradable plastic-like polymers); exploring biomimicry (including novel natural building materials, such as cork, mushrooms, bacteria); engaging circular economy concepts (life cycle assessment, supply chain analysis, cradle-to grave and cradle-tocradle products, the donut model of ecological economics); certification programs (LEED, BREEAM, Living Building Challenge, and more); using software programs (Generative Design in Revit 2021 – and many many more). An architect seeking to understand interaction between individual acts of building and the larger environment can question each approach, as built results too often can seem environmentally dubious. A concept that should be more developed in architecture would recognize sites as adaptive selforganizing complex systems. Systems theory offers emerging knowledge for addressing complex problems on sites and the larger environments. Discussion here proceeds in distinct parts: First, I provide underpinnings, constructing a frame of reference for a conversation

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in print with a text by Rafael Moneo, to introduce the notion of the site conceived as an isolated or closed system. Second, I discuss concepts and theories related to building and site through the structures and characteristics of self-organizing systems, including thermodynamics. Finally, I investigate what this approach might imply for thinking about sites, for site thinking, and for cognition in this time of uncertainty. A particular place in the world, when considered for physical intervention, conventionally can be characterized as a site. As a preliminary design phase, site analysis involves study of contexts including climate, geography, history, infrastructure, and law. In construction documents, a site plan conveys the organization of land use, zoning, access, utilities, circulation, land drainage, materials, shelter, and other salient features. Since each building has a unique location, architects naturally think about sites. As an architectural design professor, I have been motivated to develop a literature within design theory that generalizes “site thinking” and that articulates it as extending across scales and over time.

The Murmur of the Site, a Conversation in Print with Rafael Moneo Known for design of contextual site-responsive buildings, Rafael Moneo wrote “The Murmur of the Site” to describe his views about this topic in architecture. Further underpinning the ensuing argument, extended quotations from Moneo convey a premise in architecture about sites (even if not often articulated with such eloquence). As Moneo states, establishing and knowing a site remains fundamental to realize architecture. Without the site, without a singular, unique site, architecture doesn’t exist… . A site is more than a simple frame; it also provides the clues to the correct direction for the process of building. As such the site is an expectant reality, always awaiting the event of construction, through which its otherwise hidden attributes will appear. The action of building takes possession of the site, but as a counterpoint it also allows us to discover its attributes. At the same time, the site allows architectural thought to be specific and to become architecture… . I would like to reserve the concept of architecture for the actual presence of built reality, which in turn implies the sense of radical, substantial immobility that can only be achieved by means of the site.1 Within any site, further limits arise including for example: zoning controls (use, height, FAR, setbacks); limits of landscape interventions within more extensive land use patterns; setbacks and boundaries associated with easements or wetlands. These

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establish an area of possibility within which a building can be located. Moneo explains that possession includes yet extends beyond the literal de jure ownership boundary to encompass culture, humankind, and history itself. The site is always expectant, awaiting the arrival of an event that will allow it to play an active role in world history. To be on the site means to take possession of it, and to build implies consumption of the site. Thus, to build brings a sort of violence, accepted or not, to the site. The rites of foundation explain quite eloquently the act of possession implicit in every architecture. The first gesture of the rite—to surround the site with a rope or a ribbon—is clearly a sign of possession… . Architecture was raised as a testimony of that domination, as a gesture of possession. To colonize and possess the land has always required its transformation, a leaving behind of the testimony of mastery. This explains the attempt to map, register, and measure the land, defining sites for the sake of establishing borders and for receiving the construction that consummates the act of possession and bespeaks the presence of humans and history itself.2 For designers, a site must be understood as inseparable from the physical visible setting and the history that brought it into being. Moneo asserts that architecture belongs to and should recognize in some way the site’s attributes: The architect’s first move when starting to think about a building should be to decipher the site’s attributes, to hear how they manifest themselves. It isn’t easy to describe how this happens. I believe that learning to listen to the murmur of the site is one of the most necessary experiences in an architectural education. To discern what should be kept, what could permeate from the previously existing site into the new presence and emerge after the substantial immobile artifact is built, is crucial for any architect. Understanding what is to be ignored, subtracted, erased, added, transformed, etc., from the existing conditions of the site is fundamental to the practice of architecture.3 For Moneo, the site conjoins with architecture. As a relational construct, its properties and qualities, evolving over time, support grounded examination and design response. Together, the site and the architecture allow “transferring individuality into object hood.”4 Moneo shows care and attention about the visual conditions and elements at and around the site.

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From a different perspective, Moneo’s statements can be interpreted as a tacit understanding of a site as a closed system that, once established in construction, has been possessed and colonized, considered not open to further influences or future exchange of matter. Systems theory classifies both the closed system and the isolated system as intrinsically stable systems.5 In such stable systems, the whole equals the sum of the parts. For Moneo, the site plus the realized building comprise architecture.

Systems Theory and Systems Since the first edition of Site Matters, literature about the site in architecture has become more robust. Also in this timeframe, the major costs of building construction have continued shifting from the shell and structure to mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems. Mechanical systems of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) have become increasingly complicated and generally temper indoor environments conceived as closed to climate, region, air movement, and site microclimate.

Change and the Emergence of Network Culture In our lifetime, physical environmental events around the globe have presented ever more complex or “wicked” problems.6 These include named historical events, like Hurricane Katrina: global sea rise in a low-lying city combined with storm surge and infrastructure failure. Or the Australian wildfires: following the country’s warmest year

Figure 10.1  Limekiln Grid and House on Limekiln Line Environmental modeling including full-scale site installation and scaled dynamic “live modeling” can inform design, as shown in this project. As part of the site analysis regarding wind, traditional survey of the site located a grid of steel poles outfitted with windsocks to track diurnal and annual wind patterns.

 

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Figure 10.1  (Continued) Annotated drawings of field measurements record multiple topographies, including earth, crops, and snow.

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Figure 10.1  (Continued) A scale model translation, tested in a wind tunnel, reinforces the notion of site as a closed system with clearly identified boundaries and inputs.

 

on record, leading to very dry flora and soil. Or the South Asia floods: monsoon rains intensified by rising sea surface temperatures forcing millions of survivors from their homes. These problems also include other long-term, slow-burn crises in the Earth system rarely named in headlines: ocean acidification, caused by changes in ocean temperature and aggravated by pollution and run-off; mass extinctions, caused by changing climate temperatures and resulting environmental change; the prospect of diminishing economic conditions as the era of fossil fuel capitalism wanes. Given conditions in a changeable and changing climate, designers need help to grasp the interaction between individual acts of building and the environment. This time distinguishes itself less by change itself than by the accelerating rate of change. Things now change faster than the human ability to comprehend them. The pace of growth – in the human population, the ever-expanding “throughput” of energy and materials, and the accumulation of pollution effects – has overturned almost every point of reference that might have been used to guide designs for the future. The magnitude of current changes in environmental conditions simply demands new ways of working and living. Widespread consensus now links accelerating change since World War II with explosive development of cybernetic, information, and telematic technologies that contribute to an emerging network culture most notably marked by the World Wide Web.7 As the industrial revolution set into motion developments leading to wicked environmental problems, so the technological developments of the last half century have been creating conditions for a revolution as far-reaching and profound. Telematic and 157

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Figure 10.1  (Continued) Design of the house respects the richness of temporality by establishing a fixed datum in the landscape. The house sits within a topographic dip and incorporates a long deck walk that extends into this landscape declivity, as both a fixed measure of the site and a space for observing it (photograph by Shai Gil Photography, images courtesy of Lisa Moffitt)

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Figure 10.2  Scales, representations, dependencies in analyzing embodied carbon Processes throughout the lifespan of a building entangled with carbon presently remain elusive or impossible to quantify. Information technologies currently in use in various fields, transferred and combined with emerging tools of simulation and analysis, hold promise of enabling architects to see, understand, and design in multiple contexts. (analytic diagram from Architecture Design Data courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein)

information technologies continue to recast the fabric of life socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Theories and concepts of the era of computation should, in my view, be used in turn to address wicked problems.

Systems Thinking and Site Thinking Systems theory has the basic principle that the component elements of an organization or system can best be understood in the context of their relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. As cohesive conglomerations of interrelated and interdependent elements, systems can be made by humans or exist in nature.8 Systems thinking offers a means to address wicked environmental problems because – as an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and multiperspectival endeavor – it promotes dialogue among the many fields related to sites and environments. System thinking relates to site thinking because development affects global phenomena. For example, avoiding some of the direst outcomes of climate change requires world-wide reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and elimination entirely by 2050.9 The built environment contributes almost 40 percent of these emissions worldwide annually. Operational carbon – the emissions associated with the energy used to operate a building – accounts for roughly 28 percent of global carbon emissions. A system exists in the context of its environment. To differentiate among types of systems, and to clarify the isolated and closed systems mentioned earlier, an open system interacts with its environment while maintaining its state.10 As a particular place in the world existing in the context of its environment, a site must be considered an open system, but it should also be understood as complex, adaptive, and with emergent behavior. A complex system has components that interact in multiple ways while following local rules. The characteristics of such systems and their relevance to system

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design have been recognized for years: “From the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, with Bernard Mandeville’s bees and Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand,’ to the 20th-century developments in cybernetics and system theory, aggregate cumulative behaviors have become increasingly recognizable as having their own kind of logic.”11 In his 1979 work on artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter discussed systems made of simple or even “meaningless” elements that, through self-reference and formal rules, nevertheless acquire meaning. He also recognized the importance of the emergent behaviors that come from these systems. Research into adaptive systems “opened by the 1990s with computer hardware powerful enough to efficiently run large-scale simulations.”12 Instead of imposing structure from the top down, structure emerges from an environment bounded by relatively simple rules. Insights developed from this research can improve the leadership of complex projects, as discussed ahead. Usually, the individual elements of a complex adaptive system remain in themselves relatively simple and operate according to a set of similarly simple rules. But when these simple elements combine, the system exhibits complex behaviors not made readily predictable by examining the behaviors of the individual elements. Such a system – in which the system as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts and behaves differently than any of the parts – exhibits emergence, a key characteristic of adaptive systems. As formulated by historians of evolution David Depew and Bruce Weber, complex systems have “a large number of components that can interact simultaneously in a sufficiently rich number of parallel ways so that the system shows spontaneous self-organization and produces global, emergent structures.”13 To an outside observer, the emergent behaviors might appear as the result of centrallycontrolled optimization and prioritization of a system’s actions. In reality, however, emergent behaviors result from each of the individual elements of the system operating according to its own internal rules and motivations, in the context of the operating environment, and interacting with other elements of the system. Emergent structures arise in many natural phenomena, from physical to biological domains (e.g., the appearance of hurricanes in weather phenomena). Emergence occurs in a narrow possibility space, the zone between very ordered and very disordered conditions.14 Emergent behaviors underlie sudden developments, including crises. Such behaviors within sites and environments should be better understood in order to engage complex adaptive systems with the intention of averting crises in a world marked by uncertainty.

Taking Systems to Sites: Increasingly Complex Buildings and Construction, Architectural Design with Thermodynamics, and Leadership in an Enterprise Architecture Model Conventional economic models have historically been based largely on the assumption that a population can be characterized as both homogeneous and rational: homogeneous in the sense that members of the population have the same goals (higher income, lower prices, etc.) and rational in the sense that individuals make decisions

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directed at maximizing the likelihood of achieving goals. While useful for understanding some aspects of social behavior, this model has limitations in comparing predictions to observed behaviors; traditional economic modeling techniques can effectively neither analyze highly heterogeneous populations nor reflect human behavior, which can be unpredictable. In contrast, complex adaptive systems research gives economists a way to model and analyze both heterogeneity and the extent to which actors behave irrationally. Digital simulation techniques used by economists can model “artificial” societies that evolve over time – where individuals may alter preferences based on experience and interactions with others or may act “irrationally” by, for example, forgoing increased income to remain neighbors with others. What does economics have to do with adaptive systems and the built environment? Economists adopted new models in order to account for behavior and phenomena they observed on the ground. Similarly, as environmental problems have become more wicked and as buildings and construction have become more complex, designers should embrace new models and tools to account for observed phenomena and to challenge existing knowledge about sites in environments, built and natural.

Increasingly Complex Buildings and Construction The number of components in a building system, the tight coupling of interrelated elements on multiple levels (economic, social, programmatic, geometric, structural) the establishment of hierarchies among them, and the nonlinear character of their interactions contribute to the increased complexity of design and construction today. The construction industry – consisting of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) – tends to work with processes passed from discrete design disciplines to discrete subcontractors, leading to inefficiencies in the process of design and construction realization. Engagement of designers and builders, generally based on the premise of lowest first cost, leads too often to thin profit margins that neither support nor reward innovation. Conventional engineering education, along with engineered building systems, continues to emphasize the efficiency of isolated closed-system elements, targeted to solve a limited problem (appliances get marketed on the same basis). In contrast, architectural design problems, typically novel due in part to the specificity of site, are more open-ended, subject to flux, uncertain, and, generally, wicked. Digital design approaches to date have generally remained limited in exploring formal geometric complexity. For more holistic understanding, different levels of complexity should be identified and comprehensively studied. Recent work from both academia and practice suggests that computational design methods can help manage further complexity in design and construction processes. Design-enabling technologies have been evolving rapidly. In the last 15 years, construction representation has largely changed from drafting-centric digital drawing to building information modeling (BIM) software that creates three-dimensional models of a design from which drawings can be produced like reports from a database.15 Networked technologies and software can bring design enhanced accuracy, precision, coordination, and transparency. Construction has trended generally toward increasing industrialized

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Figure 10.3  Tally Tally, a plug-in web app, allows designers to calculate from within an Autodesk Revit model the environmental impact of material and product choices more effectively than prior methods. Developed by architecture, planning, and research firm KieranTimberlake in collaboration with thinkstep and AutoDesk in 2014, Tally provides environmental-impact information, such as embodied energy and global warming potential, for construction materials that users can assign to BIM elements and objects in designs. It reports project impacts in five EPA categories and three energy demand categories as well as by life-cycle stage, Revit category, and Construction Specifications Institute division. Tally can be used to compare design options (top). An integrated materials data base generates environmental impact information for BIM elements (bottom). (image courtesy of Kieran Timberlake) 162

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Figure 10.4  SmartPlan

production – prefabricated components and automated and robotic-assisted construc-

Screen capture of interactive dynamic visualization tool showing alternatives including program uses, mixes, areas, counts, and densities distributed spatially in massing with sun/shadow study. Teams including designers, planners, data scientists, and software developers work with data and technology at the intersection of research and development, analysis, innovation, and professional practice in order to empower strategic design. (image courtesy of Sasaki Associates)

tion techniques, as two examples – creating demand for data. Such emergent behaviors and structures herald the next computational turn for architecture. Seeking new models and methods, data-savvy clients have begun working with designers to integrate diverse sets of information in decision-making. Data visualization, a form of representation using systematic mapping between graphic marks and data values, aggregates information from disparate sources in a shared graphical representation. Interactive data visualization, encoding statistical information with visual characteristics, helps interrogate and gain insight from data, supporting real-time exploration and offering a platform for shared discussion, collaborative work, and evidence-based decision-making. Existing and emerging tools including software applications and apps of the network era support new interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems, leveraging design thinking and the latest methods from computing, interaction design, and threedimensional graphics. Design based on data requires collection and input of accurate, sufficient, and appropriate information, a significant effort in itself. To translate models and tools emerging today within forward-thinking data-savvy sectors to the many myriad types of sites will require effort regarding information as well as invention or adaptation or hacking. Looking farther forward, various types of modeling – combined with interoperable technologies,16 cloud computation, and big data – will begin to enable “predictive strategies of how a building will actually look, operate, and feel when complete.”17 With hardware that can efficiently run larger-scale simulations, analytical instruments will soon shift to predictive analytics, or machine learning.18 Analysis, simulation, and modeling,

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Figure 10.5  Selfreinforcing data flows between design, construction, and operation

when augmented by machine learning, will create a design environment where predictions

Building design, construction, and operations have potential to become conjoined in a selfreinforcing predictive analytic system using simulation, information modelling, and data from sensor systems. This model implies the evolution of role definitions over time, as intellectual dynamics across building projects suggest shifting locations for authorship, authority, and alliances. (analytic diagram from Architecture Design Data courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein)

of various outcomes can be used to refine a design. Design goals will become more complex in addressing budgets, schedule, energy usage, and geometry, and will also expand to encompass building performance dimensions as well as human experience.19 Architects will face and solve more wicked problems as challenges in the built environment continue to increase in complexity. Design discretion and decisionmaking can be enhanced, but not replaced, by robust parametric and representation platforms that simulate building and environmental behaviors and, in combination with analytical engines, report on the results of decisions. Though the range of design options can enlarge, final conclusions will remain the result of the designer’s judgement about trade-offs and opportunities. As the designer’s capabilities for prediction become an explicit component of the expression of the design, “new more-enabled tools can allow architects to keep up – indeed, set the pace for – design of increasingly complex buildings and the more complete and exacting information required to realize and operate” them.20 With emerging models and tools understood as social as well as technical, architects can integrate and coordinate ever-increasing sets of building requirements and specialty consultants.21 Emergent technologies can serve (though cannot replace) architects’ abilities to attack wicked problems, and they enhance the probability of finding solutions.

Architectural Design with Thermodynamics Thermodynamics connects system theory and the building scale because buildings contain many systems and many machines.22 Links between thermodynamic energy, the

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physical environment, and buildings have been formulated and developed over time and across disciplines in relation to the concept of power. H.T. Odum, an ecologist known for pioneering work on system ecology, developed 19th-century principles of thermodynamics “from an engineering focus on machine efficiency to contemporary concern with resilient self-organization of ecosystems.”23 The basic principle of Odum’s approach involves tracking energy exchanges between the elements of an ecosystem, taking into account every exchange, storage, and conversion of available energy. Odum established the link between trophic (or energy-availing) relationships and the process of succession. In ensuing collaboration with the physicist R.C. Pinkerton, Odum related energy exchange to natural selection by demonstrating that natural systems, including “living organisms, gasoline engines, ecological communities, civilized nations, and storage battery chargers” all “exhibit a general tendency to sacrifice efficiency for more power output.”24 They made a startling conclusion: “We are taking ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean persistence of those forms which can command the greatest useful energy per unit time (power output).”25 Shifting the scale of thermodynamic analysis from the efficiency of a single entity (a machine or appliance or member of society) to the power of a larger complex system (a building, site, or polity), they demonstrated that maximum power – as well as the probability of survival – occurs at less-than-maximum efficiency. An adaptive system, as well as its subsystem elements, has capacity to self-organize and promote its own resilience. The change of emphasis from efficiency to maximum system power, a dramatic development, has begun to inform physical design. American professor William Braham has devised an accounting system for ecological design, developing from Odum. It involves the thermodynamic principle of energy transformation hierarchies, along with the competitive and collaborative pursuit of maximum power, described earlier. Energy transformation hierarchies produce increased total power flow. In such open systems, different energy sources have different qualities and costs.26 The higher cost of an energy resource typically indicates a higher quality and more valuable role in the production hierarchy. As an example, solar gain entering buildings during cold seasons represents a low-level source of heat; electricity, in contrast – as a light, flexible, and concentrated form of power – uses more energetic potential for production and delivery than any other material used for heating or cooking. The fossil fuel economy has introduced the “all-electric” home, even though some energy uses such as hot water could be served by much lower-quality or lower-cost energy sources, such as solar water heating. Though each element (motor or engine) in a home might be quite efficient, the all-electric home overall has less energetic hierarchy, higher costs and, overall, relatively diminished power. A more complete accounting of energy hierarchies at every level – within and across the building, its site, and its settlement – can be more comprehensively analyzed and understood by designers and more intentionally engaged by all involved with decisions about the environment. As economist and organizational theorist Herbert Simon said, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”27 As a pragmatic technique to address complex problems, Simon also noted that adaptive systems organize themselves into discrete, hierarchical, interrelated

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Figure 10.6  Energy systems language

subsystems and that particular questions can be approached in terms of the subsystems involved. Braham asserts, therefore, that an environmental designer must, as their first task, establish the system boundary and identify the subsystems within it. Braham elaborates the energy systems language in analysis of three distinct categories of building.28 The building-as-shelter incorporates its construction and ongoing maintenance, including provisions for climate modification through heating, cooling, airconditioning, ventilation, and illumination. The building-as-setting for work and living incorporates concentrated flows of fuels, power, information, and money, as serviced by systems including water, wastewater, food, supplies, and trash. The building-as-site incorporates the spatial hierarchies of settlement and urban self-organization, including social and economic production hierarchies. Adopting a language of diagrams invented

This accounting system for ecological design describes the structure and organization of complex systems by tracking exchanges of energy, materials, and information. Requiring clear definition of the system boundary or scope of analysis, it offers flexible applicability to any system in accounting for all the stocks, flows, funds and services of work and resources within the system and from its environment. Grounded in thermodynamics and principles of selforganizing systems, the language tracks two interrelated quantities, energy and cumulative dissipated energy (or emergy), present in the storages and flows of anything capable of accomplishing some kind of work. Translated to a common unit of solar energy (solar emjoules or sej) different kinds of input and process can be compared and evaluated. (For full explanation, see Appendix A in Architecture and Systems Ecology by William Braham.) (diagram courtesy of William Braham)

by Odum, Braham has developed this energy systems language to provide fuller context for the performance evaluations conducted by architects – including energy use, material selection, and specifications. The shift from efficiency to power, along with the accounting system, has great potential for design thinking; within the system boundary, energy transformations related to clearly bounded overlapping, nesting, and hierarchal subsystems can be comprehensively identified at scales that include and supersede the ownership boundary.29

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Leadership in an Enterprise Architecture Model Enterprise architecture applies architectural practices and principles to guide and execute strategies for change in business, information, process, and technology organizations. A complex building project, business enterprise, school of architecture – all may be led in a process that considers the enterprise, or project, as a complex adaptive organization. The leader of such a process can be characterized as the enterprise architect, who might well actually be an architect. Every enterprise, even a small one, can be understood an adaptive system. Small enterprises may be relatively easy to govern, but large enterprises produce more emergent behaviors. The enterprise architect has charge neither to understand the details of how each system functions nor to control implementation but, using constraints and rules, to channel emergent behaviors into productive activities that contribute to attaining established goals. The enterprise architect provides a clear definition of what must be done without directing how to do it by establishing rules and constraints that will inform later review of implementation efforts. A flexible, goals-based approach based on predictive outcomes gives those responsible for implementation the space to exercise creativity in designing systems conforming to rules and constraints Figure 10.7  Tombesi’s diagram of flexible specialization Labor economist Paolo Tombesi posits that interrelated architectural design services go well beyond narrow focus on formulation, massing, function and expression. He also recommends that architect’s design responsibilities can be applied more widely across the entire building lifecycle as a form of flexible specialization. (analytic diagram from Architecture Design Data courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein and with permission of Paolo Tombesi)

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while efficiently meeting the system specifications.30 Applying the concepts of adaptive systems research to enterprise architecture leverages emergent behaviors of the enterprise to simplify and refocus resources on meeting stated goals. This model has been adapted from large-scale organizations, including the federal government and the military, as well as information technology. Architects may already be providing such a form of leadership in the built environment. The pay status of the enterprise architect in fields other than design also suggests, however, the potential for designers of the physical environment to reposition themselves and make their work more valued. With AEC partners, architects design and deliver approximately $400 billion in buildings annually. Architects and the profession of architecture should be recognized for the value of providing integrative leadership in design.31 By proactively engaging with emergent models and tools, architects can reposition ourselves to be recognized as providing high-order synthetic leadership in the energy hierarchy within the complex adaptive environment of the AEC industry.

Complex Adaptive Systems in Architecture Complex adaptive systems inhere within buildings, design, and leadership. New forms of design modeling – interacting with data and physical environments visually, physically, computationally – mirror the structure of complex systems as “a large number of components that can interact simultaneously… so that the system shows spontaneous selforganization.”32 Design with thermodynamics (quite different than conventional design for thermal control) works within boundaries to identify energy transformations and hierarchies of resilient systems that adapt and, over time, can survive. Leadership in an enterprise architecture model, perhaps more accurately called adaptive leadership, resists micro-focus and, instead, manages from positions far from equilibrium to maximize system resources. These examples of adaptive systems share key features: understanding entities in the context of their relationships with each other, as interrelated and interdependent, not in isolation or alone; openness; and recognition that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

(Site) Thinking as Complex and Adaptive The phenomena of adaptive systems can only be understood holistically and historically as events that unfold over time. Neither static nor eternal, such systems emerge in time and evolve continuously; neither prefigured nor programmed, they remain subject to the uncertainty and unpredictability of chance. Why have some structures survived on sites over extended time across changing cultures and polities? Stonehenge or the pyramids at Giza mark the shallow time of human history within the deep time of the planet. They endure as each succeeding regime in a succession of territorializations recognizes in them something meaningful, provides protection, and, in so doing, transforms them with new cultural meanings. Within sites as well as systems, the ceaseless play of chance eventually upsets every equilibrium and makes homeostasis impossible. Scientific understanding of adaptive systems in various fields has been extended to individual organisms, species, the evolutionary process as a whole, and

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interrelations among them. As Mark Taylor states, “The same patterns are discernible in cultural development. Individuals, groups, and sociocultural totalities are all bound in complex relations of restriction and production. Moreover, nature and culture are woven together in nonlinear feedback and feed-forward loops through which nature produces culture as much as culture produces nature… . Since nature and culture develop interactively through a process of coevolution, natural and cultural processes form a complex adaptive system… . Within these networks, adaptation inevitably involves coadaptation.”33 We see examples today in sites that bind natural and cultural processes into new networks. The Landschaftpark in Duisburg designed by Peter Latz and the IBA Emscher Park described by Lisa Diedrich in this volume – examples of the concept of industrial nature – associate themselves with past uses of a site, including the industrial past and preceding agricultural use. Rather than focus on preservation, these projects invoke the memory of a site to apply it to emergent entities and concepts. Coadaptation can also be seen in aspects of the interaction between the brain and mind. J.A. Scott Kelso points out that the “human brain is fundamentally a pattern34

forming, self-organized system governed by nonlinear dynamical laws. Rather than compute, our brain ‘dwells’ (at least for short times) in metastable states; it is poised on the brink of instability where it can switch flexibly and quickly… . By living near criticality, the brain is able to anticipate the future, not simply react to the present. All this involves the new physics of self-organization in which, incidentally, no single level is any more or less fundamental than any other.”35 Understood in this way, “the brain, like the world in which it is enmeshed, then, operates according to network logic. Changes in the structure and function of the brain result both from the coadaptation of neural networks within the brain and from the coadaptation between the brain and the environment. As a result of its coadaptive capacity, the brain is not hardwired but, like all complex networks, functions between fixity and flux.”36 Cognition should likewise apprehend a site as always in flux. A site has a life as a self-organizing Figure 10.8  Pedagogy: Blue Lagoon/Bath Environmental models are architectural models with the added demand of creating a controlled steady-state environment to materialize flows— focusing attention on the relationship between buildings, instruments, environmental phenomena, and their idealizations.

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Figure 10.8  (Continued) Environmental models operate as potent lenses for reconciling the scales and problematics of working with consequential environmental processes that extend beyond the conventional scales of architectural investigation. Live environmental models can be read across at least three scales: the 1:1 scale of the physical artifact, raising questions about tectonics and material systems; the scale of the architectural model, raising questions about environmental performance; and the nebulous scale of the environmental phenomena, situating the project within a much broader theoretical context of constructing climatological systems in light of climate change today.

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Figure 10.8  (Continued) In the Blue Lagoon and Bath studio, students engaged with two sites of geothermal activity - the Blue Lagoon, Iceland and Bath, England working with highly calibrated physical environmental models both in the studio and in the field as a means to develop a conception of architecture as calibrated environmental instruments. Student research included design of three types of physical environmental models: wind tunnels, water tables, and filling tanks. Among conclusions, if found that the Blue Lagoon and the adjacent Svartsengi geothermal power plant perform as intertwined systems - heat sources and heat sinks; alternating between open loop and closed loop processes; as complex collusions with not only their atmospheric and hydrological surroundings, but with much broader systems of energy generation, environmental alteration, resource consumption, and consumerism. (images courtesy of Lisa Moffitt)

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system. Each site enmeshes in the larger environment and also coadapts with the mind of humankind. Sites learn, and humans can learn from sites. Bringing the concept and methods of complex adaptive systems into design education could have significant implications, focusing it while also situating it within significantly-broadened contexts. Design studios could engage with explicit boundarysetting, problem-framing, and testing and evaluation of results, foregrounding methods integral to undertaking design as a form of research. Concentrations, minors, and faculty specializations on coding, interactive data visualization, and systems theory could complement use of robotics and virtual reality tools now found in many design schools. The general curriculum could incorporate cross-disciplinary exposure to provide awareness and experience of addressing complex problems of the built environment in the only way they can be addressed – across disciplines.

Facing forward This text has called for embracing systems thinking as a form of design thinking. Architecture historically has been considered, for readily apparent reasons, through spatial perspectives focused on physical places. From at least the fourteenth century, architecture has shown possibilities through understanding of horizons, setting views and view heights, and vanishing points. It has been easy to conceptually misunderstand architecture as an “object.” Instead of being seen as the subject of depiction within the perspective drawing, architecture more accurately can be understood as creating the perspective drawing itself. The tasks of the architect change as architecture evolves over time. Architects must work with new ways of thinking and conceptual tools emerging now, including forms of analysis, simulation, representation, collaboration, discussion, and realization. Projective and descriptive capacities must be created from emerging forms of knowledge in order to address complex problems, both present and as-yet-unknown, of the coadaptively-conjoined built and natural environment. From a different perspective larger than architecture, the wicked problems of climate change obviously cannot be solved by design alone. Substantive change depends on people, planning, and policy combined, in energetic hierarchy within an adaptive system. Lacking leadership today at the highest levels, adaptive systems theory reassures us that “No single level is any more or less fundamental than any other.”37 The adage of strength in numbers38 translates to a new notion of power in adaptive social systems. The era of climate crisis has instigated mutations of systems that supersede 20th century anthropomorphic models, implicating and impacting biomass and energy, microbial mutation and erased borders, extinction events, and nanographic and geological time. Countering a current cultural sense of depletion and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of authoring and publishing, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re-alignments of these re-arrangements occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises, and definitions of “life.” Energized by the impermanence of life, we now face the tasks of learning about complexity

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in order to live creatively with it and, as designers, to create courses of action that will shape and protect physical environments that adapt resiliently and promote survival. The current era of change and crisis demands deep reconsideration of architecture’s temporal qualities because the tasks, no longer about composition, have turned to engaging with a turbulent state of nature in a perpetual process of becoming and coming undone. The COVID-19 pandemic might represent a dress rehearsal for effects of climate change. Not stuck in a past reality, we as a polity create and co-create the future. In an era with weather, species, and geology all changing intensely and at unprecedented rates, the question of time increasingly impinges on us all. Note: The author would like to thank Nancy Levinson for commenting on earlier versions of this text and Phil Bernstein, Bill Braham, Billie Faircloth, Lisa Moffitt, and Kiel Moe for insightful conversations about their research and generosity in sharing illustrations.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

8

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Rafael Moneo, “The Murmur of the Site,” in ANYwhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 48. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Isaac Newton formulated the basic laws of motion that inform stable systems in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1686, a milestone in the history of science that defined fundamental concepts including mass, acceleration, and inertia. Although Newton was primarily concerned with systems in the physical universe, his analysis has been widely appropriated to interpret many aspects of society and culture. Peter G. Rowe, “A Priori Knowledge and Heuristic Reasoning in Architectural Design,” Journal of Architectural Education 36(1) (1982): 18–23. Rowe offers a definition of wicked problems: “Architectural design problems can also be referred to as being ‘wicked problems’ in that they have no definitive formulation, no explicit ‘stopping rule,’ always more than one plausible explanation. . . .and their solutions cannot be strictly correct or false. Tackling a problem of this type requires some initial insight, the exercise of some provisional set of rules, inferences, or plausible strategy, in other words, the use of heuristic reasoning.” Mark C.Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Taylor explains complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes, drawing on a wide array of sources to explore implications related to philosophy, religion, art, architecture, and higher education. In the 19th century, systems thinking emerged in sociology; in parallel, Sadi Carnot and James Joule introduced systems theory into sciences engaged with energy transformation. Systems theory has developed principles and concepts from many disciplines: physics, computer science, biology and engineering, and the philosophy of science, as well as ecology, management, economics, geography, sociology, political science, and ontology. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Other studies call for even more drastic measures. A system’s environment includes everything that may affect the system or may be affected by it. Open systems in interaction with their environments usually include biological and social systems, whereas mechanical systems mostly constitute closed

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11

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stable systems. The boundaries of closed systems associated with the classical sciences stay conceptually rigid, so pure closed stable systems represent an idealized world of frictionless mechanistic devices that seem to remain perpetually in motion. Closed boundedness makes classical systems easier to teach. In contrast, the boundaries of open systems act more flexibly and dynamically. William W. Braham, Architecture and Systems Ecology: Thermodynamic Principles of Environmental Building Design, in Three Parts (London, New York: Routledge, 2015), 5. Braham describes a method of environmental assessment to reconcile techniques of building design with radical urban and economic reorganization and asserts that, over the coming century, we will be challenged to return to the renewable resource base of the eighteenth-century city with the knowledge, technologies, and expectations of the 21st-century metropolis. John D. McDowell, Complex Enterprise Architecture: A New Adaptive Systems Approach (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2019), 13. McDowell describes how simulation-based research led to new insights in fields as diverse as economics and social sciences, highlighting the effects of small changes on the behavior of large populations and how societies self-organize. David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 437. The boundary or margin that supports emergence is always far from equilibrium (the highly ordered state of inertia that closed systems tend to exhibit). The boundary for emergence can be considered the edge of chaos. Phillip G. Bernstein, Architecture Design Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018). Bernstein assesses a systematic transformation underway in the AEC industry, a computational turn generating new workflows, business models, responsibilities, and potential opportunities for architects. Interoperability is a characteristic of a system or product whose interfaces work with other systems or products without restrictions. Coined by the information technology (IT) industry to define an ideal way for computers and other electronic devices to relate to each other, the World Wide Web has interoperability as a hallmark since its initiation by industry partners who identified, agreed to, and applied common technology and open standards to the development of their own products. However, the concept extends past the Web including, for example, the U.S. Interstate Highway System, established on shared national standards, which eventually became an interoperable national transportation network. Similarly, “Neither the U.S. government nor its global aerospace, defense, and IT sector partners can afford to ignore the value that interoperability brings to their peacekeepers, warfighters, air traffic managers, and emergency responders. Not the least of these advantages are seamless information-sharing and collaborative decision-making among diverse partners.” For more, see “What is Interoperability?” at https://www.ncoic.org/what-is-interoperability/. Bernstein, Architecture Design Data, 13. A shift from fixed algorithms (with evaluation predetermined and written into the software code) to predictive analytics or machine learning involves building algorithms that improve automatically with experience encountering new data. Bernstein, Architecture Design Data, 28. Ibid 26. I am indebted to Billie Faircloth of Kieran Timberlake for the emphasis on the social dimensions of devising new tools. For this discussion, thermodynamic systems should be understood as open and with specific distinguishing characteristics: converting usable energy into less usable forms, they diminish and eventually deplete available resources, and their operation depends on temperature differentials among different components.

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23 24

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35 36 37 38

Braham, Architecture and Systems Ecology, 3. Howard T. Odum, and R. C. Pinkerton, “Time’s Speed Regulator: The Optimum Efficiency for Maximum Output in Physical and Biological Systems,” American Scientist 43(2) (1955): 332. Odum describes this observation and conclusion in relation to environments characterized by abundance. Ibid. In a trophic web, a larger number of lower-level producers support the smaller number of higher-level, higher-quality entities at the top. An example of an energy transformation hierarchy from biology is the food chain, in which meat represents a higher quality of food than plants because herbivores have to consume many calories of plant matter for each calorie of flesh. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Braham, Architecture and Systems Ecology. Braham uses the three aspects of building – as shelter, setting for the work of living, and site – to organize the structure of the book. More work is needed to realize the potentials of an energy systems language that includes and is not limited by the ownership boundary. Kiel Moe has done much to open and contribute to this work, and to the discourse of architectural thermodynamics, in research, writing, and design. This correlates with an analogous structure in physical design projects, types of specifications, the portions of contract documents that determine the quality of construction. Proprietary specifications can simply identify preferred products or materials; in contrast, performance-based specifications convey metrics or outcomes so that any conforming product or materials would be equally acceptable. Bernstein, Architecture Design Data. Bernstein asserts that design information can move the AEC industry from a documented history of low productivity, that complex projects require integration of parts into a whole, and that architects by virtue of training and mindset should not resist the next computational turn but seize it in order to provide integrative leadership. Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving, 437. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 225–226. One of the most common ways to understand the interrelation of distributed neurons is in terms of neural networks, which display many of the most important features of complex adaptive systems. Neural nets consist of links and nodes, which receive, transmit, and send signals. When numerous nodes connect, complex behavior becomes virtually inevitable. J.A. Scott Kelso, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 26. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 227. Kelso, Dynamic Patterns, 26. Journalist Mark Shields coined this phrase, adding: “When the size of the group supporting your cause reaches a critical mass, any legislator or elected official has to pay attention.”

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11. Translating Sites: A Plea for Radicant Design Lisa Diedrich Postindustrial transformation poses one of the biggest challenges of urban planning since the late 20th century and a major task for the physical design disciplines. Design answers most often aim at radical turnover or radical museumification of derelict industrial land, without much interest for the qualities of the specific sites. Behind these dualistic approaches lies a shadow zone of alternative, more site-responsive answers that can be observed in contemporary transformation projects. They cater to the idea of sites as resources whose specificities can be valued in new ways to support sustainable transformation processes. To update ideas of site-specific design, intuitively associated with recognizing static site qualities, radicant design is introduced here as a concept that brings often overlooked transient aspects of site such as human uses and processes of nature to the fore. The act of design, rather than formalization of static site components, becomes then an act of continuous translation. Such reconceptualization of design builds on the exploration of design practice and promotes design research as a transdisciplinary endeavor in a historic moment in which no single discipline can claim to solve globally entangled problems alone. The IBA Emscher Park in Western Germany’s coal and steel district of the Ruhr, a redevelopment enterprise carried out from 1989 to 1999, is a prominent example of large-scale, long-term industrial transformation. Conceived in the 20th-century tradition of the German international building exhibitions (Internationale Bau-Ausstellung [IBA]), this event surpassed previous building exhibitions thanks to its geographical embrace of an entire run-down metropolitan area and its long duration of ten years. It launched postindustrial upgrading through spatial design. As a designerly engagement with postindustrial sites, it advocated conceptualization of site understandings by prompting questions about the geographically and temporally expanded notion of site and the resulting design approaches. IBA Emscher Park aimed to become a laboratory for a new design task – namely, testing how urban planning and design could prepare “the future of old industrial areas.”1 The project focused on the transformation of more than delimited physical forms. Rather than producing architectural advances on defined urban plots, it engaged the physical, economic, and social structures of an entire metropolitan

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  Figure 11.1  Tableau of scope and aspects of IBA Emscher Park Above: Emscher Landscape Park as building block of the Ruhr Metropolis’ green infrastructure. Below: Selected landmark projects at IBA Emscher Park: Zollverein park by Planergruppe Oberhausen et al (top); Duisburg North Park by Latz & Partners (bottom left); café at Zollverein coke plant (bottom right). (map by Regionalverband Ruhrgebiet; photos Andrea Kahn and Lisa Diedrich)

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region molded by the mining and metallurgic industry. Covering an area of 70 by 30 kilometers, it began with a strict premise of reusing the existing industrial landscape. After a decade-long process, the IBA displayed many transformed sites, a better-connected metropolitan area, the affirmation of residents’ self-worth, a new planning culture, and – most importantly in the context of this book – a site-sensitive design paradigm. The transformation continues today under the auspices of regional and communal authorities, with an ever-growing oeuvre and knowledge of industrial transformation, and it will remain a work in progress. Meanwhile the idea of the full-scale urban laboratory has inspired other actors, informed associations and networks such as the European Network of Living Laboratories,2 and aligns with the emergence of a new knowledge-generation model focused on transdisciplinarity.3 IBA Emscher Park is at once a mental construct (a plan) and a physical construction (a park), a moment in time (an event) and a work in progress (a transformation process). Studying it in conjunction with other large-scale, long-term postindustrial projects promises to yield keys of understanding for an ongoing conceptualization of site as a dynamic relational construct.4

From Site Specificity to Radicantity Urban planner Thomas Sieverts, a former IBA Emscher Park director, believes that the project’s success relies on developing local specificities and countering international tendencies to sameness.5 The project was set up in response to the decline of a regional mining and metallurgic industry that, after initially turning the preindustrial Emscher river landscape into a hotspot of heavy manufacturing, left it with the surface of the earth literally upside-down. In Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the decrease of such fossil-extractive and site-destructive industries in the second half of the 20th century has opened the door for a more resource-conscious human interaction with this planet, as postulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015. If sites were understood as resources, authorities could discern the recuperation of derelict industrial areas as a path to sustainability. Given the spatial component of such transformations, the physical design disciplines should be expected to offer crucial contributions to such sustainability, both in theory and practice. To do so, however, demands questioning how to truly engage with sites as resources. It entails valuing, not wasting or ignoring, the specificities of each site. The question of how to design site-specifically in postindustrial contexts has only recently triggered disciplinary concern. One approach, forwarded by Danish landscape scholar Ellen Braae,6 proposes design as transformation, rather than creation from scratch. She highlights that since the Renaissance design has been associated with creating new forms on a blank sheet of paper, culminating in the tabula rasa approach of the modern movement in the 20th century. Countering this position, postmodern design has tended to preserve historic forms up to museum-like states. Both tabula rasa and museumification can be understood as equally site-repressive extremes; both underscore the need for site-specific alternatives.7

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The Emscher project counters site-blind generic development with other, site-sensitive approaches. At the same time, it challenges the notion of site specificity understood as referring to strictly static physical site qualities. With its expansive geographical and temporal scope, IBA Emscher Park illustrates powerfully that time-based design approaches are key to designing large-scale, long-term postindustrial transformation projects site-specifically. On a theoretical level, this raises a question: if designers today could stress this concern for time-based methods and conceptualize site specificity as time specificity. Site specificity was coined as an artistic concept in the 1960s. Site-specific art challenged the universal self-referential sitelessness of modern art of the first half of the century. It claimed that a work belongs to a site by material inseparability: Robert Morris’ Splashing (1968) consisted of lead tossed on the walls of a warehouse gallery in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Neither sculpture nor painting nor even a relocatable object, the work merged with the physical site of its installation, condemned to be either abandoned after the exhibition or to be scraped off and destroyed. The site specificities of Splashing and similar works depended on their enduring material status. Similarly, site-specific works in architecture and urban design rejected modernistic tabula rasa approaches and spatial objects unrelated to their surrounds, instead embracing static physical locational identity. Dynamic factors proved less constitutive to such site specificity. Today, half a century later, when contemporary designers and design critics qualify a work as site-specific, the idea often recalls the post-modern rejection of sitelessness in favor of the site as an enduring stable locus, sometimes even frozen in a historic status.8

A Time-Inflected Idea of Site Meanwhile, and surprisingly underrecognized by the physical design disciplines, a more time-based idea of site specificity arose in the arts in the early years of the 21st century. It suited better the unleashed mobilities of a globalizing world that increasingly proffered transient identities. The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija installed a soup kitchen in a New York gallery and arranged his work Untitled (2011) as a cooking event; the work included the artefacts of the installation, the spaces of the gallery and the food served, as well as the coming and going of dinner guests, the preparations, the act of eating, and the cleaning after the party. The work was more than static form; its formal appearance included happenings over time. It forwarded the site as a dynamic locus and the creative act as shaping spaces, materials, and atmospheres in steady evolution. In 2002, observing artists of the late 20th century, American art historian Miwon Kwon defines site specificity as an oscillation between place-bound and transient poles.9 Following in 2009, French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud recognizes a dedicatedly time-inflected concept of site specificity in art works of the early years of the 21st century, prompting him to abandon the term site specificity in favor of radicantity.10 Changing language promotes changing ideas about site, of interest for contemporary designers grappling with transformation of postindustrial sites.

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Recent research in Europe has revealed that many designers keep referring to static site identities, catering to globalization-opposing localisms and the idea of rootedness, sometimes serving populistic aberrations. Designers easily rely on materials, colors, geometries, and other formal elements as site-specific features. In so doing, they restrict themselves to the static instances of site specificity, sometimes approaching museumification in an attempt to avoid a tabula rasa.

Designing Journey-Forms Bourriaud’s notion of radicantity helps acknowledge the site-destructive radicality of museumification and tabula rasa while offering a framework for site-responsive alternatives. Replacing the idea of the root (radix, a noun, static) with one of continuous enrootings (a verb in gerund, dynamic), Bourriaud invokes the following metaphor: “One might say that the individual of these early years of the 21st century resembles those plants that do not depend on a single root for their growth but advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does. Ivy belongs to the botanical family of the radicants, which develop their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals, whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil.”11 In this sense, radicants exist in constant dialogue and constant motion. They are “caught between the need for a connection with (their) environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalization and singularity, between identity and the opening to the other.”12 This observation points at an ontological conception of human existence; being is experienced as a constant becoming, in motion. It also resonates with the understanding of site as a dynamic relational construct, continuously undergoing transformation in dialogue with other sites. Downplaying the emphasis on static site identities inherent in the notion of site specificity, radicantity invites focus on transient aspects of site. As an activity creating ever-ongoing enrootings, radicant design offers an alternative to ideas of design as starting from scratch, aiming at a finished work, or engaging in a historic freeze-frame. In its evolutionary nature, radicant design stretches form over time into what Bourriaud calls a journey-form. Within the Emscher Park project, for example, the notion of the park brought the idea of an ever-evolving postindustrial landscape to IBA’s previously time-limited notion of a building exhibition, resulting from the continuous interplay of natural forces and human activities, instated before and ongoing after the exhibition. In this sense it takes a journey-form. Within Emscher Park, places like the Zollverein coal mine in Essen can be seen as having first been shaped by engineers and industry, then by abandonment and pioneer vegetation, and in recent years by landscape architects and their management regime of successive plantings and regular understory cutting, a landscape design ongoing over years, not reduced to instant delivery of form but to constant transformation. When one acknowledges design projects as journey-forms – that is, products within a never-ending production trajectory – one can judge their qualities in the light of change (how they translate from industrial to urban sites) and not of status (what the industrial, or the urban, site is like). Appreciating change rather than status quo supports the idea of

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sustainability based on resource consciousness, with sites as resources meant to transform continuously, rather than being imported or extracted.

Beyond Dualities: Into the Shadow Zone Proclaimed positions on sustainable urban transformation are too easily charged today by populistic ideas about, say, global elites versus local people or global scroungers intruding on local homelands and so on. Innovation gets played out against preservation. Debates get stuck in radical positions and false dichotomies based on assumptions of mutual exclusivity where none might actually exist. New societal narratives can evolve from the concept of radicantity, since it offers opportunity to reject the dualistic figure of tabula rasa versus museumification, as well as the related global versus local opposition. Beyond these highlighted concepts lies a shadow zone worth exploring, with the help of interpretation tools for radicantity. As the Emscher case shows, some professionals already operate within this shadow zone. They design site-responsively, but their approaches have remained tacit. Theorizing this tacit practice leads to forging new concepts that can enrich site-oriented sustainability discourses in the spatial design disciplines. Such keys to understanding help designers and design students to more consciously exercise site-sensitive design activities - as new intellectual tools and terminology spur thinking about practice by practitioners and eventually advance practice, Reconceptualizing design practice helps urban planning authorities and developers to frame and commission designs that build on qualities inherent in sites – as they hold the power to create conditions for new testing approaches in practice. Introducing a new understanding of design in teaching and research helps design educators and scholars to address the relationship between site and design beyond the black box of artistic intuition and short-sighted “scientific” scrutiny – as new discourses are nurtured and refined by discussion among peers and across the generations of designers. Exploring the shadow zone of site-respective design approaches sheds light on the fact that all sites are inhabited by many qualities and related claims, whose originators and interests must be respected and reflected before design takes place. Only then can design become an intellectually grounded and societally responsible political activity eager to orient globalization toward more siteresponsive and hence resource-saving ways of living on this planet.

Site Thinking and Thinking About a Site Defining site as a dynamic relational construct, Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn write that designers construe and construct site from an exchange between what they see in front of them and what they wish to find there, between ideas from outside (the physical site) and inside (disciplinary norms, personal convictions, societal ideals), between the real as observed and the real as defined.13 Burns and Kahn distinguish between site thinking – a mindset that is general and proper to every discipline or designer – and thinking about a site – thoughts about a concrete plot of land in its physical condition.

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They argue that “a specific locale provides the material ground for action in design practice, and the designers’ ideas about site provide a theoretical background against which design actions are taken.”14 This means one can learn about designers’ site thinking by unpacking their thinking about a site – that is, through the study of their design projects. On an epistemological level, this testifies to the entanglement of theory and practice: studying practice allows reflection on modes of thinking, theory evolves from looking into practice. In this case, scrutinizing design works makes it possible to identify site thinking, to judge if the site is conceived as a blank condition (tabula rasa), shrine to history (museumification), physical figure (site specificity), evolving construct (radicantity), or a combination of these, or something else altogether. Such a study can distinguish two mental moves in the designers’ thinking about a site: first, how do they apprehend a site; second, how do they transform what they capture. Invoking a linguistic metaphor, the apprehension of site can be called site reading and the transformation site editing. There can be no site editing without previous site reading, which means that the reading becomes the foundational act in the creative process. Ironically, site reading is most often considered preparatory to, but not part of, the design. Many design schools teach students to perform a scientific, supposedly objective site analysis before engaging in their design project, and many designers motivate their design ideas through what they call an analysis of facts and figures. In short, site reading escapes recognition as an act of design. Site editing, however, is associated with the transformative act, meant to be the “real design.” Radicant design blurs these boundaries and encompasses both moves, reading and editing, as part of site-respective design. This parallels Elizabeth Meyer’s observation that landscape architects do not invoke a site’s qualities simply as the framework for their design but as its very starting point. Meyer rejects the idea of site reading as a neutral site analysis which precedes the creative act of site editing: “The repositioned site concerns challenge the modern divide between rational site analysis and intuitive, creative, conceptual design: design as site interpretation, and site as program, not surface for program.”15

Translating Sites For Bourriaud, the creative effort leading to journey-forms takes the form of translation. His reference to the concept of translation prompts links to Italian semiotician and linguist Umberto Eco, who explored translation in more detail, through observing his and others’ writing and translating practices.16 A closer look into the principles of translation depicted by Eco helps delineate parameters for unpacking radicant design approaches. Eco observes that between the theoretical argument that languages cannot be translated at all (due to their different structures) and the practical observation that people all over the world do translate and understand each other, the only idea corresponding to human experience is the one of translation as a process of negotiation. For Eco, these negotiations play out in various ways – between author and text, between author and readers, and between the structure of two languages and the encyclopedias

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of two cultures.17 When applied to the context of postindustrial transformation, negotiation can facilitate translations between designer and site, between designer and public, between industrial and the urban structures, and between semiotic systems and spatial vocabularies of sites. Negotiation, according to Eco, implies losses and gains. A translation can never comprehensively transfer every single level of a text; beyond the most obvious lexical level, a text also conveys syntactical, rhythmic, referential, stylistic, and graphic levels.18 Translation therefore always operates between faithfulness to a source text and freedom of interpretation in view of a target text: “Faithfulness [alone] is not a method which results in acceptable translation. It is the decision to believe that translation is possible, it is our engagement in isolating what is for us the deep sense of a text, and it is the goodwill that prods us to negotiate the best solution for every line. Among the synonyms of faithfulness, the word exactitude does not exist. Instead there is loyalty, devotion, allegiance, piety.”19 Part of the negotiation preceding translation lies in the decision of the translator to domesticate or foreignize texts. The terminology of translation studies refers to this is as source-oriented or target-oriented translation. A target-oriented translation adapts a given text to the linguistic and cultural universe of the readers, in the translation mode of domestication. A source-oriented translation pushes reader into the linguistic and cultural universe of a given text, in a translation mode of foreignization. In the first mode, the text is altered considerably to come closer to the reader; in the second, the reader’s mind must be extended to approach the text.20 In the context of postindustrial transformation, a domestication involves changing the industrial site considerably, making it adapt to contemporary urban needs and expectations. A foreignization, by contrast, aims at changing considerably the appreciation of the urban audience of the industrial sites. Both approaches raise questions about who loses and who gains. Results of analyzing parameters of translation identify a site’s change (from industrial to urban) rather than its status (as industrial or urban). They forward insight into the radicantity (instead of the site specificity) of a design work understood as a journey-form (instead of form).

Identifying Instances of Radicant Design An interpretation tool to identify radicant approaches develops as a fine-grained analytical grid that still leaves room for interpretation. Based on the insight that one can understand the designers’ site thinking through examination of their thinking about a site, the tool offers one set of filters to scrutinize the designers’ site reading (discerning physical, dynamic, and immaterial aspects), and then another set of filters to investigate the designer’s site editing (distinguishing foreignization and domestication along nuanced translation parameters). When applied to a case study of select contemporary European postindustrial transformation projects,21 the filters highlighting dynamic aspects in the work of designers prove particularly relevant. They invite design researchers to pay

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Figure 11.2  Interpretation tool for radicant design approaches of post-industrial sites (sketch by author) The designers’ site thinking can be understood through examination of their thinking about a site, in two moves: how do designers apprehend (read) a site, and how to they translate (edit) it? The tool offers two sets of filters, the first used to scrutinize the designers’ site reading, distinguishing physical, dynamic and immaterial aspects and the second to investigate the designers’ site editing through foreignization and domestication. When designers read physical, dynamic and immaterial site aspects, and choose to edit especially the dynamic ones in foreignizing ways, they aim at designing a site’s change instead of a site’s status, making their design is radicant.

attention to the nature of transient qualities addressed, and to who gains, or loses, from foreignization or domestication. Two publicly driven transformation projects in France, the Euroméditerranée 2 project in Marseille22 and the Ile de Nantes project in Nantes,23 illustrate in extremis how differently designers address transience and why only one classifies as radicant.

Domesticated Flux The designers in Marseille24 read their site of 170 hectares as a topographical form, a dry river valley with a watercourse buried by industrial remains and a coastal cliff accommodating a motorway along the industrial port. Both river valley and motorway comprise highly fluctuating components – namely, water and traffic. The designers suggest editing those so that the river valley becomes a floodable park with new housing estates, and the motorway receives a cover to install a harbor promenade and a business center. This design clearly domesticates the run-down harbor district to correspond to contemporary ideas of a business-driven, climate-adapted city. The flux of water is contained in a remodeled topographical structure, while the flow of people is meant to irrigate a business ensemble. Overall, the design proposes a static end scenario of how the district should look in about 30 years; it aims at creating a form. Here, international companies targeted

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by the business project benefit while low-income communities that run a major flea market and a network of small economies in reused premises on the present site lose out. A radicant design could have translated those transient qualities.

Foreignizing Urban Planning The designers in Nantes25 read exactly such dynamisms on their 330 hectares site comprising an old wharf, adjacent workers’ neighborhoods, and 1960s condominiums. They even established a new method for reading and editing the ever-changing uses of the brownfield and its surrounds, so as to incorporate into their design how people accommodate space, what new uses emerge, and how spaces adapt to host emergent practices, which include crafts, arts, small businesses, cultural initiatives, cafés, and leisure activities. A variety of site actors benefit from this design source-oriented approach. Existing practices and premises become the main sources for translating the postindustrial site into an urban district – of a rather unfamiliar nature, clearly foreignizing the conventional image of the city. This district surprises through unconventional combinations of uses, spaces, and materials, and also through a novel composition of actors driving the design project, including the public clients, various specialists, and neighborhood associations. The overall unfinished aspect, as a city under construction, represents a journey-form. The design can be called radicant as it upgrades transience as the main design driver. As opposed to the conventional masterplan, it introduces a new target-oriented planning tool from a sourceoriented procedure, the Plan Guide.26 These two examples make clear that radicant design emanates from the act of reading the transient qualities of a site while questioning its role in the act of translation: Are transient components contained in a fixed structure, as in Marseille, or does observed transience inspire an overarching planning principle, as in Nantes? Radicantity seems to require a new framing of the postindustrial transformation project, with designers including more than the spatial design professions and disciplines, the public client defining new profiles within its very structure, and new collaborations between designers, public and private sectors, and larger public audiences.

Toward Transience Positing sites as valuables resources leads to the claim that sustainable postindustrial site transformation requires site-responsive design. In the professional context of the past decades, site-specific design of postindustrial sites has rejected tabula rasa approaches, tending instead to museumification. In the shadow zone beyond these extremes, alternative approaches exist, here termed radicant. They accentuate otherwise downplayed site qualities – namely, the transient ones. From a research point of view, monitoring and interpreting the designers’ reading and editing of such qualities produces valuable knowledge on radicant design. From a professional perspective, this knowledge can inform practice by refining principles of steering change, rather than simply shaping status of sites. Instead of a fixed form, radicant design can deliver a journey-form. The act of

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Figure 11.3  Analytical sketches discerning time-based components in the design of the harbour transformation project of Ile de Nantes (Design Alexandre Chemetoff/Atelier de l’Ile de Nantes, client SAMOA) (sketches: Lisa Diedrich, Caroline Dahl)

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design, rather than resource-wasting creation ex nihilo, becomes an act of resourcesaving translation. Engaging sites as resources in design requires research on, and within, practice in a transdisciplinary mindset while widening the professional and disciplinary horizons of those not only supported but also sometimes limited by their respective professions and disciplines. Researchers face the question of how to escape static conceptions of know-how and knowledge and of whether it needs a transient mind after all to transform postindustrial sites sustainably.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

Minister für Stadtentwicklung, Internationale Bauausstellung Emscher-Park. Werkstatt für die Zukunft alter Industriegebiete. Memorandum zu Inhalt und Organisation (Düsseldorf: Ministerium für Stadtentwicklung, Wohnen und Verkehr des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1988). European Network of Living Labs, “What Are Living Labs?,” accessed 5 July 2019, https://enoll.org/. Transformative science is addressed in the following texts: Helga Nowotny, “The Increase of Complexity and its Reduction: Emergent Interfaces between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2005): 15–31; Helga Nowotny, “Transgressive Competence: The Narrative of Expertise,” European Journal of Social Theory 3, no. 1 (2000): 5–21; John V. Pickstone, “Working Knowledges before and after circa 1800: Practices and Disciplines in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine,” Isis 98, no. 3 (2007): 489–516; and Nigel Thrift, “The University of Life,” New Literary History 47, no. 2 (2016): 399–417. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn, eds., “Why site matters,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2005), x–xviii. Thomas Sieverts, “Improving the Quality of Fragmented Urban Landscapes — a Global Challenge!,” in Creating Knowledge: Innovation Strategies for Designing Urban Landscapes, ed. Hille von Seggern, Julia Werner, and Lucia Grosse-Bächle (Berlin: Jovis, 2008), 263. Ellen Braae, Beauty Redeemed: Recycling Post-Industrial Landscape (Risskov: Ikaros, 2015). Lisa Diedrich, Translating Harbourscapes: Site-Specific Design Approaches in Contemporary Harbour Transformation (PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2013). Diedrich, Translating Harbourscapes, 305. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009). Bourriaud, The Radicant, 51. Bourriaud, The Radicant. Burns and Kahn, Site Matters (2005) xv. Burns and Kahn, Site Matters (2005) viii. Elizabeth Meyer, “Site Citations: The Grounds of Modern Landscape Architecture,” in Site Matters, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 93. Reprinted as Chapter 4 in this volume. Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (London: Orion Books, 2003). Eco, Mouse or Rat, 34.

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18 19 20 21 22

23

24

25

26

Umberto Eco, Quasi dasselbe mit anderen Worten. Über das Übersetzen (Munich: dtv, 2009), 67–96. Eco, Mouse or Rat, 192. Eco, Mouse or Rat, 88–103. Diedrich, Translating Harbourscapes, 97–286. The urban transformation project Euroméditerranée 2 is addressed in the following literature: EPAEM, Euroméditerranée Marseille: Le coeur d’une grande métropole méditerranéenne (Marseille: EPAEM, 2010); EPAEM, Marseille, le temps de la métropole: Euroméd 2: Francois Leclercq avec Agence Ter, Rémy Marciano, Jacques Sbriglio, SETEC (Marseille: EPAEM, 2010); and Leclerq Design Team, “Euroméditerannée 2, Marseille,” competition documents, 2009. The urban transformation project Ile de Nantes is addressed in the following literature: Alexandre Chemetoff, Le Plan-Guide (Suites) (Paris: Sautereau Editeurs + Archibooks, 2010); Chemetoff, “L’urbanisme comme œuvre,” Urbanisme 372 (2010): 44–46; Alexandre Chemetoff and Paul-Henry Henry, Visits: Town and Territory — Architecture in Dialogue (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009); and SAMOA, Ile de Nantes. Un grand projet pour une métropole européenne, Catalogue d’exposition du projet Ile de Nantes (Nantes: SAMOA, 2007). The urban transformation project Euroméditerrannée 2 was designed by architect François Leclercq, with landscape architect Agence Ter (Paris) and architects Rémy Marciano (Marseille), Jacques Sbriglio (Marseille), and SETEC engineers; the public client is EPAEM établissement public d’aménagement Euroméditerranée. The urban transformation project Ile de Nantes was designed by architect and landscape architect Alexandre Chemetoff/Atelier de l’Ile de Nantes; the public client is SAMOA société d’aménagement de la métropole ouest-atlantique. Alexandre Chemetoff, Le Plan-Guide (Suites) (Paris: Sautereau Editeurs + Archibooks, 2010).

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12. Defin弞ng Urban S弞tes: Toward EcotoneTh弞nk弞ng for an Urban弞z弞ng World Andrea Kahn

How does an urban site gain design definition? What delineates its boundaries? How does it engage its surrounds? What determines its scale? This essay works through the problem of site definition as a necessarily indefinite task, especially when looking at terms of site definition in urban design. As used here, urban site makes double reference to both the whole city and limited sites within it, since even the smallest urban design intervention always speaks to the project of city-building writ large, and defining applies to both a process and its outcomes. At issue are means of site definition in urban design and the site knowledge they produce. In design discourse, the qualifier urban attaches to the concept of site to no significant effect. This should not be the case. When representing urban sites, or relationships between sites in urban situations, designers draw on concepts, terminologies, and graphic conventions that pertain to all kinds of sites, in general. Common terms (place, ground, context, scale, location, boundary, etc.) remain largely indiscriminate with respect to differences in setting or settlement conditions. Without benefit of language expressly applicable to urban sites, their definition, as a subset of sites in general, remains tied to notions of property and ownership, to a physically delimited and containable parcel of land. A site is defined as urban adjectivally, based either on geographic milieu (an urban design site refers to a limited place within an area already designated urban or to an urban area in its entirety) or physical size (urban design sites are presumed to be larger than architectural sites and smaller than regional ones). To frame a site in explicitly urban terms, I use examples from New York City to lay out an operationally based definition concerned with what a site “does” in the city rather than what (or where) it “is.” Then, I turn to the role of representation in the site definition process. Finally, I conclude by offering up new terms to address the complexity inherent in urban sites. These terms provide conceptual tools applicable to urban analysis as well as urban design. By representing sites as having multiple boundary conditions and multiple scales, they frame a new conceptual model for describing, interpreting, and analyzing places slated for urban design intervention.

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Figure 12.1  Anonymous, Palmanuova Plan, 1713.

Defining Urban Sites The point is not that drawing boundaries is somehow impermissible … but that the permeability of those boundaries has to be constantly reasserted; more than this, that the space in which they are drawn is not a simple plane. Each side folds over and implicates the other in its constitution.1 Two drawings, a 1713 anonymous plan of the ideal Renaissance plan of Palmanuova and a 16th-century Leonardo da Vinci sketch of Milan, register an often-overlooked but significant distinction in the way designers define site limits and how they understand site scale. The Palmanuova plan depicts the urban site as a clearly bounded place. In this walled enclave intended to be impenetrable to attack, the city is described as a fixed object in an open field. The drawing’s centered composition, inset textual inscriptions, and heavy dark lines enclosing fortifications reinforce the reading of a city figure afloat in empty space. The plan strongly delineates inside and outside. Inside the walls of this city rendered as discrete object, everything sits carefully contained in its proper place.

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Figure 12.2  Leonardo da Vinci, View of Milan, sixteenth century. (Courtesy of Biblioteca Ambrosiana)

In stark contrast, da Vinci’s sketch swirls with the movements of many trajectories crisscrossing an unbounded space. Radiating lines activate the drawing’s surface, projecting an image that extends outward beyond the edge of the page. Neither the bird’s-eye view at the bottom nor the plan above inscribes full enclosure. This drawing, which depicts a set of active interrelations, makes it impossible to locate the edge of the city. What lies inside its boundary and what lies outside is unclear. The limits of this urban site cannot be pinned down in the horizontal or the vertical dimension. Its boundaries remain porous, its figure incomplete.

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Comparing these historical images illustrates an important difference between an idea of site linked to conventional notions of place and one disentangled from notions of limited location. The single Palmanuova plan conceives the city as stable and rigidly bounded. The composite sketch of Milan shows an active setting with permeable limits, an urban site comprised of many overlapping spaces. In Leonardo’s image, no border divides site from situation. Rather than equating boundary with a line of separation, this sketch encourages viewers to ask how an urban site links to its outside. Instead of creating divisions that frame simple enclosures, as Palmanuova does, the looser and more porous image of Milan offers an alternative conception of site limits and scale. It captures the complexity found in actual urban situations. Consider, for example, the high-density Riverside South residential project on a large lot extending north from 56th to 72nd Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Understood narrowly as legally owned property, this site – developed in the late 1990s by Donald Trump – obviously has a fixed boundary line. However, since the urban impact of the development project reaches well beyond the edge of the parcel, when considered in urban terms the significance of this legal perimeter diminishes greatly. Known until 2019 as “Trump City”, this urban site includes not only the ground under the residential towers but also those areas affected by their construction. For instance, a subway station three blocks to the east required renovation to accommodate the expected load of thousands of new commuters, and a waste treatment facility 80 blocks to the north in Harlem was built to bear the infrastructural burden of the new high-density towers. Forcing changes to New York City’s subway and sewage systems, the property limits of the Trump site are hardly impervious to the many forces that ultimately establish the project’s urban condition. Adopting an operational definition of the site – based on how it works in, with, through, and upon its urban situation – alters the understanding of Trump City’s “limits.” Treating urban sites as operational constructs recasts their boundedness. Instead of demarcating simple metes and bounds, defining urban site limits requires accounting for co-present but not necessarily spatially coincident fields of influence and effect. Urban sites encompass proximate as well as nonproximate relations, physical as well as nonphysical attributes.2 As settings for interactions and intersections that transgress abstract property divisions, urban sites are conditioned by, and contribute to, their surroundings. Times Square, in New York, easily fits such description: a place whose identity is comprised by interactions between a global circuit of entertainment (the Disney Corporation, Condé Nast), a metropolitan crossroads of commercial developments (Broadway and Seventh Avenue), and a local district of direct and imaginary engagements (Broadway shows, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, ABC’s Good Morning America, the minimal remains of an erstwhile thriving sex industry). The specificity of this urban site is construed through an array of co-present but not coincident operations. Its reality – or, more accurately, its realities – are constituted through the experience of radically shifting programs in constant interaction. What defines Times Square as an urban site is a function of the crossings of spatial networks, each with its

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own degree of spatial extension. The determination of its boundary – or again, more accurately, its boundaries – depends on how far afield these networks, and their influence, reach. As an urban site emplaced in numerous local, global, metropolitan, and regional settings, Times Square ties into diverse scaling processes at one time. While it provides a particularly vivid example of the multiscaled site, urban sites – wherever they may be located and whatever their size – will be similarly constituted. Hell’s Kitchen, lying just two blocks to the west, operates at just as many scales. The area is at once a residential neighborhood, a commercial district, and a nodal intersection of transportation infrastructures. It is the locus of a national highway system (entering midtown Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel); regional, cross-country, and international bus lines (arriving at and departing from the Port Authority Terminal); a metropolitan public transit system (subways and buses); global speculative ventures (the Hudson Yards luxury development); citywide commercial markets (specialty food shops, restaurants catering to immigrant taxi drivers); and local communities (Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, with its own association). Numerous fields of operation converge at this one place, each involving different scales of activity. As such, the scale of this site cannot be characterized as singly or simply urban. Rather, this place operates at local, metropolitan, regional, national, and global scales. As an urban site, it is scaled through a set of dynamic functions created by fluid interactions between many differentially extensive processes.3 Embedded within, and constitutive of, so many framing contexts, such multiscalar urban sites open to diverse interpretation.4 They are saturated with difference, permeated with irreducible diversity: heterological, to borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin.5 They offer up myriad dimensions for consideration (economic, social, historical, physical, political, haptic), each of which situates the site within a web of specific associations. In terms of their limits and their scales, urban sites present designers with shifting and potentially conflicting identities. As such, they are best characterized as resulting from “a matrix of forces, impossible to recoup and therefore impossible to resolve.”6 They are crisis objects that destabilize our certainty of the real.7 Urban sites are dynamic rather than static, porous rather than contained, “messy” like da Vinci’s Milan sketch rather than “neat” like the ideal plan of Palmanuova. Defining them in design terms thus does not come down to establishing some unique identity of a limited physical place, but quite the opposite. It involves recognizing the overlay and interplay of multiple realities operating at the same time, on the same place. How designers give definition to these multivalent and multiscalar urban design sites, however, remains an open question.

Representing Urban Sites However forcefully the real and the represented world resist fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction, uninterrupted exchange goes on between them.8

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Figure 12.3  Rodolfo Lanciani, Forma Urbis Romae, plate 15, 1893–1901.

Figure 12.4  Giambattista Nolli, Rome Plan, 1748.

Given an operational definition of urban sites as multiscalar, heteroglot settings for interactions and intersections, how do designers think through their complexity and multivalence? This question raises the issue of site study and with it the means, methods, and modes of site definition processes. As in any design process, ideas of site come through making. Designers confront the challenge of defining urban sites through a creative process of representation.

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The artifacts of this process, representations such as drawings and models, do not simply illustrate what designers think about (in this case, the city); more profoundly, they reveal how designers think. The identities of an urban site can be construed many ways. Mappings can present each “reality” separately and attempt to position each in relative terms as a function of shared descriptive and analytic parameters (scale, drawing type, categories of information, etc.). Or they can project a heterogeneous urban condition by utilizing representational techniques that actively combine distinct parameters. By bringing different realities into contact and establishing methods to chart their interplay, the process of site representation works as the staging ground of site thinking. It is a place of assembly and a point of departure for constructing relations between and across different forms of site knowledge. In common usage, representation is a word loaded with meaning; it has political, philosophical, symbolic, and aesthetic dimensions, visual and nonvisual connotations. Even in the relatively focused vocabulary of design, representation is a term subject to misunderstanding. Used as a noun, it refers to things made. Used as a verb, it refers to a process of making. But these two meanings still do not make the full extent of representation’s role in site definition apparent. Representation is a conceptual tool that orders understanding of the multivalence of urban sites. It is a means of literally thinking through their many realities – presencing as well as positioning them in relative terms. Site representations propose working hypotheses for comprehending and testing working definitions of urban site. To grasp the full import of this idea, one first has to recognize the expansive potential of representation: that in the most profound sense, representation is not about depicting reality, but about making knowledge. For design, it is a mode of conceptual operation, a process of knowledge formation. More than simply amassing and organizing facts, figures, and impressions of a given condition, the descriptions and analyses that designers produce actually generate the knowledge necessary to engage a given condition as a site. Site representation is not a matter of getting a reality right as much as a matter of constructing forms of knowledge that can cope with multiple realities. In this sense, site drawings, models, and discourses are never mere second-order redescriptions of some preexisting condition as much as they are evidence of thought in formation, a thought about what the urban site might be. At the most basic level, representation gives definition to the urban site because it is a process in which different ideas of site settle down or settle in – perhaps an idea found through urban history, as in Rodolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis Romae mappings, or perhaps an idea based on city form, as shown by Nolli’s well-known figure grounds of the same city. Each mapping proposes an identifiable site reality, because each operates as a distinctive mode of site thinking. To ask which of two representations depicts the real site is meaningless, just as it makes no sense to ask which of two ways of thinking is correct. Distinct site representations produce different artifacts, but each artifact instantiates a similarly dialogic and creative performance, an “experiment in contact with the real.”9 Site representations construct site knowledge; they make site concepts manifest by design.

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Five Concepts for Urban Site Thinking For urban design, site concepts matter. More than merely discursive, they act as powerful tools to structure site thinking. Yet without language to discern between different kinds of sites, the ways designers represent and engage with urban sites cannot be situationally derived. Generic concepts only allow for generic site thinking. But design discourse has no specifically urban site concepts on offer. The five new terms outlined in the following sections conceptualize sites in meaningful ways for urban design.

Mobile Ground Much of urban design, as a field of design action, involves framing constructive conversations among different interests and agents in the city. To be effective, designers at work on projects with urban aspirations must account for and negotiate between many players invested in the future of a particular locale: workers, owners, neighbors, and builders; politicians, developers, and bankers; preservationists, ecologists, and economists; to name but a few. Each interested party construes the urban design site according to its own terms, adopting its own preferred modes of representation.* They all claim to know it, but one player’s knowledge rarely conforms to the knowledge held by others. Different lenses filter these understandings. As concerns shift back and forth between various takes on the same place, these oscillations define a variable field where the constructed and the real are not opposed.10 They inscribe a mobile ground where urban sites are understood as dynamic and provisional spaces, as points of departure to parts unknown rather than places of arrival of fixed address.11 Conceiving of urban sites as mobile ground foregrounds their provisional condition, reminding designers that sites remain subject to change beyond their control.⸋ On mobile ground, urban design actions are best considered in strategic terms – focused on framing urban relations and structuring urban processes.12 Mobile ground describes a space of progression, slippage, and continual revaluation, where diverse realities tip over, into, and out of each other. It is where site boundaries and site images shift, bend, and flex, depending on who is looking.

* “Most conceptions of suburban landscapes miss sites of multifamily housing partly because of conventional ways of measuring and understanding urbanized areas. For instance, standard geographic units of analysis used for mapping, analysis, and decision making such as census tracts, forecast analysis zones, and transportation analysis zones poorly capture relatively small but dense areas of suburban apartments. Maps at the tract scale, for example, show few areas outside the cores of the old, central cities with residential densities higher than ten people per acre.” P. Hess, “Neighborhoods Apart” □ “For members of the design and planning fields, waking up in the Anthropocene unsettles previous thinking about relations between humankind and the sites and planet they inhabit. The Anthropocene must spur a new search for professional attitudes, responsibilities, and even a new look at the ethics of the design disciplines.” D. Sijmons, “In the Anthropocene site matters in four ways”

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Site Reach The issue of scale is key to the definition of urban sites, influencing how designers understand the context of their work and how they define the geographic extent of their areas of concern. Because urban sites participate in many differently scaled networks at once, talking about an urban scale, as a singular measure or the attribute of some entity, obscures the multiscalar condition of urban sites. Urban locales register on multiple scalar networks, in some cases at different times, in other cases simultaneously.** Site reach measures the extent, range, and level of interactions between a localized place and its urban surroundings. It gauges vicinities of exchange and intersection between places, reciprocal and nonreciprocal relations, inscribed within and contributing to co-present urban spatial networks. For urban design, the concept of site reach proposes a much-needed alternative to a conventional, nested, and hierarchical model of scale that identifies different scales with differently sized territories and as such obscures the multiscalar condition of urban sites. Urban sites are constructed by a complex overlay of distinct but interrelated uses, boundaries, forms, and temporal sequences. In any given locale, variously scaled interactions establish a unique set of linkages to other places. The reaches of a site depend on the spatial and operational extension of those associations and connectivities that tie it to other places. By situating any limited place within the space of the city as a whole, site reach reinforces the fact that any urban design intervention, no matter how limited in physical scope, participates in a project of city-building writ large.□□

Site Construction Although considered a predesign activity, site analysis inevitably prefigures and reflects design intentions. The logics and values structuring initial site observations are always and already prescribed by ideas about the future modifications imagined for a place, and, conversely, the analysis process initiates a way of thinking about place that resonates through all subsequent phases of design.□□□

** “The practice of line drawing also has relevance for a hierarchy of issues concerned with the goals and values affected by the location of those lines. These encompass social, political, and legal private and public actions impacted by where and how those lines get drawn, what the resulting boundaries delineate, how space gets used, who determines its uses, what effects it will have, and on whom. Links among the hierarchies of scale issues and social value issues are seldom recognized or dealt with directly.” P. Marcuse, “From gerrymandering to co-mandering: re-drawing the lines” □□ “The foremost significance of context arises in its immanent capacity to foster strong positions toward the spatial aspects of the city and the quality of the urban life it triggers, rather than in focus on the individual structure. Such an understanding of context could enforce an architectural practice that is both critical and engaged: one that does not comply with the immediate forces acting upon it but projects an idea of the city as its constituent element.” E. Komez Daglioglu, “Reclaiming Context” □□□ “Site analysis, at a large scale and recorded through detached rational mappings, has given way to site-readings and interpretations drawn from first-hand experience and from a specific site’s social and ecological histories. These site-readings form a strong conceptual beginning for a design response, and are registered in memorable drawings and mappings conveying a site’s physical properties, operations, and sensual impressions.” E. Meyer, “Site Citations”

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In urban design, more often than not, sites are actively produced. Site construction is a site study process that yields a designed understanding of site through consciously selective viewing. The site definitions it produces are distinct from the design decision that results in establishing project boundaries (the determination delimiting where design actions physically take place).13 This site study method embraces design agendas and asserts the interpretive basis of any site-viewing process. To define a site as urban, the process of site construction accounts for multiple fields of influence and effect, each with distinct spatial limits that in concert construe a territory of design concern. It recognizes, but does not attempt to reconcile, heterogeneous urban orders and logics. By not oversimplifying site complexity, this method of site study initiates and supports nonreductive urban design actions. These site analyses underscore the multivalence of urban sites, making of it a key issue for urban design attention. Regional, metropolitan, and local architectural; moving or static; large and small scale; close and distant: each vantage point brings different aspects of a site to light and each way of organizing site information (politically, economically, formally, historically, spatially, etc.) results in a distinct site configuration. Individually, these expose a predilection toward some combination of the city’s myriad characters.* Drawn together, the many approaches begin to approximate the multivalence built into the urban landscape. Rather than conceive of sites as having one single bounding condition, site construction posits that site boundaries shift in relation to the position – the physical location and ideological stance – of their beholder. It dispels the illusion of the city as either containable or controllable by hypothesizing the urban situation as a porous and shifting space.14

Unbound Sites Any design action for a limited site in a city is at once influenced by and has consequences for the city as site. The impossibility of isolating one urban locale, operationally, from its surrounds lends urban design its inherently public dimension, and acknowledging this public dimension prompts a critical reassessment of how site boundary is typically understood in design. Irrespective of whether rights to a limited development parcel are privately, publicly, or jointly held, design actions in urban contexts have consequence beyond narrowly construed limits of legal metes and bounds. The unbound site uncouples the definition of site boundary from notions of ownership and property. It views site limits as open to configuration according to various forms and forces of

* “Part of preparing a place to become a site and then a new place involves the formation of new narratives. Familiar to anyone who observes real estate development is the narrative onslaught that begins almost immediately as developers and real estate brokers tout the prestigious address and urbane lifestyles associated with a proposed apartment building. Planners and designers are complicit in this process. Their presence indicates a seriousness of purpose and even inevitability to the project and their reports and images portray and publicize the new place. The first act of real estate development is the narrative remaking of the site.” R. Beauregard, “From Place to Site”

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determination.* Rather than drawing a line between urban and site (equating boundary with a line of separation), urban designers need to ask how many ways sites are linked to an “outside,” to spaces, times, and places beyond their present and immediate control.** Defining site boundary in terms of a single property line produces a circumscribed figure, contained, isolatable, and controllable (the site defined as an entity under design control). Designers need instead to recognize border porosities and to treat scale as a measure of boundary permeability. In this sense, the urban site is unbound by virtue of it having many different structuring limits simultaneously in play, not because its boundaries are simply effaced. Urban sites are comprised of multiple fields (areas under design control, areas of influence and areas of effect) each delimited according to its own operational horizons.15

Urban Constellation Context is what the site is not. Yet urban sites exist and participate in many contexts.⸭⸭ How, then, to define the confines of urban sites? The traditional idea of context implies that sites derive definition from their larger situation. Seeing a site “in context,” however, depends on maintaining a clear distinction between inside and outside, thereby obscuring the difference between the boundaries of a building lot and the limits of an urban site. At once a concept and a process, urban constellation blurs the line between context and site by demarcating site interactions across multiple fields of urban operation. It refers to a dynamic relational construct – formed by myriad interactions between variable forces (physical, social, political, economic, etc.) animated across multiple scales (as embedded in local, metropolitan, regional, and global spatial networks) – and the process through which that construct is defined.⸭⸭⸭ The process of urban constellation involves

* “Grounds operate with great nuance. They resist hierarchy. There are no axes, centers or other obviously explicit means of providing orientation. Single, uncomplicated meanings are rare. Instead, there are open networks, partial fields, radical repetition, and suggestive fragments that overlap, weave together, and constantly transform. Within this textural density edges, seams, junctures, and other gaps reveal moments of fertile discontinuity where new relationships might grow. Relationships among grounds, are multiple, shifting, and inclusive. They engage the particular and the concrete rather than the abstract and the general.” R. Dripps, “Groundwork” ** “Epidemiology and other fields of medicine have revealed that our human skin, once considered a significant boundary, is not so discrete. The work of Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist who has written about cancer and the environment, provides a case in point. Her reconsideration of the human body’s boundary with landscape has been both poetic and radical. Steingraber emphasizes that humans actually incorporate into their bodies the molecules of landscapes where their food is grown.” K. Hill “Shifting Sites” ⸭⸭ “At any given moment, a single landscape has different meanings to different people; they understand its significance depending on their interests, their viewpoints, and their values. Beyond that, landscapes change over time; they evolve as material realities and also as ideas. Stories about a single site overlap and vary. Sometimes they contradict each other, but one doesn’t invalidate the rest.” J. Wolff, “Sites, Stories, Representations, Citizens” ⸭⸭⸭ “Identification of a boundary object encourages collaborative focus among different communities with dissimilar perspectives and goals. A boundary object also allows for dialogic interaction without conflating diverse intentions or perceptions; it creates space for sharing ideas and simultaneously holding onto divergent understandings” T. Way, “Urban Site as Collective Knowledge”

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integrating knowledge of local place-based urban characteristics with knowledge of largerscale spatial logics that underlie contemporary urbanism in all its forms. It problematizes the received idea of context as some outside, impassive backdrop. Constructing urban constellations is not simply a matter of enlarging the contextual frame through which a particular place may be viewed. Rather, the concept of urban constellation requires that designers situate their urban sites in multiple contextual, or scalar, frames simultaneously Constellations foreground context itself as a variable. Further, by projecting site and context as mutually implicated in the other’s constitution, urban constellations reinforce understandings of site as a relational construct.

Defining the Indefinite The concepts outlined in the preceding sections consider urban design sites as relational constructs. In so doing, they oblige relational site thinking. They invite designers to consider how urban design sites differ from architectural ones on more than simply locational or dimensional grounds, emphasizing that limited locales in cities incorporate urban processes, systems, and logics that qualify and extend to the city as a whole. In lieu of adopting topology (or topography) to generate schematic site representations, these five concepts set up a site definition process grounded in tropology.16 Slippages in meaning between the terms intentionally figure urban sites as dynamic and processive. Their purpose is not to stabilize meaning but to challenge the very idea of a stable urban site. These tools frame a new conceptual model for thinking about, and thinking through, urban sites. They construe the process of urban site definition as one of defining the indefinite. Instead of defining site in a narrow lexical sense, these concepts activate gaps between sign and meaning to characterize urban sites as spatially elastic and temporally provisional. Each recasts received ideas of boundary and scale in a slightly different way, yet all rebound around the same underlying point: that for urban design, what matters is gaining understanding of the city in the site.

Ecotone Thinking (Postscript, 2019)17 As American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce has written, we can only set out from where we find ourselves at the time. If, at the turn of the 21st century, it seemed vital to devise concepts that animated a dynamic understanding of urban sites and their delimiting conditions, 20 years on an even greater necessity to blur boundaries prevails. In 2020, urban refers not simply to city centers as historically constituted but to a dispersed mosaic of rural, peri-urban, and high-density settlement patterns. Constructed environments today defy classification according to simple or fixed categories. They mix and mess things up, physically and conceptually, resisting characterization by conventional terms such as natural or human-made, city, or country. The unseemly hybrid conditions of the Anthropocene fail to neatly map onto established disciplinary research categories or comport with long-standing professional practice domains.18 If this were not reason enough to reimagine urban design as an operational field, urban sites today face existential

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environmental threats. Wicked problems like climate change, coastal rise, resource scarcity, and weather weirding render habitual, siloed ways of thinking and acting obsolete. Blurry, uncertain, contemporary circumstances call for a new habit of mind. In “Search for the Great Community,” John Dewey writes that “all distinctly human action has to be learned, and the very heart […] of learning is creation of habitudes.” Habits, explains Dewey, bind humans to orderly and established ways of action; they determine channels through which thought operates.19 What if the habit of mind needed today were based on a metaphor of the ecotone? Dynamic, unstable situations reconfirm the relevance of tropology as a model for thought. Defined in strict ecological terms, an ecotone refers to any transitional area between two ecosystems, such as grassland and forest or forest and river edge. It designates an interstice, a region where adjacent yet distinct ecological patches come together. As an interstice, an ecotone can also be described as a thickened edge, a material boundary space rather than an abstract boundary line. As places of transition, ecotones are essentially spatial relational constructs wherein one system impacts, influences, animates change to another. As a zone of interface, an ecotone attains its specific set of ecological features by the force of interactions among the adjacent ecological systems. The distinctiveness of any one ecotone gains definition from the unique interactions between systems, rather than by traits associated with a “place in and of itself.” Ecotones have dynamic qualities, altering in width and position over time, responding to changes in the environment. Ecotones foster interchange between species and nutrients. As different communities mix and mingle, increased biodiversity creates species richness and adds biomass density. Ecotones yield beneficial ecological results, called edge effects. Ecotones, as overlap zones, exhibit conditions that just as easily could describe urban design sites. The notion equally captures (metaphorically at least) the inherently multivalent aspects of urban design as a field constituted by many specialized areas of expertise – from planning to design, history to engineering, policy to geomorphology, economics to ecology, to list but a few. Inhabiting the metaphor of the ecotone suggests a path toward habit change. A few lines after Dewey introduces learning as the creation of habitudes, he notes: “Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habit.”20 This remarkable sentence can be interpreted two ways. Reading the word secreted as concealed, stashed, or squirreled away, it recalls the inhibitive powers of habits of mind. Alternatively, read secreted as released, emanated, generated from the interstices, and the same statement suddenly points to productive ecotone-like spaces in-between orderly and established ways of working – underscoring interstices as the space where ideas are born. Conceived as any instance of overlap or adjacency, ecotone space provides room for divergent values, ideas, positions, and practices to come into direct contact, to constellate. Ecotones, literally mobile ground, afford a reminder that urban design and urban sites – the discipline and the constructed places upon which that discipline focuses – never settle down or stabilize. Both remain ever-evolving situations, transformed and transformational, by their nature. Acknowledging that dynamic relations

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lend specific qualities to a particular physical urban site stands in stark contrast to the idea that uniqueness derives from unchanging, inherent qualities belonging to a place in and of itself (genus loci). Reflecting on the particularity of urban design as a composite field, relational dynamics also apply. Undertaking urban design in the Anthropocene, a period of intensifying uncertainties, places new demands on architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, and policy makers with an interest in and concern for physical environments. On a practical plane, urban projects require cross-sector exchange, communication between fields, and collaboration across disciplines and professions at levels previously unimagined. In short, the current situation calls for a radical reconstellation. Having lost the comfort of knowing exactly how to define where we live (Is this urban or landscape?), as well as the luxury of clear-cut lines between our domains of professional responsibility (Is this a planning problem, a design problem, a political problem, an engineering problem?), compels those who share a commitment to city-making to critically revisit how they look at, think through, and act upon habitats and habits of mind. Since its inception, the urban design field has established itself as a diverse and continually expanding community harboring, among others, scholars focused on history and theory, engineers committed to infrastructure, landscape architects concerned with open space, behavioral scientists studying environmental psychology, design visionaries speculating on future scenarios, urban planners committed to social equity, urban agronomists exploring new types of food production, and on and on. It has accrued a rich and diverse array of working knowledges and modes of operation. If urban design were to problem-frame and problem-solve according to an ecotonal model, developing tools and techniques to navigate across its traditionally separated but practically intertwined knowledge areas, it could instate a new habit of mind, with the potential to synergize previously isolated resources in truly transformative ways. Ecotone thinking, emerging from the five urban site concepts outlined earlier, points toward a mobilization strategy that translates those concepts into action (or even activism), and also offers an operational and conceptual framework to initiate much needed changes to urban transformation discourse and practice. Ecotone thinking proposes a model for creatively working in gaps and overlaps, particularly suited to the interstices-rich knowledge/practice landscape of urban design and particularly attuned to wicked problems. Considered from all angles, ecotone as concept offers a provocative lens onto urban design as a multidisciplinary field with still untapped capacity. As a metaphor, it reveals opportunities for a practice and discipline characterized by its many openings – a multivalent, potent, and potentially transdisciplinary space for growing ideas. Ecotone thinking constructs relationships between things previously perceived as unrelated or separate. It creates new value by crossing the line. By messing with what still gets taught as the “right way” to work, by inhabiting the interstices, ecotone thinking harbors the promise to retool institutionalized habits of mind. This going too far, beyond the habitual, is exactly what is required if we hope to rise to the challenges of a rapidly changing urbanizing world that forms part of an increasingly threatened, and threatening, earth system.

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Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 72. Melvyn Webber, “Urban Place and Non-place Urban Realm,” in M. Webber et al., Explorations in Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1964). Neil Brenner has written extensively on the issue of scale and scaling processes. For a discussion of urban scale, see “The Urban Question as a Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (2000): 361–378. For a discussion of the fluidity of scale, see Erik Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale,” in Spaces of Globalization, ed. K. Cox (New York: Guildford Press, 1997), 137–166. See Nigel Thrift on the definition of context as “active” and “differentially extensive” in Spatial Formations (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 3. On heterology, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), 56. On heteroglossia, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 291. The notion of the city as a “‘crisis-object’ which destabilizes our certainty of ‘the real’” comes from Robert Shields, “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do about It: Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory,” in Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, ed. A. King (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 227. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 254. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Athlone, 1988), 12. On the constructed and the real, see Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,” http://www.ensmp. fr/∼latour/articles/article/92-BECK-CK.html (April 2004). “Places are best thought of not so much as enduring sites, but as moments of encounter, not so much as presents, fixed in space and time, but as variable events, twists and fluxes of interaction.” Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Re-Imagining the Urban (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 30. See Aarden Hank, “Nomadic Thoughts 1: LA,” LAFORUM Newsletter (September 1992): 5; and “Nomadic Thoughts 2: NJ,” LA FORUM Newsletter (February 1993): 7. On determining urban design site boundaries, see Edmund Bacon et al., “The City Image,” in Man and the Modern City, ed. Elizabeth Green, Jeanne R. Lowe, and Kenneth Walker (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). For a more extensive discussion of site construction, see my “From the Ground Up: Programming the Urban Site,” Harvard Architectural Review 10 (1998): 54–71. For a more elaborate discussion of the different areas of a design site, see Ch. 1, “Why Site Matters.” On the theory of tropes, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 31–38. This postscript is adapted from my essay “Ecotone Thinking: Exploring the Promise of Landscape and Design for the Urbanizing World,” ‘Scape 15 (2016): 140–143. For a discussion of hybrids, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954), 160. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 160.

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13. Portfolio: Sites, Stories, Representations, Citizens Jane Wolff

Every site tells many stories. At any given moment, a single landscape has different meanings to different people; they understand its significance depending on their interests, their viewpoints, and their values. Beyond that, landscapes change over time; they evolve as material realities and as ideas. Stories about a single site overlap and vary. Sometimes they contradict each other, but one doesn’t invalidate the rest. A site’s many possible interpretations evoke the film Rashomon,1 in which characters account for the same events in substantially different ways according to their own roles in the action. In sites subject to pressure for change, plural meanings create what film scholars call a Rashomon effect, in which “a combination of a difference of perspective and equally plausible accounts … with the inability to disqualify any particular version of the truth … [is] surrounded by the social pressure for closure.”2 To recognize that sites embody plural stories turns site design into a dilemma. Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers are trained to make specific proposals that assume predictable consequences. Those proposals rest on representations that conflate different perspectives into a single resolved view. They assume that history is linear and that the present is coherent. Even scenario-based design deals with a narrow range of site interpretations and possible outcomes. But the Rashomon effect calls for “ways of thinking, knowing and remembering … for understanding complex and ambiguous situations on the small and large scale, in both the routines of everyday life and in its extraordinary moments.”3 The studies on the following pages propose representational strategies to acknowledge and document a site’s plural stories. Conceived to address large scales, complicated situations, and contradictory interests, their goal is not to delineate exact plans but to frame terms of discussion among the range of people with a stake in the future. They design conversations. The portfolio includes excerpts from “Saint Louis, Brick City,” an account of bricks in relation to the geology, geography, economy, and culture of Saint Louis, Missouri, and “Bay Lexicon,” an examination of the constructed shoreline of San Francisco Bay. One project appeared in a design publication about material landscapes;4 the other began as an installation in a science museum and will be published as a field guide.5 Meant to provoke thought rather than to adhere to a rigid method, this work asks what design can do in tangled, open-ended, large-scale landscapes that designers don’t

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control. Interpreting varied meanings for the same site and translating those meanings among people with different expertise and values expands the disciplinary boundaries of design. It requires the investigation of wide-ranging subjects. It means the representation of findings with strategies borrowed from broadly accessible narrative media like film, painting, and scientific illustration. It depends on the description of rigorous content in a purposely unstudied tone. Designing conversations blurs the boundaries between scholarship and activism.

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Writing and Drawing

Figure 13.1  Pages from Saint Louis, Brick City. Drawings serve as introductions to each topic in the essay—and as graphic summaries. (Courtesy of Jane Wolff)

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“Saint Louis, Brick City” offers an alternative to the standard narrative that Saint Louis, Missouri, is a site in decline. This illustrated essay represents Saint Louis as a landscape in perpetual metamorphosis. It situates present difficulties in the context of change in order to argue for the possibility of a meaningful future. The essay examines an everyday object, a brick, to pursue a series of separate but interwoven stories about the city’s evolving natural and cultural history. Though it was produced for a book whose main audience is landscape architects, its subjects extend beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries into regional geography, geology, local and national law, social history, technology, economics, and racial politics. Its methods, borrowed partly from the design disciplines and partly from the humanities, use the complementary media of writing and drawing to tell stories in different ways. The text lays out a chronology of the urban landscape’s construction and disassembly and comments on the visible and invisible forces driving those processes. Images punctuating the text distill and describe the landscape’s essential spatial relationships. Running notes explain technical details and cite scholarly sources. The essay’s plural subjects and parallel methods bring together information that is usually considered separately; its juxtapositions illuminate associations that often go unnoticed. It articulates connections that have been obscured by time, buried underground, suppressed by social forces, and overlooked in their ordinariness. Why retell these stories, and why now? As people wrestle with the uncertainties of climate change, professional audiences would do well to remember that they work in the context of social and environmental forces beyond their control, and general audiences need to know that simple things can evoke sophisticated questions about the dynamic landscapes they live in. “Saint Louis, Brick City” describes the past and the present as a way of setting terms for discussion about the future. It extends design’s tools and subjects as a way of extending designers’ agency.

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Changing Scales

Figure 13.2  Sequential drawings from Saint Louis, Brick City. The first drawing shows a specimen brick; the second describes the geography of brick manufacture and commerce; the third situates Saint Louis in relation to national and international labor pools; the fourth is an inventory of ornamental brick types; and the fifth addresses the deployment of bricks in the assembly of the city. (Courtesy of Jane Wolff)

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To understand a simple thing as a key to varied, abstract, far-reaching subjects, a person has to situate it in plural contexts. That requires documentation at a range of scales, in different moments, and through different means. In “Saint Louis, Brick City,” writing establishes connections between the everyday object of a brick and the actors, events, and processes shaping the landscape; it illuminates causes and effects. But words remain intangible. Drawings make essential relationships visible; they show that something embodied and persistent results from and reveals immaterial forces and dynamic processes. Drawing portrays spatial and physical contexts. It anchors bricks to sites. The drawings in “Saint Louis, Brick City” work in series. Like the images in a storyboard or an old-fashioned filmstrip, they provide the essay’s narrative spine. The first drawing, at the scale of the body, pictures something ordinary and familiar – a specimen of common brick. Then, to represent the conditions that produced an entire city from such specimens, the sequence changes scales and conventions. An aerial perspective of Saint Louis reveals the geomorphological connection between the financial district on the Mississippi River and the clay mines and brick factories hidden in a tributary valley. The Mississippi appears again in a map that locates Saint Louis in relation to the labor markets of Europe and the American South. An array of ornamental bricks catalogues the technological capacities of local manufacturers. A section perspective of streets and blocks indicates the structures and surfaces where individual bricks were aggregated into complex systems. These drawings depart from the standard conventions of design representation deliberately. Bringing the rigor of design thinking to figural representation expands content beyond what plan, section, and elevation allow; it enables the construction and articulation of essential site information that doesn’t conform to measured conventions. Drawing in series creates meaning between images as well as within them.6 Making drawings that general audiences can read opens the discussion of a site to experts from other fields and to citizens whose collective decisions will determine its future.

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Frames of Reference

Figure 13.3  Explanatory diagram, Bay Lexicon. (Courtesy of Jane Wolff)

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“Bay Lexicon,” a field guide to the urbanized edge of San Francisco Bay, defines a placebased vocabulary for observing, understanding, and rethinking a landscape subject to sea level rise. The edge of the bay doesn’t conform to conventional ideas of nature and culture. Interactions between cultural intention and forces that people don’t control have made it into an ecological hybrid. Descriptions in generic language obscure its complexity, but technical language hinders the sharing of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and levels of expertise. In a culture where landscapes take shape through the aggregated decisions of individuals, markets, and several levels of government, a common vocabulary could help to support public discussion and prevent practical and political dilemmas. “Bay Lexicon” builds vocabulary for the edge of the bay from a walk along San Francisco’s shoreline: its field entries document and examine places and things a person encounters along the way. Like “Saint Louis, Brick City,” this endeavor discusses the material landscape in relation to invisible forces and dynamics. It brings together content from wide-ranging disciplines. It uses writing and drawing as complementary media. However, it creates a different relationship between text and image. Each field entry centers on a drawing of something visible, and the drawing anchors layers of definition and commentary. A diagram at the beginning of the field guide lays out an entry’s components and frames of reference: the location of the drawing; names and description of its elements; a question about the meaning of the scene it depicts; a short essay that meditates on answers; relevant citations; and three keywords that propose broad themes connected to its subject. By helping a reader decipher a field entry, the diagram lets her use the entry’s representation to decipher the landscape. Reading what exists is a first step toward imagining what might be next: the language people use to describe the places they already know becomes the language they use to consider new possi­ bilities. The field guide becomes a tool for thinking about the future. Extending design’s bailiwick from bounded sites into open discussions about large-scale landscapes requires effort beyond the expansion of subject matter and the broadening of representational strategies. Designers have to make their work legible to the range of audiences they hope to engage. Like any tools, new methods and media for describing and discussing landscapes confer agency on people who understand their use.

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Questioning Appearances

Figure 13.4  Field drawing, Bay Lexicon. (Courtesy of Jane Wolff)

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The theory of the Rashomon effect recognizes that even people standing in the same place might have different points of view. A person’s experience, expertise, interests, and values affect what he sees in a site. The things he takes for granted might make it difficult to imagine his neighbor’s impression of the landscape. Representation offers a chance to establish common ground. A drawing can act as a framework to gather and register different meanings; a question about a picture of the landscape can elicit shared reflection about what lies behind appearances. The field drawings in “Bay Lexicon” are composed and edited to uncover relationships hidden by the detail and commotion of everyday life. Commissioned by a science museum and created for general audiences, the drawings present sophisticated ideas in ways that look simple. This example borrows the structure of a tourist photo, but it strips away photographic information to illuminate a set of significant connections: the islands in the center of San Francisco Bay echo the shape of the hills on either shore; the piers and sheds at the water’s edge suggest a harbor constructed for the ships sailing past the islands; and the person surveying the landscape from under a tree stands in for the person surveying the landscape in the drawing’s frame. The question “What defines an island?” draws attention to a subject that might not seem to require examination. It’s an invitation to wonder about the meaning of a general word and a particular place. The field entry’s main text reveals that water is only one of many possible responses. Designers who draw sites make choices about content based on their own ideas about what matters. Representations of the landscape are never neutral, but when they are conceived as armatures for plural meanings, they become open documents. A designer’s work is to provoke enquiry. It’s up to citizens to offer answers.

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Designing Conversations in the Anthropocene The landscapes of the Anthropocene are in crisis, and scholarship can’t afford to be disengaged from social life. Addressing dilemmas caused by climate change depends on building consensus among people with radically different points of view. Representations that translate plural understandings of a site into common language can make values visible, and that might be a step toward productive public conversation about difficult places. Design representations have always mediated between landscapes as they are and as they might be. The work in this portfolio takes that capacity into arenas beyond design’s control. It asks how representation can generate and share knowledge to help citizens act knowledgeably. Representation does not mean the neutral cataloguing of every dimension of a site. From the infinite possibilities of a landscape, a designer draws a finite set. Her representation puts forward the observations that seem most important to her and leaves out what she doesn’t find significant. It organizes plural observations in relation to each other. It articulates values and relationships. It makes the site visible in new ways, and its revelations comprise an activist project: what can’t be perceived can’t be acted on. If other people can read and understand a designer’s representation, it becomes a tool for sharing knowledge. If readers can register their own interests within the set a designer has distilled, they can use her drawings as a way to express their own concerns and values. When that happens, a representation becomes a tool for advocacy – and for action.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

Akira Kurosawa, dir., Rashomon (1950). Robert Anderson, “What Is the Rashomon Effect?” in Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies, ed. Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, and Jan Walls (New York: Routledge, 2016), 71. Anderson, “What Is the Rashomon Effect?” 67. Jane Wolff, “Saint Louis, Brick City,” in Material Culture: Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes, ed. Jane Hutton (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2017), 115–123. Jane Wolff, Bay Lexicon, installation in the Fisher Bay Observatory (San Francisco: The Exploratorium, ongoing). Book manuscript in process. The Kuleshov effect, described by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 20th  century, causes viewers of a film to infer meaningful connections between sequential shots in a film despite discontinuity in their content.

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14. Urban Site as Collective Knowledge Thaïsa Way

Designers must grapple with multiscalar heteroglot settings for interactions and intersections that comprise the urban site.1 What domains of knowledge might frame these readings of urban sites – overlapping, conflicted, complex, and multivalent – with appropriate depth and breadth? The methods of landscape architecture offer productive tools to describe a site’s suitability for building, ecology, social context, and dominant histories; such breadth certainly substantiates one description of design as a complex practice integrating multiple ways of reading place. Nevertheless, this remains a conventional view of landscape focused primarily on what can be seen and, therefore, registered and described. While useful, it sustains a limited view of what landscape architecture, as a way of thinking, might offer urban research. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested almost 50 years ago that reading the complex relationships of a place requires rejecting “thin descriptions” and, instead, creating “thick descriptions” that engage a “multiplicity of complex conceptual stories, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, inexplicit.”2 The design of an urban site in a contemporary framework requires a similarly thick reckoning, one that intentionally acknowledges the importance of what Peter Marcuse has described as the area of study and that of concern.3 Thick descriptions and reckoning situate negotiations of distinct site knowledges that are embedded in the interactions and intersections of the urban.4 This thick site inquiry – composed of multiple, diverse, conflicting datasets, approaches, and narratives – in turn requires broad transdisciplinary knowledge. Landscape architecture offers essential tools for registering thick complexities and can expand to contribute to more fully spatializing inquiry in multiscalar heteroglot urban settings and sites.

A Platform for Thick Reckoning Urban@UW, an academic initiative that serves as a living lab at the University of Washington, was launched in 2015 as a collaborative endeavor by faculty members from landscape architecture, history, social work, public policy, engineering, and geography. Offering resources for experimenting with alternative modes of urban-focused transdisciplinary scholarship, it has performed as a platform for engagement extending across the

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university’s three campuses, as well as regional, community, and civic organizations. Intentionally cultivating new and dynamic communities of inquiry, Urban@UW strives to imagine, foster, and expand modes of knowledge production as a means to pursue deeper readings of urban landscapes and their cities. One of its hallmark interrogation tools, the “thick section,” was specifically formulated to assist participants to engage in reading the site in ways that provide for emergent transdisciplinary site knowledge. In turn, from such deep place-based collaborative inquiries, a collective site emerges. Drawing on the breadth and depth of a research university that hosts a strong design school, the initiative reimagines urban research as collective, layered, and dynamic explorations of urban sites. Urban@UW recognizes that urban landscapes harbor increasingly complex challenges: climate change, air quality, energy security and resources, water scarcity, food security, poverty, and rising social inequity. These challenges shape urban systems, sites, and places in multifaceted ways with divergent intended, and unintended, consequences. They cannot be appropriately understood or addressed solely within disciplinary or professional boundaries: constructing more shelters or changing residential zoning will not solve homelessness; public health depends on far more than the absence of disease; climate adaptation demands more than smart technology; equity requires ample access to quality housing as well as education, jobs, and health services. Addressing these wicked problems calls for scholars, designers, planners, and civic leaders to think and act collectively and collaboratively.5 Urban universities afford a unique opportunity for realizing the collaborative cross-sector leadership required to productively partner with cities on problem solving. Assuming that the academy manages to overcome its traditional manner of describing problems in strictly disciplinary terms, the urban university can contribute to the identification and tackling of wicked urban challenges that call for holistic responses. The academy’s faculty and students from across disciplines, as well as centers, institutions, and initiatives positioned between disciplines, have the capacity to collectively construct territories of knowledge motivated by shared queries. Drawing on that capacity, Urban@UW works as a boundary-crossing entity. As a border-crossing entity, Urban@UW also functions as an academic lab to facilitate novel modes of urban research and teaching in partnership with civic leaders and professionals. Seeking to advance rigorous transdisciplinary collaboration, the platform necessitates that participants test practices and concepts across disciplines and ways of thinking. New scholarship and practice emerge from the experiments and subsequent discourse, shaped by the transdisciplinary nature of the inquiry. Designers can play a significant role in this transformative effort. They grasp the importance of identifying problems arising from a specific locale and know how to work with the urban site as the locus of investigation or boundary object. Equally, designers understand how to ground research that may not be specifically place-based in the realities of a particular site and place; by locating and spatializing a research question, they know how to work with the urban site as the focus of investigation or boundary concept. By sharing such approaches, designers might reconceive and enhance how

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academic knowledge and design practice contributes to wrangling the 21st century’s most pressing, and most vexing, questions. Assuming they effectively deploy their know-how, designers operating in academic settings could take the lead in reimagining the academy itself – as an institution defined by the questions it tackles rather than the disciplines it houses. They could reshape how scholars from other fields discern, understand, and imagine the urban site. In this scenario, the design school steers the academy in discovery and innovation.

Urban Site as Boundary Object Urban@UW draws on the scholarship of feminist sociologist Susan Leigh Star on the boundary object as a framework to steward rigorous transdisciplinary collaboration in the study of urban sites. Star describes boundary objects as “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. … The objects may by abstract or concrete.”6 Identification of a boundary object encourages collaborative focus among different communities with dissimilar perspectives and goals. A boundary object also allows for dialogic interaction without conflating diverse intentions or perceptions; it creates space for sharing ideas and simultaneously holding onto divergent understandings. Interpreted differently by different communities, the boundary object retains integrity as a recognizable and relevant entity. At Urban@UW, scholars draw on the construct of the boundary object to facilitate the use of the urban site as an object of discovery accessible equally to academicians, civic leaders, and community members. Each contributing actor knows the site from both an individual and a community perspective. The urban site – a space in which multiple spheres of concern and influence intersect, interact, and overlap – forms the foundation of inquiry. The research platform encourages a process of inquiry into the urban site, where diverse participants position themselves as contingent and collaborative without necessarily converging around a shared set of intentions. Participants use this operational platform-space to build knowledge toward articulated goals while recognizing and respecting inherent diversity in their research purposes. The urban site represents a shared space of process and production, used for distinct ends that interact to form complex systems and narratives. The Doorway Project, an initiative to create an urban place for youth, embodies a reading of the urban site as boundary object. The project reflects concerns about neighborhood safety and sense of community in the University District, a place that acts as both an extension of the academic campus and a Seattle neighborhood. Working under the auspices of Urban@UW, faculty members from multiple disciplines found an increasing number of youths in the university district experiencing housing and food insecurity. The 2018 one-night count of homeless people in Seattle revealed that an estimated 1,518 individuals were unaccompanied youth and young adults and that young people represented 13 percent of the total count population.7 To address this problem, faculty and students from the Schools of Nursing, Law, Social

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Figure 14.1  Setting up for a pop-up café and Doorway project meeting to consider designs for a shared place for community and youth in the U-District. (Courtesy of the University of Washington)

Work, Business, and the College of Built Environments engaged with leaders of local service agencies, including YouthCare, as well as with local youth experiencing homelessness, to identify shared goals.8 While not equally valued by every participant, goals included building a more resilient community, strengthening coordination of services for youth, designing and creating a one-stop services and community café and, ultimately, reimagining the public realm as a collective community. As a boundary object, the urban site – in this case, the University District – was the locus of investigations and experiments centered on imagining and creating site insertions that might realize multiple, conflicting, and overlapping purposes in an equitable and inclusive manner. Experimenting with pop-up cafés, participants in the Doorway Project created spaces where the voices and needs of a previously ignored population could be heard and, at least partially, met. As temporary installations, the pop-ups marked loosely defined site insertions hosting multiple narratives, from a social gathering to a collection of services to a source of food and warmth to a community event in the vein of farmers markets. Users did not necessarily share a common experience despite sharing a common space. For vulnerable youth, the access to food and drink, social services, and medical care for themselves and for pets clearly made a difference. Equally significant, a community coalesced among youth, residents, and businesses as they enjoyed music, performing arts, and the transformation of a specific place. The copresence of sometimes overlapping but never fully congruent site narratives recalls Robin Dripps’s discussion of how edges mediate readings of and relationships between the site as locus and experience and the ground as place and context. Reflecting on Dripps’s description of the site as a “special repository of clues,”9 it could be argued that a transdisciplinary community provides the key to unlocking its storehouse of narratives.

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The urban site functions as a boundary object for collective inquiry when it provides the locus of research. In such cases (where the urban site “generates” the research question), a designer participating in a collective research process draws on their assumed expertise to read the site as place, ground, and context in ways that engage multiple datasets, approaches, and narratives. Their role builds on how designers already think and practice, integrating design thinking with other modes of inquiry. However, researchers can also seek to position the urban site as a conceptual ground for their inquiry, collectively framing a broad inquiry informed by multiple and diverse sites and places, as well as disciplinary knowledge. In that case (where researchers “generate” the question), the designer might contribute by grounding the question in a particular urban site. This inversion of the boundary object as the locus to that of the focus of inquiry suggests the potential of the urban site as a boundary concept, a means to spatialize a research question.

Urban Site as Boundary Concept The boundary concept offers a broader application of the theory of boundaries. Defined here as a question motivating different communities with dissimilar perspectives and goals to jointly undertake a study or inquiry, the boundary concept expands the role of the boundary object. The boundary concept addresses an urban site from “the outside in” or, as described by Peter Marcuse in his 2005 essay, from the areas of concern as the focus of inquiry.10 The identification of an urban site (or multiple sites) as a locus of action comes later still – in response to the question rather than as its initial catalyst, at that point when a question calls for investigation at the scale of a specific lived place. By literally situating collective inquiry in place, the urban site can spatialize research investigation. Remaining open to various interpretations, this place offers “a common ground for scientists and practitioners with varied backgrounds, values, norms, ideas, and interests to collectively and meaningfully engage with landscape approaches.”11 Attention to the boundary concept posits landscape as distinctly suited to the project of constructing transdisciplinary knowledge. Scholars, practitioners, and the public at large share ideas and visions for an urban site12 while retaining nonshared facts and opinions, interests, and values related to their specific constituency.13 Animating the urban site through investigations of a boundary concept begins by designating a broad challenge or issue, such as urban gentrification and equity. Because wicked questions resist simple solutions, they require complex responses born of often strange bodies of knowledge that often arise out of the unsuspected intersections of inquiry. This makes expansive engagement critical. The broad challenge, or common question, has relevance for various involved disciplines and practices, and does not belong to any one alone. For that reason, it functions as a boundary concept, around which multivalent expertise and knowledge coalesce. After identifying a common point of inquiry, explorations are grounded in a particular, local, and lived place. This positions what originated as a nonplace-based question in the spatial experience of a specific urban site. Participants undertake to

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understand an explicit community and its realities – a specific urban site – through dialogic interaction; they claim the site as means to position the site knowledge deemed essential to developing novel responses to a particular question. In this process, the urban site might best be viewed, metaphorically, as an interlocutor that talks back to project participants, revealing a multiplicity of place-specific narratives and spheres of influence that serve to reframe the initial line of inquiry and suggest potential courses for actions. The site performs as focus of investigation and agent of change. The Critical Narratives Project14 offers one possible model for launching an inquiry around a boundary concept (homelessness) and then landing it in place as a living lab. It began when a group of UW faculty and students decided to meet regularly, hosted by Urban@UW, to reflect on how their teaching and research engaged questions and vocabularies of homelessness and poverty. To better understand and respond to the homelessness crisis, and to its attendant dramatic disparity of access to community resources like education, jobs, medical assistance, and housing, the group first engaged in open discussions. These dialogues sought to broaden knowledge of homelessness, exploring ambiguous territory between the participating disciplines, as well as between academic experience and the lived experience and language of the street. To test emerging ideas in a place-based living lab, project discussions contributed to a university decision to set up a temporary, on-campus, self-governing community for individuals who lack permanent housing, TentCity3. Hosting TentCity3 provided an opportunity for UW students and faculty to generate detailed site knowledge about a precise place on their campus; issues they examined included access to water for personal hygiene, transportation, and personal security. Partnering with residents of TentCity3, the project team took up the community’s medical, social, and economic needs. This work prompted a new and novel survey of housing and food insecurity among UW students.15 More than an academic exercise, the study findings pointed to real problems facing UW students that called for a concerted institutional response, even as the academic inquiry continued to unfold.16 Between the broader discussions and the site-based project, academics and community residents have begun to transform the discourse around the region’s housing and homelessness challenges. Transdisciplinary dialogues brought new participants to the table, spawned alternative modes of operation, and set the contours of an emerging collective site. Three local universities subsequently joined in a project to investigate how a wider academic community might contribute more effectively to the homelessness crisis in the Seattle area as it affected their campuses and areas beyond.

Tools for Interrogating Boundaries Accessing transdisciplinary territories of knowledge requires specific tools that can be nimbly deployed across disciplines, to engage multiple forms and scales of adjacencies, as well as conflicts. Dialogue offers one means toward this end. For Urban@ UW, the act of drawing thick sections and the use of the collective site as a framing concept function as two generative tools.17

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A thick section delves beyond the surface to render interwoven layered narratives embedded in an urban site visible and tangible. It is conceived as an interrogative tool to generate thick descriptions (à la Geertz). Unlike the abstract, dimensionless section line conceived as a cut or limit, a thick section produces a substantive edge, disclosing relationships between and among layers. Suggesting a dense membrane stretching across the site, a thick section gathers and illuminates multiple relationships and adjacencies; they recall the rich history of natural and human morphologies that normative thin descriptions often hide from sight. By means of thinking through drawing,

Figure 14.2  Thick Section. Drawn by Niccoló Piacentini, MArch candidate, and Jennifer Kriegel, MLA candidate, University of Washington. (Courtesy of Niccoló Piacentini and Jennifer Kriegel)

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the thick section as interrogation tool generates novel and provocative questions and approaches. It collects into a single descriptive document what Elizabeth Meyer describes as the “deep time – the longue durée, the thickness of time – embedded into spaces and surfaces.”18 A thick description captures different voices, each of which pose and pursue a shared question or framework, culminating in a collective site of inquiry. Such a collective site comprises what can be seen and registered as a copresent multiplicity of complex conceptual stories grounded in place. By actively acknowledging traces of what gets erased in the making of new places – the strange, irregular, and inexplicit nature of the layers that define the place – the process of capturing the collective site stands in direct contrast to the process Robert Beauregard describes as the clearing of a place in order to become a site.19 This collective site makes manifest the lived site as multivalent and heteroglot. By intentionally constructing a thicker reading of urban sites and their contexts, scholars and practitioners collaborate to frame complex questions that invite responses at once place-based and relevant to broader spheres of influence. Drawing the thick section and building the collective site sets the stage to tackle 21st-century challenges. How to tackle urban environmental justice in a time of climate change is one such wicked research question undertaken by Urban@UW as part of the Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change Initiative.20 Finding an adequate response to the complexly layered forces at play requires co-creating lines of inquiry among scholars and co-defining challenges and opportunities with the community in situ. Essentially it requires constructing a collective site, physically and conceptually. It means transitioning from a thin question like “Where is the toxic air and water?” and toward examining matters related to race, identity, and difference in the political and civic power hierarchies. Local narratives and experiences can be initially identified using engaged scholarship processes familiar to landscape architects. But how can we reveal contested stories or suppressed experiences? Here, involving the scholarship of sociologists, geographers, artists, and humanists proves essential. Scholars, designers, and community leaders seeking to realize environmental justice in the Pacific Northwest are called upon to consider how indigenous peoples, who have inhabited the region for 10,000 years, read and experience the land. An American Indian Studies faculty member will pose questions such as: Whose land are we studying, who should welcome us, and what do we have to offer in return?21 How is the urban site defined through a settler-colonial frame?22 Sociologists and historians ask about the legacies of redlining in Seattle.23 The public health faculty will investigate the changes in the land and the corresponding impacts on community health and wellbeing, working alongside social work and nursing practitioners to determine cause and response. From these perspectives, the urban site in and of Seattle reaches out through space and time, as well as through narrative, to intersect and more often than not conflict with multiple Coast Salish and Squamish tribes and their stories, memories, and practices, as well as those of communities of color. In this case, the urban site both is

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a boundary object as a shared locus of discourse that generates distinct questions and serves to inform broader discussions of rights, justice, and equity in the city. This environmental justice initiative began with the assumption that an environmental framework requires acknowledging that urban sites are embedded in urban systems that extend far beyond city limits. Energy and water systems, critical components of urban infrastructure, routinely reach outside of the city. North of Seattle, the North Cascades National Park adjoins a landscape of lakes and rivers that have been reengineered for electricity generation. The Skagit River Hydroelectric Project by Seattle City Light is comprised of three dams built to generate hydroelectricity from the massive elevation drop of over 1,000 feet from the Canada-US border. These produce over 32 percent of Seattle’s electricity needs. The engineers at the university and those employed by the utility company will focus on the system’s performance and resilience. The climate change scientist will study how snowmelt cycle changes affect changes in water access and quality in the city, partnering with utility companies to consider modifications in the timing and extent of water release in the dams. This will require collaborating with law faculty (among others) to consider the role and future of water and land rights, including but not limited to contested fishing rights of indigenous tribes in the urban lakes and rivers. While perceived by tourists as simply nature, this inherently multivalent and complex waterscape functions as an essential node in Seattle’s urban infrastructure. Focusing on the role of territories and boundaries suggests a fluidity among the spatial, conceptual, and pragmatic. In such a process, participants read and reread urban sites through the lens of diverse users, past, present, and future; they reimagine the language of description and inquiry. Shared bodies of knowledge emerge from, and as, collective sites of inquiry. Designers participating in these investigations witness new ways to read sites and engage in research, inviting them to reflect critically on their habitual frames of reference and begin treating questions as a means of learning, maybe even designing, new vocabularies.

The Academy as an Urban Site Could Change the World As a living urban lab, Urban@UW offers a generative platform for constructing collective sites of inquiry aimed at tackling complex problems. Scholars, practitioners, and civic leaders gather, in community, to study broad domains of concern. These communities build informed bodies of knowledge that ground novel responses. Questions might emerge from a place or site, a study area, or larger areas of concern. Deep readings of an urban site require building bridges of transdisciplinary language and concepts, without consensus but with specific and distinct views, knowledge, and objectives. Finding common ground that transcends boundaries becomes a means of productively confronting multiple diverse and conflicting visions, goals, and descriptions. This is not simple work. Designers understand how to mobilize the potentials arising when the site serves as a boundary object for distinct communities. As such, their process offers a model for other heterogeneous communities, within and without the academy, who

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grapple with the disparate and conflicting narratives of the “multiscalar heteroglot” context of urban projects. Acknowledging and building on the complexities of the urban site as an irregular and strange setting challenges normative modes of academic knowledge production. Whereas 20th-century disciplines sought clear boundaries, 21st-century challenges demand convergence, transdisciplinary pursuits, and conversation with community. The revolution as proposed not only reshapes disciplines but requires reimagining the academy as a place of collective inquiry and knowledge.24 Urban@UW offers a vision of what it means to collectively foster discovery by functioning as an academic living lab. It demonstrates the power of the urban as idea, system, and site to change the future through a more informed knowledge of the past and present. Drawing on the ways that designers think, create, and act on urban sites yields radical forms of knowledge that can, in turn, radically redescribe the academy not as an aggregation of disciplines but as a catalyst for shared knowledge. While such work will not necessarily result in simplifying the complex problems the academy seeks to address or its complex institutional structures, the urban site as a place of common knowledge may well allow us to move more dynamically forward as a community and planet.

Acknowledgments Colleagues across the university contributed, but none more than Margaret O’Mara, Susan Kemp, Kim England, Scott Allard, Rachel Fyall, Gregg Colburn, Bill Howe, Ken Yocom, and Vikram Jandhyala. Furthermore, UW President Ana Mari Cauce has been a stalwart supporter of this provocative initiative. I also want to extend my deepest appreciation for the editorial stewardship of Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns.

Notes 1 2 3

4

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Andrea Kahn, “Defining Urban Sites,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 287. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10. Peter Marcuse, “Study Areas, Sites, and the Geographic Approach to Public Action,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 249. Andrea Kahn, “Ecotone Thinking,” Scape 15 (2016): 138–143; Alessandro Balducci, “Strategic Planning as the Intentional Production of a ‘Trading Zone,’” City, Territory and Architecture 2, no. 1 (2015): 23–35. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–169. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420, at 393; see also Susan Leigh Star, “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 601–617.

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7 8 9 10

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King County, Washington, “2018 King County Count Us In Report,” accessed 8 May 2019, http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/. Led by Drs. Josephine Ensign and Wendy Barrington, School of Nursing and School of Public Health and Charlotte Sanders, School of Social Work. Robin Dripps, “Groundwork,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 71. Peter Marcuse, “Study Areas, Sites, and the Geographic Approach to Public Action,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 249. Bas Arts, Marleen Buizer, Lumina Horlings, Verina Ingram, Cora Van Oosten, and Paul Opdam, “Landscape Approaches: A State-of-the-Art Review,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 42 (2017): 439–463, at 457. Paul Opdam, Judith Westerink, Claire Vos, and Barry De Vries, “The Role and Evolution of Boundary Concepts in Transdisciplinary Landscape Planning,” Planning Theory & Practice 16, no. 1 (2015): 63–68, at 64. Christoph Kueffer and Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn, “How to Achieve Effectiveness in Problem-Oriented Landscape Research: The Example of Research on Biotic Invasions,” Living Reviews in Landscape Research 2 (2008): 1–49. Led by Drs. Victoria Lawson (College of Arts & Sciences), Amy Hagopian (School of Public Health), Lynne Manzo (College of Built Environments), and Amoshaun Toft (UW Bothel Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences). Led by Drs. Rachel Fyall (Evans School of Public Policy and Governance), Lynne Manzo (College of Built Environments), and Christine Stevens (Urban Planning, UW Tacoma). Rachel Fyall, Christine Stevens, and Lynne Manzo, “Understanding Housing and Food Insecurity among University of Washington Students: An Internal Report,” University of Washington, Seattle, May 2019. Thaïsa Way, “Landscapes of Industrial Excess: A Thick Sections Approach to Gas Works Park,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 8, no. 1 (2013): 28–39. Elizabeth Meyer, “Seized by Sublime Sentiments,” in Richard Haag: Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park, ed. William Saunders, Patrick M. Condon, Gary R. Hilderbrand, and Elizabeth K. Meyer (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 20. Robert A. Beauregard, “From Place to Site: Negotiating Narrative Complexity,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39. Led by Drs. Kenneth Yocom and Thaïsa Way (College of Built Environments) in partnership with the City of Seattle and the Othello/UW Commons community. Elizabeth Dempster, “Welcome to Country: Performing Rights and the Pedagogy of Place,” About Performance, no. 7 (2007): 87–97; and Chadwick Allen, Trans-indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Deborah A. Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007), 169–187. “Segregated Seattle,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, accessed 22 August 2019, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/segregated.htm. Helga Nowotny, “The Increase of Complexity and its Reduction: Emergent Interfaces between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences.” Theory, Culture & Society, 22, no. 5 (2005), 15–31.

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15. From Place to Site: Negotiating Narrative Complexity Robert A. Beauregard All sites exist first as places. Before places become objects of urban planning and design, they exist in personal experience, hearsay, and collective memories. Standing between planners and designers and the sites on which they hope to act are socially embedded narratives. And while these place narratives can be ignored, they cannot be wholly erased. No place, even if unexplored, escapes this rule. Simply that we know of the jungles of Borneo or the desolate tundra of northern Russia means that a story can be told. At the least, we imagine these places as far away, undeveloped and uninhabited, dark and mysterious. These images, in turn, prepare the way for other narratives. When settlers establish wilderness outposts, they enter into narratives of discovery, conquest, and the beneficence of civilization. Antithetic to places unknown are places saturated with meaning. Densely imagined through overlapping histories and intersecting current events, they resist being turned into “cleared” sites, that is, sites “received as unoccupied, lacking any prior construction and empty of content.”1 A multitude of stories compete for attention. These are places whose inhabitants live in history, whose identity has not been formalized, and whose intellectual status is ambiguous.2 The options for planners and designers to impose their singular vision are severely curtailed. At the same time, the richness of narratives constitutes a wellspring of creative possibilities. The former World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, where twin 110-story towers once stood, is one such saturated place. Encased in a multitude of powerful and competing narratives, it became the most freighted of redevelopment sites. No plan for the site could avoid the narratives of terrorism, globalization, US hegemony and cultural imperialism, victimization, and sacrifice that shaped how this place was collectively imagined.3 At the same time, Lower Manhattan is known locally by a number of stories that began prior to that tragic day. One story tells of the recent conversion of office buildings to residential use and claims that investment in housing will release the area from its commercial doldrums and make it a 24-hour neighborhood of multiple uses and diverse activities. Critics of the original World Trade Center tell a story that refers to a high modernist hubris that took hold in the early 1960s. This vision led to the demolition of

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a wholesale produce market, the closing of Radio Row (a cluster of consumer electronics stores), and the displacement of a Lebanese merchant community. This narrative includes the abandonment of the city’s port for the world of high finance. This history was buried beneath the massive foundations of the Twin Towers and layer after layer of retailing and transit paths. That history now lies even deeper. A site is a social construct, a representation conceived apart from the complexity of human relations. It is a place that has been denatured, formalized, and colonized, its meanings made compatible with the relations of production and state imperatives and the order that both imply. Opposed to the site is a representational space – what I have termed place – and its complex symbolism grounded in lived experience.4 The former emanates from professionals and technocrats, the latter from human encounters in dwellings, churches, sidewalks, plazas, markets, and places of work. Sites do not appear initially as fully rationalized. They have to be created through the articulation of certain professional qualities (e.g., area, economic value) and the suppression of other qualities. The place to be displaced has first to be prepared. Consequently, the site does not exist prior to the onset of planning and design. Urban designers and planners, developers and engineers, government administrators, and architects deploy a variety of methodologies for making sense of place. Using variations in scale and slope, economic worth and solar orientation, configuration and zoning, and other analytical and abstract categories, they turn different places into a smaller number of types of sites. First, they move the specific place – with its connotations of richness, diversity, and complexity – onto “muted ground.”5 There, a limited number of qualities prepare it for intervention. To accomplish this, the untamed, overlapping, and contradictory histories, remembrances, and engagements that cling to the place are removed and subsequently replaced with simplified, coherent, and transparent representations. Planners and designers take control of a place by distilling its narratives. They eliminate the ambiguities that might derail the project. Their intent is to create opportunities for action. Given a set of conditions or a sense of unease, they represent places in terms that enable them and others to intervene. They turn what they are given into what they know, and what they know is situations of a certain type. In effect, places are professionalized. A small number of qualities are used to situate the place in a closed, analytical discourse. Abstractions and quantification are deployed to control the site. This hermetic move enables professionals to claim that their depiction captures the foundational nature, the truth, of the place – at least for purposes of development. Without such a site discourse, professionals claim, the site cannot be developed. Good planners and designers recognize the compulsion to engage in abstraction and reductionism. They grapple with narratives that others might discard. They attempt to use nonprofessional understandings to add, rather than subtract, meaning. They ask what design element would capture the tragedy of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. They look for ways to engage nonprofessional understandings of the site. They attempt to negotiate the messy and multiple narratives of place and explore representations that resist the bloodless quality of professional categories.

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Depicting the place as a site, however, does not end the process, Sites seldom remain vacant. They are meant to be developed and, once developed, their new use and activities create – even require – new narratives. In fact, for many development projects, whether they are suburban housing estates or entertainment districts, the making of the site into a place begins during the development phase. To support the investment, new images must be publicized. Sites are only way stations between one place and another.6 Two examples will be used to explore these themes. Each illustrates the difference between place and site and how these differences are negotiated. The first, Operation Breakthrough, is the multi-site demonstration project of the early 1970s developed by the US government to produce industrialized housing for low- and moderateincome households. The second is Brasilia, the planned capital city of Brazil built in the late 1950s and officially inaugurated on 21 April 1960. Operation Breakthrough required standard sites, sites without encumbering narratives and without physical and regulatory impediments to mass-produced housing schemes. The idea was to create interchangeable spaces that would be efficient and profitable for industrialized, modular housing. Consequently, the places in which such housing was to be built were stripped of any prior history and their physical surroundings suppressed. Rewritten as professionalized sites, they became eligible for the program. The Brasilia case is a bit different. Whereas Operation Breakthrough ignored the shared meanings of the places on which housing was to be built, the Brazilian government began by attaching a specific narrative to the potential site. It located Brasilia in a part of the country that was first collectively imagined as undeveloped, empty, and without history. This understanding opened the area to two narratives: one of modern architecture and design and the other of developmentalism and nation-building.

From Place to Site: Operation Breakthrough In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed George Romney, former head of the Ford Motor Company, as secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). One of Romney’s first policy initiatives was Operation Breakthrough, a national program designed to demonstrate the potential of industrialized housing and modular building systems and to address a housing shortage for low-income and moderate-income households. In pursuing these goals, the program would rationalize what was viewed as a fragmented and backward home-building industry immune to innovation.7 Operation Breakthrough was designed to have three phases, only the first of which was fully realized.8 After an initial phase in which guidelines were developed, HUD held two separate competitions: one for prototype building systems and the other for sites on which to erect those systems. In the second phase, the prototype systems were matched with the prototype sites and construction was to begin. After completion of the demonstration, HUD hoped that developers and communities would adopt these

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systems for large-scale production. The projected goal for the last phase was 2.8 million housing units over ten years. The competition phase unfolded on parallel paths: one for the building systems and the other for sites. (This was an early sign that sites would have to be standardized.) Over 600 product prototype proposals were submitted for consideration, of which 60 percent were for advanced research and development contracts rather than total housing systems. The housing system proposals were evaluated by a committee of individuals from various government agencies. The committee rated each proposal on the quality of the physical design, the availability of financing, and the management capability of the system producer. The last two criteria were particularly important, given the objective of moving quickly into and out of the demonstration phase. Secondary criteria included the geographical reach of the system (the extent to which it could be adapted to different climates) and minority participation in the production and construction phases. The housing systems were of different types: low-rise stackable boxes, highrise stackable boxes, concrete panels, lightweight components, and “breakthrough limits” (i.e., mixed systems). The systems were developed by a variety of producers: integrated building products corporations such as Boise-Cascade; diversified corporations such as the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), General Electric, and TRW Systems; and large home-builders such as Stirling Homex and National Homes. Consortiums made almost all of the submissions, the majority of which included architects. In the end, 37 system producers were selected, a number later reduced to 22. Simultaneously, competitions were held for prototype sites and for planners of prototype sites. Local governments submitted proposals for 218 sites while 82 architectural, planning, and design firms applied to be site planners. Eleven sites and ten site planners were chosen. Four of the sites were in the inner city, four in city fringe areas, and three in the suburbs. (The intent was to develop the prototype sites at different densities, one of the only efforts to contextualize the projects.) The selected sites were spread across the country and included St. Louis in the inner-city category, Sacramento in the city fringe category, and New Castle County (Wilmington, DE) in the suburban category. Because Operation Breakthrough was meant to be a demonstration, HUD wanted to place more than one system on each site. Moreover, it also required that housing units be clustered and that the site also include stores, playgrounds, parking, and other facilities. Consequently, site planners had to analyze the site, develop market analyses, determine the number of housing units for each housing system, develop a site plan, and negotiate regulations with local officials. In Jersey City, the site planner (David A. Crane Associates) developed a plan that integrated the housing of four system producers with parking structures, a school, and office space. In addition, Crane Associates selected the structure types and worked with the system producers to minimize costs. HUD also selected eight site developers to address market aggregation – that is, the creation of sufficient demand to support industrialized housing. Because mass production needs to exploit economies of scale to be cost-efficient and thus

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Figure 15.1  The Operation Breakthrough prototype site plan. Taken from the Final Report to Department of Housing and Urban Development or Prototype Site Design and Related Services, Memphis Prototype Site, Operation Breakthrough, dated December 1973, and prepared by Miller, Wihry & Lee, Landscape Architects and Engineers, Inc., Louisville, Kentucky.

profitable, the financial viability of these housing systems depended on the scale of construction. The scale of construction, in turn, depended on the size of the market, that is, the effective demand. Because the consumer base was to be low-income and moderate-income households, profitability required financial assistance from the federal government. These subsidies had to be identified and allocated to the projects. Operation Breakthrough was designed to open up the national housing market to industrialization. Consequently, HUD required local governments to identify places where housing was needed and then to prepare these places to receive any of the massproduced housing systems. In the third phase, HUD wanted producers to have access to standardized sites. To participate in the demonstration and the subsequent production phase, the sites had to be free of local building and housing codes and zoning ordinances. There could be no variations in regulations from one site to the next; in fact, no local regulations at all were allowed. Additionally, union work rules had to be suspended. The sites were further extracted from their physical surroundings when the adjacent street pattern was not continued onto the site. The idiosyncrasies of city blocks were viewed as incompatible with mass-produced systems. Of course, before construction could take place the sites had to be fully cleared of buildings and structures. Stripped of rules, regulations, and street patterns, the site was then ready to receive the housing systems. The demonstration phase began with HUD awarding 22 contracts for 2,796 housing units at a total cost of $63 million.9 From that point onward, Operation Breakthrough lost momentum. By late 1972, a number of system producers had gone bankrupt. High start-up costs, inadequate economies of scale, and a lack of long-term commitment by system producers and governments were immediate causes. In addition, a January 1973 federal government freeze on all subsidized housing and the collapse of the housing market when double-digit inflation and unemployment struck the economy in the mid-1970s further contributed to the financial difficulties.

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In sum, neither the site planners nor HUD gave much value to the prior history of these sites or to how these housing systems would be articulated in relation to surrounding urban fabric. The stories of people who had once lived and worked in these places, changes these communities had undergone, and the meanings disrupted by such an abrupt design shift were ignored. Not only did Operation Breakthrough erase history from the site, it also cast aside local government regulations, labor relations, and the surrounding street pattern. The only relevant stories about the site were those that indicated its suitability for industrialized housing systems and that positioned it favorably as regards market aggregation. Only in this fashion, HUD believed, could Operation Breakthrough overcome fragmentation in the building industry. That the housing system and site identification processes occurred in parallel, only intersecting after systems and sites were independently selected, only reinforced this attitude. The implicit assumption was that for industrialized housing systems to be profitable, they had to be erected on sites that posed few variations. Every place in which mass-produced housing was to be located first had to be standardized. Romney and his policymakers at HUD wanted to avoid a scenario that seemed pervasive in the residential building market. In this scenario, “a producer has to locate land site by site on which to build housing, then he has to deal site by site with local zoning, building and housing codes, and, of course, locate financing on a project by project basis.”10

From Site to Place: Brasilia From the late 18th century, political elites in Brazil dreamed of establishing a capital city in the interior of this large and resource-rich country. Brazil then, and through to the last half of the 20th century, was primarily a coastal country, with its major cities and most of its population arrayed along the Atlantic Ocean. The interior – vast areas of savanna and jungle – remained mostly undeveloped. The country was blessed with “boundless resources and untapped wealth,” yet its destiny was not being realized.11 The dream came to fruition under President Juscelio Kubitschek (1956–1961). In 1947, a national commission had designated the Central Plateau – located in the symbolic center of the country – as the place of the new national capital. Not until 1956, however, was a competition held to produce a plan. Twenty-six proposals were submitted. The jury selected the submission of Lucio Costas, a self- described “free-lance town planner” and a key figure in the modern movement of architecture and design in Brazil.12 Costas offered an “elementary gesture,” a dual-axis plan with one east-west axis of monumental buildings serving political and administrative functions and a northsouth axis of residential and commercial superblocks. In effect, he proposed “one of the oldest devices of urban design,” a cross.13 The architect Oscar Niemeyer, a member of the competition jury, was selected to design the buildings. Like Costas, he was a high modernist in spirit and style. A team consisting of Belcher Associates of Ithaca, New York, and two Brazilian consultants chose the actual site. The team was asked to study a 54,000 square

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Figure 15.2  Lucio Costas’s competition sketches.

kilometer area on the Central Plateau and to select five alternative sites of 1,000 square kilometers that would support a population of 500,000 people. The chosen site would be the one that best met criteria established by an earlier government commission. These criteria included an altitude that would provide an amenable climate and reduce the incidence of malaria, moderately sloping terrain with a gradient sufficient for drainage, a nearby water source with hydroelectric power potential, modest distance to an urban center for obtaining supplies during construction, and available construction materials (specifically, sand and gravel). The team made its decision known in 1955, and it was this best site for which Costas drew his highly stylized plan. The Central Plateau lies approximately 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean, not quite halfway across the country to the west. It sits on the high plains, basically a gently rolling woodland savanna comprised of grasslands, scrubby and scattered deciduous trees, and poor soils. Despite its temperate climate, development lagged. In the early 1950s, there were a few, mostly isolated towns and agricultural stations, little economic activity, and hardly any industry. “Transportation depended on paths cut into the ground and through the bush … [and were] … almost impassable during the rainy season.”14 Prior to construction, the region constituted 22 percent of the territory of Brazil but had only 4 percent of the country’s population and generated only 3 percent of its national income. By contrast, the east coast (with Rio de Janeiro) had

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15 percent of the territory, 34 percent of the population, and accounted for 36 percent of the national income.15 To the Brazilian government and most of the country’s citizens, the Central Plateau was the undeveloped interior. Three quite powerful and intersecting narratives subsequently represented this frontier place. These narratives were at the root of the idea for a new capital city; they shaped the plan and influenced the architecture that came to dominate Brasilia. The first, a story of the Central Plateau as undeveloped and uninhabited, created the place as a site. It emptied it of all but its development potential. Moreover, it prepared the place to receive a highly stylized plan and ultramodernistic architecture. The other two narratives filled the site, turning it into a place it had never been. One set the site in a framework of developmentalism and nation-building that would achieve Brazil’s destiny. The other juxtaposed the new capital with the existing capital of Rio de Janeiro and signaled a break from the past. Brasilia was to be located in a place widely described as wild and undeveloped. Sparsely populated, with vast open spaces, the Central Plateau was the remote interior. One commentator labeled it an “enormous expanse of emptiness,” another called the location a “no man’s land,” and a third referred to the planned city as being built on “virgin soil.”16 The journey from the developed coastal region – from Rio de Janeiro or Salvador or Porto Alegre – to Brasilia involved a transition from densely spaced settlements to an undeveloped interior and from urban congestion and clutter to “silent horizons.”17 Initially, the Central Plateau was situated in a narrative without history. Nothing of significance had happened there for either its people or the Brazilian nation. Its perceived emptiness, though, enabled the jury to select Costas’s highly stylized and schematic gesture and allowed Niemeyer to impose a severe and high modernist architecture on its initial buildings. The site – a “clean tablecloth,” Kubitschek claimed18 – provided little resistance to an elementary and utopian idea and to a rigid and closed plan. Consequently, Niemeyer could indulge his modernist ambitions and design buildings whose massing and style spoke neither to context nor history. High modernism was selected to typify the emerging nation. Brasilia was the “new” Brazil, a de novo alternative to existing Brazilian cities. It was “a bold gesture and an act of faith in the future.”19 The desolate place narrative also enabled a narrative of socioeconomic developmentalism and nation-building. Kubitschek came into office touting the modernization of Brazil and its potential for becoming a world industrial power and a significant contributor to global trade. His developmentalism called for rapid industrialization, the expansion of domestic markets, and increased international trade. The country was well populated, rich in natural resources, and blessed with major ports and rivers. But the potential of interior – “the vast expanses of the Brazilian back country”20 – was being squandered. By occupying the interior and integrating it with the developed coastal cities, the nation could itself be modernized. The interior had to be settled, and this required a growth pole. A planned city would catapult the interior into the future. Quoting Lucio Costas, “Founding a city in the wilderness is a deliberate act of conquest.”21

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Brasilia would make the interior desirable to investors and settlers. Centrally located, a national system of highways would be built to connect it to cities across the country. On this 11,000-mile network, goods would move from the interior to the coast, and from there be shipped to other countries. Imports from abroad would arrive at Brazilian ports and be distributed throughout the land. Industrial development and resource extraction in the interior would expand export production and create workers with incomes sufficient to purchase imports. Brasilia, though, would remain a political and administrative capital; its satellites and other cities in the region, now connected to the coast by highways, would be the poles of state-driven industrialization. Further support for industrial development would come from hydroelectric dams, schools, and other public works. As investment increased and jobs expanded in the interior, population pressure in the large cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo would be reduced. Workers would adapt to the changing landscape of employment opportunities and resettle their families. National integration – economic and social – would be the result. Its spark would be Brasilia, “the symbol of the opening of a vast interior to modernization and the unification of all regions of Brazil.”22 By occupying “the vast empty core of the nation,” the new capital would serve as a catalyst for regional and national development.23 With modernization, Brazil would realize its continental destiny. The ultimate goal was to build a nation, an integrated political and economic space overseen from the national capital. This required an end to the underdevelopment of the interior. Only by breaking down the frontier could nationbuilding be accomplished. Keeping the capital in Rio de Janeiro thwarted this dream. Rio was known for its relaxed lifestyle and its inefficient civil service. Clientelism reigned, with patronage and social connections guiding government policy. At the same time, Rio was home to intellectuals and students, radical ideas, and (as the country’s major industrial center) labor activism. Further detracting from its status as the capital city, Rio de Janeiro still retained a European and thus colonial heritage, a symbolism that blocked the emergence of a new, independent Brazil. Brasilia would signal a symbolic end to Portuguese colonial rule.24 To build a modern nation would require strenuous effort, efficient bureaucracies, and an absence of favoritism and corruption. Relocating the capital would allow officials “to breathe the pure air of the plateau” rather than being forced to live “in the atmosphere impregnated with sea, air, burnt oil and cynical sensualism that weighs on Rio.”25 Isolation would provide the critical distance to resist the call of clientelism – and the beaches – and produce a different government culture. Brasilia would be the new beginning, lifting the burdens that had kept the country divided between an undeveloped interior and a thriving coast. Of course, clientelism did not cease with the relocation of the capital. In fact, critics labeled the planned city a massive patronage project. Building Brasilia was a political act. President Kubitschek wanted to leave a great legacy, and this could not be done in Rio. Any project there would be overwhelmed – both socially and aesthetically – by the existing city and its stunning

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landscape of beaches and hills. That Brasilia needed to be completed before Kubitschek left office was a sign that Kubitschek’s vision – “fifty years’ progress in five”26 – could not be sustained politically. In fact, “the full-blownness of the city plan was a partial antidote to the danger that future administrations … would succeed in undoing the [plan’s] lucidity and authority.”27 In sum, the planning and design of Brasilia was implicated in overlapping stories about the Central Plateau. The emptiness of the area provided a “clean canvas” on which to sketch a crisp and highly defined modernist plan and construct an architecture devoid of contextual referents. The plateau’s underdevelopment made it ideal both for nation-building and for hosting the anti-Rio. These qualities were not inherent to the place. They were part of shared narratives created to legitimize and guide planning. Brasilia was never a utopian city; it was meant to be somewhere. A place understood as – created as – empty has to be filled with the appropriate narratives. In the case of Brasilia, place had first to become site in order to be turned into a new and different place.

Final Thoughts We know little about how urban planners and designers actually go about the deconstruction of place and the narrative construction of sites. We do know that intervention cannot occur nor can development happen until the site is brought under control, situated in a professional discourse. To arrive there, prior narratives have to be discarded. Emboldened by simplification and standardization, their replacements discursively rework a particular place in terms of a category of “problems” that the professional knows how to solve.28 What occurs is a form of discursive displacement. Planners and designers substitute a professional narrative for a multitude of shared histories, collective remembrances, and personal experiences. Unwieldy stories about a place get suppressed and replaced by more actionable understandings. Planners and designers abhor narrative vacuums: even a cleared site must have meaning attached to it. To be cleared is to be prepared for, receptive to, intervention. That is what it means for a place to become a site. The Central Plateau was not raw nature. Settlements existed, there were small mining operations and a few farms, and cattle grazed on the plains. To support developmentalism and nation-building, Brazil’s leaders suppressed this understanding and portrayed the Central Plateau as pristine. The Central Plateau was returned to nature. Proponents of Brasilia then naturalized the site in a second way. They made the Central Plateau seem the only possible location for the new capital. Once the narratives were constructed and publicized, it all made perfect sense. That a site has to be refilled with narratives to realize the benefits of investment and development points to the complexity of the place and of site relationships. It is not enough to establish a new national capital on the plains, build a state-of-theart baseball stadium downtown, reinvest in housing in an old neighborhood, or turn a

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derelict waterfront into a park. These places must also, and subsequently, be reinserted into the respective narratives that make up the national identity, celebrate local entertainment, encourage gentrification, and extol the attractiveness of city living. Investment requires narrative support. Part of preparing a place to become a site and then a new place involves the formation of new narratives. Familiar to anyone who observes real estate development is the narrative onslaught that begins almost immediately as developers and real estate brokers tout the prestigious address and urbane lifestyles associated with a proposed apartment building. Planners and designers are complicit in this process. Their presence indicates a seriousness of purpose and even inevitability to the project, and their reports and images portray and publicize the new place. The first act of real estate development is the narrative remaking of the site. Real estate developers, urban designers, and planners turn places into sites in order then to turn sites into places. The connecting element is always the site. The initial place has to pass through the site to emerge as another and different place. The scenario moves forward by the deployment of preexisting and shared understandings as well as novel interpretations. Because there is no essence to any site, no single truth waiting to be discovered, different site knowledges are possible. Narratives are constructed and deconstructed in harmony with the physical transformation to be realized. Throughout, the default position remains a site story, a story of professional categories and interventions. This is the dominant narrative of planning and design. Like all stories about place, it “weaves the tissue of habits, educates the gaze, [and] informs the landscape.”29 It is the discourse of choice, meaningful within and resonant outside the design professions. Planning and design projects are never purely analytical and are fully professionalized only in an ideological sense. Maintaining a boundary between professional knowledge and what one knows is nearly impossible; few planners and designers work wholly from within a standardized site discourse. To do so would be to abandon the last pretense of creativity as well as to misread the complexity of the design task.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Carol J. Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations,” in Drawing/Building/Text, ed. Andrea Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 149. Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), 51–56. On the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, see Paul Goldberger, “Groundwork: How the Future of Ground Zero Is Being Resolved,” New Yorker 78, no. 12 (20 May 2002): 86–95; and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Representations of space and representational space are phrases drawn from Henri Lefebvre. See his The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991); and Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 71–92.

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5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20

The phrase is Michel Foucault’s, made in a comment about a famous list by Jorge Borges that eliminated, Foucault notes, the site that enables entities to be ordered. See Helen Liggett, Urban Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41–42. Alexander Reichl tells the story of the Times Square (New York City) redevelopment from a discursive-political perspective in his Reconstructing Times Square (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). See also Sharon Zukin et al., “From Coney Island to Las Vegas in the Urban Imaginary: Discursive Practices of Growth and Decline,” Urban Affairs Review 33 (1998): 627–654. See Margaret Farmer, “Toward a Decent Home … For Every American Family,” Architectural Record 146 (1969): 131–134. For a contrary view of the home-building industry, see Tom Schlesinger and Mark Erlich, “Housing: The Industry Capitalism Didn’t Forget,” in Critical Perspectives in Housing, ed. Rachel Bratt, Chester Hartman, and Ann Meyerson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 139–163. The precursors to mass-produced housing were the mail-order houses of the early 20th century sold by Sears, Roebuck & Co., among others. See Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 97–127. The more contemporary version of this housing is manufactured housing. See Andy Leon Horner, “Putting the Pieces Together,” Washington Post, 19 March 1987, 19. See Robertson Ward Jr., “Breakthrough?,” AIA Journal 55 (1971): 17–22; “Winners Assembled for Breakthrough,” Business Week 2113 (1970): 34–45, at 35; and Marguerite Villelo and John Morris Dixon, “Breakthrough?,” The Architectural Forum 132 (1970): 50–61. Schlesinger and Erlich, “Housing: The Industry Capitalism Didn’t Forget,” 144. Don Raney and Suzanne Stephens, “Operation Breakthrough: Operation P/R,” Progressive Architecture 51 (1970): 120. Norma Evenson, “The Symbolism of Brasilia,” Landscape 18 (1969): 19. For general background on the planning, design, and construction of Brasilia, see David G. Epstein, Brasilia, Plan and Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Norma Evenson, Two Brazilian Capitals: Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 117–130; Willy Staubli, Brasilia (London: Leonard Hill Books, 1966); and Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 15–27. This was not the first planned city in Brazil; that was Belo Horizonte, inaugurated in 1896. Evenson, Two Brasilian Capitals, 146. Evenson notes that most of the submitted designs embraced a “rigid formality, a lack of intimacy with the site.” See her “The Symbolism of Brasilia,” 22. On the same page, she points out that Costas did not “set foot on the site” until after construction was nearly complete in order “to be free of the temptation to vitiate the purity of the design.” Staubli, Brasilia, 11. E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 420. These three phrases are from Holston, The Modernist City, 14; David E. Snyder, “Alternate Perspectives on Brasilia,” Economic Geography 40 (1964): 34–45, at 35; and Staubli, Brasilia, 10, respectively. Holston, The Modernist City, 3. Quoted in Scott, Seeing Like a State, 118. Evenson, Two Brasilian Capitals, 104. “Brasilia,” in Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: William Benton, Publisher, 1993), 108.

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21 22 23 24 25

6 2 27 28

29

Staubli, Brasilia, 12. Burns, A History of Brasil, 403. Snyder, “Alternative Perspectives on Brasilia,” 35. Epstein, Brasilia, Plan and Reality, 28–30. The quote is attributed to Mario Penna, a leading apologist for the capital’s transfer. See Epstein, Brasilia, Plan and Reality, 30. On the politics of spatiality and the spatiality of identity, see Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996). Quoted in Holston, The Modernist City, 84. Epstein, Brasilia, Plan and Reality, 52. Another way to think about these issues is in terms of employment. How does the planner or urban designer set the site in a story of intersecting narratives, a story that brings meaning to their differences and also serves professional goals? See Hayden White, “Interpretation in History,” in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51–80. Auge, Non-places, 108.

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16. Neighborhoods Apart: Site/Non-Sight and Suburban Apartments Paul M. Hess Introduction Ideas of the suburbs refers to a peculiarly generic spatial and temporal domain disconnected from conventional notions of site. The term suburbia covers all suburbs, as if they all have the same qualities and can substitute for each other across urban areas and historical periods; the suburbs are “placeless,” with a “geography of nowhere.”1 Single-family subdivisions, shopping centers, office parks, and freeways float in a dimensionless landscape of “sprawl.” They are generic elements in a disorganized, chaotic, and unbounded landscape.2 Opposed to the vastness of sprawl, however, the idea of suburbia is also tied to a very local spatial domain, to a particular type of site: the detached house in its yard. Historians identify both house ownership and low development densities as central aspects of the American “suburban dream.”3 People consistently identify suburbs as a place for raising children and characterize suburbs as being made up of single, detached houses. The linkage of these concepts is so pronounced that, in the United States, the freestanding, single-unit house is almost always referred to as a home. A particular building type thus becomes conflated with a setting of domesticity and nurturing. By extension, this implies that to live in a structure other than a freestanding house renders one, in some sense, homeless. Although increasingly anachronistic in terms of both family structure and (sub)urban development patterns, these images continue to persist. In large part, we are sightless about suburban landscapes. This chapter focuses on three suburban sites in the Puget Sound region of Washington State that contradict conventional notions of suburban sites by containing large concentrations of apartments and attached housing. Far from being chaotic and disorganized, these postwar places are planned, regulated, and engineered. Far from being anomalous, they represent common development patterns found in American postwar suburban landscapes where multiple-unit housing is, in fact, ubiquitous.4 They serve to illuminate unseen spatial and cultural logics of suburban development and demonstrate how our notions of site depend on our frame of reference. This chapter argues that excluding multifamily housing from our vision of suburbia has implications not just for how we see suburbs, but for how we design and build them.

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Puget Sound Apartment Concentrations The central Puget Sound region of Washington State has similar patterns of growth and suburbanization as other western US urban areas. Between 1960 and 2010, the population of the urbanized area containing the central cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett tripled to three million people.5 Most of this growth is in the suburbs, containing 70 percent of the population living outside the central cities in a vast urbanized region covering more than 1,000 square miles. The growth of multifamily housing in the region, including both stacked apartments and condominium units and side-by-side units (plexes and townhomes), also followed national trends. Between 1960 and 2010, attached units went from comprising 10 percent of the housing stock in the urbanized area outside the central cities to about 34 percent, housing more than a quarter of the suburban population. This housing, unevenly dispersed throughout the region, is located in about 100 small concentrations, averaging less than 400 acres in area.6 In aggregate, the total area of these apartment concentrations makes up only 8 percent of the land area of the suburban region but contains 20 percent of its population. Dismissed as part of sprawl, the resulting gross population densities exceed those found in all but a few neighborhoods in central Seattle. Like these older Seattle neighborhoods, most apartment concentrations contain retail stores and civic facilities within a short, walkable distance from surrounding housing. Additionally, 10 to 30 percent of the population does not identify as white, making the areas as ethnically diverse as areas in neighboring cities. Together, these characteristics – medium housing densities, mixed land uses, and diverse populations – reflect conventional images of urban, not suburban, neighborhoods.

Mapping Missing Sites Most conceptions of suburban landscapes miss sites of multifamily housing partly because of conventional ways of measuring and understanding urbanized areas. For instance, standard geographic units of analysis used for mapping, analysis, and decisionmaking such as census tracts, forecast analysis zones, and transportation analysis zones poorly capture relatively small but dense areas of suburban apartments. Maps at the tract scale, for example, show few areas outside the cores of the old, central cities, with residential densities higher than ten people per acre. Remapping the urbanized area using much smaller geographic units of analysis such as census blocks, in contrast, shows spots of higher density scattered across both urban and suburban areas. The number of people living in areas at above ten people per acre increases two and a half times from 520,00 using census tracts to 1,246,00 using census blocks.7 These differences result from how different patterns of prewar (urban) and postwar (suburban) development interact with census boundaries. Suburban apartment concentrations tend to cluster around large arterial roadway intersections, but census tracts typically use these roadways as boundaries, distributing apartment concentrations

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Figure 16.1  Census tracts (left) and blocks (right) with more than ten persons per acre in the Puget Sound region. (Courtesy of Paul M. Hess)

across different tracts. Compared to their apartment areas, suburban tracts also contain large areas of low-density uses such as single-family housing. As a result, apartment areas, systematically divided and diluted, disappear from maps. In contrast, census tracts better capture the more consistent development patterns in older, prewar areas; using the language of geographers, they are less subject to the modifiable areal unit problem, in which small changes in how boundaries are defined can have large impacts on outcome measures such as density.8 In this limited respect, received ideas of the heterogeneity of the city and the homogeneity of the suburbs are reversed: measured using particular units of analysis at particular scales below that of census tracts, suburban development is more heterogeneous than urban development, containing patches of higher-density apartments and townhouses, lower-density detached houses, and various kinds of nonresidential uses. Only when measured at even finer scales within blocks or at the parcel level are densities and other characteristics of development more varied in older, more central locations. Measured at the more typical census tract scale, however, suburban areas appear to conform to and reinforce their common image as a vast sprawl of low-density

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subdivisions. The key point here is that methods of measurement affect the types of patterns that are understood.

Apartment Concentrations as Sites: Juanita, Crossroads, and Kent East Hill Refocusing at a finer scale than census tracts highlights concentrations of suburban apartments as an integral part of postwar development and a potential locus of neighborhood. Located in different suburban municipalities, Crossroads in Bellevue, Juanita in Kirkland, and East Hill in Kent are three large, mature concentrations showing many

Figure 16.2  Location map. (Courtesy of Paul M. Hess)

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Figure 16.3  Land use patterns. (Courtesy of Paul M. Hess)

of the characteristics that are developing in younger clusters located across the Puget Sound region.9 All three are substantial places with similar land-use patterns at odds with common images of suburban landscapes. Set within a larger fabric of detached housing, each of the apartment concentrations surrounds a commercial center. As of 2010, these centers varied from about 30 stores to more than 100, with each providing basic services, such as supermarkets, drugstores, personal services, and restaurants. Within a half mile of its center, Juanita contains more than 2,000 multifamily housing units, with more than 3,500 each in Crossroads and Kent East Hill (KEH). Gross population densities within this area lie in the range of twelve or thirteen people per acre, similar to Seattle’s older, streetcar-era neighborhoods. While such concentrations of services and people within a walkable area are not typically associated with suburban places, this pattern occurs through the region. The manner in which the sites emerged out of the general suburbanization process illustrates how integral they are to these landscapes. For example, Juanita, a small resort area on Lake Washington before World War II, began to take on its present pattern by 1965. A small shopping center was built north of the main intersection, with subdivisions constructed in a ring of land located at the edges of the area, away from the new commercial area. The 1960s saw continued commercial development in the center and the development of apartments, eventually filling in the land between the commercial area and the subdivisions by the end of the 1970s. In Crossroads, the sequence of development was similar, but took place more rapidly and at a larger scale. First, a large-scale subdivision with over 3,000 houses was established by the late 1950s. The same developer established a shopping mall at the intersection of two main roadways – “the Crossroads” – by 1960. The construction of large apartment complexes between the mall and the subdivisions was also started at this time; by 1980, the area’s current form was largely established. In Kent East Hill, the process skipped the phase of singlefamily homes, with retail and multifamily development proceeding rapidly, starting just before 1960 and continuing apace through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

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In all three cases, commercial and residential development is closely linked and mutually supporting. The closest spatial link exists between multifamily and retail areas. In all cases, multifamily housing was developed immediately adjoining retail uses. Single-family houses, where they exist, are located behind apartment areas and away from retail uses. In general, the patterns were established with single-family housing developed first, then retail services, and finally multifamily housing. Thus, the sites evidence similar patterns of spatial and temporal development.

Development and Division Historic land ownership and division processes illustrate the fundamental social logic of these patterns. During the first half of the 20th century, lot patterns were fluid as landowners speculated in the sparsely settled urban fringe. Parcels were subdivided, aggregated, and redivided in new patterns that legally established streets, lots, and blocks, but were often never developed. By the 1920s, average lots sizes along the main roads in Juanita, Crossroads, and Kent East Hill ranged from 10 to 30 acres, certainly large by urban standards, but small considering that substantial development did not occur until decades later. In contrast, very large, survey-section-sized lots owned by railroad and lumber companies or by government were located just outside of the areas later developed with apartments and stores. In the postwar period, these larger sites were attractive to vertically integrated companies seeking to produce entire “communities.”10 The large subdivision company in Crossroads, for example, acquired several square miles of contiguous land for this purpose. In Juanita, subdivisions were smaller but still occurred on the largest lots, located furthest from existing roadways. In Kent East Hill, land was more finely divided than either Juanita or Crossroads due to the area’s prewar use for small truck farms, partly explaining the relative lack of detached housing. In addition to its longer distance from Seattle, these lots were less suitable for large-scale, postwar single-family development, but well suited to the scale of retail and apartment development when the area was eventually urbanized. In all three areas, multifamily development did not strongly reshape land division, but occurred on lots that already existed before World War II or on their simple division or aggregation. The sequence of development, spatial arrangement of land uses, and their fit with prewar land-division patterns suggests the integral nature of apartment sites as part of suburbanization. Juanita and Crossroads started as neighborhood commercial centers located on main roads serving newly established single-family areas. This singlefamily housing was developed from large land parcels located away from the roadways. Multifamily complexes were built concurrently with retail areas but occurred on mediumsized lots that were seen as too small and too close to commercial uses for single-family housing. In Kent East Hill, large lots suitable for postwar subdivisions did not exist, but apartment development was nevertheless relegated to an area around a growing commercial center. In all three areas, multifamily zones provided a larger market for the retail stores and acted as a buffer between single-family subdivisions and commercial

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development. These areas of higher-density housing, more than contradicting the image of low-density suburbia, act as a shield that helps create the protected zones of detached housing so central to the image.

Apartments Apart, and a Part Although basic to suburban landscapes, apartment developments were rarely treated as parts of neighborhoods. Instead, each complex was conceived as an independent site with minimal connections to surrounding projects. They are designed as inward-oriented compounds that remain largely unknown beyond their residents and visitors. Suburban multifamily housing in the United States comes in several basic configurations, with a basic division between townhomes (side-by-side plex units) and stacked garden apartments, each found as either rentals or as condominiums. Townhomes are one- or two-story units attached in rows with individual ground-level entrances. Garden apartments, even more common, are typically configured as threestory walk-up buildings with units arranged around stairwells, with two units accessed per landing. Both types use through-building unit plans, with living rooms and formal spaces placed to overlook lawns or gardens, away from their entries accessed from parking lots. The design logic of the layout of buildings, parking, and internal open spaces is often obscure. Driveways do not connect between complexes and have minimal connections to public streets. Fences typically mark lot lines, and designs do not respond to conditions on adjoining lots. The treatment of multifamily complexes as abstract development modules, with little connection to or regard for surrounding development, reinforces stereotypical images of sprawl as disorganized and disconnected. However, at a larger scale the strict arrangement of land uses in the apartment clusters closely conforms to 20th-century planning models. The development of zoning as a legal and standard planning tool, for instance, was closely tied to protecting single-family areas from other uses in suburbanizing areas.11 The landmark 1922 Supreme Court decision establishing the constitutionality of zoning, Euclid, Ohio v. Amber Realty, specifically mentioned apartment houses as “parasites” that “take advantage” of the “residential character” of singlefamily districts in its reasoning. Spreading throughout the country, a hierarchy of zoning practices assigned the most preferential status to single-family zones. Courts in many states accepted that apartments may and should be used to buffer single-family residential areas from nonresidential uses.12 The spatial arrangement of retail, multifamily, and single-family zones found in the three case study areas closely reflect these zoning principals. The use of apartments to protect single-family areas from other uses was also central to early planning models, particularly Clarence Perry’s 1929 neighborhood unit proposal.13 Perry argued that residential neighborhoods should be organized around elementary schools and other community facilities and that they should be bounded and defined by major roadways. Neighborhood units could be composed of all kinds of housing types, but the classic formation as depicted in a famous diagram describes a

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Figure 16.4  Garden apartment entrances off a parking lot. (Courtesy of Paul M. Hess)

160-acre area strongly oriented toward single-family housing. Neighborhood retail uses and apartments also appear, but they sit apart from the single-family core and community facilities, located at intersections along the major roadways; apartments and stores, although perhaps necessary, are thus physically placed where they are peripheral to the vision of neighborhood life. The neighborhood unit still remains a powerful planning model and was clearly in use in postwar King County where the case studies are located. The 1958 Figure 16.5  Site layouts with parking (gray), buildings (black), and open space (white) for an area of garden apartments and townhouses in Crossroads. (Courtesy of Paul M. Hess)

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King County comprehensive plan describes the “ideal neighborhood” as “a rather solid pattern of homes, linked by quiet streets and centered on an elementary school. … A small neighborhood shopping location may be spotted near the edge of the neighborhood.”14 The more ambitious 1964 plan also relies on the concept, stating that “stable residential areas should contain pleasant homes” and that “residential areas are best formed in elementary school neighborhood units which are bounded by prominent physical land features, major elements of the circulation system, and other more intensive land uses.” In contrast, the plan states that multifamily areas “shall always be located functionally convenient to a major or secondary arterial highway” and that they may be “logically developed adjacent” to shopping areas.15 Like Perry’s vision, these plans emphasize a particular vision of the neighborhood in which single-family zones are the locus of a stable community life, and multifamily and commercial development are seen in more functional terms. The land-use patterns in the case study areas mirror these planning ideas, but with a different focus on what constitutes their centers. Indeed, treating retail areas surrounded by apartments as the center of analysis relegates single-family housing and associated schools to the periphery – exactly opposite from the neighborhood unit concept. This alternative centering, using a more urban notion that treats major commercial streets as focal points where people and activities come together, combines the corners of several neighborhood units across arterial roadways that are seen as a boundary of division in the model. Indeed, many apartment concentrations surrounding retail stores are found precisely where the corners of four 160-acre neighborhood units adjoin. Analogous to using different census boundaries to measure suburban densities, redrawing the boundaries of suburban planning models, in effect turning them inside out, opens up new questions about how suburban sites are conceived and perceived.

Streets and Automobiles Apart Relationships between arterial roads and single-family street networks also reinforce the separation of single-family housing from adjoining multifamily and commercial concentrations. The single-family housing subdivision process encourages the creation of new public streets and, in earlier projects, new blocks. By the late 1970s, however, most subdivisions were built with loop- and cul-de-sac-type street systems that created no through routes and few if any blocks. Multifamily and single-family zones frequently meet along fenced, landscaped boundaries in the middle of the resultant superblocks, but, whenever possible, entrances to subdivisions are placed well away from those of multifamily housing, often on entirely different arterial streets. Suburban apartment and retail development utilize large lots that do not require subdivision and are not, therefore, subject to one of the main tools of planning control, thereby creating no new public streets, much less new blocks. In Kent East Hill, one block containing a huge shopping district and thousands of housing units measures 138 acres. In Crossroads, the two blocks containing the majority of stores and multifamily units measure almost 200 acres each. Multifamily lots, sometimes extending

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a full quarter mile into blocks, are accessed by private parking and driveway systems that connect to public roadways at one or two points only. In large developments, these intersections may be busy enough to warrant their own traffic signals. Although they rarely have sidewalks, these driveway entrances are used by both pedestrians and vehicles to access complexes. As with the patterning of adjoining land uses in the apartment clusters, the sparse street networks in these areas also reflect early planning models. In the 19th century, critics started to attack the American tradition of laying out cities with an orthogonal grid of streets and lots as monotonous and unnatural. By midcentury, curvilinear street patterns suggesting romanticized rural landscapes were adopted in some higher-income, planned suburbs such as Olmstead’s plan for Riverside, Illinois, but most subdivisions continued to rely on grids. This began to change in the 1920s when automobile traffic became a part of daily life and street grids started to be seen as inherently dangerous with their huge numbers of intersections and the potential for through traffic on all streets. Perry’s neighborhood unit proposal, with protected areas using local, nonthrough streets was one response. Clarence Stein’s 1929 model neighborhood of Radburn, New Jersey, pushed the separation of neighborhood areas and traffic even further, placing housing on cul-de-sacs that penetrated into true superblocks. The roadless block interior was dedicated for parkland, community facilities, and a pedestrian walkway system entirely separated from auto traffic.16 Beginning in the mid-1930s and extending into the postwar period, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) publicized the Radburn plan as an important model, but key ideas from Radburn were only partially applied during the massive wave of postwar suburbanization.17 Indeed, FHA-promoted designs were so stripped down as to make the connection to Radburn almost unrecognizable. The FHA did advocate for the creation of larger blocks and curvilinear streets to create better communities, but ideas such as providing community parkland and protected pedestrian networks were dropped entirely. Developers were happy, however, to minimize the amount of land devoted to expensive, non-revenue-producing roadways, and FHA-influenced subdivision designs located within superblocks defined by suburban arterial roadways became the norm. These superblocks protect single-family housing from through traffic as intended. Outside of these protected zones, however, areas around arterials become places to move automobiles, not to build neighborhoods and communities. Places with concentrations of people and activity, such as the retail and apartment areas described in this chapter, have, in fact, skeletal public street systems and infrastructure compared to single-family areas. Despite continual road widening, traffic congestion on suburban arterials is often endemic. Walking routes are indirect; sidewalk systems are discontinuous; and wide, heavily trafficked roadways have few crossing opportunities. Detailed studies of informal pedestrian paths in these places show some people find routes through these blocks; carved into the ground, paths in, around, and through fences, retaining walls, and other pedestrian barriers illustrate the deficiencies of the formal street system. Still, in spite of the hostile environment, a surprising number of residents do walk between multifamily areas and retail centers.18

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Sighting Suburban Apartments as Neighborhoods Reflecting prewar lot patterns, early planning models, and developer interests, suburban apartment concentrations are integral to how suburban landscapes are built and structured. As such, they belie ideas of suburban landscapes as disorganized or as dominated by single-family residential uses. The almost singular emphasis on protecting single-family areas from traffic and “nuisance land uses” helped create concentrated areas of apartments and retail stores between such protected zones. As a result, these medium-density mixed areas share many attributes associated with urban, not suburban, neighborhoods. Unlike their more urban counterparts, however, these places were conceived as edges, not centers. They have a tightly structured neighborhood-like land-use program, but despite the best attempts by residents, they remain largely disconnected places. Compared to their urban counterparts, the land-use mix is coarse, the size of their parcels enormous, and the street and block systems resemble rural areas, albeit with wide, heavily trafficked roadways. They might be termed resultant neighborhoods: ones that were never planned, designed, or developed to work as cohesive places. In other respects, they should not be called neighborhoods at all. The term neighborhood is generally reserved for areas recognized as distinct places based on special character or an identifiable group of inhabitants. One of the most striking aspects of suburban apartment concentrations is precisely that they are unrecognized. Their existence remains hidden by institutionalized modes of professional analysis, by development practices, and by planning models. Recognizing these places is important for a number of reasons. Increasing the density and mix of land uses in suburban areas has become a key goal of smartgrowth policies in many parts of North America. Juanita, Crossroads, and Kent East Hill suggest that many suburban places, albeit unnoticed, already exist with substantial densities and housing and stores in close proximity. These places, however, do not create the kind of transportation and social benefits that smart-growth policy hopes to achieve; reducing auto congestion and enhancing walking, bicycling, and public transit will require more than pursuing abstract notions of density and mix. New planning tools will be needed to create finer-grained street networks, complete sidewalk systems, and improve connections between development parcels. These essential elements of community design are currently missing from the zoning and subdivision regulations used to shape suburban development.19 Despite smart-growth policies, the types of development patterns evident in suburban apartment concentrations continue to be replicated. They can, for example, be seen in master planned projects, where the arrangement of land uses, the configuration of street systems, and the design of building types are much more tightly controlled by a single developer than is possible with government planning tools. These patterns even show up in New Urbanist communities, where despite their stated objectives of integrating land uses and connecting streets, concentrations of multifamily housing often replicate mid-century suburban models, with apartments kept apart from single-family

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zones. It is necessary to understand the origins and social logics of these models to both change new patterns of development and redesign old ones to create connected neighborhoods. Rather than implementing New Urbanist principals in large developments at the far edges of metropolitan areas, we need to look more closely inside the enormous existing areas of already urbanized suburbs. Juanita, Crossroads, and Kent East Hill offer three large and mature examples from the scores of other apartment concentrations found in the urbanized region around Seattle. Similar forms exist across the United States. They are significant places, partly because of the substantial numbers of people living in them and partly for what they say about suburban development practices, suburban lifestyles, and our images of suburbia. All these places could be improved as neighborhoods and communities, but first we need to refine our images of suburban landscapes and the variety of sites within them. Suburbs are more than a dimensionless realm without site and more than the locus of single, detached houses. Redescribing suburban sites as complex, multiple, and overlapping revises the understandings we need to improve areas of multifamily housing and shape them as neighborhoods. This effort to see suburbs in a new way is a first step in acknowledging that roughly one-third of suburban Americans in metropolitan areas call their apartments home.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

7 8

E. C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); and James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). P. Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979). K. T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); R. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and R. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996). According to US Census data and definitions for urbanized areas of over one million people, almost 36 percent of the housing units outside central cities are found in some kind of attached unit. Although these attached units contain smaller households than average, they house just under one-third of suburban Americans. US Census of Population and Housing, 1960 and 2010, data for the Seattle and Tacoma urbanized areas. The 1960 data is the first to use the definition of urbanized areas that is still in use, but the area of what is considered urbanized changes over time. A. V. Moudon and P. Hess, “Suburban Clusters: The Nucleation of Multifamily Housing in the Suburban Areas of the Central Puget Sound,” Journal of the American Planning Association 66, no. 3 (2000): 243–264. These figures and the following map rely on 2000 census data and were not recomputed using more current data. See P. Hess et al., “Measuring Land Use for Transportation Research,” Transportation Research Record 1674 (1999): 11–31; and, for a detailed discussion of the modifiable areal unit problem, see B. Bhatta, “Analysis of Urban Growth and Sprawl from Remote

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9

10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17

18

19

Sensing Data,” in Advances in Geographic Information Science (New York: Springer, 2010). The areas are described as of 2010, when this chapter was first published. Juanita, in particular, has seen transformation with a New Urbanist style, mixed-use redevelopment of its main commercial parcels. Data used to understand these areas includes property atlases and aerial photographs available for five- to ten-year increments over a period of more than four decades. Field data on physical form, land use, and design features was collected in association with previous research: P. M. Hess, “Pedestrians, Networks, and Neighborhoods: A Study of Walking and Mixed-Use, MediumDensity Development Patterns in the Puget Sound Region” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001). M. R. Wolfe, Locational Factors Involved in Suburban Land Development (Seattle: Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, undated); and M. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). R. Fischler, “The Metropolitan Dimension of Early Zoning: Revisiting the 1916 New York City Ordinance,” Journal of the American Planning Association 64, no. 2 (1998): 170–188. D. R. Mandelker, The Zoning Dilemma: A Legal Strategy for Urban Change (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). C. A. Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit,” in Neighborhood and Community Planning, Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, vol. 7 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1929). King County Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for King County, Washington (Seattle: 1958), 3. King County Planning Department, The Comprehensive Plan for King County, Washington (Seattle: 1964), 111. C. S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1966). Radburn closely paralleled the neighborhood unit in the arrangement of large streets framing protected areas of houses and community facilities, but also in the arrangement of land uses with apartments located at the back of commercial facilities at the main corner of the superblock that was developed. K. T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and M. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). In good weather, daytime walking rates vary from 30 people per hour walking in Juanita to over 100 people per hour walking into the center of Crossroads. See P. M. Hess et al., “Neighborhood Site Design and Pedestrian Travel,” Transportation Research Record 1674 (1999): 9–19. On informal paths, see P. M. Hess, “Evaluating Pedestrian Environments: Proposals for Urban Form Measures of Network Connectivity, with Case Studies of Wallingford in Seattle and Crossroads in Bellevue, Washington” (Master’s thesis, University of Washington, 1994); and N. Larco, “Walking to the Strip Mall: Retrofitting Informal Pedestrian Paths,” in Retrofitting Sprawl: Addressing Seventy Years of Failed Urban Form, ed. E. Talen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 166–187. For one of the few treatments of this topic, see N. Larco, K. Kelsey, and A. West, Site Design for Multifamily Housing: Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).

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17. F  rom Gerrymandering to Co-Mandering: Redrawing the Lines Peter Marcuse Gerrymandering – the partisan practice of drawing congressional district lines in ways that deliver a voting advantage to the majority party at the expense of the minority – is of paramount concern to our national politics. Since congressional districting structures electoral college voting, partisan influence on how these district lines get drawn effects the governance of our nation at every level. Essentially a spatial planning process, gerrymandering should be of particular concern to those who fix lines to determine land use. Yet few planning and design professionals are trained to consider how their work intersects with districting procedures and their wide-reaching social, economic, and political ramifications. Established under the United States Constitution, congressional districting practices came under intense scrutiny following the 2016 presidential election and will do so again following the 2020 census. Heightened awareness of inequities resulting from the gerrymandering of districts has focused broader attention on redistricting, with an eye toward ensuring social justice. This essay goes beyond offering further critique of gerrymandering to recast redistricting as a constructive practice – one that concerned professionals from all fields, but importantly from the design profession, might actively participate in to effect positive change. This essay argues that a process here called “co-mandering” – a democratic decision-making process involving committees with broad expertise, convened to insure the equitable layout and use of space – could progress from the grassroots level up, to address local districting issues and to ultimately impact national ones. Although the Supreme Court has largely washed its hands of the redistricting problem beyond considering the constitutional issue of one person one vote, recent state level decisions suggest that committee oversight may point the way forward. While still marred by partisanship, this development holds promise. More specifically for this essay’s audience, it presents opportunities for planners and designers to participate actively in securing social and economic justice through their work.

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Districting as Line Drawing Districting – the generic process of drawing lines to define spaces – occurs at multiple scales and for multiple purposes throughout the United States. Lines drawn to form discrete physical and conceptual entities compartmentalize land and its occupants in the service of a particular goal, such as the provision of a service or the structuring of a process. Districting grounds the social, economic, political, or environmental regulation of many forms of organized human activity and administration. Spaces large and small set aside for any of a variety of purposes, from high-rise construction to wildlife preserve, police precinct to transportation hub, constitute a district. Ranking districts in a hierarchy of scale poses little challenge (see Table 17.1). Coordinating activity among scales, however, can prove difficult. Boundaries frequently cross and districts lines overlap, simultaneously uniting and dividing constituents across jurisdictions formal and informal, public and private, legal, political, and social. In every instance, locating lines in space is a value-laden proposition. Decisions as to where these lines get drawn, who determines their location, what the resulting boundaries include (or exclude), and how the resulting area is used or serviced all have real-life consequences. Districts defined as political and legal largely parallel each other in practice; state legislatures draw congressional district lines, for instance, while local legislative bodies subject to state-established rules draw zoning lines and establish permitted uses. Districts defined as service-oriented are drawn by diverse interest groups and professionals, taking into account a wide array of standards. Disparities are resolved through legal procedures established by a variety of entities (procedures not always well suited to address the particular goal to be accomplished). A whole body of law, known as Conflicts of Laws, deals with a complex subset of scale-level differences.

Table 17.1  Customary hierarchy of scales Sites Study areas Areas of concern Neighborhoods Communities Service districts Municipal voting districts Municipal (defined by land use regulations) Municipalities (bounded as political entities) State legislative and voting districts Congressional districts State voting districts States (bounded as political entities) Nation

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Links among the hierarchies of scale and social value, however, are seldom recognized – or if they are, they are not generally dealt with directly. Instead, they are by and large handled discretely by professionals of disparate disciplines, each functioning under its own set of laws, standards, and measures. Among those involved are urban and regional planners, urban designers, architects, social scientists, and environmentalists, who share a productive role in how districts are formed. Their work relating to spatial planning, urban development, redevelopment, infrastructure, and community building are instrumental in shaping the space – if not the boundaries – of any given district. And yet, while these professionals are trained to provide services that improve the quality of life and the environment in which they build, rarely are they focused on the political consequences of their work from a districting perspective – that is, how their planning or design respects or impinges upon, reifies or disrupts, the multiple existing district boundaries inscribed upon the site. With an eye toward raising questions and suggesting further avenues for research across all scales of districting, this essay focuses on drawing lines at one particular scale – the congressional district. Whereas all lines that function as boundaries shape spaces, and all spaces shape communities, activities, and relationships, nowhere in this country do district lines have more pronounced political ramifications. The drawing of congressional district lines is an unavoidably political action, with the legitimacy of any boundary making it a logical magnet for local debate. But the partisan practice of drawing congressional district lines in ways that deliver a voting advantage to the majority party at the expense of the minority party – a practice known as gerrymandering – has raised concern to a national level. By examining this particular scale of districting, this essay hopes to insert the planning and design professions into the heart of a heated and highly consequential political debate.

A Brief Introduction to Gerrymandering Gerrymandering is considered politically unfair because it uses line drawing around congressional voting districts to advantage one particular political party over another. In the United States, gerrymandering occurs most consequentially at the federal Congressional scale; it is less important at most other levels of government, since it applies only to “single member” and “winner-take-all” elections, rather than slates, panels, or multimember bodies. National electoral results in the Electoral College, which was established by the United States Constitution, are tabulated according to legislative districts determined by each individual state legislature. This opened the door to a process in which the members of political parties holding power set the size and boundaries of districts to their own partisan advantage. If voting for state-level candidates happens statewide, rather than by district, Congressional district lines function only as a matter of convenience, enabling individual voters to know in which district their ballot will be counted. This means that ballots are effective statewide. If, however, ballots are effective by districts – that is, aggregated as

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separate units to produce the state results – election results can turn out to be quite different. For example, if one party has a clear majority overall in a four-district state, but another party has a majority in a small area, one district might be drawn to encompass only that smaller area, giving the minority party one legislator. Using boundaries for partisan political purposes, as gerrymandering does, to manipulate electoral outcomes creates problems that go back centuries. The term gerrymandering has a long and interesting history. It originated in the early 19th century, the result of merging the surname of Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, with the word salamander. It was coined to call out a perceived similarity in shape between the newly created voting district (felt to favor the governor’s party) and the amphibian. A map, drawn while the governor was in office and first published in 1812 in the Boston Globe, depicts the salamander-shaped district as a dragon, replete with claws, wings, and fangs.1 Since that time, US politicians have become notorious for mobilizing the practice of gerrymandering to increase concentrations of existing power and inequality. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, despite receiving only a minority of votes, because gerrymandering tipped several state legislative districts in his favor. Similarly, dozens of congressional seats were captured. Over time, countless public electoral decisions – concerning school districts, tax districts, transportation routes, sports activities, the allocation of public police and fire services, and the distribution of subsidies – have been influenced through gerrymandered voting; likewise nonelectoral decisions such as boundaries for specific land uses, in which Congressional district lines often play a role. Many such decisions and outcomes end up being challenged in the courts; gerrymandering’s history can thus be traced through this litigation. US Supreme Court treatment might suggest that the only significant consequence of gerrymandering is the unfair electoral advantage gained by one party over another. That is not the case. Gerrymandering raises many other issues concerning fairness and the prioritizing of values. Even a cursory examination of key Supreme Court decisions illuminates the complexity of this problem. Fairness is seen by the Supreme Court mainly as a problem of fairness in voting, with fairness defined simply as “one citizen, one vote” (1:1). In reviewing cases involving gerrymandering, the courts have focused mainly on how the districting process may violate the one person, one vote rule, read into the US Constitution. But that reading of this rule is too simple; each voter may get one ballot, and each voter’s ballot may be counted, but this is not enough. Does a voter in every district cast a vote that carries the same force as every other in the same district? The techniques used to give some voters a partisan advantage are nicknamed “cracking” and “packing.” Their purpose is to dilute the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters by assigning them to districts in which they form a minority (49 percent or less); as a result, their votes will not have the power to change the overall outcome of an election. Alternatively, voters for one party can be “packed” into as many voter districts as possible to create a majority (51.1 percent) so that their votes will guarantee success in that district and will not be “wasted” in districts where that party holds a large majority.2

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Figure 17.1  Natural and Political History of the Gerry-mander! In Two Chapters. Published circa 1820, this broadside reprinted the original 1812 newspaper article and cartoon illustrating the first use of the term Gerry-mander. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. (Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library)

Gerrymandering gives the dominant party’s voters maximal impact and the minority party’s voters minimal impact. Ingenious but devastating, this process relies on statistical analysis of voter location to permit the drawing of lines to allocate each party’s vote to the desired area. Sophisticated computer algorithms make it appear simple: relevant figures, entered into a computer, allow software to differentiate between the “effective” votes needed to produce the dominant party’s overall majority and the “wasted votes” that opposition candidates may safely receive. Opposition voting blocks are cracked, and dominant voters are packed, geographically.3 Votes no longer have equal bearing on the election: they are of unequal significance. The Supreme Court, after stating the 1:1 rule, has examined the particular boundaries presented in multiple legal cases to determine compliance. Of course, no set of boundaries will result in mathematically exact equality of voting power for

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each individual, at least for long. Real life moves fast: populations shift, immigrants become naturalized, children come of age, people die. Even the most elaborate computer programs would need to constantly recalculate to account for such demographic change. Behind this practical issue, however, hides an ethical one: If gerrymandering is fundamentally unfair, should it ever be deployed as a tool in redistricting, a process designed to remove an unfair advantage? Gerrymandering gives more weight to votes cast by some voters than by others, leading some to argue that any plan will violate (at least to some small extent) the 1:1 constitutional requirement. It is for this reason that the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, have decided that some degree of leeway must be allowed for election officials to draw their district lines. While the courts generally agree on the need to question the effects of gerrymandering, cases vary widely in terms of what is considered unfair under the 1:1 rule. In allowing exceptions to the 1:1 rule, courts also offer a variety of justifications. One of these involves intent. Lines explicitly drawn for partisan advantage are unacceptable. But proponents justify lines resulting in a deviation by appealing to other standards. For example, they may claim that the lines in question will result in more compact districts or improve access to voting locations or avoid crossing other jurisdictional or historically established lines. The Supreme Court’s formulation that lines must be justified by an “overriding legitimate purpose” leaves its precise meaning open to interpretation, to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Also at issue is how much leeway can be considered allowable. While recent rulings suggest that a consensus of 5 percent variation from the desired 1:1 ratio is tolerable under most conditions, cases have gone back and forth on what constitutes an acceptable degree. It is worth considering whether accepting some degree of inequality – by drawing somewhat unequal districts or favoring one set of values over another when drawing district lines – is inevitable. If so, can only a rigid rule such as 1:1, enforced by the courts, provide some limit or standard of fairness? What other rules could the Supreme Court possibly establish? Facing endless possibilities, the courts continue to disagree on standards. Who should be empowered to draw district lines? Under what procedures should lines be drawn? What values should these lines reflect? Is intent actually relevant in accessing fairness? These questions have not yet been answered.4 In this context it is no wonder that the courts so often have difficulty passing judgment on the cases before them and frequently come to conflicting results. Court decisions are typically focused narrowly, limited to whatever particular facts justify an immediate decision. This leaves the underlying philosophical and public policy questions for later resolution, aided by the passage of time. One can have some sympathy with the courts.

The Forms of (Re)Districting Where does this bring us? The process of laying out congressional districts is politically fraught. Regardless of intent, the drawing of lines is inherently and necessarily unfair. It thus follows that any set of lines will be considered unfair by some group or other. What

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does not follow, however, is that all forms and degrees of unfairness, for all groups – rich or poor, black or white – are of equal concern within a democracy. Nor does it follow that all procedural approaches for defining boundaries of electoral districts are equally unfair. One can imagine a wide variety of forms of purposefully setting district lines – of “mandering” – that are not partisan gerrymandering. Districting need not necessarily result in one party receiving an unfair advantage over another. This process could instead be viewed as an opportunity – to improve land-use patterns; to establish a social context for spatial planning at all levels of government; to inform, make transparent, and democratize public decision-making relative to issues such as the uses of free speech and free assembly; and even to raise fundamental questions about social and political values in a democracy. These opportunities extend well beyond the need to insure partisan neutrality. Consider the many ways locally drawn lines for use in public decision-making have come to be created and used in the past, exclusive of gerrymandering: •

Constitutional (re)districting, a process by which electoral boundaries are changed with no purpose other than meeting the mandatory requirement of reestablishing district boundaries every ten years following the decennial census, subject to two agreed-upon constitutional requirements: that each district has approximately the same number of people and that each voter has an equal say with their vote (1:1)5

•

Redistricting, by which existing divisions are changed for the sole purpose of enabling voters to most conveniently cast their ballots

•

Simple redistricting, a process by which existing boundaries play a major role in assessing the appropriateness of new lines

•

Voluntary redistricting, by which electoral district boundaries are changed to take into account demographic change (used specifically to reverse or adjust the effects of gerrymandering)

•

Natural districting, by which district boundaries are established following some perceived “natural” or plausible topographic lines of territorial division (the opposite of gerrymandering)6

Other possibilities, while not currently in use, are worthy of consideration, if only to stimulate thought regarding the real purpose and effects of districting approaches: •

Justlymandering, a process by which lines focused on increasing social justice are drawn

•

Jennymandering, by which lines are drawn with a feminist sensibility

•

Un-obamandering, by which lines are drawn reflexively, deleting lines drawn under the Obama administration

• •

Black or ethnicmandering, perhaps affirmativemandering Naturalmandering, by which lines are drawn based on the location of natural geographic features

•

Marketmandering, by which lines generated by market forces are simply accepted.

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•

Affirmative gerrymandering, as opposed to gerrymandering, a process favoring

•

Comishmandering, by which district lines are drawn by a publicly appointed

•

Co-mandering, a process by which a community-based, democratically developed,

balance between opposing sides commission professionally informed group draws district lines through an open, participatory process to meet logical standards of fairness Of the many alternatives to gerrymandering, co-mandering is presented here as the potentially fairest way of drawing lines in space to regulate its use. The term reflects ideal standards and decision-making processes while giving explicit recognition to power relations and vested interest. As a process, it holds great promise for accommodating the full range of relevant social, political, economic, and environmental values. The Supreme Court has tangentially – indeed, gingerly – touched on a few other issues that might be allowed to be taken into consideration. But for the Court to formulate a remedy for gerrymandering, it must resolve many more issues. Listing those likely faced in any controversial districting process makes it apparent that most will also arise in any thoughtful planning or design process. These issues include the following: Political neutrality: Other than in voting results, can we consider real-world nonpartisanship? Diversity: By itself, diversity is an unhelpful abstraction. Is it diversity of ethnicity? Of class? Of age or experience? Is it diversity itself or the desirable scale of diversity with which we need to grapple? Is it diversity primarily in political interaction? Are we concerned with ordinary citizens talking to each other about issues of common concern? Or with local representatives talking to each other? Or with committees at different scales, formed for public or group discussion or to make recommendations? Or formal negotiations among officially constituted entities (e.g., zoning boards, police commissions, weather bureaus)? Can such diversity be achieved through districting procedures? Solidarity and reinforcement of community: Community reinforcing actions have negative side effects. They neglect others who do not belong or are not in solidarity with the group. Even involuntary spatial clusters (e.g., ghettoes) have some solidarity effects among some groups but can create hostility toward outsiders. Does formalization of the constitution of groups (e.g., registering, official recognition, incorporation) help? Or is community formation best left to purely informal action? Should there be formal regulations (e.g., prohibitions) against racial discrimination within these communities? Political Consequences: The relationship between political boundaries and community boundaries can prove tricky. The way lines are drawn to determine political boundaries (e.g. voting, electioneering, locations for public gatherings and organizing) can influence the likelihood that a given

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plan will meet with legislative approval. It can also have long-lasting effects on the political strengths and weaknesses of parties and groups. Historical traditions: To what extent should different values (e.g., inequalities, ethnic and economic differences, ideological positions, historical experiences) be honored? Can standards be formulated for distinguishing among traditions, and if so, by whom and how should they be enforced? Participation: To what extent should concepts of citizen participation, particularly at the local level, be integrated with setting spatial boundaries? Communication: Techniques of communication and interpretation for conveying nuance, reinforcing or challenging stereotypes, or simply providing information can vary greatly. They also can produce very different results, some desirable (e.g., a fully informed citizenry, transparency in public affairs, appropriate outreach) and others less so (e.g., invasion of privacy, inequity). This list contains only issues that arise if the Supreme Court confines itself to a 1:1 analysis. Each crosses disciplinary boundaries and critical value debates and calls out for further thought and research. All should be of concern to anyone struggling with aspects of planning sites, study areas, areas of interest, and any spatial-boundary-defining permitted, desired, or prohibited uses, and they merit the involvement of experienced planning and design professionals. What else might then be considered? The right of assembly, for example? For the possibilities listed in Table 17.2, evidence of good faith and the absence of intent or partisan motivation would be a prerequisite. The National Council of State Legislators has prepared a widely respected list of standards appropriate for use in legislative redistricting, including a set seen as constitutionally mandated. It has also made its own recommendations. While largely overlapping with those cited previously as currently in use by the courts, these include two standards of major interest for our purposes: the preservation of communities of interest, and the preservation of existing political communities.7 These standards may refer to the simple, practical necessities for any efficient voting system (e.g., accessibility of polling places, letting voters know where to find their polling location, making intuitive sense in relation to other known lines and borders, and building on existing infrastructure).8 They may refer to the simple, practical, political necessity of finding criteria that could meet with majority approval and permit enactment into law (e.g., reinforcing a role for major political parties, avoiding contests between incumbents). Alternatively, such standards may implement the core of democratic decision-making, whether based on constitutional provisions relating to democratic governance or court decisions having that concern (e.g., 1:1). Adopting language like communities of interest, political communities, and preservation could open the door to co-mandering. But first we must ask, what is implied by using the concept of community in this context? And why speak of existing political communities?9 Phrased this way, it may seem that using the term political aims to preserve existing distributions of power. This would include gerrymandering (as it is explicitly designed to preserve the power of those already politically dominant),

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Table 17.2  Further desirable rules for districting lines, limiting the 1:1 rule Less than 10% de minimis threshold required for 1:1 equality Justification by the State for any deviation from full equality of the given percentage “As nearly as is practicable,” one person’s vote in a congressional election is worth as much as another’s Compactness of district boundaries Respect for municipal boundaries Preservation of the cores of prior districts Rectification of adverse impacts on minority groups Avoidance of bizarre shapes Approval of a legitimate public commission Following of topographic lines Respect for the practical requirements of running an election Avoidance of contests between incumbents Responsiveness to ballot initiatives Preservation of counties and other political subdivisions Avoidance of crossing county, city, town, or other political subdivision boundaries Good faith efforts to draw districts of equal population Evidence of political neutrality, non-partisanship Use of total population rather than just eligible voters

and no respectable organization, politically partisan or not, would want to be seen as defending gerrymandering. The language of preserving political communities can also be understood as speaking to the wishes of voters rather than those of political organizations. Further, this could include preserving communities of voters of political parties not currently in power – communities of losers as well as of winners. In the context of concerns about gerrymandering, communities presumably refers to areas – such as neighborhoods of a city or regions of a state – where the residents have common political interests that do not necessarily coincide with the boundaries of a political subdivision (such as a city or county) and may or may not mean the existing leadership of a two-party system. And what of the phrase “preservation of communities of interest?” Invoking communities here introduces another set of values and concepts; it suggests the drawing of lines as an instrument for achieving goals other than efficiency or democracy. “Communities” can encompass groups of many kinds – ethnic origin, language, occupation, sexual preference, aesthetics, historical ties, recreational priorities, age, immigration status – each vital to a full definition of democracy but not normally recognized in any formal legal way. Beyond that, and central to the argument put forward here, “preservation of communities of interest” suggests a proactive role for line-drawing during redistricting, not to simply reflect preset values or effectuate preset goals but instead to establish a process whereby goals and values can be debated and set.

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Solutions By setting standards that should be met when delineating a voting district, co-mandering has the potential to rationalize and democratize the planning and decision-making process for governments and citizens. By their location – the boundaries they produce and the communities they recognize, create, or reinforce – redistricting lines affect what happens on the ground in communities. Line-drawing helps define our communities. And yet, thus far, planning professionals have largely remained absent from line-drawing processes. Involving planners in redistricting debates would be a healthy move. Not only would it expand the contribution of planning beyond its conventional concerns, it would also improve the logic of the gentrification debates by introducing into them the experience and knowledge of planning. Imagine transforming the redistricting process to make it part of a routine governmental process concerned with effective planning. Deployed this way, redistricting could support the complex set of values of society as whole, not just the value (albeit an essential one) that each voter has an equally effective vote. Co-mandering, in this sense, refers to planning for the use of space in all communities, without discrimination, using the best of accumulated experience and research transparently to create “a more perfect union” – one that indeed best serves the entire community and each of its members equally. One possibility regarding the business of drawing district lines is to delegate and help empower commissions to undertake that task. Typically, legislatures appoint commissions, and legislative work involves neither the judicial branch of government nor the executive. This leaves open the standards that should be applied in establishing a commission to undertake line-drawing tasks. Who should sit on such commissions? How should qualified members be selected? What qualifications should be required? What interests should be represented? How much power should be given to these bodies? How are the results to be judged? Finding answers to these fundamental questions is extremely difficult. Neither the historical record of such commissions nor the existing theoretical debate about their tasks and functioning is very extensive. Even the National Conference of State Legislators, otherwise so helpful, says little on the topic. That said, civil society groups, professionals, and activists – those experienced in dealing with the use of space generally, as well as the planning processes for making decisions about space in the public interest – should be affirmatively engaged in the process. Planners in particular, already wrestling with these questions at the various scales outlined at the beginning of this essay, should be called upon to contribute to the public discussion. Planners should be informing communities and interest groups of all kinds about how their interests could be represented in the process of co-mandering, clarifying what difference drawing lines at this location or that would make. Commissions’ work should be part of the regular process of redistricting, which is after all a spatial process at its core, but at the same time a critical social and political and economic and environmental process. Co-mandering should be seen as a matter for participants in or concerned with the existing formal processes of planning – spatial and land use and social and

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formal planning – to help define and implement democratically decided decisions regarding the use of space in our society. The gerrymandering of voting districts is at heart planning, but it represents a very undesirable way of doing it. So how could the line-drawing that underlies gerrymandering be used generally to promote positive planning, from sites to congressional districts? The Supreme Court – having limited its role in the process to a simple review of whether plans meet the 1:1 rule as it interprets it and having bypassed efforts to explore other standards for either constitutionality or fairness – is of little help. The formation of citizen’s commissions, implementing publicly made decisions in coordination with the tools of redistricting for social purposes, represents the best way to go to implement co-mandering and avoid partisan gerrymandering. Recently, state court decisions in a number of states have ruled on the constitutionality of redistricting maps, with arguments invoking the First to the Fourteenth Amendments. The most general rule to emerge seems to be one used in an Ohio case, where the judges adopted three criteria: whether map drafters intended to hobble their opponents, whether they succeeded, and whether there was any other justification for the maps having been drawn as they were. Concluding that the maps failed all three tests, “opponents” for that purpose were considered the disadvantaged political party. Nothing was said of the consequences if the map failed only one criterion. Nor was any attention paid to possible other justifications to support the map as drawn, despite its constitutional problems. Following these general rules, the courts have required the party drawing the challenged unconstitutional map – typically a state legislature – to prepare and submit to the court a map that would meet the constitutional standards, avoiding embedding partisan advantage to one or the other of the major US political parties. Where the responsible party, presumably the state legislature, was unable to agree on such a map, courts have required that it set up a commission to establish appropriate boundaries. In at least one case, the court has itself set up a district-drawing commission.10 In Ohio, voters adopted a ballot initiative that required a new plan to pass both House and Senate by a 50 percent majority. If they fail to agree on a constitutional map, a commission draws the maps.11 Such court-dominated resolutions of the issue of gerrymandering have two fatal flaws and present a major missed opportunity. The first, an obsession with partisanship, derives from the assumption that the only defect of gerrymandered district lines is that they create a partisan advantage for one of two existing political parties over the other, with partisanship defined as the interests of the Democratic or the Republican Party. Bipartisanship is not political neutrality; it legitimates the two dominant political parties. It might further be noted, perhaps with a bit of tongue in cheek, that the reliance on the participation of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, in some of the legal formulations of remedies in play today, is very questionable. Whether either party represents a coherent unitary ideological entity speaking even for all of its own members, in this day and age, is dubious. Nor is the exclusion of other parties logically

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defensible. That is further reason to question the appropriateness of spelling out the individual private political entities entitled to be involved in any decision-making as to the acceptability of particular district lines. The only other defect recognized by the court is the implication of redistricting on race. If a plan favors blacks over whites, this is also not allowed, usually with particular reference to the Voting Rights Act or the Thirteenth Amendment. If, however, a plan unfairly benefits one class over another, one religion over another, one historical claim over another, or provides an environmental advantage to one group over another, that defect finds no place in the court’s discussion. We should ask: To what extent are such advantages justified? The second flaw in the recent resolutions related to gerrymandering involves the limited remedial powers of courts where unconstitutionality is found. Court orders only apply to the defendants directly subject to court order in the particular lawsuit. That will often be the very legislature that adopted the gerrymandered map. Those defendants are not likely to be broadly concerned with how the legal flaws found in the gerrymandered map are achieved. And the courts, even if they wished, will have no authority to order, for instance, a city planning commission to prepare alternate maps, nor to hold public hearings on such alternatives. Nor is it clear that a court would have the necessary power to order the legislature to pass any legislation it might find desirable to implement the court’s decisions. Calling the issues political rather than legal is a way a court recognizes its limitations. Passing the buck to commissions, presumably neutral but actually more simply bipartisan retains the political party obsession and lets representatives of the Democratic and Republican Parties make decisions that ought to be fully part of an open democratic process. Even in dealing with partisanship, that concept remains narrowly limited. Typically, as in the Ohio initiative, the commission is to be composed of the governor, two other state officials, and two Democratic and two Republican lawmakers, surely a very constrained definition of what neutral means in a vibrant democracy12 and possibly an inappropriate delegation of powers.

A Missed Opportunity A new redistricting plan could use the tools of redistricting to positive ends, seeing it as part of a public planning process pursuing social ends with democratic means, relying both on expert advice and on open public participation in the actual drawing of preferred redistricted lines. Approaching it like a jigsaw puzzle, such a plan might proceed from design of the pieces to design of the whole. The constitutional requirement of setting districting lines for the boundaries of congressional voting could be used to great public benefit. It could be undertaken, in a manner of speaking, from the inside out. One could begin by considering just what we want to do with the multiple sites that comprise the general territory subject to redistricting. Perhaps we could discuss the existing space of the region and decide what we want to have happen in that space. Starting within the smallest scale – that of the available sites where changes

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are desired – we could plan new development or modifications to existing ones. Then we could put those pieces together and, working outward, construct the picture at the congressional district scale. The process would be complex, of course. But the tools with which it could be undertaken are known, and there are well-established professions that have extensive experience with them, from architecture and the design of structures to environmental evaluations of different uses of land, to economic growth assessments and social cost evaluations of alternative proposals, to tying together the multiple goals and potentials in various combinations through the well-developed processes of planning, already existing at multiple scales in addition to that of the congressional district. The difference between playing with a jigsaw puzzle and solving real-world planning issues is that in the real world, the puzzle pieces are far more complex and three-dimensional. We have the power to determine the shape of each individual piece ourselves. Each piece, each decision we make will influence the size and nature of each other piece, from the smallest legal lot to the largest urban development site, perhaps even ultimately extending beyond the boundaries of city and state to affect nations. What we do will then determine the whole picture – the livability of the whole planet – once the pieces are all in place. So what might the next step be? Perhaps it would be to concretize, both in practice and in theory, a process of co-mandering, of forming the organizations and the legal forms of planning for sites at the most local level and for coordinating their work at increasingly higher levels; of making decisions as to distributing control and, yes, power over the nature and forms of development of land and its uses to give maximum democratic control, including the power to implement what is decided over the process of drawing lines in space and in law; of implementing a cooperative process of pursuing goals that are publicly and openly and continuously debated. Perhaps we could use the opportunity presented by the obligation to redistrict as the lever to explore the best means of implementing a process of co-mandering, thereby turning gerrymandering on its head and remaking it into a process for social good, instead of private or partisan advantage, while at the same time tackling its implications for the distribution of power that must be an inseparable part of the process. Co-mandering instead of gerrymandering is a daunting challenge indeed, but one worthy of our efforts.

Notes 1

Erick Trickey, “Where Did the Term ‘Gerrymander’ Come From?” Smithsonian Magazine, 20 July 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-did-termgerrymander-come-180964118/. 2 For more, see Trickey, “Where Did the Term ‘Gerrymander’ Come From?” 3 On cracking, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering. On algorithms, see Emily Moon, “Can Algorithms Put a Stop to Partisan Gerrymandering?,” Pacific Standard, 4 October 2017, https://psmag.com/news/can-algorithms-put-a-stopto-partisan-gerrymandering.

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4

5 6 7 8

9

10

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For an excellent overview of the court’s decisions, see http://www.ncsl.org/ research/redistricting/redistricting-and-the-supreme-court-the-most-significantcases.aspx. For a critical discussion, see https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/ 7-things-know-about-redistricting. See https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/7-things-know-about-redistricting. See Trickey, “Where Did the Term ‘Gerrymander’ Come From?” The National Conference of State Legislators; see http://www.ncsl.org/research/ redistricting/redistricting-criteria.aspx. It might be tempting to claim that locating polling to facilitate interaction among communities of voters might encourage discussion of common interests in politics, but that argument is dead on arrival, since in the majority of cases electioneering is specifically forbidden within a specified distance of polling places. It is not clear why they are singled out for preservation. Perhaps the suggestion may help the legislators’ recommendation to be taken seriously in actual political practice, where the key decision ultimately will be made. In November 2018, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit demanded that the state of Maryland redraw its congressional district map due to unacceptable partisan gerrymandering. Writing for the majority of the panel and joined by District Judge George L. Russell III, Circuit Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote, “When political considerations are taken into account to an extreme degree, the public perceives an abuse of the democratic process.” See https://www.baltimoresun.com/ opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-1115-congressional-districts-20181114-story.html. See https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio_Issue_1,_Congressional_Redistricting_Procedures_ Amendment_(May_2018). For other instances of voters attacking gerrymandering but still adopting remedies suffering from both these flaws, see https://www. washingtonpost.com/national/voters-are-stripping-partisan-redistricting-power-frompoliticians-in-anti-gerrymandering-efforts/2018/11/07/2a239a5e-e1d9-11e8-b7593d88a5ce9e19_story.html?utm_term=.d56d008d6b25. In California’s well-regarded Voters First Act, Proposition 11, the membership of the commission is required to be made up of 14 members: five Democrats (see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States)), five Republicans (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_States)), and four from neither major party. It would be important to review exactly who the parties are that are the defendants and directly subject to the judgments of the court in the recent cases, those who are obligated by the court to take action to execute the courts’ judgments.

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Afterwords What does site look like to.…

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Sites of Design Design intervention is never locally circumscribed. All sites of design intervention are intermeshed within a broader ensemble of political-economic interdependencies, infrastructural configurations, and more-than-human ecologies stretching from the microbe to the planetary. Reflexivity about such variegated linkages is an essential starting point for designers who conceive their work as a contribution to socio-territorial transformation rather than merely as service to a client. From this point of view, the site of a design intervention is not a neatly demarcated spatial unit, but a vector within a force field. Its realignment has the potential to trigger a cascade of recalibrations and mutations across broader scales of life. Design interventions reshape not only the interdependencies associated with the worldwide urban fabric but the power geometries in which the latter are enmeshed. For this reason, design is always political: it advances visions of spatial order; politicoinstitutional strategies to actualize those visions; and assumptions about the future use, users, management, and transformation of that space. Should we design for a society built on class exploitation, institutionalized racism, patriarchal violence, heteronormative exclusions, and xenophobic nationalism? Or should we deploy design as a counterforce to entrenched systems of domination? Should designers presuppose continued fossil fuel extraction? Or help repair the socioecological destruction wrought by centuries of thermodynamic imperialism and planetary ecocide? Critically reflecting on the ends, means, and spatial politics of design disrupts inherited notions of site as formally demarcated and bounded. Only by doing so can we unleash the creative potential of design to imagine, forge, and reinvent interdependencies – economic, social, infrastructural, and ecological – in the service of ongoing struggles to rebuild the planetary commons. Neil Brenner, a critical urban theorist and scholar of urbanization, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Previously, he served as Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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A Performative Regionalist View on Site Barbara Allen writes about performance at the intersection of cultural practices and regional practices, noting that “Performative regionalism provides an understanding of the interaction of people and place that allows architecture to be understood as, in part, an enabler of cultural practice.”1 I wish to add to Allen’s formulation the environmental performance potential of sites and buildings, to argue for a performative regionalist approach to site at the intersection of cultural practice, climatic conditions, and material expression. Our sites must be designed to perform on all these fronts for long-term sustainability. Every site resides at the unique intersection of three bounded domains: a distinct climatic region determined by latitude and longitude, further characterized by a unique psychrometric fingerprint; a range of material expression associated with regional building traditions related to local knowledge (labor and craft) and available resources, influenced by climate and underlying geomorphology; and a sphere of cultural practices determining daily, seasonal, and yearly patterns of life lived. As an architect, it’s important to be humble, to listen and collaborate with the site so the project celebrates its specific location on earth. Climate is experienced through the soft spring breeze in the afternoon, the sound of crickets at night, the warmth of the sun on a winter morning, the changing color and intensity of sunlight across the wall. Natural resources, like the local pink granite with black biotite that crystallized during the Paleozoic used in architecture up and down the eastern seaboard, define regions of place-based, material-based memories. Spatially, site and project accommodate the need for family gatherings, afterschool playdates, seasonal observances, and continual changes in use patterns as culture evolves. Naomi Darling is an architect and educator whose teaching and practice address sustainability at the intersection of climate, culture, and materiality.

1

Barbara L. Allen, “On Performative Regionalism,” in Architectural Regionalism, ed. Vincent B. Canizaro (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 426.

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Designing a Site Chain Reaction: The Momentum of District Development Districts are physical manifestations of a network of flows – economic, social, political. Sometimes those flows stall out, but a district always remains a fluid system. Design can accelerate a stalled district site by sparking intentional, opportunistic, connective synergies that activate a true essence of place identity; inspire people-fueled program inventions; and orchestrate adaptive, surgical interventions, all at a pace to provide cumulative momentum. Unlike the more familiar contractual cadences of a building project, connection-driven district design is a messy, episodic confluence of process, projects, and persons. Urbanity evolves in contemporaneous spurts that propel a virtuous cycle of city-building. Efforts must be genuine to place, initiated by local, coinvesting human catalysts. A building becomes a community canvas. A nearby institution launches a program involving students in the place. Building on these roots, the district site designer begins their connector work. Up sprouts a pop-up market hosting new businesses. A nearby café gains new patrons. The designer suggests it should pilot a dinner service. The café invests, manufactures new products, creates new jobs, hosts a district showcase convened by the designer for a group of local businesses. Inspired by that event, a new investor buys a long-vacant building in the district. She installs a business from the market; she renovates upper floors. Newcomers set up new businesses close by; people begin using a previously vacant park. The region starts to take notice. In this system, design actions and chain reactions (not just drawings) are crucial to success; they provide a continual response, connecting, sharing enthusiasm, engaging people, amplifying momentum, integrating outside flows into a resilient authentic soul of a place. Anne Gatling Haynes is an architect, entrepreneur, and developer. She has developed districts in small and large Northeast cities and works now in Houston, Texas.

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What Does Site Look Like to an Urban Designer Working in the Public Sector? Urban designers generally, and particularly those of us working in the public sector, need to look at a site as a component of the larger city. Typically defined as an individually owned tract of land at the most basic level, a site may also be a combination of lots in an area or, in the case of larger city initiatives, a whole neighborhood. Irrespective of size and scope, it is vital to understand a site’s context and its relationships at multiple scales and from the perspective of multiple users and stakeholders. In our practice, we seek to understand physical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts. We consider metrics such as how people move around; the existence of unique geographic, natural, and man-made features; accessibility to public amenities and services; overall land-use character of a neighborhood; and softer characteristics, such as the social factors of a place. We consider these metrics on regional, city, and neighborhood scales to support decision-making about future conditions. To develop land use and design policies, we visualize existing aspects of the physical environment that define the perception or experience of a place, and we use that understanding to project how changes in the physical environment can improve our individual and collective urban experiences. For us, the city should be a cohesive relationship of buildings and streets that serves people, a harmonious sequence of spaces that support our well-being as we go about our everyday activities. As urban designers, we envision the general size and shape of a building, placing special attention on designing the relationship between the ground floor and the sidewalk, the most ubiquitous public space in the city. In light of that, our most valuable view of site comes from the daily experience of the city as a pedestrian in a public space. Claudia Herasme, chief urban designer and director of the Urban Design Division at New York City’s Department of City Planning from 2003 to 2020, has worked as an urban designer in the public sector since 2003.

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What Does Site Look Like to a Climate Scientist? Site is everything to a climate scientist. People experience climate change effects very locally: sea level rise on the coast, or drought in dryer areas. Although we understand how rising carbon dioxide levels will impact the mean climate, reliably predicting where and when we will feel climate change remains difficult to impossible, because nonlinear dynamics (called chaos) govern weather. On longer time scales, a location can have very different natural weather variability in combination with a mean change in climate. For example, one set of climate model simulations for Seattle using the same carbon dioxide concentration, the same modeling rules, and almost the same starting conditions, but multiple realizations of possible futures, suggested two very different scenarios. It showed that Seattle, in 2050, could either have the same mean temperature as today or a mean change of 9°F. Such results hardly help Seattleites decide whether or not to purchase air conditioning. The unpredictability problem worsens still when we consider statistically rare extreme events like hurricanes, which cause enormous damage. While we understand that warming climates should increase the intensity of hurricanes, the site-level impacts of climate change depend on whether hurricanes make landfall on vulnerable populations, something currently impossible to forecast. Thus, what planners really need to know – site-level impacts from climate change – remains the most difficult thing for climate scientists to predict. Right now, we are choosing how much money to spend to reduce emissions at the site level, yet humans will not see the biggest benefits from this reduction for decades, if not hundreds of years. How to encourage people at the site level to reduce their emissions when we don’t know the impact of those reductions at that same site is one of the great difficulties in motivating action on climate change. Natalie Mahowald is a climate scientist and an educator. Her research focuses on understanding feedbacks in the earth system that impact climate change.

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Site Through the Lens of an Investigative Pathologist Site has an enormous range of meanings and implications to biomedical scientists interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of common human afflictions such as infections, cancers, and neurological diseases. It can reference anatomy (e.g., eye, leg, brain, lung), cellular location (surface membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus), or subcellular components (DNA, RNA, protein). Each of these sites can be the focus of one or more disease processes. Those of us interested in infectious agents also think of site in terms of the locality where a microbe commonly resides and encounters its host. Examples include group A streptococcus in the throat, Ebola and sub-Saharan Africa, and Lyme disease and wooded areas in the northeastern United States. Viewed from the perspective of the infecting microbe, site becomes extremely important, because some sites will support its growth and promote survival far better than others. Well-known examples include influenza virus and the lung, and cholera in the GI tract. Further, biomedical research worksites are crucial for efforts to significantly increase the probability of generating productive collisions among scientists with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and/or new and bold ideas. To successfully accelerate the number and pace of victories in the war against harmful infectious agents (especially important now because of increasing antibiotic resistance), extensive reconsideration of such worksites is critical. Until relatively recently, this topic received only sparse and sporadic attention. However, advances in biomedical research frequently occur at the interstices between vibrant fields, especially those expanding rapidly due to new technological developments. This means that consideration of site as single-disciplineoriented space must give way to a transdisciplinary site, preferably nimble enough to rapidly mutate as new expertise is needed. Enhanced scholarly consideration of site will yield more new biomedical research discoveries that result in new treatments with better outcomes. In biomedical research, site matters and is more important than ever. Jim Musser, a physician scientist who studies how bacteria causing severe human infections exploit their victim’s body sites, has long been interested in the contribution of research site design to enhanced scientific creativity.

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What Does Site Look Like to a Civil Engineer Working in Site Development and Infrastructure? People walk into buildings by first experiencing their environs: the site. And, of course, the site for a project informs the design of the building. Site to some civil engineers means the topography, acreage, wetlands, and so on, and how that site can be developed is informed by zoning setbacks, traffic, building program, regulations, and other factors. To me, site reads as opportunity. The site can and should address additional issues, from the individual user’s sensation of the sights, sounds, and aromas of the site to its wider impact on resilience, sustainability, and social equity. To accomplish this, civil engineers need to be proactive collaborators with the architect, landscape architect, and owner to use the site to its maximum advantage and push agendas that are more than “just what is required by zoning.” The building’s site should enhance the neighborhood and even the entire watershed of the site: not just the building’s immediate environs. The main goal of the Kennedy Street Greened project in Washington, DC, was to demonstrate how stormwater Best Management Practices could reduce combined sewer overflows in Rock Creek. The project accomplished this and more: a striking streetscape, shade on an expansive sidewalk, social equity for the neighborhood, and public art. The Dell at the University of Virginia – a stormwater detention pond – enabled several building projects by managing stormwater runoff and flooding in a large watershed. It also provided an outdoor learning environment used for student research; created a stunningly beautiful outdoor space; and has even been a wedding photograph venue! Designing a site does not mean one has to conquer nature. The innovative civil engineer uses the principles of biophilic design to mimic Mother Nature’s natural characteristics and connect the users with nature. Site, to this civil engineer, means function and beauty. Both matter. Judith Nitsch, PE, LEED AP BD+C, is founding principal of Nitsch Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Afterwords

Empathy and Site A website run by the Architecture Foundation in London provides a window into UK architecture schools, including listing where studio field trips are taken and where projects are set. For example, the Bartlett offers a particularly striking set of travels to a collection of exotic locations. Right from the beginning of their architectural trajectory, some students are thus presented with sites as places of spectacle, appropriated only through a fleeting visit and afterward encountered through Google and random photographs. Ecosystems of place get reduced to digital data rather than experienced as actualities, understood over time. Sites in architectural education too often become distant abstractions, there for cursory manipulation in order to produce transitory visions of spectacle. This approach tends to trivialize the social, political and environmental conditions of site. In particular, it bypasses a sense of empathetic engagement, something that, with the climate emergency in particular, becomes ever-more important because of the demand to understand the interrelated systems that shape sites and our response to them. So my call to architectural educators is foreground empathy as a means of approaching site: empathy, that is, for all the factors, human and nonhuman, that make up sites. Only then can students and architects embrace the maelstrom of forces that confront us as designers in these urgent times. There is no “solution” to the climate emergency; it is not a problem to be solved but a predicament to make sense of, and that starts with meaningful engagement with site as the locus for the ravages the future world might inflict on us. Jeremy Till is an architect, educator, and writer. He is head of Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

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Afterwords

Site Matters Site is the mysterious magical seed for my art. Each monumental netscape springs from site research, which I approach almost as if I were an archeologist, anthropologist, or psychologist searching to understand not only the site’s physical attributes, but also its cultural history and sense of identity. I find joy in uncovering a site’s hidden meaning, and it is the process of discovery and experimentation that leads to each artwork’s conceptual and visual form. It’s often slow, hard, and unpredictable. An example: when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked me to “express the spirit of their mission” and “create a heart” for its global campus in downtown Seattle, I explored site broadly. I first studied the site’s physical landscape and architecture, then began interviewing people from every department to learn how they saw themselves and presented themselves to the world. My method, “One Knot = One Person,” spreads outward in concentric circles. It is inspired by Melinda Gates’s description of the foundation’s work as outstretched arms to the world, recognizing that all lives have equal value. But how can I give physical form to their mission—to give every person the chance for a healthy productive life? I placed a camera on the roof and took color readings of the sky for twentyfour hours. Color saturation became a metaphor for what it means to see and experience life in its fullest potential. To generate the sculpture’s form, I graphed those numbers radially. To express the reach of the foundation’s work in Africa and Asia—beyond its Seattle campus headquarters—over a twenty-four-hour day the colors of projected lighting on the sculpture are generated by the colors of sunrise in real time in each foundation office around the world. This gives the campus a heart by literally connecting the foundation to its mission and the daily unfolding of its work. Its title became clear: Impatient Optimist. Janet Echelman is a visual artist focused on public art, who sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks.

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Afterwords

Janet Echelman, Impatient Optimist, installation views, Gates Foundation Campus, Seattle, Washington. (Courtesy of the artist. Photo © Ema Peter)

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List of Contributors

Robert A. Beauregard is a professor emeritus of Columbia University, where he taught in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He writes on planning and urban development, with particular attention to US postwar cities. His most recent books are Cities in an Urban Age: A Dissent and Planning Matter: Acting with Things, the latter a reinterpretation of planning from a sociomaterial perspective. Currently, he is finishing a book on planning theory for a series published by Edward Elgar, titled Advanced Introductions, and is developing a book on the moral geography of nations. Carol J. Burns, FAIA, an educator and principal with Taylor & Burns Architects, has taught at Harvard GSD, MIT, UVA, Yale, and Wentworth Institute of Technology. She pioneered the founding of the AIA Women’s Leadership Summit, as well as the BSA Research Grants program, which spurred the AIA Upjohn and Small Project grant programs. Her research has resulted in books, articles, competitions, and design studios. Integrating education and practice within a culture of research, she has with her firm designed buildings, spaces, and theoretical projects recognized with awards, including the national Honor Award for Excellence from the Society of College and University Planners. Esin Komez Daglioglu received her BArch. and March. magna cum laude from the Middle East Technical University (METU) Department of Architecture, where she also worked as a research and teaching assistant from 2008 to 2012. She completed her PhD research in 2017 at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) Department of Architecture, where she also taught design and theory courses at the Chair of Architectural Composition and Public Building. Among others, she has published in the Architectural Theory Review, the METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, and OASE. Currently, she is an assistant professor at METU in the Department of Architecture.

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List of Contributors

Lisa Diedrich studied architecture and urbanism in Paris, Marseille, and Stuttgart; journalism in Berlin; and landscape architecture at the University of Copenhagen, where she received her PhD. She currently works as a professor of landscape architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp/Malmö, directing the SLU Urban Futures research platform. She is also editor in chief of the Landscape Architecture Europe books (containing the Fieldwork, On Site, In Touch, On the Move, and Care/Create/Act volumes) and coeditor in chief, with Harry Harsema, of ’scape: the international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism. Simon Dixon is a lecturer at University of Birmingham in the Department of Geography, Earth, and Environmental Science. He received his PhD in geomorphology from University of Southampton, and his research focuses on the intersection between human activities and landscape processes. His research areas include the effects of land use change on flooding, the movement of discarded plastics around the environment as novel sedimentary particles, and emerging geomorphology in cities. His 2018 paper “Ozymandias in the Anthropocene: The City as an Emerging Landform,” on the interactions between geomorphology and the built environment, was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Area Prize. Robin Dripps is the T. David Fitzgibbon Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where she has taught for more than forty years. She was the chair of the Department of Architecture and founding director of the program in American urbanism. Her research on the structure of myth as a fundamental basis for architecture was published in The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture in 1997. Her current research and teachings explore how relational software can enable the reciprocal engagement of complex urban structure and natural processes. In 2017, the Design Intelligence Survey found her to be among the twenty-five most respected educators in North America. Paul M. Hess is an associate professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Geography and Planning, where he teaches urban design in the professional planning program. His current research projects include changing North American street design practices and the ways they create socially inclusive and exclusive places; examining the effectiveness of planning strategies to retrofit suburban centers and corridors; and the history of planning, modernist apartments, and private redevelopment in postwar Toronto. His students are involved in studying active transportation and public space topics in diverse settings including Toronto, New York, Moscow, Bangalore, and Mexico City.

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List of Contributors

Kristina Hill, a scholar of urban design and environmental planning, studies the impacts of flooding on urban districts and ecosystems and develops strategies for adaptation to climate change. Her current work is on adaptation to rising coastal groundwater, centered on biodiversity, new financing strategies, and environmental justice. She has published widely, lectures internationally on infrastructure and adaptation, and has developed adaptation strategies for the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans, Seattle, Virginia Beach, and the South Bronx. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and teaches at UC Berkeley in landscape architecture, urban design, and environmental planning. Harvey Jacobs is a professor and visiting professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1984–2018) and at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands (2012–2019). His specialty is in the social and legal aspects of land policy, with a particular focus on property rights and on the structures (like zoning) that communities and societies develop to manage the relationships among different rights in property. He has been recognized through invitations to universities across the globe; the receipt of multiple Fulbright Specialist awards; and the awarding of an academic knighthood (L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, rank Chevalier), presented by the French government in 2008. Andrea Kahn holds the title Professor of site thinking in research and practice at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp/Malmö, where she facilitates SLU Landscape, a research and teaching collaboration initiative. She is also the founder of designCONTENT, a consultancy offering strategic and communicative process support for complex design, planning, research, writing, curatorial and editorial projects. She has taught architecture, urban design, planning, and landscape extensively in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Her current research interest revolves around collaboration, communication, and synthetic, transdisciplinary knowledge creation. Denise Markonish is the senior curator and managing director of exhibitions at MASS MoCA. Her exhibitions include Suffering from Realness; Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound; Critical Mass; Nick Cave: Until; Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder (catalogs by DelMonico/ Prestel); Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below (catalog, MASS MoCA); Oh, Canada (catalog: MIT Press); Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum (catalog, MASS MoCA); These Days: Elegies for Modern Times; and Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape (catalog: MIT Press). She edited the books Teresita Fernández: Wayfinding and Wonder: 50 Years of RISD Glass, and coedited Sol LeWitt: 100 Views.

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List of Contributors

Peter Marcuse, FAICP, a lawyer and planner, has taught urban planning at Columbia University in New York City for over thirty years. He is a past president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, a former chair of Community Board 9’s Housing Committee in Manhattan, and has been long active in the Planners Network. Now retired, he lives in Santa Barbara, California. He has written widely on housing, planning, professional ethics, globalization, and policy issues, with a focus on affordable housing and social justice issues. His latest book is In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, with David Madden. Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, is a landscape architect who has taught at the University of Virginia School of Architecture since 1993. She has lectured and published extensively on modern landscape architectural theory and criticism and her writings have appeared in anthologies and journals including Landscape Journal, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Places. A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on numerous award-winning urban landscape design, historic preservation, and campus-planning projects. Her expertise has been recognized through her appointment to the US Commission of Fine Arts by President Obama in 2012 and her selection as the Vincent Scully Prize laureate in 2019. Dirk Sijmons is a founder of H+N+S Landscape Architects, where his work focuses on regional plans and research projects. H+N+S received the Prince Bernhard Culture Award in 2001. In 2002, he received the Rotterdam-Maaskant Award, and in 2007 he received the Edgar Doncker Award for his contribution to Dutch culture. His recent books include Landscape and Energy, Moved Movement, and Room for the River. He was appointed the first state landscape architect of the Netherlands (2004–2008), and served as the chair of Environmental Design (2008–2011) and Landscape Architecture (2011–2015) at TU Delft. In 2014, he curated that year’s IABR, Urban by Nature. In 2017, he received the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award. Thaïsa Way is a professor of landscape architecture at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. Her books include Unbounded Practice, Women and Landscape Architecture in the 20th Century and The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag: From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design. Jane Wolff is an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Her design research investigates the complicated landscapes that emerge from interactions between natural processes and cultural interventions; its goal is to articulate terms that make these difficult (and often contested) places legible to the wide range of audiences with a stake in the future. Her subjects have ranged from the Western Netherlands and the California Delta to post-Katrina New Orleans, the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay, and the metropolitan landscape of Toronto.

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Figure Credits



1.1



1.2 Courtesy of Glenn Murcutt



Courtesy of Carme Pinos

3.1–3.4 Courtesy of The Architectural Archives. University of Pennsylvania



4 5 28-31

4.1 Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection, composite image by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar

46



4.2 Model by Elizabeth Meyer and Katie Towson

47



4.3 Model by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar

48



4.4 Composite image by Elizabeth Meyer and Robin Lollar

50



5.1a Courtesy of Denise Markonish

68



5.1b Courtesy of Grace Clark

68



5.1c Courtesy of Denise Markonish

68



5.2 Courtesy of Serge Hasenböhler

71



5.3 Courtesy of Richard Barnes

71



5.4 Courtesy of Andrea Kahn

73



6.6 Courtesy of Kroller-Muller Museum, The Netherlands

91

8a Crisis? What Crisis? Courtesy of Universal Music Group





Professional Attitude, Courtesy of Thomson Reuters



Stacked Identity, Courtesy of R.R.S. Backaert



8b Newest frontier of modernism, Courtesy of Alissa van Asseldonk



8c Nature is no longer the backcloth, Courtesy of Ilkka Halso

A vacation from being human, Courtesy of Tim Bowditch

115 119

121

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Figure Credits



8d Through unpredictable bifurcations, Courtesy of Isabelle Stengers

125



9.6 Courtesy of Dr. Pep Canadell, Global Carbon Project

143



10.1 Courtesy of Lisa Moffitt

158



10.2

159



10.3 Courtesy of Kieran Timberlake

162



10.4 Courtesy of Sasaki Associates

163



10.5 Courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein

164



10.6 Courtesy of William Braham

166



10.7 Courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein and with permission of Paolo Tombesi

167



10.8 Courtesy of Lisa Moffitt

171



12.2 Courtesy of Biblioteca Ambrosiana

191



13.1 Courtesy of Jane Wolff

206



13.2 Courtesy of Jane Wolff

208



13.3 Courtesy of Jane Wolff

210



13.4 Courtesy of Jane Wolff

212



14.1 Courtesy of the University of Washington

218



14.2 Courtesy of Niccoló Piacentini and Jennifer Kriegel

221



16.1 Courtesy of Paul M. Hess

241



16.2 Courtesy of Paul M. Hess

242



16.3 Courtesy of Paul M. Hess

243



16.4 Courtesy of Paul M. Hess

246



16.5 Courtesy of Paul M. Hess

246



17.1 Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library

256



Courtesy of Phillip G. Bernstein

Courtesy of the artist. Photo © Ema Peter

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Index

Italicized and bold pages refer to figures and tables respectively. abstraction, site practices and 2, 3, 7, 8, 28, 29, 39, 43, 44, 56, 70, 78, 85, 88, 90, 111, 112, 134, 192, 201, 209, 217, 221, 227, 245 Adams, John 15 adaptive systems 152–173; about 152–155 aesthetic theory 41, 44, 57 affirmative gerrymandering 258 Agassiz, Louis 47 Age of Mankind 110 agroecology studies 123 air rights, publicizing 17 Aldrich Museum, Richfield, Connecticut 72 Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) 229 American culture: centrality of site theories 40–43; Steingraber ecological thinking of 95 American democracy, ownership and control of property 15 American Plants for American Gardens (Roberts and Rehmann) 40, 51 amplification 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 53, 55, 56, 81 analysis, site 11, 56, 153, 197, 198; design intentions in 197; in landscape architecture 38; Operation Breakthrough 229–230; sitereading as neural 182; wind patterns and 155 Anderson, Stanford 30 Anthropocene: conversations, designing 214; denialist and 114–116; idea of humankind 111; modernist/ecomodernist and 117–119; ontological pluralism and 120–122; philosophical positions toward 110–113, 125; posthumanism and 120–122; site and 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 110–128; urban design in 202 Anthropocentrism 2.0 123–128 apartments: concentrations, as sites 242–244; suburban, as neighbourhoods 249–250 apprehension of site 7, 53, 182 The Architects Collaborative 55 Architectural Association 30 architectural design, with thermodynamics 164–166 Architectural Forum (1948) 54 architectural history 26

architectural theory ix, 1, 54, 56; see also design theory architecture 2, 5; characterization of site in 38, 51, 56, 153; complex adaptive systems in 168; critically engaged 33–34; enterprise architecture model, leadership in 167–168; ground and 85–90; iconographic aspects of 27–32; landscape see landscape architecture; language of 32, 122; modern 10, 27, 32, 85, 228; pop 31, 32; site analysis in 38; spatial aspects of 27–32 architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) 161, 168 Architecture Foundation, London 275 area of concern 10 area of control 5 area of influence 5 armature, site as 44–47 Army Corps of Engineers management, of Mississippi River 108 art object, site practices and 56 art, site-specific 52, 179; landscape architecture and 38; see also landscape architecture Aureli, Pier Vittorio 33–34 automobiles 247–248 autonomy: architectural 26–37; of art object 56; disciplinary 26 avalanche flow, composite sequence of 132 Bachelard, Gaston 81 Bakhtin, M. M. 193 Baltimore Urban Long-Term Ecological Research (Urban LTER) 137 “Bay Lexicon” 204; appearances, questioning 212, 213; frames of reference 210, 211 Beauregard, Robert A. xii, 222 Beaux-Arts see Ecole des Beaux-Arts Belcher Associates of Ithaca, New York 231 Berlin School of Experimental Psychology 27 Berthier, Alexandre 95–96, 95 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 276 biodiversity 114; erosion of 111

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biological relationships, metaphors and 135 Blomfield, Reginald 53 Blue Lagoon/Bath studio 169 Boise-Cascade 229 Boston Globe 255 boundary(ies): blurring of 43; concept, urban site as 218–219; gerrymandering 256; Heidegger and 97; node versus 134–136; object, urban site as 217–219; spatial 140–141; tools for interrogating 220–223; wholesale reevaluation of 131 bounded bodies 136 bounded place, urban site and 190 bounded site 136, 211 Bourriaud, Nicolas 179, 180 Braae, Ellen 178 Braham, William 165, 166 Braine, Bob 71 Brasilia 228; from site to place 231–235 Breakthrough Institute 117 British Pop Art movement 30 Brooklyn, New York, map of 45 Brooklyn Park Commissioners 45 buen vivir 147 building: building-as-shelter 166; building-as-site 166; inventive 86, 88, 89–90 building information modelling (BIM) 161 Burns, Carol J. xi, xii, xiii, 38, 104, 181 Bush, George H. W. 114 Cadenasso, Mary 137 “The Campidoglio: A Case Study” (Venturi) 29 Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia 67 cartographers, landscape and 42 Cautley, Marjorie 42, 61 Cave, Nick 67, 68, 73 cellar 81, 82 census block 240 census tracts 240–242, 241 Central Park, New York: in 1857 49; in 1861 42 Central Plateau, Brazil 231–233, 235 Cherubini, Nicole 74 Christianity 114 citation, site 38–64, 57–59 city planning see urban planning civil engineer, in site development and infrastructure 274 Civil War 41 claiming, site 14–25; between autonomy and engagement 26–37; environmental movement 18, 22; process of 22 cleared site 104, 226, 235 Cleveland, Horace W. S. 40, 58; differentiating landscape and site 43–44; town planning proposals 46–47 climate change xii, 108, 114, 141, 145, 147, 159, 170, 172, 214, 216, 222, 223; adaptation 128, 136, 137; anthropogenic 152; dangers of 142; as engineering problem 117; global 131, 132; human-induced 103; models 133; site-level impacts of 272; uncertainties of 207; wicked problems of 172, 193 climate scientist 272 climatologists 133

coastal systems 137–138 cognition 134, 153, 169 cognitive dissonance 114, 126 Cole, Thomas 79, 79 collective knowledge, urban site as 215–224; boundaries, tools for interrogating 220–223; boundary concept 218–219; thick reckoning, platform for 215–217; world, changing 223–224 Columbus Park, Chicago 49–52, 50 community(ies): of plants and animal 134; study areas and, in lower Manhattan 226 complex adaptive systems 168 complex buildings/construction 161–164 Complexity and Contradiction 29 complexity theory 126 composition, theory of 89 concrete theory 3 Condé Nast 192 Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE) 31 Conflicts of Laws 253 Constitution (US) 15, 25, 255 Constitutional Convention of 1787 (US) 15 constructed site 104, 105 context, landscape processes as site 101–108; future, incorporating 106–108; geomorphological past 103–105; present, framing 105–106; physical 6, 10, 86, 88, 209; urban site and 199, 200; Venturi and 27–32 contextualism 26–27; cultural 32; as uniformity and conformity 27 Corbusier, Le see Le Corbusier Costas, Lucio 231–233, 232 cost(s): of building construction 155; of energy resource 165 Cott, Bruner 67, 69 COVID-19 pandemic 152, 173 Cowles, Henry 49 Cram, Day, and Klauder (Wellesley College campus) 48 Crane Associates 229 The Crayon (Durand) 41 creativity: enterprise architecture model 167; scientific 273; site-reading and 42; and translation 182 critical architects 27 critically engaged architecture 33–34 Critical Narratives Project 220 critical regionalism 122 Cross, Susan 73–74 Crossroads, Bellevue (Washington): apartment concentrations as sites 242–244; apartments as neighborhoods, sighting 249, 250; develop­ ment and division 244; garden apartments and townhouses in 246; land use patterns 243; location map 242; streets and automobiles 247 Crutzen, Paul 110 cubist painters 91, 92 cubist theorists 92 Cullen, Gordon 27 cultural construct, ground and 79 culture, definition of 120; and ground 80; network culture, change and emergence of 155–159 Czerniak, Julia 38

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data visualization 163 da Vinci, Leonardo 190–192, 191 Davis, Margaret 134 Declaration of Independence (US) 15 denialism 114 denialist 114–116 density: smart growth policies and 249; in suburban areas 240 Depew, David 160 deposition 42; in landscape 101; patterns, heterogeneity in 105; sediment 103 Descombes, George 38 design: discourse 2, 3, 5, 189, 196; movements 6; opportunistic 10, 270; pedagogy 3; philosophies 110–113; practice 2, 9–10, 43, 47, 51, 53, 55, 58, 122, 176, 181, 182, 217; site-space 55, 58; thinking 88, 172 designers: landscape 39, 43; temporal shift in ecological theory and 137, 138 design process 194, 259; context and 26; prendre parti and tirer parti 88, 89; site as integral part of 7, 11, 38, 39 design studio(s) 172; courses 3 design tactics, site-reading strategies and 44 design theory 2, 8, 29, 40, 133, 153; see also architectural theory Design with Nature (McHarg) 56 detached housing 243–245 developers: real estate 236; site 8, 181, 228, 229 developmentalism 228, 233, 235 Dewey, John 201 diagram: describing sites in 42; flexible specialization 167; yin-yang 90–92 dialectical beliefs 145–147 Diedrich, Lisa xii, 169 Dion, Mark 71, 72, 73 disciplines, design 7, 11, 57, 111, 161, 207; physical x, 176, 178, 179; spatial 181; traditional iii discourse: design 2, 3, 5, 189, 196; identifiable, shaping 6–9; universalizing and particularizing 12 Disney Corporation 192 distillation 44, 49, 52 district development, momentum of 270 districting: as line drawing 253–254; lines, rules for 261; natural 258; redistricting 260–264 Dixon, Simon xii documentation, of plant groupings 42 domesticated flux 184–185 Doorway Project 217, 218, 218 Douglas, William O. 22 Downing, A. J. xii, 58; nineteenth-century landscape architects 40; site as armature or framework 44–45; text of 39, 40, 42 Dripps, Robin xii, 8, 218 Dubai, artificial islands in 102 Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC (Farrand) 45–46, 47 Durand, Asher 41, 52 dynamic mosaics, landscapes as 139–142 earth, Native Americans and 78–79 East Hill, Kent (Washington) see Kent East Hill (Washington) Eckbo, Garrett 54–55, 58

Eco, Umberto 182–183 Ecole des Beaux-Arts: prendre parti and tirer parti 88, 89 ecological theory 144; metaphors and 134, 135; nonequilibrium paradigm in 132 ecologists 133 ecology: epidemiological issues in 135; ethics and 112; nonequilibrium paradigm in 132; plant 42, 49, 52; urban ground and 84 ecomodernism 117, 118, 123, 124 ecomodernist 117–119 economic circumstances, property and 20 economies of scale 228, 229 ecosystem 97, 110, 117, 123, 131–133, 135–137, 139, 145, 147, 201, 275; failure of 142; functioning and maintenance 136; landscape mosaic and 140; reconstruction 133; resilient self-organization of 165; site as 44; types of 140 ecotone thinking 200–202 EDAW 55 edges 1, 4, 49, 77, 85, 94, 96–98, 106, 107, 138, 144, 191, 192, 201, 211, 213, 218, 243, 247, 249, 250; forest/meadow 43 editing, site 38, 41, 44, 45, 53, 57, 182, 183, 184 eighteenth century: claiming, site 17, 19; scientific theory 136; site theories in 40; views on modernity 11 Eisenman, Peter 26, 27, 30 Electoral College (US) 254 Eliot, Charles, Jr. 53, 58 Embassy of the North Sea, The Hague 122 embodied carbon 159 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 41, 52; Cleveland and 43 empathy, and site 275 empiricism, value-free assumptions in 6 enclosure 81, 85, 191, 192 encompassing forces 5 energy flows or exchanges 133–135, 141, 142 energy systems language 166 Engels, F. 143 enterprise architecture model, leadership in 167–168 environment, adaptive systems 152–173 Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change Initiative 222 environmental movement, claiming site and 18, 22 environmental policy, land use and 20 environmental regulation, land use and 18 epidemiological issues, in ecology 135 Episcopal Academy, Merion, Pennsylvania 29 erosion 42, 101, 102, 107; bank 106; of biodiversity 111; coastal 141; rates 136; sediment 103 Euroméditerranée 2 project, Mareille 184 European Network of Living Laboratories 178 explanatory theory 136 Falling Water 3 Farrand, Beatrix 45, 58 Federal Housing Administration (FHA): Radburn plan 248 Federalist Paper No. 54, 15 feudalism 15 field, articulated, site as 45, 47

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figure(s): ground and 90–98; modern and postmodern art and 56–57; site reading as 47–48 figure-ground drawing 26 fire evacuation routes 142 Fitch, James Marston 54–55, 58 flexible specialization, diagram of 167 Florida Everglades 4 Follies (Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York) 72 forecast analysis zones 240 forest, ground and 82 The Formal Garden in England (Blomfield) 53 formal-informal 38, 52, 53, 58, 253 Forman, Richard 140 Forma Urbis Romae 194, 195 fossil fuel capitalism 157 fossil fuel economy 165 Foster, Charles 122 The Four Elements of Architecture (Semper) 80–81 fragments: modern and postmodern art and 56–57; site 14, 22, 27, 29, 44, 49–53, 80, 82, 85, 86, 88, 91–94, 199, 228, 231 frame, context and 200 frameworks: modern and postmodern art and 56–57; site as 44–47 Frampton, Kenneth 30 Franklin, Benjamin 15 freedom 23, 123; of action 112; of choice 97; civil 15; individual 147; of interpretation 183; religious 14, 15; spatial 81; of speech and assembly 14 Gaia 120 Gans, Herbert 34 Garden and Forest (Cleveland) 43, 53 garden apartments 245, 246 gardening, landscape 39–40 Geddes, Norman Bell 119 Geddes, Patrick 135 Geertz, Clifford 215 General Electric 229 geoengineering 117 geography 132 geological theory 134–135 geology 79–80; distinguished from geomorphology 101; ontological assumptions of 136; site-reading and 42; subsurface 132 geomorphology 101–102; distinguished from geology 101; distinguished from landscape architecture 102; of past landscape 103–105 Georgia: landscape gardening in 40 Gerry, Elbridge 255 gerrymandering 252–265, 256; forms of 258–259; introduction to 254–257; issues 259–260; missed opportunity 264–265; solutions 262–264 gestalt psychology 27, 28, 32, 86 Ghosh, Amitav xi Giedion, Sigfried 27 Gilpin, William 40, 44, 52 glacial processes 42, 47 glaciation 42, 52, 134 Gleason, Henry 134 Goat Man 121

Good Morning America (ABC) 192 government: land ownership and division processes 244; regulation of private land 19; site claim and 15, 17, 19 Graham Foundation 29 Gramsci, Antonio 3 Grands Projets, Paris 4 graph theory 135 Graves, Michael 30 Great Salt Lake, Utah 66 Green Belief 128 Greenough, Horacio 41, 52; Cleveland and 43 Green Revolution 123 Gris, Juan 91 ground 76–100; agriculture and 84–85; architecture and 85–90; culture and 80; defined 76–82; distinguished from site 76–77; figure, drawing 87; figuring 90–98; general qualities of 85; materiality of 81–82; mobile, urban design and 196; modern history of 78; movement of animals and humans 84; place of 82–85; subsurface problems 83–84; vernacular history of 78 habitudes 201 haecceity, site as 51–52 Halprin, Lawrence 52, 56 Hamilton, Alexander 15 Hamilton, Clive 111, 113, 123, 128 Hancock, Trenton Doyle 74 Hardin, Garrett 19 Hashima Island, Japan 107 Hays, K. Michael 26 Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine 74 Hazard, Caroline 47–48 The Head & the Load 66 Heidegger, Martin 97 Hell’s Kitchen 193 Hess, Paul xii, 10 heterogeneity 105, 161, 241 heterostylism 26 Hill, Kristina xii, 8 historiography, modern: omission of site in 11; repressive role of 10 history: architectural 26; modernist design 10, 11; of site 10–11; vernacular, of ground 78 Hitchcock, Henry Russell 54 Hofstadter, Douglas 160 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 19 Holocene 110, 123 The Horticulturist: Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (Downing) 44–45 Hotel de Beauvais (Le Pautre) 88, 89 housing: detached 239, 241, 243–245, 250; industrialized 228, 229, 231; multi-family see multi-family housing; single-family 241, 244, 246–248; types of 245 Hudson River School 79 human-induced climate change 103 humans, relationship with the ground 84 Hume, David 12 Hurricane Katrina 155 hydrological structure 83

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IBA Emscher Park, Western Germany 169, 176–178; journey-forms, designing 180–181; radicantity 178–179; shadow zone 181; site specificity 178–179; tableau of scope and aspects of 177 iconographic aspects of architecture 27–32 idealism, value-free assumptions in 6 idealized landscape types 45 ideal neighborhood (King County) 247 identifiable discourse, shaping 6–9 identity: national, landscape and 41; professional, site and 39–40 Ile de Nantes project, Nantes 184, 186 indefinite, defined 200 industrial development 234 industrialization 17, 43, 230, 233, 234 industrialized housing 228, 229, 231 infrastructure 274; failure 155; landscape as x, 102, 106, 107; public investments 141, 143; Seattle’s urban 223 inside-out site 10 interest group concerns, study areas and 253, 262 International Commission on Stratigraphy 111 The International Style (Hitchcock and Johnson) 54 invention, site practices and 8, 19 Irwin, Robert 38, 52 Islam 114 Jackson, J.B. 76, 90 Jacobs, Harvey xii Jacobs, Jane 135 Jefferson, Thomas 15 Jensen, Jens 58; Columbus Park, Chicago 49–52, 50; landscapes 40, 42; site as haecceity 51–52 Jersey City 229 Johnson, Philip 54 journey-forms, designing 180–181 Juanita, Kirkland (Washington): apartment concentrations as sites 242–244; apartments as neighborhoods, sighting 249, 250; development and division 244; land use patterns 243; location map 242 Judaism 114 just compensation 15–16 Kaczinski, Kelly 71 Kahn, Andrea 181 Kant, Immanuel 11 Kelso, J.A. Scott 169 Kennedy Street Greened project, Washington, DC 274 Kent East Hill (Washington): apartment concentrations as sites 242–244; apartments as neighborhoods, sighting 249, 250; development and division 244; land use patterns 243; location map 242; streets and automobiles 247 Kentridge, William 66 King, Elizabeth 73 King County (Washington) 246–247 knowledge: collective, urban site as 215–224; of complex systems 123; production 216, 224; professional 241; scientific 123; site 6–9, 185, 189, 215, 216, 220, 236; situated 6, 12; tacit 6; unarticulated 6, 7; working 8, 202

Komez Daglioglu, Esin xii Koolhaas, Rem 26 Krauss, Rosalind 56 Kriegel, Jennifer 221 Kubitschek, Juscelio 231, 233, 234 Kwon, Miwon 56, 57, 179 Labatut, Jean 27 Lake Merritt, San Francisco Bay 141 Lanciani, Rodolfo 194, 195 land ownership, fee-simple 17 landscape: architects 6, 8, 39–42, 44, 47, 52, 53, 58, 102, 180, 182, 202, 204, 207, 222; architecture see landscape architecture; defined 101; design see landscape design; distinguished from site 43–44; as dynamic mosaics 139–142; ecologists 140–141; gardening, in the nineteenth-century 39–40; idealized 41, 43, 45, 49; mosaic, ecosystems and 135; painters 41, 42, 79; processes, as site context see landscape processes, as site context; site as bounded space in 135; site-specificity and 41, 43; suburban 239, 240, 243, 245, 249, 250; transposed 41; unbounded 239 landscape architecture 5, 98, 101, 102, 118, 140, 215; Anthropocene and 128; as a discipline 38, 53; contemporary 38; distinguished from geomorphology 102; ecology and geology and 53, 123; grounds of modern 38–64; importance of site 38; material specificity and 2; modernism, in the twentieth century 54–56; practice 41; professional identity 39–40; role in American town design 40; site-specificity and 69; theory see landscape design, theory Landscape Architecture (Simonds) 55 Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West (Cleveland) 40, 46–47 landscape design: Downing and 39, 40; Eckbo and 54; Emerson and 41; Hitchcock and Johnson 54; Horace W. S. Cleveland and 43; Roberts and Rehmann and 40; theory 39, 40 landscape ecology 139; defined 140 Landscape for Living (Eckbo) 54 Landscape Gardening (Simonds) 51 landscape processes, as site context 101–108; future, incorporating 106–108; geomorphological past 103–105; present, framing 105–106 Landschaftpark, Duisburg 169 land use 17–20, 111, 117, 247, 252, 262, 271; climate change and 141; environmental regulations and 19; management 18, 19; patterns 153, 243, 243, 247–249, 258; problems 18, 21; public sector framework for 18; regulations 18, 20; spatial arrangement of 244, 245; street networks and 247–249; in suburban areas 249 language 15, 26, 42, 48, 58, 120, 134, 135, 139, 172, 179, 182, 189, 196, 211, 214, 221, 223, 241; of architecture 32, 122; of colonization 146; energy systems 166, 166; of fragments and phenomena 52; of site 5, 8, 10, 55

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Latour, Bruno 122 Latz, Peter 38, 169 Law of Uniformitarianism 136 leadership 172, 261; adaptive 168; collaborative cross-sector 216; in enterprise architecture model 167–168 Learning from Las Vegas 29 Le Corbusier: purist explorations into phenomenal transparency 86 “Legal Rights for Lake Erie?” 21–22 Leopold, Aldo 120, 128 Le Pautre, Antoine 88, 89 Limekiln line, limekiln grid and house on 155 Lippard, Lucy 65 location, urban sites and 192 Locke, John 15 lot patterns, suburban 244, 249 Loudon, J. C. 56 Lovelock, James 120 Lynch, Kevin 55–56 Lyons, Oren 78–79 The Machine in the Garden (Marx) 95 Madison, James 15 Maine, landscape gardening in 40 Mandeville, Bernard 160 Manhattan Island 1, 193; geological cross-section maps of 49; Lower 226; Upper West Side 179, 192 mapping: geological, Central Park 49; missing sites 240–242; urban sites 195 maps: context: Columbus park (Jensen) 50; Prospect Park plan (Olmsted and Vaux) 46; describing sites in 42; location of Crossroads, East Hill Kent, and Juanita 242; topographical, of City of New York 84; of Williamsburg (Berthier) 95, 95 Marcuse, Peter xii, 8, 215, 219 margin, as quality of ground 96 market aggregation 229, 231 Markonish, Denise xii Marot, Sébastien 38 Marx, K. 143 Marx, Leo 95 MASS MoCA 65–75 mass production, site practices and 56 mastery vs. co-creation 146 McHarg, Ian 56 Meagher House, New South Wales, Australia 5 Meier, Richard 30 Memento Mori 72, 73 Messina, Antonella da 93, 94 metaphor 81, 97, 132–134; Anthropocene 114; mechanical or electrical system 135; for professional attitude 116; shifting mosaic 140 methodology 2, 6, 7, 12, 78, 227 metropolitan area 176, 178, 250 Meyer, Elizabeth xii, 8, 182, 222 Michasiw, Kim 56 Michelangelo 29, 86 Milan view, in sixteenth century 190–192, 191 Miller, Mara 56 Miller, Wilhelm 40, 42, 51 Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, Houston, Texas 74

Miralles, Enric 4 mobile ground, urban design and 196 model: analytical: Dumbarton Oaks garden (Ferrand) 47; Wellesley College Campus 48; climate change 133; enterprise architecture model, leadership in 167–168; digital elevation model, of Willamette River, Oregon 104; neighborhood unit as planning model 245–248 modern architecture 10, 27, 32, 85, 228 modern and postmodern art: frameworks, figures, fragments, phenomena, and recognition of 56–57 modern art 39, 56, 57, 179 modernism 117, 118, 119, 122, 124, 233; ecomodernism 111, 117, 118, 123, 124; postmodernism 26; twentieth-century language architectural 54–56 modernist 2, 10, 117–119; design history 10, 11 Modern Movement 131 Moneo, Rafael 153–155 Morris, Robert 179 multi-family housing: apart and part 245–247; in Crossroads 242–244; development and division 244–245; in Juanita 242–244; in Kent East Hill 242–244; missing sites, mapping 240–242; Puget Sound Apartment 240 Murcutt, Glenn 5 “The Murmur of the Site” (Rafael Moneo) 153–155 narratives: Central Plateau 233; complexity, negotiation of 226–236; new 228, 236; professional 235 National Homes 229 national identity, landscape and 41, 42, 52 nation-building 228, 233, 235 The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening (Waugh) 51 neighborhood: apartments as, sighting 249, 250; ideal (King County) 247; resultant 249; unit proposal (Perry) 245–248 neo-avant-garde architects 26–27 neoliberal globalization 33 network culture, change and emergence of 155–159 new narratives 228, 236 New Orleans 4 New York: Central Park 42, 49; Hell’s Kitchen 193; Times Square 192–193; Untitled 179; see also Brooklyn, New York New York City: 2012 Olympic Games 1; Olympic Village proposal 1, 2; Park Avenue Armory 66; subway and sewage systems 192; topographical map of 83, 84; zoning 18 Niemeyer, Oscar 231, 233 nineteenth century: claiming, site 17, 19; landscape architectural modernism 54; landscape architecture 38, 39; landscape gardening practice and theory 39–40; landscape vs. site 43; modern and postmodern art 56; scientific theory 136; site citations 57; site-reading practices 52–53; site theories in 40–53; spatial scale shift 134; street networks and automobiles 248; system ecology 165; views on modernity 11

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Nixon, Richard 228 Nolli, Giambattista 194, 195 nomadism 120 nonequilibrium dynamics, theory of 137 nonequilibrium paradigm, in ecology 132 North America: landscape practitioners in 39 North Cascades National Park 223 Odum, Eugene 135 Odum, H.T. 165, 166 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr. 47–48, 58 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Sr. 58, 248; Central Park 42; differentiating landscape and site 43, 44; nineteenth-century landscape architects 40; Prospect Park, plan of 45, 46; site as armature or framework 45; site fragments 49 Olympic Village proposals 1, 2 “On Site” (Burns) 104 ontological pluralism 120–122 Operation Breakthrough: losing momentum 230; phases of 228–229; from place to site 228–231; prototype site plan 230; site analysis 229–230; site of 229 Oppenheimer, Sarah 67, 69, 70, 71 Oppositions 26 organism versus system 134–136 ownership and control of site: social-legal conceptions of 14–23; in the United States 14–17 painters: cubist 91, 92; landscape 41, 42, 79 paintings, describing sites in 42 Palmanuova plan (1713) 190, 190, 192, 193 Park Avenue Armory, New York City 66 parking 58, 86, 229, 245, 246, 248 pastoral theory 41 pattern shift 133 pedagogy: Blue Lagoon/Bath 169; design 3 pedestrian path 248 Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon (1922) 19 performative regionalist view on site 269 Perkins and Will 55 Perry, Clarence 245, 247 perspective drawing 29, 172 Peruzzi, Baldassare 86 phenomena, modern and postmodern art and 56–57 phenomenal, temporal experience, site as 51–52 physical area of concerns 8 physical context 6, 10, 86, 88, 209 physical site 5, 179, 181 Piacentini, Niccoló 221 Pickett, Steward 137 picturesque theory 41 Pierce, Charles Sanders 200 Pinkerton, R.C. 165 Pinos, Carme 4 place(s): bounded, urban site and 190; of ground 82–85; unbounded, nature of 133–134; turning places into site 228–231; urban sites and 189, 191 planners 6, 111, 117, 135, 138, 147, 202, 226, 227; environmental 137; site 229, 231

planning: participatory x; site 29, 48, 54–56, 229, 230; site-space 55; study areas and xii, 247; tools 185, 245, 249; town planning proposals 46–47; urban 2, 176 plant ecology 42, 49, 52 “Planting at Radburn” (Cautley) 51 politics: green 38; neoconservative 33; neoliberalism in 147; racial 207; site knowledge and 6 pop architecture 31, 32 population densities 240, 243 position, context and 26 The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Aureli) 33 posthumanism 120–122, 126, 128 postmodern art 56–57 postmodernism 26 practice: design 2, 9–10, 43, 47, 51, 53, 55, 58, 122, 176, 181, 182, 217; landscape theory and 38, 44, 132; professional 8, 163, 200; in relation to site definition 8; theory and 2, 133, 178, 182; thinking through 2 Prague 4 The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening (Miller) 40, 51 predesign issues 3 prendre parti 88, 89 Price, Uvedale 40, 44 Printworks, Arnold 65 private property 15–23; Benjamin Franklin and 15; challenges to 21; definition of 17; existence of 15; future of 22; meaning of 15; ownership 17; race relations and 18; sign 16 professional identity, site and 39–40 professional narrative 235 projected rates of change 136–139 property, social-legal conceptions of 14–23 property rights 17–21, 116 Prospect Park, plan of 45, 46 prototype site plan, in Operation Breakthrough 228, 229, 230 “publicizing” air rights 17 public parks 43, 52; Central Park, New York 42, 49; Prospect Park 45, 46 public regulation, site and 20 Puett, J. Morgan 72 Puget Sound Apartment 239, 240, 241 purist explorations, Le Corbusier 86 Quatremère de Quincy 56, 88 Quinta da Conceiçao Swimming Pool 3 Radburn plan 248 Radical Small 72 radicant design 176–188; approaches, of post-industrial sites 184; instances of, identifying 183–187 radicantity 178–179 Radio Row 227 Rapoport, Amos 2 Rashomon 204 redistricting: constitutional 258; forms of 257–261; simple 258; voluntary 258 reforestation 124

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regional sites 41, 42, 44, 49, 51 regulations; environmental, land use and 18; government, of private land 19; public, site and 20 Rehmann, Elsa 40, 42, 51 Rensselaer, Mariana Van 56 representation: in design discourse, of human figure 93; modes of 7, 199; portfolio 204–214; reductive 98; of urban sites 193–195 resilience 8, 137, 139 re-siting 69–70 responsibility vs. capacity 146 resultant neighborhoods 249 Rhode Island School of Designs Glass Department 74 Rietveldt, Gerrit 85 rim, as quality of ground 96 Rio de Janeiro 232–234 Riverside South residential project 192 Roberts, Edith 40, 51 Robinson, William 53 Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC 45 Rogers, Ernesto N. 27 role-playing 122 Romano, Giulio 86 Rome Plan (1748) 194 Romney, George 228 “Room for the Rivers” program 108 Rossi, Aldo 27 Rowe, Colin 26, 30 RSVP Cycles (Halprin) 56 Ruskin, John 41, 42, 44, 52 S-3374373 Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio 69, 70, 71 “Saint Louis, Brick City” 204; changing scales 208, 209; writing and drawing 206, 207 Sao Paulo 234 Sasaki Associates 55 scale(s): customary hierarchy of 253; economies of 229, 230; landscape, envisioning boundary and 138; “Saint Louis, Brick City” 208, 209; spatial scale shift 134–136; temporal scale shift 133; urban sites and issue of 193, 197, 199 scaling processes 193 Scarperia, Italy 77 scientific knowledge 123 scientific theories 132 Scott Brown, Denise 27–33 Scully, Vincent 30 Sea Ranch 52 “Search for the Great Community” (Dewey) 201 Seattle City Light 223 self-reinforcing data flows 164 Semper, Gottfried 80–81 sequencing: site 10; temporal 197 setting: as form and texture 32; as space 32 shadow zone 176, 181, 185 Shaler, Nathaniel 47 shifting, site 131–147 shifting mosaic 140, 141, 141 sidewalk systems 248, 249 Sieverts, Thomas 178 Siftings (Jensen) 51

sign 32 Sijmons, Dirk xii Simon, Herbert 165 Simonds, John 55–56 Simonds, O. C. 42, 51 simulation-based research l single-family housing 241, 244, 246–248 single-unit house 239 site(s): analysis 11, 38, 56, 153, 155, 182, 197, 198; as armature or framework 44–47; construction, urban design and 197–198; defined 3–6, 9–10, 124, 132–133; of design 268; as discrete spatial entity 105; distinguished from landscape 43–44; distinguished from site 76–77; empathy and 275; figuring 47–48; fragments 48–50; frameworks 55, 58; as haecceity or phenomenal, temporal experience 51–52; history of 10–11; importance of 1–12; as interface 126; knowledge 6–9, 185, 189, 215, 216, 220, 236; between the particular and the universal 11–12; planning 29, 48, 54–56, 153, 229, 230; practices 53–54; and professional identity 39–40; reach, urban design and 197; responsive xii, 65–75, 153, 176, 180, 181, 185; selection 54; sensitive 66; shifting 66–67; specificity xii, 38, 39, 41, 43, 51, 52, 57, 65–75, 176, 178–180, 182, 183, 185; specificity of 12, 161; structure 12, 39, 40, 49, 106; suppression 10; timeinflected idea of 179–180 “Site and Context” (Scott Brown) 31 site-based design practices, in the twentieth century 53–54 site chain reaction, designing 270 site design 11, 102, 131, 204, 270, 273; tactics 44 site developers see developers site planners see planners Site Planning (Lynch) 55 site-reading 8, 10, 38, 55, 57, 58, 183, 184, 197; capacity 42; and creativity 42; early-20thcentury practices 52–53; ecological lens for 42; landscape architects and 42, 52; as neural site analysis 182; skills 43; strategies 44–46, 49–52 site-sequencing 10 site-space design 55, 58 site-specificity 41, 43, 69 site theories: eighteenth century 40; nineteenth century 40–53; twentieth century 54–56 site thinking ix–xiii, 7–11, 153, 159–160, 195; as complex and adaptive 168–172; distinguished from thinking about a site 3, 181–184; strands of 9; urban 196–200 situatedness 12 sixteenth century: dialectical beliefs 145; Milan, view of 190–192, 191 Siza, Alvaro 3 Skagit River Hydroelectric Project 223 Skidmore Owings and Merrill 55 skin, notion of 199 smart-growth policies 249 SmartPlan 163 Smith, Adam 160 Smithson, Aliver 27, 30

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Smithson, Peter 27, 30 Smithson, Robert 66 social scientists 20 social space 81 social values, property rights and 18, 19 Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 74 Somol, Robert 26 source-oriented translation 183 space 31, 32, 45, 47, 51, 52, 65–67, 69, 70, 72–75, 81, 86, 87, 92, 94, 97, 104, 116, 118; bounded 133, 135, 138; social 81; unbounded 191 Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion) 27 spatial aspects of architecture 27–32 spatial pattern shift 139–142 spatial scale shift 134–136 speleothems 106 Spiral Jetty 66 Splashing (Morris) 179 Sprague Electric 65 standardization of site 56, 235 Stein, Clarence 248 Steingraber, Sandra 135–136 Stiles, Henry 53 Still Life with Bottle (Gris) 91 Stirling, James 26 Stirling Homex 229 St. Jerome in His Study (Messina) 93, 94 Stoermer, Eugene 110 stories see narratives street networks, suburban apartment and 247–248 study areas xii, 101, 260; land-use patterns in 247; single-family zones 245; urban site and 223 style(s): architectural 33; issues of, in landscape 53 stylistic choices 53–54 subtraction 44, 49 suburban development 239–250; apartment concentrations as sites 242–244; apartments as neighborhoods, sighting 249–250; develop­ ment and division 244–245; missing sites, mapping 240–242; Puget Sound Apartment 240; streets and automobiles 247–248 suburban landscape see landscape, suburban suburbia xii, 239, 245, 250 superblock, suburban 231, 247, 248 superorganism 134 Supertramp Album Cover 115 sustainability 8, 38, 57, 178, 181, 269, 274 system metaphor 134, 135 systems theory 152–153, 155–160 systems thinking 159–160 Taalas, Petteri ix tacit knowledge 6 takings: clause 15, 25; regulatory 25 “Talking about Context” (Scott Brown) 32 Tally 162 target-oriented translation 183 Taylor, Mark C. 169 technology 31, 114, 117, 146, 147, 216; property rights and 17, 19, 21; right to ownership and 14

temporal patterns: changes in 136; landscape ecology and 139 temporal phenomenon, site as 44 temporal scale shift 133 temporal shift 136–139 TentCity 3, 220 terra incognita 9, 111 theory: architectural ix, 1, 54, 56, 61; complexity 126; concrete 3; geological 134–135; graph 135; of nonequilibrium dynamics 137; systems 152–153, 155–160 thermodynamics, architectural design with 164–166 thick reckoning, platform for 215–217 thinking about a site versus site thinking 181–182 Thwaites, Thomas 122 Tillerson, Rex 117 time-inflected idea of site 179–180 Times Square, New York 192–193 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 179 tirer parti 8, 88, 89 Tombesi, Paolo 167 topography 4, 5, 7, 52, 200, 274; as figure and surface 47; glaciated 48; Piedmont 45; site 48 to represent, defined 89 townhomes 245 town planning proposals (Cleveland) 46–47 townscape 27 transience 185–187 transient qualities of a site 185 translating, sites 176–188 transportation analysis zone 240 A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (Downing) 40 Trump, Donald 117, 192, 255 TRW Systems 229 Tussaud, Madame 192 Twaithes, Thomas 121 twentieth century: academy as urban site 224; challenges 53–54; changes 53–54; claiming, site 17–20; geomorphology 101; German international building exhibitions 176; landscape architectural modernism and site theories 54–56; landscape architecture 38; modern and postmodern art 56; site as phenomenal, temporal experience 52; site citations 57; site-reading practices 52–53; site specificity 178, 179; spatial scale shift 134; views on modernity 11 twenty-first century: academy as urban site 224; claiming, site 20; ecotone thinking 200; radicantity 180; site citations 58 The Twin Towers see World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 178 typology 113, 126 unbounded landscape 239 unbounded place, nature of 133–134 unbound sites 198–199 Uniformitarianism, Law of 136 United Nations (UN): 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 178

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United States (US): Census 18; civil rights movement 18; co-mandering 252–265; Constitution 15, 25, 254; Constitutional Convention of 1787 15; Declaration of Independence 15; Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 228–231; destructive postwar reconstructions in 27; districting as line drawing 253; ecomodernism in 117; Fifth Amendment 15, 17; First Amendment 14–15, 263; Fourteenth Amendment 263; gerrymandering 252–265; National Council of State Legislators 260; 1:1 rule 256–258, 260, 261, 263; property rights 17–21; site-reading practices 52, 53; site theories 40–43; suburban multifamily housing 245; Thirteenth Amendment 264; Voting Rights Act 264 Until (2013 exhibition, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland) 67, 68, 73 Untitled 179 urban constellation 199–200 urban, defined 198 urban design 2, 5; contextualism in 26; crossover with ecology 135; site construction and 198; site definitions in 198; topographical structure of 83 urban designers, in public sector 271 urban geography 5 urban greening 107 urbanism 117–118, 128; generic 6; neo-traditional 6; tabula rasa approach to 27 urbanization 21, 43, 110, 111; process 83; suburbanization 49, 240, 243, 244, 248; surplus value for 116; violent 33 urbanized area, density in 240 urban patterns 95 urban planning 98, 181, 226; about 2; boundaries of 247; challenges of 176; foreignizing 185 urban sites 189–202; as boundary concept 218–219; as boundary object 217–219; as collective knowledge 215–224; defined 190–193; representation of 193–195; thinking, concepts for 196–200 Urban@UW: boundaries, tools for interrogating 220, 222; boundary object 217–219; thick reckoning, platform for 215–217; world, changing 223–224 Valkenburgh, Michael Van 52 value(s): social, property rights and 18, 19; surplus, for urbanization 116 van der Rohe, Mies 86 Vaux, Calvert 58; site as armature or framework 45; site fragments 49

vegetation 4, 42, 52, 84, 137, 140, 180 Veldt, Van de 85 Venturi, Robert 27–32, 27–31 Viele, Egbert 83, 84 viewpoints 12, 75, 199, 204; geomorphological 101, 102, 104, 105, 107 Virilio, Paul 103 Voltaire 12, 114 Vreeland, Thomas 30 Waddington, C. H. 137 Wakefield, Paul 115 Ward, Nari 71 Watt, James 110 Waugh, Frank 51 Wax Museum 192 Way, Thaïsa xii weathering, effects of 106–107 Weber, Bruce 160 Weinberg, G. M. 135 Wellesley College: campus of 47–48, 48 Whanganui River, New Zealand 120, 122 Whately, Thomas 40 Whiting, Sarah 26 Whittaker, Robert 134 wicked problems x–xi, 155, 157, 159, 164, 201, 202, 236; of climate change 172, 193 wildlife ownership 17 Willamette River, Oregon: digital elevation model of 104 Williamsburg: map of 95–96, 95; Wythe house in 96 Wolff, Jane xii World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan 226–227 World War 2 bunker, Normandy 103 World Wide Web 157 Wright, Frank Lloyd 3, 85 Wright brothers 17 Wythe house 96 Yapi Kredi Culture and Arts (YKKS) 34 yeoman farmer 15, 16 yin-yang diagram 90–92 YouthCare 218 zeitgeist 132 Zollverein coal mine, Essen 180 zoning 227, 249; boards 259; controls 153; development of, as planning tool 245; Euclid, Ohio v. Amber Realty 245; hierarchy of 245; invention of 18, 19; local 231; ordinances 230; rules, state-established rules for 253; setbacks 274; Urban@UW 216

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