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Artisanal Recycling by Leger Wanaselja

Sally B. Woodbridge — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:11:10 +0000

View from Martin Luther King Jr. Street

First floor plans

Second floor plans

When you walk or drive around Berkeley’s flatland neighborhoods, the buildings that line the grid of streets are not likely to attract your attention. A few large turn-of-the-19^th century houses that once occupied outsized lots indicate that this is former farmland. Their neighboring houses are usually modest and were built later when the original parcel of land was subdivided and sold. Neither the lots nor the buildings are large. So unless you are looking for a particular address, you would not pay attention to the passing scene. Nor would anything about the houses attract your gaze

View of the new building

But if you arrive at the intersection of Dwight Way and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way from either of those two streets, a complex of two buildings on the northwest corner is likely to catch your eye. Not because the buildings–the corner one is a renovated two-story structure of circa 1900 and the other is a new 2-story apartment building–have unusual shapes, but because they seem to have sprouted pieces of cars that either look like strange carbuncles or are recognizable as the windshields of hatchbacks that once belonged to Mazdas and Porsches.

That is what they are. The railings, awnings, fences and gates of the complex’s buildings and grounds are made from discarded car parts and street signs which Karl Wanaselja, one of the design/build firm’s two partners, has avidly collected over a period of years.

Stair railing in the courtyard wrapped with street signs

At the very early age of three Karl was introduced to cars because his parents participated as amateurs in car races, and their brief career imprinted their son with a passion for automobiles that found expression, not in racing, but in preserving and rehabilitating used cars in his architectural career. In his practice, which combines design and construction, he has salvaged parts from over 250 cars for use on 7 different projects.

Easier said than done. Indeed, if he were not a skilled craftsman with an extensive knowledge of materials and a determination to convert these agents of environmental pollution into green materials, we might not detect any morality in his madness. He explains that, “he was motivated to explore using car parts in buildings as a way of merging my seemingly contradictory interests in automobiles and environmental stewardship.”

Karl and his partner and wife, Cate Leger, who is also a staunch environmentalist, have devoted much of their design energies to salvaging and restoring tons of wood and metal for use in their projects.

The Dwight Way complex was the firm’s 30th and most visible in 20 years of residential projects to explore a full range of energy-saving strategies, but three measures alone saved the two buildings the cost of a year’s worth of energy. They were: using blown-in cellulose insulation made from old telephone books and newspapers instead of fiberglass; substituting 50% of the cement in the concrete with fly ash, an industrial by-product of burning coal, and leaving the aluminum siding on the existing corner building instead of replacing it with wood or stucco.

In addition to adopting the recognized means of recycling materials and saving energy, Karl and Cate have practiced what I propose calling Artisanal Recycling, a craft-oriented approach to reusing materials and objects. Examples of this kind of recycling in the Dwight Way complex begin with the two gated entrances to the landscaped court between the buildings, which was formerly a large side yard of the corner building. The first gate, visible in the photograph above is a two-tier assemblage of the rear ends of eight Volvos operated electronically.

The pedestrian gate to the courtyard. Photograph by Scott McGlashan.

The second gate between the two buildings, shown above, is made of recycled street signs. The gate’s design raises the issue of how this reuse, which completely changed the signs’ original function, should be classified.

An assessment of the original function of these standard-issue signs makes it clear that information, not wit, was their message. That their color, format, and font are repeated without variation except for the length determined by the words, reassures those traveling in cars on these roads that the sign they see some distance ahead, but cannot read, will give them the information they need to follow their chosen route. Were they upended, as these signs are, their function would be destroyed. Yet we are entertained by this change of meaning which, under other circumstance, could be labeled vandalism and a violation of the law.

Above, the courtyard’s interior. The stair railing to the upper floor, shown above, is wrapped with street signs. Photograph by Cesar Rubio.

Projecting from the corner of the second floor is a carbuncular bay window clad in aluminum plates which, it turns out, are salvaged street signs which have been flipped over. Its underside is clad with California highway signs. Two other such bay windows projects from the rear corners of the building. The roof overhang is also composed of reversed aluminum street signs and define a balcony railing above a shallow bay on the building’s south side. Mazda and Porsche glass hatchbacks were used on the exterior and interior. Shown below is a Porsche rear window converted to an awning above the entrance to the apartment building.

Below it is a view of part of an interior stair railing on the second floor level, which also shows the connection of the window to the floor.

While the mass-produced articles that make up much of the content of our daily lives may seem to have only the one use determined by the time of their creation, their life span is even more determined by our only seeing them through the lens that led to their creation. If they cannot surprise us by suggesting other uses, they must be replaced by new devices while the previous ones are consigned to the scrap heap. Today’s challenge is to cleanse the windows and doors of our perception and reanimate these artifacts, as Leger Wanaselja have done.

Unless otherwise noted, the photographs are by Leger Wanasalja Architects.

350 Mission Street

Sally B. Woodbridge — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:45:07 +0000

The 27-story office building shown below, designed by SOM design partner Craig Hartman, is proposed for 350 Mission and Fremont Sts., a site adjacent to that of the future Transbay Terminal. The project epitomizes contemporary design aided by computerized tools and committed to energy conservation and environmental responsibility.


350 Mission Exterior. All images are by SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL LLP unless otherwise credited.

Glassy office towers are not new to downtown San Francisco. One of the oldest, the Crown Zellerbach Building at 1 Bush St., was designed in the late 1950s in the newly established San Francisco office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Its design referenced the New York firm’s Lever House, built in Manhattan in 1952, which became a landmark of the Modern Movement in the U.S.

Typical post World War II high-rise building Photograph by Morley Baer

The post World War II boom in high-rise office buildings filled US downtowns with boxy skyscrapers encased in largely glazed walls. But over time these towers lost their currency and became stereotyped as “refrigerator cartons.”

Unlike the flat “curtain-walls” of the Modernist office towers, the current glazed exterior cladding for towers, which often have irregular shapes, may be prismatic, as is the case with 350 Mission St. Instead of serving as mirrors of their surroundings, such buildings become vehicles for refracting and reflecting light. They shimmer and change color with the daily passage of sunlight and shadow. This is good news for us spectators who see the buildings from the street or freeway or the surrounding hills.

350 Mission Curtainwall Detail

The shimmering effect seen in these images is produced by arranging double rows of glass panes so that the panes in the upper rows are slanted inward while the lower panes slant outward, thus producing the appearance of a woven surface that reflects and refracts light.

Parapet atop 350 Mission Street building

The building is crowned with a parapet equipped with a layer of galvanized mesh, cyclone fencing, laced with translucent nylon strips that absorb and diffuse light in a soft way and also enhance the night illumination. The parapet also conceals window-washing equipment and a novel amenity, a rooftop dog-run for the building’s canine population.

The rooftop with the parapet and dog-run

The new Brower Center in Berkeley

Sally B. Woodbridge — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:30:22 +0000

The Brower Center at Oxford and Allston Streets.

The recently completed David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley is a memorial to a major figure in this country’s environmental movement. Brower served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club from 1952 fo 1960 and later founded such environmental organizations as Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He inspired a generation of environmental activists, some of whom now work in the building at the intersection of Allston Way and Oxford Street that bears his name.

Thirty some national and international groups occupy 24,000 sq. ft. of office space on the building’s upper three floors. Their mission is to foster collaborations, engage new people in advocacy and facilitate cross-sector communication and partnerships.

Although the work of the building’s tenants is a story in itself, the subject of this article is the Center’s building design and its structural system, which were created to insure that the physical embodiment of Brower’s legacy would be a state-of-the-art expression of his life’s work. The building is on track to receive a LEED platinum rating—the highest possible—from the US Green Building Council.

Plans show the shape of the site and the Brower Center's rounded facade derived from the street corner it faces. Plans of the Oxford Plaza housing are shown on the right.

The building’s site is unusual in that the corner it faces has a rounded edge. This feature prompted the architects, WRT/Solomon E.T.C., to design a rounded façade that enables a more natural flow of space than the typical right-angled street corner. Pedestrian traffic flows from the building’s entrance on Allston Street past the Center’s ground-floor restaurant, Gather, to a gated open space between the Center and the apartment complex, Oxford Plaza.

The building’s façade suggests a temple form with engaged columns set on a raised base, a slightly projecting attic story above, and a cornice, which departs from the classical type by continuing the solid array of photovoltaic panels on the south side with a slatted trellis that follows the roof line and rises as it curves around the eave from south to north like an upturned hat brim.

View of the Brower Center from a building across Oxford Street.
Both photographs on this page are by Tim Griffith.

The panels’ downward slant on the south side moderates the greater amount of daylight entering the building from that direction and reduce heat gain in the summer; their upward tilt on the north side increase the admission of light to meet the seasonal greater need. Measures like these have made the interior nearly 100% daylit.

In respect to materials, the metal used for the façade is zinc, which requires less energy to mine and work into forms than aluminum or steel. Its matt surface avoids glare. The window glass redirects sunlight and thereby reduces heat gain. Operable window sections allow changes in ventilation.

The concrete used in the building is 70% blast furnace slag in the foundation and 50% slag in the super structure. The use of this by-product of manufacturing steel reduces the building’s energy content and its “carbon footprint” by 40%. The Brower Center is the first Bay Area Project to use high-slag concrete on such a scale.

Salvation Army’s new Turk Street Center

Sally B. Woodbridge — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:50:57 +0000

Photograph by Tim Griffith

The Salvation Army’s Turk Street Center is that rare building which both honors the context of an historic district and stands out as decidedly contemporary.

The new building at 240-242 Turk Street was completed in July, 2008 after five years of programming and an intensive Planning Department design review process followed by 28 months of construction, which included the demolition of an existing building.

In designing a rippling facade of metallic bay windows the architects, Herman Coliver Locus, have capitalized on San Francisco’s vernacular building style and affirmed its functionality for the architecture of urban streetscapes.

Photograph by Tim Griffith

By coloring some of the window frames blue or yellow, as shown above, the architects sought to allow residents the possibility of identifying the location of their apartment and thereby lessening the anonymity of the wall of windows.

The eight-story building has 113 apartments, 110 of which are studios with 358.5 sq. ft. Three are 2-bedroom units with 912.5 sq. ft.

BART Warm Springs Extension

RCCo — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:00:33 +0000

I came to architecture with a background in English and a life long interest in design. At Robin Chiang & Company I have been learning that creating architecture for the public sector is similar to writing an essay—one conceives of themes and develops narratives. To me the firm’s most successful architectural projects tell a story. For example our firm has designed Warm Springs BART station in a way that informs people of the significance of the place.

Warm Springs became part of Fremont in 1956. The area was once known as California’s breadbasket. Rich alluvial soils and a high water table enabled farmers to cultivate a variety of crops. Abundant hot springs allowed it to become a popular resort and spa. From the Gold Rush through the Victorian age Warm Springs thrived. But by the 1920s overuse depleted the groundwater putting farms and resorts at risk. In such an arid climate the water that was used up could not be replenished. The Great Depression caused the town to fail altogether. World War 2 dispersed what population was left. Now, few people know why the area is called Warm Springs.

The Warm Springs BART station could remind people of its forgotten past. The area’s most significant resource was its aquifer and the worst thing that happened was its subsequent depletion. We decided that the design of the station could be based on water to recall what Warm Springs had been and suggest its absence as a reminder of the mismanagement of this precious resource. The receiving, directing and collecting of rainwater through architectural forms has been developed as the main design theme. The theme will be reinforced by the application of glass colored to resemble water.

A colander-shaped pavilion located at the entrance of the station serves two purposes. First, it acts as a distinctive landmark that will draw attention and passengers to the station entrance. Second, its funnel-like form will suggest that it can capture rainwater and direct it down to the entry plaza where the majority of passengers will pass by.

From the pavilion passengers will ascend two sets of escalators to a covered and elevated walkway that will connect the entrance to the main portion of the station. The walkway’s slender columns, light tones and openness will frame views of the adjacent tree canopies. Translucent panels on the ceiling of the walkway, tinted in faded colors of blue and green, will remind passengers of the theme of water.

The main roof of the station will be sloped. Its simple twisted geometry will appear to direct all the water to two opposite corners of the roof. At those corners oversized downspouts will appear to anticipate a deluge. Passengers will be protected from rain by two long walls of glass suspended from the roof like two curtains made of transparent glass panels of blues and greens.

Similar panels over the bus station (embedded with photovoltaic cells if the budget permits) will reinforce the theme of water. In this area the range of drought tolerant trees and shrubs selected by the landscape architects will be most prominently displayed.

We hope that the strong allusions to water will remind passengers of why the place was originally called Warm Springs and that passengers will wonder about the reason for such dramatic roof shapes in an area that receives very little rain. Perhaps they will understand that the buildings serve as both train station and homage to nature. Such an approach to architecture is not new; instead it is very old. Many of the most ancient monuments were designed and built in response to natural conditions, to track the movements of the sun or pay homage to life-giving water.

Credits
Owner: Bay Area Rapid Transit District
Prime Consultant: Parsons Brinckerhoff and Washington Group
Architects: Robin Chiang & Company
Landscape Architects: Heygood Associates
Design Build Team: To be determined

Related Sites:

BART > Warm Springs Station > News | Chronology
The official site for BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit.
The Official Site for City of Fremont
Located on the southeast side of the San Francisco Bay, Fremont is a city of over 211,000 people with an area of 92-square miles, making it the 4th most populous city in the Bay Area. Fremont is located within Alameda County.

Cargo Way/Bay Trail Conceptual Design Study

RCCo — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:14:58 +0000

In 2006, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) coordinating with the Port of San Francisco (Port) received a grant by the Association of Bay Area Government (ABAG) to study improving a segment of the Bay Trail along Cargo Way in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. These Agencies selected RCCo to lead a consulting team to envision the conceptual design and prepare a report documenting the design process. All parties involved collaborated to bring about discussion and design efforts with stakeholders and the community in Bayview Hunters Point.

In addition to addressing the overriding goal of making this industrial boulevard safe and attractive for pedestrians and cyclists while ensuring that it serves the City’s cargo freight transportation needs, RCCo also integrated these other opportunities in the design for transforming Cargo Way:

Improve a three-quarter mile strip of the regional Bay Trail and San Francisco’s Blue Greenway linking the Illinois Street Bridge to Heron’s Head Park.
Provide better access to existing open space at Heron’s Head Park and Islais Creek.
Create a continuous greenway from to Islais Creek to the India Basin Shoreline open spaces including Heron’s Head Park that takes advantage of the required landscaped setbacks that currently exist along Cargo Way on its south side.
Create an attractive entryway into Bayview Hunters Point, India Basin Industrial Park and the Port’s Pier 90 -96 and Backlands
Apply concepts for basic improvements such as street trees, curb ramps, etc. that are consistent with the new Better Streets Plan (BSP) for San Francisco.
Create a model of sustainable, green streetscape design in an industrial area that can guide the design of subsequent parts of the Bay Trail and Blue Greenway.
Design landscaping for the filtering and treatment of storm flows using Sustainable Stormwater Guidelines and Best Management Practices (BMP) established by the SFPUC.

Related Sites:

Greening the Port of San Francisco’s Backlands

Robin Chiang — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:56:11 +0000

In the mid-1990s, the Port of San Francisco’s planning and environmental staff collaborated to establish green guidelines for land use and development of the Port’s maritime facilities from Piers 80 to 98. One of the Port’s early moves was to turn Pier 98—bay fill that became a brownfields site—into Heron’s Head Park, a dedicated wetlands habitat. Owned and maintained by the Port, it provides a sanctuary for 78 different species of birds—and an ideal place to study the shoreline ecology of the south waterfront and how its flora and fauna have been impacted by industrial pollution.

The heart of this area is the Backlands, which takes in Piers 90 and 94. The majority of its 47 acres was undeveloped—as bay fill, it required foundations that were too costly for most industrial buildings. The development of Mission Bay forced the concrete and gravel suppliers located there to move to the Backlands. Norcal’s recycling plant was already in operation at Pier 96, close to barge and rail service. Bode’s and Hanson’s new concrete and gravel plants were required by the Port to be green by design and operation. Both plants also take advantage of service from barges and ships. Their open hard surface lots are paved in permeable concrete. Stormwater runoff is addressed by surrounding open areas and parking lots with bio-swales planted with reintroduced native plants.

Bode and Hanson have both made green part of their brands, installing large public displays of their sustainable building products. They jointly sponsored an ornamental garden on Third Street that helps form a green gateway to the Bayview. They also helped defray the cost of cleaning up a former dumping area at the end of Pier 94 to create another wetlands. New soil has encouraged native grasses and shrubs to grow, creating a home for local and migrating birds—a nature preserve in the making. Discarded tires and appliances, long buried by other debris, are removed as they continue to surface.

Green Synergy

The Port’s latest master plan for the Backlands’ 47 acres identifies potential tenants with both the means to build and operations that suit the green program. They are a bio-diesel processing plant and San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s wastewater treatment digesters. The oldest tenant in the Backlands is a tallow company. Due to clean air restrictions, it’s no longer allowed to process the grease it collects from local restaurants, so it’s been shipping the waste to Port of Stockton and from there across the Pacific to China. By locating a bio-diesel plant next door to the tallow company, the grease can be processed locally in a sealed system and then converted to bio-diesel fuel.

Greater synergy will also be realized by relocating the wastewater treatment digesters to the Backlands from their current site in a residential neighborhood half a mile away. The new treatment plant will be able to separate the organics and process them appropriately, either cooked directly into fertilizer or sent to the bio-diesel plant to be turned into fuel. The latter process will use the high concentrations of methane that are a byproduct of water treatment as fuel—another example of the Backland’s “virtuous cycle.”

What’s next for the Backlands? Logically enough, the Port hopes to attract sustainable industries, locating them adjacent to Cargo Way, creating a “green cluster” along the south waterfront. They envision improving public access on this road, which links Third Street to Heron’s Head Park, to integrate the adjoining Bayview district with the regional Bay Trail and San Francisco’s Blue Greenway. By reconnecting the city to the Bay in a way that signals a new attitude toward its ecological integrity, the Port’s efforts are as full of promise in their own way as the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway.

Book Review: The Designer’s Atlas by Ann Thorpe

Sally B. Woodbridge — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:32:27 +0000

The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability by Ann Thorpe reviewed by Sally B. Woodbridge

Why make an atlas for designers? By definition an atlas is a collection of maps, charts, and visual plates that systematically illustrate a subject. Thorpe states that it was the visual nature of atlases that inspired her book because no matter how eloquent a text may be, design audiences are not engaged by printed words alone.

The book’s message is about how design in all fields can move toward the goals of sustainability; the integration of information about design and sustainability rewards users with a rich range of ideas, concepts, and facts presented in a sophisticated format that is itself thought-provoking. As with other kinds of atlases, the varied text does not converge on one conclusion. Rather, readers take what they need to make their own.

Ingredients, not recipes, presented with verve and clarity, make the atlas useful for the design disciplines. Economic and cultural elements of sustainable design, rarely discussed in the context of ecological issues, have their own chapters, which are divided into sections related to design issues. Although long-term sustainability is the objective, the 21st century landscape is the one within which design must perform for the foreseeable future. The most important concepts and ideas about sustainability are presented in terms of its ecology, economy, and culture.

The introduction defines sustainable development versus development as we know it. Sustainable development enables environmental and social conditions that support the well-being of humans indefinitely. To give meaning to the term, “indefinitely,” Thorpe invites readers to imagine designing a functional object that will endure and be useful for thousands of years. Yet, however inspiring this thinking might be, it is unlikely to take place unless an enlightened clientele for sustainable design appears to support and fund it.

Development without the modifier, sustainable, has implied well-being achieved through economic progress in tandem with industrial development geared to technological change, usually in the short term. Sustainable development functions like ecosystems, which support themselves over a very long time period with life-sustaining products and services. This development may invest in art forms and cultural norms embodying systems of belief that sustain our well-being even though the economic value is hard to quantify and less related to the ecological origins of sustainability.

The three main themes of the atlas, subdivided into related topics, follow:

ECOLOGY

Ecology’s key sustainability issue is the overwhelming of nature’s systems by human systems. The challenge for designers during the historic period of industrialization was humanizing machine-made, mass-produced products. Today’s challenge, harmonizing human and natural systems, will best be met by learning to see hidden connections between the two. We need a holistic approach to materials that will not limit their usefulness, and we need appropriate production tailored to needs instead of mass production in the one-size-fits-all mode.

ECONOMY

Technological acceleration has driven our economic goals not only in the private sector–the free market–where design is usually found, but in the public and nonprofit sectors as well. Designers have successfully expanded the market for the mass production of machine-produced goods by giving them consumer appeal. But just how this activity has increased our sense of well-being is unclear.

What is clear is that design has played a significant role in shaping the objects and images in our increasingly visual culture. The power of the visual images that stream our way is such that viewers routinely try to achieve what is shown to them as convincingly real no matter how fantastic it is.

CULTURE

Design’s success is often judged by its commercial success. Designers’ jobs may even be determined by whether their work meets marketing projections–never mind that this short-term focus puts an emphasis on ease of use that may actually limit the product’s usefulness. Commercial pressures have turned designers into pushers rather than enablers, a role they need to shed in order to support sustainable development.

So, how can design begin to change our dependence on the market-based means of well-being that stem from our reliance on the visual sphere of material goods? Many concepts that support cultural sustainability—a sense of time and history, open source design, and the acceptance of nature as part of culture–appear impractical when viewed in the context of commercial pressures. To move toward sustainable development, Thorpe advocates recognizing that the three systems of change–technology, policy, and behavior– interlock. Designers have a role in all three systems. They explore, invent, and apply new technologies in architecture, fashion, and products.

Feedback on designers’ work typically comes from sales: consumers either buy or don’t buy. Disgruntled owners of new products that don’t work satisfactorily must wait for the next versions; they have no way to register their wishes in advance except in market surveys, which are rarely broad enough to reflect all the audience’s concerns.

Perhaps we should have feedfront to make design less of a one-way stream and to engage users in the vital process of design. For instance, open source design, most familiar in the development of computer operating systems, allows users to act as designers by providing rapid feedback on imperfect prototypes. Thus designers may quickly see their work in newer and better systems.

Although the virtual form of computer-based design removes it from the field of physical artifacts, Thorpe points out that designers are increasingly involved in supplying information about form rather than the forms themselves. Design companies now exist that permit viewers to make online modifications of products they intend to buy by giving them a choice of, say, the shapes or graphic motifs for t-shirts and other clothing. Graphic design and photography make multiple contributions to design in other fields.

In the design of physical artifacts the ability of users to access construction and repair information could enable the interaction possible in open source computer technology. New features and components of physical artifacts could be backward compatible so that users don’t have to buy the new version to get the newest capabilities.

Which products/artifacts would benefit from the open source process. Thorpe’s answer is any artifact that has a reasonably large number of users. Still, a strong motivation is necessary for this level of engagement. Most of us probably don’t want to be involved in the design of our toothbrushes or safety pins, but other artifacts—bicycles, electronic communication devices–would likely generate the kind of interactive discussion our digitally connected society makes possible.

Thorpe’s last proposal for exposing design to other professions and perspectives and to make it less beholden to private sector patrons is to bring design as a profession into the field of sustainable development as in non-profit organizations, governmental, and educational institutions. Organizations devoted to sustainable development usually lack the tools designers have to combine human factors, technology, style, and function into an attractive package. Linking them would benefit both sides.

Designers should read The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, not only because it is a mine of information and ideas, but because the relevant issues are explored and weighed with admirable directness and a sense of urgency that should strengthen their convictions about what they profess and how to do something about it.

CODA

One large-scale application of the open source process could be design competitions for, say, public parks, and buildings. Since the innovative special features of competition entries are considered proprietary in today’s modus operandi, those owned by the various competitors will not be part of the winner’s scheme even though they might benefit the project. If such ideas were shared in a preliminary design phase open to all competitors, their approach would be more holistic even though the outcome would still depend on the varying talents and skills of the individual competitors.

In the design fields the prestige of authorship is tied to ownership. But when the projects don’t function as they should, authorship loses its appeal. Yet, though the winning designs often turn out to have flaws, the competitors discount the risk of failures because winning will likely bring more projects and maybe stardom. Even though feedback in the design phase might prevent flaws, the relative lack of concern for long-term validation of performance has meant that buildings are rarely assessed in respect to their success or failure after they are completed and occupied. If the assessment occurs at all it is usually triggered by litigation rather than interest in performance per se.

Although it is easier to credit a single author than a team that instigates and coordinates the design process, it is certainly more accurate to recognize the collaborative process that not only involves a bigger team of designers but also includes other professionals such as engineers in a variety of fields. Yet few things threaten designers more than the idea of surrendering authorship or artistic control.

Although Thorpe does not advocate the use of the open-source approach to design described above in her book, it occurred to me that it could play an important role in the field of architecture.
I hope readers will weigh in with their reactions.

Book Review: Design for Ecological Democracy

Sally B. Woodbridge — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:30:16 +0000

This densely written and wonderfully illustrated book seeks answers to questions such as: what is wrong with the cities we have created and what can be done to correct our mistakes? The answers that Randolph Hester explores in chapters headed centeredness, connectedness, sensible status seeking, sacredness, selective diversity, everyday future, reciprocal stewardship, and pacing—among others–come from his many years of working as a political and environmental activist, landscape architect, urban designer, and farmer to improve the physical environment through the creation of forms that celebrate everyday life.

The depressing trends of today’s world: climate change, the loss of cultural and biological diversity, economies that exploit backwaters to create international cities, and the inequities of developing countries, are critical issues of urbanity. Hester observes that, “We sanitize our suburbs, but we still cannot make places where we feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”

Through technology, standardization, and specialization, along with freedom from environmental constraints, we have obtained privately many things that were once only available if shared. In Hester’s view, the social cost of privatization which has altered public discourse and limited the exchange of information needed by the public for responsible actions must be addressed by forging new relationships between the community and the environment.

Our lack of ecological literacy has led us to ignore natural factors in urban design. According to Hester, if cities capitalized on their regional characteristics, they would realize significant income from energy, water, and waste disposal processes while providing their inhabitants with amenities and a sense of place. Instead, we have blurred the vegetative patterns, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles that distinguish urban areas and robbed them of any special meaning. As a result we have mistakenly labeled the wildfires, energy shortages, and flood damage in urban areas as “natural disasters.”

The ecological democracy Hester advocates is government by the affected citizenry through hands-on involvement. Since the form of our cities influences our daily lives, the creation of meaningful landscapes for our cities requires a participatory, scientific, and adventuresome design process. Though not likely to produce a quick fix, ecological democracy offers a comprehensive way to act and think about the future.

The preoccupation of cities with raising their status to gain recognition and attract tourism to validate it has been, by Hester’s lights, a considerable waste of time, energy, and money. Blurring the line between healthy self-expression and unhealthy striving has produced the malls, markets, festivals, and historic districts, which are cobbled together and often infused with an ersatz history that obviates genuine needs. Design should help people take root by increasing users’ knowledge and experience of everyday features in which they may take pride. Designers should look beyond project boundaries to reveal nearby connections. Indeed, Hester says, “Connectedness in the urban environment is the most fundamental contribution of applied ecology.”

One example of the benefits of looking beyond project boundaries is Big Wild, which Hester’s and McNally’s young firm, Community Development by Design, began work on in 1985. The client, a state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, was originally mandated to acquire land in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. One Conservancy acquisition, the 1000-acre Mulholland Gateway Park, turned out to lack ecological integrity because of its fragmentation. Effective planning required larger boundaries. But even as more acquisitions enlarged the project area, Hester and McNally found it to be ecologcally connected to national forests two valleys away.

Over the course of the next decade, the concept of a greenbelt around Los Angeles evolved. But since the concept of a large region is too abstract to connect to most people’s daily life, the creation of greenbelts requires incremental implementation. A citywide campaign of education and research in conservation biology was instigated to deepen people’s experience of wilderness.

The story of Big Wild features such dramas as the battle to stop a freeway that would sever a wildlife corridor, the expansion of the Mulholland Gateway Park into a 20,000-acre Big Wild and its connection to the creation of a sustainable habitat for mountain lions.

Many victories are described in this book; enough, in fact, to turn designers into environmental activists. But before enlisting in this growing army they might want to consider what they are in for, to wit: varying success in bringing people together to discuss urban environmental issues and managing their heated interaction, defeats and/or long periods of inaction, improvising ways of bridging the doldrums, and never giving up!

In the Epilogue Hester explains how he has interwoven ecology and democracy into a theory of good city form. His theory, he confesses, is “more like a mass of mating salamanders than a regression analysis.” Urban design theory must adjust to the realities of implementation until it becomes meaningful. This process may be unending.

Always modest, Hester describes his projects as having advanced small increments of ecological democracy; they have put project design in an overall framework with a long term vision.

In the book’s last paragraph Hester reveals the secret of his success: fearless optimism. “Optimism,” he affirms, “will help us to shape healthier places to dwell and create the most fulfilling lives we can achieve. And optimism will keep us cheerful along the way.”

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