Four years after Katrina breached the New Orleans levees, the area still has not addressed water management notes Derek Hoeferlin, senior lecturer at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. Hoeferlin, who has worked extensively on post-Katrina restoration efforts, including working with Dutch engineers on successful coexistence with a sub-water-level landscape, writes that "the city must develop a more nuanced balance between the built environment and what the delta really wants to be: a soggy, sediment-rich landscape."
Hoeferlin contributed "New Orleans Needs a Water Plan" to the St. Louis Dispatch at the end of August decrying the lack of reality-based planning. Instead of working with the water, he points out, Army engineers have tried to overpower it with levees. Keeping the water out is exacerbating subsidence, making things worse not better, he says. A better solution is to work with nature.
"Room for water, at multiple scales—from backyards to public rights-of-ways—must be laced into New Orleans' existing fabric and future construction techniques," he writes.
Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin also touches on the so-often futile human attempts to create permanence when nature will impose its own forces to overcome those attempts. "Wild nature versus human order" is how Kamin summarized the "Perils of Pauline saga of the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory." He was describing the wildfires that marched close by the historic observatory in Los Angeles, which was ultimately saved by a turn in the weather and the fast, hard work of fire fighters.
Looking to the other side of the country—to Manhattan—we see an accomplishment that does indeed seem to have achieved, holistically at least, true permanence. Yes, on the eighth observance of September 11, 2001, the fragile nature of even the most impressive of architectural and engineering marvels is painfully apparent. But if New Orleans is still fighting back after its devastation, could New York City ever be in peril? It doesn't seem possible.
There are a couple of relatively recent resources, searchable on-line, that might help the imagination along that path, though. The first, the Mannahatta Project, was inspired by one person's curiosity over what Henry Hudson saw when he first laid eyes on Manhattan 400 years ago (on September 12, 1609, this month's National Geographic magazine reminds us). Ecologist Eric Sanderson discovered a color print of a detailed British military map of Manhattan drawn circa 1782 during their occupation of the city, National Geographic reports. Matching key landmarks that still exist, such as Trinity Church, allowed him to get a good pin-bar-like alignment and a sense of what the minimally altered topography of the island was in the 18th century. Through extensive research of flora and fauna, and the indigenous population, he meticulously recreated what Hudson might have encountered 173 years before the British map. That interactive information is available on-line. (Take a look, but be prepared to blow as much time as you did the first time you browsed Google Earth.)
The other eye-opener is the History Channel series, Life After People, which is based on the premise that people suddenly disappeared from the planet. It then deconstructs the human-made environment over time. Projecting forward through the same span of nearly four centuries that it took to build Manhattan to where it is today, they surmise, Time Square would once again be the confluence of two streams, made marshy by beaver dams.
But to bring this all back to some kind of point, designing for permanence is a relative concept. And striving for absolute permanence is relatively futile. Designing for a permanent progression of sustainable development over time is much more conceivable, although success in that regard is predicated in designing for inevitable degradation, if not outright destruction, by the forces of nature. In this sense, one is not so much designing with nature as designing as nature: biophilically.
With the end in mind at the outset, and with a great deal of imagination and consideration, the goal of leaving no less behind than you had at the start just might be attainable. If you have a few minutes, watch William McDonough explain the concept he developed with Michael Braungart, which they eloquently termed "Cradle to Cradle."
Comments (9)
Whats up, You should probably know this blog is not displaying properly on the Palm Treo. Although, I’m now viewing this page on my computer, Thanks
Posted by buy acai | August 9, 2010 10:39 PM
Posted on August 9, 2010 22:39
Hi there, I found your blog via Google your post looks very interesting for me.
Posted by Philadelphia SEO | February 4, 2010 7:17 PM
Posted on February 4, 2010 19:17
What is interesting is the idea that on this living world, a nearly perfect creation exists, a living system fueled by the sun with virtually no waste, on only this planet, so far as we know. The one hope of reproducing this living system, is to have an intelligent creature just like man, that can engineer an escape from this gravity well and carry the seed of this living world, to take root on another suitable world. Sort of like Noah's Ark. So, perhaps we are not just yeast but rather the agent of reproduction for the living system. Clearly the survival of the planets living system is imperative to us, perhaps to it, either way we are motivated to do it better and do better by it. Self extinction is a rather sad outcome for an intelligent beings, an advantage we presume over yeast, and on the other hand, Gorden, it is possible that we will make it a long time, given our capacity to socially adapt, another advantage over yeast. In any event survival requires sustainability be embraced, hardly a pointless exercise from my point of view.
For those of you who are more polarized towards conservative philosophy organized around dollars that liberal philosophy organized around the human condition and quality of life, consider this; There is more money to be made by surviving, than self extinction.
Posted by Terry L. Walker, Architect | September 25, 2009 12:47 PM
Posted on September 25, 2009 12:47
Thank you Terry.
And, also, you Michael, because you consistently bring this issue to the fore.
Sustainability is a pointless exercise in the long-run, if you think of how even a thousand-year span is beyond our limited ken. And this is much less than 3 billion years if one is talking about some sort of realistic Earth-life status quo.
Humanity will die out, we know this--or at least we should. The point here is whether that be at our own doing or at the doing of an external source.
I've long likened human population of Earth as tantamount to yeast populating a vat of grape juice. Eventually (for yeast it only takes a few weeks), the waste becomes toxic enough to kill the population entirely. (That is, yeast produces C2H5OH--ethyl alcohol--as a waste product until the concentration, at about 12-20 percent, kills it all.)
Will we be yeast on this planet or something more sustainable ... even if that means a mere 10 thousand more years ... rather than 10.
Michael, does that make more sense to you or less?
I'm guessing, less.
Posted by Doug Gordon | September 19, 2009 10:50 AM
Posted on September 19, 2009 10:50
Sustainable Design is a philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating negative impact to the natural environment. The term "sustainability", where used in this blog refers to the global design movement by design professionals.
Posted by Terry L. Walker, Architect | September 18, 2009 6:23 PM
Posted on September 18, 2009 18:23
Nature wastes, naturally; she just recycles 100%
Posted by Jerome Morley Larson Sr EAIA | September 18, 2009 2:36 PM
Posted on September 18, 2009 14:36
What is the definition of the term "sustainability?"
Posted by Michael Adams | September 16, 2009 12:15 PM
Posted on September 16, 2009 12:15
We need to respect the wisdom we find in natural systems. In nature there is no waste. The circle of life is the model of efficiency. We accept too much waste of natural resources and human resources. We are programed to accept high levels of waste. Because dollars are valued over material and human resources, waste is acceptable. The reasoning of dollars prevails over other considerations, including the value added by design intelligence. Dollars drive decisions and the illusion of logic but in reality it is an abstracted reasoning process alien to nature.
We are living in an age where we have specialized rooms in our homes to accommodate a wide variety of activities, including formal rooms rarely used.
With houses often more than 3000 square feet for a family of four. We tripled the size of the average house we lived in during the 1960's, with a family of six or seven.
One of the silliest things we do is to place by virtue of economic choice, the bulk of the design of our cities, into the hands of those least qualified, least educated, and those who are unexamined. In every State the logic of dollars prevails over simple design intelligence, where what we obviously should do, is employ those who can bring the highest level of design intelligence to the problem of built environment. From the corporations board room to the street make decision based upon dollars despite the costs to the environment, we have driven the existing city to form by our abstracted reasoning process.
Clearly sustainability can't be achieved by those least motivated to build it or those least qualified to design it. I am calling upon the AIA to lobby against allowing unlicensed persons to file technical submissions for permits and to support the intent of IBC Section 106.1, which is now law in almost every State in the US.
TLW
Posted by Terry L. Walker, Architect | September 15, 2009 12:25 AM
Posted on September 15, 2009 00:25
this is cool stuff. The national geographic article is but a primer.
Posted by kerry hogue | September 11, 2009 8:51 AM
Posted on September 11, 2009 08:51