SEA CLIFFS AND THE SUBLIME: A CONVERSATION

D. Graham Burnett and Diana Agrest

AGREST: Graham, it is a pleasure to have this chance to sit down together and talk. I have the clearest memory of your visit to my studio at Cooper a few years ago, when you presented on the sea. I remember how struck I was by your decision to open that vast subject with the students by means of a close reading of the Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” We centered on that text, and across the time of our collective reading, you brought us to a contemplation of the sea as something like the antithesis of human being. An anti-mirror. The failure of language, rooted in the failure of an I-Thou relationship. It was an affecting seminar.

BURNETT: Thank you, Diana. Now you have presented me with the chance to review the work that came out of your studio, Architecture of Nature/Nature of Architecture, over the years, and I see how powerfully those same themes— the challenge of scale, the drama of extremes, the limits of the human—inform every page of this book.

AGREST: The aim of this research, as you say, was exactly to look at extreme natural phenomena, and from there to focus on the materiality and forces at play in them, using the tools and ways of seeing of the architect. I believe that in architecture, as in other fields, one only learns from extremes. Focusing on the extreme, one can understand conditions that prevail in less extreme forms in other phenomena.

BURNETT: Understanding and extremity. Ah, well, yes. And also no, of course. You remind me of a story. Just last week, my daughters and I were on a small, open boat making a slow turn around the island of Capri. The magnificent rock formations loomed up before us: natural arches and precipitous cliffs that drop into the sea; the caves high up in sheer faces of stone, and the caverns opening into the deep at the crashing waterline. As we quietly rounded the northeast corner of the island, Francesca, nine, sitting on the bow, looked up and said to me, anxiety clear in her eyes: “those cliffs are scary.” And she was right, of course. Being at the bottom of a very high cliff that drops into the ocean is frightening, somehow. Now it could be “rationally” frightening because something might fall off the top and hit you. But we were way too far out in the water to have that be a real possibility. She was not afraid of that. Indeed, there was nothing to be afraid of in any rational way. And she sensed this. Hence, the puzzle—the queerness of the occasion. Its heightened air.

What she was noticing, of course, is a phenomenon that has been of great interest to philosophers for a long time. She was experiencing the queasy power of an encounter with the “sublime”—the affective-cognitive shiver Kant dissected so closely in the Critique of Judgement. It was very interesting to take a moment with

BASIN AND RANGE: GEOLOGIC TIME

John McPhee

One is tempted to condense time, somewhat glibly—to say, for example, that the faulting which lifted up the mountains of the Basin and Range began “only” eight million years ago. The late Miocene was “a mere” eight million years ago. That the Rocky Mountains were building seventy million years ago and the Appalachians were folding four hundred million years ago does not impose brevity on eight million years. What is to be avoided is an abridgment of deep time in a manner that tends to veil its already obscure dimensions. The periods are so long—the eighty million years of the Cretaceous, the forty-six million years of the Devonian—that each has acquired its own internal time scale, intricately constructed and elaborately named. I will not attempt to reproduce this amazing list but only to suggest its profusion. The stages and ages, as they are called—the subdivisions of all of the epochs and eras—read like a roll call in a district council somewhere in Armenia. Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Barremian, Bedoulian, Gargasian, Aptian, Albian, Cenomanian, Turonian, Coniacian, Santonian, Campanian, and Maastrichtian, reading upward, are chambers of Cretaceous time. Actually, the Cretaceous has been cut even finer, with about fifty clear time lines now, subdivisions of the subdivisions of its eighty million years, The Triassic consists of the Scythian, the Anisian, the Ladinian, the Carnian, the Norian, and the Rhaetian, averaging seven million years. What survived the Rhaetian lived on into the Liassic. The Liassic, an epoch, comes just after the Triassic and is the early pan of the Jurassic. Kazanian, Couvinean, Kopaninian, Kimmeridgian. Tremadocian, Tournaisian, Tatarian, Tiffanian…. When geologists choose to ignore these names, as they frequently do, they resort to terms that are undecipherably simple, and will note, typically, that an event which occurred in some flooded summer 341.27 million years ago took place in the “early late-middle Mississippian.” To say “middle Mississippian” might do, but with millions of years in the middle Mississippian there is an evident compunction to be more precise. “Late” and “early” always refer to time. “Upper” and “lower” refer to rock. “Upper Devonian” and “lower Jurassic” are slices of time expressed in rock.

In the middle Mississippian, there was an age called Meramecian, of about eight million years, and it was during the Meramecian that the Tonka—the older of the formations in the angular unconformity in Carlin Canyon, Nevada—was accumulating along an island coast. The wine-red sandstone and its pebbles may have been sand and pebbles of the beach. The island was of considerable size, apparently, and stood off North America in much the way that Taiwan now reposes near the coast of China. Where there were swamps, they were full of awkward amphibians, not entirely masking in their appearance the human race they would become. They struggled along on stumpy legs. The strait separating the Meramecian island from the North American mainland was about four hundred miles wide and contained crossopterygian fish, from which the amphibians had evolved. There were shell-crushing sharks, horn cora1s, meadows of sea lilies, and spiral bryozoans that looked like screws. The strait was warm and equatorial. The equator ran through the present site of San Diego, up through Colorado and Nebraska, and on through the site of Lake Superior. The lake would not be dug for nearly three hundred

Above: Material study model of the crystallization of salt on the surface of wood over a two-month period. Holes in the wood approximate the diameter of cracks and channels that form the underground aquifer below the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Top: Section of the Sequoia territory during the day when the temperature is higher than the dew point by more than 20 degrees, evaporating the fog between the Pacific Ocean and the Klamath Mountain range. During the day, the fog hovers over the ocean. The topography of peaks and valleys carries runoff from the mountains and creates pockets of shade and cool air.

Bottom: Section of the Sequoia forest at dawn and dusk when the temperature drops. At these times, the air cools to where it meets the dew point and becomes saturated, forming fog. Ocean currents carry the fog over the cool surface of the land to where it is captured by the dense forest canopy. The fog decreases the evaporation and transpiration of water from the Sequoias and adds moisture to the soil.

Opposite: Longitudinal section of a single Sequoia tree showing the water cycle within the tree. The sequoia generates its own rain through the harvesting of fog captured from the air. The moisture in the air condenses on the needle structure that densely populates the branches. When the weight of the water is greater than the needles can hold, the water drips down to the earth’s surface. The droplets seep into the soil and the shallow roots absorb the moisture. When evaporation occurs on the tree’s leaves, it creates a vacuum that pulls water up the trunk through capillarity.