Selected Works
Berta Zubiate
Folding Paper Pavilion
Table of Contents
The Water Educatorium: The Carved Courtyard
Faculty Posters and Gallery
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Folding Paper Pavilion This paper pavilion was made for the Moscow Farmers market in Moscow, Idaho. The final pavilion was developed from an individual component to a global aggregation. Folding Paper Pavilion was a collaborative project at Washington State University.
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The Original Component The original component is hourglass shaped with flat tops on both ends. The second variation has the same hourglass shape with an pyramid top. Both variations have tabs which allow for them to be assembled quickly with zip-ties at full scale. With the help of computer applications of parametric design, several aggregations were made to create local aggregations. Which later becomes a global aggregation to become the final pavilion.
Milk Carton Paper The final material chosen was milk carton paper which can be found locally in Lewiston, Idaho. The reason why this was chosen was for the waterproofing that occurs on both sides of the paper material. Top Diagram shows how the components are connected to each other. The bottom image is a 1:1 Scale model with the zip-tie connections.
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6 3’-0”
Mass Production at a 1:1 Scale
Carton Paper
MDF Board
3’-
0” 1’-1”
6” CREASE CUT
With a template made, mass production was possible and cost effective. The milk carton paper was cut into 3 x 3 foot squares which were sandwich between two pieces of MDF board. The template was cut out and holes were drilled the paper while still in the template.
Mass Production at a 1:1 Scale After cutting and drilling holes into the template, individual templates were ready to be folded. Folding was used instead of scoring to keep the waterproofing on the milk carton paper from being unsealed. After folding, the tabs were aligned and riveted to allow stronger connection from component to component which are connected by zip-ties. The use of zip-ties was used to allow assembly and disassembly of the pavilion and to interchange individual components in the pavilion.
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8
Ceilin
g
Wall
Landscape
Ceiling
Landscape
Wall
6’
4’
6’
8’ Horizontal Panel
4’ Vertical Panel
4’ Dodecahedron
Ceiling Horizontal Panel • Light - weight panels cause less stress on legs • Five components in a pentagon are then paneled horizontally • Three panels are in complete assembly • Patterns for shadows and shading when shading cover is attached
Wall Vertical Panel • Provides support for ceiling panels • Five components in a pentagon are then paneled vertically • Three panels are in complete assembly • Allows arching to the structure of the Pavilion
Landscape Dodecahedron • Provides stability for legs • Options for shelving and habiting, sand located on the bottom component to weigh the Pavilion down • 30 total components in dodecahedron
1:1 Scale Assembly with each Panel and Dodecahedron.
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The Water Educatorium: The Carved Courtyard The Water Educatorium: The Carved Courtyard was built to show the impact that water erosion has on the landscape. The most important feature of the building is the courtyard located on the roof of the building. The roof has a river that divides the courtyard into two sections. The back wall contains a water collection system that collects falling rain water. The vegetation on the roof is densely organized in a way that it directs people on a pathway through the courtyard. There are three stairways that are cut into the landscape which resemble erosion cutting down into the land. The Water Educatorium was a collaborate project at Washington State University.
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The Site The Site is located on the Washington State University Campus on the corner of SE Nevada St. and NE Washington St.
The Building The majority of the building is located underground with large courtyard with the residence apartments on ground level. The first lower level houses the offices, auditorium, and seating spaces. The second lowest level houses the research labs, reading and reference areas and exhibit spaces.
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East - West Section Scale 1/16”=1’
South - North Section
Scale 1/16”=1’
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2. Typical Wall Section
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1. Green Roof a. Limestone Layer b. Drainage Layer c. Moister Retention Fabric d. Waterproofing e. 4” Insulation f. Concrete Decking g. Metal Decking h. Roof Beams
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4.
2.
Water Retention Wall a. Tracking b. Metal Mesh c. Lever
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Interior Wall a. Waterproofing b. Metal Studs c. Rigid Insulation d. Gypsum Board e. Wall Finish
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Reinforced Concrete Wall #6 @ 8” O.C Vertical w/ # 5 @12” O.C Horizontal,4”Rigid Insulation, Damp Proofing, Drain Screen
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1.
3.
4.
5.
Structural Wall Section 1.
Reinforced Concrete Wall #6 @ 8” O.C Vertical w/ #5 @12” O.C Horizontal, 4”Rigid Insulation, Damp proofing, Drain Screen
2.
4 x 4 x 1/4 Tubular Steel 20’ O.C
3.
Interior Wall a. Waterproofing b. Metal Studs c. Rigid Insulation d. Gypsum Board e. Wall Finish
4. Floor a. b. c. d. 5.
Hard wood Floor Concrete Decking Metal Decking Floor Joist Beam
W 12x14 Beam
6. Floor a. Hardwood Floor b. 4” Rigid Insulation c. Concrete Slab
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7. 8.
Concrete Foundation w/ #6 Rebar @ 8” O.C. E.W 4” Drain 17
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Diagrams
Layout of vegetation and path of travel in the courtyard
Topography of the Courtyard
The top diagram represents the Courtyard and the relationship between the Vegetation and the Pedestrian Passageways that are existing on the site already. The second diagram is the water collection wall that is located on the North end of the courtyard and separates the courtyard from the residences apartments. The water is collected from the annual rain/ snow fall and runoff water from the roof’s of the residence apartments. After the water collects to a certain height, the water is released and drained into the river located on the courtyard. At the end of the river the water collected and reused to irrigate the courtyard vegetation.
Renders The exterior render is facing one of the three staircases. The interior render is from the bottom of the main staircases facing the seating area and staircase to the lowest floor.
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river structures
manifest destinations Cities and tourists in the nineteenth-Century ameriCan West
Main Street, Salt Lake City, c. 1885. Tourists came to Salt Lake City in the nineteenth century primarily to observe Mormons and their architecture. They were often surprised to find a city whose energy and built environment matched that of cities with which they were more familiar.
This interdisciplinary project addresses the often contentious relationship between the presentation of place and its experience through a study of urban tourism in the late-nineteenth-century American West. It investigates encounters in four rapidly-expanding cities: Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco, paying careful attention to tourist impressions as often as the claims of city officials and entrepreneurs attempting to shape cities for personal profit. The project begins in 1869 with the completion of the transcontinental railroad and ends in 1893, when Chicago hosts the World’s Columbian Exposition -- a watershed event commonly cited as a starting point for western tourism. Yet Chicago itself proved to be a powerful tourist attraction in its own right, and elite, notable writers as well as an increasing number of lesser-known and middle- or working-class visitors recorded their impressions of the bustling Midwestern metropolis. Many American and European tourists continued westward, making Chicago part of a longer trip that also brought them to Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco -- the major western cities along or near the first transcontinental railroad line. By 1893, tourists had long traversed the railroad route heading to the far reaches of the American West. Did they encounter western cities akin to the manner of their presentation in promotional materials? Guidebooks and illustrations promoted western cities as picturesque towns in settings of natural splendor. They transformed the quickly-urbanizing cities into orderly destinations featuring stately buildings in traditional styles alongside a homogenous, industrious population feeding economic progress. Tourists occasionally upheld this elite, booster assessment, but more frequently they experienced the urban West as a place of internal contradictions, where the haphazard and less-orderly characteristics of rapid urban development clashed with rational civic improvements; where an ethnically, spiritually, and economically-diverse population defied the city sold to potential visitors.
Chinatown Alley, San Francisco, c. 1880s. Chinatown was a big tourist attraction well before its reconstruction following the 1906 earthquake and fire. Promotional materials typically set Chinatown aside as an exotic, otherwordly attraction filled with people whose practices set them back thousands of years, but many visitors tried to understand the Chinese on their own terms and recognized their unfair and discriminatory treatment.
Bridge structure diagram + typical floor plan
flooding, shading & insulation strategy
Dark shaded areas are unconditioned corridors and porches which are enclosed with sliding doors and screens to provide passive ventilation control. Red lines mark pier locations.
A wood lattice supported by the top of the bridge structure shades the conditioned space below reducing cooling loads by 20%. Each conditioned space sets independent of the bridge structure to eliminate thermal bridging.
Tourists encountered, first-hand, the kinds of dramatic changes that earlier had transformed cities in Europe and along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. into modern places, including the expansion of urban infrastructure, the growth of civic institutions and organizations, and imposing examples of the urban built environment rooted in the western architectural tradition. Yet tourists also found themselves immersed in a diverse cultural landscape; an ordinary built environment of factories, storefronts, advertising, and residential development; and the byproducts of smoke, pollution, and noise -- the messy and less cohesive developments that accompanied the rise of modern, industrial cities. Perhaps nowhere was this transformation more apparent than in the late-nineteenth-century American West where, virtually overnight, once sparsely-inhabited areas became major metropolises. Tourists paid close attention to urban landscapes that locals often took for granted, referencing cities back home or others they had visited en route. For those who anticipated a relaxing stopover in a tranquil garden paradise -- as the American West was typically sold to potential travelers -- western cities often presented a jarring, and sometimes shocking, experience.
Andre Castaigne, A Chicago Street in the Evening (from Century Magazine, 1893). While Castaigne’s impression may have over-romanticized the efficiency and order of the scene, the juxtaposition of people, carriages, streetcars, and skyscrapers in the late nineteenth century was not an unusual occurrence in Chicago’s downtown “Loop.” Tourists immersed themselves in the everyday rhythms of the city, and took as much interest in the people and activity surrounding the world’s tallest buildings -- including their steel-frame construction as they did in their designs.
Promotional materials presented western cities as “cosmopolitan” places. They highlighted theaters, hotels, religious institutions, and prominent civic buildings that suggested the cities were refined and civilized. But they flattened the ethnic and cultural diversity of the urban population into a monolithic whole allegedly working together to achieve a common prosperity. Left out of this discourse were the urban poor and ethnically and spiritually “othered” -urban residents who did not fit this cosmopolitan vision.
Bird’s-eye view of Denver, 1874. Such views presented cities in an ideal light, emphasizing their tranquillity, productivity, and non-confrontational relationship with the natural landscape. Visiting tourists often thought otherwise.
wood shading lattice
Tourist encounters with the San Francisco Chinese and the Salt Lake City Mormons, in particular, pushed the limits of cosmopolitanism. Tourists discovered that the Chinese and the Mormons neither fit comfortably within the progressive notion of cosmopolitanism championed by the guidebooks, nor were they entirely separated from the pulse of urban life as sideshow, exotic attractions set apart both geographically and imaginatively from the cosmopolitan city. Although tourists did cast objectifying gazes on the locals, they did not divide the ethnic and cultural makeup of western cities into high and low, rich and poor, native and ethnic. Manifest Destinations is forthcoming as a book, due to be published in Fall 2014 by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Preservation Laboratory
howe truss
mining for interPretation in virginia City, montana 300 - 500 year flood level pier
Students sketch and listen as Jeff MacDonald (above), lead preservation specialist for the Montana Heritage Commission, discusses the Daylight Village site. The 1860s Gilbert Brewery, re-used as a setting for the summer “Brewery Follies” troupe, stands in the background. From left to right, pictured students include Dan McKinnon, Derek Olson, Jared Infanger, Monica DeGraffenreid, Katie Roy, Shane Fagan, Katie Eylander, and Mackenzie King. Graduate students Jared Infanger, Renn Breshears, and Scott Nicholson assisted with course preparation, content, and instruction.
ground level typical water level
lookout structure road + typical floor plan
Setback requirementS of lookout Structure
An existing road/trail paralleling the river bank was accomodated so that you could drive throught the structure on your way up river.
A modified inverted mono pitch truss cantilevers 40’ and is balanced on its fulcrum by the storage area set into the hillside. The siting of the fulcrum was deteremined by the river setback requirements.
existing road
multiuse (3 floors)
multiuse steelhead spawning pool
storage
fulcrum
existing road
False “fronts” become false “backs” at Virginia City’s Daylight Village. Built as a motel for tourists beginning in the late 1940s, the collection of wooden facades acts as a decoy for otherwise functional concrete units (far left). The boardwalk, sash windows, and classical colonnade provides the ambience of a town striving for respectability in the nineteenth-century West. Given its conditon, the invented nature of this site is not immediately apparent.
This story is not entirely accurate. But it makes for excellent drama, and for nearly sixty years it has endured to effectively lure visitors, entertain them, and keep the area economically afloat. It is difficult to find fault with this strategy: defunct mining towns all over the Rocky Mountain West –– no longer able to rely upon the riches brought in by the ore –– have instead invented an aura that folds the present back into the past, illuminating particular moments in a town’s otherwise long and complicated history. What has been happening in Virginia City is representative of a larger regional shift in the Rocky Mountain West, as the heritage of mining is increasingly mined, and manufactured, for a leisure-oriented present. Unique Features: Yet Virginia City is hardly a typical former mining town. Unlike many other mining towns throughout the American West, Virginia City boasts a number of extant buildings from its Gold Rush heyday. Furthermore, the town’s physical survival is due in large part to the efforts of former Montana rancher Charles Bovey and his wife Sue Bovey, both of whom began buying, restoring, and re-inventing individual buildings in Virginia City when their continued existence appeared tenuous in the 1940s. In this respect, one might argue that Virginia City’s legacy owes as much to the mid-twentieth century as it does to the mid-nineteenth century.
40’ cantilever
deck
The ore ran out a long, long time ago. Or at least any sort of ore that could be extracted the old-fashioned way: by panning. Placer gold mining created Virginia City, Montana in 1863, transforming a remote corner of southwestern Montana into a bustling region of some 14,000 miners –– seemingly overnight. The region, known as “Alder Gulch” after the Alder Creek where the gold deposits were discovered, featured all of the “wild west” characteristics one tends to associate with frontier boomtowns: huge fortunes, rough conditions, vigilante justice, and shootouts. And then, seemingly overnight, it all disappeared. The claims dried up, the miners left to try their luck in Helena’s “Last Chance Gulch” by 1864, and the town was largely abandoned. By the early 1870s, only a few hundred people remained.
View of Brewery Street in Nevada City, Montana, once one of several mining camps that comprised a “fourteen-mile city” along the Alder Gulch in the 1860s. Only eleven original buildings remained by the 1950s when the Boveys began hauling in threatened nineteenth-century buildings from the “Old Town” exhibit at the North Montana State Fair in Great Falls. Today, Nevada City is an open-air museum.
deck studio belly 100 ‘ minimum setback to center of river
Buildings along Wallace Street in Virginia City, Montana. When Charles and Sue Bovey first began their restoration practices in the 1940s, they were interested in maintaining nineteenth-century buildings in a state of what they called “suspended deterioration.” In this way, buildings would be stabilized to maintain their current condition, but stocked with old –– even crumbling –– artifacts to catapult tourists back into a nineteenthcentury context. They did not intend to present a sanitized vision of the past.
Interpretive Challenges: The cities of Alder Gulch raise a number of fascinating challenges for preservationists, curators, architects, and historians. In the public imagination, Virginia City is often equated with nearby Nevada City, one mile away, although the two sites demonstrate different ways of teaching and understanding the past. Virginia City’s core features both original buildings and “new” buildings, the latter erected under Bovey direction in the 1940s and 50s. Yet these “new” buildings were intended to be “old” –– the Boveys placed them on original sites and based their design upon archival photographs. To enhance the historic ambience, they furnished many of these buildings with nineteenth-century material culture, much of which they collected from elsewhere in America. At Nevada City (left), the Boveys retained eleven pre-existing structures and, beginning in the 1950s, joined them with other buildings from different parts of the state and Yellowstone National Park. Most of Nevada City includes ordinary late-nineteenth-century commercial and civic building types from Montana, but with so few on their original sites, their authenticity is frequently questioned. Meanwhile, at the Daylight Village site back in Virginia City (above, right), the Boveys fitted up the rear sides of functional motel units with false fronts to approximate an ideal vision of a commercial street along the western frontier. All buildings are in varying states of upkeep, and funding is tight. What should be preserved? A Sustainable Future? In the summer of 2008, Washington State University architecture students worked with the Montana Heritage Commission (MHC) to analyze three potential sites for a new interpretive center in the Alder Gulch region. The area currently lacks adequate visitor facilities, despite the approximately 70,000 tourists who pass through during any given summer season. Among the possibilities, the students considered the recycling of existing mid-twentieth-century buildings at Daylight Village (right) –– likely the most difficult of the three sites upon which to build, yet most closely allied with current local, state, and national agendas advocating sustainability. Students prepared site analyses as they grappled with the region’s history during the six-week course. The final report given to the MHC included sketches, text, diagrams, photographs, and recommendations. This project was generated by an interdisciplinary collaboration with WSU’s graduate program in Public History, whose faculty and students offered timely direction, advice, and assistance.
Architecture student Andy Robertson sketches the false fronts of Virginia City’s Daylight Village. The complex is in dilapidated condition today, but its mid-twentieth-century construction marks an extraordinarily early attempt to imagine an idealized version of a main street along the western frontier.
Several of the issues discussed above were published in the Winter 2012 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History. The interpretive challenges remain relevant today.
school of
+Design Construction
River Structure Near Juliaetta, Idaho The Bridge Structure: 2310 square feet conditioned space The Lookout Structure: 1139 square feet conditioned space Completed 2012 AIA Design Award in 2013 Paul Hirzel
Professor and Graduate Coordinatior
At the end of an existing single lane unpaved road cut into a hillside near Juliaetta, Idaho, the flood event elevation. This ground separation also discouraged snake infestations. A 15-foot clients wanted to create a live work space for their winery and vineyard preserving the most deep steel Howe truss system spans 80 feet at the center span with 32/16 foot balancing ideal exposure and soil for grape production. To accomplish this, we located two structures cantilevers at each end. The longer cantilever extends over the river while the other continues – one above a flood plain - called “the Bridge”, the other perched on a narrow basalt cliff to a gangway that leads to the parking area. The steel bridge truss supports a wood lattice that overlooking a spawning pool on the Potlatch River –called “the Lookout”. Owner and guest shades conditioned space below and reduces calculated cooling loads by 20%. The precise quarters are housed in the Bridge structure where multiple uses (additional guest facilities, an shape and location of the structure were made to weave into an existing cottonwood grove. small event space, storage, and studio) are housed in the Lookout structure. The Lookout (multiuse space) is roughly 1000 feet up river from the main structure and is The site challenges included: summer temperatures that can reach 110+degrees F, a healthy constructed with an inverted steel truss exoskeleton cantilevering 40 feet over the river. This population of rattlesnakes and bull snakes, periodic river flooding (the flood plain site flooded was needed to meet the river setback requirements and space for viewing a rare Steelhead twice during construction), and limited access for construction equipment. Additionally, the spawning pool below. clients requested close proximity to the river and minimization of energy consumption and Interiors of both structures are tough and utilitarian, clear finished local pine, exposed framing site disturbance. lumber, with standard plywood sheathing. The lookout space uses sealed OSB flooring. Exterior finishes are Galvalume metal siding, galvanized steel, and oiled Garapa wood decking. The building forms were derived from these circumstances. The Bridge (living-guest quarters) is set approximately 12 feet above grade and minimizes Because both structures have essentially “scaffolding” as a part of their design, construction ground disturbance by being supported on only four 8-inch thick concrete piers. The floor costs were kept to a minimum at $118 per square for the bridge structure and $147 per square elevation was determined by hydrologist water shed analysis and is set above the 300-500 year foot for the lookout.
Permaculture: aPPlying ecology at Home
The blast zone is the physical area most directly affected by the 1980 eruption of this Cascade Mountain volcano. I tour the blast zone with scientists and writers to learn about and experience this place and the research it has inspired. Above Clearwater Canyon, beside Meta Lake, at Windy Pass, I listen to scientists describe their work concerning geomorphological and ecological processes. I write notes about the key ideas the scientists study and their findings about change over time, about settlement and composure. I then stare widely outward and draw without looking down.
Associate Professor and Assistant Director
Windy Pass
This sort of drawing is called "blind drawing," meaning you are blind to what is happening on the page and your gaze stays on the scene. I think it is more accurate though, to call these "seeing drawings" because concentrating on the life beyond the canvas releases me to see more fully. Free from the concept of the "perfect" drawing, I draw what my eyes take in. Instead of crafting realistic representations of Clearwater Canyon's steep slopes flanked with young conifers, or Meta Lake's shimmery surface and cobbled bottom, or Spirit Lake's assemblage of toppled trunks, I make marks in response to what the blast zone offers. I draw landlines. Swoops and squiggles form Clearwater Canyon. Flecks and crosshatches make Meta Lake. Cascading strokes pool and shape Spirit Lake.
I arrive at the ochre house and Marilyn, clad in an Oxford University T-shirt, work shorts, and flops, greets me. She shows me the caravan where I will sleep and then we head uphill. We walk a path lined with crimson handmade tiles and amble through an edible forest garden, which is a food garden whose forms and functions are modeled after a forest. We pass peaches, persimmons, pecking chickens, hydrangea, bananas, a confetti of butterflies, a shed with a sod roof, roosting boxes, papaya, dates, fluttering guinea fowl, ferns, macadamia nuts, canna lilies, limes, yellow indigo. With its tousled canopy, established understory, and evident commingling of plants and animals (people among them), the forest garden appears as if it has always been here. Twenty years ago though, the land was covered by a tangle of spiny gorse and the soil was severely compacted. A young couple bought the property intent on becoming self sufficient. They saw promise in derelict ground and slowly transformed the landscape by employing permaculture.
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All posters are property of the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University
Creative Scholarship
Spirit Lake
The blast zone affords expansive views of faraway rocky ridges, rippled ground, and forest skeletons woven with new green. Before the 1980 eruption however, this landscape was dense with old growth vegetation, a thick fabric of foliage ribboned with streams, dotted with lakes. At some trailheads, I am told, you could not see all the way up or down to your destination, as you now can. You might anticipate topography based on a map, the undulations of tree tops, or from distant vistas, but ultimately you'd need to shuffle atop plush copper duff, move through emerald canopy light, to learn the rise and fall of the land. To see a lake, you'd need to wander under a sky of needled branches until you hit water.
For me, permaculture is an extension of landscape architecture, the field in which I am trained and teach. Like landscape architecture, permaculture involves designing opportunities for people to engage with their environment, draws from many disciplines, and is dedicated to crafting meaningful places. What distinguishes and attracts me to permaculture is that it is necessarily hands-on, and for that reason can facilitate self-reliance, foster deep connections to place, and enable people to positively effect and interact with their local landscape.
Amid the prospect, exposure, and sweeping scenes of the blast zone, drawing orients me since it involves a kind of place-based witnessing that allows me to slow down and take in. The loose, imprecise big picture views I create evoke the tumbled trees, raw ridge lines, and shifting streams of the Mt. St. Helens landscape. They do not show particulars. However, the process of making them spurs me to further contemplate particulars I've learned from the scientists: the wind-borne spider webs that settle upon and enrich infertile ashy earth; the pocket gophers that survive the blast and bring nutrients to the surface through their tunneling; the lupines that alter the soil and help foster biodiversity across the blast zone. Through drawing, I become alert to the latent, the lingering, and the little, and simultaneously question prevailing features, patterns, and transformation.
During my visits to each permaculture household, I am an observer and an agent. I witness and I initiate, immersed in and responding to domestic activities: harvesting fruits and vegetables, feeding animals, constructing garden beds, digging ditches, building soil, processing food, maintaining composting toilets. Each activity is linked to and supported by another activity. Completing any task broadly links me to big picture processes, like the hydrologic or carbon cycle. Each task also tells me something about the unique dynamics of the house.
Meta Lake
~~ I opt to make seeing drawings when I am awed, when words don't come, when I seek an unselfconscious interpretation of my surroundings. I consider them visual notes. To do the drawing I fly the scene with my eyes, and my hand--holding the pen--follows. When it feels like I have thoroughly traveled the scene, I stop drawing and look down. It's always a surprise to see what is on the page. Sometimes the image is startlingly literal. Sometimes the image communicates qualities that are felt rather than seen. Delicate dashes convey the calm where water once flowed. Glissading lines speak of the swish of a lake lapping logs. Similar to composing a photograph, creating a drawing demands that I focus on the moment, though it is more of a soft focus, a broad gaze without a central emphasis. And, unlike photography, I do not have the option to snap and scamper. I must stay put and observe.
House in classical Greek is “oikos.” “Oikos” along with “logia,” meaning study of, are the roots of the word ecology. Ecology, the science that examines the interactions among organisms and their environment, literally translates to mean the study of the house. Through images and narrative I examine the interactions of the house. I focus on the concepts of hydrologic cycle, carbon cycle, and habitat and how the work of permaculture may reveal, support, or intensify them. The following images, presented as diptychs, visually express these ecological concepts at household scales and in broader landscape contexts. Ultimately, they record and reflect how people cultivate the connections that make up home.
Hydrologic Cycle
~~ The work of science calls for rigorous planning and patient observation as a means to discover, elucidate, or investigate phenomena. I ask John Bishop, an ecologist who has studied the mountain for twenty years, specifically how "sight" functions in his research. "Most of our measurements and actions involve sight – to assemble equipment, to read our instruments, to collect field data," he remarks. At Meta Lake, the visual approximation of (plant) cover may tell of the soil's capacity to hold water, alder's tenacity, sword fern's flexibility, the spring seep now gone. Watching what emerges from ash-covered forest has led botanists to more deeply comprehend the complex root networks underfoot, the intricacy of the invisible. "Of course," John continues, "a great deal of methodology in science is given over to visualizing with technological or analytical tools, like microscopes and statistics. We use these sorts of methodological tools at Mount St. Helens, but we also spend time just looking at things, scanning the landscape, taking in visible patterns and wondering what might cause them."
Hydrologic Cycle
The hydrologic cycle refers to the flow and transformation of water from the sea, through the air, to the land, and back to the sea again. Permaculturists design to extend the water’s time on the land. Tactics for holding water are diverse, and include using cisterns, swales, ponds, plants, graywater, and the ground. All of the tactics are modeled after ecosystem processes. Consider how the roof, cistern, and watering can work to capture and hold water. Like the mountain, glacier, and river, there is a strategy of catch, store, and slowly release.
Carbon Cycle
While my drawing process is clearly not science, it reminds me of the field science happening at Mount St. Helens in that it prompts observation and invites inquiry. The scientists conducting research on the mountain often use what they observe as a source for questions, whose answers may enable them to understand what guides and governs this landscape. Writing in the journal Conservation Biology, James Tolisano reflects "that observational data, whether statistically valid or not, can lead to interesting ideas that can form the foundation and promise on which rigorous scientific thinking emerges." Through observation, a scientist might establish a point of view, a perspective, an insight.
I stand on umber soil amid blackened twigs and chips, a pile of fresh biochar that will soon be mixed with compost to help rescusitate the drought depleted soil. Biochar is made from grass, stalks, and small branches–carboniferous materials– that are essentially smoked until they are char. Through the process of controlled smoldering, the carbon in the plant materials is sequestered and stabilized.
Ghost Lake
International Design Study Tours
Clearwater Canyon
~~ After I leave Mount St. Helens and return home, I decide to add color to some of my drawings. I start by laying light, monochromatic washes across the paper. As I continue, I think about the different moods kindled in the blast zone, the blue-gray quietude conjured on ragged rock beneath Loowit Falls, the giddy comfort called forth by puffs of pumice and the honey scent of lupine, or the shivery sorrow stirred by wind as it whirls through a forest of standing snags. I use subdued tones to allude to these various moods and to accentuate the open-ended feeling of the landscape.
Carbon Cycle
Habitat
Reviewing the seeing drawings, both the rendered and the black-and-white versions, I recall what I saw, along with the personal stories told in this landscape. They are pensive stories about depression, death and loss, family struggles, fading passions, recovering hope. Christine Colasurdo, author of Return to Spirit Lake: Life and Landscape at Mount St. Helens, says these sorts of narratives are what this landscape invokes. The mountain, ruptured and spilled out, invites release. There are charged narratives lodged everywhere. "The mountain can take it," Christine asserts softly. People pour their stories across the blast zone and invisibly, invariably become part of this place.
Attached to the north face of the house is a green house. Through the greenhouse, one comes into the house. It is the primary entry, even though it faces the garden and the orchard, not the street. This sun side is the symbolic and tangible expression of the processes that guide and govern the workings of this (and every) landscape. It is the front door and back door at once. Inside the greenhouse it smells sweet and powdery. Cucumbers, squash, beans, and nasturtium crawl and twirl, climb and cling to the top and sides of the structure. Towards the east wall, there is a monstera– a tropical specimen with broad sprawling fingering leaves and a head-sized fruit that emerges from the center of the plant.
Roadside Cross Section
~~ The act of sketching without looking lets me respond to and engage with the blast zone more than I would otherwise. The silent exchange between me and my surroundings unfolds on the canvas and I experience and learn the place anew. This kind of learning reminds me of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe approached science. His way of science, notes environment-behavior researcher David Seamon, focused on "an intimate first hand encounter between student and thing studied. Direct experiential contact." Goethe described his methodology as "delicate empiricism." Seamon explains this as a calculated "effort to understand a thing's meaning through prolonged empathic looking and seeing." Fundamentally, Goethe integrated intuition and reason– shared qualities of the arts and sciences– to gain awareness of a given subject. Since Goethe's time much has been written about the overlap between art and science. Essentially, the practice of both necessitates an ability to see, interpret, and reveal. There is control and a relinquishing of control, a state of deliberation and vulnerability that ultimately opens space for discovery and connection.
The greenhouse is sort of a lanai, a vestibule, a marker. It holds heat, it beckons, it nurtures. It a mercurial space that links coming and going, inside and outside, people and place. Habitat is defined as the environment in which the life needs of a plant or animal are supplied. In permaculture, creating habitat means responding to the opportunities and constraints of a site and using design to facilitate beneficial relationships among species, elements, and functions.
J. Philip Gruen
In the blast zone of Mount St. Helens, I have been drawing. With my eyes and with my pen I follow jagged ridge lines, the U's of valleys. I move through fallen forests, into snaking drainages, across billowy landslides, tracing contours, ticking textures.
Permaculture is defined as the conscious design of human environments that emulate the diversity, stability, and resilience of ecosystems, while providing food, energy, shelter and other needs in a sustainable manner. Coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the seventies, the word permaculture combines “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture.” Permanent” in this case, describes human systems that are indefinitely maintained by responding to and working with the geophysical, biological, and social processes that support all life. Permaculture practice concentrates on creating designs that address the interconnections among these processes and include people as vital participants in and beneficiaries of such designs.
Carbon is the basis of all known life. It is present in every life form and exists in rocks, soil, water bodies, and the atmosphere. The carbon cycle provides the foundation for sustaining life. Permaculturists contend with carbon at large and small scales by starting with the ground: their designs work to retain and enhance carbon in the soil, across the landscape.
Manifest Destinations Preservation Laboratory
In Terrrain: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environment, 31 Winter, 2012.
Out toward the treed ridges and purple shadows, I turn into a gravel driveway and head downhill. The driveway is lumpy and steep, and along its sides are signs that say “please stay in first gear.” I shift gears, slow down, and take in. I pass needles interlaced, bumpy fruits, velvety bark, pokey stems, wispy reeds. Through the lattices of foliage, I catch shifting views of an ochre house, a mid-slope speck nested among verdant layers and tawny patches. The house is my first stop in New Zealand. I am traveling here and in Australia to experience and document permaculture.
The dark bits around me look and feel like the charcoal I sketch with. I pick-up a crayon-sized stick and doodle on the rusty oil drum that was used in making the char. Across the rough burnt-orange surface I unconsciously draw a tree. The tree spreads out like the sinewy eucalypts that are everywhere and graces the old drum with its quiet irony.
+Design Construction
Habitat
Permaculturists also acknowledge that establishing habitat requires an ongoing assessment of shifting conditions and, consequently, a long term commitment to a place.
Ecology at Home Ecology is about the interactions among organisms and their environment, about the relationships of nature’s household. Permaculture applies the lessons of ecology to developing human households.
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Accordingly, permaculture is about relationships, about cultivating mutually beneficial connections among water, soil, carbon, plants, animals, and people. This web of connections supports a cycle of reciprocity that yields benefits to the permaculturist (food, water, energy, and shelter ) and to the environment (building soil, preserving water, sequestering carbon, returning nutrients, and creating habitat for other creatures). The permaculturist not only creates a healthy and sustainable home, but ecomes an essential community member of the local ecosystem, a full fledged partner in the larger household.
Loowit Falls
The seeing drawings I create are neither art or science, although they echo characteristics of both. They are more like spirited imprints of this landscape, impressions suggestive of the blast zone's dynamism, its capacity to draw out people's stories, and its power to draw us in. ~~ In the blast zone of Mount St. Helens, I have been seeing.
Ecology at Home
SDC Gallery Coordinator
school of
+Design Construction
The four posters on the left are examples of several posters made for the School of Design and Construction (SDC) Faculty Showcase. The text and photos are all property and work from the SDC Faculty. The layouts to each poster was customized to each faculty’s work and quantity. Top Left: Paul Hirzel Top Right: Phil Gruen Bottom Left: Jolie Kaytes Bottom Right: Carrie Vielle
Selected Works
Drawing from tHe Blast Zone - Jolie Kaytes
by Jolie Kaytes & Paul Charpentier In Terrrain: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environment, 26 Fall/Winter
Sometimes I try to follow raindrops. I hear them land on the roof and roll into the gutters. I trace their echoes through pipes that carry them to storage tanks or through pipes that carry them downhill and into the earth, back to the soil. I magine raindrops’ journey filling spaces between soil particles, catching rides on plant roots, hydrating microbes, coaxing seeds to sprout. Through darkest ground, raindrops find their way.
school of
Poster Layouts
school of
Selected PublicationS Permaculture: Applying Ecology at Home Drawing from the Blast Zone JOLIE KAYTES LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM COORDNATOR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Jolie Kaytes teaching, writing, and images integrate disciplinary perspectives and explore the complexity of landscapes. Her work has been recently published in Terrain and Camas: the Nature of the West, and her essay “ Putting Down Roots” is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. She holds a B.S. from the UC Berkeley and B.L.A. and M.L.A. from the University of Oregon.
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Selected Works Creative Scholarship International Design Study Tours SDC Gallery Coodinator
Carrie Vielle
instruCtor
Creative Scholarship
SDC Gallery Coordinator
Carrie has been a professional exhibiting artist for over 20 years. Her mixed-media figure work explores the universal language of the human body and feminine self-awareness. Carrie’s work is represented in several acclaimed galleries throughout the nation.
In addition to a full-time Interior Design course load, Carrie has been responsible for instituting a formal rotating exhibition program for the SDC Gallery. Carrie has redefined the role of the Gallery Coordinator, and has brought the School a new professional forum for interaction between students, faculty, and professionals in practice. With the help of a highly-creative, hardworking team of seven Interior Design and Architecture students, Carrie has coordinated a successful series of highly professional exhibits and gallery happenings ranging from two-dimensional display to full immersive environments. Carrie’s work in the gallery fuels her program of research which explores how the designed environment can manipulate and enhance the communication of artistic expression.
International Design Study Tours Since 1993, Carrie has been helping coordinate and lead summer International Design Study Tours for Eastern Washington University, Spokane Falls College, and now - together with Interior Design Professor Robert Krikac - for Washington State University. Carrie exposes her students to the art and architectural history of the regions explored and designs unique modes of site engagement for her students.
SDC Galleries For the majority of my college career at Washington State University, I have been a part of the “Gallery crew” in the School of Design and Construction under the direction of Carrie Vielle. The photos on the left show the different Gallery Show that have been showcased in the School of Design and Construction. Ranging from the individuals to Student Organizations, each gallery is layout and displayed to the customization to each show. Top Left: Facutly Showcase - Spring 2014 Middle Left: “Beyond the Design: SDC Fab Labs” - Fall 2014 Bottom Left: “WE ARE the SDC” Spring 2015 Right Column: “Unexpected Journeys” - Spring 2015 All photos credited to the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University
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