The Domestic Landscape An Urban Armature in Fallow Cities Lucy McFadden
the domestic landscape: an urban armature This research responds to the phenomena of the house and yard pattern of the post-war generation and the increasingly “burdensome� sum of unoccupied residential lots. It asks, can we use the needs and the values of domestic landscape of front, back, and side yards, streets, and short cuts as a tool to reconfigure and regenerate neighborhoods with shrinking populations? These post-industrial, post-growth American cities are comprised of dozens of square miles of single family houses and yards, and as population peaked decades ago, neighborhoods in these cities are full of land and potential to be used as a design tool. Looking at aspects of the landscape within the domestic realm -- the garden, the porch, the yard -- in the context of the urban and the political and economic, the domestic landscape can start to highlight value extending beyond the boundary of the parcel line and onto the street. Through mechanisms such as circulation, home-based entreprenueraliasm, and place-making planted form, a new kind of urban life can populate these swaths of landscape.
How will landscape architects approach design in fallow cities? How will landscape architects honor the boundary between private landscapes and simultaneously implement legible urban landscapes? Can mechanisms such as circulation and access, home-based entreprenueraliasm, and legible planted form enable a new kind of urban life that can populate clusters of these swaths of landscape while leaving some parts to ecological succession?
Can plant form and shared space revive fallow cities and neighborhoods? How can designers and government work to integrate domestic patterns and streetscapes? What kind of plant architecture is conducive to safety, and thus, an infrastuctural piece of the city?
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“During a lecture one day, my photography teacher swooned over a copy of William Eggleston’s “The Democratic Forest,” a tome of his images depicting the Deep South, particularly the Delta and Memphis. In a Boston accent tinged with a lisp, she pronounced the author of the book “the father of modern color photography.” I was stunned that such a title would be given to someone born in a state I had heard about only in reference to the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning,” if mentioned at all. Like many people who draw conclusions about things they know nothing about, my perspective was narrow and naive. Throughout that course, our teacher inundated us with photographs by Mr. Eggleston, as she preferred to call him, but they had no effect on me. “What did you think of his home?” she’d ask us. My jaded 16-year-old self scoffed: “Have you ever been there?” In French there is no word for home. There is, of course, the term “maison,” which refers to the structure people live in, but there is no definitive word to explain what philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls our “corner of the universe,” or “home.” As snarky as my comment was at the time, there was some truth to it. To understand the “home” that Eggleston depicted, I would have to live it.” “The Weight of Home,” Mary Warner, The Bitter Southerner
William Eggleston Memphis, TN 5
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through circulation, planted form,
Garrett Eckbo Reseda, CA
9
and plant architecture
Frances Halle
11
be an armature for neighborhoods in cities that have experienced some kind of disturbance? 13
fallow
existing planted form
oppurtunity for landscape armature 15
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25
27
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And then there is his use of colour. Photography didn’t use colour seriously until Eggleston came along. Colour was the prerogative of the slick advertising man, that dealer in clichÊ and banality. Eggleston saw a use for heightened colour; in fact, his colours can be shrill to the point of near hysteria. So he shows us objects that are both ordinary and very particularised, and then ratchets up the tension that surrounds those objects by infecting their atmosphere with shrill colours. He is besotted by the imaginative possibilities of the ordinary. He wants us to rinse our eyes until we see, without prejudice, the exquisite poignancy of the seeming banalities of the everyday. Michael Glover, critic
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contents
+ + +
Abstract William Eggleston and everyday Matrix Context
+ the T W O year cycle: the Mayor of Motor City leveraging votes for landscape // 35,000 trees domestic pandering + landscape // 35,000 trees + the domestic shop T H E H AVA N A PA R C E L finding seats in havana / living in vedado anatomy of self-employment +
people watching (with Jane Jacobs) Smithson, “as found”
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“A Free Plan for New Orleans, Domestic Rhythms, Public Ground,” UVA, LUNCH 10 the PRECISION of Garrett Eckbo’s site organization, “Landscape for Living” comparison: Miller Garden to Herman Kiefer Health Complex
+ +
shared space, desire lines, circulation as a tool Cerda and urbanization in barcelona
+ A N A L O G / plants as corporeal / mimicry and plant integrity GREY GUNDAKER, “No Space Hidden” Pearl The Buzz +
yardKEEPING: domestic and vernacular landscapes, lexicon, surfaces and borders the landscape of laundry // le febvre and rhythm analysis
+ hitting PAV E M E N T berlin // bodies + movement detroit // figuring the ground ambiguity // Teardrop + Brooklyn Bridge Park +
practioners // methods
+ +
GLOSSARY INDEX
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2 Fallow City Data
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Cities in America that are larger than 100 square miles. 39
Cities whose population dropped since peaking. 41
One hundred square mile cities whose populations have dropped since peak43
100+ MILE AMERICAN CITIES SITKA JUNEAU WRANGELL ANCHORAGE JACKSONVILLE ANACONDA BUTTE OKLAHOMA CITY HOUSTON PHOENIX NASHVILLE LOS ANGELES SAN ANTONIO SUFFOLK BUCKEYE INDIANAPOLIS CHESAPEAKE DALLAS FORT WORTH SAN DIEGO LOUISVILLE MEMPHIS KANSAS CITY NEW YORK CITY AUGUSTA AUSTIN CHARLOTTE LEXINGTON EL PASO MACON VIRGINIA BEACH CUSSETA CHICAGO TUSCON COLUMBUS VALDEZ PRESTON HUNTSVILLE BOULDER CITY CALIFORNIA CITY
TULSA COLORADO SPRINGS GOODYEAR ALBUQUERQUE SCOTTSDALE HIBBING NORMAN SAN JOSE PEORIA NEW ORLEANS CORPUS CHRISTI MONTGOMERY WICHITA AURORA DENVER SIERRA VISTA GEORGETOWN BIRMINGHAM FAYETTEVILLE CARSON CITY RALEIGH BAKERSFIELD MOBILE DETROIT BUNNELL MESA LAS VEGAS CHATTANOOGA PHILADELPHIA PORTLAND OR ATLANTA WINSTON-SALEM COLUMBIA SC BROWNSVILLE LYNCHBURG KANSAS CITY MARANA YUMA ATHENS LIT
LITTLE ROCK OMAHA LUBBOCK TAMPA ELOY UNALASKA SALT LAKE CITY HENDERSON SURPRISE BABBITT CAPE CORAL ABILENE PALMDALE JACKSON GREENSBORO FRESNO SHREVEPORT ORLANDO NORTH LAS VEGAS ST. MARYS SACRAMENTO NIGHTMUTE CHARLESTON PLYMOUTH MILWAUKEE ARLINGTON TALLAHASSEE CLARKSVILLE DURHAM PALM SPRINGS LANCASTER KNOXVILLE LAREDO AMARILLO DOTHAN OAK RIDGE EDMOND BEAUMONT WACO SEATTLE BALTIMORE
Land is an American asset.
PORT AUTHUR BALTIMORE TOLEDO EL RENO JONESBORO ELLSWORTH CARIBOU FORT WAYNE INDEPENDENCE RIVERSIDE CINCINNATI LAS CRUCES CLEVELAND BATON ROUGE FREMONT DES MOINES PRESQUE ISLE PORT ST. LUCIE LAWTON ROME NORTH PORT SAVANNAH LINCOLN ENID RIO RANCHO APPLE VALLEY SPRINGFIELD VICTORVILLE PLANO GRAND PRAIRIE WICHITA FALLS
61.4% DECLINE SINCE PEAK POPULATION
Vacant land, American asset. 19.8% DECLINE SINCE PEAK POPULATION
45
ST. LOUIS DETROIT YOUNGSTOWN CLEVELAND GARY PITTSBURG BUFFALO WILKES BARRE NIAGARA FALLS FLINT SCRANTON DAYTON CINCINATTI UTICA NEW ORLEANS CAMDEN BIRMINGHAM CANTON NEWARK WILMINGTON ROCHESTER BALTIMORE AKRON SYRACUSE TRENTON HARTFORD PROVIDENCE HAMMOND ALBANY MINNEAPOLIS ERIE PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO TOLEDO SOUTH BEND BOSTON NEW HAVEN READING MILWAUKEE
FALLOW CITIES were once industrial urban cores. They have experienced significant population and job loss, resulting in high residential vacancy and diminished service capacity and resources. Despite very real challenges, each city also has real assets— from strong cultural fabric and anchor institutions to abundant historic architecture and available land—that support their ongoing initiatives to strengthen their communities. Fallow cities are mostly concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, with the majority in the states of Ohio, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. America’s fallow cities have experienced profound social and economic disruption as a result of fundamental shifts of the global economy in recent decades, and policy decisions made at the local, state, and federal level. Fallow cities have lost between 20–70% of residents since their mid-century population peak, but are still vibrant, midsized cities home to around 50,000 to 1.5 million people each.
A great city should not be confounded with a populous city. Aristotle
DETROIT CLEVELAND
CINCINATTI NEW ORLEANS BIRMINGHAM
BALTIMORE
PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO TOLEDO
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MILWAUKEE
POPULATION GROWTH
-37%
FALLOW CITIES
145.27%
OTHER US CITIES
49
CONCENTRATED POVERTY
28.34%
FALLOW CITIES
16.69%
OTHER US CITIES
51
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME
$35,705
FALLOW CITIES
$49, 229
OTHER US CITIES
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2 domestic land contextualized
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1914 Henry Ford doubled wages so that his employees could afford to buy his cars (and to reduce employee turnover and training costs). CARS NEEDS DRIVEWAYS
the single family home single family houses single family yards nuclear family
and yard
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disturbance post-industry storm war economic fail
landcsape as anthropocene
URBAN
public circulation transportation infrastructure landscape urbanism ecological urbanism
HANNAH ARENDT, 1958 public and private realms “The Human Condition” JANE JACOBS, 1961 feminist landscape Elissa Rosenberg GARRETT ECKBO, 1950 “Landscape for Living”
domestic domesticity domestic realm polis and household` PRIVATE ownership interior public
THEORY facets
cultural social economic political spatial
HENRI LEFEBVRE rythmanalysis, 1974 place + time + expediture of energy = rhythms Kiley, Rose, Eckbo precision in site planning Smithson, “as found” “The American Lawn” George Teysott Beatriz Colomina Dennis Cosgrove, social formation Dolores Hayden Beth Meyer
landscape as collection sum of parts “landscape architecture as cabinet of curiosities”, Gunther Vogt, 2014 James Rojoas, “Enacted Environment” GREY GUNDAKER anthropomorphizing domestic landscapes and gardens US Dept of Interior “Plants, people, and environmental quality” A Clash of Cultures, Elizabeth Brabec
vacancy missing teeth diminshed tax base deteriorating city services thickets > fear crime land bank acquistions mow-to-own lot-next-door self organizing private contractors “right-sizing” “the buzz”
material studies laundry mimicry planted form plant architecture analog to body integrity of plant paving edging porches shade fence or wall
fallow land
elements sum of parts
new economic land new industry Hantz farms orchard JOBS hours land stewardship plan 35,000 trees
ECONOMY
DOMESTIC LAND
american dream beautification gender roles maintenance worker housing The Art of Tidying mowing side lot programs life in the yard being neighborly borders + edges setbacks ordinances grass heights safety garden parcel line abidence amiguity > threshold Radburn lot, yard, garden
generator mechanism gentrification the creative class oppurtunity for new SHARED SPACE oppurtunity for new CIRCULATION
TOPOTEK1, 2006, “Paradise Remix” Inside Outside Petra Blaisse MVVA Kienast / Vogt Walter Hood Reed Hildebrand Cornelia Oberlander Russell Page
figure ground path as spatial tool layer play gardens yard as archive 59
CONTEMPORARY WORK design tools / method
ways the landscape serves as armature through the FACE ECONOMIC
CULTURAL
NEW ORLEANS
street economy, cultural avenues, peddlers and street performers, tourism, chicory? lumber?
neutral grounds -- corridors, the STREET parades cajun prairie
DETROIT
lumber - Hantz land grab - developer the creative class furniture, design reuse of material JOBS PROGRAM
Motor City house and yard pattern, the industrial landscape, assembly line (packard),
domestic entreprenuerialism (cafeterias, autoshops, casas particulares, vendors)
the STREET (escaping urban renewal does amazing things for cities, working class hoods maintained vernacular)
cafes, collectives and squatters, private public partnerships, foundation investors, creative class
squatters, bosques, public space to the next level
HAVANA
BERLIN
FACETS of city...
as found
SOCIAL
POLITICAL
long term perception of blight, hurricane culture (topo-based segragation)
gerrymandering, relation to canals, long lot evolution
fear of the wilds, distrust, grasslands, good lake soil, YARD LIFE/ beautification?
domestic landscape = VOTES for the mayor, block clubs
vastness, less obvious fabric, blighted trees, larger swaths to be backbone once again
strolling, people watching, blvds and avenues, corner sitting,the malecon, porches
shifting power changing grain of hoods, need protection
medieval to grid system, long promenades, colonial, small setbacks and mostly paved, cisterns
germans love parks of all sizes, common trust among peeps
squatters win, work off canal and spree, wartime space maker
no more legroom, looking for mechanisms, using footprints
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SPATIAL based off MS meanders, long lot evolution, house and yard pattern
350’
figuring street and yard, New Orleans
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EXISTING CONDITIONS
PRIORITY WINDOWS TO MAINTAIN PRIVACY
ESTABLISH COUPS WITH PRIVATE GARDENS
DRAW LINES BACK TO PARCEL CORNERS
fall 2014 studio project, finding logic to break down the grid
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s
te 3 vo tes
2 vo 1
vote
es
ot 4v
.
5...
DETROIT :
the two year mayoral cycle
domestic landscape = VOTES
leverage that the domestic landscape and land users have on the mayor LAND STEWARDSHIP PROGRAM ROLLS OUT 2016 72,000 trees in Detroit, 10 weeks of labor JOBS PROGRAM
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HAVANA : economic model
domestic entreprenuerialism (cafeterias, autoshops, casas particulares, vendors)
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Centro, Havana including private/public home/store fronts in figuring public street
350’
71
Centro, Havana including private/public home/store fronts in figuring public street
350’
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75
Parts + making plant palettes + plant books and practitioners + plant architecture examples + anthropomorphizing plants + The Buzz and Detroit Future City + yardkeeping independent study
77
neighborhood based project in NOLA studio (completed)
+
site + neighborhood based project in Detroit (in progress)
ecological social
circulation
planted form plant architecture
economic
plant palette
on a city scale using the precision of Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley with ecological underpinnings of landscape urbanism to specifically address issues of circulation and safety/danger to address whimsy and play in urban environments
Piet Odoulf --- structure (as much as color and texture) is crucial to success of gardens art of home landscaping contents why landscape? problems home planning foundations surfacing enclosure shelter enrichment plants and planting procedure design examples at home in the neighborhood
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There are no boundaries to the scientific investigation of the world, to the artistic expression and projection of the potentiality of that investigation, nor to the democratic patterns of society which are implicit in their vision and sight. Garrett Eckbo
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83
sample of plant architecture
sample of planted form
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planted form for urban environments
yard street common
as they relate to social needs
ground cover herbaceous shrub understory canopy
inbetween yards path common to street
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Pearl Fryar
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The Buzz Detroit Future City
Foundation Planting and Plan for a Formal Garden from Cecile Hulse Matschat, Planning the Home Grounds, 1937
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Grey Gundaker, “No Space Hidden” “For many years I was fortunate to visit and learn from around fifteen African Americans and their yards in detail. Most of the yards are located in small towns and cities in the South and a few are rural. I wasn’t looking at that them from an environmental perspective, but more at their design–the total layout as well as placement of plants, art works, and other areas. I wanted to know what these places meant to their makers and neighborhoods. Mainly I looked for memorials to ancestors and loved ones. Each yard had areas that represented “wildness” and those that role modeled how to be “cultivated”–a mature, responsible person. These different areas has different contents. Wild parts were jazzier and looked like little forests. Cultivated areas were more symmetrical and planned. Eventually I realized that these yards built in some valuable information about an African American environmental philosophy that is very old and also mentioned in memoirs from the past.”
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Lucy McFadden Independent Study, Spring 2015 Adviser: Beth Meyer African American Yard-keeping: domestic and vernacular landscapes Course Description Common practices of keeping a yard can reveal some of the cultural traditions that make up a community. Ways of arranging, caring for, and maintaining personal space demonstrate how a person values his or her land. These rituals, or lack thereof, provide insights into how members of society act as custodians of the land they occupy on a neighborhood scale and a city-wide scale. By looking closely at the evolution of the design and makeup of African American yards, originating in Africa, surviving slavery, and existing today in a contemporary versions of themselves, we can see vernacular sensibilities -- permutations of the same value system updated to fit the needs of today. These cultural landscapes are prevalent. This course is comprised of a series of readings and potential site visits and interviews in the Virginia Piedmont and Chesapeake regions. The bibliography provides a close reading of sequential eras of African American yard-keeping, gardening, and urban house and yard patterns in Virginia, including slaves’ garden plots in Williamsburg and at Monticello, Aberdeen Gardens in Hampton, Anne Spencer’s home and garden in Lynchburg, and contemporary gardens in Charlottesville. It delves into modern design build studios to understand current translations of vernacular into design, and it looks at large scale understanding of rhythms, gender issues, and space. By mining the sources for helpful words and phrases that help define the topics and discern their issues, the course will conclude with a lexicon of terms describing African American yard-keeping and domestic landscapes in addition to developing a notational key for diagramming rhythms within these domestic landscapes. 2/3
Grey Gundaker, anthropological framework, Virginia Gundaker, G. (1998). Signs of diaspora/diaspora of signs : literacies, creolization, and vernacular practice in African America. New York: Oxford University Press. Gundaker, G., & McWillie, J. (2005). No space hidden : the spirit of African American yard work. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
2/7
visit Grey Gundaker @ WM, site visit at Chesterfield Heights, Norfolk, and Tidewater Gardens, Norfolk
2/17
African origins, Carter’s Grove plantation, multi-generational translations Frischkorn, R. T, Rainey, R. M, & Morrish, S. Dvells. (2003). Half my world : the garden of Anne Spencer, a history and guide. Lynchburg, Virginia: Warwick House Publishing. Walsh, Lorena S. “From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community.” (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 181.Westmacott, Richard Noble. African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
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Westmacott, Richard Noble. Pattern and Practice in Traditional Black Gardens in Rural Georgia. 1987. 2/19 Jefferson School with Leni Sorenson, “Goodnight Irene” Additional reading Jacobs, H. A, Child, L. Maria, & Yellin, J. Fagan. (1987). Incidents in the life of a slave girl : written by herself.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Genovese, E. D. (1976). Roll, Jordan, roll : the world the slaves made. New York: Vintage Books. Arnett, P., & Arnett, W. (2000). Souls grown deep : African American vernacular art of the South. Atlanta, Ga.: Tinwood Books . Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” Material Life in America 1600-1860 ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 357-369.
3/5
Robert Farris Thompson, Judith McWillie, vernacular art Methodological precedents -- Elizabeth Brabec, Richard Westmacott Ethnobotany / African diaspora Brabec, Elizabeth; Richardson, Sharon (2007). "A Clash of Cultures.." Landscape Journal, 26 (1), 151-167. Thompson, R. Farris. (1993). Face of the gods : art and altars of Africa and the African Americas. New York: Museum for African Art . Voeks, R. A., & Rashford, J. (2013). African ethnobotany in the Americas. New York: Springer. Draft of notational system and lexicon matrix.
3/17
Everyday landscapes, urban and suburban issues, yard types Barton, C. Evan. (2001). Sites of memory : perspectives on architecture and race. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Balmori, D., & Morton, M. (1993). Transitory gardens, uprooted lives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rojas, James T. (1993). "The Enacted Environment of East Los Angeles." Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, 8 (3), 42-53. Teyssot, G. (1999). The American lawn. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Sills, V. (2010). Places for the spirit : traditional African American gardens. San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press. Additional Reading Hood, W., & Levy, L. (1997). Urban diaries. Washington, D.C.: Spacemaker Press. Wilson, C., & Groth, P. Erling. (2003). Everyday America: cultural landscape studies after J.B. Jackson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Groth, P. Erling, & Bressi, T. W. (1997). Understanding ordinary landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press.
3/31
Rural Studio, Anuradha Mathur - shifting from vernacular analysis to working design catalogue
“Abstract ideas based upon knowledge and study are transformed into workable solutions forged by real human contact, personal realization, and a gained appreciation for the culture.” -- Rural Studio mission
Mathur, A., & Cunha, D. da. (2006). Deccan traverses : the making of Bangalore's terrain. New Delhi: Rupa. Mathur, A., & Cunha, D. da. (2001). Mississippi floods : designing a shifting landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dean, A. Oppenheimer, & Hursley, T. (2002). Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an architecture of decency.New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Tulane City Center, Maurice Cox -- community values and culture incorporated into design work Initiatives of the Tulane City Center vary over time, but share a focus on improving cities - particularly our home city of New Orleans. Our project sites range in scale from small installations to neighborhood scale planning. Our work is grounded in the values and culture of our community partners in dialogue with current environmental sensibilities and innovative design strategies. Beyond deep citizen engagement, an important aspect of our work is to ensure that the research results in a constructed design and/or advocacy and education.
4/14
Henri Lefebvre, Sidney Mintz, Louis Nelson, theoretical / rhythms Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis Space, Time, and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine Pub., 1974. Nelson, Louis P. (June 22, 2011). "The architectures of black identity: buildings, slavery, and freedom in the Caribbean and the American South." Winterthur Portfolio, 45 (2-3), 177-193. Conan, Michel. Performance and Appropriation: Profane Rituals in Gardens and Landscapes. Washington, D.C.: Published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2007.
4/28
Conclusion: notational system + matrix / lexicon of terms and references
Interviews Sara Bon-Harper, former archaeologist at Monticello, current director at Ash-Lawn Highland Grey Gundaker, WM anthropologist and author Leni Sorenson, former Monticello scholar and culinary historian Maurice Cox, Tulane City Center Reuben Rainey, Half my world : the garden of Anne Spencer, a history and guide
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from:
Grey Gundaker <gxgund@gmail.com>
to:
Lucy McFadden <lccmcf@gmail.com>
date:
Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 3:00 PM
subject:
Re: Gullah article
Hi Lucy, Your syllabus looks great. Wish could follow in your footsteps. Leni Sorenson! Now, there's a blast from the past. Hope she is doing well and that you had a good conversation. Leni was one of the first graduate students I met when I arrived at W&M. She knows so much about just about everything. Louis Nelson yes I know this paper and his other work. Sometime we can perhaps talk about it. For now, suffice it to say that his work is in line with a position taken long ago, thoroughly entrenched at CW and among a certain group of historians of plantation slavery who took Sidney Mintz and Richard Price's work as a theoretical frame. They are as predictable in describing whatever Black people do as "creative" in the face of oppression as the African retentions folks they critique. The trouble is they don't know anything about African anything. Not having to learn it is a great time saver. But they would not rule "European" or "British" "retentions" a priori out of their analyses of European descendant architecture and landscape design in order to show Euro Ams are "creative" and, in some cases, oppressed. It makes more sense to me to learn as much as possible about the full resource repertoires people may draw on. They do not draw on them consistently but rather juggle among them to find what works. Resources on one level of abstraction may well differ from those on another. In music scholarship much better in quality than material culture this goes without saying. In WWI Black musicians got Eurooriginated brass band instruments. But the aesthetics of playing the instruments is not reducible to Euroonly, or "creativity"only explanations. Oh well, they don't know what they don't know so how can your expect them to know? Grey
from:
Lucy McFadden <lccmcf@gmail.com>
to:
Grey Gundaker <gxgund@gmail.com>
date:
Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 8:09 AM
subject:
thank you!
Dear Grey thank you so much for writing a letter for me for the fellowship. I will let you know how it goes. I spoke with Louis Nelson the other day. It is definitely interesting and I appreciate what you said about drawing upon several resources and trying to gather and form a stance from juggling several perspectives. I am learning a lot. I find it really helpful to be able to focus on landscape architecture, materiality, and domesticity as a way to ground the study and keep it about the yard. After all, what interested me in this entire topic, I can't remember if I told you this, is studying laundry in India last summer. I decided to look at every place we went to with a filter for observing laundrydoing. Most of the time it was women but in the large dhobi ghat in Mumbai it was only men and it was commercial. After seeing how domestic activities took any public space with water, I was hooked on the idea of moving domestic rituals out from the home, and then I was just hooked on thinking about domestic space, and then on domestic space that is designed/vernacular, and then as a way to study a case or find a way to be more specific it seemed natural to me to study African American yards. Maybe that's because I am most familiar with them? and I think what really sets them apart is their notion of the yard as a 'roost for memory.' Anyway, his advice was to be careful not to source the yardkeeping rituals in a strictly African beginning, but to think about them as reactions to stressful situations, like you were talking about. I never thought of this question as part of my research. I'm interested in the valuing of land, ground, growing things, expression, memory roosting, and domestic nuances. In an era where family association with land we live on is less recognized, I find that there is a certain specific cultural tradition and value in a range of activities in the yard for African Americans, from intimate space to public, and from understanding the yard holistically. So I guess, at least for now, I don't have to try to answer this question. This project could be about any kind of vernacular yard keeping that I found that valued the land using aesthetics in a cultural way. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you and share with you my latest thoughts. Also, I know this is last minute, but I might be coming down to the Hampton Roads area this Saturday. I will let you know once I have my plans set. Best, Lucy
103
from:
Grey Gundaker <gxgund@gmail.com>
to:
Lucy McFadden <lccmcf@gmail.com>
date:
Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 9:54 AM
subject:
Re: thank you!
Hi Lucy, I should be around Saturday so keep me posted. There's a place we could meet for lunch that is on your way would spare you missing lunch and me having to drive into Williamsburg. Last time i wanted to meet in the office in case the books came in handy. You had not told me about laundry in India. That's fascinating. If you were ever to go for a PhD laundry and landscape in African American history and culture would be a great topic. (One of many, of course.) Black women who did laundry for whites and traveled around towns picking it up and delivering it were major players in the economy of survival, especially from the end of the Civil War until washing machines came into use. Then they did it at the whites' houses. There are many snippets of information about laundresses in interviews by WPA workers of formerly enslaved people. The work, as you probably know, was done outside, boiling the laundry in a big pot. Fine ironing of delicate handkerchiefs, ruffles etc became a specialty and required keeping the area very clean. The archaeological lit is a great resource for locations of these areas because they are marked by lots of buttons in the ground. Two other areas, more ecent car repair and stockpiling potentially useful stuff to use for repairs and improvised implements. yes, to do any kind of scholarship it seems essential to me to dig all the way down to your epistemological premises. A lot of the debate about "African origins" is grounded in premises that seem faulty to begin with. Some of the is built into the disciplines. One in landscape architecture that I've been tracking is a legacy of Jellicoe and his forebears: design is a projection from the head of the designer onto land. Another that comes along with much history and art history is the idea that the scholar's job is to show "change" and explain it. he problem there is that this means assuming a stable back drop for the change shown. Stasis as normative. If you think change and mixture are the continuing ways of the world, and that what feels like stability in human experience is an achievement that takes a lot of work to produce, one's questions change radically. Although the word "influence" is out of vogue in history and art history, the concept is essential, whatever they call it, because how else can you posit linear causation for change? So we get African retentions, influences etc. As to Nelson it's funny. Much much more work has been done on African American music than on landscapes and materiality. No one in her/his right mind would say music/performance traditions that were already widely distributed in Africa did not move on into the Americas. That doesn't mean mambo, the twist, and samba are "influenced" by Africa or are "retentions." It means that across the generations people have continued to rework their world with a generative repertoire, mixing in whatever else comes to hand as well. I think about landscape as constantly clanging and orchestrated by and through those who inhabit it, along a spectrum from emergent (like paths becoming more pronounced as people repeatedly go the same way,, and then a trail is established and then it may even become major infrastructure like I81... and at the other end of the spectrum, highly focused change in deliberate;y allocated spaces. This is just a larger scale way
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circulation as a tool
107
109
hitting PAVEMENT
berlin
organize modes of transportation with pavement + change size of module + change pairings of sizes + adjacencies increase friction and help awareness + change materials + change color
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BERLIN PRECEDENT: TOPOTEK1 large and small size pavers dictates speed through tactile and visual means texture can make immense places feel intimate
ground plane patterns can be
ambiguous and uplifting at the same time.
+ existing social paths + clearly articulated use and efficient wayfinding + strategies derived from existing + social paths carved out of meadows + cheap and cheerful + â&#x20AC;&#x153;figuredâ&#x20AC;? wilds with a hard edge material for path + minimal design allows for individual freedom and expression
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domestic realm circulation
multi-use ground plane + accommodating and functioning + playful + change color
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articulating space, reclaim street
large groves with gravel as occupiable streetside space
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figuring the ground in Detroit
which belittles some of these existing, functioning landscapes with pathways like this desire path that has existed for 16 years
Planted Form for the Neighborhood A 2015 Field Guide This design will be a [field guide] [plant palette] [wanderkammer] for planted form and architecture as it directly relates to the body moving through space. The purpose of this field guide is to draw connections between the body on the ground, in the yard, or on the street, and how one feels as they are moving through different conditions of visibility, texture, and enclosure. The field guide is meant to draw on previous home landscaping guides and plant palettes in a way that updates them to the needs of places today -- ecologically and socially -- in relation to how they are culturally valued and thought of. Outside of the field of landscape architecture, many people do not know the power of the simplicity in the morphology and architecture of plants, and a field guide that explains this connection of plant architecture to everyday needs would help realize the value of lasting planted form. Detroit -- Land Stewardship Plan, 2016, City of Detroit Herman Kiefer site and neighborhood Field Guide + Domestic Landscape thesis presentation - field guide - mock up of ground / shrub - models (or site visit and photos) - drawings
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the spectrum of ambiguity , MVVA intimacy in immensity
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studio: Fallow City Detroit domestic space + private development new urban life for post growth city
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EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
EXISTING CONDITION
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
EXISTIN
street-tuned strategies on the scale of healthy clusters that are already working in the neighborhood. Strategic deconstruction
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
UVA Detroit + Be
EXISTIN
Quick Growing Forest
Slow Growing Forest
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
UVA Detroit + Be
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
LATER street-tuned strategies on the scale of healthy clusters that are already working in the neighborhood.
New Pedestrian Access
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
EXISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
LATER street-tuned strategies on the scale of healthy clusters that are already working in the neighborhood.
Partial Occupation
Next Generation of Forest
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
UVA Detroit + Berlin | Fallow Cities Design Studio | Fall 2015
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Future Fabric | Alex Dimitri, Margaret Rew, Tom Bliska, Lucy McFadden, Chad Miller, Nina Comiskey
ISTING | NEXT | SOON | LATER
LATER
Next Generation of Forest
street-tuned strategies on the scale of healthy clusters that are already working in the neighborhood.
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herbaceous back to parking parking to herbaceous
shallow pits
Byron Grove
+ remove top coat and plant shrubs, fast growing trees, and herbaceous plants
+ 10 rows of catalpa planted 10’ o.c.
+ planting displaces parking + replace with porous paving when parking is needed
Event space, bandstand, trees spaced to accomodate parking for food trucks, etc.
Woodland Rooms moveable furniture
Virginia Park Market + space under grove for weekend markets
Tulip Poplar Room ramp/access to the Kiefer building
crack the asphalt painted parking places for trucks
+ cut long straight lines in existing asphalt space 60’ apart to accomodate parking + remove top coat and base course to plant trees 3’ deep and 4’ wide
Woodland Rooms moveable furniture
Crosswalk
Buckeye Bosque
Freeway Forest
Hamilton Road
Lodge Perch
+ entrance to the site
+ 10 rows of horse chestnut spaced 20’ o.c.
+improve air quality in neighborhoods near expressways through the use of forests
[Lodge Frontage Road]
+ use base course fill from site parking lot
+ paint as immediate place maker
+ reducing stormwater runoff to the combined sewer system in areas affected by combined sewer overfow (CSO) discharges into the Detroit River
asphalt ate parking to plant trees
+ 35’ and lanes down to 12’ and one lane
+ raise the existing mow strip up and flatten to make a high pedestrian route
Site Section
+ provide a new facade for Virginia Park from the Lodge + enhance the existing entrance from the footbridge from Woodward + plant 5’ on center max and thin after 5 years species: larch, tulip poplar
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John C. Lodge Freeway
160’
University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA T +1 434 924 3715 F +1 434 982 2678 www.arch.virginia.edu www.uvalunch.com
Lunch
studio: Fallow City Future Ground
10
Alien
141 UVA
Alien
Lunch 10
Lunch is a design research journal printed in the United States by the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904 www.uvalunch.com Editors Amanda Coen, Katherine Gleysteen, Amanda Goodman Design Taylor Hewett, Seth Salcedo, Ben Scott Team Batual Abbas, Rebecca Fornaby, Luke Harris, Laurence Holland, Jennifer Hsian, Karilyn Johanesen, Kaitlyn Long, Sam Manock, Mary McCall, Chad Miller, Margaret Rew, Matt Scarnaty, Scott Shinton, Jasmine Sohn, Emma Troller, Steve Wang, Chris Young Advisors Iñaki Alday, Sarah Brummett, Nicholas Knodt, Sarah Beth McKay Special Thanks Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, Rebecca Cooper, Nana Last, Louis Nelson Copyright © 2015 Lunch Journal Copyright © 2015 University of Virginia Cover image by Katherine Gleysteen Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-9894453-2-0
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Lucy McFadden
A Free Plan for New Orleans: Domestic Rhythms, Public Ground
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fig. 1 (previous) Plan A mosaic of private-public rights of way and public ground.
alien was the Creole long lot positioned to extrapolate success off the meandering Mississippi alien was the transposed USGS grid alien was draining a cypress swamp and filling it with concrete alien was slavery alien was the tropical wave that disturbed the twelfth cyclone of 2005 and the wind, and the rain, and the floods alien was the exodus alien is the ruptured sidewalk alien is the mowed vacant parcel alien is the un-mowed vacant parcel alien is an urban block gone to seed alien is the encroaching vegetation along streets bucolic life in the city finding the alien is finding the value in fallow land what we consider to be alien becomes familiar upon observation alien is the homeowner the mower alien is the ritual aliens are us alien is the american dream alien is our paranoia regarding (losing) ownership and exhibiting success alien is the paranoia encompassed in ownership and success alien is what emerges when we shift from owning to sharing from disturbing, mowing, corrupting, to recognizing, keeping, and tending we are custodians of the land we occupy we are players in the land grid, contributors to a matrix, a mosaic, a house-and-yard pattern domestic life that defines us
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fig. 2 Concept Diagram Using circulation and planted form to dissolve the grid and reorganize the block.
Paul Klee, Castle and Sun, 1928, oil on canvas, 50 cm x 59 cm, Private Collection.
fig. 3 (next) City Plan Analysis of fallow land types in New Orleans.
Designs for cities spur visions of renewal that will take decades to realize. Learning from our overarching misreadings of the past, we can take new readings of the city, understanding its discords and unions, its inanimate and animate, its rituals and rhythms that exist in-between houses and on street corners. We can see and touch and feel the aliens that may emerge from these encounters. We can offer a series of responses, scenarios, choices, based on the calls we live and know. We must embrace aliens, celebrate their oddities, and make space for them in our plans. Aliens are the disturbances to our equilibrium, necessary components of our reading of the city, if not drivers of our designs altogether. Aliens ground us; they are generational; they transgress boundaries and redefine limits. After a close reading of the neighborhoods, blocks and clusters of vacant parcels in New Orleans, it is clear that American rituals rooted in ownership have impeded the evolution of the contemporary vernacular landscape. There is a source of potential, abounding heat, light, and water. But there are also confines – visible and invisible – hemming in this potential. The line of ownership, a parcel line, laid out by a surveyor, is a symbol in our culture and a prized piece of our American dream. The parcel manifests itself in the fence line, the edge of the driveway, the ecotone from one yard to the next. There is a new type of edge: the meeting of a mowed lot and an unmowed lot. This edge reveals the obsessive cutting of fescue – the disturbance that has arrested succession on this land indefinitely – next to an unmanaged tangle of grass. This contrast creates unintended barriers between neighbors and antagonizes growth of vegetation. This proposal is about broadening the definition of ownership; valuing domestic and private space; and finding
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1 Garret Eckbo, Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 153-157.
new public space. Scholars and designers have long mused over the promotion of collective, communal land, social gathering spaces, shared domestic duties, and organization of cultural tasks. Designers have experimented with new types of suburban living to bring amenities and culture from the city into the domestic realm. Radburn, founded in 1929 and designed by Marjorie Sewell Cautley, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright connected neighbors with hedge-lined paths in the front and cul-de-sacs in the back. By articulating private-public ground with planted form, a hierarchy of spaces can exist, and previously undervalued public land can be incorporated into the domestic domain, articulated and used for gatherings. Garrett Eckbo explored the free plan in the garden, notably in his landscape and planning work for migrant labor settlements under the Farm Security Administration in 1946 in Southern California. Eckbo used planted form to guide circulation and to create figures, fields and spatial hierarchies.1 He embraced the vagueness of public and private space as a way of uniting the individual and the collective in unexpected ways. He worked to integrate architecture, private and public space, and to prioritize pedestrian circulation over automotive throughout the cooperatives in the San Fernando Valley. He wrote at the time, “Cooperatives are successful if only the need is real and close to the member’s personal security. They atrophy or are vegetative when interest is passive or intellectual.”1 The backbone of the development was a rigorous tree plan with vertical formal accents and a grid organization, which alleviated weight off the borders of the property parterres and freed the plan of the community. One strategy for mitigating high crime rates in neighborhoods of New Orleans with large numbers of vacant parcels is to address the vacancies as opportunities for unexpected communal spaces that emerge from desires and needs and span the hierarchy of public to private types. By selecting path types and maintenance regimes, homeowners can choose different amounts of responsibility and ownership beyond their parcel line. The boundary has been pushed; this is alien territory. The proposal is the New Orleans free plan—no load-bearing parcel lines, no patriarchal divisioning of space, no American dream as we know it. In 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg stated that the more precisely the position of an particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known. Uncertainty is found in the measurable quantities 24
fig. 4-6 Master Tree Plans for Cooperative Housing, San Fernando Valley, CA from Eckbo, Modern Landscapes for Living, 238.
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fig. 2 Site plan (1:2000) Sentence describing the image.
fig. 7 Diagram Phase 1: Establish private coops.
to the jolt-like disturbance triggered by observation. As we observers allow for more jolt-like disturbances, more blended edges, and ambiguous communal spaces, we are letting the aliens in our own American rituals emerge and play out, reclaiming land and revealing value. We are letting our domestic life spill out from our backyard into the next, allowing a wake from our daily rhythms to emanate through the block.
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple-these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.2
2 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 572.
fig. 8 Diagram Phase 2: Enable passage.
fig. 9 Diagram Phase 3: Make new public ground. fig. 10 (next) Section Perspective fig. 11 (next) Section A ‘missing-tooth’ parcel, Holly Grove. fig. 12 (next) Section Blocks gone to seed, Lower Ninth Ward.
The project is comprised of an explanation of the prototypes, the implementation, the test fits, and the making of the mosaic. Residents adjacent to vacant parcels can choose to adopt and plant a ‘coup’ by choosing their most private window of their home and measuring 20 feet into the vacant lot. Then, by drawing back to the corners of their parcel, they are left with a triangular piece of public land that they can plant and maintain if they choose. This coup will provide a threshold between them and the subsequent private-public rights of way through the blocks. These rights of way follow desire lines of neighbors through blocks and along sidewalks, connecting people to places of work, school, or to friends and family. Corner lots provide direct pathways for shortcuts, and create highly visible public space due to their location. The resulting hierarchy of private to public space maintains privacy while allowing articulation and care of currently fallow, unsafe territory. Within the patriarchal evolution of planning, from the interpretation of benefit from the topography of the Mississippi River through Creole forms and French long lots, to the urbanizing and radial grid formation dictated by canals built for the harvesting of bald cypress trees from swamps along the Louisiana coast, to the post-Katrina fallow land condition that pervades the low lying land, there is an overarching problem: the parcel line. Created through residual allotment post-Creole plantation era, and now, an arbitrary form-maker for homes and gardens, the rectilinear parcel line bears too large a burden. Imagine them gone.
fig.13 (next) Perspective Semi-public right of way, Bywater.
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pine mulch path
mowed side yard
front yard Cajun prairie short grass seed mix
coup phase 2 private
coup phase 1 adjacent resident chooses Cajun prairie grass, pine, or hardwood public
original parcel line
gathering space behind coup
mowed cared for b neighbors
pine mulch path coup phase 1 adjacent resident chooses Cajun prairie grass, pine, or hardwood public
mowed cared for by neighbors
the coup - phase 1
the coup - phase 2
gathering space behind coup
original parcel line
rcel line
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fig. 2 Site plan (1:2000) Sentence describing the image.
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Vol. 11
DOMESTICATION
HOUSETRAINING Can we imagine ways of domesticating species and spaces that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t aim at domination and control?
HOME ECONOMICS Can the domestic sphere expand to include the economic and ecological networks on which the contemporary home relies?
DOMESTIC POLITICS What is the role of the home in the contemporary cultural imagination, and how are cultural values imprinted on domestic space?
OPEN HOUSE Can we see migratory, nomadic, and transient inhabitation as something other than the breakdown of a domestic ideal?
discourse Vol. 11
DOMESTICATION The familiar understanding of the domestic increasingly fails to fit contemporary ecological and cultural realities. Housing bubbles and new technologies of labor are upending the macro- and microeconomics of the home. New possibilities of interaction among generations and genders are being negotiated in spaces designed for the tidy norms of the nuclear family. Persistent urban homelessness, systematic racial segregation, and periodic refugee crises are reminders that not all homes are safe and stable. Ecopolitical disturbances inscribe themselves on domestic space. Upheavals in the domestic realm, in turn, reverberate through the economy and the environment. Friction at the boundary between the domestic and the foreign (between inside and outside, private and public, local and global) creates a complex and contested threshold. This year, Lunch explores the ways that we make ourselves at home. Lunch 11 will consider two categories of submission: scholarship of design (essays of no more than 2500 words, supported by relevant visual and textual sources) and design as scholarship (image-based, with a narrative statement and captions totalling no more than 1000 words). Abstracts due November 30, 2015; full submissions due January 31, 2016. Visit www.uvalunch.com for more information. Lunch is a design research journal edited by students at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Visit www. uvalunch.com for past issues and more information.
Lunch 11 is soliciting critical essays and design propositions that test the limits of the domestic through four lines of inquiry: HOUSETRAINING Practices of domestication are practices of control: they redraw the boundaries of the domestic realm by imposing order on people, animals, and territories. But hybrid species and spaces inhabit the threshold of domesticity, complicating the neat distinction between tame and wild. Can alternative models of domestication subvert the illusion of complete control? Can domestication lead to cohabitation instead of domination? HOME ECONOMICS The household is increasingly situated in economic and ecological networks whose operations extend far beyond the traditional domain of the home. Can our understanding of the domestic sphere expand to include the infrastructures on which the contemporary home relies? Do emerging systems of homebased economic production demand new forms of domestic architecture? Can the productive home serve as urban infrastructure in the post-industrial city? DOMESTIC POLITICS The American home is expected to be a spatial representation of the nuclear family, an extra-governmental realm of complete safety and privacy, a barometer of personal economic achievement, and a site of patriotic participation in national agendas. Who is excluded from these domestic myths? Who is entrapped by them? How are they enforced through the design of domestic space, and how can design help imagine new norms of domesticity? OPEN HOUSE Homes are fixed. Homes are stable. Unless of course they arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. The nomadic and the migratory represent alternative paradigms in which the home is distributed and the domestic is dispersed. Can these critical frameworks address contemporary economic and ecological predicaments? Can we learn to see transient inhabitation as something other than the breakdown of a domestic ideal?
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EARLY WORLDS, RECENT RUINS, STUDIO BRIEF Domesticity today has become an increasingly politicized category. Bound up as the site and product of sovereign debt wars being waged throughout Southern Europe, Puerto Rico, the US and beyond, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish boundaries that separate private domestic life from transnational political economies. And yet within architectural discourse, domesticity has oddly received little serious attention as a political category. Constantly overshadowed by other more dramatic themes, from the euphoria of the 90’s around the ‘knowledge economy’ to tapping into ‘creative industries’ that captivated architectural practice in the early 2000’s, to ongoing efforts of ‘regeneration’, sustainability and now ‘resilience’, if gauging meta-themes of arcitecture tells us anything, it is that the uncritical infatuation with the entire ‘post-industrial’ landscape of the global north has concealed the tremendous burden that domesticity has taken on in facilitating this shift, covering over the disastrous precarity offloaded onto the domestic realm, exposing private property to the whims of vast global markets and their constantly unstable flows of capital. In a word, the ‘post-industrial’ economy enjoyed by the global north is also crucially a real-estate economy.The financialization of domesticity that this shift has caused is now arguably one of the main engines that drives contemporary world economic
Ross Exo Adams, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Architecture College of Design Iowa State University 595 Design 158 College of Design Ames, IA 50011 http://rossexoadams.com https://iastate.academia.edu/RossAdams
From: Lucy McFadden <lccmcf@gmail.com> Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 11:36 AM To: Ross Adams <readams@iastate.edu> Subject: Re: hello! [Quoted text hidden]
Lucy McFadden <lccmcf@gmail.com> To: "Adams, Ross E [ARCH]" <readams@iastate.edu>
Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 2:29 PM
hi ross, thanks for getting back to me so quickly last week. the grant request was an exercise in class, so it forced me to think of a reason to be funded for something, but i wasn't ready for that yet. anyway, i am glad it prompted me to reach out to you. i am working on the precise question and i think you may be a great resource! i've been trying to figure out how to frame the argument that the domestic landscape including yards, streets, and sidewalks, thought of as a system, is a source for a urban armature in shrinking and postgrowth neighborhoods, or 'fallow cities,' as we've been calling them lately at uva. although, i don't think it's exclusive to these cities, but it's cities that have experienced a disturbance, for lack of a better word. havana fits into this study, for me at least, and is at a different point in time then detroit, new orleans, or berlin. i'm working in detroit this semester with critic julie bargmann, and we visit in 10 days. my approach in the studio is essentially an iteration of my thesis topic, in a neighborhood in northern detroit. i was able to start this with her in new orleans, as we spoke about this summer a little bit, and i wrote an article in our design journal, lunch, about property lines in the lower ninth ward as a visible hindrance to a new kind of urban neighborhood that organized vacant lots according to privacy needs of neighbors, essentially creating drifts of landscape as buffers or dividers between someone's side yard and the vacant lot that then acts as semiprivate, or shared, or semipublic, like a right of way through the block. i've been trying to maintain a very pragmatic and specific approach to this process, and my topic / questions are as follows. TOPIC fallow cities + the sum of domestic landscapes KEY QUESTIONS Can the domestic realm (rich in ritual and private value) be a source and a structural armature for neighborhoods with vacancy? In what ways can domestic yard and housekeeping routines extend beyond the property line and where is this already happening? What are the political and economic implications of advocating for a shared space of a number of individuals with shared private interests? How formalized does this have to be? (A maintenance/lot keeping plan like MowtoOwn and AdoptaLot, but to support paths.) Can planted form, organized pathmaking, and shared space derived from existing conditions revive fallow cities and neighborhoods? (Garrett Eckbo, Reseda, CA)
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15 PRACTITIONERS Pier Vittorio Aureli / ‘The City as Project’ Research Collaborative
The ‘City as a Project’ is a collaborative of Researchers that focuses on the relationship between architecture, politics and urban history. The collaborative started within the PhD program at the Berlage Institute and TU Delft between 2010 and 2014. Presently it is an independent group of architects and candidates from PhD program ‘City-Architecture’ at the Architectural Association in London, whose work aim to go beyond the traditional division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ and reclaim architecture as a project and thus as an integral approach to both our discipline and the city. A fundamental issue at stake in the work of ‘The city as a Project’ collaborative is the issue of form in relation to ideas of the political. The term city is here defined not as a mere mass of flows and programs but as a political form. The terms political and form are assumed to be the fundamental criteria that construct the essence of the city. If the essence of political action is the attempt to project a form of coexistence among individuals, it may be said that architectural form—by means of patterning, framing, and representing the space of coexistence—inevitably implies a political vision. Even if there is no explicit ‘political architecture’, there is certainly a political way of making and reading architectural form. Far from being just an aesthetic category, physical form represents the political understanding of the city as a constant dialectic process of inclusion and exclusion. This commitment to formal and material responsibility is meant to be a departure from the laissez-faire rhetoric of flexibility, indeterminacy, programming, branding, hybridity, and immateriality that has paralyzed recent discussion on the city.
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In Search of a Position If there is no such thing as nature as a whole – perhaps there is landscape as a cabinet of curiosities. Thereby, in the best of cases, this lack of wholeness seems to be a gain rather than a loss. What is required for this kind of reinterpretation is an attentive observer who collects the various phenomena as individual elements, relates them to each other, and rearranges them. Günther Vogt is one such collector, and his cabinet of curiosities can reveal both landcapes and his approach to them. With reference to five different locations, Günther Vogt speaks about current themes of landcape architecture and its relationship to architecture and the city, about his teaching at the ETH Zurich, and about the work of Vogt Landscape Architects. This book, which ultimately searches for a position, can, in a way, itself be read as a cabinet of curiosities, for it offers an insight into the multifaceted cosmos of Günther Vogt`s thought and work.
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Picking up on architecture’s tradition of teaching professional experience to students through conversation, this book provides insight into the ideas, methods, and memories of Günther Vogt, and questions the attitude that this innovative landscape architect adopts towards his profession. With reference to five different locations, Günther Vogt speaks about current themes of landscape architecture and its relationship to architecture and the city, about his teaching at the ETH Zürich, and about the work of Vogt Landscape Architects; he describes his perception of the landscape as a cabinet of curiosities, tells how he collects various phenomena and individual elements, relates them to each other and rearranges them. And in the reader’s mind’s eye unfolds a cosmos, in which the lack of wholeness of nature seems to be a gain rather than a loss.
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CONTEXT FALLOW CITIES + DETROIT FUTURE CITIES nonprofit (strategic framework for economic growth, land and building assets, city systems, land use, neighborhoods, civic engagement) + “The Buzz” Erin Kelly + VAN ALEN INSTITUTE, FUTURE GROUNDS NOLA + JILL DESIMINI, GSD + JULIE BARGMANN, SUZANNE MOOMAW DOMESTICITY, URBANISM, POLITICAL
GOALS
+ CITY AS PROJECT -PIER VITTORIO AURELI (politics of space, private and public) + ROSS EXO-ADAMS -- http://rossexoadams.com/2015/09/15/early-worlds-recent-ruins/ KEY GOALS + publish an article + partner with LUNCH to put together a symposium on domesticity + urban issues + potential design research collective for arch students with similar interests in domestic + urban issues + complete a thesis by graduation, to include a design project within current berlin/detroit studio studio project in manifesto studio with teresa gali-izard independent study with julie bargmann to hone in on specific thesis needs not addressed in studio
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PAST
PRESENT
October + Detroit (Dew Traveling Studio trip) meet with Maurice Cox, Detroit director of City Planning meet with Detroit Future Cities + Oct 23 // thesis grant due + Oct 25 // Dumbarton Urban Landscape Research application due (Havana) + Oct 27 // LAR 8100, midreview, draft of design log printed + bound + Oct 30 // Midreview, Dew Studio, Beth Meyer and Michael Lee
FALL 2015 September + Berlin (Dew Traveling Studio trip) meet with Klaus Overmeyer, Urban Catalyst
SUMMER 2015 + The Havana Parcel, 2015-2016 Howland Traveling Fellowship research and documentation
SPRING 2015 + African American Yard-keeping: domestic and vernacular landscapes notional language and lexicon Independent Study, Beth Meyer + “A Free Plan for New Orleans, Domestic Rhythms, Public Ground,” Lunch 10, UVA Raven Fellowship, UVA (denied), spring 2015 Albemarle Garden Club Grant, UVA (denied), spring 2015
FALL 2014 + Fallow City| Future Ground, New Orleans ASLA Honor Award (2015)
the domestic landscape / timeline + checklist SUMMER 2014 + India Summer Studio, Weedon Fellowship, summer 2014?
Oct 27 // LAR 8100, midreview, draft of design log printed + bound Oct 30 // Midreview, Dew Studio, Beth Meyer and Michael Lee
[placeholder] Manifesto Studio, spring 2016 critic: Teresa Gali-Izard [placeholder] Fallow Cities, independent study + thesis, spring 2016 adviser: Julie Bargmann
177 May + Book printed and sent to publishers by May 2016
+ Mar 18 Exhibition, “The Havana Parcel,” (a version) book printed + Mar 25 CELA Conference, Havana Parcel
February DESIGN // manifesto, lexicon, continue work on BOOK March DESIGN // manifesto, PACKAGE // thesis
January begin manifesto and sythnthesis, site + Jan 4-18 Havana Parcel charette
+ +
December + Dec 1 // + Dec 7 // Final Review, Herman Kiefer and neighborhood, Detroit critics: Maurice Cox, Elizabeth Mossop, Ron Castellano (developer)
November + Nov 4 // Chicago, ASLA Conference, Fallow City Future Ground + Nov 11 // MVVA workshop + Nov 20 // Dumbarton Oaks, Mellon Foundation Award (if applicable) + Nov 30 // submit abstract to Lunch, vol. 12 “Domestication”
+ +
TIMELINE
3 SOURCES
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“You CAN go home again, of course. The question is what you find when you get there. Complexity, most likely; a corrective adjustment to what memory has simplified and purified. A discontinuity in time, a glimpse of a different world from a different life, and, if you’re lucky, a reclaiming, a repositioning that restablizes memory and meaning.” Robert Riley, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 6 / Representations/ Misrepresentations and Revaluations of Classic Books
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public
private semi-public semi-private shared
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The Domestic Landscape An Urban Armature
LUCY MCFADDEN
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