Blueprints: Introduction Lowell Duckert

Blueprints

Lowell Duckert

In design there is nothing foundational. —Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?”

Designing without nature has never been possible, 1 even if one response to the conglomeration of ecological crises known as the Anthropocene has been an architectural acceleration: the urge to build bigger, faster, and stronger, the need to rise higher than the tsunami’s wave (bungalow), to reside deeper than the soil’s contamination (bunker). Gird. Seal. Dam. Wall. “Pave” (McGuire). Such words are surely recognizable to landscape architects, these verbs that encourage fanatical and fantastical beliefs that the “outside” world can be kept “out” and that place their faith in techno-scientific mastery, foolproof feats of engineering, and the march of teleological progress (grander still: Progress). The course is clear: when topographical untidiness poses a problem, “infrastructure is the solution” (Tucker). What is more, it is the human alpha-architect who assumes the prime position (arkhi-, “chief ”) at the construction site: the material world exists solely as archetypal building blocks that stand at their foreman’s command, a series of cataloged objects erected exactly in accordance with calculated designs that cannot err. As functionality marries practicality, an ontological split ensues. By some stupendous act of scaffolding, the builder (subject) separates from the built (object). If Victor Frankenstein had manufactured fountains (but another animated figure), he would have surely abandoned those creations as well. 2

The ways in which we story the shaping of water are no less vulnerable to this anthropocentric logic: from pushed-around “rivers of empire” 3 that zigzag “between wildness and utility” (Dawson), to Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-fi “water knives”—stealthy political agents who cut channels, deals, and throats in a dystopic, dried-up (though not totally unimaginable) American Southwest 4 —dazzling hydrotectures devoid of their temporal and physical connections to the surrounding waterscape seemingly appear out of nothing at all. Parsed this way, the parched treatment and terminology of “design” deserves to be redesigned. The philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, for one, has recently offered a different approach; noting that the word design comes to English from the French “relooking,” he identifies an affiliation between the field of design and the “things” that populate the field: “the typically modernist divide between materiality on the one hand and design on the other is slowly being dissolved away,” he observes. Look: “[t]o think of artefacts in terms of design means conceiving of them less and less as modernist objects, and conceiving of them more and more as ‘things.’” 5 Instead of delineating a seismic shift between nature and culture, that is, the

tectonic (from tektōn, “carpenter, builder”) unveils human-nonhuman hybrid assemblies—or “things,” according to Latour—under complicated conjuncture, unending co-construction. “Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past,” he counsels, “[i]t is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.” 6

How, then, to put this re-designing of design into practice? To paraphrase the rhizomatic plotters Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, one method would be to “make a [blueprint], not a tracing.” 7 Look here: it is precisely this penchant for de-territorialized modes of mapping that eventuated as “Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories” in September 2018, a symposium that has (just now) arrived in its edited form. As you will discover—or perhaps already suspect—the Great Lakes and Mississippi River are no exception to the modernist split. The deaths and lives of and within their waters are bound up, for instance, with parasitical zebra and quagga mussels hitchhiking in- and overland, an unreliable electric barrier guarding Lake Michigan from constant invasions of Asian carp, 8 and the “hypoxic dead zones” (Lipschitz) and “pre-mortem” (Eaton) spaces that continually haunt. Cohabitation with un/wanted hosts of in/ organic creatures is an imperfect, because ongoing, relationship. As many of the authors herein argue, however, we may seize upon the “fantastic notion of designing through history” (Seibert and Cheramie) in order to imagine alternate scenarios for current bodies of water both great and small—adopting the motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they at least “let us try.” “De-linearizing remains speculative,” as Billy Fleming points out; the contributions that follow share an abiding investment in “speculation”—literally a prospective “look” onto the present and into unknown futures—and bespeak an unwavering interest in human-nonhuman collaborative creativity: maps, stories, are “blueprints” in the truest sense; they demonstrate design to be a co-shaped event, an interdisciplinary and multi-temporal whirling-together of arts-sciences, “nested scales” (Deming), author-landscape architects, and their available waters. Read on to witness this multi-species sort of aqua-forming in stirring action.

This compilation is also a testament to how the environmental humanities and schools of design (to name but two) can come to congregate, and, in doing so, mutually in- and transform one another. As someone steeped in early modern literature and steered by the “hydrological turn” happening in ecocultural studies more broadly, 9 I find Helen’s speech from William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (1606–7) prescient in this regard: “Or remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky / Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull” (1.1.201-4). 10 On the one hand, her message could be construed as an incitement to act quickly, to banish sluggishness (the “dull”) in an escalating era of climate change. On the other hand, we can appreciate the slowness of “designs”—and its encouragement to decelerate, or pause—and employ it in order to care more carefully. Contrary to a popular catastrophism that would necessitate the desertion of the lakes, or require an abiding commitment to learning how to die with/in them, everything (the “all” of existence) will not inevitably collapse regardless of our well-meaning “remedies.” As Nina-Marie Lister reminds us, shorelines are “storylines” that draw human and nonhuman bodes into allegiances; their lines act as tethers, not divides. The “slow violence” 11 to which all regions are susceptible, the frequent reminders of disequilibrium that plague sustainability models: these concerns provide us with the “free scope” not to sever our attachments to other selves, but rather to ponder how “we”—an expansive more-than-human we—might conduct research together, and, in so doing, redefine “ourselves.” The health of the lakes (scale out: Planet Water) is far from “fated,” even if all species’ lives do not end well. In an effort to underscore further the confluences between the symposium’s organizational themes—water-bodies, lines, and sheds—I turn briefly to a “blueprint” from the past, a short story that calls attention to the ways in which these strident collectives are exposed and expressed. I will then adumbrate a few routes the anthology avails us; what you are reading, I wager, will invite you to make impressions of your own.

Quills

We open upon coupled pipes and pages: a case of the early modern bends. Predicting (accurately) that seventeenth-century London’s water-ills would worsen, Sir Hugh Myddelton, founder of the New River Company (chartered 1619) dug a forty-mile canal—the New River—from Chadwell, a little north of city, to Islington. Begun in 1609, the company’s costly spillway was finally finished in 1613 only after receiving critical financial contributions from King James I the year before. The dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) wrote The Manner of His Lordship’s Entertainment in 1613 to celebrate Sir Hugh’s accomplishment and to commemorate the recent election of his brother, Thomas Myddelton, as mayor of London. Set around the dry cistern at Islington on Michaelmas Day (September 20th), the poet’s civic entertainment was also intended to figuratively open the canal by literally lifting the floodgate at its southern terminus. The pageant’s first lines, in fact, catalyze the wished-for waters. Human ingenuity, in its improvement upon nature, coaxes the canal: “Long have we labored, long desired and prayed / For this great work’s perfection, and by th’aid / Of heaven and good men’s wishes ‘tis at length / Happily conquered by cost, art, and strength.” 12 Here “art,” as techne (“craft”), and “art,” the linguistic skills of the poet, cleverly conjoin. Waterlines adroitly intersect; the author has deliberately crossed the streams. The language of conquest turns Middleton’s entertainment into an exhibition of hydraulic mastery: the New may not be a river of (nascent) empire, but it is at least a nationalistic watercourse channeled by “good [English] men.” What is more, the inordinate attention paid to Sir Hugh restricts the canal’s anthropocentric straits to a sole progenitor: “this [project], a work so rare, / Only by one man’s industry, cost, and care / Is brought to blest effect, so much withstood, / His only aim the city’s general good.” Eventually the poem dilates enough to include the others involved in this “one man’s” ambit. “Clerk of the work,” the speaker enjoins, “reach me the book to show / How many arts from such a labour flow”: the “overseer,” “clerk,” “mathematician,” “master of the timber-work,” “measurer,” “bricklayer and engineer,” borer and “pavior,” “labourers,” “keeper of Amwell-head,” and “walkers” are all hailed in succession (comprising, we are told, simply a small “part of six hundred more”). At long last, the lock opens and the pent-up water rushes forward to fulfill these men’s requests. Water delivery, in a word, is “perfect[ed]” by the indomitable prowess of those in assembly. With “a peal of chambers” marking the ultimate show of militaristic “strength,” the river is streamlined. No mere pipe dream, water “[h]appily conquered” has given them a reason to rejoice. So far, the New River seems to fit the schematics of “Progress.” But let us not depart the cisternal scene so fast; subjugation is but one reading in a vaster reservoir of signification. The New River feeds Middleton’s ecological encomium. Water is present in the wet-world at riverand canal-side, flushed into tank and inkpot, tapped by “quills.” Although in-house pipes became more prevalent in London over time, only wealthier households could afford them. Exclusive spigots attached to the mainlines—called “quills” because of their similar shape—could tax the entire community’s limited quantities of potable water. The “quill” as a dual writing and watering utensil underscores Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s assertion that “[a]ll matter … is a ‘storied matter.’ It is a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces.” 13 Middleton advances the ecological thought of humans and water as co-designers; according to his “blueprint,” London’s tubes transport verse: waterlines, then, mark the artful moment when lines of poetry wrought by water emerge. Middleton’s blandishment “[h]ow many arts from such a labour flow,” consequently, is more than metaphorical praise. Waters work works. Look to the conduit of the cistern. Rather than human subjects (a few “good men”) lapping up a nonhuman object, the object gathers sipping subjects around it: water’s attraction is thereby evinced in its gravitational, absolutely agentic pull. (Conduits, as conducere, denote a “bringing together.”) Researching the history of what Mark S. R. Jenner calls the “conduit communities” 14 in early modern England not only refutes the line between human and nonhuman, it also redistributes the agency a specific

designer is said to possess. Such actor-networks of tectonic texture divulge these watery bonds between designing and writing—building projects both—to be co-authored lines of poetry and prose gliding down ducts and via riverine flows, drippy “quills” requiring physical water for words to depart. A “blueprint,” so defined, reconsiders what constitutes the “social,” the public, and the real “work” of a city’s public works. The “[m]anner” of water, ultimately, is to materially impress upon us, leaving linguistic prints—the page, reservoir, or pageant—as a result.

What the freshwater designs of Middleton and Myddelton reveal is not simply water’s situation in literature and architecture, but also, and more importantly, its real role in re-designing them, in drafting our bodies and projects anew. To be sure, the best-laid plans of aqua-men and women often go a-dry: then (London ca. 1613) as now (Flint ca. 2014), the thirsty poor are intentionally preserved as such, water rendered a “resource” along the way: a veritable and vendible commodity at its “peak” (Nideroest), a cash-flow, its lines of work structured by socio-economic inequalities. The New River Company’s aim, it should be noted, was on pace with the gradual shift in the late sixteenth century from the more medieval and so-called “moral” economy that perceived water distribution as a public service—and therefore dependent upon civic authority and common charity—to a privatized business. We need these “stories” with all their kinks, I think—but I believe we need others, too. The participants of “Fresh Water,” fortunately, have a ready supply. Their pipes pivot us into a crucial curve: the precarious watersheds of refuge and resilience, the shelter of “deep[water] organizing.” 15 They offer a lesson in how shields (sheds) of protection—even if of unstable duration—may be provided, how a “sponge farm” of gregarious-georgic lifeforms can be coaxed to grow (Baranski, Panno, and Kelly), how trips into said soggy fields can be both “intensified” and “incentivized” (Holzman and Cook). If “there is no such thing as flood control,” there is also a “community with no future” (Henson) teetering upon delugic banks. The faults in our designs are lessons in heaviness—the weight of waterlogged others—from which to learn: such are the power relations writerly waterbodies importantly pen, those who gauge how “much” more is to be “withstood” in harmful currents’ way, who repeatedly query “bodily tides” (Cooper). “Resist the urge to correct the past,” Danielle Choi advises, “in order to ask collective questions about the future.”

To adapt, and to thrive: the voices enclosed in this volume desire to muse with you about the designs of interdisciplinary methodologies and the planning for unpredictable, but nevertheless possible, futures. The “blueprint” has always been that site of projected flourish: a contingency plan replete with contingencies, a “project” is something that is literally “thrown forward”—pro- (“forth”) and jacere (“to throw”)—spatially as well as temporally. Thinking, at bottom, is a relentless persuasion to story in this fashion. What are “stories,” after all, if not a paradigmatic (at least etymological) instance of the architectural-literary imagination? The word’s homonymic bridge between structural levels and lines of plot is due to the late Middle English abbreviation of the Latin historia (“history, story”). A tiered “story” originally indicated a row of windows or sculptures on the front of a building portraying a historical event. Design theorist Tony Fry might have this multifaceted definition in mind when he writes that “[p]lacing the historicity and history of human emergence in [the] wider context of connectedness and world allows us to explore our ontological designing as implicated in the very acts of ‘self and world formation’ and the ‘nature of our beingin-the-world.” So might have Jaume Plensa when he designed the cond/u/itional, inter-dependent and disciplinary commons known as Crown Fountain (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Let us lay these “storied” ecologies on wet foundations; become a “landscape architect-advocate” for waterscapes; bring as many others as we can “[in]to blest effect”; check “progress” with “process”; draw lines that highlight the liminal, lines that enmesh instead of demarcate. How we narrate design matters. We inhabit a watershed moment at/of risk, a turning point that can turn in several directions, a peril and a promise at once. In “dredge and sediment” (Burkholder and Davis): here is where I would like to leave you. Slip, reader, into the collection’s unfinished contents: examine where their “blueprints” lead, how they entreat you to re-design, and beckon you to look again.