Nature, Landscape and Building for Sustainability

by William S. Saunders, Editor, with an Introduction by Robert L.Thayer, Jr
Number 6 in the Harvard Design Magazine series
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN (2008)
200 pp., illus. 22 b/w. Trade, $69.00; paper, $22.95
ISBN 978-0-8166-5358-4; ISBN 978-0-8166-5359-1.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney

legart@ozemail.com.au



A fundamental reappraisal of our current consumption of the global resources, particularly in the Western world, is at the core of these fifteen essays. The fact they appear in the Harvard Design Magazine Readers series explains perhaps their belated appearance, most having been written anything up to a decade ago for the source journal. There is no indication as to why the urgency of the message most of the contributors convey should have been delayed for the broader audience. The realisation that warnings posted as long ago as fifty years have in the last two years become the full force of Walter Benjamin’s storm, irresistibly propelling us into the future to which our backs are turned, as the pile of debris before us grows skywards. The pioneering landscape architect Robert L. Thayer Jnr observes in the Introduction that it is, “Quite simply, scale” that prevents humans and their technology becoming a part of the natural order of an ecosphere in balance. The scale of time no less.

One third of the pages following discuss the metaphysics and the materiality of our relationship with the natural world, the place we name Nature. As a part of the concoction we call Culture, the term describes the physical and material environment that in varying measure both sustains and astounds us. ‘Ametric space’ – the space of memory and imagination – has been swamped by artificial light and endless methods for mobility, increasing our habits of ‘unmediated inhabitation’ suggests Borgmann, and purging the opportunities for comprehension of the universe to ‘rouse us from the slumber of anthropocentricism’.

The art critic Lucy R. Lippard ponders the authentic experience of landscape as one of specificity. It follows her guided sojourn through that great symbol of the American wilderness, the Grand Canyon. Scale, as many have observed, overwhelms and it is her multi-modal physical interaction inside the cleft that enables her to come to terms with its immensity, before constructing significance from the experience with the help of earlier accounts. It is the dynamic transformations of energy and matter in all its complexities that Catherine Howett describes as central to the ideas of the 19th Century reformer Frederick Law Olmsted that influenced the young Robert Smithson, creator of the Spiral Jetty (1970), a key (dump-truck) event in the move toward a “concrete dialectic between nature and people”. Ignoring the collector and wooing the sponsor, the land art imaginaries were the vanguard of collaborations between artists and designers that will go on to propagate the broader objective of long-term survival. From the ideals of the American dream to the natures of shopping malls, theme parks, the front lawn and the wilderness preserves, provides a confection of backdrops to the actual management of the environment by the conspiratorial triumvirate of politician, scientist and developer. Rossana Vaccario’s analysis reveals the weaselly use of language from the 1920s onwards to deregulate and exploit what earlier generations had preserved: “The half-hidden agenda of rhetorical persuasion is control”. This is a tendency harbouring deep foreboding for our present predicaments, whether mid-West twisters and southeastern hurricanes in the USA, or the extinction of great river systems like the Murray-Darling in Australia.

The present and the future of moving toward re-establishing ideals are headed by the single European contribution to this collection: Susannah Hagan identifies environmentalism as embarrassing for many within architecture — “no edge, no buzz, no style.” Her analysis commences by pointing out that it is the built environment that contributes 50% of all man-made greenhouse gases and that architects are best placed to lead the “overcoming” through their schools and practices, for five reasons: the intellectual, practical, technical, economic and pedagogical. With devastating clarity, the argument is presented — concrete (as play-dough), aluminium, glass and copper are “embodied energy” materials beyond sustainability. Simple math demonstrates eco-footprints — comparative levels of greenhouse gas emissions – where combined heat and power (CHP) technology is applied can deliver results that challenge the sceptics and the conservatives. Likewise, a fascinating chapter on lighting levels (that includes a practical demonstration on the page), develops the statistics of argument for asking, “What humans need in order to see?” We are left to ponder the semantics.

Robert France’s retrieval of C.P.Snow’s ‘feeling of art and knowing of science’ seems curiously dualistic in its application to stormwater wetland parks, as evidently their design and building require the surrender of such old-fashioned divisions, or at least their replacement with the equally true, knowing of art and feeling of science. Following on are detailed examples from Berlin and Seattle of successful design case studies of water runoff management. Site decontamination, entropy and redesignation together with flora management complete the case studies and demonstrate that architects have begun, in the words of Michelle Addington, to “. . . think in territories larger and broader than the things we make.”

These essays though belated in appearing are vivid briefings on the recent history of the developing human and material fundamentals for addressing climate change in the built environment. Like the line of purchasers for the homes in the Beddington Zero Emission Development (BedZED) in England, I have been convinced as someone indirectly connected with environmental management, that an individual can make a difference now, by associating their presence actively with zero emission approaches, of and through technology design. The volume is a valuable introduction to the key areas of sustainability in the built environment through which such a difference can be affected.