RANCHO CUCAMONGA – Residents who live in the northern portion of the city now can get ideas for fire-safe landscaping at Hellman fire station.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District recently introduced the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety Education Project at the station. Landscaping at the station is meant to demonstrate best practices for homes in the high-fire-hazard foothill areas above the 210 Freeway.

Landscaping at the station, including stones, mulch, and low-lying native plants, when placed around a home can create defensible space to keep flames away from homes.

“This will help homeowners better defend themselves and help us to defend them should a fire burn through the area like it did in 2003 during the Grand Prix fire,” Fire Chief Mike Bell said.

In addition, the Fire District recently announced a new warning program and RC Fire Watch. When a red-flag warning is issued to warn of high wildfire risk, the district will hang red flags at its stations.

The department also plans to deploy red-shirted RC Fire Watch volunteers on red-flag days and the Fourth of July to have “eyes and ears” out in the field as an early warning system for fire. Volunteers would also contact people entering mountain areas and make sure they’re prepared to go into canyon, mountain and wildland areas.

In a separate project, the fire department is working with Eagle Scout Jacob Fakhoury to identify fire-safe plants in the high-risk zones in

the foothills.

“I will be putting the signs near the identified plants just to help the community so we can help prevent fires as much as we can from destroying the community,” Fakhoury said.

Residents can get fire-safety tips and check whether their home falls in the Wildland-Urban Interface Area at rcfire.org.

Mary Peat, who lives in northwest Rancho Cucamonga, said a visit to the fire station has given her ideas on how to landscape her own backyard.

“I have a back section like this that I wanted to develop, and the landscape architect was able to answer some questions for me,” Peat said.

Peat had to evacuate horses when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area 10 years ago.

The 6,000-square-foot single- story Hellman Fire Station 177 opened on Jan. 24, 2012. A three-person crew staffs a paramedic fire engine ready to respond to fire, medical and rescue emergencies.

The station also houses a fire engine designed for response in the brush-covered hillsides in northern Rancho Cucamonga.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA – Residents who live in the northern portion of the city now can get ideas for fire-safe landscaping at Hellman fire station.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District recently introduced the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety Education Project at the station. Landscaping at the station is meant to demonstrate best practices for homes in the high-fire-hazard foothill areas above the 210 Freeway.

Landscaping at the station, including stones, mulch, and low-lying native plants, when placed around a home can create defensible space to keep flames away from homes.

“This will help homeowners better defend themselves and help us to defend them should a fire burn through the area like it did in 2003 during the Grand Prix fire,” Fire Chief Mike Bell said.

In addition, the Fire District recently announced a new warning program and RC Fire Watch. When a red-flag warning is issued to warn of high wildfire risk, the district will hang red flags at its stations.

The department also plans to deploy red-shirted RC Fire Watch volunteers on red-flag days and the Fourth of July to have “eyes and ears” out in the field as an early warning system for fire. Volunteers would also contact people entering mountain areas and make sure they’re prepared to go into canyon, mountain and wildland areas.

In a separate project, the fire department is working with Eagle Scout Jacob Fakhoury to identify fire-safe plants in the high-risk zones in

the foothills.

“I will be putting the signs near the identified plants just to help the community so we can help prevent fires as much as we can from destroying the community,” Fakhoury said.

Residents can get fire-safety tips and check whether their home falls in the Wildland-Urban Interface Area at rcfire.org.

Mary Peat, who lives in northwest Rancho Cucamonga, said a visit to the fire station has given her ideas on how to landscape her own backyard.

“I have a back section like this that I wanted to develop, and the landscape architect was able to answer some questions for me,” Peat said.

Peat had to evacuate horses when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area 10 years ago.

The 6,000-square-foot single- story Hellman Fire Station 177 opened on Jan. 24, 2012. A three-person crew staffs a paramedic fire engine ready to respond to fire, medical and rescue emergencies.

The station also houses a fire engine designed for response in the brush-covered hillsides in northern Rancho Cucamonga.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA – Residents who live in the northern portion of the city now can get ideas for fire-safe landscaping at Hellman fire station.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District recently introduced the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety Education Project at the station. Landscaping at the station is meant to demonstrate best practices for homes in the high-fire-hazard foothill areas above the 210 Freeway.

Landscaping at the station, including stones, mulch, and low-lying native plants, when placed around a home can create defensible space to keep flames away from homes.

“This will help homeowners better defend themselves and help us to defend them should a fire burn through the area like it did in 2003 during the Grand Prix fire,” Fire Chief Mike Bell said.

In addition, the Fire District recently announced a new warning program and RC Fire Watch. When a red-flag warning is issued to warn of high wildfire risk, the district will hang red flags at its stations.

The department also plans to deploy red-shirted RC Fire Watch volunteers on red-flag days and the Fourth of July to have “eyes and ears” out in the field as an early warning system for fire. Volunteers would also contact people entering mountain areas and make sure they’re prepared to go into canyon, mountain and wildland areas.

In a separate project, the fire department is working with Eagle Scout Jacob Fakhoury to identify fire-safe plants in the high-risk zones in

the foothills.

“I will be putting the signs near the identified plants just to help the community so we can help prevent fires as much as we can from destroying the community,” Fakhoury said.

Residents can get fire-safety tips and check whether their home falls in the Wildland-Urban Interface Area at rcfire.org.

Mary Peat, who lives in northwest Rancho Cucamonga, said a visit to the fire station has given her ideas on how to landscape her own backyard.

“I have a back section like this that I wanted to develop, and the landscape architect was able to answer some questions for me,” Peat said.

Peat had to evacuate horses when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area 10 years ago.

The 6,000-square-foot single- story Hellman Fire Station 177 opened on Jan. 24, 2012. A three-person crew staffs a paramedic fire engine ready to respond to fire, medical and rescue emergencies.

The station also houses a fire engine designed for response in the brush-covered hillsides in northern Rancho Cucamonga.

RANCHO CUCAMONGA – Residents who live in the northern portion of the city now can get ideas for fire-safe landscaping at Hellman fire station.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District recently introduced the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety Education Project at the station. Landscaping at the station is meant to demonstrate best practices for homes in the high-fire-hazard foothill areas above the 210 Freeway.

Landscaping at the station, including stones, mulch, and low-lying native plants, when placed around a home can create defensible space to keep flames away from homes.

“This will help homeowners better defend themselves and help us to defend them should a fire burn through the area like it did in 2003 during the Grand Prix fire,” Fire Chief Mike Bell said.

In addition, the Fire District recently announced a new warning program and RC Fire Watch. When a red-flag warning is issued to warn of high wildfire risk, the district will hang red flags at its stations.

The department also plans to deploy red-shirted RC Fire Watch volunteers on red-flag days and the Fourth of July to have “eyes and ears” out in the field as an early warning system for fire. Volunteers would also contact people entering mountain areas and make sure they’re prepared to go into canyon, mountain and wildland areas.

In a separate project, the fire department is working with Eagle Scout Jacob Fakhoury to identify fire-safe plants in the high-risk zones in

the foothills.

“I will be putting the signs near the identified plants just to help the community so we can help prevent fires as much as we can from destroying the community,” Fakhoury said.

Residents can get fire-safety tips and check whether their home falls in the Wildland-Urban Interface Area at rcfire.org.

Mary Peat, who lives in northwest Rancho Cucamonga, said a visit to the fire station has given her ideas on how to landscape her own backyard.

“I have a back section like this that I wanted to develop, and the landscape architect was able to answer some questions for me,” Peat said.

Peat had to evacuate horses when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area 10 years ago.

The 6,000-square-foot single- story Hellman Fire Station 177 opened on Jan. 24, 2012. A three-person crew staffs a paramedic fire engine ready to respond to fire, medical and rescue emergencies.

The station also houses a fire engine designed for response in the brush-covered hillsides in northern Rancho Cucamonga.

By James Howard Kunstler

From the newly published book, Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City by Andres Duany and Emily Talen.

Long about the late 1990s, anxiety beset the mandarins in the architecture schools when a reform movement calling itself The New Urbanism began to excite interest around America, and elsewhere.

The New Urbanists proposed a revival of traditional city-making principles as a sovereign remedy for the practical absurdities, economic quandaries, ecological terrors, and spiritual disorders of 20th century land-use planning. What’s more, The New Urbanists functioned in the real world of property development and had gotten scores of new projects underway, beginning with the demonstration project of a new town at Seaside, Florida.

This anxiety was most acute at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), the Vatican of Modernism. After more than seven decades and countless iterations of dogma, and a vast record of built mistakes, they had little left to offer but a pretense of ideological correctness, in particular that they represented “the cutting edge” of design innovation reaching toward an evermore technologically dazzling future.

The New Urbanism (NU) especially galled them, with its menacing porches and picket fences, those totems of bourgeois small-mindedness. Eventually, the GSD folk began to grok that the NU was about way more than these minor details, but rather a wholesale re-ordering of the human habitat into a coherent and comprehensible design theory that ran from the relations between buildings, to the ordering of streets, neighborhoods, and regions. Worse yet, the NU incorporated codes – the DNA of urban design – intended to be legible to both practitioners and their customers, ordinary people. The NUs were against mystification! How vulgar.

In elite architectural circles, mystification was the supreme weapon wielded by their warriors-of-the-cutting-edge. Harvard’s Aegnor at the time was Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who used mystification the way Stanford White had used a protractor. Koolhaas viewed the predicaments of over-population, resource depletion, financial instability, and consumerism as fundamentally hopeless, and had adopted the career strategy of going with the flow of the entropic zeitgeist, with all its delirious confusion. Hence, the buildings he designed were intended to confound the people who used them or saw them, to produce a delicious sense of anxiety, the characteristic emotion of the era. Of course, many others in the starchitect firmament – Libeskind, Holl, Eisenman, Mayne, Hadid, et. al – were working along the same lines, toward the effect of making cities everywhere more incomprehensible and alienating. When Koolhaas was first hired to occupy an eminent chair at the GSD, he devoted himself to a study of consumerism and produced a book about shopping. The joke was on everybody.

Meanwhile, The New Urbanists gradually occupied, shall we say, the field of operations where so much of the normal stuff of everyday life got built: the places where people lived and carried on commerce. In the booming economy of the millennium – which was, in fact, the last great gasp of the cheap oil era – their services were in demand from ambitious developers skeptical of suburban sprawl and all of its dismal schlock components. Mainly, they strove to build mixed-use, walkable places at a scale agreeable to human neurology, with attention to regional tradition. The New Urbanists were ambitious, too, about reforming the crusty accumulation of planning and zoning law that mandated a sprawl outcome practically everywhere in the USA and made it nearly impossible to assemble a human habitat worth living in. These reformers sent forth potent lecturers into unfriendly quarters, such as the Harvard GSD, which regarded the NU agenda with diffident contempt. But the threat to the Mandarins’ ideological power put the fear of God in them.

They had done almost nothing for ages to address the manifest horrors and hazards of American suburban sprawl. How the folks chose to live out there in the “flyover” states was not their thing. The Mandarins’ thing was keeping up with fashionable theory within the rigorous parameters of the Modernist canon of styles. One of the reasons they objected so vehemently to the New Urbanism was that they only understood it in terms of style, and so the most trivial elements of the movement – the porches and picket fences – drove them crazy. This was to be expected as the dirty secret of Modernism’s American branch was that it had always been about style ever since it arrived from Germany with Walter Gropius in 1937 (who was hired straight off the refugee gangway by Harvard).

In the event, Gropius shed all his old Brave New World Bauhaus social engineering baggage at the immigration line and replaced it with an Horatio Alger kit-bag of personal ambition, in which Cambridge intellectualism melded with American razzle-dazzle hucksterism to create a market for a new intellectual fashion imported from Europe. Before long, Modernism successfully morphed from its original social program (housing for proles) to the official style of corporate America (glass-skinned office towers for the over-class). Architects could make a lot of money designing towers with big floor-to-area ratios, and corporations could get a lot of prestige for the buck from dressing their headquarters in the sleek new Modernist raiment, which required no costly ornament. In the post war era, it also helped that Hitler and Stalin had completely discredited anything neoclassical. After the allies defeated them, Modernism became the official architectural style of the Free World, representing democracy and decency.

 

Pretty soon, urban design – that is, the officialdom of planning – caught up with the architects when the long-fermented ideas of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (a.k.a. Le Corbusier), which had been laughed out of Paris since the 1920s, were adopted all over America. I refer here to the notorious piece of mischief, the Ville Radieuse or Radiant City, the “buildings in a garden” format, the basis first for the new public housing projects , quickly to become slums of vertically concentrated poverty. This bundle of ideas then went on to infect all other realms of city planning – especially as joined with the well-intentioned monomania of the traffic engineers, whose extract from “Corb” was to keep the cars comfortable above all other considerations. By the 1950s, these behaviors were becoming encoded in the post-war planning laws that would mandate suburban sprawl.

 

One result of this activity was the cumulative impoverishment of the urban streetscape. Between the sleek glass-box office buildings set back behind pointless landscaping displays or “plazas,” both of which discouraged ground-floor retail, and the widened streets with their traffic lanes all turned one-way (and on-street parking removed), which allowed the cars to go faster, downtown pedestrian life withered until it was below the necessary critical mass for shopping, which duly moved to the new suburban retail ghettos mandated under single-use zoning – the highway strip, and then the mall. The pattern was set and continued to proliferate until the collapse of the housing bubble starting around 2007.

During this period, the Mandarins in the elite architecture schools did nothing to oppose these practices. In fact, they sponsored them and taught them to their students who, in turn, went out into the officialdom and practiced all the humdrum duties of administering parking standards and doing statistical analysis – which was what remained of urban design with all the artistry removed. In academia, the art module was vested in the design of individual buildings and the cult of the individual genius-architects who conceived them. This program followed several parallel tracks.

One track was the aforementioned practice of maximum mystification. The more the genius-architect was able to confound the ordinary public with rhetoric, the more he/she would appear to be a wizard, a supernatural being, authorized by dint of superior powers of intellect to traffic in concepts beyond the ken of the common folk. Since narcissistic personalities were attracted to this racket, they naturally believed their own metaphysical bullshit, and easily derived support from both their fellow narcissists and the sycophants they attracted.

They engaged in generating ever more new intellectual fashions to support career movement in the Big Business that higher education had become after the troublesome social commitments of the 1960s were demoted to the Kennedy School of Government and its imitators elsewhere. New intellectual fashions were required in order to wade through the swamps of accreditation for the PhD and enter the sinecured ranks of tenured professorship. A striving young scholar in the doctoral marshes had to generate an original idea, and often an entire thought-system used to arrive at it, in order to soldier through the dissertation ordeal and qualify for a faculty job.

This racket was in turn supported by the ideological politics of the day, namely the struggles of females, racial identity groups, and homosexuals against the age-old domination of hetero Caucasian males. It hopped on the express bus of the Post-structuralism fad, which described all human endeavor in terms of “power relations” and all reality as “constructed” – meaning, if you wanted to change who was in charge of things, you could simply employ rhetoric to manipulate reality according to your needs. Under such a thought regime, reality was a fungible and chimerical commodity. The stresses of such obvious relativism might not be salubrious for the collective mental health of a culture, but it hugely benefited ambitious narcissist intellectuals who could claim that reality was whatever they said it was. And it did pave the way for management changes in the universities. Anyway, a great many ambitious hetero males were going into greener pastures of an over-financialized economy, so fewer were even competing for the plums of academe. The net result was that a lot of female PhDs manufactured in the Boomer Generation bubble landed in department chairs in the humanities, and the study of literature in particular entered a wilderness of Theory from which it has not since reemerged.

But the traffic in metaphysics affected all other quarters of the academic world, except for the hardest sciences, and it was especially suited to the architectural scene, another fairly low-paying vocation, like teaching, with all the additional hazards of small business, if you actually opened a practice. Anyone who succeeded in architecture in a major way became a kind of superstar, but there were very few of them. Many of the wannabe superstars gravitated to the superstar training academies, of course, where the metaphysical bullshit thickets were in full flower. Theory larded with mystification was the ticket to a thriving career in the building arts.

Another track that ran through the architectural programs of recent years was the obsession with technology. Computer-aided-design software (CAD) had made it possible to tweak and torque construction materials in just about any manner – at least on the screen – and emerging architects were using this ability more and more to make bold statements, to create forms that had never been seen before, swooping curvilinear facades, constructed amoebic blobs clad in exotic metals, and UFO-like fantasy structures for which there were no aesthetic precedents and no practical justification. This ability to shape buildings in any conceivable way played neatly into the cult of the supernatural genius-wizard insofar as one could endlessly innovate novelties – and nothing was more central to the cult than the ability to produce sui generis novelties – to wow the public (and mystify them, too). It was the very essence of the cutting edge, the place so far out that nobody had any reference for what was produced there. It left the practice of architecture in a kind of circus of wizardry.

These stunts depended on a particular kind of economy, too: the late stage crackup-boom economy of the Peak Oil era, which, accompanied by Peak Credit creation, had left huge pools of deployable money around for real estate ventures, especially for non-profit institutions like museums, symphony halls, and college libraries. These projects benefited from the staggering profits in innovative financialization (i.e. the racket in mortgage backed securities and their derivatives) as newly-minted billionaires and their cohorts vied with their checkbooks to have galleries and auditoria named after them. The Guggenheim Museum turned itself into a franchise and began replicating itself all around the planet like an especially fecund alien life-form, and every second-tier city got a new museum of this or that. Monumental buildings such as museums and college libraries were exactly the types that lent themselves to grandstanding, so each new one became an opportunity for an attention-getting architectural stunt. To be such a genius-wizard of innovative cutting edge forms, and to garner such superstar commissions, along with the superstar adulation, became the great aspiration of young architects, while the whole faculty and its programs were bent in the service of it. In the end, they managed to turn architecture into just another branch of the fashion industry.

Such ventures in metaphysics, high fashion, celebrity, and novelty ultimately redounded in the realms of pure status-seeking. The Ivy League outfits like Yale and Harvard obviously carried generations-long accretions of status. The name Harvard alone on a C.V. might denote a nice fat five million dollars additional expected lifetime earnings for an alum, on an actuarial basis. But it took some effort to maintain this status aura. Where status as attached to fashion is concerned, it is in the unfortunate nature of fashion that sooner or later it falls out of fashion. The audience or customer-base tires of it and yawns and then the mob is on to the next fashion, leaving the old mode du jour looking pitiful and its followers ridiculous. Thus, the pursuit of fashion, of novelty, becomes an exhausting process, a hamster-wheel of futility – even potentially humiliating, as when Mr. Koolhaas turned on the sycophants at Harvard with his prankish graduate program in… shopping, as if to say: here, you conclave of status-seeking, fad-following, celebrity-obsessed, boot-lickers is the one field-of-study worthy of your craven, tawdry, lost souls. At the time, given just how demoralized they were up at Gund Hall, the GSD headquarters, they were probably thrilled to bend over and take it up the rear from the exalted, demigodlike, uber-genius-wizard Koolhaas.

At this point of moral and vocational exhaustion, around the turn of the new millennium, some other things were going on in the world which even designers preoccupied with the trivia of fashion could not fail to notice, if only as peripheral annoyances. One, as averred to above, was this bizarre phenomenon calling itself The New Urbanism. For those engaged in millennial high architectural fashion, with its sleek, exquisitely tortured surfaces and reflective claddings, the NU’s work was laughable. Porches and picket fences were about as bygone as poke bonnets and hobble skirts. It must be some kind of joke perpetrated by a claque of backward- gazing, neo-conservative ape-people unacquainted with the concept of progress. This was, of course, a terrible strategic miscalculation on Harvard’s part. A few of them began to suspect that NU was onto something. It was hard, at first, to tell just what because the whole paradigmatic world-view at Gund Hall was focused on individual gesture buildings devoid of context. NU was all about the context, the human settlement as an integral organism of parts, elements, components, and programs (in which, by the way, grand architectural gestures played only a minor role). NU was about the one thing that all of America had ignored since the end of World War Two: how the things we build relate to each other and to the terrain on which they were located. It was also concerned with the deeper structure of principles in nature that could be employed in the design and assembly of human habitats that were worth living in and worth caring about.

This was really the crux of the matter. Any nine-year-old in America could sense neurologically the appalling failures of the post-war built environment with all its zones of alienation and anomie, its thoughtless, off-the-shelf, generic arrangements of boring-unto-death housing subdivisions, Big Box PUDs with groaning out-parcels of clown-like fried food dispensaries, and horizonless wastelands of free parking. These were the mere surface disturbances of a way-of-life so out of whack with the larger ecosystem that one could literally sense portents of apocalypse in it. Not to put too fine a point on it, American society had made a range of tragic choices in the late 20th century which, if not altered, were sure to make civilized existence impossible.

The GSD eventually began to catch onto this, and even sent some envoys to the annual convocations of The New Urbanists, who by then had formed a professional organization called the Congress of the New Urbanism, or CNU. The GSD folk brought the news back to headquarters and something started to ferment there. First, they realized that they were late to the game on this whole larger question of how the human habitat might be treated as a design exercise. All they could do was ridicule the NU for being so hopelessly retrograde and un-sexy as to look back in history for practices to emulate. History, all Modernists knew, was a dusty attic of full of obsolete claptrap that was nothing but an impediment to innovative genius at the cutting edge. To be “edgy,” indeed, was the great personal tribute of the moment. The NUs were anything but edgy. Their fuhrer, Andres Duany, wore pastel button-down shirts and plaid ties rather than the standard-issue all-black garb of the cutting edge, which flattered the edge-people to think of themselves as like unto the Viet Cong, indefatigable revolutionary warriors!

What nagged at them, though, was the suspicion that something about this context thing rang true. Wasn’t there something called Global Warming or Climate Change happening in the background of all the ribbon-cuttings for the countless new Guggenheim Museums? Wasn’t there a realm loosely referred to as “the environment?” (Many professors remembered it dimly from their own college days.) Was there not something cutting edge about it? Could one not assume a heroic, sexy position in defending this “environment?” And what was there in the residue of the praxis (a favorite jargon morsel at the GSD) that might point the way to some new, cutting edge approach to all this. The answer was: Ian McHarg (1920 – 2001) and his currently out-of-fashion manifesto from 1969, Design With Nature.

McHarg was a landscape architect who had settled into a nice job on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Landscape architecture, much as it sounds, is the practice (praxis) concerned with shaping a piece or property, generally to prepare a site for building, or in the design of parks and gardens. LA, for short, had been architecture’s muscle-bound step-brother for most of the 20th century, charged with the grunt-work that called for front-end-loaders and bulldozers to push dirt around. But as the late 1960s gave birth to the environmental movement, it took a new place in the order of things and found a voice in McHarg. Design With Nature was a call to action for respecting the planet at a time when many other such calls were issued and the public’s awareness was keen about keeping the Earth whole. LA was particularly concerned with directing water flows, hydrology, since water management is usually the most problematic site planning chore. It also happened that the biggest environmental preoccupations of that day were air and water pollution. McHarg’s larger philosophical agenda revolved around the notion that human activity was something in opposition to nature, a toxic alien presence on the planet, the footprint of which needed to be minimized. He came to refer to humanity as a “planetary disease.”

From Design With Nature sprang hundreds of PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) of garden apartments nestled in bosky, natural settings and sheathed in environmental-looking cedar, and scores of university housing “complexes” bermed into the terrain (with plenty of free parking), and, to be fair, a set of water management methods that worked their way into the now-substantial body of law that regulates environmental permitting. In any case, 40 years later, McHarg’s work was the lost signpost that the GSD had been searching for in its quest to get off the hamster-wheel of futility that was the starchitecture racket and into something fresher, newer, edgier, with more sex appeal – and finally to shake off the growing embarrassment over its failure to address the larger context of the built environment – territory occupied by the hated The New Urbanists.

The Harvard GSD found its avatar in Charles Waldheim, an associate dean at the University of Toronto, a sedulous contributor to the professional journals and an especially deft theorist conversant with all the post-structuralist lingo that had infested the humanities and fine arts programs since the 1970s. He had conveniently coined the term “Landscape Urbanism” as a way to make the profession seem more up-to-date, edgy, and sexy and in him Harvard found the perfect field marshal to carve out some of its own territory on the battlefield of urban design where, so far, it had been subject only to humiliation. Waldheim was anointed dean of the GSD’s Landscape Urbanism program in the summer of 2009.

He came out swinging immediately with an overt declaration that his new field was “a critique of the disciplinary and professional commitments of traditional urban design and an alternative to ‘New Urbanism.’”[1] He accused the NU of failing “to come to terms with the rapid pace of urban change and the essentially horizontal character of contemporary automobile-based urbanization across North America and much of Western Europe.” This enfilade exposed foremost a bizarre feature of Landscape Urbanism’s purported ethos: while supposedly predicated on sound ecological discourse, LU had no conception whatsoever that the suburban development program of the past 90-odd years had reached its sell-by date, that the last thing you would want to do as an ecologically-minded urban designer (i.e. of human habitats) was promote the idea that we could continue living a car-dependent lifestyle, or that we would even want to, given the grotesque diminishing returns involved. Waldheim assumed that the horizontal spewage of sprawl would continue indefinitely, and that there was no need to arrest it, merely a charge to refine and improve it. He showed next-to-zero awareness of the global energy resource quandary, or its relation to the disorders of capital formation, and all the related dilemmas of epochal economic contraction. In essence, he was enlisted to serve Harvard’s chief institutional aim: defense of the status quo, that is, the cherished old dogmas of Modernism. The giveaway was in his statement that LU amounted to “a critical and historically informed rereading of the environmental and social aspirations of Modernist planning and its most successful models.”

In point of fact, Modernist planning had no successful models. It had only a long record of failure embodied in the 1972 demolition of one of its signature projects in the USA: the Corbu-inspired Pruitt-Igoe subsidized housing complex in St Louis, Mo., a mere 18 years after the 33 towers-in-a-park opened for business. Modernist urban planning had amounted to repeated, cruel experiments on the poor with untested building typologies delivered in unprecedented mega-quantities with the explosive results of massively concentrated poverty: crime, drugs, family disintegration, misery. What remained of Modernist urban planning beyond that was little more than traffic management. Indeed, one of the reasons that Landscape Architecture had discredited itself in recent decades was that most of its remunerative work came from the decoration of parking lots with bark mulch beds and juniper shrubs. Waldheim showed what he had been hired for when he unabashedly defended the pantheon of Modernist demigods: Gropius (the first GSD director), Mies (a.k.a. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designer of the iconic Seagram Building on Park Avenue), and especially José Luis Sert, the GSD’s dean in its long heyday from 1954 to 1969, whose contributions to urban design in the USA were scanty to nil.

In the spirit of the reigning ideology of the campus, with its incessant prattle about power relations between the sexes, the classes, and the ethnicity cohorts, Waldheim inveighed against “privileged” groups and “wealthy elites” – as though wealthy elites had never been seen around Harvard. (The NU project at Seaside, Florida, was a constant target of attack by GSD profs, who regarded it as an affront to decency for being an exceptionally successful beachfront real estate venture – as if some programming error had prevented it from becoming subsidized housing for the indigent or a retirement village for coal miners.)

Waldheim’s chief ally was James Corner, chair of the LA program at a sister university, Penn, where Ian McHarg had roosted back in the day. Corner was an even more florid metaphysician than Waldheim – where Waldheim merely strove for obfuscation, Corner achieved nearly complete opacity. Corner was preoccupied with the “imaginative and metaphorical associations” lurking in the underlayment of landscape studies, which was another way of stating that it might represent whatever anyone said it was, a tactic straight out of the post-structuralist playbook where an ever-shifting reality could be manipulated by means of rhetorical narrative. Hence, the title of Corner’s seminal text: “Terra Fluxus,” an opposition to the age-old notion of terra firma. Consistent with these shifting sands of reality, and the primary axioms of post-structuralism, was his assertion that terms such as “landscape” and “urbanism” were “contested,” that there was some question as to what each meant, especially in relation to each other. (Indeed, one of the chief consequences of the suburban fiasco was the loss of any clear distinction between the rural and the urban, an unfortunate condition that had a great deal to do with the pernicious incoherence of American planning-and-zoning law.) Corner’s narrative intention was simply to wrest the territory of urbanism away from the detested traditionalists who revolved around Duany and The New Urbanist forces, and re-occupy it for the axis of Modernism. In short, Landscape Urbanism, in its full-dress metaphysical uniform, was designed to allow the Modernists pretend that they were interested in things urban…

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GASTONIA, N.C. — Gastonia’s Highland community has seen its share of struggles with growth over the last 30 years.

But Frances Hoyle even seems to get a little taller when she talks about what’s sprouting there these days.

“We’ve got a little something coming up,” she said of the rows at the Highland Community Garden. “Some flowers are growing and some people’s green beans have started to come up, too.”

The city-owned patch at the corner of North York Street and West Granite Avenue represents another recent effort to revitalize Highland. After two old homes were torn down there years ago, only an empty, littered 2-acre lot was left. So in 2011, Keep Gastonia Beautiful began working to establish a community garden that could benefit the surrounding neighborhoods.

More than $8,000 in grants and donations were raised prior to construction beginning, and this marks the first planting season.

“Our program money is all raised, but this isn’t something we could’ve afforded to do without the city’s involvement,” said Jerod Shuford, a coordinator for Keep Gastonia Beautiful. “They have been a huge supporter.”

The garden consists of three long and two short parallel planting beds, with space for 26 plots – each measuring about 100 square feet. Eighteen amateur gardeners had reserved space as of last week, meaning a few plots are still available.

Two of the spaces are being used by Food Corps, a national nonprofit that strives to teach children and adults about the values of eating right, particularly in low-income communities.

Participants pay $20 to use a plot for an entire year. For that, they may work in the garden during the day, and they have access to shared, community garden tools in a shed on-site. Each person who rents space gets a key to the shed.

The key also provides access to a locked water pump at the garden, which hooks up to a sprinkler system.

“The $20 membership fee mostly covers the cost of the water,” said Shuford. “Everything else is donated or provided by us.”

Gardeners can mostly plant whatever they like, as long as it doesn’t grow higher than 4 feet. That eliminates crops like corn, because the height can shade neighboring fruits and vegetables from getting sunlight.

Gardeners also take turns maintaining the site.

Hoyle was one of the first to plant in April, putting in tomatoes, green beans, squash, cucumbers, watermelon and cantaloupe.

“Some of the others have planted flowers and various vegetables,” she said. Cucumbers and eggplant have also turned up.

Hoyle doesn’t live in Highland, but attends church there and has other ties to the area. One of the garden’s big benefits is providing users a way to grow free, healthy food that would otherwise inflate their grocery bills, she said.

A new farmers market at the nearby Highland Health Center is also promoting the benefits of fresh, homegrown fruits and vegetables.

“It’s helping us come up with ideas about what we should do to eat healthier,” Hoyle said.

Hoyle and others are meeting at the garden once a month to go through “Gardening 101,” Shuford said. It’s an opportunity to learn tips such as how to compost, and how often to water different fruits and vegetables.

Future plans include adding more flowers and a butterfly garden to the landscaping at the site, to go along with the trees and bushes there now.

“Part of the goal of this is to get neighbors meeting neighbors, organizing and building a stronger sense of community,” said Shuford. “It’s still a work in progress, but we’re very pleased with it so far.”

Information from: The Gaston Gazette, http://www.gastongazette.com

RANCHO CUCAMONGA – Residents who live in the northern portion of the city now can get ideas for fire-safe landscaping at Hellman fire station.

The Rancho Cucamonga Fire District recently introduced the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety Education Project at the station. Landscaping at the station is meant to demonstrate best practices for homes in the high-fire-hazard foothill areas above the 210 Freeway.

Landscaping at the station, including stones, mulch, and low-lying native plants, when placed around a home can create defensible space to keep flames away from homes.

“This will help homeowners better defend themselves and help us to defend them should a fire burn through the area like it did in 2003 during the Grand Prix fire,” Fire Chief Mike Bell said.

In addition, the Fire District recently announced a new warning program and RC Fire Watch. When a red-flag warning is issued to warn of high wildfire risk, the district will hang red flags at its stations.

The department also plans to deploy red-shirted RC Fire Watch volunteers on red-flag days and the Fourth of July to have “eyes and ears” out in the field as an early warning system for fire. Volunteers would also contact people entering mountain areas and make sure they’re prepared to go into canyon, mountain and wildland areas.

In a separate project, the fire department is working with Eagle Scout Jacob Fakhoury to identify fire-safe plants in the high-risk zones in

the foothills.

“I will be putting the signs near the identified plants just to help the community so we can help prevent fires as much as we can from destroying the community,” Fakhoury said.

Residents can get fire-safety tips and check whether their home falls in the Wildland-Urban Interface Area at rcfire.org.

Mary Peat, who lives in northwest Rancho Cucamonga, said a visit to the fire station has given her ideas on how to landscape her own backyard.

“I have a back section like this that I wanted to develop, and the landscape architect was able to answer some questions for me,” Peat said.

Peat had to evacuate horses when the Grand Prix fire swept through the area 10 years ago.

The 6,000-square-foot single- story Hellman Fire Station 177 opened on Jan. 24, 2012. A three-person crew staffs a paramedic fire engine ready to respond to fire, medical and rescue emergencies.

The station also houses a fire engine designed for response in the brush-covered hillsides in northern Rancho Cucamonga.

Jun 17, 201306:12 PMPoint of View

The METROPOLIS Blog

Because the enveloping presence of light energy transforms our levels of competence, security or moods – our essential well-being and survival – the effective control of daylight, flames, and their replacements, naturally has long been part of the expertise of designers and engineers. And it’s been obsession, too, of visual artists and poets.  In Le Corbusier’s familiar words, architecture is the “play of masses in light,” and its history, “a struggle for light.”  And for all of us, light energy is an inescapable “material” in design – both as a content and as a context.

Light invites action. The eyes are automatically drawn to – alerted by – the places that seem to offer the most important and readily available information – moving lights, sudden changes, or the brightest spots. In verbal language we even use “light” as a metaphor for knowledge. It’s a defining quality of any experience – orientation, exploration and peril – clarifying threats and opportunities, refuge and prospect, and unraveling “mysteries” in the shadows. And so we add skylights, build glass buildings, and open up entire land- and townscapes to become, in effect, larger and larger prospects – broader clearings in the forest – well-lighted by day and, by our ingenuity, at night.

The light we see is a mix of radiation from sources, diffusion in the atmosphere and reflections from a multitude of surfaces, including the shadows created by their forms and textures. At an intimate scale, it’s largely those reflections that tend to make plaster or concrete read as “neutral,” plants, fabrics or wood “alive,” and polished marble, “perfection,” before we touch them. And in larger forms, the artful shaping and detailing of places built in the brilliant sunlight of Greece, Italy, and deserts – now without their colors – the sculptural chiaroscuro illustrates the breadth of expressive potential, as light changes the geometry of space and masses through the seasons and through a day, both inside and out. In differing light, we live in a different environment.

The Acropolis in Athens – the “presence” of the gods, on a refuge and prospect high above the working city in the clarity and shadows of the brilliant Aegean sun

Dazzle

That is just the beginning, of course.  In the creation of sacred places or performing arts and commercial settings, essentially all of the operations and limitations of human vision are being exploited.  Toward one very effective extreme are such spectacles as the sparkling signs and saturated colors of entertainment places, or the scintillating light of a white ballroom or flashing disco mirrors, or the brilliant stained glass light in cathedrals.  By simultaneously exciting every point on a retina and overloading the visual system – dazzling the eyes – the mind is disoriented as it struggles to find order in the bewildering flow of sensations and information. 

Then, with senses on full-alert, but still confused, we seem to reach out – even if only for a short time – to imagine a new order – new rules – for a “new world” – one that does make coherent sense.  The cathedral builders saw that “other world” in light itself – light as a divine “substance,” a divine presence in super-natural soaring weightless space. For others, it’s in the body chemistry of an intoxicating party-mood and earthy, hyper-natural world of Las Vegas, with its own rules –“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Both create settings – environments – that invite experiences of rare pleasure – a release, an escape from habitual, imposed day-to-day patterns – in one case, a profound religious experience, and in the other, a new-found sense of wealth and uninhibited freedom of action.

The designers of theatrical and cinematic lighting do the same with great subtlety. First the audience is disoriented by darkness and then reoriented when combinations of lights “materialize” the new world. Then, the feeling of being for a time in a new reality is intensified by linking in the other senses: rhythmic sound that overflows the space – like an organ or drums that seem like the earth speaking, or the pulsating super-amplified sounds of a rock band – all given color and life in ritualized movement, secular or sacred dancing or touching.

Downtime

As body chemistry evolved within the planet’s cycle of sunlight and darkness, it came to produce parallel rhythms of survival-based hormones. Melatonin, prompted by darkness and inhibited by light, especially sunlight, and responding to receptors on the retina, induces a daily rhythm of waking and sleeping – a time when other exhausted receptors, muscles, and neural connections are typically refreshed by disengaging, by hibernating. Sensing that transition in a secure setting seems to be one of the pleasures of sunrises and sunsets. In any case, sleep brings on a very real vulnerability, and we seek out, often urgently, places where protection and warmth provide refuge. Sheltered resting-sleeping places are probably half of our indoor built environment, and, no matter what other symbols they embody, in daily life we tend to approach them with a narrow, demanding, survival-based mental set – a defensible perimeter, elevated and secluded, with enough light indoors and out to feel the security of the place.

A similar body-chemistry tends to be produced when we find ourselves temporarily confined in an unchanging setting. As sense receptors are fatigued by concentration and repetition, the drowsy consequences frustrate everyone involved. It’s going to happen, but daylight alone can change the chemical mix – just as food and drink, coffee breaks and exercise do. Accordingly, in the otherwise handbook-perfected work places, conference centers, museums, and many new schools – places where people spend long hours staying alert – designers have been able to recharge a body-state within those spaces with exposure to natural light – to real sun, sky, and shadows and the refreshment inherent in the cycles of daylighting of the natural world.

Night

“Light, open and airy” feels like a refreshing release, but the night has other pleasures. Darkness, when eyes are disabled, sharpens both the other senses and the “mind’s eye” – inviting fantasy and imagination. And the presence of darkness and dimly lit places tends to arouse other predilections and stir other mixes of hormones – producing other priorities – that compete with, and can overwhelm the melatonin in a bloodstream.  Both the fear-of-the-dark – the uncertainty about mysteries and hidden dangers – and a consuming ambition to extend the time we can work, move, and play in daylight, have resulted in brightly lit twenty-four hour habitats. But, at the same time, we build places with low light levels where we can “hide” ourselves from observation and distractions but without feeling confined. By “losing” the ceiling and walls of a larger space in darkness, and introducing a small, soft, warm source that lights up a foreground of faces – in candlelight, at a campfire, around a card table – designers create feelings of seclusion and a private intimacy with the accompanying body states that favor confidentiality and trust, daring and risk-taking, persuasion, and seduction.  In other words, with changing light, sleep is overruled by more immediate challenges to survive, win, and prosper.

Breaking through constraints

Limits on seeing feel like limits on life, and we have a long history of technology designed to light up the dark or to deal with too much “blinding” light. Because the pupils adapt to the brightest light, they necessarily edit out whatever is dimly lit. Then unlighted colorful foregrounds become featureless silhouettes and signs, clues to orientation, work surfaces, food, and faces can be frustratingly – or intentionally – obscured by glare. In response, we have developed vocabularies of built environments to compensate for the pupils’ natural limitations: selective shading and reflections, task lighting, balanced multiple sources and the focused highlights that signal “destinations” – the human purposes within a space, indoors and out. And we are continually exploring new forms that resolve conflicts – like those between functional night lighting and seeing stars in a dark sky, or between the desire for both daylighting and big-window panoramic views, but without glare and heat-gain. In a parallel way, too, we invent lenses that supplement our own, extending the range of focused vision.

The important point here is that, year by year, our ambition – our innate predilection – to keep extending our reach, brings into being more sophisticated science, design, engineering, and industries to manage light. We can – and many do – measure, model, control and predict human responses – emotions, associations, intellectual performance – to the light and color content of essentially any habitat we are building. Yet much more is known than is put to use.  And that’s what a new broader humanism is about: breaking through convention and out-dated “intuitions” and adopting more systematically than we do today, the advancing arts and sciences – in this case of vision and optics – into the everyday practice of architecture, landscaping, and urban design.

The presence of divinity in the dazzling light and color that fill the soaring space – once everyday practice in a gothic cathedral – this one in Mallorca.

Color 

We live wrapped in feelings aroused by colors. In a sense, they all – including black and white – tend to produce a range of moods – body states – and associations that prime responses to whatever we encounter. As raw color sensations follow paths into different parts of a brain, the meaning to us, the significance, is, as always, shaped by contexts; it can change as we’re competing or courting, problem-solving or facing a moral judgment. And while often learned from our culture and experience our responses are naturally grounded in some basic, common physiology.  

The red effect

In the retina, and concentrated within the central fovea three types of cone cells are sensitive to, and report on, light energy frequencies. The greater number by far senses reds and oranges, giving them more clarity and impact. Naturally, then, they draw the most attention, and seem to advance. They feel aggressive – possibly threatening – and tend to increase heart rates and blood pressure and thus a sense of warmth and impulse for action. We’ve all seen how that’s exploited as the “red effect” in fashion and uniforms, or in a built environment, signs, signals and all kinds of eye-catching.

Blues and greens

…and especially violets, activating fewer cells tend to be perceived as less so, receding not advancing, leaving sensations of calm and cool. And blue, like yellow forms tend to become indistinct and immaterial, especially seen against the sky or water.

Essentially all tones of green tend to be associated with the natural settings they dominate, and beyond that, research is showing that, in a problem-solving context, greens can be refreshing, reduce stress and foster creativity – in a sense like the presence of nature itself. And along the same lines, in almost all contexts we respond to green as a symbol – a positive sign of approval and “go ahead.”

When the question is asked, blues are typically selected as a “favorite” color. And research is showing that responses to blue – what seem to be innate associations – in social contexts are feelings of friendly or approachable, and in work situations open-minded, unconfined. At the same time, though in another part of a brain – in another context – we tend to respond to blue light – unless balanced by other colors – as “cold” and in another, it’s the symbolic color of melancholy or in another, it’s the UN and EU color of peace. Again, the context shapes the meaning.

White and black

This mix of all color wavelengths is rare in nature – except in the sky. And we tend to perceive it in ways parallel to geometric forms – as a distinctly human order – or a divine one – imposed on a less perfect natural world. Seeing pure, reflective white Carrara marble against the darker stones of Florence or bricks of Rome, or a white plantation house in the green/blue/brown of a wilderness, tends to lead toward sensing personal mastery, a place released from outside threats or aging, and as the most visible, these symbolic white human civilizing victories singled out as the most important, privileged places.

In a built environment, black, like darkness, is used to hide or minimize a presence. And in a social context, used sparingly, tends to be associated, like white at the opposite pole, the ultimate in formal authority.

Priorities  

Because it is the intensity of the impacts – of excitement of the receptor cells – caused by brightness, lighter values, sharp contrasts, and saturated colors, we give a high priority to finding and focusing on them as “first impressions.” They structure the sequence of perceptions. And contrast is the key. Repeated, bright look-at-me light – and vivid colors – along a confined corridor like highway strip or in a carnival setting, can be energizing to exhaustion until the significant information in each individual “first impression” is communicated. Then it’s absorbed in the identity of a larger district, a destination clearly set off from its surroundings.

“Living”color

When light energy reflects off surfaces, their physical textures and variations, creating changing shadows, naturally add a dimension to what we see. The reflections from natural irregularities in building materials, or weathered pigmentation, a patina of human use, or colors seen in firelight become flickering images on the retina. Unconsciously we tend to sense that as motion and, in turn, almost human life. Landscapes, especially in a breeze or dappled sunlight, or in the sparkle – and sound – of moving water can do the same.

As a language   

With these few basics as a start, cultures – and individuals – have elaborated out of their own experience and associations, a range of “languages” of color that have been most effective for them. Like verbal languages they appear to evolve over time, becoming enormously complex and powerful. And sensitive, trained designers, artists and colorists, have used the historic color vocabularies of a culture together with the science behind them to develop an impressive fluency. In a sense, they’ve organized the visible spectrum into a vocabulary of hues, values, and uncounted distinct tones that we are readily able to perceive. And then, in a parallel with composing music, they can hold in their minds, and foresee colors in relationships with each other and with the other senses. And they can use combinations of mixes, textures, layering, lighting, harmonies and contrasts to evoke hundreds of predictable feelings – except, of course, in that +/- 10 percent of the population that the rest of us call color-blind. 

In a built environment, colors are, of course, only one factor in a scene, but again experience has proven colorists in our culture able – on their own – to stimulate, or set the stage for such imagined sensations as: warm or cool; soft, smooth or harsh; excitement or serenity; harmony or confusion; formal or casual; refined or rustic; dignity or flamboyance; solidarity or conflict; natural or crisp and machine-like; old and prestigious or new and prestigious; and varying political and religious values. In other words, they have identified workable translations from colors to body states, and the expressive languages of color – from the cool white-black-gray of the Bauhaus to the intense rainbow of a Caribbean village – are as inevitable and forceful in a built environment as they are in love and in battle.

Local color

Alongside the clear, bright white pride in mastering an uncivilized place, often not far away are other settlements where color is not a choice but a given. The practical, cost-effective materials of architecture and landscapes are at hand in the earth itself – the warm sandstones of Bath and the Cotswold hills, red clays, the redwoods of California, the fields of lavender or tulips and native associations of plants everywhere. Then at all scales – in buildings, landscapes, cities, and regions –  powerful, memorable color identities are valued because they tell stories of home, stable societies, roots in the land, and the larger, longer history of surviving and prospering here. In today’s mixed national/global markets, color rarely plays that role except in places deliberately branded by their occupants or developers. Our lowest-cost, vernacular materials are as likely to have the colors of recycled plywood, plastic tarps, and corrugated metal sheets, and they tell their own stories of settlement and survival in an industrializing culture.

* * * *

Next: An overview of how the sensations of hearing, tastes, and smell are integral to experiencing the places we build. 

This is the twenty third in a series of posts that spell out a set of ideas called A New Humanism: in architecture, landscapes, and urban design. They’re about enlarging the way we think about design by applying, in day to day practice, a broader range of insights into the cutting edge sciences of nature and human nature — using them to understand how our evolved mind-and-body actually experience the places we design, and why people respond the ways they do.

Robert Lamb Hart is a practicing architect and planner educated at Harvard GSD and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and a principal in Hart Howerton, a planning, architecture, and landscape design firm with an international practice out of offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Park City, and Boston. He believes that the design professions have been falling behind in their understanding of one of the defining enterprises of the Modern revolution, the application of the maturing, fast-moving sciences of ecology and human behavior — and the compromised results are showing. 

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Jun 17, 201306:12 PMPoint of View

The METROPOLIS Blog

Because the enveloping presence of light energy transforms our levels of competence, security or moods – our essential well-being and survival – the effective control of daylight, flames, and their replacements, naturally has long been part of the expertise of designers and engineers. And it’s been obsession, too, of visual artists and poets.  In Le Corbusier’s familiar words, architecture is the “play of masses in light,” and its history, “a struggle for light.”  And for all of us, light energy is an inescapable “material” in design – both as a content and as a context.

Light invites action. The eyes are automatically drawn to – alerted by – the places that seem to offer the most important and readily available information – moving lights, sudden changes, or the brightest spots. In verbal language we even use “light” as a metaphor for knowledge. It’s a defining quality of any experience – orientation, exploration and peril – clarifying threats and opportunities, refuge and prospect, and unraveling “mysteries” in the shadows. And so we add skylights, build glass buildings, and open up entire land- and townscapes to become, in effect, larger and larger prospects – broader clearings in the forest – well-lighted by day and, by our ingenuity, at night.

The light we see is a mix of radiation from sources, diffusion in the atmosphere and reflections from a multitude of surfaces, including the shadows created by their forms and textures. At an intimate scale, it’s largely those reflections that tend to make plaster or concrete read as “neutral,” plants, fabrics or wood “alive,” and polished marble, “perfection,” before we touch them. And in larger forms, the artful shaping and detailing of places built in the brilliant sunlight of Greece, Italy, and deserts – now without their colors – the sculptural chiaroscuro illustrates the breadth of expressive potential, as light changes the geometry of space and masses through the seasons and through a day, both inside and out. In differing light, we live in a different environment.

The Acropolis in Athens – the “presence” of the gods, on a refuge and prospect high above the working city in the clarity and shadows of the brilliant Aegean sun

Dazzle

That is just the beginning, of course.  In the creation of sacred places or performing arts and commercial settings, essentially all of the operations and limitations of human vision are being exploited.  Toward one very effective extreme are such spectacles as the sparkling signs and saturated colors of entertainment places, or the scintillating light of a white ballroom or flashing disco mirrors, or the brilliant stained glass light in cathedrals.  By simultaneously exciting every point on a retina and overloading the visual system – dazzling the eyes – the mind is disoriented as it struggles to find order in the bewildering flow of sensations and information. 

Then, with senses on full-alert, but still confused, we seem to reach out – even if only for a short time – to imagine a new order – new rules – for a “new world” – one that does make coherent sense.  The cathedral builders saw that “other world” in light itself – light as a divine “substance,” a divine presence in super-natural soaring weightless space. For others, it’s in the body chemistry of an intoxicating party-mood and earthy, hyper-natural world of Las Vegas, with its own rules –“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Both create settings – environments – that invite experiences of rare pleasure – a release, an escape from habitual, imposed day-to-day patterns – in one case, a profound religious experience, and in the other, a new-found sense of wealth and uninhibited freedom of action.

The designers of theatrical and cinematic lighting do the same with great subtlety. First the audience is disoriented by darkness and then reoriented when combinations of lights “materialize” the new world. Then, the feeling of being for a time in a new reality is intensified by linking in the other senses: rhythmic sound that overflows the space – like an organ or drums that seem like the earth speaking, or the pulsating super-amplified sounds of a rock band – all given color and life in ritualized movement, secular or sacred dancing or touching.

Downtime

As body chemistry evolved within the planet’s cycle of sunlight and darkness, it came to produce parallel rhythms of survival-based hormones. Melatonin, prompted by darkness and inhibited by light, especially sunlight, and responding to receptors on the retina, induces a daily rhythm of waking and sleeping – a time when other exhausted receptors, muscles, and neural connections are typically refreshed by disengaging, by hibernating. Sensing that transition in a secure setting seems to be one of the pleasures of sunrises and sunsets. In any case, sleep brings on a very real vulnerability, and we seek out, often urgently, places where protection and warmth provide refuge. Sheltered resting-sleeping places are probably half of our indoor built environment, and, no matter what other symbols they embody, in daily life we tend to approach them with a narrow, demanding, survival-based mental set – a defensible perimeter, elevated and secluded, with enough light indoors and out to feel the security of the place.

A similar body-chemistry tends to be produced when we find ourselves temporarily confined in an unchanging setting. As sense receptors are fatigued by concentration and repetition, the drowsy consequences frustrate everyone involved. It’s going to happen, but daylight alone can change the chemical mix – just as food and drink, coffee breaks and exercise do. Accordingly, in the otherwise handbook-perfected work places, conference centers, museums, and many new schools – places where people spend long hours staying alert – designers have been able to recharge a body-state within those spaces with exposure to natural light – to real sun, sky, and shadows and the refreshment inherent in the cycles of daylighting of the natural world.

Night

“Light, open and airy” feels like a refreshing release, but the night has other pleasures. Darkness, when eyes are disabled, sharpens both the other senses and the “mind’s eye” – inviting fantasy and imagination. And the presence of darkness and dimly lit places tends to arouse other predilections and stir other mixes of hormones – producing other priorities – that compete with, and can overwhelm the melatonin in a bloodstream.  Both the fear-of-the-dark – the uncertainty about mysteries and hidden dangers – and a consuming ambition to extend the time we can work, move, and play in daylight, have resulted in brightly lit twenty-four hour habitats. But, at the same time, we build places with low light levels where we can “hide” ourselves from observation and distractions but without feeling confined. By “losing” the ceiling and walls of a larger space in darkness, and introducing a small, soft, warm source that lights up a foreground of faces – in candlelight, at a campfire, around a card table – designers create feelings of seclusion and a private intimacy with the accompanying body states that favor confidentiality and trust, daring and risk-taking, persuasion, and seduction.  In other words, with changing light, sleep is overruled by more immediate challenges to survive, win, and prosper.

Breaking through constraints

Limits on seeing feel like limits on life, and we have a long history of technology designed to light up the dark or to deal with too much “blinding” light. Because the pupils adapt to the brightest light, they necessarily edit out whatever is dimly lit. Then unlighted colorful foregrounds become featureless silhouettes and signs, clues to orientation, work surfaces, food, and faces can be frustratingly – or intentionally – obscured by glare. In response, we have developed vocabularies of built environments to compensate for the pupils’ natural limitations: selective shading and reflections, task lighting, balanced multiple sources and the focused highlights that signal “destinations” – the human purposes within a space, indoors and out. And we are continually exploring new forms that resolve conflicts – like those between functional night lighting and seeing stars in a dark sky, or between the desire for both daylighting and big-window panoramic views, but without glare and heat-gain. In a parallel way, too, we invent lenses that supplement our own, extending the range of focused vision.

The important point here is that, year by year, our ambition – our innate predilection – to keep extending our reach, brings into being more sophisticated science, design, engineering, and industries to manage light. We can – and many do – measure, model, control and predict human responses – emotions, associations, intellectual performance – to the light and color content of essentially any habitat we are building. Yet much more is known than is put to use.  And that’s what a new broader humanism is about: breaking through convention and out-dated “intuitions” and adopting more systematically than we do today, the advancing arts and sciences – in this case of vision and optics – into the everyday practice of architecture, landscaping, and urban design.

The presence of divinity in the dazzling light and color that fill the soaring space – once everyday practice in a gothic cathedral – this one in Mallorca.

Color 

We live wrapped in feelings aroused by colors. In a sense, they all – including black and white – tend to produce a range of moods – body states – and associations that prime responses to whatever we encounter. As raw color sensations follow paths into different parts of a brain, the meaning to us, the significance, is, as always, shaped by contexts; it can change as we’re competing or courting, problem-solving or facing a moral judgment. And while often learned from our culture and experience our responses are naturally grounded in some basic, common physiology.  

The red effect

In the retina, and concentrated within the central fovea three types of cone cells are sensitive to, and report on, light energy frequencies. The greater number by far senses reds and oranges, giving them more clarity and impact. Naturally, then, they draw the most attention, and seem to advance. They feel aggressive – possibly threatening – and tend to increase heart rates and blood pressure and thus a sense of warmth and impulse for action. We’ve all seen how that’s exploited as the “red effect” in fashion and uniforms, or in a built environment, signs, signals and all kinds of eye-catching.

Blues and greens

…and especially violets, activating fewer cells tend to be perceived as less so, receding not advancing, leaving sensations of calm and cool. And blue, like yellow forms tend to become indistinct and immaterial, especially seen against the sky or water.

Essentially all tones of green tend to be associated with the natural settings they dominate, and beyond that, research is showing that, in a problem-solving context, greens can be refreshing, reduce stress and foster creativity – in a sense like the presence of nature itself. And along the same lines, in almost all contexts we respond to green as a symbol – a positive sign of approval and “go ahead.”

When the question is asked, blues are typically selected as a “favorite” color. And research is showing that responses to blue – what seem to be innate associations – in social contexts are feelings of friendly or approachable, and in work situations open-minded, unconfined. At the same time, though in another part of a brain – in another context – we tend to respond to blue light – unless balanced by other colors – as “cold” and in another, it’s the symbolic color of melancholy or in another, it’s the UN and EU color of peace. Again, the context shapes the meaning.

White and black

This mix of all color wavelengths is rare in nature – except in the sky. And we tend to perceive it in ways parallel to geometric forms – as a distinctly human order – or a divine one – imposed on a less perfect natural world. Seeing pure, reflective white Carrara marble against the darker stones of Florence or bricks of Rome, or a white plantation house in the green/blue/brown of a wilderness, tends to lead toward sensing personal mastery, a place released from outside threats or aging, and as the most visible, these symbolic white human civilizing victories singled out as the most important, privileged places.

In a built environment, black, like darkness, is used to hide or minimize a presence. And in a social context, used sparingly, tends to be associated, like white at the opposite pole, the ultimate in formal authority.

Priorities  

Because it is the intensity of the impacts – of excitement of the receptor cells – caused by brightness, lighter values, sharp contrasts, and saturated colors, we give a high priority to finding and focusing on them as “first impressions.” They structure the sequence of perceptions. And contrast is the key. Repeated, bright look-at-me light – and vivid colors – along a confined corridor like highway strip or in a carnival setting, can be energizing to exhaustion until the significant information in each individual “first impression” is communicated. Then it’s absorbed in the identity of a larger district, a destination clearly set off from its surroundings.

“Living”color

When light energy reflects off surfaces, their physical textures and variations, creating changing shadows, naturally add a dimension to what we see. The reflections from natural irregularities in building materials, or weathered pigmentation, a patina of human use, or colors seen in firelight become flickering images on the retina. Unconsciously we tend to sense that as motion and, in turn, almost human life. Landscapes, especially in a breeze or dappled sunlight, or in the sparkle – and sound – of moving water can do the same.

As a language   

With these few basics as a start, cultures – and individuals – have elaborated out of their own experience and associations, a range of “languages” of color that have been most effective for them. Like verbal languages they appear to evolve over time, becoming enormously complex and powerful. And sensitive, trained designers, artists and colorists, have used the historic color vocabularies of a culture together with the science behind them to develop an impressive fluency. In a sense, they’ve organized the visible spectrum into a vocabulary of hues, values, and uncounted distinct tones that we are readily able to perceive. And then, in a parallel with composing music, they can hold in their minds, and foresee colors in relationships with each other and with the other senses. And they can use combinations of mixes, textures, layering, lighting, harmonies and contrasts to evoke hundreds of predictable feelings – except, of course, in that +/- 10 percent of the population that the rest of us call color-blind. 

In a built environment, colors are, of course, only one factor in a scene, but again experience has proven colorists in our culture able – on their own – to stimulate, or set the stage for such imagined sensations as: warm or cool; soft, smooth or harsh; excitement or serenity; harmony or confusion; formal or casual; refined or rustic; dignity or flamboyance; solidarity or conflict; natural or crisp and machine-like; old and prestigious or new and prestigious; and varying political and religious values. In other words, they have identified workable translations from colors to body states, and the expressive languages of color – from the cool white-black-gray of the Bauhaus to the intense rainbow of a Caribbean village – are as inevitable and forceful in a built environment as they are in love and in battle.

Local color

Alongside the clear, bright white pride in mastering an uncivilized place, often not far away are other settlements where color is not a choice but a given. The practical, cost-effective materials of architecture and landscapes are at hand in the earth itself – the warm sandstones of Bath and the Cotswold hills, red clays, the redwoods of California, the fields of lavender or tulips and native associations of plants everywhere. Then at all scales – in buildings, landscapes, cities, and regions –  powerful, memorable color identities are valued because they tell stories of home, stable societies, roots in the land, and the larger, longer history of surviving and prospering here. In today’s mixed national/global markets, color rarely plays that role except in places deliberately branded by their occupants or developers. Our lowest-cost, vernacular materials are as likely to have the colors of recycled plywood, plastic tarps, and corrugated metal sheets, and they tell their own stories of settlement and survival in an industrializing culture.

* * * *

Next: An overview of how the sensations of hearing, tastes, and smell are integral to experiencing the places we build. 

This is the twenty third in a series of posts that spell out a set of ideas called A New Humanism: in architecture, landscapes, and urban design. They’re about enlarging the way we think about design by applying, in day to day practice, a broader range of insights into the cutting edge sciences of nature and human nature — using them to understand how our evolved mind-and-body actually experience the places we design, and why people respond the ways they do.

Robert Lamb Hart is a practicing architect and planner educated at Harvard GSD and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and a principal in Hart Howerton, a planning, architecture, and landscape design firm with an international practice out of offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Park City, and Boston. He believes that the design professions have been falling behind in their understanding of one of the defining enterprises of the Modern revolution, the application of the maturing, fast-moving sciences of ecology and human behavior — and the compromised results are showing. 

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The planned 2.7-mile Bloomingdale Trail and five linked parks — envisioned as an elevated pedestrian and bicycling corridor splashed with artwork and landscaping — will assume a new, overarching identity Tuesday when the multi-use recreation system assumes a fresh moniker: The 606.

The Trust for Public Land, manager of the project that will link four regenerating Northwest Side neighborhoods, will announce the label while presenting final project plans at a public meeting Tuesday evening. Construction on the $91 million public-private venture is expected to begin this summer, with the elevated trail portion to open for use by the fall of 2014. Artwork and other amenities will be added after that.

• Related

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  Bloomingdale Trail

• The Bloomingdale Trail project

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  From an abandoned railroad to a park

• Maps

• West Bloomingdale Avenue, Chicago, IL, USA

The 606 label represents something virtually all city residents share — the first three digits  of Chicago ZIP codes, which planners hope will connote unity and links among neighborhoods.

“It’s really a sign that the project can stand on its own feet as being uniquely Chicago — the fact is, it will be pure Chicago,” said Paul Brourman, CEO of ad agency Sponge and member of the Chicago advisory board to the trust. He organized the pro bono naming effort.

The numerical label also is meant to harken back to the path’s roots as a 100-year-old rail bed running through a once-industrial corridor. “It’s reminiscent of a train route,” said Beth White, director of the trust’s Chicago office.

The 606 will be the brand for the whole project, which also is envisioned as an outdoor education site for Chicago schools. But its component parts, including the Bloomingdale Trail, will retain their own names.

“We respect the trail for what it is, a trail, but now i’s part of something bigger, the way Cloud Gate and Lurie Garden are part of Millennium Park,” said Matt Gordon, director of naming and writing for brand consultant Landor Associates and part of the park project’s branding team.

A logo, in which the numeral’s circles interlink, aims to show the brand as “a connector of people, communities and ideas, and a connection back to the city” said Jennifer Harrell, owner of Wyville USA, who designed the logo.

The text style aims for a modern look, and something that reflects the “Industrial Revolution, the grit of Chicago,” she said, adding that “we’re talking about doing a three-dimensional structure in black iron or steel.”

The development of a project name came about to dispel confusion surrounding the trail, which will run atop an abandoned 16-foot-high rail bed that runs above Bloomingdale Avenue, which is about 1800 north. It stretches from Ashland Avenue on the east to Ridgeway Avenue on the west, linking Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square and Humboldt Park.

“Lots of people thought it was in Bloomingdale, Ill., or many times people would call it the Bloomington Trail,” White said.

Attracting corporate sponsorships was tricky, too, given that Bloomingdale’s is the name of a prominent retailer, which could dissuade other stores.

“There were questions raised in that arena too,” White acknowledged. The trust hopes to find a lead sponsor, as well as backers for components of the project.

Some marketing experts said the project should appeal sponsors, including health-oriented companies.

“You’re seeing parks, bicycling’s a healthy, outdoorsy type of thing,” said sports marketing veteran Bernie DiMeo, now head of public relations firm DiMeo Partners.

But some question the wisdom of retaining the Bloomingdale Trail as well.

“The 606 sounds cool, it has an obvious story to it,” said Tony Schiller, executive vice president of Paragon Marketing Group, a sponsorship and partnership marketing agency. “The Bloomingdale — what’s that?”

He also said it would have made more sense to engage a lead sponsor and bring the corporation into the naming process, rather than tacking it on later. “If you don’t integrate the brand into the name, it’s easy for the brand to go away,” he said.

The key, now, will be to come up with a strategy to integrate the corporate brand into the name, with various points of engagement, including media play, signage and special events, he said.

The project, which has been on the city’s wish list since 2004, has been put on a fast track by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with city departments overseeing construction of what will be part of the Chicago Park District system. The trust, along with Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, have been working to garner support.

The project has garnered $39 million in federal funds; $2 million from the park district; and as of early this year, $12.5 million in private donations including $2 million in leftover NATO summit funds, leaving another $38 million to be raised. The trust plans to announce progress on its fundraising later this summer.

kbergen@tribune.com | twitter@kathy_bergen