McHarg Ian
From UANotebook
Design with Nature
by Ian McHarg
Contents |
citation
Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, New York: Natural History Press, 1971) iii-93.
AUP stacks: HC110.E5 M33 1969 Odegaard: HC110.E5 M33
notes
"Almost ten miles from my home lay the city of Glasgow, one of the most implacable testaments to the city of toil in all of Christendom, a memorial to an inordenate capacity to create ugliness, a sandstone excretion cemented with smoke and grime. Each night its pall on the eastern horizon was lit by the flames of the blast furnaces, a Turner fantasty made real." --pp. 1
"If we can create the humane city, rather than the city of bondage to toil, then the choice of city or countryside will be between two excellences, each indispensable, each different, both complementary, both life-enhancing." --pp. 2
"The best symbol of peace might better be the garden than the dove." --pp. 5
"It is not a choice of either the city or the countryside: both are essential, but today it is nature, beleaguered in the country, too scarce in the city which has become precious." --pp. 5
"Our eyes do not divide us from the world, but unite us with it." --pp. 5
Sea and Survival
Dutch three lines of defense, the dikes: the Guardian (Waker), the Sleeper (Sloper), and the Dreamer (Dromer).
"In their long dialog with the sea the Dutch have learned that it cannot be stopped but merely redirected or tempered, and so they have always selected flexible construction." --pp. 7
He talks of Dutch dikes being made out of mats of twigs laid on coarses of sand and clay, which are then armored by masonry. (Is this still the case today?) This is in contrast to concrete walls, which are eventually undercut by the sea.
Spinal roads along dune developments run parallel to the sea, along the backdune of the secondary dune. (pp 15)
"In creating works like an artificial dune to support a highway, it is important that the sand be withdrawn from the ocean and not from the bay. The beach is not a very rich [productive] environment while the bay is the very richest."
"The silts of the bayshore are unsuitable for septic tanks...
--pp. 14
This suggests a broad outline of ecological analysis toward development in dune environments. These pages have good diagrams of basic dune formations and plant communities. Suggestions for proper plantings, mimicking what happens in nature over longer periods, are made.
The Plight
"...that most complete conjunction of land rapacity and human disillusion, the subdivision. It is all but impossible to avoid the highway out of town, for here, arrayed in all its glory, is the quintessence of vulgarity, bedecked to give the maximum visibility to the least of our "
"You will drive on an expressway, a clumsy concrete form, untouched by either humanity or art, testament to the sad illusion that there can be a solution for the unbridled automobile." --pp. 21
"You can tell when you have reached the edge of the countryside for there are many emblems --cadavers of old trees piled in untidy heaps at the edge of the razed deserts, the magnificent machines for land despoilation, for felling forests, filling marshes, culverting streams, and sterilizing farmland, make thick brown sediments of the creeks."
In this countryside... the "greed belt... where the farmer sells land rather than crops, where the developer takes the public resource of the city's hinterland and subdivides to create a private profit and a public cost
"Certainly here is the area where public powers are weakest --either absent or elastic-- where the future costs of streets, sidewalks and sewers, schools, police and fire protection are unspoken." --pp. 22
Compare this to Hal Rothman's chapter on the rampant development in Las Vegas subdivisions.
A Step Forward
"The highway is a particularly appropriate study. If one seeks a single example of an assertion of simple-minded single purpose, the analytical rather the synthetic view and indifference to natural process --indeed an anti-ecological view-- the the highway and its creators leap to mind. There are other aspirants who vie to deface shrines and desecrate sacred cows, but surely it is the highway commissioner and engineer who most passionately embrace insensitivity and philistinism as away of life and profession." --pp. 31
The opening paragraphs of this chapter are wonderfully polemical... worth a thorough read. Talks about Bronx River Parkway not only to move people but as "an ameliorative device to improve the landscape" of the foul river.
Parkway versus Interstates and other highways. Worth more exploration. Parkway perhaps have more landscape architects involved?
Page 32 speaks of new values to add to the old ones of highway construction. These are additional social and ecological values.
"It is clear that the higway route should be considered a multipurpose rather than a single-purpose facility." --pp. 32
Nature in the Metropolis
Pages 58 to 63 summarize appropriate land uses considering natural features (aquifers, marshes, floodplains, forests, etc.)
class discussion
begins with the simple, elegant methodology of walking, observations, affective measurement.
early chapters set up a sensitivity to subtle cues. then he rationalizes them scientifically (see description of dune system).
approach is half scientific method and half values
- cultural values
- biological values
- economic values
layer cake approach to describing landscapes (involving layers of transparencies, see pp. 36)... a predescessor to GIS.
Shu-Mei's presentation
John T. Lyle (1991) Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms?
Anne W. Spirn (1984) The Granite Garden.
(also The Language of Landscape.)jkl
- Spirn was famous as photographer
- "city is a granite garden, composed of smaller gardens, set in a garden world"
- "the city is part of nature through transformation"
- continually evolving
- must be cultivated
a spectrum of built environments:
- low impact
- sustainable
- regenerative
