ADAPTATION, MUTATION, AND SPECIATION IN CHICAGO

The evolution of cities occurs at all scales, from the tiniest urban gesture to the grandest of plans.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chicago.

After the Chicago Fire of 1871, when the first-growth city was destroyed, the city reacted to the trauma with a burst of creativity that virtually invented modern America.  New building species emerged, most notably the skyscraper, which was pioneered there during a building boom that coincided with the arrival of steel construction and the invention of the elevator and the telephone.  While the skyscraper genus quickly spread to New York, it underwent an intriguing evolution in Chicago with architects attempting to render it the various styles of the day.  Thus from the Tacoma Building to the Reliance Building to the Guarantee to Carson Pirie Scott, and to the Chicago Board of Trade, the skyscraper tried on a succession of eclectic styles, from Richardsonian Romanesque, to Gothic, to Beaux Arts classical, to the iconoclasm of Louis Sullivan, settling comfortably on Art Deco as what, for me, is its defining style.  That is, until Mies came along and reinvented it once again, initiating a wave of skyscraper cultivars that continues to this day.

But Chicago is also known for the efforts to plan the city.  Since the Great Fire, Chicago has never stopped reimagining itself with a series of grand schemes, the most famous, of course, from Burnham and Bennett, whose plan for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the one plan of so many proposed following the Chicago Fire to be realized.  The more recent Millennium Park comes out of this tradition.  A public/private partnership, it took longer and cost far more than had been anticipated, yet it has drawn an unprecedented amount of tourists and, with art and architecture by Anish Kapoor, Renzo Piano, and Frank Gehry, has cemented Chicago’s already solid reputation as a cultural capital.  

Of course, it was Daniel Burnham, whose handiwork can bee seen everywhere in Chicago, who famously declared, “make no small plans.”  But it is precisely in these smaller plans that Chicago is readying for the future.  “Cities adapt or they go away,” is what Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment said in a recent New York Times article describing plans for the city to adjust to the inevitable climate change on the horizon.  The city is taking steps to prepare for hotter, wetter weather.  That means devising ways to deal with stormwater with permeable paving and changing the urban plant palette toward more heat tolerant varieties.  This also means taking the city in a more sustainable direction, working on an electric car infrastructure, a network of bike paths, reduction of paved areas to reduce the heat-island effect, and moving the city to zero waste through aggressive recycling.  Such measures are part of a strategy of urban adaptation that Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment describes in the same New York Times article as “a constant ongoing process to make sure we are as resilient as we can be in facing the future.”

New York Times article

This is how the evolution of cities proceeds: not through the simple mechanics of Darwinian capitalism naturally selecting certain forms, nor merely the result of good planning, but an interaction of these and other less-obvious forces.  Cities like Chicago constantly reshape themselves – from a treasured landmark adapting to a new use, to the mutation of known building species in reaction to altered conditions; from the birth of a totally new building genus that forever transforms the city, to a simple change in paving.  Urban Successionism is the endless struggle to remain vital in an increasingly competitive global economy.

BEYOND URBAN SUCCESSIONISM

Classification of building species proceeds much in the same way as it does for plants or animals.  Differentiation between the species must be definite, yet must be open enough to allow for a degree of variation within the species.  If all dogs are the same species, for example, how are the different breeds distinguished from one another.  The use of a simple differentia following the genus and species name could solve this:

A Proposed Taxonomy for Building Species:

KINGDOM
        Plants
        Animals
        Matter           

PHYLUM                                                           

        Gas

        Liquid

        Solid

CLASS
        Natural

        Manmade

ORDER
        Infrastructure
        Architecture
        Objects

FAMILY
        Residential

        Retail

        Office

        Institutional

        Civic

        Cultural

        Educational

        Recreational

        Health Care

GENUS

        Domus

SPECIES
        casestudiana

DIFFERENTIA

        “Craig Ellwood”

                                                                                      

Thus the house pictured above, Case Study House #16 by Craig Ellwood, could be called:

Domus casestudiana "Craig Ellwood"

The task of identifying and naming the various native and non-native building species in a  city like Los Angeles is fairly daunting.   Yet when approached from the perspective of Urban Successionism as outlined in my previous post, such an effort could result in a history of the city told in its buildings, making it visceral, alive, relevant.

Coming Soon:

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOS ANGELES (www.afgala.org)

A CITY IS NOT A FOREST: 
URBAN SUCCESSIONISM AND THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

Taking the idea of Green Architecture to its logical conclusion – the city as an semi-autonomous ecosystem – gives us another way to think about urbanism. But how does an urban ecosystem function? How does it come into being, grow, evolve?

SUCCESSIONISM IN FORESTS

An ecosystem just doesn’t emerge fully formed overnight. In a forest, for example there is a distinct process that occurs, something known as the succession pathway: First, nudation, which could occur, say, after a glacier has exposed a raw granite in a canyon such as in Yosemite. Next is the migration and arrival of propagates, then rooting and initial growth, then competition of species, which, for a given set of conditions leads to a climax community, a mix of species that achieves a fairly stable equilibrium. Such an equilibrium usually remains in place until the conditions change, either slowly or due to trauma. When the change is slow, the equilibrium shifts to adapt; when the change is sudden and/or catastrophic as in a fire or ice age, a sort of nudation occurs and the cycle begins anew with a succession of plants more suited to the altered condition.

SUCCESSIONISM IN CITIES

In cities, the succession pathway would also occur, in an albeit modified way: nudation would describe the raw land prior to the arrival of humans; the migration and arrival of propagates would refer to the first settlers, who would accomplish rooting and initial growth of the city by erecting non-native buildings according to their own traditions. Competition of building species would begin upon arrival of subsequent settlers who would erect their own non-native buildings as needed; a succession of species would take turns being dominant; this pattern would continue through waves of growth until reaching, for a given set of conditions, a fairly stable equilibrium consisting of mix of species with one or more achieving dominance. As with forests, such an equilibrium would remain in place until the conditions change, either slowly or due to trauma. When the change is slow, the equilibrium shifts to adapt; when the change is sudden and catastrophic as in a fire, earthquake, or economic crisis, a sort of nudation occurs and the cycle begins anew with a succession of species more suited to the new conditions.

EVOLUTION IN FORESTS

A forest has a variety of ways it can adapt to changing conditions. Successionism favors contingency over climax, meaning that a climax community is most often transitory, that a state of constant adaptation is more the norm, as environmental conditions continually shift. Evolution occurs at the level of the individual and at the level of species, where, through natural selection, good traits persist across generations and where innovations introduced by new variants are also rewarded. Desire to thrive propels individuals and species to adapt or die. New species are formed once this adaptation passes a certain threshold. And when it comes to the survival of the forest itself, there is an additional tool: the ability of the ecosystem itself to mutate to create the optimum mix of species for the forest to endure.

EVOLUTION IN CITIES

Cities are like forests in that adaptation to changing conditions is driven by a desire to thrive: most development occurs out of an attempt to meet a present need. The city also has many tools it can use to adapt. Building owners can alter individual structures to meet their needs; or they can build a new mutation of an existing species, one with adjustments that more closely match what they want; or they can develop an entirely new species.

Cities are not like forests in that conscious human intervention often directs the process. The evolution of cities is moderated by pressures not present in forests, social forces looking both forward and backward: Planning, a force driven by a hope of what city might become, tries to anticipate and shape future development, while Preservation, a force driven by the memory of what once was, attempts to protect the city from further change. In most cities both these forces work in various degrees to temper the mechanics of what a pure Darwinian capitalism might wreak, often simultaneously encouraging and discouraging new species from taking root.

URBAN ECOSYSTEMS

For cities, the establishment of propagates, successive dominations, fugitive equilibria, traumas, and rebirths occur over and over again with a climax state remaining ever elusive. This is because unlike forests whose ecosystems are driven by Ecology – which is always seeking equilibrium – the ecosystems of cities are driven by Economy, which is always seeking expansion. For a city to survive it must continue to grow. This requires a climate conducive to growth, when both a robust economy and the political will converge. This means growth occurs during times of economic expansion, often after trauma – Fires, Floods, Earthquakes, War, Depressions, Recessions, etc. – mobilizes a city to rebuild itself. In fact, Post-Traumatic Stress is a fertile time for cities, when more new species are created and established; but propagation relies on economic expansion to make it possible.

URBAN SUCCESSIONISM IN LOS ANGELES

Could this be why cities look the way they do? Because they reflect the styles in vogue during times of greatest economic expansion – why Paris is so dominated by Hausmann era apartment blocks or San Francisco is so Victorian? Or why the Inland Empire looks the way it does? Clearly there are other factors involved; but looking at successive dominant species does make cities more legible. Los Angeles, which at first glance appears quite incomprehensible, seems to undergo a major shift every 30 years; tying its architecture to its economic cycles helps to bring the city into focus.

Pre-1885

In the beginning, the first settlers – the Tongva – seem to have built no permanent structures in the village of Yangna near downtown. Instead they famously gathered around what was later termed El Alisal, a massive Sycamore located on a spit of land now sandwiched between on and off ramps for the southbound 101. During the Spanish and Mexican periods, the architecture was Spanish Colonial. Later, as the economy shifted from the missions to cattle ranching, the architecture remained simple, mostly adobe structures.

1885-1915

When the railroad reached Los Angeles, the first real estate boom hit the city and the new buildings reflected this, reshaping what had been a sleepy Spanish-speaking outpost into a growing Victorian metropolis. As more and more people flocked to Southern California for the healing effects of its weather, people like the Greene brothers adapted the forward-thinking yet non-native Arts & Crafts movement to create a new California variant that propagated, mostly as bungalows, across Southern California through the first World War.

1915-1945

The rise of the oil economy, increased car use, and the birth of Hollywood further accelerated the growth of the city. The dominant species between the wars were the adapted non-native period work of architects such as Wallace Neff, Gordon Kaufmann, and Paul Williams in the private realm, while the public realm favored the art deco style found in ferro-concrete infrastructure throughout the city.

1945-1975

Coming out of World War II, a new real-estate boom, propelled by the surging aerospace industry, swelled the city and a fascination for the future fueled an explosion of new building species. Following the earlier adapted non-native strains of Modernism from Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, new home-grown hybrids were developed by efforts such as the Case Study program and propagated by a housing industry hungry for new product.

It was also during this period that the most significant transformation of Los Angeles took place in the many ways it adapted to the ongoing trauma caused by that most invasive of pests – the car. Not only did these adaptations change the way the city looked, but the auto itself changed the way we lived, steadily diminishing the public realm while expanding private one. Though the process began when the car was first introduced, it was during the post-war period that the most massive concession – the system of freeways that first disrupted then later defined the city, was constructed.

The car induced trauma indirectly as well. Allowing freedom of movement throughout the city, the car eliminated the need for intra-urban rail, which had created a matrix of villages across the city. It incentivized real estate developers to fill in between the villages, which erased boundaries and made inevitable the annexation of those villages into a single, massive urban ecosystem.

1975-2005

Following the malaise of the post-Vietnam era, the new species that emerged were mostly a postmodern mess. The era that spanned approximately from1975 to 2005 produced such unprecedented hybrid species as the McMansion, the minimall, and the Alameda Corridor; however it also witnessed the birth of more compelling hybrid species from Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, and Morphosis.

2005-Beyond

Based on our past, it appears we alternate every thirty years from a forward to a backward-looking trend in species making. Where does that put us today? Even though we see the unfortunate propagation of apartment mega-complexes like the Medici and the Orsini – invasive non-natives, adapted, it seems from similar such apartment communities in Orange County – I have the hope that a new green economy will pull us, through technological innovation and force of will, toward embracing the future once again.

CITIES AS ECOSYSTEMS

In order to allow ourselves to view cities as ecosystems, we actually have to shift they way we think about our role in the world – not as separate from nature, but as part of it. The question is, how to balance Ecology and Economy to reach an equilibrium in which both are sustainable? We need to think holistically about villages, cities, and regions that function somewhat self-sufficiently on their own, yet operate more significantly as linked elements in ever larger ecosystems.

Studying cities as ecosystems places architecture in a context that is larger than traditional histories of architecture seem to consider. While this appears to remove architects from a central role in the shaping of cities, it actually frees us up. Like mad scientists working in remote labs concocting cures for unimaginable diseases, architects are at the forefront of imagining new species to adapt to present and future conditions. If you want to get excited about the future, just walk through an advanced studio in any one of the several architecture schools in Southern California. We may not have an economy to build these emerging visions just yet, but when we do, we’ll have plenty of interesting options.

GREEN AND GREENER

Last week, after a closed door meeting with members of the City Council, a stop-work order was lifted for a solar array under construction on a hillside in Northeast Los Angeles. The project, a 429 megawatt photo-voltaic system for a 53-bed nursing home adjacent to Debs Park, polarized residents in the surrounding communities: some decried the desecration of a pristine hillside, others questioned the wisdom of placing such an array in a High Fire Severity Zone; still others saw the uproar as blatant nimbyism.

On the surface, the law seems to favor this last group. The California Solar Rights Act of 1978 and its subsequent amendments, does not allow any governing body to block new solar projects with unreasonable regulation and requires that permits be obtained through an administrative not discretionary process. This means that solar panels can be placed just about anywhere without restriction and without public review. Here in Los Angeles, it’s about the same as getting an electrical permit.

By this standard, the nursing home did everything right. They wanted to be smart about energy costs and they wanted to be green. I really believe that their hearts were in the right place; but I also believe they were hoodwinked the company they picked to install the array. When these guys caught a glimpse of the several-acre open hillside above the nursing home, just there for the taking, I believe they steered their client away from the more difficult task of mounting the PV panels to the buildings and urged them to take advantage of the slope.

There’s green, and there’s green. I think by sizing the array far beyond what could be considered reasonable in anything zoned R-1 Residential, these guys were targeting the soon-to-expire rebates offered by the state – the larger the array, the bigger the rebates – and then the bigger payoff down the line: the nursing home does not own the array, it leases it, so the installers reap the benefits of the power the array generates in perpetuity. As the cost of power goes up, they make more money.

Is this the green economy everyone keeps talking about? Another opportunity for savvy entrepreneurs to make a few bucks in the guise of doing good? Sure, some would say, why not? Green is green; who does it hurt? I think it hurts all of us. Green should be about the big picture, certainly, but it should also be about livable places. I think any solar ordinance for Los Angeles should accommodate how a community chooses to builds itself. Things like the Northeast Hillside Ordinance allow us as citizens to participate, to feel we actually have a stake in shaping our neighborhood. How else are we to establish an emotional commitment to a place?

In our area, this particular corner of Northeast Los Angeles, along the banks of the Arroyo Seco, we want green everything – solar power, wastewater polishing, transit oriented development – but we also want to protect our environment. The bottom line is this: You can put solar panels anywhere; but how can you ever replace open space?

THE BIPOLAR PARKWAY

The recent work on the Pasadena Freeway has been an exercise in contradictions – a beautification that actually renders the scenic byway less beautiful; safety barriers that make the road less safe; and a nod to local history that insults Arroyo Seco culture by reducing its significance to bland, ill-conceived motifs dreamt up in Sacramento and stamped in concrete to last an eternity.

The $17 million project started just as the six-mile stretch of freeway received both landmark designation and a new/old name to go with it. The “Arroyo Seco Parkway,” has, in the course of its renovation, lost many of the elements that made it, the first “freeway” in America, so groundbreaking – the innovative curb and gutter system, the classic wood and steel safety barriers, and the compound curves built for speed (a lightning-fast 45 miles-per-hour); actually the curves will remain. What won’t are the vistas to the series of sycamore-filled parks that line alternating sides of the highway as well as into the Arroyo Seco channel itself.

In place of all this, drivers will be treated to new decorative elements courtesy of CalTrans – concrete side barriers stamped with a pattern attempting to mimic either the rubble walls that characterize the Craftsman homes along the Arroyo or the broken concrete walls that first adorned the route; “historic” lighting that bears no relation to any of the fixtures anywhere in Northeast Los Angeles despite their cloying faux-traditional look (and which, when suspended one hundred feet in the air, look pathetically inadequate); and a concrete center divider stamped with a bizarre design motif of alternating arches intended, apparently, to reference the bed of the channel on the one hand and the parabolic arches of the several overpasses on the other. Some call it the Happy-Sad Highway; I prefer the Bipolar Parkway.

I guess the most irritating thing about the whole exercise is the implication of community input. This is CalTrans: there was none. They took it upon themselves to tell us what we’re about. I say, don’t bother. If you’re going to “restore” the parkway, then really do it – go back to the original drawings and put it back to the way it really was, down to the smallest detail. If you can't do that, then do what you do best – simple clean lines, the latest technology, the most current light fixtures. Anything in between is at best pastiche and at worst a slap in the face.

The Massive Media

Architecture is a massive medium, it communicates what those who build it value most – their hopes, desires, aspirations. In the same way, infrastructure conveys what is important to a given society.

In Los Angeles we think of infrastructure as something that purely addresses our functional needs. But what we build, where we build, and how we build it speaks volumes about what we hold dear.

Most of our infrastructure is invisible to us. Our utilities are primarily underground; where they make their appearance – as telephone poles, electrical transmission lines, cell sites – we have become accustomed to them, their undeniable ugliness becoming the banal background to our lives. But when they require a more physical presence – as buildings, bridges, tunnels, water channels, freeways – we need to understand the message we are conveying.

In 1958 the California Division of Highways released “The California Freeway System” a 37-page document that Kevin Starr characterized as a “quasi-utopian” vision of the state’s future. It proposed a dense network of highways that would make travel through the state efficient, even pleasurable. One of the highways proposed was what would become State Route 710, a link between Long Beach and Pasadena. Most of the freeway was built, but its progress was halted when the citizens of South Pasadena rose up to protest the inevitable destruction of its city which lay in the road’s intended path. The threat of closing the resulting “gap” – which extended from the end of the 710 in Alhambra and the 210 in Pasadena – was very real until the EIR supporting the project was decertified in 2004.

Recently, a movement to “close the gap” has returned, this time with the option of taking the freeway underground, with a handful of alternate alignments. The motivations are murky: certainly the city of Alhambra would like to resolve the issue of traffic – the dispersal of commuters from the end of the 710 to their homes in the surrounding cities – but a less expensive low-build alternative could take care of this; in addition, the need to transport freight from the port of Long Beach to the northern half of the state – a closed gap would divert truck traffic away from the already congested Interstate 5 – begs the question: are trucks the best way to accomplish this, especially with rising fuel prices? Certainly a rail alternative should be explored.

A yet more sinister motivation is also possible – an opportunistic seizing of government funds, made available through Measure R as well as the Federal Stimulus Package. The website for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority shows a commitment of $780 million dollars for such a project, which would include partial funding by a public/private partnership that would no doubt demand a toll for travel through the proposed tunnel. This would be a boondoggle of epic proportions whenever it was introduced; but now, in this economy?

Whatever the reason for the sudden reemergence of the 710 gap issue, the response must be the same: absolute rejection. We are not the same city we were in 1958; the myth of flow – that more lanes will make our lives batter, is part of an outmoded way of thinking that we cannot seem to shake. Clearly more lanes means more cars, more trucks – and more pollution. If indeed we require an expansion of capacity to facilitate movement from our ports to the rest of the country, why can’t we look at all our options instead of resorting to the kneejerk response of more traffic lanes. Especially if we are to become the model of sustainability that Mayor Villaraigosa imagines for our future.

In psychology they call this repetition compulsion. We keep choosing the same things because they are familiar, even comfortable. Even if we know it is unhealthy. Even if we want to change. But the fact remains: we are what we build. We say we want to be green but our actions reveal our true character. We need behavior modification – if we are to become what we want, we have to change what we do.

Let’s begin by abandoning the now antiquated promise of a freeway paradise, what Reyner Banham called “Autopia,” and embrace the more complicated challenges that confront a maturing metropolis: housing, healthcare, and mass transit. Rather than passively allowing the city to build itself, which reflects negative values – laziness, complacency, alienation – why can’t we build the city that reflects values that we want to project – things like energy, connectivity, community – and use the massive media of architecture and infrastructure to lead us to a more sustainable future?

The Brown Room

Rumor has it that when, sometime on the late 70s, a certain publisher of a major Los Angeles newspaper was chairing a meeting in the company boardroom, a young intern entered the room quickly and whispered something in his ear. “Surf’s Up” was all the publisher needed to end the gathering abruptly, sprint downstairs, and head due west from Downtown L.A. to a private men’s club right on the beach in Santa Monica.

But the publisher soon learned the surf was not the only thing that was up that smoggy summer day in the late 70s. The waves had a distinctively brown hue, a fact that the publisher noted when he found himself, less than an hour after hearing those fateful words uttered, surfing within the curl of an unusually large wave. Commonly referred to as “The Green Room,” the publisher cringed at the thought of being swallowed by what was instead something quite a bit browner; he managed to propel himself out just before the wave came to its crashing conclusion. Word on the sand was that this discoloration of the sea was due either to the unusually rough surf or a robust colony of phytoplankton that visits the beaches of Southern California every year and turns the waves a reddish brown. However, later that evening, as he sipped a draft beer at a table overlooking the surf, the absence of phosphorescence that accompanies such “red tides” disquieted the publisher. And when  an ear infection established itself over the next few days, the conclusion was inescapable: there was shit in that thar sea.

Even before the founding of the city in 1781, wastewater from the small Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles was conveyed from the center of town to the Los Angeles River to the ocean. In 1892, the city purchased 200 acres of oceanfront property near the mouth of the L.A. River, which at that point was just north of Playa del Rey, what is now Ballona Creek. From 1894 until 1925, raw sewage was discharged directly into ocean waters just a few hundred yards from the breaking surf.

In the 1920s, after public outcry from residents and visitors to the beaches of Santa Monica Bay, the city of Los Angeles built the first facility at the Hyperion site a mile south of the LA River which was a simple screening plant separating liquids from solids. During World War II, several miles of beach in front of the plant were quarantined because of near-shore discharge of what was still essentially raw sewage.

After the war, plans for a full secondary treatment plant at the Hyperion site were developed, eventually funded, and built. When the new Hyperion Treatment Plant opened in 1950, it included full secondary treatment that processed biosolids into heat-dried fertilizer, using anaerobic digesters to produce methane. And although it was one of the most modern facilities in the world, it could not keep up with the pace of growth throughout the region. By 1957, the new plant stopped its biosolids-to-fertilizer program and began discharging digested sludge into the Bay through a separate seven-mile ocean outfall. In time this discharge grew to 25 million pounds of wastewater solids per month and it this constant river of under-treated sewage began to take its toll on the marine life in Santa Monica Bay. Samples of the ocean floor where sludge had been discharged for 30 years demonstrated that the only living creatures were worms and certain hardy species of clam.

But it wasn’t until surfers like our newspaper publisher started complaining of sinusitis, eye and ear infections, and a variety gastrointestinal illnesses that the general population began to take serious notice. In 1985, the group Heal-The-Bay was formed by activist Dorothy Green to address the declining state of water quality in the bay. She marshaled enough support to file a lawsuit which resulted in a consent decree in which the city of Los Angeles agreed to comply with the Clean Water Act of 1972.

To meet the requirements of that landmark act, the city of Los Angeles launched a construction program costing almost 1.5 billion dollars to totally upgrade the facilities at the Hyperion Treatment Plant. The goal was to stop the flow of sewage into the Santa Monica Bay. The mechanics of the treatment process are as follows: Coming from residential, commercial and industrial sources throughout the Los Angeles Basin, raw sewage enters the Hyperion Treatment Plant where it first encounters the Headworks which act as a primary filter, removing larger debris such as bottles, cans, sticks, etc. Rocks and sand are then filtered next in Sedimentation Tanks. This collateral material is then cleaned and trucked to landfills on a daily basis. The wastewater continues onto Primary Treatment, which are underground tanks the size of football fields where chemicals are added to help the settle solid matter.

After oil and grease are skimmed off the top the solid waste is separated from the liquid waste and sent to Digesters. The liquid waste then goes onto Secondary Treatment where virtually pure oxygen and tons of microorganisms are pumped in to consume whatever organic material is left after Primary Treatment. When the feeding frenzy is finished, the wastewater is directed to Clarifying Tanks where it is allowed to sit for the several hours it takes for the microorganisms to settle to the bottom. Once this happens 90-95% of solid material has been extracted from the wastewater, which makes it clean enough to be discharged into the Santa Monica Bay at a point 5 miles out to sea, at close to 200 feet below the surface. A portion of the micro-organic solids gathered at the bottom of the Clarifying Tanks are then sent to the Digesters where they rejoin those solids extracted in Primary Treatment, while the rest are reintroduced into Secondary Treatment to begin work on the next batch of wastewater.

It’s in the Digesters that the most interesting action takes place. The solids extracted during Primary and Secondary Treatments are pumped into giant egg-shaped tanks where they sit, without oxygen, for fifteen days. This is where certain bacteria and other microorganisms thrive, consuming up to half of the biosolids, killing disease-causing pathogens such as giardia and hepatitus, and releasing methane, which is then itself harvested to power the system.

The remaining biosolids are then run through a centerfuge to remove as much water content as possible. With the treatment process now complete, the biosolids now have the consistency of toothpaste and are ready for their final destination, whatever that may be.

In 1987 when this treatment process was up and running, biosludge from Hyperion stopped flowing into the ocean. As a result, life returned to the Santa Monica Bay – fish populations restored themselves, kelp beds regrew; and surfers returned, this time without biohazard wetsuits. And except for the occasional equipment breakdown or the periodic flushing of storm drains that comes with the more substantial rains, the Santa Monica Bay remains essentially bacteria free. With the Santa Monica Bay now clean, the city of Los Angeles faced a new dilemma: what to do with an ever-increasing backlog of biosolids. Before 1987, biosolids were dispersed directly into in the ocean. Compliance with the consent decree mandated that the city cease this operation. With options running out, the city fell back on an old solution: stuffing landfills with biosludge. But in 1989, after even this provoked public outcry, the Bureau of Sanitation launched a “beneficial reuse program” that offered the ”humanure” to any and all who were interested. The hope was that the agricultural interests in the counties surrounding Los Angeles would leap at the chance to have virtually free fertilizer. But oddly enough, it has proven to be a hard sell. So the city of Los Angeles turned to the 4200-acre Green Acres Bio-Farm it owns in Kern County where approximately 97% of biosolids are now land applied.

Unsurprisingly, Kern County has found the prospect of spreading human waste over its fields distasteful and has attempted to enact a ban on it, citing presumed health concerns. At first upheld by a Kern County Court, the ban is currently on hold, pending further studies. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stands behind the program, calling biosolids the ultimate Renewable Resource. Undaunted by the criticism of this program he has gone on to embrace another plan that proposes to pump biosolids into depleted oil fields a mile below the city’s Terminal Island Treatment Plant. He calls the process, which will produce enough methane to power energy to 3000 homes, an example of how he plans to make Los Angeles the greenest city in America.

Long after he recovered from his ear infection, our newspaper publisher decided to end his quarter-century reign over the paper and move up north. Part of this was due to his pending divorce, part due to endless acrimony within the family-owned business; but - rumor has it - a large reason for the move was the fact that, despite his best efforts to transform Los Angeles into something resembling a metropolis, he saw the city decomposing, degrading, falling apart: its skies a thick yellowing haze; its people depressed, malaisestricken; its seas ripe with sewage, ebbing and flowing, dying.

Fortunately, our mayor seems to be more optimistic, seeing beyond our brown past to a green future.

The House Whisperer

When called in to renovate a house, you as the architect are interviewing the potential clients as much as they are assessing you. There are several items to note: if interviewing a couple, who is asking the questions? Who seems to have the vision for the project? Who would rather be undergoing a colonoscopy without anesthesia than sitting here with you? You will learn there are many reasons why people hire an architect, but two really stand out above all others.

1. An architectural modification is necessary.
This occurs when there is a dramatic change in the family structure, such as the initial purchase of the house or when children make their imminent arrival known. In the latter case you will always be asked if the house can be ready before the baby arrives. This is always a dicey situation. You want to say yes, but there is so much that is beyond your control that, if you are being honest with yourself, you have to say no. But you need the job, so you rationalize saying yes by assuming the best of all possible scenarios will happen simultaneously, that for instance, you will be able to finalize all decision-making in one month, that it will take another month to do the drawings, a month to get the permit and the contractor on board, and that all the construction will take less than six months. Which would mean you would have to start work the moment the baby is conceived, which could be awkward for all parties involved. In any case this is an example of when a true lack of space must be addressed.

2. A relationship needs healing.
This occurs when a couple can no longer tolerate a particular spatial relationship with one another. For whatever reason, something has soured between them and they imagine the easy fix to be an alteration of their physical environment. Unless you are a scholar of the human psyche, you are in a lose-lose situation. If you listen to one half of the couple the other half feels left out and can never quite get behind the project. If you try to appease both of them, they gang up on you. If you need the money and can handle the abuse, obviously take the job; however if you have the means to avoid the project, do so.

Often both sorts of House Whispering need to take place. The wisest course of action during design meetings is to deflect the conversation away from the personal needs to the physical. When issues of snoring or foot odor come up, turn the conversation to the office/den off the master that could double as a guest room if necessary. Truth is, who’d want a guest that close? But you should always strive to address the problem without embarrassing the offending partner.

3. Your career comes first.
There is another option when all else fails. This is the opposite of House Whispering. This is when you ignore everything that the space and the clients are telling you and listen only to the voice in your head. This is when you force your will upon the couple. They hired you for a reason, right? Clearly they want you to design a space in your style. So you exploit this. You design whatever you want and make them pay for it. Oh sure, you may have to divert them with grand theories and intimidating concepts and suggest that if they don’t quite comprehend to just trust you to deliver what they need. At first they will be relieved -- they will be happy the burden of decision-making has been removed. They won’t really have a sense of what you did until far after they’ve moved in and paid all their invoices; and when they wake up several months down the line and realize they hate what you’ve done, you’re long gone, having settled into a new project or two with new sets of clients to snow.

However, in this New Economy, I’d try House Whispering first.

California Cooler

Last night I had a dream I was stuck in a basement. When I climbed up the stairs I was in the attic. Where was the house? I wondered. Then I realized that this was the house; that architects and real estate developers have spent fifty years ignoring basements and attics to get more bang for the buck in their buildings; that maybe we should return to an architecture of basements and attics if only for the green benefits.

Instead of designing just living space and throwing an oversized HVAC system to regulate heat gain and air flow, etc., we should consider an architecture that connects to the earth and reaches to the sky. We should look at that remarkable produce storage mechanism that relies solely on the passage of air from the basement to the attic, the California Cooler, a staple in the California Bungalow of the early 20th century.

People lived for years without the benefit of air-conditioning; if we could employ a few time-tested passive means to achieving energy efficiency in our buildings, perhaps we wouldn’t need to overload the grid with electricity demand. We could save energy costs and improve the quality of indoor air at the same time, never mind the added storage space.

What could be cooler than that?

Good People, Bad People

Part 1 Building Our House

In building our house we found ourselves dividing up the subcontractors into the good ones and the bad ones. Rarely was anyone merely competent.

THE GOOD PEOPLE, in order of appearance were:

Tom Courtney
Having worked with him before I knew he was the contractor of choice. And although he warned us that our plans were too ambitious, we still thought we could afford him. Until we got his first bill and realized we couldn’t. To help us out Tom graciously offered up his subs with whom we would be contracting directly, which saved a ton of money. But without Tom’s pull, some of them were less motivated to perform well job (see “Bad People“ below).

Guy Thomas
This man is definitely the dirt whisperer. He spent months grading, benching the slope, over-excavating and recompacting, etc., to make this project work. The only problem was we had no idea all this work was necessary when we embarked on this project. In the bid breakdown, we had allotted only a fraction of what it ultimately cost to do this work. Which put us upside-down with our budget even before the foundations were poured. Still, I count him as a good guy because he was pleasant to work with and truly tamed our site.

John Ecker
A master concrete guy.

Dick Marriott
A quick framer, fairly priced, though it was difficult to get him to come out do the finish work at the end.

Michael Sandford
Pan Pacific Metals did a great job with the metal siding.

Steve Malsbury
In addition to the gutters and downspouts, this guy formed, by hand, the metal eaves as well.

Rick Pycz
This mason did such a great job with the fireplace that the inspector was impressed enough to ignore the fact that Rick did not insert the 5’-0” high bond beam that is usually required by the city.

Brad Spolar
A tile specialist borrowed from Pae’s mother, Brad even indulged Pae’s desire for red grout in the Guest Bath, to great effect.

The Stainless Steel Guy
I can’t remember his name, but he was good.

Max Macias
We felt very lucky to find Max to do our drywall. Not only did he live up to his promise to deliver walls “as smooth as a baby’s butt,” but he managed to work out the complicated geometries of our entry hall.

Mary Sargent
After suffering through a series of not-so-great painters, we went with Max’s recommendation. She proved to be knowledgeable as well as skillful, and was able to help us determine which colors would work best in which rooms.

Alan Myers
The man who came in and corrected all the mistakes of the bad electricians (see below).

THE BAD PEOPLE

Live Wire Electric
These guys were nothing but trouble. Since we’ve lived here, we’ve had to have other electricians come in a fix their mistakes – receptacles shorting out, sloppily installed switches, ungrounded fixtures, etc. The problem with these guys is that they were clearly irritated that Tom Courtney sent them over here, away from their usual Pasadena/San Marino/La Canada territory, into the hood. They were contemptuous from the start but the problems really started happening when they lost the plans that I went over with the only bright spot in their company, Mike. Even he was flabbergasted that the plans had disappeared; but at some point they refused to send him over because, since he was the only guy with brains in the outfit, he was needed on the big money projects that the rest of the company must have been screwing up without him. And then, the coup de grace, the undergrounding of the power line. They brought in their own grading guy who, unlike Guy Thomas, was as moronic as they were and did not excavate all the way to the power pole. So it took weeks of begging, pleading, and finally threatening him to come out and complete his work. Then, once the trench was dug and the power line in, Live Wire was supposed to embed it for most of its length in concrete. Which they came out to do. But the idiots did not bring enough concrete so there was a twelve foot gap that, again, required weeks of phone calls to get resolved before the inspector could sign off on it so we could get our C of O before the deadline that IndyMac bank had set for us. Again, begging, pleading, threatening. I just don’t think the head guy over at Live Wire would believe that his people could make such a huge mistake. Finally Tom Courtney had to lay down the law and they finished the job. What a nightmare.

Marrone Plumbing
Again, this was a case of a few lousy workers leaving a really bad taste in my mouth. They had no problem hacking away at our cabinetry to put the plumbing through, leaving us scant shelf space under our kitchen sink. They redeemed themselves by sending in the guy with brains at the end.

Quality Craft Cabinets
Here’s a rule: if they use the word “quality” in their name, they’re anything but. These guys were by far the low bidders but that’s no excuse. Their workmanship was terrible. We had to have them come out two or three times just to adequately reinforce the drawers, some of which are still sagging, one of which won’t remain shut. They won’t even return our calls anymore, even when we call under pretense of more work.

Joe’s Quality Painting
Again with the quality? (see above) This guy gave us a good bid then proceeded to encourage us to go with a “time and materials” contract. “Sometimes it works out better for me, sometimes it works out better for you,” he said. Right. Never again. He did lousy work then charged us way too much. Then his workers came early one morning, took their compressor, and then claimed someone stole it. Then Joe wanted us to split the cost of a new compressor which I agreed to until I realized it was another scam.

Jordan Air
Another case of a sub upset at having to do a favor for Tom Courtney. Not only were the units undersized, but the vents were practically useless. We’ve had to hire a series of HVAC guys to come in and piece together a system that actually works for us. What really pissed me off about the workers at Jordan Air (I think one was Howard Jordan’s son) was that they took a hammer to the corrugated metal siding to make the condensers fit. Morons.

Jack Ruttan
I don’t know how we would have gotten our windows in without Jack, but he was so personally offensive, especially to any Mexican within earshot, that we had to get rid of him. We thought it was good timing, after he had installed all the really heavy aluminum windows; however, he had not put in the flashing yet, and we’re still suffering for it.

Taylor Brothers
I know everyone loves these guys, and sure, they’re nice enough. But they were total assholes about our front door. I mean, granted, it was oversized, and had a special operable window inside it; but did they really have to put MDF in the bottom panel? So that in the first rain, after the paint had cracked, water seeped in and expanded it like a sponge? It took months, MONTHS, of bothering them to get any sort of response. They kept saying they did not guarantee doors that large. Fine. But the problem was in the panel, which could occur in a door of any size; were they really going to stand by putting MDF on a panel that not only faces due south, but is painted black? Finally, B&B doors, the people who actually fabricated the door, felt bad and came out and fixed it.

THE LESSON
I don’t know if there is a lesson, other than the relative amount of attention the Bad People get compared to the Good People: those who go in, do their job quickly, quietly, and skillfully are appreciated, then removed from thought; those who come in and blunder about, take too long, create chaos – these people stick in your craw, they continue to irritate, like a pebble in your shoe, until whatever havoc they’ve wrought can be resolved. The lesson is, maybe it’s better to be forgotten.

The Tree is not a City

In Los Angeles, our mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has decided that native trees are better than non-native. I would say that in general this is true, that the native species do have a singular fit with their environment; but there are a whole assortment of adapted species coming from similar climates around the world that flourish here. In fact, Southern California has been defined by a handful of these: the Jacaranda, the Liquidambar, the Ficus. But the palm tree has been specifically singled out by our mayor as particularly offensive, mostly because of what occurs during the Santa Ana winds when its fronds are strewn over the streets, wreaking havoc on passing cars, houses, and the occasional pedestrian. My feeling is that if the city would do routine maintenance on the trees, there would be no problem. I personally cannot imagine a Los Angeles without the subtle play of more traditional street trees – the Sycamore, the Magnolia, the Jacaranda – against the tall, sinewy Washingtonia robusta or the squat yet eerily evocative Phoenix canariensis.

The city of Pasadena has a different problem. They have embraced the palm, in fact using it as the street tree on one of the main approaches to the city, the Arroyo Parkway connecting the city to the end of the 110 Freeway. The problem here is, it’s the wrong palm. Clearly they wanted to use the Phoenix canariensis, a tree that has, for as long as Southern California has been depicted in literature and other media high and low, come to signify beauty mixed with a forlorn sense of longing, an impending doom, a paradise soon to be lost. These trees give the streets of Pasadena a certain nobility, a vaguely Mediterranean air that appeals to those in the city who imagine a connection to a distant, patrician if not European past.

Instead of the Phoenix canariensis, the geniuses at the city opted for the Phoenix dactylifera, a desert date palm whose many negative associations include the groves that you passed on the way to Palm Springs, rows and rows of ratty looking trees that were once farmed (and perhaps still are?) for dates but that were so uncompelling en masse that, passing in the family station wagon, they never once inspired a quick stop, unlike those immense dinosaurs down the road. No, the choice of the dactylifera by the city of Pasadena only has one explanation: Value Engineering. Unable or unwilling to foot the bill for the canariensis, some bright fool from city hall decided that it would be acceptable to substitute for the lesser tree. As if nobody would notice. I mean, come on, if you don’t want to spend the money on the right trees, find another solution: maybe there are fewer trees; maybe you adjust the design; or maybe you don’t put in those ridiculous crosswalks that scream “bad public art” and that snarled traffic for months along that crucial artery.

Despite the fact that Antonio Villaraigosa declared war on the palm in Los Angeles, someone managed to slip in a few fairly recently along Century Boulevard approaching LAX. Whoever was responsible for that certainly did it right – bolding alternating the Phoenix canariensis with Tipuana tipu in the parkway and lining the median with Washingtonia robusta. Pasadena should have taken a lesson from that and spent its money well. But then again, who would have noticed?

A Line in the Sand

At the end of July, the Montecito Planning Commission delayed approval of Rick Caruso’s plan to transform the Miramar Hotel from a collection of dilapidated buildings alongside the 101 into a new resort destination. At the end of the 11-hour session, Caruso was begging the Commission to deny his proposal outright, claming the changes they were requiring would kill the project.

The problem as I see it is not the relative quality of this specific project – the Miramar certainly could use a major overhaul – but in something much larger: a subtle but very real sense that we as citizens have lost our say in our government. Instead of playing a part in the larger debates of our time – how do we fix and expand our infrastructure, improve our education, provide universal health care, and invest in sustainable energy – we focus on problems we can manage.

Witness the proliferation of Design Review Boards, Town Hall meetings, Neighborhood Councils, etc.: our powerlessness with the big issues makes us hypervigilant when anything that reeks of the bullying power of money comes too close to what we hold most dear. It seems that only when our specific community is targeted, when our immediate surroundings are threatened, or when the very authorship of our lives is at stake, do we take a stand.

Our lack of power with the bigger issues makes us passive and apathetic; we tolerate the erosion of our democracy because it falls away in vague, abstract little bits that are hard to define or even perceive. But come too close to home and our instinct to fight kicks in. Sure, you can plunder our schools, ruin our environment, and suspend habeas corpus at will; but don’t dare come into our neighborhoods and tell us how we should live.

Rick Caruso entered the fray with the confidence that he could win over the locals the way he has in retail projects across Southern California. However, in those other projects he was building retail developments near other retail; the fact that he added housing to the Americana at Brand perhaps gave him the idea that residential and retail could happily coexist.

When he proposed his Brand New Urbanism in Montecito, screening a video that showcased all the cheesy elements that make the Americana so dreadful – the period architecture, the bold perennials, the water fountains dancing to Frank Sinatra classics – Rick Caruso was sure the Montecito Planning Commission would eat it up. Fortunately, they saw past the song and dance routine and were able to request specific improvements that would better reflect the spirit of the old Miramar, a formerly middle class retreat set among humble cottages lining the beach in this particular corner of the city. And at the end of August, after complaining about the changes the Planning Commission requested of him, Caruso came back and received unanimous conditional approval for the project. Final approval is expected at a hearing on October 8, 2008.

Neighborhood activism clearly paid a part in making this a better project (though I fear the dancing fountains remain). The larger and much harder question is, can we extrapolate on this experience? Can we harness this power to shape our world locally to address some of the bigger, scarier issues? Or do we retreat to our lives, content in having fought off the beast, but unwilling to look beyond the borders of our community?

The Carmack Cheeseball

This is something that has haunted me since childhood, or at least since my mother started getting these things, these green fuzzy balls that came, wrapped in plastic, in the weeks before Christmas and, for most of my brothers and sisters, initiated a frenzy of consumption that eroded, triscuit by eager triscuit, these perfect round globes of goodness.

Needless to say the recipe is closely guarded by Jim Carmack and his cheeseball collaborators. However, over the past few years, Pae and I have been conducting forensic investigations of our share of the booty. And this is the result:

8 oz Kaukauna Sharp Cheddar cheese spread
4 oz Philadelphia Cream Cheese
2 oz Mystery Cheese
2 oz Bacos, finely chopped
2 oz minced onion, dried
2 oz dried parsley
2 oz raw pecans, finely chopped
1-1/2 Tbs Cayenne pepper
1-1/2 Tbs A-1 steak sauce
1-1/2 Tbs KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce, original recipe
1 tsp Wright’s hickory liquid smoke, from concentrate
Distilled water to achieve texture
Sugar to taste
MSG to taste

Load ingredients into bowl. Place under a mixer. Blend to proper consistency. Form into balls 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Roll balls in extra pecans and parsley. Place in plastic bag. Place plastic bag into another plastic bag. Tie bags with red and white yard from Stats. Distribute.


(If anyone reading this knows the identity of the Mystery Cheese or the actual recipe itself and cares to correct this one, please do. We are committed to having a fully functional replica by Christmas this year.)

A Manifesto

The current fascination with Pre-Fab homes as promoted by Dwell and other magazines has roots in a genuine concern, that is, to provide a form of housing that is inexpensive and quick to install. The promise has been that, if done properly, Pre-Fab might provide much needed housing for low-income families and the homeless. However, what has happened instead is the emergence of Pre-Fab as commodity, seen online on a variety of websites promoting specific models, but understood most clearly with a quick browsing of the www.fabprefab.com website. It is here where the most crucial of activities related to the production of prefabricated homes takes place: marketing.

Gone is any concern for cost (I could not find anything that could be built for less than $200 per square-foot); gone too is any hope that these could be viable alternatives for affordable housing. What remains is the Pre-Fab as a consumer product, like a car or a toaster oven. More often than not, Pre-Fabs are designed to appeal to the environmentalist in all of us, sporting sustainable features that distract us from the fact that we might was well be shopping for an appliance -- and in the end even these accessories provide more for us as symbols validating our status as earth-friendly consumers than they do as functional elements.

So, without cost or status or even sustainability to justify our acquisition of the Pre-Fab, what are we left with? Convenience. That’s really what it comes down to. I’m guessing that (if you leave out the permit process and the construction of the foundation), these puppies can be bolted into place over a weekend. So Pre-Fab, which came out of a desire to build a home quickly and predictably, has been burdened with a whole host of semes, memes, and other themes that disguise the true motivation for wanting one of these things, which, it turns out, is sheer laziness.

Let this then be a call for Slow Architecture.

A good home takes time to build. The selection of site is critical, as is the placement of a house on that site; the specificity of a site demands a specific response. Every decision made during construction is crucial, and adapting to the ever-evolving conditions requires constant attention. The amazing part to me is that building this way also saves money. Any advantage gained by building a Pre-Fab in volume get lost in other ways - shipping perhaps, profit margins definitely. And when you’re done with your project, when you’ve handed over the wad of cash to the Pre-Fabricator and enter your new dwelling, you’re entering a house that is too small, too expensive for its size, and neither reflects you nor its site.

There’s an old saying in construction: “Price, Speed, Quality: pick any two.” I say pick price but pick quality; and leave the speed to the Autobahn.

Manifest Density

The concept of Manifest Destiny lit a fire under the feet of adventurous Americans over a century ago, stretching a thin film of Western culture from sea to shining sea, and providing justification for all the sins against native cultures that we committed. But Manifest Destiny was a sales pitch masquerading as a pseudo-religious calling and its ultimate result has been the infection of every corner of the continental US with profit-motivated consumer capitalism, an expander of economies to be sure, but a primitive mechanism in the development of cities, a stupid, blundering process that, for the most part, has created a nation made up of cities without civility.

With the rise of the internet, a counterposing movement has emerged. As individuals discover their neighbors online -- in chat rooms, blogs, and Yahoo Groups -- they become more personally invested in their community. In neighborhoods across America, people have begun to take more personally how their environment is being formed. With the land having been conquered, cities are becoming more crowded and density of development is inevitable; yet as concerned citizens begin to take on a more activist role in their communities, they provide a check to the unlimited growth that would occur otherwise. And as a result, cities are becoming more civilized.

This maturing of American cities might be called Manifest Density and promises the advent of a more enduring sort of urbanism. The tyranny of the wealthy, who historically have viewed land as just another natural resource from which they can extract profit, now must engage with the politics of the masses who have now assumed active stewardship of the built environment.