Posts from — April 2008

With gas prices continuing to go up, up, up, we are undoubtedly going to be inundated with politiking over who is to blame. The Republicans blame Nancy Pelosi for raising gas prices and just about everything else wrong with our economy. The Democrats will blame Big Oil and the friend in the White House. On top of the blame game, presidential candidates McCain and Clinton are proposing lifting the federal gas tax. Obama is courageously refusing to support this short term fix which will have no long term effect on gas prices.

Unfortunately not everyone lives in a metro happy city like DC or can sell their car and buy a bike like me. So what are we to do as we near $4 a gallon? Tom Friedman’s excellent column in today’s NY Times gets it right – if we are going to help people survive in world of higher gas prices, we have got to start investing in alternatives.

“But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.”

on planting trees…

I spent Earth Day (Wednesday the 22 of April, 2008) planting trees. However, these carbon consuming machines were not your garden variety stick the shovel in the backyard and toss in a stick with some branches on it trees.  They were big plants; house sized trees that cost more than most cars and alter local weather. We’re talking trees that deserve a crane to plant them…

The root ball of the tree shown  is a 20 feet diameter laced artwork. Although I don’t know the age of the tree I would guess it to be at least 15 years old. And so this becomes a question of buying time.  Affecting the landscape with such size certainly provides a satisfaction of immediacy, but isn’t there something about measuring the struggling seed; about marking the kitchen wall against the marks of your sister? Since younger trees, particularly ones that haven’t been shocked by transplanting, grow much faster than larger and older trees I wonder if were not missing something by allowing ourselves to wait and watch something grow. 

Or maybe this is an inspiring testament to the resiliency of trees and a parallel perspective on our ability to uproot and re-establish in a new American soil… sending new feeder roots through channels supported by a culture of scientific solutions and a mix of proper medicines.

Behind either perspective is the simplicity of digging up the dirt and letting something grow inside it.  New and old laces drinking up an alphabet of elements and releasing something good to breathe. 

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs second home in December of 1943.

Despite my ongoing pursuit of plant knowledge and current employment as a landscape architect, architecture was my first love, and however cliche in the architecture community it may be, I will continue to argue that FLW was the best and most influential architect ever. Although published far less frequently than other Wright homes, one of the most interesting houses he designed and built was the Jacobs II house.

On the first six working drawings of the Jacobs II house (as it is often referred to) the project is labeled “solar hemicyclo”. Subsequent drawings and references use the name “solar hemicycle”. The house is called a solar hemicycle because the plan is based on a south facing semi-circle. Although the home occupies only 120 degrees, planting beds occupy the remaining 30 degrees on each side, finalizing the half circle.

The design was shown to the clients at Taliesin on February 8, 1944. Paul Sprague defines the geometry of the home in its National Historic Landmark Nomination as follows;

In plan it was nothing more than an arc of about 120 degrees. Inside it would be two stories, 14 feet in height, and would spread out along the arc for approximately 88 feet at the rear, or north side, and 60 feet on its front , or south side. Its depth inside was to be 17 feet. The south wall would be all glass, 48 feet in length, divided between doors and fixed panes.

I find the home most interesting because of its relationship to the site and its integration with a landscape that extends from the north berm all the way to the southern sun. The entry procession cuts through the ground and bleeds sunlight on the other side.

The sunlight is captured as heat in the home during the winter and shaded by a large overhang in the summer.

The poetry of the house is less in the furniture or details but rather grounded in the stone wall, concrete floor, and cylindrical towers that contain a stairwell and service functions. The house has a strength that I think is often guilded in other Wright homes. Sunlight and plants drive through the veins and keep the house breathing and beautiful even in eventual decay.

(original photography credits unknown; photograph color and diagram by Ryan Moody)

When gardens stop war.

5 years into the second volume of this babelized war it occurs to me that bamboo can grow as fast as 3 feet per day and that a white oak beats gravity at more than a foot per year. Forget a dividing wall. Forget airplanes filled with food. Want to divide people; grow a garden. Want to feed people; grow a garden. Grow a big, aggressive as hell collection of plants (modified beyond natural recognition) to grow fast, tall, fruit bearing, pulp encircling, fuel producing and outrageously beautiful. Throw seed bombs from planes and watch the monster grow by the minute. Let it divide waring factions, feed hungry stomachs, warm cold nights, boil parasitic water, and bloom until the flowers catch every damn bullet. Forget flower power, lets fight with trees…

or lets at least collect the eggs of our favorite native plants, encase them in soil and toss the seed bombs over every urban fence protecting wastelands of concrete and grass.