Staring into the reds, whites, and blues of the Iznik tiles in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul I was struck by the concept of American ornament.  Do we have a recognizable American ornament? Turkish ornament felt embedded. Beyond its religious definitions and cultural expressions it felt made from the place; as though it were weaving between the people, the architecture, and the history of the land.  Somehow inviting foreigners to recognize its beauty while simultaneously limiting our deeper knowledge.  You can see the Topkapi Palace but you can’t really know.

(ornament in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey)

(Topkapi Palace Istanbul, Turkey)

Did Louis Sullivan know this kind of ornament? I’ve seen his incredible hand on State St. in the Carson Pierre Scott facade.  But that seems to be  an eccentric expression; an individual presentation.  Frank Lloyd Wright certainly learned this expression from Loius Sullivan but never mastered it in the way Sullivan did. Wright’s work was controlled by geometry in a greater extent than Sullivan’s.  The geometry (and perhaps calculus in later work) was certainly adorned but rarely ornamental.

(ornament from the Carson Pierre Scott building in Chicago, IL by Louis Sullivan; photograph by Tim Samuelson)

Ornament seems to have disappeared from American architecture. Or did we have an American ornament? In the Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones published greater than 2,000 classic patterns in 1856; none of them of American origin.

I have seen glimpses of it in complex modeling from software such as Maya and Rhino but it is rarely controlled and even less embedded in any idea of place or culture.

The sustainable architecture movement has relied on the honesty of materials and a focus on local (whether materials, people, economics, etc.) but seems to have largely ignored the potential of ornament.  Might landscape provide a new inspiration for an extensive vocabulary of American ornament?  The American landscape is certainly visible in Wright’s stained glass and Sullivan’s facades.  But does an American Landscape still exist to derive ornament from? Must it be unearthed from decades of disrepair?

Perhaps our ornament is alive? Perhaps our ornament lives and dies. Instead of cast in terra cotta or hammered out of iron maybe the new american ornament can grow under walls, beneath ceilings, and into buildings? Perhaps it can grow from the polluted soil, acid drenched waters, and concrete horizons into something as beautiful as the Iznik tiles.

The pink plastic flamingo was designed by Don Featherstone in 1957.

The Dogwood tree (Cornus florida) was first cultivated in 1731 (Dirr 1998)

Don Featherstone conceived the plastic flamingo while working for Union Products. His original designs were modeled from National Geographic photographs of the curious birds. In his own words from an interview in 1996 – “You can’t go locally and buy a flamingo, so I got some books, and one that had some good shots was National Geographic. I made the silhouette, then put on the clay and that’s how it all started.”

American flamingos have an expected lifespan of 40 years, one of the longest among birds.

Dogwood trees have an expected lifespan of  40 years, a fairly limited life among ornamental trees.

Plastic pink flamingos were in production for fifty years from 1957 until November 1, 2006.  Nearly 250,000 plastic birds were made each year.  Union products stopped the production in 2006 due to rising electricity and plastic resin costs. Public demand for plastic flamingos has soared since the closing.  While many imitations have been produced all have lacked the quality and attention to detail of the originals.

Returning flamingos…  In early 2007, HMC International LLC purchased the molds and copyright to the Featherstone flamingos.  Just as the originals, the new birds are available in pairs, one with it’s head up and the other with it’s head curved toward the ground.

Returning dogwoods… the American dogwoods have just started blooming this week at the National Arboretum – many are pink.

“I loved what I did, it’s all happy things. You have to figure, my creations were not things people needed in life, we had to make them want them. Things I did made people happy, and that’s what life is all about”

-Don Featherstone

buy pink flamingos

see pink flamingos

visit the National Arboretum

When I return to Persimmon Drive I will plant persimmon trees.

What would happen if we all returned? Not in some backward arc of sentiment, but a movement toward a fruit bearing future; a protest to the death of place directed by the markings of white on green.  No matter that many were picked from a book of common names; I promote the lie of a botanic future.

After the first frost we can sit together with our backs against the blocky bark and talk about short days in long midwestern winters.  We can eat ripe American persimmons and wonder if the seeds really can predict a cold future.

Wolfgang Oehme parts the sea of Panicum (switchgrass) under the careful watch of the red berries of winterberry holly and the dead heads of Rudbeckia maxima. As a founding principal of Oehme van Sweden Associates in Washington DC, he and James van Sweden have brought perennials and grasses into the conversation of landscape architecture and helped define an American garden style. While the “New American Garden” proposes a melting pot of appropriate plants from all corners, I find the style most intrepid when it remains bold, simple, and largely native.

Realizing that the native/exotic plant conversation is fraught with slippery slopes I am nonetheless attracted to a native set of plants as the structure for the most successful gardens. Amidst a backdrop of natural environments which are increasingly difficult to decode I propose a recombination of native plants. Although our native landscapes are largely gone, native plants can still play an important role in the designed landscape. The regeneration of native landscapes can be achieved using a palette consistent with the cultural past while providing the ecological links necessary for a healthy web.

But it can look different. The action of regeneration provides the opportunity to make bold statements with planted form. Color, scale, and texture can be used in artificial combination to bring the disappearing background forward and ultimately replace the monoculture of green grass and imported exotics so prevalent in our suburban landscape.  Plants like switchgrass, winterberry holly, and black eyed susan create a chorus of 4 season interest while still providing ecological symbiosis for critters and creatures.  This combination is one of many that deserve a place in the Americas next landscapes.

The best parties inevitably end up in the kitchen.

The best parties resolve themselves in the kitchen because kitchens are comfortable.  Kitchens are comfortable because they are designed to perform and are tested everyday.  These collectors of conversation and conservatories of cuisine succeed because of a few simple availabilities; food, water, table, view.

What if landscapes were more like kitchens?

Better landscape architecture.

Steal the structure of the kitchen and build better landscape architecture. Take notes Senor sunflower:

1. Food. Plant food in your garden. Whether its food for you or food for the birds, plant shrubs, trees and perennials that produce fruits and nuts for humans and habitat to enjoy.

2. Water.  People love the sound of running water and the birds need a bath. No problems with water fountains either.

3. Table. Provide a place to sit. Bring people through the landscape and let people relax in the landscape. Make the table big; as big as the landscape allows.

4. A room with a View.  Provide a scene for lunch. Borrow scenery if necessary (Shakkei). Borrow the sky if needbe.

PEOPLE. People converse. People eat. People drink. People stare. The kitchen collects it all. Landscapes can too. Its not the photograph or magazine spread that makes a good landscape. It’s you and me, and those two, and that other couple talking about nothing between the clicks.  Fill landscape architecture with people and call it good. Let it perform under the guise of comfort and call it good.

On that day, ABC television promoted “National Stay at Home Week”. What an abomination. How could anyone with any intelligence or respect for this world promote something so assinine.  In a   culture overrun with stuff, people making stuff, and people working ever harder to pay for more stuff, someone cooked up some terrible idea to get people to stay at home, watch more advertisements, and ultimately buy more stuff.

Go outside! It’s the first week of fall.

when you get back inside, turn off the TV and watch this.

Even the Vietnam memorial, so precise in concept and execution, is metastasizing into something less thought provoking. The interpretation centers, sculptures, and bookstores that are added to this and other memorials result in an intellectual and emotional debasement; a narrow allowance of interpretation and freedom to explore what these events and people mean to our country, culture, greater society.

Actions to these thoughts are born from a comparison between the DC World War I and the National World War II memorial. One is currently on the the DC Preservation League’s Most Endangered Places list and the other has an entire website run by a company called the Maximum Response Group where I can buy any number of things from a U.S. Navy – The Ageless Fleet Puzzle, to a Official National WWII Memorial Mug.

Nearly hidden by summer foliage and dwarfed by sprawling constructions around it, the DC World War I memorial is sited between the Tidal Basin and the reflecting pool. There are no bus drop offs. There is no vending. There is no bookstore. and there is no tour. There is simply a small, elegant marble structure set in the landscape. Its dome reaches just below the reach of the trees, carved into the canopy edge. It is a moment that reminds me of Versailles.

The peristyle dome was designed by Frederick H. Brooke to honor the DC residents who lost their lives in World War I. The memorial was completed in 1931. Running by on a Sunday night I stopped and thought about 1931. I thought about war. I thought about war in 1917. I thought about 2008. I thought about war. I thought about war in 2005. I thought about baseball cards that advertise war. I thought about beautiful buildings crumbling from bombs and I thought about beautiful buildings crumbling from moss. I thought about war. war. war. I thought about running home. I thought about 1931.

strange how small things can make you think about big things and big things can sometimes make you not think at all.

Or so the sign by the side of the road says. Upon reaching the redneck riviera and entering St. George Island Florida, one is greeted with these words of advice.

Leaving the sea oats in place is of course a very wise (and apparently lawful) course of action. This dune binder is a native, perennial, semitropical, rhizomatus wonder grass. Yummy to the oldfield mouse, Perdido Key beach mouse, marsh rabbits, and songbirds such as sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, this grass helps build and maintain dunes along the eastern shore from Washington DC south to Florida and west into Texas.

I don’t know what it tastes like with raisins but it looks laid back in my front garden and even calmer on the beaches of St. George Island.

Plant it porchside and watch the seedheads bow to the lawful soul.

The American Chestnut blight was first noticed on trees in the Bronx Zoo in 1904.

Seven years later it was conservatively estimated to have done $25,000,000 worth of damage.

There are currently fewer than 100 American Chestnut trees over 24″ in diameter in its former native range.

3 billion trees. gone.

Strange how things can fade out so quickly. As the Starbucks, Countrywides, Bear Stearns, and other American institutions crumble I propose we infill them with Chestnut Parks. Slivers of land with an f.a.r. of 1. One layer of native plants reaching crookedly parallel to glass curtain walls, up concrete retaining walls, and inside the decommissioned dirt of failed commerce; places to watch the sun traipse between the cities sight lines and spill pieces of shade on unadvertised surfaces.

When the Chestnut tree comes back it will come back recomposed. When plants come back to the city, they will come back recomposed.

I have been to Chestnut Park in Philadelphia twice and once it was closed. I know nothing about it except what I have read on the plaque and seen on those two occasions. I nonetheless find it to be one of the more elusively beautiful places I have ever been and wish that everyone in every city had a place like this to read, eat, watch, daydream, listen, write, do nothing in.