Durable

All buildings are temporary, when measured against geologic time scales, but architects also admit that the act of construction establishes a legacy.  Buildings outlast the period of construction, the builder’s life; the period of inhabitation of any human within a building is even more narrow.  Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced.” 

Durability of materials contributes to their permanence, but the selection of materials, especially exterior finishes, confers a history of connotations, evocations, and intentions to every project.  There are a wide range of choices available, but the following criteria should be considered:

Climatic conditions

Available regional materials/construction knowledge

Maintenance schedule

Visual impact

Performance beyond standard requirements, including impact- and wind-resistance

Budget

The recent state design awards allowed us to compare our architect-designed and inhabited office with a stellar example of a colleague’s architect-designed and inhabited house.  We initially planned our new office to be built with steel framing and impact-resistant windows, as appropriate for our coastal environment.  However, the commercial building climate and comparable assessments couldn’t balance the value with the cost – at least for the bank.  Instead of waiting, we proceeded with a wood-frame construction and slightly less resilient materials.  It is still beautiful, sustainable, and durable, but it doesn’t meet the higher standards for wind-resistance to get a break on insurance, and nor does it have a material palette that speaks to permanency.  The cypress wood rainscreen cladding may age gracefully, but it will require more maintenance than copper or concrete.  The corrugated metal is durable and local and has a rich vernacular expression in the community, but its dignity has been reduced by use on agricultural structures; it is seen as a low-cost alternative, not as a noble reclaimed material with efficient structural properties.

There are 2,000 year old wooden ships buried in the sands of the Mediterranean, and 2,000 year old concrete structures in the same region, still in use today.  The evocative materials today may have to respond to new threats: acidification of rainwater, saltwater intrusion below-grade and at inland locations, higher windspeeds and accompanying debris impacts, limits to toxic waste streams in manufacturing, and limited access to materials from outside of the region.  These restrictions may leave us reaching for ways to enclose buildings that are distinct, thoughtful, and serious.

Polycarbonate is very lightweight, and yet stronger than glass.  It is available in multiple colors and patterns, and new products offer higher clarity and UV-resistance.  It is available in double-wall panels with insulating properties.  Although it uses a virgin petrochemical material, it is fully recyclable.  New options include ballistic-resistant (therefore impact-resistant) polycarbonate with multiple layers bonded together with urethane.

Precast concrete has a quality control process for manufacturing that allows the product to be insulated, colored, patterned, formed, and finished in a variety of ways.  It can resemble stone, has high durability and the ability to shape for special forms, corners, and thicknesses.  Precast may use recycled content, including fly ash from coal-fired power plants and aggregate from reclaimed slabs.

Terra Cotta is a clay-based ceramic, used for over 150 years on building facades.  It is lighter than stone, and can be worked to incorporate decorative features.  Glazed faience offers bright color and is easy to keep clean, not like earlier, porous examples.  It can be configured in panels and tubes, primarily as a rainscreen.

Exterior Laminate panels are composed of kraft paper layers impregnated with phenolic resin, then compressed and bonded under heat and high pressure.  They can be printed with color/pattern/graphics.  These have been applied mostly in Europe, but are likely to expand their range.

Metal panels offer durability and value, and a long history of commercial application.  They may be rainscreen or sealed installations, insulated or not.  Panels may be of copper, zinc, aluminum, or steel, with anodized coatings, high-durability finishes such as enamel or powdercoating, or they may be left to oxidize naturally, such as Cor-Ten.  Metal has a high recycled content, with panels often including 35% pre- and post-consumer recycled content.  18-gauge steel meets safe room standards for impact-resistance, in combination with other prescribed materials.

Fiber-reinforced concrete panels have become ubiquitous since Hurricane Katrina.  They are lightweight and insect-resistant, but not waterproof.  They are subject to puncture by debris.  These are very inexpensive cladding materials, and with FRC or wood battens, can reproduce the character of board-and-batten vernacular architecture.

Wood is the traditional material of choice for residential projects throughout the south, due to its wide availability and low cost.  In this region, southern yellow pine has evolved from old-growth heart pine with 30 growth rings per inch, to the common standard today for dense lumber at 6 growth rings per inch.  The difference in the old wood was a natural resistance to insects, moisture, and expansion.  Treated lumber is required to ensure durability; the current standard treatment is ACQ (Alkaline copper quaternary).

Brick is another local tradition, with hand-molded bricks of Mississippi clay a stalwart choice for commercial structures, and foundation pilings everywhere.  The very dark brick of the Halstead campus are unusual – a buff-to-rose color range more closely replicates the native clays.  Although not impact-resistant at the highest performance standards, brick can cover masonry assemblies that do meet safe room requirements. 

Cement Plaster provides excellent shear capacity during a storm event, and can be dried out rapidly afterwards to avoid structural damage and moisture buildup.  Historically, cement plaster was installed over wood lath strips at interiors, and over brick masonry at exteriors, but now metal lath and Autoclaved Aerated Concrete are more standard.  There are craftsman resources available in the region to handle historic restorations, even including horsehair.

Defensive Maps

Maps orient us to familiar and unfamiliar places, and trace our journeys.   They represent the nature of terrain and the presence of water, plus the manmade world: building and open space, public and private, circulation, access, roads and transport, land use, and density.  Even further, maps establish the territories of the political world: nation, religion, ethnicity, poverty, voting precinct, education, commerce, disease, taxation, and post code, often invisible to passersby. 

Maps are one of the first visual languages that we learn.  In the classroom, we translate the globe and wall map into directories of our own relationship with place.  Maps do not command the universe, but they do place the viewer face-to-face with the known world.  We conceive the shapes and icons, the colors and lines into natural phenomena, built form, and areas of political control so that we may understand and act with this knowledge.  The world from the ground is much less legible than the world from the air, and maps eliminate the irrelevant details.

Maps present a group of arguments, a set of posits about what stands here or there.  Maps can only reveal the limit of knowledge at the time of their creation, with guesses about what lay beyond, or reports unconfirmed by reliable eyewitnesses.  Along the water’s edge lie the most fiercely contested, most carefully explored, detailed, and drawn features of our planet.  In the days when sailors drew the maps, coastlines and a very short range of inland features were all there was to a map.  Winds and water were of the greatest importance to the explorers who went by sea; they feature in detail and color and scale more vividly than the mountains and lands, which rapidly disintegrated into Terra Incognita.  The angry and cherubic faces of the winds were often drawn around the perimeter of maps, to appease these shifting currents. 

The most ancient maps appropriately show what is closest to us, the city and neighborhood in which people once lived.  And the very oldest one of all, drawn in 6200 BCE on a wall near Ankara, Turkey, shows the town plan of Catal Hyuk under an ancient and active volcano.  The plan of the city shows about 80 buildings in an orderly grid, with very little variation of hierarchy of scale or geometry.  The figure-ground drawing indicates rows of houses with central courtyard voids, and above the neatly scribed town looms a volcano in elevation, the forested slope of its sides leading to a pinnacle spraying lava.  In this remarkable drawing, the artist captured the critical moment when the most important things in his world were threatened.

By selecting details to include or discard, maps have the ability to persuade viewers to see subjects within a defined context.  We expect human-made images to (in some way) decrease the information given, to reduce the truth about what is real.  Maps are, after all, art and not life.   But the experience of being immersed in an environment can be overwhelming.  Maps focus on one set of variables, and restrict the number of distractions.  This leads to new insights about relationships between structures which were previously masked by obstacles; alerting us to the presence of hidden landscapes beneath our feet; or presenting all manner of fragments of the past that coexist within the brand-new city.

If maps can inspire action, what is the most critical threat that they can address?  What dangers are currently facing cities that maps can solve?  What insights can maps impart that will make our cities safer and more durable against future threats?

Now, as ever, populations prefer coastlines.  A majority of the people on earth are concentrated in coastal areas, on just 10% of the earth’s land surface. As of 1998, about 3.2 billion people lived and worked within 200 kilometers (120 miles) of the sea, while a full two-thirds, or 4 billion, are found within 400 kilometers of a coast.  The most densely populated coastal area is the mega-region stretching from Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with 40 million inhabitants, but 17 of the 20 largest global mega-cities lie along coastlines.

Mapping the defense of a coastline used to mean showing safe harbors and rocky promontories, gun emplacements and unexploded ordinance.  Today maps indicate a greater threat, one that does not discriminate between political boundaries.  This is the sequence of maps that show predictions of change over time to sea levels worldwide.  A single map alone won’t show the extent of the possible if sea levels rise 3’, 6’, or 8’ in the next generation.  The realization comes with seeing the difference between what was then, is now, and will be; the historic sequence reveals that this change has already been underway for many years. 

Maps that prompt action present a new viewpoint for consideration, show changes over time, outline the extent of a threat, or introduce something so beautiful, so sublime that we will fight for it.  The maps have to engage us in our own backyards: the cities where we work, have family homes, and the beaches where we play.  Maps of the Greenland Ice Shelf, as scary as each summer’s loss of ice pack may seem, won’t work.  We have to know the places that are going underwater for the maps to become real, the losses to become tangible.

The Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRM) chart land across the United States exposed to coastal and inland flooding, and define Zones indicating high hazard and low hazard areas.  These are used by cities and counties to determine minimum elevations for building, by state Community Rating Bureaus to define floodplain compliance, and by insurance companies to establish rates.  Generally, there are three categories: Velocity (V) zones where building is severely curtailed, AE zones within the 100-year recurrence interval, and X zones, outside of the dangerous boundary.  The 100-year flood zone seems like a reasonable gamble, “a convenient, credibly long time frame for humans who seldom live past their nineties and prefer round numbers.”[i]  FIRM maps chart the 100-year recurrence, but that doesn’t mean if it flooded last year, your property is safe for the next 99 – instead, your home has a 1% chance of flooding every year.  It sure sounds a lot worse, put that way. 

The FIRM maps are a purely social construction.  They are based on map voodoo – not created solely from past data, and sometimes not even with a prediction for the future.  When FIRM maps were rushed out after Hurricane Katrina with new (and more restrictive) Advisory Base Flood Elevations, people were relieved to see that they didn’t condemn every place that received water for that gigantic storm, until they realized the financial impact on their communities: defying historic downtowns from rebuilding unless retail areas were raised 10 feet or more, eliminating funding to put public buildings back at former locations, and requiring demolition of many buildings with damages greater than 50%.  (The financial impact of the insurance hikes came much later, when property owners learned that FIRM maps also provide the rationale for charging higher rates in riskier places.)

Several cities fought against significant changes to their business as usual policy, and quietly won.  If this map can be influenced by activism, it is clearly a social construction, albeit a valuable planning tool.  The flood lines do not follow either strict topographic contours or the historic extent of flooding; they gain utility by setting a community-wide datum for the lowest floor elevation of inhabited space.  Although not perfect, the maps protect homeowners against devastating losses by getting them out of the danger zone.

Coastal maps showing land use are a pretty good indicator of the places where there will be vigorous resistance to sea level rise, accompanied by demands for public investment in artificial shoreline protection.  Retreat is more likely where property values are low and untaxed, in areas where there are farms or conservation easements.  But in beach communities where tourism has resulted in high-rise condominiums and outlet malls, in industrial waterfronts and shipping docks, in wealthy enclaves of housing with a water’s edge view, there will be strong, well-funded, and organized unwillingness to let nature take its course.  Instead, the business-as-usual response will be to elevate structures, defend the infrastructure with revetments, beach renourishment, and seawalls.  They will let the shoreline retreat somewhere else.

“Somewhere else” is the place without power, the locus of the vulnerable.  These may be the low and shattered lands, carved by generations of abuse and neglect, or the much-beloved places of childhood, overcome by more successful economic development down the road.  When these assets are not highly valued, the lives of the people are considered with less favor, and the investment may take the form of buy-outs and resettlement, rather than protection.  After Katrina, offers from the government to buy out repetitive loss properties were received with great suspicion by their owners, and only the elderly and destitute participated.  But these were exactly the people that needed to be relocated out of the danger zones; they were the people who would have required assistance in the storms to come.

The loss has to hit our own pockets to inspire action.  In wealthy nations, where we can afford warnings and evacuations, coastal armoring is mostly about protecting assets, and not people.  This is when we fight – not for the loss of uninhabited islands, not for subsiding wetlands, not for the receding glaciers far from home, but for our own homes.  If you knew that Miami would have $3,513 billion in assets exposed to coastal flooding in 2070, plus a limping flood insurance program funded by the federal government, would you invest in a building with a lifespan of over 50 years?

People can argue the cause of sea level rise – whether manmade or natural. They can even argue the science of prediction, and the uncertainties of the future. But they may find it harder to argue against a real and accurate map that shows the history underway, and which points to a very clear future trend. We place our faith in maps and in the potential for a map to show the truth. Maps may accomplish what rhetoric cannot, explaining the danger to coastlines without exaggeration… and without blame. Facts with inescapable consequences. And a limited time for response. This is our call to action.

---

Mile Markers

Knowing where you are, and where you are going, depends on a dizzying array of tools including maps, aerial algorithms, and global positioning satellites.  Earlier journeys were undertaken using rudimentary directions passed from person to person, with only a few scattered markers to verify the correct path.

The first markers were cairns of stone, stacked in various ways to indicate the correct fork or the presence of a special feature nearby.  The Romans elaborated on these stones to carve obelisks from granite or marble. They created durable roads for the timely delivery of supplies and armies, and clear signage assisted their competent engineering.  Road crews placed a cylindrical stone every thousandth double-step from the Appian Way to the very edges of the Empire.  Place names and distances were not always included; some mileposts carried only the name of the Emperor and the distance from Rome. The Golden Milestone (Milliarium Aureum) was erected in the Forum, marking the presumed center of the world.

There are many examples of historic mile markers in Britain, from the simplest tombstone carved by locals to cast iron whimsies with details highlighted in stark white and black paint.  The most prevalent distance markers in current use are found on the national motorways.  In the United States, aluminum mileposts are placed beginning at the southern and western boundaries of each state line.  These driver location signs provide a landmark so that stranded motorists can call for help.  Canals, rivers, rail lines, and other modes of transportation have similar signposts for safety and orientation.

The Zero Milestone in Washington, D.C. was inspired by the Golden Milestone; it established the point from which all road distances were calculated in America.  Each city has a single point to which all distances are measured on highways, usually a post office or city hall.  In New Orleans, the zero point is the U.S. Customs House on Canal Street, New York City uses Columbus Circle, and in London the prime reference point is not at Greenwich, but a plaque at Charing Cross.  Kilometer zero in France is a stone compass embedded in the cobblestone plaza in front of Notre Dame; in Cuba a 25-carat diamond (since 1973 a replica of the original once owned by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia) lies in the floor of El Capitolio.  What is the central point of your city?

Drought

The year 2011 brought severe droughts across the United States. The Governor addressed the unprecedented droughts in Texas by issuing an official Proclamation for Days of Prayer for Rain in Texas: “I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on those days for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”

Prayers are not enough; in widely scattered parts of Australia, Africa, and Texas, there is no end in sight to the absence of water. To ensure our basic needs for consumption, hygiene, and food production, each of the 7 billion people on Earth need 20-50 liters of clean water each day. Drought is measured in increasingly tough language, ranging from abnormally dry, moderate, severe, extreme, to exceptional. By 2030, 47% of the population of the world will live in areas of high water stress.

We think of water as an infinite and inexhaustible resource, but as increasing water consumption exceeds the planet’s capacity to renew itself, we are headed toward a destabilized future. In the past 50 years, there have been 1831 water-related interactions between nations. The wars of the future will focus on water.

Architecture can reduce the demand for non-industrial, non-agricultural use of fresh water by resource recovery and reuse, and rainwater harvesting at the project scale. Places with moderate rainfall, such as Tamil Nadu in India, have made rainwater harvesting mandatory for new public and private buildings. Germany imposes a rain tax on impervious surfaces leading to storm sewers, to prevent mingling fresh and foul waters, and requiring treatment. The fear of insufficient supplies creates a ripple of patchwork solutions across ecosystems. City-scale infrastructure can create adequate storage to reduce the short-term uncertainty, but only wise planning across boundaries can manage the long-term reality of insufficient supply.

There are places on the earth where there has been no significant rainfall for 401 years. From 1570 to 1971, there were measurable rainfalls of less than 1 mm per year in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and geologists estimate that the riverbeds have been dry for 120,000 years. (Even Death Valley in California’s Mojave Desert, well-known for harsh conditions, receives 60 mm per year of precipitation.) How and why do people build in such extremes?

Inhabitation follows resources, and deserts often harbour critical minerals: bauxite, gypsum, and silver. The Atacama had deposits of sodium nitrite and copper in quantities that brought mining companies in 1872 to build towns and bring in water, fuel, and food. Prior to that, only a few missionaries and farmers huddled at the oases where springs and geysers from deep sources came to surface. The Andean civilization and the tribes that followed built with rock and mud, with thick walls and thatched coverings, flat on grade with small openings. The Spanish missionaries who built San Pedro de Atacama in 1577 followed their lead.

In arid conditions, walls may be built of anything, even the local salt blocks. It is not as if they might dissolve. Doors can be made of the lightweight wood of a cactus, and walls made of timber from far-away forests last a very long time. Wood will not rot in the dry air.

The mining town at Humberton built the thick mud-brick walls in serried ranks, the identical white walls covered with corrugated steel. They built a cast-iron swimming pool from a shipwreck at the coast town of Iquique, now rusting and waterless. They built a theatre of wood, scoured and polished by winds but still intact, and very possibly improved. The mining companies trucked infusions of water and entertainment together over the coastal mountains, to over 170 towns in the heyday. By the 1940’s the towns had dried up due to synthetic sources of sodium nitrite, market speculation, and fluent deposits of ore in more hospitable places.

Today, the region thrives for two reasons: the science of astronomy, and the curiosity of eco-tourists. The dehumidified climate, high elevation, and distance from major cities create ideal conditions for telescopes. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array is a collection of 66 radio telescopes, trained on star birth in the early universe. Along with the Very Large Telescope scientists, casual visitors come to experience the extreme desiccation, to try sandboarding, to explore the Andean legacies of basket-weaving, pottery, archaeological foundations, and petroglyphs. They delve into hot springs and view geysers, go climbing and trekking, and enjoy the Mars-like views of this, the driest place on Earth.


The new tourists stay in luxe architectural retreats consciously designed in the vernacular style. At the Explora and Remota Hotels, Puritama Hot Springs, and Hotel Salto Chico, among others, Chilean architect German del Sol works within the pre-Colombian traditions, creating layered and multiple relationships between the building and nature to establish their aesthetic grounds. Raised boardwalks traverse tender and rare riverside grasses; on rockier slopes, the hotels are built with slight elevation to float above the desert floor and adopt a modified viewpoint. Light washes the white ceilings and walls, sometimes through slats of wood ceilings like the pickets of cactus fences crossing dusty fields. The extended roofs define the outdoor circulation and recall the galerias of  Colonial towns. Adobe brick is stacked to create texture and shadows, albeit muted with white paint to reflect sunlight and heat. Del Sol designs with the geometries of the mountain pass and steep slope, using their changing levels as an opportunity to connect with a different aspect of the view, each a separate access to the stark adjacency.

Remote locations within the Patagonian peninsula determine the rules for construction, reducing excess fixtures and unnecessary finishes, using locally available materials to make the masonry walls, and finding expedient ways to transport uncommon materials such as steel and timber. If there were more ruins, these might become opportune targets for salvage.

Even in such inhospitable places we are not first. Other people have determined ways to build, find food and water; it is ungracious not to acknowledge these precedents. We want to experience the extremes, but from the comfort of a climate-controlled hotel room. We have more resources now, innumerable options for vacations, so we spend them searching for the authentic places, the iconic views, and the gasp-inducingly beautiful landscapes. The arid and mountainous regions offer these, but they come at a price: all life-giving sustenance requires transport to these distant locales. When the mining companies extracted enough to profit on the work of the miners, they willingly trucked in food for the commissaries, movies for the theatres, and millions of gallons of water for the thirsty workers and machines. When prices for their products fell the towns were abandoned. Someday, these luxurious structures in the desert will be abandoned, only to be marveled over and reclaimed by the people of future societies. What will they think of the indoor wet environments, glass-roofed atriums, and crystal chandeliers of these lifeboats stranded far from the ocean?

Filters and Sponges

The undecided edge between land and water teems with life.  Wetlands and marshes, reefs and mangrove forests, estuaries and tidal flats demonstrate the physical result of ebb and flow.  They embody the indeterminacy of the physical status between liquid and solid, dissolving into vapor on foggy mornings.  Productive ribbons along coastlines create shadow nurseries for finfish and crustaceans, filter suspended material, stabilize and trap sediment, and assimilate dissolved nutrients.  The living plants here are unusual species, halophytes, which thrive in salty conditions; botanical amphibians that can survive choking mud and desiccating heat to naturally break storm surge and absorb wave action. 

Coastal wetlands are bioshields for the continental edge. Marshes and maritime forests protect coastal development and infrastructure from hurricanes and other storm surges. Where they do not exist, such as in south Florida, property damage caused by storms is much more devastating than in Louisiana, where a buffer of coastal wetlands separates cities from the Gulf of Mexico. “By serving as a buffer to destructive marine forces and the episodic impact of storms, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands help to protect the vast infrastructure of nationally significant oil and gas facilities.”  The marshes protect other infrastructure, too, such as roads - and more than 400 million tons of water-borne cargo, including ten federal navigation channels that provide access to port facilities handling 25% of U.S. exports.  

Most threats to the wetlands seem like a personal challenge to continued occupation.  A New York Times article explored the barrier islands of North Carolina, and the changes due to rising sea levels – 7” in the last 100 years, with an additional 2’-3’ rise by 2100 – and the communities affected by coastal erosion.  “Dr. Riggs predicted, major storms will turn many parts of the Banks into underwater shoals or flats that are above water only at low tide. If Highway 12 were abandoned and the islands allowed to find their natural equilibrium, he writes, the resulting villages would be ‘situated like a string of pearls on a vast network of inlet and shoal environments.’”[i]  Loss of the connecting roadways would lead to isolation, accelerating decay, and the abandonment of the community, first by the hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, and then by the inhabitants.

It is a constant battle against the sea to postpone but never halt completely the shifts along the edge.  The constant toil of dredging and beach renourishment, of building levees, breakwaters, seawalls, groins, piers, jetties, and dunes signify the impermanent quality of the line between water and land.  With the added pressure of climate change, chances of erosion and flooding increases.

One way to respond to the threat of rising waters is to plan now for their eventual extent by creating space along the coastlines for water to occupy. “Immediately after the tsunami (in 2004), the Sri Lanka government through its Coast Conservation Advisory Council declared a conservation buffer zone along 1,000 kilometers of coastline prohibiting rebuilding and new construction.  The buffer varied in width: in the south it was 100 meters and along the east coast it was 200 meters.  Many viewed the ban, an attempt to safeguard the country from future flooding disasters, as a government land grab to promote the lucrative tourism trade.  The resulting public outcry ultimately caused officials to relax the blanket post-tsunami ban; it is now 15 to 40 meters.”[ii]

Managed retreat from the coastal edge was a topic during the post-Katrina political discussions, but was abandoned faster than a flooding building.  The result illustrated a linear park at the western edge of Mississippi, a green buffer with boardwalks and bayous at the lowest lands on the coast, and an extension of the already-protected cheniers and marshes stretching to the Pearl River which forms the dividing line with Louisiana.  But residents were not ready to hear that their beachfront lots were the target of a buy-out program to avoid future government flood program payments… and communities didn’t look forward to the loss of the highest property tax dollars, plus the prospect of inheriting maintenance on the empty lots.  (The program proceeds quietly and voluntarily, the impetus fueled by older people who just cannot afford the emotional and financial toll of life on the beachfront, accompanied by a sharp rise in insurance and construction costs.)

Wetlands across the globe show evidence of a system well into collapse.  In the 1600’s, the continental United States had 220 million acres of wetlands, but by 1997 there were less than half of that, a total of 105.5 million acres remaining.  Only about 5% of these wetlands are along coastlines; the remaining 95% are inland marshes, meadows, forests, and swamps.  

At inland locations, most floods come from the clouds above.  Planning space for stormwater runoff is the reasoning behind requirements for retention ponds as an alternative to structured drainage, but most examples fail to contribute to the aesthetics of the community, or to ecological functioning.  Ringed with chain link, home to invasive species and windblown litter, retention ponds at the edge of big-box parking lots may provide space for water to infiltrate, but they certainly don’t come close to replicating authentic wetlands, which (along with tropical rain forests) are among the most biologically productive habitats on earth, supporting nearly 200 species of amphibians, 5,000 plant species, one-third of all native bird species, and a similar diversity of plant life.

After devastating spring floods in 2011, people along the Mississippi River better understand the value of wetlands as flood control.  Because of the loss of wetland areas for catchment and percolation, damage to buildings, infrastructure, and industries along the river banks was estimated at $6 to 9 billion.  The bottomland hardwoods and wetlands along the river could store at least 60 days of floodwater in the early 19^th century, but can now store only 12 days of floodwater.  This loss of capacity led to dramatic rises along the hard-edged river, with more episodes expected in the future.

Drainage woes plague many towns, especially in flat areas, coastal plains, or valleys threatened by flooding.  Storm drainage, whether surface or subsurface, must handle the overflow and keep water moving to safe discharge areas.  Constructed culverts and drains are durable, but also susceptible to obstruction.  Surface drainage, such as swales, filter non-point source pollutants and handle higher capacities during significant rainfall. 

Water plazas in cities are the newest idea for creating a multi-functional open space to be used as a park, a grassy field, a stepped amphitheatre, playground, skate park or labyrinth in fine weather; giant catchment areas, mega-sponges, when the rains arrive.  Rotterdam, a city where the elevation is below sea level, is flirting with the idea.  No single catchment area is big enough – even Central Park cannot drain New York City alone.  A system of smaller units, spread across neighborhoods and linked, will help to offset the accelerated and intensified stormwater in cities.

The solution may be as simple as replacing structures with soils.  Not to form dead-end canals which lead water into sites, but to create more places for percolation.  Water in the city reintroduces habitat for wildlife, and provides space for children to dream, and adults to meditate.  Water, that least mysterious element of two hydrogen molecules and one of oxygen, has secret powers within the urban environment that can lead to more vibrant and congenial social spaces where neighbors talk, and adults play, and children imagine entirely different worlds. Meanwhile, the focus of all this dreaming and thinking and planning, the water silently percolates through sand and clay to the infinite cracks and fissures below, swelling the earth with fecundity once more.

Green filters are “non-structural” methods for restoring capacity along coastal edges and within cities to handle the increasing demands of storm waters: storm surge, flood, excessive rain, tidal flow, and sea level rise.  Creating green buffer zones allows water to safely pool before affecting the lives and works of man.  Until recently, wetlands were seen as wastelands.  Their productivity remained unmeasured – they occupied the undervalued edges, the barriers to contiguous development patterns, and the places of last resort for the poor and the latecomers to the urban environment.  The pressures of low densities and high population growth have nudged growth ever outward, knocking down the mangrove forests and bottomland hardwoods, filling estuaries with concrete and asphalt.

Wetlands are critical to humans’ continued occupation of the fragile edges between land and water.  They endure the most extreme conditions of flux, and provide greater value (by diverting, filtering, recharging, and evaporating stormwater) than much of the grey infrastructure which underpins cities.  Wetlands may be the most valuable lands on earth, without a single “improvement” made by man.  Man should not build with permanence on their indeterminate ground. 

---

[i] “A Lifeline Built on Shifting Sands.”  Cornelia Dean, New York Times, 5 March 2012.

[ii] “Lessons from Sri Lanka” in Birch, 247.

Preparation

Emergencies, by their very nature, cannot be predicted. However, the likelihood of disaster always threatens to befall us.  Weather channels erupt with blizzards, cyclones, tornadoes and flooding.  Fires strike with or without the presence of lightning, but with its immediacy and apparent randomness.  Plant closings, job losses, and real estate foreclosures produce more indicators but their implementation may still take us by surprise. 

Humans are not the only animals with the ability to prepare for lean times.  We create codes and processes in preparation for many instances which will never arrive.  We institutionalize responses to emergencies by creating and staffing public services such as firefighters, police, and emergency medical personnel.  The entire Department of Defense - in effect, the entire governmental system - exists to provide help in times of need.

Prediction of a state of emergency seems easy during a war, but with what effects?  Interruptions to services and sleep are expected, but bombs follow no predictable pattern or schedule.  Armies change tactics and weapons.  Citizens prepare for one threat and are faced with another, from a totally unexpected corner.  Rationing of gasoline and rubber might be anticipated to provide troops with needed resources for mobility, but who would have guessed that silk for stockings would have been sheared for use in parachutes during WWII, or that spices would become impossible to obtain since boats from the sources of such staple goods as salt and pepper – India, China, France – were sunk?

The most inspirational examples of community resilience persist in stories of London during the Blitz.  For eight months, between September 1940 and May 1941, few nights passed without aerial bombardments.  Although casualties were predicted at the start of the war to tally over 1 million people, civilian deaths numbered about 67,000 throughout the Commonwealth[i], a significant reduction from the initial prediction. 

How did Londoners protect their lives and city without succumbing to the temptation to flee, or give up hope?  Resourceful and responsive citizen volunteers minimized disruptions and furnished essential services.  Wardens of the Air Raid Precautions Service (A.R.P.) were organized in posts located every few blocks in London; their familiarity with the buildings, resources, and people in their ward were critical for the initial tasks of registering residents and distributing gas masks.  During bombing raids wardens patrolled in pairs to maintain blackout conditions, escort people to shelter, douse incendiary bombs, perform upkeep on public shelters, and rescue people after air raids.  The 1.4 million volunteers’ service was personal, protective, local, and relied on close acquaintance with their neighbors.

Not every job depended on volunteers, but every job supported either war or recovery.  The Ministry of Works’ primary task was to keep industry functioning, making essential repairs to factories after bombings, often within one or two weeks.  Their “Special Repair Service” teams completed structural repairs to private buildings and also built new structures, travelling in “Flying Squads” of caravans with their own supplies.  Their self-sufficiency helped locals recover by leaving community resources for residents.

In damaged cities, life took on a new-found spontaneity and culture of adaptability.  Taxi-drivers found new routes around bombed intersections, medical aides treated patients without benefit of much training, and communications were handled by everyone: Army signalers, volunteer radio operators, even teenagers on bicycles.  When shops were bombed, shopkeepers moved their stock to an intact spot without concern for the niceties of ownership or lease.  A wartime columnist told of an unusual sharing of resources, “It was funny to see raw sirloins of beef being carried from one stately club, which was temporarily cut off from the gas supply, to another equally stately establishment, which had offered the hospitality of its old-fashioned coal ranges….”[ii]  The expectation of continuity demanded no less. 

Although clearing up after bombings took time, billeting for people who had lost their homes was handled immediately – sometimes with friends and family, but often with strangers far from home.  Sir John Anderson  who designed British evacuation schemes beginning in the summer of 1938, divided the country into three areas: sending areas - urban districts where heavy bombing raids could be expected; neutral areas that would neither send nor take evacuees; and receiving areas - rural districts where evacuees would be sent.  Although families on both sides were concerned that "compulsory billeting would be far worse than war," bedrooms were requisitioned and filled with little consideration for preference or proclivity.  Urban dwellers were encouraged to arrange with friends and relatives in other parts of the city to provide shelter in case of emergency… and a temporary lodging allowance was paid as an incentive.  Throughout the war very few people slept rough, without a shelter of some kind.

There were three factors that supported resiliency in the city while under terrible duress:  the urban form, intimate knowledge of one’s neighbors and surroundings, and redundant and scalable solutions for sheltering.

Great redundancy was built into the city.  Underground transport was independent from the interconnected network of streets above ground.  Neighborhoods were small enough that people could get from home to work on foot or bicycle.  Land use patterns distributed factories and stores throughout the city so that no single area was a primary target. The tremendous number of structures lowered the odds of any one being hit.  (The density did cause collateral damage through bomb attacks and resultant fires, but access to firefighting services was close at hand.[iii]) 

Winston Churchill exhorted the House of Commons on 8 October 1940, “We must so arrange that, when any district is smitten by bombs which are flung about at utter random, strong, mobile forces will descend on the scene in power and mercy to conquer the flames, as they have done, to rescue sufferers, provide them with food and shelter, to whisk them away to places of rest and refuge, and to place in their hands leaflets which anyone can understand to reassure them that they have not lost all, because all will share in their material loss, and in sharing it, sweep it away.”[iv]

People – volunteers, civilians, and the military willing to undertake intense and irregular work when confusion reigns - is the most effective component of preparedness.  Peter Ackroyd writes in London: A Biography, “It is difficult fully to define that particular spirit, though it is clear that Londoners made a deliberate effort to seem unafraid, and that this self-control may have sprung from an instinctive unwillingness to spread the contagion of panic. After all, what if this city of eight million people were to regress into hysteria?” 

Finally, there were multiple options for dodging bombs, from as close as the dining table or only as far as the Tube stop.  There were Morrison shelters, a steel-topped table with mesh sides and a sprung base to become a bed at night.  Distributed in kits of 359 pieces and three assembly tools, over 500,000 of these were used during the war.  They measured 6’-6” by 4’ long, and could accommodate two adults and a child, or more people if necessary.  They were designed to be placed on the lowest level of a structure, and could withstand the force of “substantial debris” falling without collapse.

The Anderson shelter was the popular backyard version, which could house six people on narrow benches.  In the simplest installation, a rectangular area was excavated, corrugated metal shaped into a protective half-oval and covered with earth, and the metal ends reinforced with sandbags.  These had the benefit of being virtually indistinguishable from the gardens and yards from the air, after a few months of vigorous plant growth.  They had the severe disadvantage of trapping groundwater and condensation, often soaking the blankets and supplies placed within them for safekeeping.

If people were in transit, there were Communal Shelters available.  Often located in church crypts, apartment cellars, or other available spaces, they were rudimentary spaces that could house 10 to 50 people.  They offered no more than benches or a floor space, with sandbagged entrances.  They were not designed for to meet any specific structural resistance, but were pressed into service as an alternative to being caught outside with no protection.  The communal shelters that housed the greatest number of citizens were the London Underground stations.  Many stations opened after 9 pm every night, and were outfitted with bunks, clinics, canteens, toilets, and entertainment.  Many people staked their claims early to spaces along the walls, but space was at such a premium that hammocks were strung across the tracks after trains shut down for the night.  The nightly ablutions, hair rollers, bedtime stories and children’s pajamas became as much a routine in public as they had been at home.

And when the barrages were over but the war was not yet won, “The city seemed to resume its normal course, with its postmen and bus-drivers and milkmen and errand boys, but there was the strangest feeling of ennui or despondency after the spectacular damage of the Blitz.”[v]   Years of preparation were complete, and the enemy diverted.  Evacuees returned home, and people became complacent about the air-raid and all-clear signals. 

Becoming prepared is only half the battle – remaining so may be the more difficult task.  It is difficult to sustain the energy necessary for constant preparation over a long time period.  When emergency supplies are not activated for a while, we break into the storerooms or fail to set aside additional resources.  We lose our exhilaration at the prospect of another shift at the volunteer post.  We enumerate the difficulties of evacuating versus the comforts of remaining home, even when threats are nearby.  When faced with crisis after crisis, we suffer from disaster fatigue, and find it difficult to evaluate the relative strength of one threat against another which passed with no consequences.  Even with unceasing reminders from television and media, we forget the past.

It is only through constant interaction with other people – trusted friends, neighbors, colleagues – that coercion works.  Their behaviour impacts our own, and we model our actions to mimic theirs.  We fill bathtubs and water jugs before storms, shop for bread and peanut butter, stock candles and batteries.  Told over and over about the severity of the storm, we will only evacuate if urged by those we trust, because we see only the trouble of the endeavor, and not the potential for deliverance.

---

[i] Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

[ii] Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs. Craven.

[iii] Except during the Second Great Fire of London, on 29-30 December 1940, when the German Army waited for the River Thames water levels to shrink to uncharacteristically low levels and dropped 10,000 incendiary bombs.  Resiliency, in this case, depended upon water… which wasn’t there.

[iv] Mitchell, Blitz Spirit.

[v] Ackroyd, London: The Biography.

Ruins

Buildings surround us, intact and crumbling structures measured by the dynamic process of weathering and time.  Whatever defenses man constructs, in time the roof shall be stripped away, the walls crumble, the doors swing wide and hollow, the windows break.  The force of nature and the entropy of weather shall prevail.

Ruins may be the real remnants of previous inhabitations, or artifice and conceit.  Confected from scavenged bricks and forms stolen from the past, the picturesque quality depends not a bit on the authenticity, but on the setting.  British ruin-lust began in 1716 with Lord Bathurst and Alexander Pope's Albert Hall, the first truly “Gothic” playhouse found in a gentleman’s garden, and then the fashion exploded: crenellations with inconstant proportions, “medieval” windows too large to defend against arrows, octagonal towers beneath high escarpments, accompanied by none of the true defensive features.  A stable government precluded the need for fortification, and so gentlemen who might otherwise have fought turned to manufacturing the receipts of war; but gently, so that they might become the backdrop for frolics and picnics and gaiety.

The cult of melancholy extended through garden design at Stowe and Stourhead to leave its mark on follies, through literature and theatre, the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Eliot, and in art.  Horace Walpole developed the Gothic Revival in form, through architecture at Strawberry Hill, and in fiction in The Castle of Otranto.  His novel blends supernatural fantasy with romance, populated by enough plot twists to keep Shakespeare happy; scenes take place in a mouldering castle near an empty church, a stone tower and dismal dungeon, and a hillside cave, all places rife with the echoes of former lives, appropriate backdrops to launch the Gothic novel craze.  The eccentric settings for his real-life existence harnessed the irregularity of a great work built over centuries, his version instead constructed between 1749 and 1776.  Fan-vaulting, engraved tombs, fretwork, arched windows and turrets became an “oracle of style and taste” which many of his peers in Parliament and others followed.

The architect Sir John Soane also wrote fiction, in "Crude Hints towards the History of My House," the story of his return to the ruins of home following a tragedy; but he is best known as a collector of antiquarian elements from ancient buildings, filling his house with sarcophagi and sculptures, paintings, scrollwork, brackets, baubles, and ephemera.  Soane was appointed the architect of the Bank of England from 1788 until his retirement in 1833, rebuilding nearly every part of the three-acre site. War with France threatened security of the bank and vaults, so he devised an interior-focused arrangement of corridors, courts, and skylit banking halls behind a fortified and windowless screen wall.  During his tenure as surveyor, he commissioned Joseph Gandy to paint the stalwart Bank in ruins, a cutaway view for his own delight, his personal Pompeii.  

Soane had actual pieces of the abandoned city within his vast collection.  Fragments of ancient cultures, from Egypt to Rome and Athens, framed Soane’s Neo-Classical penchant; for an antiquarian, they created a wistful self-portrait of desires and obsessions, stability, and a tangible connection to history. 

Travellers to Rome brought back so many fragments of the temples and monuments, it is surprising that there is anything at all left to visit.  Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents, “we cannot help wondering what traces of those early stages can still be found by a modern visitor to Rome – whom we will credit with the best historical and topographical knowledge. He will see Aurelian's wall virtually unchanged, save for a few gaps. Here and there he will find stretches of the Servian wall that have been revealed by excavations.… One need hardly add that all these remnants of ancient Rome appear as scattered fragments in the jumble of the great city that has grown up in recent centuries, since the Renaissance.”[i] 

Tours of the monuments of Rome have long been a design-school requirement, the grand tour, a pilgrimage to the places where architecture was born.  Why do we bother with ruins?  Is it to experience the visceral impact of history?  To imagine the horrors of the past in contrast to our naïve and colorless lives?  To acknowledge that perfection (or completeness) can never address our deepest desires?  The sense that our own fragile body has survived beyond the demolition of such an imposing and permanent thing as a structure, imparts a wicked frisson of delight.

In many places in Rome, what we see in ruins is the structure beneath the artifice, the underpinnings of brick and tufa and cement once invisible beneath the noble sheets of marble and travertine.  “There is anyway something peculiarly mournful about them; they are so sober and tidy, you feel the hand of the workmen in them more than anywhere else, the little individual moment of skill and patience, and probably haste too… spent on something never meant to be seen, and that was never seen again, once the workman was through, until the whole tragedy had been finished for so long the place was anybody’s to go picking around in.”[ii]

Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the ruins he visited in Rome.  In 1938 he visited Benito Mussolini in Rome, commanding his attentions for a tour of the city’s great monuments.  His state architect, Albert Speer, had proposed “Teorie von Ruinwert” (A Theory of Ruin Value) in 1934, requiring the use of marble, stone, and brick in new edifices, so that they would someday resemble their Roman counterparts.  "The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that 'bridge of tradition' to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My 'theory' was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models….  (Hitler) gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins'." [iii]

In the end, very little remains of the work of the Fuhrer’s architect.  The Nazi’s scorched earth policy, to destroy infrastructure to prevent its use by their enemies, was returned to them tenfold.  The only projects of Speer’s that still exist today are a portion of the Nurnberg Zeppelinfeld and a double row of lampposts marking the Strasse des 17. Juni.  Not much of a legacy for the man who envisioned the new wonders of the world, but the destruction of the Nazi monuments reflected the political will of the inheritors. 

Durable structures of the past were planned to last the duration of an Empire, throughout the reign of dynasties.  As the buildings of today decay, they are less likely to leave regal silhouettes for the tourists of the future.  Robert Smithson writes, “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, (they are built with) plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries.”^[iv]

How shall we design modern monuments with the great attraction of ruins?  The American sculptor Robert Morris summarizes the visual register, “Approached with no reverence or historical awe, ruins are frequently exceptional spaces of unusual complexity, which offer unique relations between access and barrier, the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal, ground plane and wall.  Such are not to be found in structures that have escaped the twin entropic assaults of nature and the vandal.”[v]

Architects have certainly been accused of vandalizing context in the design of new structures, especially in the ragged forms of decontructivism.  But we persist in the desire to create places with the timeless qualities which make them beloved by users, owners, and the community of critics at large.  Not all architects are antiquarians, enamoured with details of dentils and moulding and captivated by broken shards; instead we transform these into new and glittering frames of light and mirror.  Will these become the 200-year or 2,000-year structures of the future? 

The manufacture of artificial ruins established an alternative history, and concocted a glorious heritage for  newly minted gentlemen in the eighteenth century. Hitler looked to the future to glorify the present.  For the real future of our buildings of today, the Romans shall give some indication: even if buildings are beloved, very few will survive the depredations of man and nature.  The useful pieces will be carted away for re-use, scattering the building DNA across the globe, but leaving little trace on the sites where they once stood in their families of stone and brick.  It is the triumph of time over strength.

---

[i] Freud, 8.

[ii] Clark, 142.

[iii] Albert Speer 1970, 56.

[iv] R. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings.  Berkeley, University of California Press, 2^nd Edition, 1996.

[v] Robert Morris, American sculptor, in Harries, 246.