so here we are again

As regular listeners might have guessed by the break in blog service, James did indeed make it out and we had a fine old week catching up and exploring new parts of San Francisco and California.

I then had one day in SF to try and do all the things I meant to do before leaving (visit Chinatown, another Halprin plaza, Coit Tower, sort out fieldtrip and M.Ed stuff, buy train tickets, buy sandels, go out to Palo Alto with Rachel and visit Emine) and today I’m heading on the train out to Scaramento for the EDRA (Environmental Design and Research Association) conference.

I offer below, a few place related highlights of the last week or so (I think I’ll have to come back and put the images in later, I’m a bit tight for time at the moment).

PS. Sacramento. A bit boring compared to other places I’ve been here. And the hotel charges stupid money for internet access. boo!

living it up in Soda Springs

We were offered use of a holiday lodge by the lecturer I met in Davis so we stayed at Soda Springs in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a few days. Lovely house: Scandinavian style, woodburning stove, dead squirrel in the double garage. It’s a 1990s ‘estate’ of very upmarket holiday homes with spacious plots and curved roads in coniferous woodland.

 

Soda Springs is a cross-country skiing resort so it was like a ghost town midweek mid-May, and we found the whole area had shut up shop somewhat (Tess, remember Licon Ray!). Still snow on the hills (we were at about 6,000ft), but not enough to ski and too much to walk on the mountain trails.

We enjoyed some fantastic diner food (61 omelette options), tried walking in snow, watched the UEFA cup final in a bar in Truckee and stocked our woodburning stove.

arrested decline

From Lake Tahoe we headed south on amazing scenic expansive highways and turned left to the genuine ghost town of Bodie, set 8000ft high in the hills towards Nevada. Bodie was one of the capitals of the gold rush, in its heyday the second largest town in California. Changes in industry and a couple of bad fires in the first part of the twentieth century meant it was eventually deserted in the 1940s, with only about 5% of its buildings still standing.

Since then it’s been protected as a state historic park, and managed in a state of ‘arrested decline’. There’s almost no visitor facilities, no fibreglass figures, no interpretation panels, no reconstructions. Instead you make your way round the 200 or so wooden buildings, from shacks to salons, peering through dusty windows into even dustier rooms. Everything has been left ‘as left’ more than sixty years ago, sometimes relatively in order, more often chairs upturned, broken chandelier glass on the pool table, or cleared out.

 

The non-domestic buildings – shops, diners, the hotel – generally had more contents intact, though some parts of town had been burnt down and disappeared altogether including the Chinatown and the prostitutes’ street.

 

The ‘arrested decline’ policy is an interesting one, and one most historic tourist attractions are not bold enough to follow. It calls for restraint. Information is simply provided in a standard leaflet, inevitably there are questions unanswered. Some intervention must be gently, carefully carried out to keep verandas safe and buildings secure.

But it allows the place to speak for itself, and to speak differently to different visitors. While information provides a framework of understanding; watching, touching, moving and quietness gives space for the imagination. Curiosity and unanswered questions lead you round the settlement, engaging thoughts and emotions. It’s a viscal, sensory experience; made intriguing by the mystery of the left traces of human activity. And mournful. Dusty beds, empty rooms, the bleak landscape. Of course this is in part a sentimental response to loss, to evidence of loss, that places and people that are busy and full of life do change, do die, do empty. But that’s history, that’s part of why history is important. Bodie, and being in Bodie, gives space and time to engage emotionally with this change. If you are ever in this part of the world, go and visit.

it’s tufa-tastic!

Mono Lake is an environmental disaster and a spookily beautiful place. A lot has been written about the history of the lake and the devastation of water rights granted to Los Angeles, about the campaign and restoration project. It’s interesting. What’s also interesting is just how bio-diverse and important to wildlife this lake is despite being entirely toxic to fish. And if, like me, you like weird natural landscapes then the shoreline of tufa towers (calcium plus carbonate and alkali) with the sharp blue of the lake and snow capped mountains on the skyline is a good place to get your fix.

We tried to find the black fissures but they eluded us.

water, dark, paddles and a big bridge

A few hours after James arrived we applied emergency jet lag defence treatment and whisked him to Pier 40 and a twilight canoeing expedition. We paddled on the east side of the SF shoreline, down Mission Creak, behind the ballpark, under a very low metal tram bridge with a tram going over it, and then back on ourselves and under one of the piers of the enormous Bay Bridge that links SF to Oakland. And from sunset to twilight to complete dark. It’s a wonderful view of downtown; the mosaic lights of the skyscrapers, the floodlight effect of the glow of the Bay bridge way above us, and the searchlight sweeps of the container ships. Also a feeling of being small in a large landscape, a pinpick of light and movement against vertiginous masses of engineering, architecture and harbour activity. And of being a bit giddy, a bit adventurous, a bit tired and a lot glad to see James.

top wildlife sighting so far.

James and I drove back from Mono Lake to SF over the Tioga pass, including a quick detour into Yosemite valley and we saw a bear! OK, we saw a crowd of people lined up with cameras on the side of a winding road and then we saw the bear, so it didn’t really count as an entirely in the nature eyeball to eyeball encounter. But it was still a bear!

 

Eating grass.

impressive decisive incision

Rachel and I went to a Asian Culture Street Fair this afternoon. Rachel struck lucky and took advantage of a Hep B vaccination at a reduced rate. I decided not to partake of the bargin. Unpredicatable things, street fairs!

will he won’t he?

first there was the yes no will we get the house we bid on.

second there was the yes no of whether the paperwork initiating the legal and financial sides of house purchasing could be completed in time

and thirdly the yes no of whether planes were taking off from Leeds airport Saturday morning due to high winds. I got a sad little phone call from Leeds when I was expecting James to be airborn in a transatlantic manner. But he should be taking off 24 hours later, and arriving lunch time Sunday (my tomorrow, your today). Come on James!

freeway park (seattle parks #2)

The long flight of grey concrete steps leading up to Freeway park are both sensational and rather scary. The feeling in me that this entrance provoked turned out to be indicative of my experience in Freeway Park, a controversial beauty or eye sore in the centre of downtown Seattle.

Freeway Park was conceived by Halprin as a dramatic response to the incision of Interstate 5 which had been bulldozed through the heart of the city in the 1960s. Under the project leadership of Angela Danadjieva, the 5ha park stepped up and spanned the interstate, not only covering over the traffic stream but also including elements such as dense vegetation and large scale waterfalls to muffle and the sound. Completed in 1976, it was an iconic modernist design of complex level change, concrete chasms, evergreen trees and rushing water; framing a design ideal of bringing nature into the city, the park as a woodland glade.

Visiting this park was my first experience of a large scale Halprin design (followed a few days later by Ira Keller fountain in Portland. I was impressed by the clarity of design form, the confident handling of a simple palette of materials, the sense of sequence and exploration. It is uplifting to see something seemingly so effortlessly accomplished, where it would be possible to photograph almost any corner as an example of some handling, integration and finishing of design elements. As a walk through sculpture, as an example of abstraction from nature, as an evocative, surprising place, Freeway Park is a worthy case study.

But it’s the social aspect where things get interesting.

Like any of the big downtowns in the US, there’s a significant number of rough sleepers, drinkers, people with mental issues. And Freeway Park, with its enclosed spaces, bushes, comfortable ledges and quiet corners is an attractive place to hang out. And though these park users can co-exist reasonably comfortably with more ‘mainstream’ users in more open parks, the enclosed and intimate nature of the spaces here mean that casual passers through can feel intimidated. I don’t know what the actual record of crime is, low probably, but the possibility of uncertain encounters is a one that discourages many. I visited at about 6ish on a sunny weekday evening, usually a busy time for urban spaces, but the park was sparsely populated. A few benches, grass areas and one of the concrete canyons were occupied by individuals or groups in the male, drinking/ drunk, shabbily dressed category. Two young teenage boys practiced parkour in the non-waterfall waterfall cliffs. Others visitors passed through in a fairly businesslike way, and though I was wandering about circuitously taking photos, I tried to do so fairly briskly.

One of the problems is a lack of legibility about through routes and deadends. Do you have to go close past this group of men or is this an alternative route? I got teased at one point by someone for putting my camera in a pocket as I went past a small gathering… one of those head down and walk on occasions. Why did I put my camera in my pocket? I don’t think I felt that I was going to be attacked… I wouldn’t have been in the park if I had. There were enough people walking through that I was never entirely alone, and the people hanging out seemed benign rather than aggressive. But taking photos of people in public places can be a sensitive issue, especially if you feel that people may not want to have their photo taken for an unknown purpose. So partly it was respect, and partly it was a desire to look normal, not to draw attention to myself.

But that’s a problem isn’t it? People want to be able to relax in parks, not feel a bit anxious about how their actions may be perceived. And the fact that more people weren’t around implies that this might be a general anxiety.

Judging by some of the articles that I’ve read (Seattle newspaper, cultural landscape foundation) and my observations on site, there seems to be a few key civic responses. One that I noted is to make the place seem ‘tamer’: to add more horticultural ‘pretty’ planting near entrances, additional tubs of flowers (in gentler rounder containers than Halprin’s blocks, an odd contrast when they are side by side) and brightly coloured clear signing. A proposal cited in the newspaper is to try and introduce a wider range of possible activities, a café, performances, a play area (for a start they could turn the water cascades again, see Ira Keller in Portland). A third strategy is to increase sightlines and decrease the surprise… cutting back key areas of vegetation and reducing the height of some of the walls.

Reasonable, pragmatic approaches to a problem with social function of the park, or a threat to the essential nature of a historic landscape? Alongside valid issues of safety, legibility and diversity of use there needs to be proper recognition of the original design principles. To whittle away with chips, tweaks and prettification does no justice to the intention of simplicity, of drama, of echos of wilderness. It must be possible to respect these qualities while broadening appeal to new users, making it easy to pass through, pause in or spend a lazy afternoon. A few rounded decorative planters are not good enough.

a trio of talks in Seattle

Talk 1: David Streatfield, retiring professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. “‘Heroic moments’ and neglected figures in American Landscape Architecture 1856 – 1960”. Couldn’t have asked for a more interesting insignt into some of the principles and pressures on the development and practice of the profession in America. A great talk to go to, and a friendly reception afterwards for this much respected and loved man. I didn’t feel aggrieved that in order to avoid a clash ‘my’ lecture slot got bumped backwards at the last minute to…

Talk 2: Clare Rishbeth. ‘Belonging in new places: experience of locality by first generation migrants’. A lunchtime talk with less than half a day publicity. A small but interested audience, some good questions, should have put a bit more focus on findings and a bit less on setting the scene. But OK, and a cheerful lunch with Landscape and Planning staff afterwards.

Talk 3: Jhumpa Lahiri in conversation with someoneorother, at the Town Hall. A lovely building and an interesting unpretentious chatty author. JL won the Pulitzer prize with her first book of short stories, and her first novel ‘the namesake’ just out as a film. I felt a bit of an imposer as I hadn’t read either of her books but was interested in her themes of living as children of immigrants, and, hey, it was a free gig and not a bad way to spend an evening when you are visiting a city solo. P.S. Have now almost finished ‘The Namesake’… an enjoyable read.