Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human existence. Are we building a world where there is no “there” there? How will we know what we have lost?
Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. We will also consider together how these elements of place can be treated responsibly by architects, planners, designers, and others who shape the spaces where we spend our lives.
Click here to see an index of all of the pieces in the “Elements of Place” series. The discussions will also inform a Lab on the future of community development in May 2012.
Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So the working assumption of our project is that there is such a thing as a sense of place and that, for a number of reasons, it is under threat in contemporary life. Another assumption is that “placeness” is made up of a number of factors, our “elements.” So on the whole, how would you say climate is doing as an element of place? Do you think people are very aware of it? Do they care about it? Are we less in touch with climate than we were in the past?
Mike Davis: The first thing that comes to mind is the ongoing issue of global warming or climate change, as people now like to call it. I think that is being borne out by many of us where we’re at. One of the phenomena I’ve seen living most of my 53 years in Arizona is that it does certainly seem that over that period, our climate here has changed. I think that’s statistically borne our by things like evening-time low temperatures. August of 2011 was the hottest month ever recorded in Phoenix, and our evening-time temperatures were the highest ever. Because of the low humidity, the evening-time temperatures here were traditionally quite cool. That’s different from a situation where it’s 110 during the daytime and 95 at night.
We used to use a form of cooling here called evaporative cooling. It was basically water pads with air blowing over them. It works really well when the temperatures stay below 100 degrees. But the climate has changed enough in my lifetime that it’s really not a very effective way to cool things anymore in the city. Now we don’t notice it as much because everyone just turns their air conditioner to 75-80 degrees. But were we not able to do that, it would be really bad. You don’t want to lay out under the stars at night when it’s 95 degrees.
I’m not a scientist. I don’t presume to understand climate change in detail. Maybe it’s just a 30-year or 100-year or 3,000-year cycle we happen to be living in. But it does seem to me that climate is something that is on a lot of people’s minds. Unfortunately, phenomena like flooding in the Midwest also seem to becoming something like a seasonal norm. And the spring of 2011 had the highest number of tornadoes ever. I think there’s a real awareness of all that. We haven’t become the supreme gods of our environment yet. We’re still challenged and intimidated by it.
ABN: Yes, I was thinking that if there is a greater awareness of climate, it would have to be pegged to that “quiet crisis” the environment is experiencing over time. And then these large and immediate climate catastrophes. But I would think that if you did some sort of national poll asking people about the average temperature or yearly rainfall in their town, they wouldn’t do as well as they did 50 years ago.
MD: I think you may be correct. That may be part of the conversion from an agricultural society where people are aware of things like the seasonal cycle of crops and they read the Farmer’s Almanac. We spend more time with our iPods and iPads and Facebook in our hermetically sealed environments. That’s different from a time when most people were involved, directly or indirectly, in some sort of farming or outdoor work.
Think of what shows up in the supermarket, even. A peach or nectarine or green grape used to be a sign of summer – that’s when they were harvested. Apples and other produce would signify the fall, and so forth. But now all of that is ubiquitous in every part of the country – it has been brought up from South America or somewhere else. That’s the on-demand nature of our culture. But the climate does still give us those occasional catastrophic reminders that there is a bigger picture.
ABN: You know, it’s funny, in getting ready for this interview, I started questioning our assumption that climate is inherently important to place. In Spanish, the word for “weather” is “tiempo,” which is also “time.” I think that element is also there in English if you think about the way we talk about “weathering a storm.” If you substitute “weather” for “climate,” you really get this temporal element that almost moves in a different dimension from place.
For instance, when I lived in Baltimore a few years ago, there was this gigantic snowstorm that shut down the city for weeks. We didn’t leave the house for several days, and when I did, it was still really easy to get lost because so many of the landmarks were buried. Do you think it is possible there is a way that climate works against some of the elements of place?
MD: Hmm. It seems that there are very few places on Earth that are intrinsically habitable without any effort or need to manipulate the environment around a person. Perhaps some tropical islands or parts of Hawaii – I’m loathe to say the Caribbean because that’s hurricane central. But generally speaking, you’d have light to temperate rain, temperature that varies from 65 to 85 degrees, little disruption to settlements, and so forth. Plate tectonics being what they are, there is greater land mass in the northern hemisphere than the southern, and a large part of that land mass has really harsh climate. Technology has done a lot of things for us, from giving us more options in entertainment to sequencing the genome, but we haven’t really been able to gain dominance over climate on the level of a tsunami or an earthquake.
ABN: I think it’s true that we can talk about technology displacing a sense of climate as a recent phenomenon. Yet I also wonder whether there is a longer spectrum of that phenomenon. I mean, in theory, the maximum experience of a climate would be achieved by hunter-gatherers and nomads whose life is completely determined by the weather. Isn’t there a sense in which architecture inherently works against climate?
MD: It certainly presents technological solutions to mitigate the harsher effects of it. But it also makes habitable places where we couldn’t live otherwise. But yes, architecture inherently began with mitigating the effects of climate on Man. It can have more noble purposes of being timeless or inspiring that take these climatic controllers and turn them into things of beauty and higher function. But climate is a primary factor, if not the answer to the question of why to build in the first place.
ABN: I am pursuing this because in some ways I am frustrated by the idea that adaptation necessarily distances us from place. In fact, I was thinking that the sum total of my adaptive knowledge is in fact a really important part of my sense of place. One of the ways I know I’m from Kansas is that I can evaluate what kind of structure is safe in a tornado, for instance. I don’t know that because of training in meteorology – I know that because of where I’m from.
MD: The other day I was with a group of 45 or 50 businesspeople, some of whom were Canadian and some of whom were American. And one of the things I did (being a good American) was, in encounters within this group, ask them, “Where are you from?” Someone made the comment that that is an American thing to do. The Canadians don’t do it as much. There seemed to be an accord in the room that that was an accurate assessment of our etiquette. It’s similar to the fact that asking about the weather is the standard American salutary banality. I don’t know if the rest of the world follows suit or not. I literally would have thought until last week that these were universal qualities. Maybe asking “How is the weather?” to someone on the other side of Canada is considered an absurdity, though Vancouver is really different from Toronto. Still, they don’t have deserts or sunny beaches like Southern California. There is more geographic diversity in the United States than there is in most places, more than in Norway, say, or Venezuela.
ABN: Let’s go to architecture. To what extent do you think contemporary architecture takes climate into account?
MD: If 100 percent is that it’s the primary determinant and zero percent is that it’s ignored, my sense is that between zoning and design review boards and building codes and engineering it would certainly be in the upper half, something like 60 or 70 percent. I don’t know if it’s the primary factor, but I don’t think it’s ignored. The things I would tend to question or poke fun at have more to do with the appliqué or the generalized skin that is over those structures. When I find plate glass single-pane, windows looking into a lovely second-story bedroom in some housing monstrosity facing due west and the sun is beating down at 110 degrees – that’s just bad design. That’s something beyond a lack of climatic concern.
ABN: What do you think is the distance between where contemporary architecture is now in terms of climate and where you might like it to be?
MD: Probably never before in our history as humans have we been able to bring this degree of control to the environment we live in. I’d like to think of architecture as being a part of that beyond the usual elements of heating and cooling and air conditioning and engineering and the intrinsic parts of the built environment. I’d like it to be a part of the surfaces and the architectural character of buildings. Architecture has availed us opportunities to live in many different environments. But I don’t think the design profession is suffering from a lack of attention to those sorts of details. My sense is that there are a whole lot of other competing factors that are in fact diluting place.
ABN: I can see how that analysis of the design profession would apply to some of the examples you’ve discussed over the past few weeks – large-scale architecture, sometimes your own, that attempts to integrate itself with the landscape around it. But can you adapt that sort of sensibility to something more ordinary like a car dealership or a strip mall?
MD: Actually, yes. For better or worse, a part of the modern American strip mall is that the large tenants – not to pick on them – some of them are my favorite stores – but the large tenants like Target or Home Depot have determined through their in-house design and demographic “experts” that they need to look like “X.” So pretty soon the whole strip mall or power center becomes a deck of cards – you’ve been dealt a king of diamonds or a Lowe’s and that’s just how it’s going to look, whether it’s in Topeka or Tuscaloosa or Raleigh, North Carolina.
So dealing well with retail space would begin and end with designing appropriately themed architecture for the place, not the brand. There is a project called The Marketplace in Tustin, California that was designed by LPA, in Irvine, California with a Mexican architect named Ricardo Legorreta. Now a large retail space is really just a series of distribution warehouses. They took something of an industrial architecture “box” ethos but combined it with fun colors and did a really exquisite job with the landscape and hardscape. The usual signs were there; the tenants would change and different signs would go up. But the point is that it still looks really good more than 20 years. You don’t look at it and say, “Ah, there’s Lowe’s, the little blue cabinet with the white crown moulding.” There’s none of that crap there. It’s generic, in a sense, but it’s drawing from that great California palette and landscaping. It’s very appropriate to the place.
So I think these are not just lame gestures. The idea of human merchants selling their wares to the public, opening up and closing down at certain times of day – there’s some strong vernacular sort of things that can be played with. You need shade and landscaping to indicate a gathering place, the things that have formed the marketplace for 7,000 plus years of human civilization. Those are just as relevant today. That’s why retail centers still exist. We’re not buying everything at home on our computer in our jammies. Marketplaces are a great place for human interaction. But we’ve got to do something better than paving paradise with a 5 1/2 per thousand parking ratio and asphalt up to the curb of the front door of the generic big-yellow-tag Best Buy store. If we’re going to have those, let’s have a little less of the generic.
A few of the better malls that I’ve been to are Oak Brook Mall in the Chicago area, Biltmore Fashion Park in Phoenix and Fashion Island in Newport Beach. They are outdoor malls in places of pretty diverse climate – there is snow on the ground in Oak Brook quite a lot – but nevertheless it is still a decent, enjoyable place to shop. They’re much better than the hermetically sealed 1970s mall, which is now going away in favor of the open-air town center concept. In Biltmore Fashion Park you are probably not going to want to stand around outside in July or August. Newport Beach is of course, wonderful year-round. But in each case, because they chose to make the outdoors a part of the experience, each of them are great places. As long as they remember that they need shade and heat and a place to put the snow drifts, it works.
ABN: So we’re saying goodbye to climate for the time being. I’m wondering what you feel we’ve learned that might help us as we investigate other kinds of elements?
MD: There are many aspects of place that can have a profound impact on us. Some of those things are in our control. Some of them are not in our control. Then there are a large number of them that are merely manageable, where we need to adapt to them or celebrate them without destroying them. I don’t think humankind literally “conquers” climate. You don’t “conquer” Mount Everest – you survive. But with technology and so forth, one can climb Mount Everest or live in a desert.
I wonder how that relates to other aspects that we haven’t touched on yet, like community and politics and economics and so on. Some people clam up and get this victim mentality – whether they’re Tea Partying or Occupying Wall Street or whatever – but most of us feel like there are knowledgeable experts in these various areas that we can engage with. It stretches the mind to think about the ways in which we have engaged climate throughout the generations and to think about how we might use that approach to engage other people. We don’t try to make it rain in Phoenix – we try to adapt to the fact that it doesn’t rain. Maybe we need to find similar ways to be human and not be generic and celebrate each other.
It might sound idyllic to live in Hawaii all year, but cold is also fun. Rain is also fun. Wind is also fun. Tornadoes aren’t typically fun, but they are at least special and interesting. That’s true about people too. And just like I don’t think we should have a generic architecture, I don’t think we should aim to turn everyone into a single global citizenry that all thinks the same thing. Let’s get along, let’s not tread on each other, but let’s not all be the same.
ABN: For some reason what you say makes me think of the traffic control efforts in cities like London, where they have high fees for driving in certain parts of the city during rush hour. I have no feeling about it either way as a policy option, but taken to an extreme that sort of thinking is saying, “Okay, to fix our city, first let’s fix human nature…” And there must be a point where that is as absurd as trying to change the weather.
MD: You know, Phoenix is frequently roundly assailed for being unsustainable. I recently picked up a book by Andrew Ross called Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Then I thought, “Oh, that’s where I live!”
But nobody rounded up people on busses and said they have to live here, even if Hunter S. Thompson said that hell is a more brightly lit version of Phoenix. A lot of people wanted to live here. I think there is historical backing for the idea that it was not completely insane to settle a place like Phoenix. This is not the Sahara Desert. Some crops grow here well, there is a watershed, and so forth. But bringing four million people here is a different kettle of fish. If we run out of water in a place like this, there’s no reason to be here. Still, we’re not all going to live in Michigan or wherever the pundits say is best. There’s not enough room.
There are some people who say we should try to make Phoenix a more walkable city. Ha! Great time to start! This is one of the most expansive places in America. I don’t know what you do with that. I don’t like it either. I don’t like the gas costs and all of it. But where do we go from here? I tend to fall in the camp that we have to make better cars with less pollution rather than get rid of the car, because how the hell would we do that?
So I think we would do well to respect human nature as well as Nature itself. Our ability to manage and manipulate it is somewhat ephemeral. We have to deal with tornadoes and tsunamis and earthquakes as well as things like the apocalyptic tsunamis of human emotion that welled up twice in the last century as well as the unbridled brush fires of the last 50 years. The age of peace that was supposed to be brought in by the fall of Berlin Wall didn’t exactly work out that way. There are still storm clouds, weather patterns. There are still things we cannot control.
Previous Elements of Place discussion: “Respect the mountains” • Next in The Elements of Place: “See place between the lines”
All images courtesty Wikimedia Commons: photo of Shelter at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument (link from homepage); satellite photo of Joplin, Missouri following May 2011 tornado (bottom); satellite photo of Fashion Island, Newport Beach, California (top).
