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 we’ve tackled the sun and shade. What comes to mind in association with water?

Mike Davis: Definitely life – literally, water and air as the things without which you won’t be here long. A refreshment. A respite. Nourishment. But like the sun, it depends on context. You might think of a dive into the pool as refreshing, but do you want to take a dive off that 60-foot oil platform into the icy sea? Most of the water on this planet is undrinkable for humans. It’s life-giving for fish and the the creatures that live 20,000 feet below the surface, but not for people.

RIght now I’m sitting here on my patio looking out on my swimming pool. It’s visually pleasing. It’s relaxing. Though in Phoenix every spring you read again the tragedy of a dozen kids who slip in the pool and don’t make it. So I think of water as 95 percent benevolent and about 5 percent dangerous. I think the sun is more like fifty-fifty at best – the sun will kill you pretty quick. Both of them can lead you into some pretty rough situations. Hurricanes. Floods. A deluge that breaks the levy. The monsoon.

Though when you think about it, water is one of the most unrelenting forces on the planet. Canyons are carved with it. Towns are destroyed by it. The sun, at least at this point in history, has not destroyed any human settlement on the planet directly, that I am aware of. It does rot wood, cracks and fades paint, and makes some things rapidly deteriorate. But water, in its unbridled fury, is incredibly destructive.

Just think about the tsunami in Japan. That’s the same ocean that was there yesterday. It’s just a little taller. But the destruction is mind-numbing. How long did we spend cleaning up the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York? Nine months? And that was two city blocks. When you look at the impact of the tsunami, you think, this is going to take a hundred years.

So water, I welcome. And yet I wonder how much of that viewpoint is informed by being here in Arizona. Because without water, there’s no business being here. I don’t worry about leaving the faucet on in Chicago like I do here. You get little things like that in your head when you’re young here, because it’s a precious resource without which we wouldn’t have a place here at all. It’s like gold.

ABN: I would guess that you are right that your initial answer of 95 percent benevolent, five percent destructive is based on being from Phoenix. It seems to me that people who live their whole lives by the water, and may have experienced some significant destruction because of it, describe it with that “godly” aspect we discussed in regards to the sun: it giveth and it taketh away.

But let’s look at a subspecies of water, rain.

MD: Yes. I love thunderstorms. They are this great show. It rains about 30 days a year here in Phoenix: about one in 12 days. There are two kinds of rain here. There are the pivotal winter rains, which are highly predictable and generally occur sometime between late November and as late as February or March. There are a series of storms that travel the jet stream through California and come here. Nothing particularly odd – we’ll probably have three to four inches in that period, and never all at the same time. It generally won’t rain for a day – it will rain for an hour. It’s really rare for it to rain in Phoenix all day.

Then we have the other version, which is thunderstorm, the “monsoon,” which usually occurs from early to mid-July to early September. I wouldn’t say that it’s on the scale of things like tornadoes in the Midwest, but we do have these occasional microbursts and other sorts of violent wind. They’re almost like little mini-tornadoes, but they don’t really go anywhere – they generally just occur in a place. So every once in a while the roof of a building is torn off.

There can be a lot of violence with that summer stuff. We get pretty high winds and the lightning is spectacular. There are these huge dust storms that will start outside of the city, gigantic brown clouds that will make the farmers out there eat dust for hours. And then it doesn’t rain, and you’re like, “Son of a bitch, tricked again!” Because even with the violent thunderstorms, water is such a precious thing here.

Of course, Phoenix doesn’t exist because of seven inches of rain a year. It exists because of the snow and watershed off the mountains to the north and east, and is then a function of dams and reservoir lakes and so on. We’re a story of post-WW II development: the interstate system, air conditioning, and the water system.

There’s a school of thought that looks at all that and says we shouldn’t be here, certainly not at the scale we’re at. Sure, you could have a nice desert outpost of half a million people, but when you get to four or five million people who demand golf courses and swimming pools… it’s a resource that has been taken for granted for a long time.

So the rain, even though it’s a bit of a token gesture, is still perceived as something of a blessing in spite of the storms and the thunder and the violence and the lightning and the dust and the wind and so forth. I know enough people who live in the Pacific Northwest who would think, “Geez, more rain.” No one ever thinks that way here. We don’t play golf in the rain. In Portland, you had better play golf in the rain – otherwise, you’ll never play golf.

So we have some danger from water and rain here, but it’s not a hurricane. It’s not a tsunami. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the forest fires in the timberland. We have seven months where it’s beautiful, two months when it’s okay, and three months where it’s miserably hot – and we welcome the rain.

ABN: What are some other aspects of water that are important to keep in mind when working in Phoenix?

MD: Well, as I said, you want to do everything as intelligently you can to treat is as a precious resource. But as in the oasis, it can be a wonderful visual cue. It gives you a sense of arrival and serenity and place. I am not a big fan of seeing gigantic lakes and stuff sitting out here, since that stuff evaporates so quickly. And every third or fourth house – including mine – has a swimming pool where the water probably evaporates at three or four inches a day. You’re constantly refilling that. Now, the water isn’t going into outer space – it’s still in the atmosphere and gets back to the ground somewhere – but we do have to be respectful of it.

We went through a period in the 70s and 80s out here where we had a lot of huge master-planned communities with lakes everywhere. Strangely enough, in that same period we had the highest per capita rate of ownership of recreational boats in the U.S. I think there is a sense in which we used to think of ourselves as the cowboys who dammed the river and made all the rivers and lakes we wanted – that’s starting to change a little bit. There are some extreme reactions, like the city of Tucson where I grew up, where you’re looked upon as some sort of scoundrel if you actually have a lawn. The whole town is brown.

But overall I would say that water is an important part of the public good, and you don’t want to be visually wasteful with it or practically wasteful with it either.

ABN: I think I understand what you mean by not being “practically wasteful” with water, but could you tell me what you mean by “visually wasteful”?

MD: Hayden Ferry, the project where we have our office in Tempe, sits on a piece of reclaimed land that was carved out of a roadway realignment. And it’s on a lake. So the buildings have a bit of a nautical feel to them. Now are they ships? No, they’re office buildings. But they have a base element that fits with the lake. The middle is mostly the office space. And then the top, with the balconies and so forth, has handrails of the sort you might find on a ship. Ships are not necessarily the first thing one might connect with Arizona, but this development establishes a gateway to Tempe while celebrating the Mill that operated on the river. It’s designed to celebrate water as a highly valued commodity here in the parched desert.You don’t necessarily have to do it with a “water element” like a waterfall or a fountain.

One of the fun things we did with it was we created something with terrazzo – that’s a kind of ground material with stone in it – you can make it almost any color you want – it’s a favorite of public school systems. Anyway, we integrated into the project a sort of terrazzo river. It’s too much to say it’s an optical illusion – it’s more of a visual allegory. I don’t think it’s a cartoon. It’s perceived as a quality corporate building. But it also has a sort of reverence. The blue material streams through the project and ultimately ends up in the real water. It’s another way to respect water without simply adding a fountain or some other feature where the water will evaporate by several inches a day. You can acknowledge in some ways that once upon a time there was a running river here, the Salt River. It’s not running anymore because about four million people decided they wanted a drink from it. And to put it in our swimming pools.

Previous Elements of Place discussion: “See the sun and the shadow” • Next in The Elements of Place: “Respect the mountains”

Oasis image (thumbnail) and Pacific Ocean image (top) courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Hayden Ferry image (bottom) courtesy The DAVIS Experience.