My pictures from the gardens of Rancho Los Alamitos. Long Beach, California

I´ve been visiting Rancho Los Alamitos last weekend and enjoyed the house and gardens.

See the gardens after the restoration:

Rancho Los Alamitos is a microcosm of the regional story. In the intersecting lives of native people, owners and workers who once called this place home and transformed its land is the richness, drama and complexity of California’s legacy. Change and continuity reverberate throughout the history of the Rancho. Sacred ground; water; land for farming, ranching, and real estate; oil; historic open space; as well as people from around the world—all have emerged at the right time to renew and sustain natural and cultural communities, and reshape and renew the Rancho over generations. The continual remix of diversity is the mark of a resilient landscape and accounts for the long, ongoing, beneficial evolution of Rancho Los Alamitos. Today Rancho Los Alamitos is 7.5-acres, a rare vestige of the original 300,000-acre Los Coyotes land concession given to Manuel Nieto in 1790 for his service on the Gaspar de Portolá expedition to California under the Spanish Crown. However, the story of Rancho Los Alamitos precedes these first newcomers, for the historic site is also part of the ancestral village of Povuu’ngna, the traditional place of origin of the native Gabrielino-Tongva people of the Los Angeles Basin, and still a sacred place. Nieto’s vast land holdings included 25,500 acres which in 1833 became Rancho Los Alamitos—Ranch of the Little Cottonwoods. The name suggested its most valuable asset since cottonwoods grow near water, and grew plentifully near the natural springs of Povuu’ngna below the hill. For Nieto, the land was a ranching gem and reward from the Spanish Crown. Subsequent owners Governor José Figueroa and Yankee Don Abel Stearns saw the site as a smart investment and perhaps a haven away from rough Los Angeles. To generations of the Bixby family, the ranch’s last private owners, and the workers, tenant and lease farmers who worked there, Rancho Los Alamitos was an enterprising ranch that would endure for almost a century through the rise of modern-day Long Beach. From the time of ancestral Povuu’ngna through the Spanish-Mexican era of land concessions and grants native workers fueled the Alta California economy. In turn, the early American era owners of Alamitos, like other Yankee dons throughout the state, relied on successive workers from the U.S., Europe, China, and Japan to cultivate fields and raise livestock, and in the twentieth century, depended on labor from Mexico as well as Belgian tenant and Japanese lease farmers. During the 1880’s booming real estate, 5,000 acres of Alamitos land were developed, and by the early twentieth century, Alamitos oil subsidized the remaining 3,600-acre ranch, but the black gold flowed over open space into rampant urban growth. In 1968, the children of Fred and Florence Bixby, the last private owners, donated the family ranch to the City of Long Beach, transforming what had been a working ranch to a public oasis and setting the stage for what Rancho Los Alamitos is today—a place for all time..

http://www.rancholosalamitos.com/history.html

Some works of landscape art by Cornelia Konrads

I´ve been reading at THE DIRT about the landscape works by German artist Cornelia Konrads. I really liked them, so I´m sharing today some pictures posted at The Dirt and the last two of them are from Cornelia´s web site.

¨German artist Cornelia Konrads creates pieces made for a certain place using found local materials. Many feel temporary, perhaps created just long enough to be photographed. Konrads, unlike other land artists though, also has a unique bent on gravity, creating works that defy Newton’s laws. In Passage (see above and below), fine wire or fishing lines hide the underlying machinery.¨

REFERENCES:

http://dirt.asla.org/2012/06/28/cornelia-konrads-moments-of-indecision/

See much more from Cornelia´s 

http://www.cokonrads.de/index.html

Overview of Versailles. 1688

Pierre Patel´s overview of Versailles painted in 1688 demonstrates the power and glory of the French gardening style as exemplified by Louis XIV and Le Notre. In the perspective, avenues stretch into the distance, while nearer the chateau ordered and disciplined plants line expanses of green and the wide alleys through which the king makes his tour. Tall hornbeams are clipped and trained to make vertical screens -the charmilles lastingly associated with French formal gardening- and the bosquets make a dense screen around their inner features and planting.

From Gardening through the ages. By Penelope Hobhouse. Italy. 1992. P. 162-163

The ideal of the Islamic and Mughal garden

The detail of an eighteen century Rajput miniature of an Indian princess in a garden reveals typical features inherited from the ideal of the Islamic and Mughal garden. Within high enclosing walls with imposing entrance gates there are pavilions and lotus-filled pools, and cypresses and flowering fruit tress as well as colourful flowers flourish in the geometrically arranged beds. Beyond the outer walls irrigation from the river has made it possible to grow a shrubbery which includes cypresses and bananas and perhaps other exotic trees and flowers as well as those native to India.

From Gardening through the ages. By Penelope Hobhouse. Italy. 1992. P. 50/51

When trees have a negative (?) urban impact

Newcastle, Australia. Image downloaded from http://www.luxuo.com/travel/l

I was working once for a case about trees, beautiful old pines that blocked the view of the City of Los Angeles at a property on hill side. Both homeowners, on the trees' ground and above, were involved in legal issues.

The pines where trimmed (chopped I'd say), they looked like amputated, but the homeowner with the view could see Los Angeles far away and considered the value of his property was increased.

I love cities with trees, my native city, Buenos Aires is full of them, you walk in between trees and it's a nice sensation. Let's see what's going on in Newcastle, Australia: 

 Newcastle, Australia, should be crowned the world capital of tree drama. Residents there in recent months have shown such intense love and complete disdain for trees that one has to wonder whether there's anything else important going on in Newcastle beyond its flora. The latest dose of Newcastle tree-sanity results from a plan to plant 30,000 trees throughout the city. For local politicians, such projects are often an easy way claim credit for something undeniably popular. But in the Stockton section of Newcastle, this seemingly feel-good proposition has brought locals to their feet in protest and put the city council on an unexpectedly hot set of seats. "There are no parts of Stockton, no people in Stockton that are going to benefit from these trees," resident Bob Dein told the Newcastle Herald. It's hard to imagine a neighborhood where more trees would be a bad thing, but for residents of seaside Stockton, new trees mean a reduced view. Dein and about 50 other residents have signed a petition protesting the tree proposal, arguing that the plantings will negatively impact their views of the ocean and, as a result, their property values.

Keep on reading Nate Berg's article:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/05/newcastle-australia-world-capital-tree-drama/1982/

Vertical gardens in Mexico

I remember many years ago, when the newspapers published that Mexican women traveled to the country to give birth to their babies, because of the terrible pollution in the City.

At least, some effort is shown to find a solution. From New York Times, by Damien Cave:

 “We must cultivate our garden,” Voltaire famously wrote at the end of “Candide,” but even he could not have imagined this: a towering arch of 50,000 plants rising over a traffic-clogged avenue in a metropolis once called “Mexsicko City” because of its pollution.

The vertical garden aims to scrub away both the filth and the image. One of three eco-sculptures installed across the city by a nonprofit called VerdMX, the arch is both art and oxygenator. It catches the eye. And it also helps clean the air.

“The main priority for vertical gardens is to transform the city,” said Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, 30, the architect who designed the sculptures. “It’s a way to intervene in the environment.”(.....)

“Both L.A. and Mexico City have improved but in Mexico City, the change has been a lot more,” said Luisa Molina, a research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has done extensive pollution comparisons. Mexico “is very advanced not just in terms of Latin America, but around the world. When I go to China, they all want to hear the story of Mexico.”

Partly, it is policy. Starting in the 1980s, Mexico’s government created mandates that reformulated gasoline, closed or moved toxic factories, and banned most drivers from using their cars one day a week. More recently, Mexico City added a popular free bicycle loan program and expanded public transportation systems.

The Eco sculpture. Photo by Rodrigo Cruz

Picture from verdmx. com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/world/americas/vertical-gardens-in-mexico-a-symbol-of-progress.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss

Toronto, the first city in North America to require the installation of green roofs

Today I´m sharing an interesting article by Kaid Benfield, published at theatlanticcities.com:

In January of 2010, Toronto became the first city in North America to require the installation of green roofs on new commercial, institutional, and multifamily residential developments across the city. Next week, the requirement will expand to apply to new industrial development as well. Simply put, a green roof is a rooftop that is vegetated. Green roofs produce multiple environmental benefits by reducing the urban heat island effect and associated energy demand, absorbing rainwater before it becomes runoff, improving air quality, and bringing nature and natural diversity into urban environments. In many cases, green roofs can also be enjoyed by the public much as a park can be. Toronto’s requirements are embodied in a municipal bylaw that includes standards for when a green roof is required and what elements are required in the design. Generally speaking, smaller residential and commercial buildings (such as apartment buildings less than six stories tall) are exempt; from there, the larger the building, the larger the vegetated portion of the roof must be. For the largest buildings, 60 percent of available space on the roof must be vegetated. (...) 

The triptych image above was developed by students at the University of Toronto to illustrate changes that could ensue from ten years of progress under the city’s requirements. Prior to the bylaw, Toronto was second among North American cities (after Chicago) in its total amount of green roof coverage.

READ IT IN FULL:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/04/what-cities-can-learn-torontos-green-roof-policy/1846/

A vertical ¨green house¨ in Sweden is under construction

The future of urban farming is under construction in Sweden as agricultural design firm Plantagon works to bring a 12-year-old vision to life: The city of Linköping will soon be home to a 17-story "vertical greenhouse." The greenhouse will serve as a regenerating food bank, tackling urban sprawl while making the city self-sufficient. Plantagon predicts that growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers, a key shift as the world's population grows increasingly urban—80 percent of the world's residents will live in cities by 2050, the United Nations estimates. "Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide," Plantagon CEO Hans Hassle says. The greenhouse is a conical glass building that uses an internal "transportation helix" to carry potted vegetables around on conveyors. As plants travel around the helix, they rotate for maximum sun exposure. Hassle says the building will use less energy than a traditional greenhouse, take advantage of "spillage heat" energy companies cannot sell, digest waste to produce biogas and plant fertilizers, and decrease carbon dioxide emissions while eliminating the environmental costs of long-distance transportation. And growing plants in a controlled environment will decrease the amount of water, energy, and pesticides needed. The greenhouse, which will open in late 2013, is already serving as a model for other cities—Plantagon hopes to install the transportation helix technology in regular office buildings around the world, eliminating the need to build entirely new structures. The tallest models even have a name: Plantascrapers.

REFERENCE:

http://www.good.is/post/a-vertical-greenhouse-could-make-a-swedish-city-self-sufficient

Most interesting for me is the response from agronomist Miguel Aloysio Sattler, I really appreciate his point of view:

Dear Myriam,

That is complete nonsense. The traditional food production systems would require an area something between 4 and 10 times larger than the share of urban space/per capita to supply a minimum diet. So you can guess how much built area you would need to grow all this food on a building. As an agronomist I have been investigating this for several years with my students and the exact area would depend on the type of diet of each person. You could minimize this required area by using intensive production systems, like the permacultural forest garden we have talked about some weeks ago.

New Spring Street Park. Los Angeles

New Spring Street Park. Lehrer archs. From Bureau of Engineering.

Concept for Spring Street Park, Los Angeles. From theloftexchange.com

I hope more parks would be developed in Los Angeles, the city for automobiles, the city where walking between high buildings without human scale is not nice. Pershing Square designed by Legorreta, so boring and empty, specially in Summer, except for a few ones who want some tanning.

From the loftexchange.com:

The city continues to fine-tune its design and plans for a 0.7-acre park set to replace a parking lot in the Historic Core.

The latest conceptual designs for the Spring Street Park, which will be located between the Rowan and El Dorado Lofts, were unveiled at a recent community workshop hosted by Council District 9 office and the Downtown Neighborhood Council, and led by the Bureau of Engineering’s Architectural Division, and Michael Lehrer Architects, who are in the process of preparing the final park design plans.

Attendees of the meeting got a peek at the park's proposed walking paths, seating furniture, water features, art work and security fences. As planned, the park would feature eco-permeable pavers and stormwater runoff mitigation which is designed to capture and treat all the water runoff from the park site before entering the underground storm drain system.

http://www.theloftexchange.com/downtownspringstreetpark.html

New Spring Street Park, Los Angeles. From http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5906

Seattle´s Beacon Food Forest

The complete plan for the Beacon Food Forest. From crosscut.com

An idea to be imitated:

Sandwiched between 15th Ave. S. and the play fields at the SW edge of Jefferson Park in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle are seven acres of lonely, sloping lawn that have sat idly in the hands of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) for the better part of a century. At least until this spring, when the land that has only ever known the whirring steel of city mowers will begin a complete transformation into seven acres of edible landscape and community park space known as the Beacon Food Forest.

The end goal is an urban oasis of public food: Visitors to the corner of 15th Ave S. and S. Dakota Street will be greeted by a literal forest — an entire acre will feature large chestnuts and walnuts in the overstory, full-sized fruit trees like big apples and mulberries in the understory, and berry shrubs, climbing vines, herbaceous plants, and vegetables closer to the ground.

Further down the path an edible arboretum full of exotic looking persimmons, mulberries, Asian pears, and Chinese haws will surround a sheltered classroom for community workshops. Looking over the whole seven acres, you'll see playgrounds and kid space full of thornless mini edibles adjacent to community gardening plots, native plant areas, a big timber-frame gazebo and gathering space with people barbecuing, a recreational field, and food as far as you can see.

The entire project will be built around the concept of permaculture — an ecological design system, philosophy, and set of ethics and principles used to create perennial, self-sustaining landscapes and settlements that build ecological knowledge and skills in communities. The concept of a food forest is a core concept of permaculture design derived from wild food ecosystems, where land often becomes forest if left to its own devices. In a food forest, everything from the tree canopy to the roots is edible or useful in some way.

Keep on reading:

http://crosscut.com/2012/02/16/agriculture/21892/Nation-s-largest-public-Food-Forest-takes-root-on-Beacon-Hill/

Grants Open Spaces Sacred Places: The Healing Power of Nature

The TKF Foundation announces the final phase of the Open Spaces Sacred Places (OSSP) National Awards Program. The program was enacted in 2 phases, a Planning Grant Phase, now closed, and an open call for proposals. Final Awards will fund development of significant new sacred public green spaces in urban settings that demonstrate a combination of high quality design-build and rigorous research about user impacts. The total remaining funding pool is $4 million. Funding will be provided to cross-disciplinary teams that are able to 1) conceptualize, plan, design and implement an open and sacred green space, 2) conduct associated research study(ies), and 3) communicate scientific findings. TKF seeks to identify projects replicable in their intent. Projects should also be generalizable in the challenges they address to serve as potential archetypes for urban areas across the U.S.

Read more:

http://www.opensacred.org/grants

More from tactical urbanism!

I´ve been looking at some pictures from theatlanticcities.com of urban guerrillas (in the good sense of the word), organized groups of people trying to make the cities more livable for everybody; that is called ¨Tactical Urbanism.¨ The examples are really interesting, some of them a little shocking, it´s impossible for the authorities not to pay attention to the inhabitants´ necessities.

¨In mid-January, a group calling themselves Walk Raleigh posted 27 such signs at three intersections around the city, and we hear (by reading their Facebook page), that the stunt has actually caught the eye of city officials who may look to make the signs permanent. This is tactical urbanism at its best: a fly-by-night citizen-led escapade whose whimsy could ultimately prompt real improvements to city amenities.(....)This got us thinking about some of our other favorite tactical urbanism capers: yarn bombing, chair bombing – and guerrilla gardening, of course.¨


Read the full article:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/02/guerilla-wayfinding-raleigh/1139/

Active relations with the environment in Sunset Beach

Amos Rapoport, architect and anthropologist, taught us about the human interventions in the environment. Buildings would conform the fixed environment, furniture, objects, etc are the non fixed elements of the environment. When inhabitants interact with their environment, they leave clues about the way they live or feel.

Sunset beach is a quiet small neighborhood that was annexed to the city of Huntington Beach, Southern California. Here, some examples of the town character of some houses, the marine decoration, the nice garden in a public boulevard, full of stones with the ¨designer´s¨ memories. I´m not sure if everybody in town is allowed to add plants and objects to the garden, but I think there wouldn´t be any problem to share memories.

All pictures by Myriam B. Mahiques, personal archives.

And that´s me, with some beach houses, in Sunset Beach. A bad picture taken by  my husband.

¨The ¨will to live,¨ often said to be the great inclusive motive of all living creatures, is in human beings not simply the will to stay alive but rather the will to live in active relations with the environment. Being equipped with sense organs and motor organs and a well developed brain, the human individual has a fundamental inclination to deal with environment. This motive is not primarily directed toward serving the organic needs and meeting the emergencies of life, but toward knowing objects and persons, doing things to them, and participating in what is going on in the environment. Just because this objective tendency is so all persuasive it is often overlooked and omitted from a list of fundamental motives, where it certainly belongs. It shows itself in the general tendencies to explore and manipulate the environment, and in a great variety of more specific interests.¨

Robert Woodworth and Donald Marquis, Psychology, 5th edition, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York, 1947, p. 323.

Footprints of the seaside´s visitors in a beautiful winter day. The track of the interaction with the environment

The artistic landscapes of Zander Olsen

Since 2004, architecture and landscape photographer and artist Zander Olsen has been working on Tree, Line, a series of “constructed” photographs that play with our notion of foreground and background in a forest (http://dirt.asla.org/2012/01/19/landscapes-that-fool-you/)

From zanderolsen.com:

These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.

http://www.zanderolsen.com/Tree_Line.html

ALL PICTURES BY ZANDER OLSEN

Concept of a landscape structure

This is a concept of a landscape structure or a digital painting that I see as landscape. The terraces of greens, a structure of rows of blue flowers and on top of this hill, the landscape is covered by yellow flowers, as those who  I can see on the 5 freeway, to San Francisco, in summer. And lakes as oasis among the yellow flowers.

Flowers that blow at midnight

Photo: Zarko Vijatovic. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery. 

Sharing from arcspace.com:

As fall cedes to winter, the Jardins des Tuileries in Paris will be enlivened by Yayoi Kusama's vibrantly colored Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, a series of unique large scale sculptures. This is the first time these sculptures will be seen in France.

Read the full article:

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/kusama/flowers/flowers.html

The sublimity of landscape

J. M. W. Turner. The decline of the Carthaginian empire. 1817. Google images

¨The interest of a landscape consists wholly in its relation either to figures present—or to figures past—or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity —per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock, than in a horizontal one. The only thing that makes the one more interesting to you in a landscape than the other, is that you could tumble over the perpendicular fracture—and couldn't tumble over the other. A cloud, looked at as a cloud only, is no more a subject for painting than so much feculence in dirty water. It is merely dirty air, or at best a chemical solution ill made. That it is worthy of being painted at all depends upon its being the means of nourishment and chastisement to men, or the dwelling place of imaginary gods. There's a bit of blue sky and cloud by Turner—one of the loveliest ever painted by human hand. But, as a mere pattern of blue and white, he had better have painted a jay's wing: this was only painted by him—and is, in reality, only pleasant to you—because it signifies the coming of a gleam of sweet sunshine in windy weather; and the wind is worth thinking of only because it fills the sails of ships, and the sun because it warms the sailors. (....) Only natural phenomena in their direct relation to humanity—these are to be your subjects in landscape. Rocks and water and air may no more be painted for their own sakes, than the armor carved without the warrior.¨

J.M.W. Turner. Modern Rome. Campo Vaccino. Google images

John Ruskin. Lectures on Landscape.

These Lectures on Landscape were given at Oxford on January 20, February 9, and February 23, 1871

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20019/20019-h/20019-h.htm

Urban trees and the value of properties

Trees in a street of Buenos Aires. From Tam Muro at http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Jacaranda trees in Buenos Aires. From http://www.flickr.com/photos/machteld/2515975677/

I´m not surprised to see that urban trees generate extra value for the properties. I can´t imagine somebody disliking them, though, I know a case in Colombia,  exposed at a Symposium by a Colombian architect who explained that in some areas of Bogota, people preferred no trees in the streets because the trees were reminders of the fields, and the fields reminders of guerrillas. 

Platano trees in a street of Santiago de Chile. Picture by YYC at http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1113329&page=52

From the article by Eric Jaffe:

¨In his quest to quantify, (Geoffrey) Donovan has investigated the influence of trees on neighborhood crime, electricity use, even the health of babies. Over the past few years he's focused much of his energy on measuring the effect trees have on home prices in Portland. The results suggest that "nice" and "good" can be pretty valuable words.

In the latest issue of the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Donovan and coauthor David Butry of the National Institute of Standards and Technology examine the impact of trees on rental prices. They looked up the asking price of about a thousand Portland rental homes on Craigslist, then collected data on the number and size of trees in the vicinity using Google Earth.

After controlling for the factors that someone examining the effect of trees on rent should control for — most notably, neighborhood desirability — Donovan and Butry determined that a tree on the lot of a home increased its monthly rent by $5.62, while a tree on the street near the home increased it by $21. Not exactly budget-busting figures. When combined with previous research, however, the results point to a clear preference for trees among Portland residents.

In a 2010 paper in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, Donovan and Butry found that a tree in front of a Portland property added more than $7,000 to its sale price. Earlier this year another team of economists reported that walkability, in the form of nearby businesses, raises a Portland home's value by about $3,500 in a treeless neighborhood, but more than $22,000 [PDF] in a tree-lined one.¨

Read the full article:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2011/09/where-trees-rule-real-estate/223/

Botticelli and Leonardo: different ways of seeing landscapes

St. John on Patmos. 1490. By Sandro Botticelli. Google images

Sandro Botticelli. Agony in the garden. 1500. Google images

Botticelli didn´t paint landscapes but if so, they were as a background where the main frame was acquired by the addition of arches, architecture in general. Even rocks seem to be built by humans. From Au-dela de la peinture, 1936; first published in Cahiers d´Art, Special Issue, 1937, the words by Max Ernst:

Sandro Botticelli. Virgin and the Child enthroned. Google images.

Landscape detail. Sandro Botticelli.

¨Botticelli did not like landscape painting, regarding it as a ¨limited and mediocre kind of investigation.¨He said contemptuously that ¨by throwing a sponge soaked with different colours at a wall one can make a spot in which a beautiful landscape can be seen.¨ This earned him a severe admonition from his colleague Leonardo da Vinci:

¨He (Botticelli) is right: one is bound to see bizarre inventions in such a smudge; I mean that he who will gaze attentively at that spot will see in it human heads, various animals, a battle, rocks, the sea, clouds, thickets, and still more: it is like the tinkling of a bell which makes one hear what one imagines. Although that stain may suggest ideas, it will not teach you to complete any art, and the above mentioned painter (Botticelli) paints very bad landscapes.¨

Reproduced in Surrealism. By Patrick Waldberg.

Arno´s landscape. By Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

A storm over a hilly landscape. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

Landscape near Pisa. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images