All the things I would eat if I were in STL

If you live in St. Louis, and you haven’t had any of these divine indulgences consider this your bucket list.

Full disclosure, I stole all of these images from instagram.

Drawing Architecture

But not knowing how to scan. 

As I get ready for my final studio as a grad student, I found these artifacts from my first year at the University of Cincinnati. Then, I took everything so seriously. Every drawing, every concept model, every conversation mattered. Over time, as I have become more comfortable with my abilities and the discourse of design, I am just as serious. Maybe this is because I am an older sibling, or perhaps because my zodiac sign is that of the Aquarius. Regardless, I look back at my work from years ago and I am grateful for the earnest effort I put forth, but I am also reminded that this is a life-long pursuit and I will always work hard to master the difficult tasks ahead. I remember when I drew these back in 2010, I spent hours sitting around the DAAP building with my pencil and erasing shield measuring out walls and steps, trying to make sense of the seussical sense of Peter Eisenman's building. It is in this time, the hours spent looking and recording, that I grew to love architecture as object. And while we are trained to not consider the building as an sculpture in a field, it is only with this fundamental appreciation that I have been able to integrate design into its complicated context. These basic drawings show that I can tackle new skills and that with patience and persistence I have done it before. 

to intervene

 
to intervene.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concrete
Rushes upward
To support walls
Of stone and steel. 
Line intersects Linear
Building a grid
Of mirrored prisms.
A rhythmic translation; 
From void,
To frame,
To mass. 
A maze of gravitas
Grounded within the earth
Definite. 
It seeps exponentially into the
Surrounding depths. 
Infinite. 

Posters for Change

In a time of increased political debate and civic engagement the Princeton Architectural Press held a competition for original posters that advocate for social and environmental justice, economic equality, and human rights. As part of my participation in the Sam Fox School Alberti Program, we used this competition as an opportunity to offer our students a chance to let their voices be heard. 

The Alberti Program

An architecture program for Young People hosted by Washington University's Sam Fox School of Architecture and Urban Design. It is a problem solving workshop about architecture, community, and the environment. 3rd. through 12th. grade students of different social and economic backgrounds in the St. Louis region participate in 2d and 3d hands-on problem solving projects and are introduced to the fields of architecture and sustainable design through lectures,  projects, discussions, field trips.

 

Reflections inspired by Hannibal Missouri

The River Town is undoubdtedly a Floodplain

hannibal_steamboat

Like most river towns, the Mississippi river is essential to the lifeblood of the Hannibal. Here, steamboat traffic and trade promoted city growth to become one of the largest populations in the entire state before the Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad was established. While the river has been essential to putting Hannibal on the map, it too has been the source of sever damage and defeat. Hannibal is precariously protected by a floodwall, but has seen the consequences of water pouring over top. Like many river towns, Hannibal is at the mercy of a brute force solution. A wall that furiously imposes itself on the landscape funneling water through its course, without allowing any of it to escape. This is a engineered approach to water management that doesn’t occur naturally. Hence, when it fails, it is dire. Houses are ruined, neighborhoods are abandoned, and lives are potentially lost. 

American

Like many other cities within the Union, Hannibal was built on a history of slave labuor. African American labour was fundamental to the daily lives of white Hannibalians to maintain their properties, farm their land, and keep their houses. Those few African Americans who were free developed churches, businesses and fraternities that have had a lasting impact on the city. Eventually, after emancipation from slavery, African American communities grew into self sufficient cultural entities, including the historic wedge district. Nowadays, the segregation has begun to disintegrate, and communities like The Wedge no longer exist as it once did. African American history in Hannibal has been forgotten. No, not forgotten, ignored. The stories need to be told and remembered, design and community shaping has the power to bring people with stories together. To tell and retell stories helps to affirm culture with place, and place to a culture. We need to make places that subliminally tell ignored stories in part to revive distinct sense of community, but also to validate and respect these pasts. This is how the designer makes reparations.  

hannibal_vacancy

Responsible Revival from Dilapidation

The vacancy, as exhaustively displayed on Broadway, is the physical manifestation of a changed city. The downtown core, is no longer the essence to town living. Instead, services and amenities have been pushed to the boundaries of town. Vacancy is not necessarily an indication of defeat, but it does announce altered values. Vacancy indicates that there is opportunity for a re-emphasis of the towns identity. This identity is not defined by the outsider, myself, but instead the designer must surround themselves by the essence of a place, and re-articulate it so that it can be understood and  lived within by community members.

hannibal_marktwain

The Local vs The Tourist

The city of Hannibal is dependent on tourism for economic sustenance. The tourism industry is reliant on the name of Mark Twain to attract people from all over the country to visit Twain’s hometown. That said, the legacy of Twain is controversial. Locals are frustrated with the mainly Twain oriented cultural services and as such have turned their back on downtown Hannibal. Many Hannibalian’s prefer to live West of downtown in the suburbs and rarely come downtown except for annual festivals. Twain’s legacy has lead to a cultural drain for the locals, shielding the many cultural amenities the city has fostered for  almost 200 years. Cities and towns need to find ways to reintroduce businesses and services not oriented towards their main attraction in order to foster local loyalty to one's hometown. 

A Letter to the State Capital

April 21, 2017


To Our State Senators, 


As young professionals currently studying landscape architecture in the state of Missouri, we consider the proposed course of action in our state regarding the registration of landscape architects particularly troubling. It is our strong belief that the free use of this designation by those who have not attended an accredited program and completed the further necessary licensure will severely disenfranchise students such as ourselves. It is not unlike allowing an individual to practice law or medicine without the appropriate credentials. This failure to recognize the professional training and experience of registered landscape architects in the state of Missouri has already caused many students, like us, to reconsider our intention to remain in the state following graduation and instead move to another state that recognizes our commitment to quality.


To maintain the integrity of our built environment, it is imperative that landscape architects be licensed. Technical knowledge, such as grading, drainage, and construction detail, can thereby be accounted for in depth. What further distinguishes a licensed landscape architect, however, are the sophisticated considerations we make that go far beyond the technical contingencies associated with design. Registration ensures that an individual has demonstrated an attuned ability to understand impacts of design, ranging from cultural to environmental. Landscape architecture is far more than mere aesthetics. The profession is one that explores the relationships between humans and their environment. Once these relationships are better understood, we aim to create processes that enable these relationships to grow stronger and more beneficial to all. Dual infrastructure, ecological services, and performative landscapes, are among just a few of the highly productive forms of landscape that can only be achieved through the aid of professionally trained and registered individuals.


Finally, registration ensures that all practicing landscape architects are held accountable for their work. Our practice, since its establishment in the early 20th century, has used registration as means of maintaining the highest of standards and public respect.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Student American Society of Landscape Architecture Chapter
Washington University in St. Louis

How can the various approaches to nuclear landscapes help to understand the topic and treatment of environmental memory?

The complex socio-political context of nuclear extraction, processing, testing, employment, and disposal has informed built spaces and environments. Through each of these processes, landscapes of nuclear waste are formed. Many artists, historians, scientists, and designers have developed an understanding and interpretation of the post-conflict landscape of nuclear war. However, this is an investigation into how we might remember and interact with a paradoxical past; a past of conflict between spectacle and fear, triumph and tragedy, discovery and destructiveness, through the revealed and concealed. Nuclear landscapes are boundless, and yet defined with perimeters.  What can we interpret about environmental memory from the treatment of nuclear landscapes?  This is a local condition with a global reach, of which the consequences are likely too large to fully understand, affecting the conditions of soil, water, and air, creating unfit conditions for biota. This is an effort to not only heal the radioactive environment, but also investigate scars of an emotional and cultural nature. 

Nuclear Landscapes | 1991Peter Goin (photographer) 

Nuclear Landscapes | 1991
Peter Goin (photographer) 

The obsession of nuclear technology and the various nuclear landscapes can be epitomized by American photographer Peter Goin, who in his photographic book “Nuclear Landscapes” explores the nuclear landscape as a landscape of desolation and expansiveness, one where the human is a foreign object. In doing so, he describes these landscapes through pictorial symbolism, evoking the fear inherent in these landscapes. Through his archive of images, the use of photographic techniques helps to symbolize the destruction thatoccurred on the landscape, but objectifies them as no longer attainable to the human civilian. Instead they are archived through imagery only, accessible only through the pages of a book. This form of documentation is one way in which the memory of nuclear landscape remains, perhaps due to the inherent danger of radioactive exposure, it is the only way these landscapes remain in the consciousness of memory.

Accidents Will Happen: Lessons on Honey, Smoked Pig Fat, Atomic Disaster and the Half-Life of Truth | July 2012 |  Steven Boyd Saum Places Journal                Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, Kuznetsovsk, Uk…

Accidents Will Happen: Lessons on Honey, Smoked Pig Fat, Atomic Disaster and the Half-Life of Truth | July 2012 |  Steven Boyd Saum Places Journal                Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, Kuznetsovsk, Ukraine. [Photo by Jakov Vladimir Leonidovich]

In contrast, Steven Saum, a visitor to the Ukraine, writes about the fear that underlies the everyday condition in Ukraine. Even as a visitor, and someone who did not live through the catastrophic event of Chernobyl in 1987, he has absorbed some of the cultural ways in which an environmental memory lives on in cultural practice and the collective psyche. From this, we can interpret that environmental memory perhaps has nothing to do with how a nuclear landscape is presented, but instead how that nuclear landscape interacted with those communities and people in the area during its use. As such, memory is carried through culture. For example, Saum describes being instructed to eat kelp, which has a high percentage of iodine in case of high radiation levels in the air, or the practice of powerful figures to always have train tickets out of town on hold in case of another nuclear disaster. Through a narrative of personal experience, primarily written to provide a counter-narrative to one of reassurance and security by local newspapers, Saum presents a basis for an argument beyond physical interaction with nuclear sites and society, but instead that environmental memory exists once it has affected the culture of a place.

Similarly, Tomoko Tamari, lecturer of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, writes about a cultural shift in architectural priorities because of nuclear landscape in Japan. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 sparked the modernist movement of metabolism. This interaction with a nuclear landscape not only generated a demand for a new movement in architecture, one that allowed for the re-development and design of a new identity committed to advanced technology (you say not only here, but you don’t say what else it does). Architectural ideals shift again as a consequence of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that caused the meltdown of Tepco Daiichi nuclear reactors. Tamari describes a catalyzed shift in Japanese architecture from one of megastructrues and the organic city from the metabolism movement, to one of another post-destruction age. Designers such as Toyo Ito and Shigeru Ban are part of a cultural movement that rejects a reliance on technology and security in the environment and instead dwell within the realm of refuge and individual protection. Like in the Ukraine, there are evidences of an environmental history engrained in the shifting cultural practices of the country. 

One the other hand, scholars such as Shiloh Krupar and Miriam Engler who study the treatment of nuclear landscapes in the United States offer other insight into the topic of environmental memory. Krupar writes about the heighten concealment of nuclear landscapes as arsenal of the de-militarization of them and the policies of greenwashing by the DOE and DOD. She suggests that ‘military to wildlife’ (M2W) practices act as a screen that removes responsibility of the militarized landscape from the government. Through the device of spectacle as a means of natural consumption, it further conceals the militarized legacy of these nuclear waste landscapes by disguising them as conservation. Environmental memory is intentionally eliminated. Similarly, Engler suggests that through the practices of monumentalization and memorialization, the transformation of nuclear landscapes to cultural landscapes contributes to the practice of landscapes for consumption and concealment. They both encourage that these landscapes not to be concealed, but be considered landscapes of complex socio-political histories that need to be further tested and explored by designers. In short, they argue that American treatment of nuclear landscapes, reduce environmental memory by concealing their pasts. 

Environmental memory is especially significant when it comes to nuclear landscape because of their inherently dangerous condition to humans and other living species. Their danger is augmented as they are without clear boundaries, and basically undetectable through human means of perception. While archaeologists and scientists work on ways of communicating hazardous landscapes to future civilizations through symbolism and monuments, perhaps as landscape architects we can work to understand how nuclear landscapes prompt changes in culture. By altering these landscapes to take on new cultural meanings, the environmental legacy of nuclear waste sites is broken, thus reducing the awareness of these sites to future generations.   Perhaps through cultural practices, the memory of these landscapes can continue. 

Works Cited: 

Engler, Miriam. “Post-Nuclear Monuments, Museums, and Gardens.” Landscape Review 9.2 (2005): 45. Print.

Goin, Peter. Nuclear Landscapes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Print. Creating the North American Landscape.

Steven Boyd Saum, “Accidents Will Happen: Lessons on Honey, Smoked Pig Fat, Atomic Disaster and the Half-Life of Truth,” Places Journal, July 2012. Accessed 22 Mar 2017. https://doi.org/10.22269/120716

Shiloh Krupar. “The Biopolitics of Spectacle: Salvation and Oversight at the Post-military Nature Refuge.” Global ReVisions. Ed. Zahi

Zalloua and Bruce Magnusson. : University of Washington Press, 2016: 116-153
Tamari, Tomoko. “Metabolism: Utopian Urbanism and the Japanese Modern Architecture Movement.” Theory, Culture & Society 31.7–8 (2014): 201–225. SAGE Journals. Web.

 

Parklet Installation - Smart Growth Conference 2017

The rich, native forests around St. Louis – like those in and around your own community – hold tremendous value worth protecting.  These landscapes define the places we call home.  They call out to us to slow down and may stop us in our tracks and take our breath away.  Research finds that trees improve the air we breathe and the water we drink; they cool us in summer and slow the winds of winter; and reduce our stress levels to such a degree that they may literally improve our productivity and save our lives. In particular, street trees are an integral part of the urban fabric and necessary for the creation of vibrant communities. In a partnership between Forest ReLeaf of Missouri, the US Forest Service, and the ASLA Student Chapter at Washington University, this unique parklet showcases the importance of and challenges facing ash trees in St. Louis – 17% of the street tree population devastated by the emerald ash borer (EAB).