Joan and Cedric

BOOKS The White Album by Joan Didion (1979) and Cedric Price: Works II by Architectural Association (1984)

From Joan Didion, 1979:

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to those who do not have it, and the same is true of control. I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall...

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile."

Before starting, I toured a few design schools and ended up asking Richard Forman about the role of ethics in landscape architecture. I didn't know what I was asking, but he responded to me as if I did, and I pretended to understand. After having my mind delightfully obliterated by the writings of Joan Didion and Cedric Price this past week, I think I might be starting to get hints of what Forman might have been saying. 

In this case, I don't think ethics in design has to do with the right thing to do, but rather the recognition that every decision comes with a heavy, very invisible bag of values attached to it. Every line that is drawn is weighted down by the bag and everyone's got a different bag. Like the idea that science is a cultural construct, design is an ethically loaded act. Why pretend like it's anything less. 

Let's see. Some words from Cedric Price:

"The consciously planned and purposely built environment that exploits the potential of unevenness of environmental conditioning is likely to become one of the main contributions that architects and planners can make to society..." 

"Instantaneous response to a particular problem is too slow. Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment. Like medicine it must move from the curative to the preventive. Architecture should have little to do with problem solving - rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible."