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." 

ecofarm

CONFERENCE EcoFarm 2015: the hottest farmers around

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You Are My Sunshine

Next January, it'll be my thirteenth semester at UC Berkeley and my thirty-first semester attending public school. Sort of sick and pretty privileged.

And it's the third time an occupation has occurred since I started. Although I've got no hopes of being an occupier, I do hope some of us can slip away and be builders of places for people to occupy and tear apart upon their will. In a way, UC Berkeley has been successful in inspiring folks to do this, just that the idea of the place is very big, heavy and pretty hard to crack in one go. 

The folk song, You Are My Sunshine, perpendicular to the UC's motto, Fiat Lux:

The other night, as I lay sleepin'
Dreamed I held you in my arms
When I awoke dar, I was mistaken'
An' I hung my head an' cried

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away

I'll always love you an' make you happy
If you will only say th same
But if you leave me for another
You'll regret it all some day

You told me once't dear, you really loved me
An' no one else could come between
But now you left me for another
You have scattered all my dreams

Villa Prima Facie

PAMPHLET Villa Prima Facie by Lars Lerup, 1978

Checked the 'free pile' at the library today and picked up a sweet thing - a pamphlet about walls. It begins with a quote about blackberries:

On typographical bushes constituted by the poem along a road which leads neither beyond things nor to the spirit, certain fruits are formed by an agglomeration of spheres filled by a drop of ink. 

- Francis Ponge

What does it mean?! 

the power of story

STORY Come Hell or High Water directed by Leah Mahan

A story tonight, notes: the power of storytelling as a conveyance of language that continues to move and connect, the necessity for counter narrative, the blessing of strong relationships, being forever placed within the context of history, constantly rolling. 

Dis-ease of being busy

COLUMN The Disease of Being Busy by Omid Safi

How exactly are we supposed to examine the dark corners of our soul when we are so busy? 

Staying up until 2 in the morning to meet a deadline: desperately gluing little pieces of printed paper to collage an image of Florence Nightingale with her dress, a candle, and a cutout of my face (?) to accompany a biographical report I'd written for submission to the LA County Fair. 18 years later, I am cutting and pasting tedious bits of paper together into the dark hours of the night making god knows what, something to do with psychogeography (?) and sea level rise. It is my habit that I love. When the doing becomes something for the sake of doing though, it dies a little. Maybe this is what dying a little inside means, when the heart and soul are lost. I forget that I'm alive, buried under an epic pile of tasks, so I have to remember why I am doing something, why it might be worth the hours of my life gluing, writing, sitting, that I will never get back. Then it's not about being busy and it becomes easier. It is hopefully a way in, to examine those wonderful dark corners that don't exist anywhere else.