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Chapter 1. Design with Nature
Promises and Pitfalls
In order to endure we must maintain the great cornucopia which is our inheritance. It is clear that we must look deeper to the values which we hold. These must be transformed if we are to reap the bounty and create that fine visage for the home of the brave and the land of the free.1
—Ian. L. McHarg, Design with Nature, p.5
I knew little of ecological complexity while attending architecture school in Miami in the early 1970s. I knew less about the Florida Everglades, the “River of Grass” so dubbed by writer-environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas in an effort to mitigate the insidiously ignorant reference to the place as a “swamp.” And yet there I was, standing along the side of Alligator Alley, the two-lane road between Miami and Naples that cuts through the heart of the Everglades, admiring the emergent sawgrass for as far as the eye could see.
The occasion was the study of Cheekees, the airy thatched structures that have sheltered the goods and people of the Miccosukee tribe for centuries. Many of them remain in use as part of a small roadside village conveniently close to the Miami city limits. Some serve as a marker for flat-bottom boats, watercraft that can traverse standing water or emergent reeds and sawgrass equally well. Farther into the Everglades, dome-shaped stands of cypress trees can be seen dotting the watery expanse, capturing in their verticality the evershifting play between bright light and passing shade. It is a mesmerizing landscape, less for any single standout feature than for the measured pace of its diurnal and seasonal change (see Figure 1.1).
About the time I turned in for review a meticulously scaled replica of a Cheekee, another expansive grassland became etched in my mind, this time via a documentary, Multiply . . . and Subdue the Earth. The on-screen image showed a vast Midwestern meadow with nary a vertical counterpoint save for a tall, mustachioed man standing resolute amid the vegetation: Ian L. McHarg. Many people became acquainted with McHarg through this documentary. It was, for me, a momentous introduction. I cannot recall the details of the script, but the message through McHarg’s voice was clear: the time was here and now to protect the earth and guide humankind to a shared, mutually beneficial existence with nature.
Figure 1.1. A cypress dome rises out of the "River of Grass" in the Florida Everglades. The trees take root in shallow solution holes that over time accumulate layers of organic material, deeper at the center and shallower at the edges.
I had to be part of it. What little I had seen of the Everglades made it so. I then rushed to the campus bookstore and purchased McHarg’s book, Design with Nature, which bore an endorsement on the back cover, calling it “the most important book of the century.”
One can only guess what must have crossed McHarg’s mind a few years later when I unfolded a design portfolio before him in the hope of gaining admittance to the master of landscape architecture program he chaired at the University of Pennsylvania. Following undergraduate studies I had found work in a small Miami landscape architecture office specializing in planning single-family subdivisions0—many of them showcasing cookie-cutter homes spaced along curving roadways and cul-de-sacs set comfortably over excavated Everglades marl and crushed oolite limestone. Plans of this development lay open on his desk, including planting schemes festooned with rubber-stamped trees. Absent in the presentation was any recognition of an underlying ecology or sensitivity to the bygone South Florida landscape, an omission that surely helped intensify McHarg’s redemptive educational mission. He offered the eager presenter a scholarship on the spot, contingent on first completing introductory courses in biology and earth sciences.
Following this coursework, I returned to the Everglades and was able for the first time to truly marvel at its water-powered ecology: majestic nimbus clouds, deep into the landscape, with feathery anvils 60,000 feet up in the air and with furious, dark underbellies lashing at the sawgrass below, literal gushers of life to myriad creatures large and small, from the American alligator to the Florida apple snail. As hydrology goes, few places on earth offer evidence of the daily exchange between land and sky at such a grand and palpable scale. There is inherent beauty in nature’s work, all the more so if one knows how and why it is so.
This, above all else, was McHarg’s pedagogical intent: to teach impressionable young people—architects especially—how nature works and, in doing so, fortify their commitment to and skill at designing with it. This was the clarion sounded by Design with Nature. Enhanced by McHarg’s fervent writing style, the book set the stage for a magnificent indoctrination, one that begat many apostles of the faith, including me.
And so, many years later, it surprised no one gathered to interview consultants for the preparation of a master plan for the South Livermore Valley in California when this author and his partner, Stephen Hammond, summoned the promise of Design with Nature as the best way to develop the valley while preserving and even enhancing its natural and rural beauty. It was 1997 and we had at our disposal the best possible precedent with which to support our claim: the Plan for the Valleys,2 prepared three decades earlier by McHarg and his partner David Wallace. Echoes of this celebrated project filled the conference room as landowners, community representatives, and City of South Livermore and Alameda County planning officials listened to WRT’s statements of approach and qualifications. (More on the South Livermore Specific Plan in Chapter 3).
The key to the pitch was “fitness,” the idea that the proper analysis of environmental factors—geology, hydrology, soils, vegetation, wildlife, among others—can bring to light a landscape’s intrinsic suitability for a given land use program, be it development or conservation.
Ecology as a Promised Land
Fitness is the ultimate aim of Design with Nature, the path toward environmental health and beauty. McHarg based the truth of this thesis on the multifarious ways in which organisms adapt in the struggle for survival and the resulting correlation between natural form and ecological function. This was the lesson he hammered home year after year to the graduate students who came from across the globe to study under his wing. To McHarg, nature’s own bent towards fitness was a creative act:
Evolution consists of a tendency towards increasing fitness whereby the organism adapts the environment to make it more fitting and, through mutation and natural selection, adapts itself towards the same end. As the process of fitting exhibits the direction from simplicity to complexit . . . it corresponds to the most creative processes on earth. Processes whereby the system reverts from complexity to simplicity . . . are therefore entropic and destructive. These are two polar conditions, the first creative fitting and the other destructive and unfitting. The measure of fitness and fitting is evolutionary survival, success of the species or ecosystems, and, in the short run, health.3
These are among the most significant words in Design with Nature—its very promise. They underscore the view that only the mutually beneficial adaptation between humans and nature—between a development program and a site’s underlying ecology—can be considered fit and, therefore, creative.
Listening to McHarg speak about fitness could be a revelatory experience. Three vital arguments spewed forth. First, that the process of planning and design was deterministic, one that was based on factual information leading to defensible conclusions. If there was nothing arbitrary about nature’s work, then neither should there be in the work of man (so long as ecological health was the overriding goal). Second, that the concept of ecological health applied seamlessly to all scales of inquiry, from the region to the specific site. Accordingly, the artifice of property lines and political boundaries was meaningless, a patently un-ecological way to view the world perpetuated by misguided bureaucrats, mapmakers, and school teachers the world over. And third, that addressing fitness required the expertise of multiple disciplines—of designers, planners, and scientists alike, the latter providing the requisite exactitude in pursuit of fact and defensibility. These were the attributes that made McHarg’s vision transcendent: it was not merely a way to practice a profession but also a way to change the world, site by site, region by region, in lock-step with others.
However, McHarg neatly divided the world between that which was fit and that which was not. Nature was fit, cities were unfit. He regarded cities as “scabrous” entities: grimy, scummy, vermin infested, and beset by disease—a Dantesque form of earthly imprisonment. Few cities exemplified this ugly predicament more than his hometown of Glasgow, Scotland. He lamented the city’s careless growth and its impact on the wildlife he cherished as a young lad:
Lark and curlew, grouse and thrush had gone, the caged canary and the budgerigar their mere replacements. No more fox and badger, squirrel and stoat, weasel and hedgehog but now only cat and dog, rats and mice, lice and fleas.4
The Layer Cake
McHarg’s views of cities are succinctly conveyed by the cover of the first edition of Design with Nature: a dark, foreboding skyline, diminished by the weight of its own fowl air and grime. It is in the perceived stark contrast between city and nature where the soul of Design with Nature resides. He spared no word, no critique, in advocating nature as the source of health and well-being—a paradisiacal ecology. The challenge was figuring out how to inhabit this ecology without ruining it; in other words, how to live in paradise. The solution was the “layer cake,” the method by which scores of students learned how to decode a site’s ecology and assess its suitability for urban development.
A precursor to the geographic information systems that support every modern-day planning practice, the Layer Cake was built of strata representing individual natural factors such as bedrock geology, aquifer recharge areas, slopes, soils, vegetation, and the like. From this representation, one assessed where, say, homes or a highway could best be located without upsetting the natural ecology. Layers of information were gathered from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and aerial photography. Prior to the advent of computer-based mapping, a site’s ecological attributes had to be graphically superimposed by means of color markers applied on transparent sheets of mylar, a tedious exercise that nonetheless could produce astoundingly beautiful results.
Figure 1.2. The Valleys are approximately 10 miles NNW of Downtown Baltimore; the Baltimore Beltway, I-695, is in the foreground. The Plan envisioned single-family home clusters tucked in the forested slopes and plateaus framing the valleys, which are valuable aquifer recharge areas.
The Plan for the Valleys
In the early 1960s McHarg applied the “layer cake” to the planning of the Green Spring, Worthington, and Caves Valleys near Baltimore. Known as The Plan for the Valleys, the project area comprised approximately 14,000 acres outside the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), more than ten miles from the city’s downtown. In this pioneering effort, the layering of ecological data pointed to the preservation of the flatlands in favor of development on the valley walls or the forested as well as unforested plateaus—a counter-intuitive result. More than 26,000 dwellings were proposed, distributed in residential clusters, hamlets, and village centers. Parks, greenways, and natural areas flowed through the development zones, constituting in open land and community facilities nearly one-third of the total project area (see Figure 1.2).
Economists retained by Wallace and McHarg projected a $7 million greater return on the sale of land based on the proposed conservation plan rather than under an uncontrolled growth scenario. The plan thus demonstrated, at least on paper, that ecologically-informed development could be both environmentally sound and profitable. The Plan for the Valleys was “fit” and “creative”—a new and powerful way to direct development toward and within exurbia. Rather than expunging nature, The Plan for the Valleys let development coexist with it. To McHarg, this seminal achievement pointed to a redefinition of the American landscape, fortified by the promise of a fulfilled populace:
The United States awaits a large-scale demonstration of a beautiful landscape developed with wisdom, skill and taste, the evolution of a process which can produce a noble and ennobling physical environment, a step towards the American Dream.5
Except that it never happened. Wallace and McHarg had argued that a private real estate syndicate and conservation trust were needed to manage the open land and equitably distribute the profits from land sales among the 250 landowners who had signed on for the project. This did not come to pass, and without such a legal foundation the implementation of the plan languished. It also did not help that a series of economic recessions in the 1970s effectively arrested the expansion of urban development into Baltimore’s prized rural landscape. Without growth pressures, why fuss over a complicated and contentious legal implementation mechanism? An update to The Plan for the Valleys was prepared by WRT in 1989, but it too failed to institutionalize a transfer of development rights. In his memoir, David Wallace rendered the verdict:
The County, the Baltimore Regional Planning Council, and the State of Maryland all adopted the plan ‘in principle’. Damaging zoning changes and inappropriate utility and highway layouts [were] perverted, or coerced into conformance. But unfortunately the Valleys cannot be considered, as has been touted, to be the first successful large-scale example in America of humane development and conservation of the countryside by citizen action.6
Figure 1.3. Owing to the absence of a transfer of development rights, Wallace’s economic projections, attached to McHarg’s ecological planning method, were never tested. The Valleys today have not appreciably changed since the plan, except for strip commercial development along adjoining highways.
William Roberts, McHarg’s long-time partner and an esteemed landscape architect in his own right, asserts that the Plan “at least protected valued scenery, although to the benefit of a social elite and for no better reason than the projected growth in Baltimore County did not materialize” (author’s recollection of a conversation with Roberts on the subject). By “social elite” Roberts is alluding to the wealthy homeowners who prize the valleys’ horse-breeding and fox-hunting setting. The Plan’s exclusionary motive was emblazoned above the report’s preamble by a hand-drawn vista of one of the valleys, with two horsemen admiring the countryside, devoid of development save for a distant residential manor (see figure 1.3). A drive through the valleys today reveals nothing more than scattered homes wedged in the woods or poking out into open fields, a low-density pattern of development at the very low end of the density spectrum.
Still, The Plan for the Valleys remains a monument to the vision McHarg professed in Design with Nature. It certified that through a rational planning method, communities could well grow outside the gr...
