The Gift of Daylight

It’s that time of year again, the moment when I realize a full turn has come and gone and another year is in the books.  Not December 31st, Auld Lang Syne, ‘Happy New Year,’ and all that.  Rather, June 20th, Summer Solstice, ‘Happy Summer’ and ‘Nice to see you!’

For once, I’m prepared.

Every year it seems the run up to full daylight happens briskly, arriving with suddenness and a resounding reminder of time’s merciless pace.  And yet this year, a gift, in the awful packaging of a pandemic: a chance to meet the solstice with a measured awareness of the greater blessings we’ve been given as residents of Earth.

Think back for a moment.  It was just about the Spring Equinox that we began to realize what lay ahead in the Covid era.  Most of us had just begun to shelter in place as a first uniform response to contain the virus.  Changes were abrupt and dispiriting.  They were an interruption to our normal ways of life, and they came with discouraging realizations that, in fact, we’re not always in charge of our personal destinies as we so often believe we are.

Since then, the balance of daylight has slowly run towards longer days and less darkness.  And alongside, the awkward and unbalanced days of March and April spent reconciling our lives in situ have given way to a mild harmony of discovery and rediscovery.  New knowledge of how we can bridge social gaps amidst distancing and a renewed understanding of the merits of slowing down have brought a light of their own.  The deliberate pace of life run almost exclusively from home, in rare serendipity, has coalesced with the deliberate advance of late Spring days in a way that’s allowed Earth’s turn to be felt and not forgotten.

Have you felt it?  Have you been able to linger outside without concern for how you might relocate yourself or others with due haste?  Perhaps you’ve been able to notice the subtle changes in light quality from day to day; or reflected on the value of shade in a high sky, or the value of sunlight in an evening awash with golden hues.  For all the darkness that has come since early March, the quantity of daylight has only increased.  And thank goodness!  Sometimes just seeing the light of day is enough to keep you going.  Often, and I hope in particular now, it reveals the common basis we all share for the turns our lives take.

DJ

Finding Your Outdoors

Have you ever asked yourself what the outdoors means to you? And by outdoors, I don’t mean “the Great Outdoors,” like Mt. Everest or the Pacific Ocean or countless other of earth’s component features. I mean the outdoors you used to spill into at recess when you were a kid; the one the buildings kept you out of; the one that hit you the minute the door opened; you know – the OUT DOORS. 

After years of practicing landscape architecture, I’ve slowly realized that while we all move through the outside world, we bring with those processions an array of different sensibilities and varying awareness of its features. Even more, we impose our own expectations and aesthetic priorities while there, and this greatly affects our experience of being outside. Obvious, right? Yes, at a certain level, but the ramifications of those divergent perspectives are vast. Let’s not forget that the only reason we have an outdoors is because someone made an INDOORS. Until then, the outdoors went without saying - it was just the place we lived. And yet of course we slowly developed shelter to protect us, and shelters became architecture, and architecture became engineering or vice versa, and together they became art, and on and on. And so now we’ve all come to the outdoors from different indoor places, whether we grew up in a high rise or a bungalow or an A-frame or log cabin, and those indoor places have helped define our view of the outdoors. 

But there’s more to it than that. When it comes to using and designing the outdoor spaces connected to your home, your approach will be defined by your past - the style in which you grew up, cultural ideas passed down to you from your inner and outer circles - as well as by your present - the way your days are organized, your predilections and practical requirements, and those of any others you share space with. While we may frequently take them for granted, a review of our own unspoken ideas about what our personal outdoors should do and represent is a worthy jumping-off point for any endeavor to improve it.

Consider my architect friend who grew up in New England and makes a living crafting simple, well-proportioned indoor spaces. He’s always seemed baffled by the idea that architecture would be a requirement of the outdoors. It’s as if, in his mind, the very purpose of architecture is to build a place out of the outdoors and so by definition the outdoors is the place without architecture. But that’s not to say he doesn’t love the outdoors. In fact, most would label him a “great outdoorsman” because he is constantly OUTSIDE: he runs dozens of marathons a year, skis from hut to hut in the wildest of winter places, paddles raging rivers and choppy surf, skates on frozen ponds and asphalt parking lots, and generally has done more outside than most of us will ever do in a lifetime. And, yes, he’s even applied his architectural expertise to some small outdoor spaces adjacent to his buildings. For him, though, a patio is almost an obligatory gesture, and a table with a few chairs is plenty of embellishment for such. His outdoors, it seems, is an active engagement in places untouched by the built world – a place to go out into and return from. For the most part, you’re in or you’re out. 

Another friend of mine, a salesman, is the son of an architect. He confessed to me that when first visiting our house he would chuckle at the various “arranged scenes” of bistro table and chairs here, steamer loungers there and Adirondacks over in the corner, as if the whole place were a series of theatrical sets with the purpose of engaging in each of the programmed activities they implied. He’d seen it before, he said: “My dad used to do that all the time.” And it’s true, programming space is exactly what architects do. A few years later, we helped him design a patio with a sitting area out of the wind but oriented so that he could catch the dying light of the sunset while drinking a beer after work and watching his kids play on the swing set and at the basketball hoop that the patio extended into. And we added soft night lighting to extend that experience beyond nature’s darkness and into seasons that it might not otherwise occur - for the night, as we know, presents itself differently during the year while our working lives quite frequently do not. So for him, the outdoors was an extension of his day; a place where his return to the family could wash over him, but not contain him as the walls of his office or the doors of his car had for so many hours prior. 

A third friend, also a client, asked for help after relocating from the suburban Bay Area to a mildly less suburban swath of 5 acres in Washington state that cascaded down a hill to its western edge, a meandering stream rich with visuals not much changed from pioneering days. The outdoors was integral to his life and he wanted the home he had purchased to embrace the acreage to which it had been assigned, for building and landscape to work together much as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello had. He wanted an estate. For him, the outdoors was as much a part of his spatial footprint as a trip from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, and so a walk to the boathouse required as much consideration as a journey through the main hallway, and the run of the horse fencing must address every tree through which it rambled with proper angles, and so on. Even more, the programmed activities were functional - not solely leisure spaces - and so required proper outfitting. The boat washing station should drain properly lest the cherry tree’s roots in the swale suffer eternal damp distress. And the flower garden, so beautiful yet so contrived, must properly engage the contrasting beauty of the wild stream beyond. In the end, from the minute his driveway gates swung open you were meant to be given a sense of arrival, as if you’d just come through the front door. His place began with the outdoors. 

So, what does it mean to you? What is your outdoors? And just as important, how did you get to it? A worthy series of questions, I think, to which thoughtful answers can bring a strong sense of purpose at your own property.

DJ

Working to Find Nature

When Bill McKibben penned “The End of Nature,” in which he proposed that Earth no longer contained raw wilderness, uninfluenced by man, I thought It was a distressingly insightful, landmark book. Now, many years later, I think it’s just reality: wilderness is a doomed concept, and most of us must work to find nature, or at least the good parts. 

Of course, any discussion of finding nature invokes the question: what is Nature? Forgive me as I fly past this ideological canyon and simply assume that all items provided by natural processes (i.e. animal, vegetable, mineral) - and not by humans - comprise Nature. Are humans a part of Nature? We are natural beings, yes, but the gifts of consciousness and opposable thumbs set us apart, so...no. Synthetics are our stock-in-trade, and in that way we’ve contributed more that is manufactured than natural. Human communities in the twenty-first century are essentially unnatural.

So where, then, is nature? Where do the concepts of wilderness survive? How do we experience it? Increasingly, we have to either work to find it or find ways to recreate it within the natural laws that still govern all of us beneath the skins of technology. 

I recall my most authentic glimpse of the natural world. I was far down east in Maine many years ago on an uninhabited private island that had been designated as conservation land. We were given special access, and on a late August night our group of 4 huddled around a small campfire just above high tide’s watermark. The sky was moonless, the stars were magnificent, and the chilly embrace of salty marine air hung above us. The intertidal rockiness at the low tide hour of our gathering seemed to stretch forever into the night, and I adjourned from the group’s warmth and wandered into its invitation. Slowly a wilderness I’ve not known before or since enveloped me. I tripped and stumbled a long way out, too far certainly than common sense would consent, but the grip of this mysterious place was unrelenting. With thrilling and terrifying abruptness, I suddenly realized I could no longer see any direction clearly, and the rolling sounds of waves were now close beside me. There was no shore, there was no fire, there was no Maine, there was no light. There was elemental earth, and my own exhilaration for having brought myself there. I was strangely unafraid, and I let that place run through me as best I could. For me, in retrospect, it’s the closest I’ve come to glimpsing nature’s soul. 

Thankfully I reoriented properly and returned to a smaller yet somehow warmer fire. I had no tales to tell, and in fact any phrases would have only told a false one. The truth is no words can explain that feeling, and by extension no arguments to maintain such places can justifiably enforce their urgency. The vanishing wildernesses around us will simply lose their soul, slowly, and silently, from one life to the next. 

But that doesn’t mean our passions for the natural world should whither alongside. In fact, they should grow and be fueled by these losses. I never tire of hearing the perspectives and translations of nature that clients share with me as we work together framing and sometimes creating natural processes on their properties. I’ve yet to reproduce the unrelenting grip of that August night long ago, but I’ve nudged against it, often with others, and sometimes only vicariously through their experiences. Finding the ground to find your nature is occasionally a frustrating fail, but almost always worth the effort, certainly its own reward, and, without a doubt, forever exhilarating.

DJ

Property Lines

So much of our daily life is impacted by property lines. Like the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, the way we traverse earth is so fundamentally affected by property lines that we simply take their directives as a given. Go to this land here and not that land there is an internal imperative delivered multiple times a day, most often at a subconscious level.

And yet property lines are invisible in our spatial experience. Much like the wind, our experience of them is defined by the residual results they manifest: fences, curbs, hedgerows, security guards, etc. Why, then, do so many architectural plans scribe these lines with such gusto, their presence the loudest of all markings? And why are such other perceptible parts of our spatial experience so frequently omitted, like shadow, roof lines, or tree canopies?

Topographical lines are another frequent omission on plans. Yes, much of our planet is essentially flat, but our processions are most deeply defined by the landforms we traverse. Property lines, the Euclidian strokes of man so often at odds with these natural expressions, are rendered with disproportionate satisfaction, while nature’s organic lines retreat to a devalued background. Yet another example of a carnal need to leave our mark on the earth? I don’t know, remind me to ask that kid on the beach carving his name in the sand.

In the meantime, consider Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia (pictured above), an experimental subdivision of mid-twentieth century New York state. As author Roland Reisley has explained, Wright laid out residential building lots as circles of about an acre, touching tangentially rather than “cheek by jowl,” in an effort to procure greater individual privacy and a sense of a much greater, common space. Imagine how many property disputes have been muted by such a layout, where one man’s property only kisses his neighbors rather than striking a line in the sand against it. And then imagine how that posture may have impacted those relationships. Perhaps a worthy consideration in a world so keen on division of space.

DJ

Shadows of a Palm Tree

One of the best things about practicing landscape architecture is the daily mandate it gives to observe nature. Today the welcome pattern of a fan palm’s shadow invoked consideration. There’s an implicit reference to tropical afternoons, almost always a wonderful thought capable of transporting the mind to breezy tranquility, past or future.

Unlike amorphous patterns cast by other trees, the fan palm offers a solid, patterned shade imprint, clear in its form. In fact, it’s enough to be used as a component in garden design: the idea, for example, of a tiled patio doubling as a canvas for this fleeting form could be central to a landscape. Or perhaps even better, the pattern is deliberately cast over a deep blue swimming pool, giving an extra layer of visual serenity.

The date palm offers another distinct pattern. In this case it’s more a tropical embrace than welcome mat, with the heavy, down-trending fronds stretching outward to cast a fabric of concentric shade. Have you ever sat under one? It’s as if Robinson Caruso has built you a personal shelter from where you can survey the low latitudes in proper comfort. Never mind the conflicted world outside its realm that offers a mish-mash of shadow and light. In here, beneath the fronds, it’s simple.

There are others. The dragon palms with their tight, spiky edges; the windmill palm with an array of trunks and soft blades; or the queen palm with its dynamic, feathery reach. If you’re like me, you’ll find their shadowy silhouettes as compelling and transcendent as the trees themselves - mai tais optional.

DJ