the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Fountain of the Great Lakes, Lorado Taft, Art Institute of Chicago

chicago, as we all know, is the city of big shoulders; and is stormy, husky, brawling; alive and coarse and strong and cunning; building, breaking, rebuilding; and all those other things Carl Sandburg said.  I am ready to believe it all, even on the very thin evidence of just a couple days in Chicago, most of that time spent behind convention center walls in the company of the american society of landscape architects.

time spent in an over-chilled convention center, brooding on the future of the profession and the difficulties of re-imagining the urban environment, doesn’t really count toward having an experience of chicago.  I know that  in the few moments I escaped from the isolated island of McCormick Place, I got just the narrowest possible slice of Chicago; a trailer for the real visit I need to make someday.  apart from one rather unsuccessful prospective students’ weekend at the university of chicago when I was seventeen, this is one city I haven’t managed to get to, though it looms fairly large in my ancestral consciousness; to my Midwestern forebears, Chicago was the ultimate urban experience, the mythical emerald city.

Chicago has a different kind of mythical status for those of us in the landscape architectural profession.  because the political landscape there is so very different than it is in LA,  what the mayor decrees, tends to get done.  and Chicago happens to have a green-minded mayor with the last name “Daley”, and thus Chicago has by fiat implemented green roofs, permeable alleyways, tons of public planting and beautification, an ambitious Climate Action plan, tree planting, etc. etc., and of course the nearly half-billion dollar Millennium Park project.  which we tend to speak of in awed tones here in Los Angeles, where a couple million to fix up ball fields is so incredibly hard to come by, and the barriers to new “world-class park” construction seem so insurmountable.  in Chicago, they damn well did it.  apparently, because they are stormy and husky and brawling and all the rest of it.  but I needed to see the result for myself ; a million cute “bean” snapshots on Flickr don’t really tell me what I need to know.

lakefront condos under construction, Chicago

at the conference, among the landscape architects, though attendance is good and plenty is going on, the veneer of confidence and optimism can seem a little fragile.  too many people still out of work, too many projects still on hold.  we say to one another, cautiously, “things seem to be improving…”, but our fingers are crossed behind our backs and you can still see the whites of our eyes.

you wouldn’t know it, though, walking north along the lakefront toward the Loop, that times are hard and things are dicey out there.  in the september sunshine, this particular slice of Chicago seemed to be putting its most confident face toward the future.

it is the centennial of the Burnham Plan, and banners along Michigan Avenue declared a celebration: “Bold plans, big dreams, for the next 100 years.”    it’s a cheap shot at Los Angeles, to be sure, but I can’t help immediately thinking of the fate of the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for our own city – commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and then ruthlessly suppressed upon completion, in a good old-fashioned book burning.  it’s since been re-discovered, and re-published, and tearfully pored over by open space advocates in Los Angeles; meanwhile, in Chicago, they’ve got Daniel Burnham on t-shirts.

I didn’t really have much of an agenda for myself in Chicago.  for the conference, just seeking the serendipity of whatever I could hear or pick up or whoever I ran across.  for the city, just the Art Institute and Millennium Park.  for my own future — bold plans and big dreams?  or just struggling to get by? I set myself a task of getting some thinking done about my own career, such as it is.

chicago seems to demand a level of energy and optimism that I am not sure I’ve got available, here in September of 2009, a confusing and sometimes dispiriting time. when I look at myself in the obligatory “bean” reflection pictures from Millennium Park (post coming soon), I just look extremely tired.  which I was … and I haven’t been well.

but I did come home with some odds and ends in my pockets that might turn out to be useful.  I heard Ken Smith give a few talks at the conference – he’s the arty landscape architect with the big arty glasses who won the competition to design 1,200 acres of the Orange County Great Park, the preview of which I saw earlier this year – and he’s got a nifty saying, which I’ve heard various versions of quoted before:  “big, little, skip the middle.”

you could interpret this in different ways; but I think it’s useful.  to me, it means: look for and try to understand the precision of the details; and try to grasp the big idea, the overarching vision.  one is a reflection of the other.  the rest, the stuff in between – maybe not so important.

more chicago soon.

originally posted November 3, 2008

one day before election day

today I was at home during my lunch hour, and was obsessively reading the election news on the Internet as usual, when I saw the breaking news that Barack Obama’s grandmother had died.

of course I thought right away about my own grandma, and even got out her picture from the back of the dresser and dusted it off.

I remember that fall a few years ago, when it became clear that she didn’t have too much time left, and all the cousins started making plans to come out to Iowa and spend some time with her. I was making my plans for thanksgiving, but as it turned out, that was too late.

I was at a professional conference in Salt Lake City when I got the call from my mom that grandma was unconscious, and it was too late to say goodbye. I flew back home to Los Angeles a day or so later when the conference ended, and the next day, got the call that she was gone.

my parents have been divorced for many years, but they are still friendly. my dad was living in East Africa at the time, and he wrote the following words in an email to our family:

“Recently I read that in Africa, where much of the history and culture is passed along orally by the elders to the new generation, when an elder dies it is like losing half the books in a library. Much learning and wisdom is lost. But much is preserved, and I know she will be in her family’s memories.”

earlier today, I was laughing at a youtube video of a song about how “there’s no one more Irish than Barack Obama.” I too have Irish ancestors, by way of a Midwestern mother. even Africa does not seem so strange and exotic to me; I’ve only visited for a few weeks, but it’s almost a second home for my dad, and I’ve met his friends, and supported the work that he does there. there are a few wells in villages in Malawi that I had a little tiny bit to do with.

it’s a mistake to think that anyone is a foreigner.

only much later on today did I manage to remember the exact date my grandmother passed away: November 3, 2004. these pictures are of the lake that she loved, where she lived the last few decades of her life, taken on the day of her funeral.

originally posted November 2, 2008 -2 days before election day

…that I am sharing the obsession of everyone else right now, which is THE ELECTION, drowning out any thought that I’m going to quietly post about architecture or green infrastructure or sustainable urbanism or anything like that, today.

sometimes I feel like this guy…I just want it to be OVER…

today I talked on the phone with my entire family, with a bonus call from my ex, and it was 90% about the election.

my family is all over the place, this billboard always kind of gets to me:

my ex is on the road to las vegas to knock on doors for obama, since Los Angeles and the whole state of California are so boringly blue. my mom has already voted by mail in Colorado, where they have been looking pretty blue, and also have some whacked-out ballot initiatives to defeat. my sister and her husband are looking forward to getting up early on Tuesday to stand in line at their local polling place in Philadelphia; I said, “bring your camera!”  Dad and stepmother were going to vote early at their town in North Carolina, but didn’t manage to do it and will be going to their polling place on the 4th, which also happens to be my stepmother’s birthday. I told her, I hoped we were getting her a very nice present on the 4th, which we have all been chipping in toward…

so here’s hoping, that by the 5th, I’ll be feeling like this lady instead:

I believe what she’s saying is “How do you like them apples??”

sculpture garden pictures from the Baltimore Museum of Art