It’s been awhile since I wrote one of these, but the spirit moved me this morning. As James will be sure to tell you, the spirit usually moves me right about the same time I am staring down the barrel of an important deadline. My muse goes by the name of procrastination. Lucky for him, I’m not his problem anymore.
There is a song by Pink Martini about being trapped between two worlds called “Dosvedanya Mio Bombino”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story of a man torn between his Russian and Italian homelands. It reminds me a bit of myself as a misfit caught between my somewhat conservative and practical civil engineering self, and the part of me that wants to make the world a better place.
Civil engineering is generally regulation driven. We do what we have to do to meet requirements and stay within budget. When I am surrounded by civil engineering colleagues who face that reality every single day, I often feel like a bit of an impractical tree hugger with my talk of green this and iterate that. For many engineers, it isn’t like they don’t want to do something innovative or green, it’s that they:
- aren’t comfortable with how to design it
- their regulators aren’t comfortable reviewing it
- their clients aren’t asking for it
On the other hand, when I am interacting with people who specialize in environmental issues, like my colleague Autodesk’s Dawn Danby, I feel like an uncreative, uncaring stick-in-the-mud mired down in red tape and excuses. I feel like I might as well trade in my Miss-Piggy-Meets-Librarian wardrobe for some black suits and climb up into the balcony next to Statler and Waldorf.
We’ve talked about this before (such as in 2008 with Five Simple Things You Can Do To Make Sustainable Design a Reality in Your Lifetime). The civil engineering part of doing better design is undeniably huge, but it can’t happen without:
- Regulations with real mandates (think about how NPDES Phase II changed everything)
- Incentives for owners/operators/developers to demand more innovative, lower impact designs- such as regulation, tax incentives, market demand, etc.
- Education for our engineering students, regulators, contractors, owners, government workers and more so that they are comfortable with the science, design, maintenance and cost of doing things differently
- Creative thinking and good old fashioned chutzpah in our design community to keep trying, keep digging, keep working to sell new ideas to help change regulations and drive demand.
Back 100 years ago when I lived in Edmonton, I attended the Banff Session of the Alberta Association of Architects. Two things stuck with me from that event.
The first was just an overhead conversation at cocktail hour. A woman was talking about her recent Mediterranean cruise and spoke of villages built on the sides of mountains that were thousands of years old. They collected rain water in cisterns and still moved supplies with donkeys. They built with the material at hand, they ate what could be grown or raised. She said, in her opinion, that was sustainable design. If not sustainable, perhaps enduring. The formula developed in the past is still works today.
All of the talks at the session were excellent, but the speaker that still influences my feelings about design was James Wines. He used an ancient slide projector instead of powerpoint. He just got up talked. He talked about many of his projects, including a series of stores for BEST in the 1970s and 80s..
Do you remember BEST? It was just about the most boring store in the universe. I remember going with my mom as a kid and it made Kmart look like Anthropologie. He made a design statement, and often a “green” statement, with a series of big box stores. I figured if James Wines could figure out how to make a big box store a tourist attraction, I could figure out how to make a stormwater pond a beautiful thing in both form and function.
There are some videos on youtube that show old footage of the BEST stores. I’ve embedded Part I below, here are Part II and Part III.
There was a third thing that I remember. I took a wrong turn coming out of Banff on my way home and wound up facing a decision- did I take the road less traveled (which happened to have a sign that said “road travel currently not recommended”) that appeared to shortcut me to Sundre then back on highway 2, or do I take the boring, safe highway to Rocky Mountain House, or more annoying yet double back and add another 2 hours to my trip? I had a 4 wheel drive, dang it, I could handle it! (Note that I also was wearing a suit and 4 inch heels and had only similar in my suitcase. Also note I had zero bars on my phone.)
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I made the decision to take the dirt road. They weren’t lying about that not recommended thing, and I regretted the decision for every single white knuckled minute. And yet… I went slow enough to stay within my driving skill limits and learned a lot about driving in the mud on the side of a mountain. I called upon things I knew about driving in snow and used it in a new way.
The views were spectacular, the wildlife sightings were unprecedented and when I stopped at the Esso in Sundre for a much needed bag of cheetos, I felt rather proud of myself despite the seemingly obvious brazen blockheadishness of ignoring the sign.
It’s up to you which signs to read and which to consciously ignore. Sometimes the painful memories of designs that didn’t get approved, the calculations that were rejected, the public presentations that tanked and the horrible prom dress that we never should have worn are the memories we call upon the most.