Chris Hardy | IDEAS

Texting prunes our language, while Twitter compartmentalizes our thoughts. The working dialectic is a leafless tree – pollarded, with inadequate adjectives, resulting in smooth grey bark. Modern language does us a disservice, when you tell me of your workplace woes – the meaning spans a library of potential, from gently anxious to freaking out. … Read more »

Texting prunes our language, while

Twitter compartmentalizes our thoughts.

The working dialectic is a leafless tree –

pollarded, with inadequate adjectives,

resulting in smooth grey bark.

Modern language does us a disservice,

when you tell me of your workplace woes –

the meaning spans a library of potential,

from gently anxious to freaking out.

The beauty of our mongrel tongue

is usually found in perspicuous specificity.

from talweg to tor, the susurrus of gab

should give us the perfect word –

or at least a pleasurable dictionary fumble.

Stress is barren, with anxiety, tension,

and a small set of engineering terms,

practically lifted from a command prompt.

In our lives of sweaty plastic keys

and accelerating expectations,

we need a new lexicon of stress.

Some ideas:

Smoos – lightly frazzled, but everything is under control,

is cute and fuzzy, but slightly uncomfortable,

like an Ikea office chair.

Garbleforp – can’t keep up, keep getting buried,

is a velarized stumble, dropping a stack of files

and needing a cry.

Damfrigizt – freaking out with anger and fear overtones,

a tautology more than a minced oath,

best said under the breath and repeatedly, as a koan.

Umberwold slows us down, it’s too much to even try.

Let’s just pretend the power went out and turn off the server.

And lie on the floor in the cold room, rebooting.

A few starters to share, pass the meme.

we are name-givers after all,

and with a lexis of stress,

a precise understanding,

we will be able to rise above it

to have nuanced strategy and tactics.

The Inuit didn’t idly coin their snowy terminology,

they make their words work for a living.

In English our history of violence is tediously long,

with an associated richly evocative

and distressingly poetic word-hoard.

But the balance to the cruelty is a dictionary

of amends and amity.

It is hard to see a dagger in the emails.

The slow building of adrenaline from cubical-drama

doesn’t share the same threat as an axe-handed invader.

But both we can better understand

when we give it a name, and pause,

considering our enemy.

Chris Hardy is a designer in the San Francisco studio.

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Posted by Chris Hardy
in Uncategorized
on 14 November, 2016

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Landscape Architecture as an aesthetic discipline may at times seem irrelevant in the face of such pressing problems as global warming, social inequity, resource depletion, and habitat loss. But there is a fundamental aspect of what we do that tackles these issues, with landscape architects a part of interdisciplinary teams. This movement, if you will,… Read more »

This movement, if you will, can encompass the specification of recycled content and the parametric modeling of coastal revetments. We participate whenever we push our projects, clients, and communities to consider data as part of the design, when we reach out to large groups through social media to contribute to democratic design processes, and when we collaborate with horizontally structured interdisciplinary teams. In return, we experience a growing sense of empowerment and capacity; we’re part of an idealistic and values-driven practice that at once ignites a designer’s passion and adds a touch of whimsy to our work. We are the Neo-Victorians.

Like Olmsted and Downing, we have the benefit of following a cresting wave of innovation in tangentially related industries. Olmsted first used asphalt, patented in 1870, to reduce noise from carriages in Central Park; Portland Cement was invented in the 1850s; the Bessemer process was patented in 1856. The first reinforced concrete bridge was built in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1889. The Victorians were inventing urban parks with new high-tech tools developed during the industrial revolution. Neo-Victorians have the information revolution as our wave. We came into practice after the hard work of adapting computer technology to design occurred; we expect open access to information, and using CAD, 3D modeling, GIS and cloud-based collaborative tools to enable precision, processing, and systems analysis.

The similarities between generations is also aspirational. Olmsted’s generation of urban park designers sought to improve the quality of life for the public. Neo-Victorians come out of school with the desire to change our environment and communities for the better. We are embracing the challenges of an urbanizing world undergoing climate change and the Anthropocene. We are exploring the relationship between design and social justice. Public Architecture’s 1% program, B-Corporations, non-profit design firms, and activist designers all push issues at the front of practice.
Since the 1980s, the growth of concept-based design curriculum has become pervasive. Today, “Draw ‘til it’s beautiful” and problem solving is not sufficient without a strong narrative. In seeking narrative, designers are trained to develop higher levels of awareness around the site, as well as the politics of place and systems. Their interventions are tied, however tenuously, to these networks of ideas and this pedagogy develops the expectation of higher levels of meaning to practice. Concept-based design education has raised a generation of unabashed idealists who see landscape architecture not as a job, but as a lifestyle decision.

When considering how landscape architecture as a discipline will address the world’s future, the answers are already embedded in our collective practice. Neo-Victorians are diverse and pluralistic, unhesitatingly technical and optimistic. This mandates the integration of environmental amenities and infrastructure; community involvement; and an aesthetic whereby digital custom fabrications welcome ornamentation.

Neo-Victorians are everywhere: small research-oriented firms, government, nonprofits, and corporate offices. These different types of practice provide varied channels and support for elevating the discipline. Work such as Kate Orff’s Oyster-Techture or Petrochemical America integrates real data and research methods into design processes, revealing charismatic ideas for intervention and experimentation. Challenging typical funding and business practice, Mass Design Group’s work in Rwanda identified the issue first, and the team applies as much creative process to funding its work as to its physical design. SWA Group’s Landscape Infrastructure practice integrates public space amenities with large-scale infrastructure systems such as the Buffalo Bayou Park and flood control system, in Houston, Texas.

Neo-Victorians have a huge advantage over the Victorians: there are so many more of us, and we come from all over, with every culture and background influencing our inspirations. We practice with the last 150 years of technical advancement, cultural development, and design experimentation at our fingertips. We will develop many strategies to overcome the looming crises of our times. Many will not work, but those that do will inevitably have major implications.

Imagine today’s cities without the benefit of Olmsted and the Victorian designers. Tomorrow’s communities will look back on the Neo-Victorians as igniters of an explosion of ideas who just started to harness the power of the digital age to inform place. As we continue to focus on concept, values, and rigor we can look forward to a future enriched by the romantic belief that we can make a difference, and find nobility in giving our best selves to our work.

Chris Hardy is a landscape architect in the San Francisco studio and the creator of the montage accompanying this post.

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One Response to “Who Are the Neo-Victorians?”

Durp

With this good article, a lot of light is shed as to how landscape architecture is the future we need if we have to overcome the current urban problems.
June 28th, 2016 Reply

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Posted by Chris Hardy
in Landscape Infrastructure, Landscape Urbanism, Urbanism & Planning
on 13 May, 2016

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Everything we do as landscape architects is site specific—we enter the life of a place for but a few long moments, investigate its culture and history, and work to add an appropriate contemporary layer. The San Francisco office recently joined Gelfand Partners Architects to look at refurbishing the Ping Yuen public housing development in Chinatown, San Francisco. Composed of four buildings with 500 units and two acres of Chinatown property, this project has opened up a whole world of ideas that are not typically encountered in our office, and yet it also hits close to home for our team (principal Jim Lee was raised and married there, and went to Chinese School within a few blocks of the site).

We realized early on that we needed to educate ourselves about the history of Chinatown as well as the turbulent record of public housing. As it turns out, we entered this project in the midst of a quiet revolution for the San Francisco Housing Authority—the City is divesting itself of the responsibility of maintaining public housing to nonprofit groups. This transition is the result of mismanagement and corruption over a half century, including millions in graft each year, bribery schemes, drug cartel payoffs, and, most infamously, the Reverend Jim Jones, who used his role of the head of the SFHA for a variety of abuses. The task of governing the future of the Pings, as they’re called, is being handed over to the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), an organization that manages a variety of affordable housing developments and also advocates for the Chinatown and San Francisco Chinese diaspora community.

This turnover is not simply a matter of handing over the keys, as there are around 1700 residents in the Ping Yuens, many of whom are elderly and extremely impoverished. The buildings themselves were built between 1953 and 1964, and have received sporadic maintenance since then.

At the same time, the Pings are widely considered “successful” as a SF public housing project. They are comparatively low-crime and the tenants are well-organized. Part of this success is a direct result of ties with the wider Chinatown community. Amy Howard’s book, More Than Shelter, compiled years of research to explain the history and trends in SF public housing. One of the clear conclusions she made regarding the Pings is that its success is not owing to the “model minority” myth, but rather to a strong community infrastructure. Across the street from the Pings is cheap fresh produce; within a few blocks are over a dozen nonprofits dedicated to public health, integrating first-generation immigrants, and Chinese and English language schools. Chinatown began as a ghetto, a place where Chinese were forced to reside when in San Francisco. A history of institutionalized racism there begat a well-connected, ethnocentric community that supports its residents.

All of this information reveals an even bigger, positive trend: urban poverty (as opposed to rural poverty) in the United States registers higher rates of social mobility, especially with recent immigrant populations. The Pings are a part of a complex web of social, cultural, and historical constructs, and we are trying to envision how they can be improved while navigating the significant management and demographic changes they face in the future.

The more we learn, the more questions we have. Landscape architecture is more than specifying new playground equipment; to be diligent, considerate, and effective we must strive to understand the places we design as thoroughly as possible over the time we encounter them.

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Posted by ChrisHardy and Yu-ChungLi
in Community
on 10 July, 2015

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Designing in the public interest is often challenging–and controversial. How do you know when to do public interest work and when pro-bono efforts are going towards greater good? In our office with the recent launch of our pro-bono Social Impact Design Initiative and partnership with the 1% Program at Public Architecture, we continue to learn from our work… Read more »

Chris Hardy, a designer with our San Francisco office, gave a lecture at ASLA’s Northern California Chapter this Spring to talk about the benefits and challenges of pro-bono work. In the lecture, he mentions six ways that pro-bono work makes us better designers:

New and otherwise unavailable projects help us broaden our experience and train young and intermediate designers in on-the-ground project work;
Each project makes us better designers, particularly (and often) locally;
Younger staff can take ownership over the process in ways that might not be available yet in big office-wide projects within the firm and demonstrate leadership and project management skills;
The project is often an opportunity for mentorship and learning between staff and new contacts within the field;
Strategic volunteering–when a project is pro-bono at first but beneficial to the firm in the long-term–can bring projects that are otherwise unavailable to the firm. For example, when a community has a need for an amenity that’s very strong, but there’s no visioning documents or initial support, a landscape architect can assist with the visual and preliminary documents needed to get a project up and running to later phases;
Inter-office collaboration: with quick charrettes and idea brainstorming, you can meet people within the office and collaborate on a quick project with a tight timeframe and generate new ideas quickly.

Additionally, Chris noted that pro-bono and local projects are “often small enough to get your hands dirty” and they are also discrete–in that you can finish them–so that designers can participate in local design-build projects they can point to fairly quickly. These projects, in turn, serve as a model to help us do more work in the field in the future and act as a catalyst for creating a new market or niche area of expertise within your firm.

As he concludes in his lecture, “pro-bono work is often the beginning of a longer process, and we can learn a lot while doing it and capitalize on our experiences to share and grow.”

“As long as we’re passionate, that’s all that matters.”

Chris Hardy is a designer with SWA’s San Francisco office; he holds an MLA from Cornell University and a B.S. In Conservation Biology from Duke University. He is part of the Social Impact Design Initiative at SWA and spearheads projects focused on ecological design and collaborative community infrastructure.