architecture of the everyday

This book, as strange as it is, really has some good insight to how the common or mundane are not as ill informed as they appear, but rather just outside of the narrow, or short reaching radar of design professionals. I think its still a bit weird that things that are common and plain are written about by people whose writing style is anything but commonplace or easy to understand, but im sure my ramblings are also hard to follow (though only because of poor grammar rather than fancy wordiness). ill try to be concise on what i have been thinking, and how design of the public realm could be open enough to consider our current "american vernacular."

the essay called "tom's garden", by Margie Ruddick, accounts the design decisions of a neighbor, Tom. Issues on aesthetics and landscape are brought up, and the nature of how landscape architecture is portrayed.

Tom's garden is "only beautiful when people use it, not when its empty (when those spaces best shown empty often alienate people)."

The beginnings of the essay nobly describe her own garden, where her long island beach home's landscape is designed to appear native, and natural, which to some would seem strange to spend all this money so that a landscape can appear like nothing had been done. its funny, but is it more appropriate or honest to display that you did in fact "improve" a landscape, or hide the work you did. I know my non-architect parents dont warm up to the idea of spending money to make things look like you did nothing at all. (i almost said non-designer parents, but just like tom, design happens whether some one is trained or not)

tom's garden is a garden of program, a landscape with overlappings, shifts, interruptions, signs of matter that show inhabitation (daily events). Sound too effects how this landscape is perceived, something that landscape journals can't really represent. Its good that this reading didn't have images, because the nature of this type of garden is one where the only way to come into contact with a landscape describes as this is to go and experience, and inhabit it.

this is similar to my own house i grew up in. the landscape is not one you would find in journals, but one that has so much meaning to me as person, more than as a designer. Overly articulated, or exaggerated drainage ditches are signs of how my dad and i tried to fix hydrology issues of our river-bluff location. Though a civil engineer or landscape architect might have done some things differently, the actions my dad took were one's informed by an innate experience with the site, rather than a generalist's education. his actions were more site specific.

i like how most design falls outside of idealized conditions, and how we're going to be faced with the left-over sites, once marked with past actions done by "tom's", and other property owners. Looking at conditions in this light, work is no longer a clean slate, but a palimpsest layered with actions done over time by inhabitants. I'd like to explore how a process can accounts for this as if our design propositions can be considered as marks on a time line, rather than for an end-all solution. Landscapes should be able to adapt to future additions, and be open enough for new types of program.

more to come on the essays by Joan Ockman and Deborah Fausch.