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Warm and Fuzzy Logic



http://www.metropolismag.com/new/aug_content/hrg.htm#4
-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr. Venaura Farm ICQ#27930345
lflondon@mindspring.com    london@metalab.unc.edu
http://metalab.unc.edu/ecolandtech    Ecolandtech
http://metalab.unc.edu/permaculture  Permaculture
http://metalab.unc.edu/intergarden/orgfarm AGINFO
Title: Warm and Fuzzy Logic

The Gospel
According To Ian HcHarg

Click on an image to access the original plate.

He created the fields of ecological planing and environmental design. And on the seventh day, he rested.

by Ken Shulman

 

Ian McHarg sits on a shaded campus bench and motions for the photographer to give him a minute. The walk here from the elevator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Meyerson Hall is not far—not even 100 yards—but his almost 80-year-old lung (he has only one), scarred from tuberculosis, six decades of smoking, and a recent bout of pneumonia, has not recovered from the modest effort. Still tall, still immaculately attired and groomed, he maintains the carriage, if not the form, of a powerful, virile, vital man. People passing by on Locust Walk, through the campus he and a few former students helped redesign, pause and try to identify him. Unable to do so, they move quietly on. Now McHarg’s breathing begins to slow and deepen. His opaque blue eyes, eyes that still sparkle when he speaks of Lewis Mumford or Margaret Mead or Charles Eliot, are calm, betraying only an unmistakable shade of annoyance that it has come, after all this time, to this.

“Right now I see him as very sad,” says Niall Kirkwood, a landscape architect and fellow Scot who studied with McHarg in the 1980s and who, like so many of McHarg’s former students, acknowledges a huge debt to his former mentor. Today Kirkwood teaches at the Design School at Harvard. He still has his notes from his days at Penn and often refers to them for direction and inspiration. “I think he wishes he had more strength, more influence, and more disciples,” Kirkwood adds. “Most of all, I think he wishes he had more time.”

“There’s a wonderful story about Capability Brown, bloody marvelous landscape architect in England,” says Ian McHarg. His blue woolen suit, a bit faded, is crisply pressed. His striped tie is pulled tight, pressing against a weathered neck. He still enjoys telling stories, which he does with a studied, military cadence, perhaps acquired from his seven years of service as a paratroop officer and saboteur during World War II, a tour of duty that brought him to action in North Africa, Italy, France, and Greece. “The story tells that he was met by an English lady who said she had a large estate in the south of Ireland. ‘Mr. Brown,’ she says, ‘would you come down there and do a plan for me?’ ‘No, Madam, I can’t,’ he says. ‘I haven’t finished England yet.’”

It is a Tuesday morning in early April. McHarg, professor emeritus at Penn since he was invited to resign in 1985, is back behind his office desk after our stroll outside. Although he no longer teaches, he still shows up as often as he can. One week ago he returned from Tokyo, where he received the 2000 Japan Prize. He pauses to munch a doughnut and sip his coffee, removing from beneath his nose the plastic tube that connects him to an oxygen tank. His office sits in overgrown, loosely organized clutter, like the eighteenth-century gardens that McHarg so dearly loves. The tapes from his 1960s TV series The House We Live In—which McHarg ransomed from the Library of Congress for $1,000, saving them from destruction—sit stacked on overburdened bookshelves alongside titles like The No Growth Society, The Urban Condition, and Chinese Classical Gardens of Suzhou. “I haven’t finished England yet,” McHarg repeats, his body, swelling in contained laughter. “Jesus Christ. That’s wonderful.”

There was a time, a very long time, when every-one on the Penn campus—and much of the rest of the world—knew Ian McHarg. He was a char-ismatic professor, the chairman of the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania’s department of landscape architecture, a national television personality, and a leader of the environmental movement. Above all, he was the author of Design with Nature, the 1969 volume that exhorted designers to conform to, rather than compete with, nature. Handsome and eccentric, with a force of personality barely contained in his solid, Scottish, six-foot-two frame, McHarg had the temerity to tell an assembly of Fortune 500 corporate executives that the time had come for American industry to be “toilet trained.” In a 1970 letter, he suggested that the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers and all his staff consider committing hara-kiri as atonement for their environmental excesses. With his formidable character, booming voice, almost impenetrable Scottish accent, and evangelical engagement with the natural world, McHarg enjoyed a worldwide reputation as an inspiring, eclectic, and at times irascible teacher and leader.

“The most exciting thing about Ian is that he’s completely fresh in his thinking,” says Leslie Sauer, who studied with McHarg at Penn and also worked with him at the firm Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd in the 1970s. Sauer works as a landscape designer at Andropogon in Philadelphia, a firm founded by four Mc-Hargians and named after Andropogon virginicus, a field grass that is often among the first flora to colonize damaged landscapes and begin environmental healing. She still considers herself “a daughter of Design with Nature.”

“Ian didn’t start with old models,” she says. “His is truly a new way of looking at things. What is remarkable is just how ferocious he can be about ecological issues. But the reality of what he did as a designer was to listen—listen to the site, listen to the cultural information—and assume that what he heard was much more important than anything his ego or internal creative process could come up with.”

McHarg’s students and colleagues still speak of him with unbounded respect and affection. And they do so in the present tense. Apart from his health, McHarg and his habits are little changed. He still meanders in his anecdotes, asking friends, and occasionally interviewers, to prod his memory just as he once asked his students to do. He still enjoys peppering his lectures with dirty jokes. The profession that he almost single-handedly refashioned—molded in his own, eco-conscious image—continues to cherish his theories and teaching. But it seems to have outgrown its need for his benign but intractable ministry. “Ian’s contribution to de-sign and to ecology has been enormous,” says Laurie Olin, a Philadelphia–based landscape architect who taught with McHarg at Penn in the 1980s and still teaches there today. “He got much of the world to view the earth through ecological glasses. A lot of current environmental legislation and methodology is a direct result of Ian’s work. But there has been an evolution in the profession since the 1970s. We don’t map things with the same numbing regularity as we once did, because much of the data is implicit. And we don’t believe, as some of Ian’s early students did, that a design or formal expression necessarily needs to look like nature.”

In a career that spans five decades, McHarg has participated in more than 150 landscape-design projects, many of them exemplary. The Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd 1965 report to the I-95 planning commission helped divine an ecologically and economically viable route for that highway’s path between New Jersey’s Delaware and Raritan rivers. McHarg’s 1974 design for the northwestern Houston suburb of Woodlands—today a community of 50,000 nestled in a forest of indigenous trees and plants—stands as an impeccable prototype of environmental analysis and visionary watershed management.

Yet McHarg has earned prominence for his method, rather than for any single project. The McHarg method dictates that a broad selection of environmental and human factors be charted on a series of overlay maps, and that an attentive analysis of these interdependent systems will reveal whether a site is suitable for development, and what form that development should take. It is like taking the vital signs of the earth, an earth of which man is part, but not master. His method, achieved with mylar transparencies and magic markers, anticipated computer-based geographic information systems (GIS), perhaps the single most important tool in urban planning today.

McHarg was also respected—and in some cases revered—for the tenacity with which he disseminated his method through his teaching. “Once Ian gets you into his clutches, your entire world view changes,” says Edmund Hollander, a Manhattan–based landscape architect who studied at Penn with McHarg and later taught there with him in the 1980s. “He is this wild Scottish genius who has a vision about how the earth should be ordered, and who can’t be bothered by day-to-day practical affairs. If a student would ask him an apparently simple question about how to get from point A to point B in a project, Ian would launch off into a 10-minute existential answer that seemed to have nothing to do with the question asked. But if you listened very closely, you realized that while Ian wasn’t giving you the answer, he was giving you the process, the map by which you could find your way: how to design things that complement the earth and are not a blot upon it.”

In 1959, in his fourth year as department head at the newly created department of landscape architecture at Penn, McHarg created a course entitled “Man and Environment.” The premise of the course was beguilingly simple: examine the evolution of matter, life, and man. Towards this end, McHarg enlisted geologists, hydrologists, botanists, wildlife specialists, climatologists, physiologists, anthropologists, and theologists to speak to his students. McHarg gave the opening and closing lectures. For the rest of the semester, he served as interlocutor and interpreter for his experts.

“Man and Environment” was not only a big draw on campus. In 1960, one year into the course, McHarg was approached by a producer from a local CBS affiliate, who proposed that McHarg’s multidisciplinary eco-salon be transformed into a television series. The result was The House We Live In. McHarg, elegant and irrepressible, was host and interviewer, smoking and sniffing as he prodded his guests—including biologist Sir Julian Huxley, astronomer Harlow Shapley, psychologist Erich Fromm, and anthropologist Margaret Mead—toward ever-greater insights. The show enjoyed two 12-episode seasons with CBS and was later syndicated through PBS. In the late 1960s, with the twin currents of antiwar and ecological activism in-undating American university campuses, McHarg became a radical yet uncommonly elegant spokesperson, a sui generis, cigarette-smoking, self-appointed paladin of the natural world. He used his well-earned prestige—and well-cultivated idiosyncrasies—as a bully pulpit from which he excoriated the “scabrous, syphilitic bastards” who were “defiling the earth.” Students, environmentalists, and the media were in awe of him.

McHarg’s genius has always lain more in theory and observation than in design technique. He has always been a big-picture person, but one gifted with an almost divine focus. Today, his health failing, his vision is even broader but far less defined. He has taken to writing books of poetry for children and adults, coddling readers of all ages in his love of the earth. He likes to reminisce, about his own career, about the evolution of his profession toward a stewardship of the earth—a turn for which he takes credit. “It’s a little bit like taking credit for discovering the obvious,” he says. “But in my lifetime we have certainly gone from oblivion to awareness. Even obdurate architectural magazines are now talking about buildings being naturally lit, naturally cooled, naturally heated, producing some of their own energies. This is the very antithesis of modern architecture.”

When he speaks about the future, it is usually in overarching and spiritually ecological terms. He delivers stern environmental homilies now, in place of lectures. “It’s very presumptuous to think that man can improve on nature,” he says. “Why don’t we just settle for maintaining that which is good? We should take care about those areas that fix carbon,” he says, referring to organisms and ecosystems that remove carbon dioxide from the environment and store it. “The rain forest, the coral reefs—they’re limestone, for God’s sake—estuaries with clams and mussels, lovely things that fix carbon in their shells and bodies. The most useful human role here would be just to put up a bloody fence and prevent their destruction.”

Last October, 51 years after he finished his master’s in landscape architecture at Harvard—a place where he complains he “didn’t have a single bloody course in the natural sciences”—the Harvard School of Design invited McHarg to deliver the third annual Charles Eliot lecture. The lecture was supposed to be about Eliot, a prodigy of landscape design who died in 1897 at age 38, and a man whom McHarg recognizes as his practical and spiritual forebear. McHarg began the lecture as he has al-ways done, comparing the hall to a Presbyterian church, complaining that it was more fit for a sermon than a lecture, and that there was no place on the lectern to rest his glass of Char-donnay. He tried to read from notes, losing his place each time he drifted off into anecdote. He put on and removed his eyeglasses at least once a minute. It wasn’t age or senility; he’d done this at Penn in the Seventies and Eighties. Still, many in the auditorium, especially the students who’d heard of McHarg but weren’t certain until now whether he was still alive, grew impatient. But halfway through, McHarg put aside his notes, stepped away from the podium, stopped lecturing and began performing the role that he had perfected in almost half a century of teaching: irascible, boisterous, irreverent, overreaching, overpreaching Ian McHarg. For a moment, the crowd loved him.

McHarg has a wife and two sons aged 12 and 17. He’d like to see them finish college. He’d like to see genetic research create a new lung to replace the one damaged by the tuberculosis he caught at Harvard in 1950. He’d like to stick around to witness a new age of design—as if he were putting off contemplating what he might do with the heavens because he, in the spirit of Capability Brown, hasn’t finished earth yet. “At the moment I am an optimist,” he avers. “I survived seven years of my life as a soldier, when I never expected to see the next morning. I survived tuberculosis. A few years ago I survived an aortic aneurysm. Who would have expected that some little boy out of Clydebank, Scotland, would become the winner of the Japan Prize? It’s unbelievable, by all measures of magic.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could look back at the earth from space and see nothing but bent backs?” he says, wistfully, his voice thinning, just slightly, in inevitable fatigue. “An incredible sight. Populations all over the world, planting trees, planting plants—the greening of the earth. To bend the back and bring forth fruit.” He pauses again, his eyes glowing from within as he draws a deep breath. For a moment, McHarg is transported back to his youth, to the Presbyterian church where he worshipped, and to its minister, John M. Graham, who taught him that the word “enthusiasm” meant “filled with the spirit of God.” “Mankind is a magical species,” McHarg says. “If only we could get him to behave.”

Ken Shulman contributes the New York Times, Artnews, and
National Public Radio. .

 

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