It is more than a coincidence that in his two essays, “Wilderness and the City: Not such a Long Drive After All” and “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful? Reflections Grounding Two Apparently Oxymoronic Aspirations,” Scott Cameron looks to water as a basis for evaluating the city in relationship to the wild and in imagining new possibilities for urban nature. In an attempt to complement and enrich Cameron’s thinking, this essay focuses on emerging, decentralized and ecologically responsive approaches to (...) water and wastewater systems in architectural projects in dense urban environments. Such an emphasis on “blue architectures” allows for a reframing of the city/nature relationship in terms of degrees of concentration—of water, organisms, and pollutants—as a precursor to considerations of distances involved. To concentrate on localized hydrologic conditions is to support the integrity of broader scale ecological systems and to reconnect urban dwellers to processes that bear directly on the wild. (shrink)

It is more than a coincidence that in his two essays, “Wilderness and the City: Not such a Long Drive After All” and “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful? Reflections Grounding Two Apparently Oxymoronic Aspirations,” Scott Cameron looks to water as a basis for evaluating the city in relationship to the wild and in imagining new possibilities for urban nature. In an attempt to complement and enrich Cameron’s thinking, this essay focuses on emerging, decentralized and ecologically responsive approaches to (...) water and wastewater systems in architectural projects in dense urban environments. Such an emphasis on “blue architectures” allows for a reframing of the city/nature relationship in terms of degrees of concentration—of water, organisms, and pollutants—as a precursor to considerations of distances involved (“not such a long drive”). To concentrate on localized hydrologic conditions is to support the integrity of broader scale ecological systems and to reconnect urban dwellers to processes that bear directly on the wild. (shrink)

Environmental designers employ ordering systems as a means of achieving spatial clarity and richness of organization while contending with the complexities that characterize design endeavors. This paper considers aesthetic potentialities when built and natural orders are considered together, specifically when an architectural investigation and ecological restoration are articulated as one integrated problem. After considering a range of approaches to the ordering the built and natural, I look to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘continuity of singularities’ as intimating an (...) ‘aesthetics of the indeterminate’ that encourages a desired nuance, openness to the unforeseen and respect for the (ecologically) particular. (shrink)

The Swiss-born designer Le Corbusier’s famous metaphorical characterization of a house as a machine heralded a view of architectural impulse of staggering influence. It was for Le Corbusier “not foolishness to hasten forward a clearing up of things” and to affirm the radically transformative possibilities for making architecture in full acknowledgment of the forces of industry. Architects are to embrace the logic and symbolic economy of the machine in order to guide the spirit and gather the forms of the emergent (...) age. For Le Corbusier:Our external world has been enormously transformed in its outward appearance and in the use made of it. By reason of the machine, we have gained a new perspective and a new.. (shrink)