Splendor in the grass

Each year in springtime, the fireflies return to my garden. It’s what the essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson called “the resurrection of the ordinary.” Not the resurrection of human beings, but of the earth.

If fireflies only appeared every 100 years, would people rush out to see them like millions of people did two years ago to observe the total solar eclipse? Yet now, when the fireflies surround us, so few of us notice.

In the Black Mountains of North Carolina one summer night, I looked over a meadow at dusk to see the grass suffused with fireflies. It was as if the stars had fallen to earth. And above the French Broad River nearby, I saw a landfill lit by fireflies: millions of tiny luminous things in the place you’d least expect, floating above buried dishes, eyeglasses, Pampers, and plastic bags, mirroring the stars.

The poet Fred Chappell wrote, “The pleasure garden is a place apart, where the savors of the season are augmented, where the soul is invited to invite itself.”

What better place to observe a small resurrection blinking in the night?

Native Places Site

Greeneville, Tennessee

I went to Greeneville, Tennessee, to visit two dear friends who were aging fast. Their columned house was once resplendent with a long swimming pool lit by lanterns. Now the lamps are broken and the pool is full of slime. Yet, despite their own frailness, my friends still help a neighbor go to church every Sunday.

Not far from their house, I noticed a little church clinging to the hillside by its fingertips. Its cross was leaning and its columns were bent, but the sight of it gave me comfort.

I thought of the elemental need for consolation in the face of life’s uncertainty, and how simple temples, shrines, and chapels like this one can be found all over the world. “The chapels are as eloquent about deep-seated human fears,” wrote nature author and essayist Barry Lopez,” as they are about deep-seated faith.”

When I said goodbye to my friends, they gave me cuttings of my aunt’s favorite climbing rose.

Then they shared the latest gossip about their neighbor who was arrested while rolling naked in a public mulch pile. He told the police, “I was instructed to do so by God.”

There’s nothing like living in the moment.

[et_pb_section bb_built="1"][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text]

Source

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_gallery _builder_version="3.17.6" gallery_ids="4699,4700,4701,4702,4703" posts_number="5" fullwidth="on" zoom_icon_color="#4b4b4b" hover_overlay_color="rgba(255,255,255,0.9)" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Cozumel

From the airplane window, I glimpsed a small airport terminal in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was painted in bright colors. The jacaranda trees were blooming and a mother was selling tortillas in the open breezeway.

I wanted to get off the plane and start my life over.

How is it that a small detail can change the way we live? What does a painted airport tell us about a country, and even about ourselves?

In Mexico everything matters, my wife Judy said. “The stones in the street, the fruit placed on a market stand, the geometric pattern on the dress of a tortilla seller. It’s all esthetic.”

Moreover, this esthetic wasted little and honored much. After seeing toy animals made of soda cans, egg shells turned into flowers, and an ordinary philodendron growing on a wall in a reused jar, I slowly realized that the extraordinary could be made from the ordinary.

When I looked out of that airplane window 30 years ago, our children were in school and Judy was becoming a landscape architect. We wouldn’t get off.

But later, we would build a pink stucco house in a walled flower garden in North Carolina. Philodendron included.

Chandigarh rethink: transforming ruralities & edge(ness) in global urbanities

edited by Manu P. Sobti, ORO Editions, Novato, CA,USA, 2017, 279 pp. ISBN 978-1-939621-36-8.

This is a contribution to what is becoming a sub-genre in its own right: books reporting on the work of graduate students in planning and urban design. Characterized by its independence from administrative and contractual constraints, such work can produce fresh perspectives on the development of acity, though it may be of limited interest beyond people familiar with the area. In some cases, innovative teaching methods will appeal to a broader audience of instructors. The most compelling publications are those that articulate a strong theoretical perspective. Such is the case with Chandigarh rethink, which makes the argument that development at the edges, in particular in India, and more broadly in Global South cities, often present surbanization that is truer to the local social and political conditions than the institutionalized development that marks more central locations. Chandigarh, the epitome of grand modernist planning and design servicing a centralized political vision, is a case in point. Sobti posits that an urban edge denotes a physical condition, a metaphoric concept, and a design methodology. Such tenets are derived from empirical work and explorations through design from a series of urban design studios conducted by him in India. In the first chapter, he develops the idea that edges should be looked at from ‘within’ rather than from ‘without’, and in terms of de-ruralization rather than urbanization. Such a perspective allows unveiling of the ‘ex-urban landscape matrix’. For urban morphologists, such ideas are certainly evocative of fringe-belt theories, and more broadly of the notions that natural and human-made barriers and boundaries, as well as inherited spatial forms, such as agricultural allotment patterns, are informing morphogenesis. Five essays by invited contributors explore development at the social, political and spatial margins in Chandigarh, and beyond. In 2009 and 2015,the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning urban design students collaborated with their peers from local institutions to explore Chandigarh’s urbanization processes and prospects. Their work is featured in the second half of the book.

The Architecture writer Anthony Tung on Mass to Membrane:

Nic Goldsmith's Mass to Membrane reads as lightly and succinctly as his architecture. It is both a basic and reflective text on the history and evolution of lightweight, membrane-covered tensegrity structures and an architect's diary of creative problem-solving on the cutting edge of emerging new technologies. Starting with the earliest membrane structures: traditional American Indian teepees, Bedouin goat-hair tents, and Mongolian yurts, Goldsmith journeys over 4,000 years to acoustically refined and portable concert halls, to an iconic urban landmark: the luminous roof of the Rosa Parks transit center in Detroit, to a moveable and energy-efficient skyscraper. And for all its sophisticated scientific engineering, he also shows readers pure mathematic beauty: as in the delightful shade-providing canopy in the Sky Song plaza at Arizona State University. In all, across 40 years of award-winning international practice, Goldsmith’s Mass and Membrane is a journey of the human imagination that reveals ethereal and economic options for a more sustainable future.

By Anthony M. Tung author of Preserving the World's Great Cities

The architecture was little more than an air-conditioned tin shack. A whiff of rotting garbage scented the air. The pavement was greased from 10,000 leaky crankcases. It was the Bi-Lo grocery store parking lot at Edisto Beach, South Carolina, on Friday afternoon.

Places like the Bi-Lo parking lot are simply necessary, neither good nor bad. They knit the world together.

Inside the Bi-Lo, pressed chino shorts brushed up against overalls in the beer cooler while a mom outside toted key lime pies and marrow bones to a minivan and warned her children not to run.

A black SUV that, 800 miles and a day earlier, had crossed the George Washington Bridge now rested in the Bi-Lo handicapped parking space while its driver picked up some Tums.

An uncle walked out of the store with three shiny red shovels and yellow pails.

At daybreak the next day, just above and to the right of the ice vending machine, Venus ascended to heaven over an empty parking lot.

Not far away, three yellow pails were lined up on a seaside porch while the children slept.