Ecology for Architects

For the past three + months I have been teaching a new course at NYIT called Introduction to Ecology (for Architects). The course introduces students to ecological systems with respect to interactions between the natural and built environment, and specifically with regard to shelter and environmental conditioning. Students are asked to consider the relationships between technology and culture as they learn how old and new technology can compliment the rhythms of the sun, wind, rain, water conservation and cycles of biomass and waste when designing habitable spaces.

As the semester ends, I must say that I tremendously enjoyed teaching this class. The students were inquisitive at a variety of levels, sometimes asking deep questions about how we live on the earth to asking the simplest questions that revealed how disconnected we are from our food, water and energy. Second, the course gave me a platform for disseminating my travel research in New Orleans, Bangladesh, India and Brazil (not to mention my composting experiments at the community garden this summer). I also gave a separate lecture on water to 60 first-year students and faculty. My skills as a lecturer/professor are slowly developing. I'm learning how important it is to engage the students, to make the class fun and stimulating and to really listen to them and offer the best feedback I can give.


Ecology students on a tour of the new LEED-platinum rated visitors center at the Queens Botanical Gardens


Assignment: collect the garbage that you would normally throw away over the course of one day. Discussion: How can waste become resources? How can we redesign products and packaging to become useful "technical nutrients"? What role can architects play in reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills or polluting water?

Edibles & Colorfuls

After returning from India, JP and I started growing things. Arugula (wilted flowers pictured here), heirloom tomatoes, Portugal hot peppers, sugar snap peas, herbs, cucumbers, and mesclun for eating, marigolds and hollyhocks for dyes.
Our apartment is overgrown, our fire escape would be hazardous to negotiate in a fire situation, and we've spread our growing fervor to neighbors. We have a community garden plot too. A 4 x 4 plot of arable land. 16 square feet to farm. We compost food scraps. We save water for the plants by keeping big jars and buckets in the shower while waiting for the water to heat up. We haven't produced much yet, but each tomato is cherished and shared in a slightly ceremonious pseudo-harvest.
Now if only my landlord would let me on the roof...

Red Hook

Shifting

This is Long Beach, Long Island. Flat, watery & fragile, its edges shifting whether we like it or not, eroding, building land, and occasionally brought back from natural disaster by conservationists to its "natural" state. Like most water's edge sites on Long Island, this place was inhabited by humans, reconstituted, dredged, paved, jettied, bulkheaded and stabilized. Certain sites are left "natural" like beaches for human pleasure. When a storm blows over and washes miles of this beach away, it is promptly rebuilt with sand that had been deposited in the "wrong" place.

The lives of Long Beach are fascinating. People who live near the coast have a stronger connection to the land and water, and it brings a sort of cadence to everyday life. The rise and fall of tides, the telling winds, the threat of a storm, the weathering of everything from the salty air. It is a microcosm of the long sandbar that is Long Island, although LI has been developed so much that living just slightly inland can destroy any intuition of living on an island.

My first architectural project on the water is becoming a laboratory of renewable energies and sustainable manipulations of water for human needs. This structure will take salty water from the Bay to a rooftop pond where it will be heated by solar thermal tubes, turn to steam and condense into a channel leaving the salt and minerals behind. When enough water has been purified and collected in the channel, it becomes a waterfall off the side of the building into a tank below, alerting the inhabitants to the progress of the system. The water is then potable and the salt collected is the kind of sea salt that gourmet food stores sell at high prices.

This is a new architecture for Long Island in which the building (working with its inhabitants) makes its own sea salt, cleans water, produces its own energy with photovoltaics, grows its own food (there are herb and vegetable gardens), and uses geothermal for heating and cooling.

In the Dead of Night

A post from 2/26, not yet published on this blog:

In a jeep, driving from Jessore to Kulhna through small villages, woods, dark fields, with a stranger, I played a little game where I tried to count how long I could look out into the night and not see another person. It never happened. I always saw people walking, carrying loads, riding bicycles. People everywhere.

You really learn to control your imagination when in these kinds of situations in Bangladesh. I stepped out of the jeep and two men waiting on the street took my bags. Without a word and just a quick wave from my driver, I followed them through a market, into the darkness, down the dock towards a tiny boat, the sounds of the village life fading behind me. We pushed off the dock and rowed in silence except for the tinny, small splashes of water and faint din from the town and far away motorboats.

I boarded the M.V. Chhuti, our boat for the Sundarbans tour. My cabin was small, about 5 by 7 feet with two hanging bunks, a mirror and nighttable. No electricity, but cosy, comfortable and simply what I needed. I wasn't expecting dinner so late (11:00 pm) and I was the only person to arrive the night before our departure, but in true Bangladeshi hospitality, a huge meal was waiting for me in the lounge: dal (lentils), rice, roasted cauliflower, vegetable curry, salad, prawns, fried fish, an orange, tea and cookies. I ate alone. An oil lamp lit my small area, just beyond the radius of light- darkness. I was alone, but watched, and taken care of. I knew I was safe.

Betel tree in the Khasia village

Post started on 2/17/08... not published on the blog til now:


In two short days I experienced so much, I can't begin to describe it all. Over time, I'll reveal the story of my trip to Srimongal through the picturesque hills of tea gardens, pineapple plantations, in the tropical rainforest, through villages of betel-nut and betel-leaf cultivators, at the Hindu festival for Pooja that I happened upon one clear night and the fascinating people I met along the way including a young geologist working for Chevron, drilling for oil in the fragile Bengal landscape. (As you can imagine, we had lots to talk about!)

Everything is an adventure here. I asked my tour guide, Santoush if he could bring me to an ATM at some point during the day. We kept driving and stopping, asking directions, twice walking into what looked like an old Victorian home, but without furniture, just a desk in each room. How could anyone think that these places might be a bank? After an hour and a half of driving, wondering if I should be stopping this wild goose chase or just enjoy the adventure (and actually being let out of the car to navigate the crowded streets once in a while) I realized that the Bengali people truly want to help and this time it had led to an undesirable situation for all, and I was the only one who would stop it. Finally I told Santoush that I wanted to get going on our tour. His face was flush with self disappointment at not being able to find what I needed, but I suspect there was a bit of relief too.

Going on (and on) about India

India isn't planned or built, but grown from the earth. Its people, buildings, cities, are borne of the land and water. The territory is fertile, oozing life, an overgrown plant (we would have trimmed it long ago). India is... sensual, swollen, pungent. We become so accustomed to our surroundings, our built environment, and we don't realize how scripted, forced and unnatural it is for humans. India is dynamic, organic, and borne of necessity and availability. Their local cultures and environment are genuine because it's coming from them. We must borrow from other cultures to make life interesting.

I can't get India out of my head so I've been listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, hanging out in Jackson Heights, meeting Bangladeshis, cooking dal, curry and parantha, wearing bangles, and reading books on India desert architecture. It brings me back, lets me dream of going back...


Organic Cities- Ahmedabad, Udaipur and Jodhpur



Doorways.

Bangladeshis

More.

I have this terrible habit of trailing off at the end. When I returned home I didn't want to be completely "back". But I have so much more to tell, so, nearly a month after my return to New York, I bring you more photos and a bit of the story from my brief glimpse into Bangladesh.

This place in the mangrove forests is what I believe to be a most unique place on planet earth. Unimaginably pristine, beautiful from afar and at close inspection, ecologically complex and hardly touched by humans, it touched me profoundly.

We took a small wooden boat through the creek and landed on some sandy ground and I walked for the first time on land formed by the roots of the mangroves. We hiked for a short while, about 2km across a savannah, then through some rough terrain of trees broken by the cyclone last December. We arrived at a silver, crescent shaped beach. I kicked off my shoes and the sand felt like soft velvet. Tiny sand crabs made intricate patterns with beads of sand across the entire beach. I rolled up my jeans and walked into the Bay of Bengal. The water shimmered like crystals and the fine sand turned to dense mud as I walked further and further out; still the waters were shallow.

All rivers that originate in the Himalayas, travel through India, Bhutan and Bangladesh, converge near Dhaka, then spread and distribute in an elaborate delta that is Bangladesh. The Sundarbans mangrove forest is where those sacred, fresh waters meet the salty ocean. Mangroves are unique trees that thrive in the place where salty meets sweet water. Their roots draw in salt and excrete it through their leaves, encouraging other plant life, shellfish, birds, Bengal tigers, deer, and more to live, thus creating one of the most complex ecosystems on earth.

I felt humbled and suddenly needed to immerse myself in this sacred water that had traveled so far, been tainted and cleansed, provided cleansing, provided life, and is the source of life. I left my clothes on the beach and lay in the waters. I thought about the mud and the homes caked and made structural with this earth. I thought about the glorious mangroves, making life possible, protecting the vulnerable population of Bangladesh from cyclones, preventing erosion of the entire nation, so close to sea level, so precariously sited. I felt how small we all are in contrast to nature and these great waters that we take for granted. Gandhi said, “use water as you would milk,” and I imagined rivers of milk.

I knew at that moment that my journey had come to an end. I could go home. I had been to the source of the water- the beginning and the end. I had seen places parched, yet full of life in the desert, and places inundated with too much water, still surviving every day.

I couldn’t stay and would never stay in a land that wasn’t my own. I needed to get back home and embrace my own land, water, and people. I will spend my lifetime doing this. But I will return to India as my muse.

River Life

People, boats and water

A village on the edge of the mangrove forest.

Our mini cruise ship into the Sundarbans mangrove forest.

Cyclone Sidr tore mangroves out by the roots in November last year.

At the forest station, far from the electrical grid.

Mudbath

Old Dhaka Visuals

Rickshaw Art

Hindu Street




The place where I got my boat on the Buriganga River:


River life in Old Dhaka