What is a megadrought?

Looking at soil moisture and tree rings, researchers are becoming increasingly concerned about a megadrought in the desert southwest.

 “Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future,” said lead author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now. We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts.” 

It isn't just that there are markers of a dry future. But a broad historic context also recognizes that, throughout the 20th Century, as Arizona made long-term decisions about sprawling development patterns, it was experiencing an unusually wet century. Now that the Southwest is committed to supporting those sprawling landscapes, a megadrought is a dramatic change.

Old fair, new park

Gustafson Guthrie Nichol's plans to turn San Antonio's old Hemisfair site into a new civic park are getting lots of attention. It is an important site (I have some fond memories of the place, years after the grand Exhibition). And it has great potential to expand the city's liveliest district as you can see in this plan:

Desert city art

In a studio that sounds fascinating, Sherri Bruggeemann's students designed a system for public art in an uninhabited city that someone else proposed. Bruggemann has been an outspoken advocate for public art, but arrangements for unbuilt cities seems like a new step.

Grand Canyon quote #2

"Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds."

- John Wesley Powell

Grand Canyon quote

"We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders."

"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."

 - John Wesley Powell

RIP: Paolo Soleri (1919-2013)

Visionary architect Paolo Soleri, responsible for Arizona's Cosanti and Arcosanti, has passed away.

 The NY Times obituary says that Soleri "showed a generation of younger architects an alternative to corporate modernism."

The LA Times describes the Italian born architect as still influencing recent projects:

Lately some hugely ambitious developments have echoed Soleri's call for an architecture that huddles densely in the desert, sharing resources, rather than spreading thinly across a vast area. One of them is the $22-billion Masdar City project on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, designed by architect Norman Foster as a hyper-efficient "cleantech cluster."

Daily Dose of Architecture has a touching obituary.


Here are some photos I took of Arcosanti a few years ago.

Street View in the Grand Canyon

Google Maps is now taking Street View down into the Grand Canyon so you don't have to. Very cool photos.

It seems fitting that the Grand Canyon still serves as a site of innovation. In 1882, Dutton published his Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District as a Monograph of the U.S.G.S. that included this quote:

“Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated before they can be understood.”

That quote, from Clarence Dutton, was not inspired by computers or light bulbs, but instead by the Grand Canyon. Weaving together geology and eloquent descriptions of unparalleled scenery, he argues that the Grand Canyon, as an idea not as a physical reality, is a great innovation. “As with all great innovations it is not to be comprehended, in a day or a week, nor even in a month. It must be dwelt upon and studied,” he explained.

Arcosanti

A couple years ago I finally got to visit the formerly futuristic commune-like Arcosanti.  This is Paolo Soleri's dream of how we could build future cities, although it was also a living experiment in how to incrementally advance the forms and ideas of a such a place as a self-sustaining community.  And since it was in the desert of Arizona, sustainability is especially difficult.  My visit was limited to an hour or two, so I was interested in reading someone else's account of a recent visit in PlaNetizen. 

Friday Photos:Taliesin West

Twenty years after reading Many Masks I finally made it out to Wright's Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Having been to many other Wright houses and buildings, this one still stood as unique. Like his home and studio in Oak Park, it was a place for experimentation and change. But the spatial experience of this living learning community campus and home turf and icon really lived up to the photos I've been looking at for decades. While it is a large property, the scale of the spaces are quite small.



While Wright's clients were harassed if they wanted to incorporate someone else's furniture or set out knick knacks on their hearth, his property still had odds and ends collected on various shopping trips and journeys. This dragon, picked out by his wife, breathed a 15" flame.

Back before there were laws, his students went into the hills of the property and pulled out remarkable petroglyph rocks which were integrated into the design.

He designed this three bowl memorial to his daughter and her two children who died in a car accident. The dishes were meant to be filled with water, but were not on the day we visited.


This very coarse masonry contrasts with the amazing ancient stone work at the nearby Chaco Canyon site, but it manages to feel very local. The coarseness didn't keep the walls from feeling architectural, but still satisfied his organic architectural desires. The stones were not cut or artificially shaped (we were told) and like so much of the work on the site, were made by his apprentices.

4 Corners

I hope that this doesn't screw up your summer vacation too much, but it turns out that the Four Corners is in the wrong spot.