sea change

green, green, green. I think it's time we change the color of the argument. Let's call it blue. Yes we are concerned with plants and carbon cycles and energy and love and could not all those things be blue, blue as the sky or blue as water (neither of which are actually blue upon closer examination but rather transparent. never mind that). Our views of nature (as seen literally through the photographer's lens) are often marked by conceptions of a distant "other", which is often a green "other".

Think of the fantastic views of Central Park as an island of green within the gray city. It's thrilling, but isn't it so artificial? Yes we know this about Central Park, but if we recognize our views of wilderness as an artificially constructed separation, we might be at liberty to say everything is artificial. Or alternatively everything is natural, and it is only our re-presentations of it that make it artificial.

Let's atomize this big amorphous weight of sustainability into bite-sized pieces while we're about changing the color. In this way we might localize what is almost impossible to achieve at the level of agreement between nations (see Kyoto). Also as architects, we tend to receive opportunities in spurts, in dispersed locations, and isolated circumstances. We need a blue system that works like an oxygen tank, infusing any atmosphere with vital substance.

I think of "green" architecture as plastic flowers, whether it is imitative of form or process. We aren't good at truly imitating nature. But we're actually good at doing nature because, after all, we are part of nature. We shouldn't have to feel any obligation to bring the outside to the inside, or vice versa. The outside is already in, the inside is already out. It is a continuum of space much in the vein of FLW and Mies. Blue architecture can go one step further and say not only is the space a continuum but so is the material a continuum: what we build with has a cycle of creation and destruction that is not separate or extracted from nature but remains a part of it, even as we employ it in our buildings.

I see my project of the ferry terminal in Alameda as blue for obvious reasons but also to elaborate on the above notion of a continuum. I'm fascinated by this idea of the constructed water edge as a result of military order upon the landscape, yet it is an order with weakness and false edges. The composition of the edge at the moment is rubble, plastic bags, chunks of concrete. In my scheme the water edge may be infinitely extended and retracted by a series of pontoons that achieve geometric flexibility. You can walk on the water, or walk into the water, or kayak on the water. There is no end of the city, and likewise no beginning of nature. Commute and recreation are conflated within a single landscape.

It is a negotiation between those persistent environmentalists, who hold this ideal of the world as a perfect green sphere, made gray and imperfect by human intervention, and those who herald the virtuosity and technology of gray. At Alameda, it has been in the past a victory of the gray regime. In the future, we recognize the traces and negotiations between gray and green, but no longer do we wish one side to win. We wish it to see that it was blue all along.