THE FILM STARTED OUT AS a personal project when I first apprenticed with earth architecture pioneers Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley in the rainforests of Oregon in the summer of 2004. At that time, I realized that natural building was going to be one of the most potent forces that could help shelter us from the converging catastrophes of the early twenty-first century. But it was being done out in the backwoods by hardcore deep ecologists, unaccessible to anyone else who hadn’t heard of it already. This was a grassroots movement that was never going to get good mainstream media attention; it deserved to tell its own story.

SO I BEGAN TO FILM what I saw and what I did, so that I could explain to all of my friends and relatives why building houses out of mud could be strong and beautiful, practical and affordable. It’s not easy to overcome most people’s prejudices towards dirt! In our hyper-regimented society, there is a serious stigma towards materials that are not industrially-produced and standardized. Anything out of the ordinary will usually be viewed with some suspicion, and anything that even remotely invokes the image of a ‘hippie’ house is going to get a lot of people’s guards up.

TO TELL THE STORY convincingly, I would have to prove that as a fundamental building material, unadulterated earth wasn’t only an appropriate choice for the third world, but that it had deep roots in Northern Europe and the Southwestern States, as well. To show that it could be built many stories high, I had to journey to the Middle East, and to show that it could withstand awesome earthquakes, I had to travel to the West Coast. To understand the origins of earthen architecture, I had to immerse myself in continental Africa, and to deal with legitimate questions about gentrification in the future, I had to really get to know inner city ghettoes.

IN MANY WAYS, I WOULD have much preferred to have just built my own house out of cob and be done with it, to just be the change that I want to see in the world. By now I would have long since finished building my dream home, wherever that might be in the world, sitting around the fire, baking bread, maybe taking care of a couple of goats. But there was a vacuum that desperately needed to be filled, and no one was stepping up to the plate, so I filled that niche as best as I could. And I have to say, I had a hell of a lot of fun traveling all around the world, meeting some amazing people, and learning a lot more than I would have from just staying in the same spot for four years.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT this film could possibly have been made all by myself. Computers got old and needed to be replaced, cameras broke down and new ones needed to be bought. When you’re in a foreign country and you don’t speak the local language, it’s helpful to have a traveling buddy who can take still shots while you shoot video, and vice-versa. Even if you’re using simple equipment, it also doesn’t hurt none to have another body to help lug it around across the continent and beyond. And when you’re only working intermittently on ecological activist jobs that exactly don’t pay hand over fist, there is no shame in availing yourself of ideological supporters who are willing to you get from place to place.

MANY PEOPLE CAME TOGETHER and contributed their skill sets to the project, because they believed that people need to know that the way that we house ourselves in North American is patently wrong-headed. They know that we need to look to all of our ancestors that used their ingenuity, and the common materials that were the closest — and to our best and brightest mad scientist environmentalists — who are using their ingenuity, and common materials that are the closest! Among these people, Peter held the vision, and contributed of his own time, energy, and resources to ensure that this important film would be seen by as many people as possible.

SO INVITE YOU TO WATCH the film FIRST EARTH – Uncompromising Ecological Architecture. Right now, while the DVD is still in post-production, you can see the film in its entirety in a YouTube-embedded frame on the official website for the film. Just click on the link “Videos”, and you can watch all twelve parts in succession. The website is also filled with additional material, hundreds of still photos and extended interview footage with some of the most important pioneers of the natural building movement. And if you enjoy the film, feel free to share it with anyone you wish. Happy viewing! – Compliments of Green Apple Landscaping.

IN RECENT DECADES, LANDSCAPE has taken on an expanded definition in architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century, the architectural avant-garde celebrated autonomy from nature, and architects devised utopian schemes for creating urban realms from scratch. More recently, however, the challenges of a threatened environment and rapidly expanding cities have fostered a revised understanding of landscape. Harmony between the spatial, social, and environmental aspects of human life has become a priority in political thought, and this has had profound reverberations in both architecture and landscape design. Landscape — no longer understood merely as nature untouched — now encompasses complex interventions by architects and landscape architects in urban and rural surroundings. In Situ: Architecture and Landscape draws from the rich collection of The Museum of Modern Art to examine the diverse attitudes towards landscape over the last hundred years.

SUPERSTUDIO

Superstudio, founded by five architects in Florence, Italy in 1966, developed The Continuous Monument, their utopian design for putting “cosmic order on earth,” as a single structure extended over the entire surface of the globe.   Conceived as a response to the chaotic growth of cities at the time, the proposed megastructures are simple and minimal but monumental in scale.  As seen in this rendering, landscape and architecture are treated as strictly separate and opposing forces.

ROBERTO BURLE MARX

Roberto Burle Marx was the most influential landscape designer in Latin America — and, arguably, the world — during the vibrant period of artistic interaction following World War II. Composing plant material according to contemporary artistic aesthetics, he developed a unique, painterly style of landscape architecture. These vibrant gouaches are abstract schematics of his planting patterns in amoebic colour fields. The conflation of biomorphic abstraction with tropical planting created a playful new geometric language for urban parks and gardens.

Garden Design, Saenz Peña Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948

Garden Design, Duque de Caxias Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948

YONA FRIEDMAN

Adapted here for two undeveloped landscapes, Spatial City is based on a structural framework system suitable for urban and rural applications alike.  This lightweight, flexible structure is designed to accommodate what Friedman saw as inevitable changes in society.  Influenced by the French housing shortage of the 1950s, he created an adaptable, minimally invasive system that privileges the user’s interests and does not displace or interrupt the landscape.

EMILIO AMBASZ

Set on a six-hundred-hectare estate in the Sierra Morena mountains near Seville, in Spain, Ambasz’s Casa de Retiro Espiritual (House of Spiritual Retreat) is a minimalist sculpture in a nearly untouched landscape. In contrast to the straight, monumental walls, a meandering line in the front lawn alludes to the subterranean rooms oriented around a central square patio. Mysterious in character and function, the Casa de Retiro Espiritual reveals its and its strong relationship to its surroundings most easily through firsthand experience. It is an ideal place of spiritual retreat, of contemplation of the relationship between nature and humans, architecture and landscape.

DR. DICKSON DESPOMMIER, professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University, believes he has seen the future of agriculture, and it takes place in city skyscrapers. Excited by the concept of green roofs, his students calculated the amount of food that could be harvested if all 13 acres of the commercial roof space in Manhattan was used for farming. Unfortunately, it only amounted to a measly two per cent of the borough’s food bill. To come up with the remaining 98% of New York County’s food budget, Despommier advocates planting crops on more than just top floors; let entire high-rises be dedicated to urban agriculture. By his calculation, 33 of these 50-storey farm factories could make the island self-sufficient for food, and with funding money, he could have the first vertical farm up and running in under a decade.

Vertical Farm (exterior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

FOR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES to grow in the heart of the concrete jungle, an environment completely alien and utterly inhospitable to them, lots of NASA space age technology is required. Instead of embedding them in irrigated soil, they are placed in plastic carts and are ferried around on assembly lines, where robots spray them with mist and minerals, and dose them with their allotted amount of light and heat. A sophisticated sensor system is supposed to screen out any offending bacteria and isolate any infected fruit or vegetable. When their robot keepers scientifically determine that they have sufficiently matured, they are mechanically harvested, processed, and packaged. On the first floor of the building, they are even sold to general public. Talk about vertical consolidation!

DESPOMMIER AND OTHER ADVOCATES of the vertical farm tout its numerous advantages. Conventional farms occasionally suffer from disastrous acts of nature, like hailstorms and monsoons, or droughts and wildfires, and as global warming kicks in, these incidences will only increase. Vertical farms are immune to these, since they regulate their environment and are protected from the elements. For these same reasons, advocates of vertical agriculture claim that these skyfarms will grow only “organic” produce, because fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides will become superfluous without soil. And under these artificial conditions, they will be able to recycle massive amounts of water, one of the biggest expenses of open-air farms. Most fabulously, since they are removing themselves from natural cycles and simulating optimum growing conditions, they will be able to yield far more harvests, producing much more food.

Vertical Farm (interior), Las Vegas - by Chris Jacobs

AND WE’RE NOT JUST TALKING about veggies and legumes.  The plan is to produce cow meat for human consumption. They can’t possibly graze on grass at a thousand dollars per square foot of precious real estate — they still haven’t come up with a techno-fix for that problem — but they can clone bovine stem cells, feed them protein shakes, and electrically shock them to simulate muscle texture.  So just about all aspects of the average American diet are accounted for.  If we base our calculations on Despommier’s optimistic figures — that a 30-storey building that covering a single city block could feed 50,000 people — this means that 60 of these skyfarms could feed the entire city of Toronto… and 600 skyfarms — an array of 25 by 25, the size of a small town — could feed the whole country of Canada!

OKAY, I’VE GIVEN the supporters of skyfarming ample opportunity to present their case in favour. Can I please rip into it now?

Dragonfly (overhead), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

WHERE TO START? Let’s begin with the supposed savings that result from food localization. Yes, growing food much closer to the point of purchase will significantly reduce the amount of costly energy and environmental damage incurred transporting produce to market. But food miles constitute only a very small fraction of the energetic, economic and ecological costs.  That’s not to say that it’s not important to reduce these wherever we can.  But it’s certainly not the area in which we can make the most difference.  University of Toronto professor Pierre Desrochers calculated that even in Britain — an island that has higher import costs than we do, because it can’t have produce trucked in from tropical climates in the way that we can import berries overland from California — the costs associated with driving back and forth from the supermarket to buy green beans from Kenya are more than 40 times the price of it being shipped onto their shores from faraway Africa.

Dragonfly (exterior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

IN DESPOMMIER’S FUTURIST FANTASY, it’s not just that these skyfarms will supply some of the food for city slickers — he means for them to supply most of the food for urban areas, if not almost all of it.  So what will become of the farmers of today, and what will become of the land that they farm?  Let’s dismiss the obviously false claim of allowing farmland to return to its native state:  permitting trees to populate meadows, reducing greenhouse gases and preserving animal habitats, saving them from extinction. Under the hyper-capitalist conditions that caused this food crisis to begin with, there’s no way that so valuable a commodity would be allowed to lie fallow. Will they start supplementing the monocultural crops grown in the inner-city food factories with exotic, expensive heirloom varieties of vegetables?  Under current market conditions, it’s far likelier that these fields will be turned into carbon farms, growing inefficient bio-fuels to replace rapidly-peaking oil and natural gas.

Dragonfly (interior), NYC - by Vincent Callebaut

AN ARRAY OF SOLAR PANELS on the southern face of the building and wind turbines on top of the tower are not going to even come remotely close to meeting the needs of an energy-addicted skyfarm. Fifty-storey concrete-and-steel skyscrapers contain megatonnes of embedded energy. Water recycling systems are incredibly energy-intensive, too. And because crops won’t be exposed to the southern sun, it’ll need lots of artificial light and heat — 100 times more than is used by the average office worker! Despommier thinks that by funneling the city’s sewage system through the base of the building, he can burn methane and create excess energy to power the whole damn contraption. But he hasn’t done his high school homework:  the amount of power produced is miniscule in comparison — if it even came close, it would violate the law of conservation of energy!

Skyfarm (skyline), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

BUT DESPOMMIER’S MOST OFFENSIVE claim is that this is a solution for Darfur and other conflict-ridden regions of the world that suffer from food shortages.  Ha!  Billion-dollar vertical farms wouldn’t even be profitable in a First World city, competing with investment bankers for premium square footage.  And when environmental costs can’t be externalized any more and food starts to its reflect real value, making rent on a Park Avenue penthouse will be the least of his worries, as the inevitable riots ensue. On average, North Americans spend less a tenth of every dollar they earn on foodstuffs — less than anyone else in the world, so our perspective on this issue is completely skewed. Sudan won’t ever be able to afford a castle-in-the-skyfarm — this is just another neo-colonial slavery scheme that has more to do with First World agro-tech profits than Third World sustainability strategies.

Skyfarm (rendering), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

DESPOMMIER HAS EVEN SUGGESTED that Monsanto, arguably the most evil corporation on the planet, is the perfect partner to develop seeds specifically for skyfarms. This fact alone pushes the plan over the edge from impossible pipe dream to heinous apocalyptic nightmare. Media critic Jerry Mander has explained how it is insane and suicidal to insist on trying to fix a problem that was caused by technology with another technology-based solution! The first two high-tech agricultural revolutions in our lifetimes produced much more food for market, but at great human and environmental cost. Yes, conventional agriculture is the biggest polluter on the planet, even bigger than ‘industry’, as Despommier points out — but this is a red herring false dichotomy: conventional agriculture is industrial. Yes, we have to change the way that we acquire our calories, and fast. But NOT LIKE THIS.

Skyfarm (overhead), Toronto - by Gordon Graff

IF THE OBJECTIVE IS really to grow healthy food much closer to the point of purchase, there’s no reason that supermarkets all across the country can’t turn their own roofs into greenhouse grow-ops. In fact, there’s already a company out in California that is doing exactly that. Sky Vegetables, out of San Francisco, partners with local grocers to produce food right on top of their retail outlets. Even Harrod’s, the largest department store in the United Kingdom at over a million square feet, has begun to grow green vegetables on the roof at their flagship location. You don’t have to engineer any complex structure or research any unproven technology; just go green on your existing roof, and save on your heating and cooling bills while you’re at it.

IN ANY CASE, there’s no need to reinvent the plow in every generation. We already have a perfectly good idea of what happens when a culture suddenly has to feed far more mouths than its industrial farming model can provide for.  When the Soviet Union collapsed twenty years ago, and its ideologically-motivated oil subsidies ended, Cuba was still under a crippling American trade embargo. But it managed to survive its food crisis, because of old-school small-scale organic urban agriculture that proliferated across the island. Watch the incredible 53-minute documentary below and be amazed, then learn more at the website The Power of Community. Thirty-six years ago, E.F. Schumacher taught us that Small Is Beautiful, and it’s truer than ever in our own time.

IN OUR BLOG POST of a couple of weeks ago, Beautiful Blanc Walls, we looked at the possibility of greenifying not only the land that surrounds a building, and not even just the land that’s on top of a building, but land that’s on the sides of buildings, as well! In our blog post of last week, Chow Towers of Babel, we took a close and critical look at the way that our civilization produces most of its human food, far away from most of its humans, and far from healthy for human, animal, and plant alike. Now here in this blog post, The History of High, we will begin examining the futurist pancake-stack answer to the agricultural crisis, Vertical Farming.

PANCAKE-STACKING, the visual metaphor I’m going to use to describe the proposal that human sleeping quarters and work camps be located extremely close to one another, to achieve certain excellent efficiencies of scale, is a state of affairs that is completely alien to the way that humans have lived on the planet for 99% of the time that they have been classified as distinctly human, of the species homo sapiens sapiens. But in the last hundred years, humans have started to imagine a not-too-distant future where they live less like monkeys and more like termites or bumblebees.

Visionary City

IN 1908, AMERICANA ARTIST William Robinson Leigh produced a painting entitled Visionary City. In it, he imagines an urban area of such complexity and compactness that it surpasses even contemporary rates of human density. Look at this image in isolation and it seems that Leigh is glorifying twenty-first century technae. But compare it to the rest of his large body of work — which consists almost exclusively of idealized desert landscapes and indigenous peoples of the Southwest — and it is instantly transformed into a dystopia. Observe the human subjects that Leigh lovingly portrays: they are obviously affluent, they have all the time in the world to embellish their own artwork or just stare off into the sunset.

Visionary City & The Golden Hour

Pueblo Summer & On The Sand

ARCOLOGY IS THE WORD that has been used ever since his time to describe an environment that is composed primarily of architectural elements. Only for the last forty years has the term been used by Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri to signify environmentally conscious architecture — specifically, the purposeful densification of human habitation, not only for logistic reasons in order to achieve greater rates of economic production, but for ecologic reasons in order to mitigate the devastating destructive impacts of human economic activity to the planet and her playthings.

STARTING IN THE LATE 1960’s, Soleri began to react to suburban sprawl by designing arcologies of up to a million human residents. By dispensing with private automobiles altogether, Soleri prefigured that pedestrian culture would be paramount, that all interpersonal interactions would occur at a much more human scale. The land surrounding the megalopoli would be reserved for recreation, and further afield, for farming. Architecture and agriculture were still separate components in Soleri’s system, but his hyperbuildings would enter the public consciousness. Since the 70’s, he has built the beginnings of Arcosanti, an intentional community in the Arizona desert based on his planning principles.

Arcologies

MANY FANTASTIC ARCOLOGIES have been brainstormed since then. I believe that the most fantastical of these is the Bay Area Architect Eugene Tsui’s Ultima Tower. At two miles high, it dwarfs all existing skyscrapers by more than a factor of five! In 2004, I apprenticed at his Oakland offices and had the chance to work on some of his amazing projects. Eugene is a biomimic, so he looks at animal architecture and draws inspiration from their ingenius building techniques. If humans are going to end up living like insects, in infinite condominiums, then it would make good sense for our human hives to resemble massive African anthills, and that’s what the Ultima Tower appears to be.

Ultima Tower

BUT MOST EGOTISTICAL ARCHITECTS don’t look to nature as a model master-builder, but as an adversary to be conquered and controlled. So as the planetary population skyrockets and rural residents follow the jobs to the big cities, engineers everywhere are drafting up plans to shoot up to increasingly absurd heights. It is almost impossible to see this pattern as anything other than cock-jockeying, an architectural attempt to prove that you have a sizable phallus. That, and the ideological extension of the colonial project to the in-between spaces in a world in which there are no more physical frontiers.

Burj Dubai

BUT NOW IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, since the granaries of the West aren’t growing quick enough to keep up with more than seven billion bellies, at long last, ecological sustainability is starting to take to the stage. Architectural firms are beginning to take plant elements much more seriously in their skyscraper designs. Unfortunately, some of these examples are only green window dressing, like putting on lots of perfume when you haven’t bathed your body recently enough. But some forward-thinking people are proposing a radical idea — turning big buildings into fifty-story full-on farms, to feed the people.

IS THE PANCAKE-STACK PLANTATION even possible? If so, is it desirable? Will it fix our plethora of problems? Or will it cause even more of them? Can cubicles co-exist with tractors? Or is this complicated scheme just another bluff by the industrial capitalist system? In our next blog, Grasping at Grass, we focus our sights on Vertical Farms, architecture’s answer to edible jenga.

Freidensreich Hundertwasser

NEARLY SIXTY YEARS AGO, Hundertwasser began formulating his philosophy of roof reforestation. It took him a full five decades to realize his dream, but by time of his passing at the turn of the millennium, several cities in Germany and Austria had graced their skylines with his magnificent tree temples. At street level, his buildings don’t blend into the background because they’re bright and colourful, but from an eye-in-the-sky perspective, their topographic appearance is completely green. Hundertwasser didn’t pot plants into concrete cubes, he stuffed housing under bushy turf and leafy trees — hundreds of them! He considered it his human duty, even appropriating apartments within the buildings for ‘tree tenants’ that cantilever their canopies out the upper-floor windows. Hundertwasser’s houses are hyper-futuristic — if you believe that future is something worth fighting for.

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 1

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 2

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 3

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 4

HUNDERTWASSER’S MORTAL ENEMY was the right angle. His first manifesto, published in 1953, was entitled ‘The Straight Line Leads to the Downfall of Humanity’ (La ligne droite conduit a la perte de l’humanité). He proclaimed, “The eyes’ nervous system perceives the infinite number of straight lines as acute dangers. Man grows mentally ill without knowing why.” Chinese feng shui practitioners, anthroposophic interior designers, and most modern environmental psychologists would agree. Hundertwasser applied this philosophy to all three spatial dimensions, undulating not only a building’s walls and windows, but its floors, as well — “An uneven floor is a melody to the feet”, he asserted with typical aplomb, “Flat floors are good for machines, good for dictators — not human beings.”

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 1

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 2

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 3

HIS REVULSION FOR all things rectilinear extended even to the fourth dimension, time. Buildings, he believed, should not remain constant, but instead morph from moment to moment. “We should be glad when rust settled on a razor blade, when a wall grows moldy, or when moss grows over the geometric angles of a corner, because, together with microbes and mushrooms, life thus moves into a house and through this process we more consciously become witnesses of the architectural changes from which we must learn.” Predicting the field of biomimetics a half-century before it became a meme, Hundertwasser felt that the best examples of engineering occur where an edifice degrades and non-human nature reclaims the man-made environment.

Magdeburg - View 1

Magdeburg - View 2

Magdeburg - View 3

HUNDERTWASSER WAS so far ahead of his time, that just in order to get noticed, he would have to be radically theatrical. During a university campus speaking tour in the 1960s in which he fearlessly promoted composting toilets (which he later named the Sacred Shit Manifesto), in order to underscore his contempt for contemporary architecture, he would launch paint projectiles at the surrounding structures, and strip naked for added emphasis! Asked if he saw himself as a good architect, he quipped, “No, I don’t… But the others are so bad!” Inevitably, the police would arrest him for creating a public nuisance. In his defense, he would cite Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, who purportedly would also preach in public without any clothing on.

Tree Tenants

HUNDERTWASSER WOULD claim that clothing is a person’s second skin, and housing is their third skin. When the emperor has no clothes, sometimes you have to take off your own just to draw attention to that fact. So he removed his own secondary stratum to draw attention to the paucity of our tertiary layer. And this he did out of love for our shared humanity, not for his own personal benefit. When the spirits moved him (and they often did), he donated his drafting skills on a pro bono basis. It was well worth it to design a healthy house for free, he felt, if it would “prevent something ugly from going up in its place”. If, in his own place, another dozen Hundertwassers had sprouted out, we would see a real ecological leap forward in our time. And if we could co-create a culture that nurtured a hundred Hundertwassers, then we would truly deserve a collective pat on the back!