DryStoneGarden

Underground Architecture by Malcolm Wells

‘In 1964, after 10 years spent spreading corporate asphalt on America in the name of architecture, I woke up one day to the fact that the earth’s surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants. I’ve been an underground architect ever since.’ Malcolm Wells

I didn’t notice until I saw mention at veg.itecture, but Malcolm Wells passed away last month at 83. Wells was the author of Underground Designs, one of the earliest books to advocate for underground buildings, green roofs, and what he called “gentle architecture,” architecture that would leave the land no worse than the architect found it. It was probably the first book I ever saw on green building, and one of the first, I’m sure, for many other people. As happens so often, his passing got me looking at his work again, and there’s a lot there, including some great water colors, drawings, cartoons, and quotes on his website. Highlights are an illustrated glossary of passive solar concepts and suggestions on how to celebrate the holiday he created, Underground America Day (think about moles, eat a parsnip or a radish, stay home from work and put some dirt on the roof…).

The Wells website has links to over a dozen obituaries, including the one he wrote himself. He clearly had a good time writing it, showing off a black eye in the photo and mostly talking about the people in his life. He ends with instructions that his last words should ‘tail off into a string of dots.’

‘But wait: don’t cut me off here. I haven’t told you about my two years in the Marine Corps - World War II - studying engineering at Georgia Tech and carrying a wooden rifle, of working with the Seneca’s, or doing a World’s Fair building, or designing a quilt, or never having touched a computer or a cell phone, or having done dozens, probably hundreds, of incredible designs and…

Patio with Laundry

My bloom day photo of what Daffodil Planter called ‘the vine with multi-colored blooms’ reminds me that I took a photo of it in full bloom back in May. We hang-dry our laundry for a variety of practical reasons — it doesn’t use fossil fuels (clothes driers account for 5.8% of residential energy use), line-dried clothing lasts longer, it makes sense in our climate, and, well, we don’t own a dryer — but also I sometimes like the look of it. I remember when I was in Italy I thought the laundry lines between the apartment buildings were very charming, and now looking at two shots of our patio this past spring, I prefer the one with the laundry.

Patio lacking Laundry

I know at least some garden bloggers use a line. Daffodil Planter said she has one. Townmouse has a variety of drying contraptions. It’s getting more fashionable, and there’s, of course, even a blog devoted to the topic. How fashionable is it? Seems like an opportunity to try out my slick new polling feature.

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Composting toilet

A friend of mine once said that the stupidest thing our culture does is put our waste into clean water. I think there are some other serious contenders for that title, but she had a point, the current system is a wasteful solution, though it’s hard to see it changing any time soon. Grist has a long article about the humanure/composting toilet movement, part 3 of a 5 part series on human waste. Personally, I would chime in that I’ve used a variety of composting toilets–they’re fairly common in some of the more off-the-grid parts of Australia and New Zealand and at the backcountry campsites here in the states, the Little Yosemite Valley campground has the best one I’ve ever used–and that the good ones are not at all unpleasant. But I shower on my front porch, so I’m not sure how much weight my opinion has on this issue.

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Tomorrow from 8:30 to 9:30 PM your local time is Earth Hour. You can read the description here, or at about a million blogs. It falls within the Earth Day genre of activism, but it’s actually pretty cool to see so many lights go out. More and more people participate each year, and it’ll be interesting to see the stats afterward.

   

map of a compact community, walkability within 1 mile, from sightline.org

In the planning world, one mile is considered walkable and one quarter of a mile is the gold standard. WalkScore.com takes that standard and gives a rating from 1-100 for an address, giving high points for things like stores, libraries, and schools within a quarter mile and diminishing points for up to a mile. The ratings seem fairly accurate, my current address gets an 83, very walkable, while the house where I grew up gets a 27, very unwalkable. That matches with my experience at both places.
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Or at least we should consider it normal.

Forum on KQED did an hour this morning on California’s water shortage. The Department of Water Resources has our precipitation at 70% and the snowpack at 50-70%, and we’re likely to have rationing this year. Wendy Martin, statewide coordinator drought coordinator for CDEC, talked about consulting with Australians about their drought. Australia is in their 10th year of drought, but they’ve decided to stop considering it a drought; they adjusted their baseline water expectations to consider their drought normal. They are a drought country, they realized, so they should expect drought. Anything extra should be considered gravy. She said the Australians were unimpressed with our California drought, because we still have turf. How could we be in a drought if we were still putting water into our lawns?

EBMUD and MMWD did a really good job last year with their invoices to get people thinking about their water usage. We noticed a big difference in people’s awareness, directly related to the information they read on their invoices. We’d never before had a client talk to us about the water bill, but last year almost every client did. MMWD has a rebate program that helps pay for the materials to improve water efficiency; they pay up to $350 for a single family house. It can be hard to spend money on irrigation, and have the landscape look essentially the same after the work is done, so the rebate checks make a big difference, not only by lowering the cost, but also by showing that the community appreciates the effort. Changing habits needs the carrot and the stick. This drought is a great opportunity to change how people think about water usage.

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