Theme: SIPHON

In the West, water runs uphill toward money.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

Innocent, courageous, curious, the characters of Canadian literature have a longstanding reputation as victims: servants of colonialism, and explorers of an unruly nature. In her anthology, Survival, Margaret Atwood presents this underlying theme and poses Nature as a great Monster. She demonstrates time and again the monster’s fury, her weapons being rock, ice, and trees. But where in the story, does this leave the role of grass? It’s as if explorers reached the edge of the prairie and found the ample belly of the beast, naked and defenseless. Here, they thought, we can create order.

So they started carving straight lines running to the east and west, establishing order, and feeding the coasts. In some ways, they were playing the landscape’s own game, a game of motion, draining steadily to the east.

The uplift of the mountains created a gentle tilt of the old sea bed, a consistent slope of ten feet to the mile from the mountains all the way to the Mississippi. This tilt meant the plains would drain, but slowly.

Richard Manning suggests that our infrastructure was a continuation of motion, only now it was substantially sped up. Finally, the landscape was the victim. In Survival, Atwood presents some literary works that mark a critical shift in the perception of Nature from that of a monster, to one of a victim. Earle Birney’s poem, Transcontinental, tells the story of the Railroad through new eyes.

…behold this great green girl grown sick

with man                        sick with the likes of us?

Toes mottled long ago by soak of seaports

ankles rashed with stubble

belly papulous with stumps?…

…For certainly she is ill                her skin

is creased with our coming and going

and we trail in her face the dark breath of her dooming

On the Prairie, we are left to deal with her two sides, juggling her quiet malleability with her unpredictable rage. The “creases of our coming and going” were like canals, moving not only resources, but power. And with it, there is a steady drainage of people. Farmers, no longer able to compete with conglomerates, move on. The landscape continues to be siphoned.

This is a story not only of resource loss, but also the loss of a quality vital to place making, the unknown. As we build more sameness, and deplete or contain all rarities, we’re establishing a new emptiness. It becomes increasingly more difficult to lose oneself in the wildness of a place, as there is little left to be found.

More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Theme: EMPTINESS

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

Emptiness is deemed as a space to be filled, like a parking spot, or a glass. Void of content, the space is charged with potential to be claimed, owned, and filled or altered. At the scale of geography, the North American Prairie was settled with emptiness at its core. But this was merely a cultural perception.

In his book, Place and Placelessness, E. Relph describes Geography as an awareness of the world relative to one’s intentions. He suggests that geographical space “is not indifferent space that can be arranged or dismissed, but always has meaning in terms of some human task or lived-experience.” In the eyes of farmers, ranchers, and founders of all kinds, the prairie was unequivocally empty.

Armed with telescope, compass, and chain, the surveyors set out on a cardinal trajectory to divide and package empty space. Each parcel held the promise of an empty glass in a well stocked bar, a vessel for whatever libation fueled your vision. Richard Manning proposes that the survey was one of the greatest acts of democracy his nation ever saw, and that it was a lie. “The land was assumed to be democratic.” They cast a perfect grid of square sections, 640 acres each, reckoned both equal and empty. It was an unprecedented structuring of Tabula Rasa. In its Latin origin, Tabula Rasa means ‘scraped tablet’. The space is not only empty, but erased.

Persistently malleable and unfixed, the prairie is unable to shake the habit of falling empty into the hungry eyes of yet another enterprise. Failed land passes from hand to hand, towns grow into cities without edges, drills dig deeper and broader. A blank slate or empty space is a magnet for the homo fabrican: Man the Maker. But as Joe Truett suggests in his book Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, there may also be a deeper genetic draw to empty spaces, a survival instinct. The short grass of the prairie provides good visibility, a habitat that “would have let us eat more and be eaten less.”

Consider now a shift in the perception of emptiness, from that of a void, to that of a thick substance, fluid, and unknown. In her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit reads into the title of a photograph taken from a common phrase.

The ‘leap into the void’ is sometimes read as a Buddhist phrase about enlightenment, about embracing the emptiness that is not lack as it seems to westerners, but letting go of the finite and material, embracing limitlessness, transcendence, freedom, enlightenment.

Emptiness in both terms is the promise of potential. The question is whether it is experienced as exclusive or inclusive.

Theme: DRIFT

The power of the land moves, and those who derive their power from the    land must move with it.

-Richard Manning, Rewilding the West

I began to feel that the vastness, the bulk, the overwhelming power of the prairie is the same in its immensity as the sea – only the sea is changeless, and the plains, as I knew, were passing.

-John Noble (quoted in Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban)

Bo was always restless, always chasing another dream. When the bars went dry he went north. When the snow flew and the crop failed he sought out shelter in town. And when disease struck the town, he ran Whiskey by the carload. As a character he was both pig-headedly stubborn, and frustratingly impulsive, changing course at every junction. Wallace Stegner wrote him to be much like the land he came from, somehow hard and soft at the same time. And as I read his story, reflecting on the accounts of places and people I’ve found, he is the embodiment of an unavoidable penchant to drift.

The Prairie sustains itself on an underlying current. Motion is the only constant. In Grassland, Richard Manning tells a story of a place that goes back to a time of Glaciation.

Always there were winds, enormous winds sweeping off the unobstructed plain of ice. Wind and cold stripped vegetation, leaving soil exposed, creating dust. This dust piled in dunes that became the foundation of grassland soils today, a wind-bred soil ready to run again at the slightest excuse of wind.

Grass rooted itself deeply in the landscape, building soil from dust. But always there is the idea of some shifting body below the surface. Manning describes the grassland in flux, expanding and contracting, its edges shifting in response to rainfall and fire.

            The place shifts both in this slow, unperceivable way, as well as suddenly, without warning. This landscape is unpredictable, temperamental like the sea. In its early written and charted history, it was neither land nor sea, ambiguously blending with the whiteness of the page. But even today it’s greatly misunderstood. No matter how we try, it cannot be harnessed. Nothing can be sacred when everything is changing.

Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

- Willa Cather, My Antonia, pp 7

From Near to Far

I want to introduce a cast of architects that shaped this landscape. They created and carved space from the scale of a single seedling, to a quilt of fields that drape an entire region. These architects were farmers, railroad tycoons, surveyors, explorers of all kinds. And they gathered a kit of tools for getting lost, and finding place. They erased the places they didn’t see or didn’t understand, and plotted new grounds for dwelling and uncovering the unknown. When I visit her this summer, I’ll ask my grandmother to stand on the front porch of the old house that looked across the road at their wheat field, and tell me the stories of all the things and places she knows, as far as the eye can see.

Space and Architecture reach from the scale of the intimate to that of the infinite, and all scales make up our perception of the world. An outsider in the prairies is engulfed by the weight of the unknown, while an insider is surrounded by all those things that compile their sense of place. They couldn’t possibly find themselves lost in this field of familiar landmarks.

Humans instinctually shift from exploration to dwelling, from near to far. To explore is to seek out the unknown, the “blue of distance” as Rebecca Solnit would call it. And to dwell is to pause in the realm of the unknown for long enough for it to become familiar. The dwelling creates our sense of place from which to then depart and search for new unknowns. Solnit presents the “Blue of Distance” as the thin band of color that falls on the horizon. You can never reach it because it always recedes into the distance. But arguably, its human nature to try.

The Prairies have seen a great many explorers seek out the blue of distance. Perhaps it’s the absolution of the horizon that defines its Genus Loci: the tension between staying and going.

It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

-Jonathan Raban

The Horizon is the boundary of this place, creating a sense of belonging for everything within it. Yet every boundary is also a passage, the place where you move from inside to outside. It’s a constant reminder of all that is still unknown. Whether you are a nomad or a drifter, the Prairie and its horizon are the epitome of the exchange between exploration and dwelling. This exchange is how we create place.

Lost In Place

Rebecca Solnit proposes that being lost is “a psychic state achievable through geography”. Humankind shares a desire to get lost, in order to escape, to find oneself, or to find a sense of belonging. Just as drudgery and devotion to place is embedded in our culture, longing for distance seems embedded in our nature. But being lost takes on a number of forms.

There is the desire to be lost for discovery. People hope to lose themselves in search of the new, of reinvention. They embrace the unknown. They shed one skin in order to don another. It’s the kind of being lost that children find in playing. It’s a kind of being lost that is vanishing with all that terrain labeled terra incognita.

I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

-Rebecca Solnit

Solnit suggests that our modern places and landscapes are suffocating our ability to get lost for discovery. Media, fences, networks, and design, are cutting off and disembodying the unknown. And as architects, we’re at the forefront of the problem. It would seem that a world caught up in design and communication has created a new sense of being lost.

We now find ourselves so often lost in longing. With so many opportunities available to us, at such costs that we can never obtain them, we are always in search of more. It’s a similar form of losing oneself, but now instead of seeking the unknown, we seek those things we know as distant. When shiploads of city dwellers packed up and left in search of more, they headed for the prairies. The railroad and the government promised ample opportunity, cutting no costs in spreading the word. The prairies were founded in the spirit of getting lost.

In this way, place making and a sense of getting lost, are intertwined. But there are two ways of being lost that create entirely opposite senses of place. The first is to be lost as in never knowing truly where you are. You are physically lost in place, attempting to recreate where you came from. You are detached from the here and present, from the inherent qualities of the landscape. Your sense of place emerges out of where you came from, and what you expect.

Or you could be lost because you’re absolutely immersed. You are, in this way, lost to the outside world like a set of keys, but entirely present wherever you are. Solnit quotes Walter Benjamin as he states that being lost is “to be fully present”. It might have been the captives who found this sense of being lost, or the farmers who wholly dedicated themselves to a new land and new life.

The Prairie Landscape, as in the introductory chapter titles of both Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and Raban’s “Bad Land: An American Romance”, presents an “Open Door” through which to get lost. But some exploration might discover that much of the place created in being lost, was in longing and detachment, rather than discovery and immersion.

The qualities of place come from two paths, those inherent and those inscribed. The prairies are built on a strenuous convergence between the two. We find the cultural qualities, the longings and preconceptions that followed the founders, inscribed on the landscape. And those qualities that are embedded in the landscape can be read on the people themselves. They are the qualities that pass from one culture to another, revealing the unavoidable truths of the place.

The Lightness of Place

Nearly a hundred years after they were born, the accidental nature of their conception still haunts these towns. Their brick work has grown old, the advertisements painted on the sides of their buildings have faded pleasantly into antiques, yet they seem insufficiently attached to the earth on which they stand. Leave one in the morning, and by afternoon it might easily have drifted off to someplace else on the prairie. Such lightness is unsettling.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land

As towns were founded across the prairies like rest stops on a road trip, each town came into the world teetering unsteadily on its land. Someone, somewhere else, conceived of it, pinpointing it on a map and claiming it by name. The roots in these towns grow shallow and wide. They reach east to the eager emigrants leaving Europe, and west with the ambitions of the railroad. But at its center, the town lies as though the slightest gust of wind might have it wither and blow away.

This incredible lightness of place is both a Western and Modern phenomenon. So often have I felt detached from place, from the physical geography of place. In a globalized world where the architecture and culture of one place bleeds into that of another, place is becoming increasingly homogenous. Place hovers lightly over the landscape it’s built on. It is neither here nor there, but everywhere.

In the Prairies, the manufacturers, surveyors, and railroad officials exemplified this homogeneity with the systems they laid over the landscape. They painted the prairies with a lexicon of mass-made, pre-manufactured, and imported illusions that eroded from the harshness of the landscape.

In addition to the lightness of our insignificant being, the temporal nature of the prairie has rendered its places impermanent. They have seen the decay of their buildings and crops alike. Entire towns have washed up like shipwrecks on an unforgiving sea. Their ruins slowly dissolve into the grass. Amid a scattering of ghost towns, our presence takes on an entirely moral stature. It is one that’s unique to the new world, where place is founded with ideas rather than traditions, and is cast in loose soil, beneath a temperamental sky.

But in contrast, the lightness of place has caused an immense weight on the landscape. Our treads degrade much slower than we do. And they’ll shape the landscape for longer than we can perceive. This is the imperceptible weight of our lightness.

Over Terra Incognita

This is a story about Place Making. From a landscape that was once read as placeless, to a new kind of placelessness inscribed upon it, the Canadian Prairie is a region that inherently asks us, what is place, how is it created, and how to do we value it? There is a fine line between a sense of belonging and being lost, a possibility that they are one in the same, and a fear that we are losing our ability to sense either.                                                                                                                                    

These are the stories of a cast of architects, each with particular motives, and a complex web of forces that came together to create places where there were none before. In the act, they built a new kind of placelessness, no longer empty, but filled with ambiguity. In its relatively short written history, the Canadian Prairie is a microcosm of our placeless existence. It witnessed the mass movement of an expanding population, opening its doors as a “new” or “final frontier”. It is a place built entirely by people who came from elsewhere, carrying the weight of previous lives and expectations, and hoping to start anew. It’s a place built on the pursuit of opportunity, preceded by an image, and founded in a gamble.

This is a story that questions our modern paradigm of place, but looks with optimism upon the human spirit. It explores our ceaseless drive to create, to withstand hardship, and potentially to rediscover what we’ve lost.