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.

Floodplain Dwelling

The Dwelling Design has become another cardboard moving box, questioning and packing up the pieces of home. Between the design of a mobile dwelling on a Unimog Frame, and a landscape space cast into the floodplain, we’ve been exploring those agents that tie people and architecture to place. In the truck, a sense of place is boundless, always available out the front window. Its also protected and carried with you, a cozy bunk in the back. On site, the place is part of the very riverbed it sits on. Its exposed to the flood and the ice, robust enough to withstand the forces, but malleable enough to capture an impression of passing seasons.

All the parts of home are divided into either those that you carry on your back, the necessities for survival, and those that you return to, unlock, and let spill out into open space. For us, there would be a cistern, a cellar, a library, and a fire pit waiting in the flood plain for our return. But the design of the space left behind could incorporate all those personal nooks and collections one stashes away and comes back to, like the obscure ashtrays my Grandfather collected even though he never smoked, or the miniature spoons my Grandmother hung on the wall and never used.

The two halves of the home then start to take two approaches to a minimal existence. The truck takes its cues from survival and efficiency. The home is tailored to the mechanics of the vehicle, and to the everyday parts of living, compacted. Its design attempts to carve out every available space for storage, and then to leave spaces one can tuck them self away in. On the other hand, the site is minimal in the sense of defining space. It does not use walls or roofs, but instead it uses topography to form space. Platforms and benches for lounging, eating, and bathing, are cast into the riverbed. Flooding can flow over and around them, pooling in basins and streaming through gutters. In this minimal palette of edges and platforms, space is able to grow.

 One pulls up with all their belongings in tow, opens up the watertight cells that keep their books or spoons, and inhabits the open space that becomes home.

Harvest Scales

From the scale of a single grain of wheat, and the way it propagates, to the scale of the human body, and the extent of it’s arm swing, to the scale of the machine, and the horsepower that pulls it, animal or manufactured. With each increasing scale, the swathe widens, and so too does the extent of the field. During Harvest, where time is a constant and limiting factor, the space that can be reaped is defined by the speed of the reaper. Collectively, a grid of farm fields creates a pattern of not only space, but of the imprint of time. 

Sources:

Barlow, Ronald Stokes. 300 Years of Farm Implements and Machinery. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2003.

Deere & Company. John Deere Agriculture. 2011. http://www.deere.com/en_US/ag/online_brochures/combines/combines_brochures.html (accessed March 8, 2011).

MacEwan, Grant. Power for Prairie Plows. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Book Service, 1971.

Seeligman, Genetta. BitterSweet. Springfield-Greene County Library District. Spring 1974. <http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/bittersweet/sp74toc.htm> (accessed March 7, 2011).

Todd, S. Edwards. The American Wheat Culturist. New York, New York: Taintor Brothers & Co., 1868.

Thing: Cardboard Moving Box

My mother dropped a stack in the hall outside my room. It landed with an unremarkable thump. She carried in two boxes and assembled them on the floor in front of me. A papery dust wafted out as she folded the flaps, and tipped the hollow side up. She pressed open the top flaps along the crease, and uncapped a marker with her teeth. On one box, she wrote, “Lindsey’s Room” and on the other, “Lindsey’s for Storage”. She resealed the marker, and left a black garbage bag, explaining with sympathetic eyes, “This is for anything not worth keeping”. That was a precarious idea. Might there really be something not worth keeping? Every old stuffed animal, scrap of paper, or shard of broken toy was a part of my childish world, real or make-belief. When it retired from the realm of useful things, it found a new purpose in the hands of my imagination.

I pruned my belongings of anything I could part with: things that were replaceable, objects more valuable in memory than in substance, and things I was embarrassed of. Now I had to sort through the ‘keepers’. We were moving over seas for two years, and bringing only what we needed. We would leave the rest in storage until we returned. I began with the bookshelf. I needed my favorite nighttime stories: Grandma and the Pirates, The Snow Queen, and my collection of Roald Dhal and Robert Munsch. These would come with me. I wanted my sticker collection and book of Cat’s Cradle. These would be stored with my schoolbooks, neither wanted nor needed, but obligated to keep. I continued in this manner, weighing needs against wants, sifting through dolls, marionettes, pencils, puzzles, and other oddities. Each thing was carefully considered for how lonely it might be, abandoned in a warehouse, or for how lonely I might be without it. The boxes eagerly welcomed the objects, filling up far too fast. My Mother tackled the wardrobe, filtering out clothes that were too small, too big, or too itchy to wear.

The room was emptying as I rearranged the contents of the box, trying to squeeze out any extra space. Inside, everything looked shabby against the fresh cardboard. My things were foreign, just objects, stacked with the efficiency of a seven-year-old. My hands felt dirty, covered in a thin film shed from the box. Only a bed, bookshelves, and a little desk remained. They would all disappear when the moving truck arrived in the morning. Mom sealed the boxes with packing tape, and took the garbage bag down to the curb. I sat on the floor, my world shrunken from around me.

It would be several weeks before we saw the boxes again. They took the slow voyage by ship while we packed our suitcases and flew. For weeks we camped out in a furnished apartment, on loan. When we heard the ship was fast approaching, we moved. I slept in an empty room, in an empty house, on an overgrown lot. I got to know every ripple in the ceiling and every snag on the carpet. The whole house was ripe with potential, awaiting the sound of moving vans turning up the drive.

It was clear the boxes had taken the brunt. They were no longer new, but marked up, dented, and wilted from sea air. The movers carried them in, one after the next, stacking them in the living room. Excitement erupted in all of us as our handpicked world unfolded in an alien place. I found my box amongst the heap. Like all the others, it was branded with the mover’s stamp, and in finer print, the words, “Lindsey’s Room” were scrawled in the corner. I heaved open the flaps and let out a musty scent of home. My things lay there, untouched, against the weary cardboard. They looked brand new.

After the boxes had been lovingly unpacked and dismantled, we began to build. We built fortresses with watchtowers, hideouts quilted with pillaged blankets, and rocket ships embellished with triggers and controls. Those spared of our playful destruction, were stowed away for the trip back. Then I would be faced again with the tiresome task of re-evaluating my material world.

With every move my collection got smaller, my boxes more expertly packed. I tested ways of classifying possessions: by room, by association, purpose, material, or fragility. The cardboard box became a ritual in my life, a de-tox of sorts. Its rigid dimensions are a constantly nagging discipline. Every possession has been scrutinized for its ability to be packed into an 18” by 18” by 22” cube. Anything larger must be exceptionally sturdy, or easily dispensable.

Those boxes that are still intact, that have not been dismembered of flaps and sides, are folded flat. They’re stacked under the bed, collecting dust, awaiting another move. The cardboard box continues to keep my world small, and renders it mobile.