FW: Graton Green on Steroids?
Hollynn D'Lil
Though you might enjoy this from Merrilyn.
HolLynn
From: Merrilyn Joyce [mailto:m...@monitor.net]
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 5:09 PM
To: Hollynn D'Lil; Karin Lease; Jane Kurtz; John Diniakos
Subject: Graton Green on Steroids?
More wonderful ideas here!!! http://www.originalgreen.org/blog/the-agricultural-aesthetic.html
On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Steve Mouzon <st...@newurbanguild.com> wrote:
The Agricultural Aesthetic
Most vegetable gardens look utilitarian at best, but more often they're likely to be downright messy, often even ugly… and this is a big problem. Here's why: Most places in the US cannot nourish their inhabitants from nearby fields and waters because we've sprawled cheek-to-jowl across the landscape in such a way that dedicated farmlands are often miles away. So without a lot of building demolition, the best hope for becoming Nourishable rests in embedding edible gardens within the urban fabric of the neighborhoods.
If those edible gardens were lovable, they would be easy to embed because many people would want them. But if they're unlovable, then they're not so much of a good neighbor, and more likely to be shunned or outright banned, like this Oak Park, Michigan garden. To be fair, the Oak Park garden isn't downright ugly… but it's not beautiful, either, and that's just enough to bring out the opposition.
So what do we need to do? Currently, most places in the US have no living traditions of beautiful edible gardens, so we need to create new traditions. A living tradition begins with a single insight by one person. That person creates an ideal version of something based on their insight. If that person has enough passion, they can transform their insight into a personal cause. If that cause is compelling enough, it can spread to other people in the same locality or distributed hive, and the ideal gets replicated by these other people. If the ideal and its progeny is a good enough fit for regional conditions, climate, and culture, the cause spreads to the culture at large and becomes a movement. If that movement travels across generations, it becomes a living tradition. Check out this post which describes in greater detail the transformation from insight to living tradition.
We're clearly at the beginning of this process right now, and more of us need to be thinking of ways to make edible gardens lovable. I had one insight recently which I believe can help: we need to create an "agricultural aesthetic" that can guide lovable garden design.
In the early years of the Modernist movement in architecture, the pioneers spoke early and often about the "machine aesthetic." Simply put, they wanted to make buildings look like they were products of the assembly line, and they wanted to do it artfully. This ideal guided the first several decades of Modernism.
The Agricultural Aesthetic is based on a parallel question: how can we take the common artifacts of edible gardens and compose them artfully to create gardens that are lovable? The images in this blog post aren't the final product; they're merely the toolkit of raw elements from which we might create an Agricultural Aesthetic. Here's how some of these elements might be used...
If this is of interest, check out the rest of the post.
Thoughts?
Steve
Steve Mouzon
AIA ~ CNU ~ LEED AP
New Urban Guild
1253 Washington Avenue
Suite 222
Miami Beach, FL 33139
USA
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st...@newurbanguild.com