The Human Age (11 page)
Other living roofs and vertical garden companies have sprung up and begun greening all sorts of buildings, from hospitals, homes, and police stations to banks and offices. Some use hydroponic methods; others plant in turf on the roof à la the European tradition. A former Renault factory in Boulogne, France, has been reborn as a school with an undulating green-roof that reduces heating and cooling costs. The design firm Green over Grey, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has created some spectacular living walls for sites in Canada, including the international building at Edmonton Airport, where arriving visitors inhale a shot of oxygen and plant-scrubbed fresh air from a gigantic living wall whose design swirls were inspired by high-altitude cloud formations. “Jungle Waterfall,” their dramatic, multistory cascade in an office building in Vancouver, includes tropical trees, and a maintenance crew occasionally has to harvest the pineapples lest they fall and hit passersby.
Planted walls and roofs and sustainably designed buildings, along with wildlife corridors, city parks, solar and wind power, and trees aglow with bioluminescent foliage (to replace streetlamps), are but a few of the initiatives gaining popularity in the U.K., Germany, Taiwan, the United States, and many other places worldwide. Roofs planted with sedums and succulents blossom, changing color with the seasons, while being low-maintenance, reflecting heat, and providing a habitat for birds. The goal is homes and public spaces that are living organisms that will scrub the air of pollutants, increase oxygen, reduce noise, save energy, refresh the spirit, and sink our roots deeper into the natural world.
IN CONTRAST TO
Blanc’s elegantly formal walls for the Quai Branly and a similar project at the Athenaeum Hotel in London, his own house on the outskirts of Paris is a throbbing green Mardi Gras of microhabitats, with knolls of lance-shaped leaves, jutting rocks, prongs of tiny flowers, thick heart-shaped leaves, arrow-leafed philodendrons with roots adrift in a flowing stream. You don’t so much enter the abode he shares with his longtime partner, the actor Pascal Henri (a.k.a. “Pascal of Bollywood”), as join a green rhapsody, or possibly a green bedlam, and become part of the cascading carnival of fronds, mounds of moss, umbrellaing ferns, twig elbows, searching roots, and leafy limbs probing at everything, including you. The superabundance of leaves caresses you lightly with barely discernible veined fingers as you pass. Beaded curtains serve as doors, and free-flying coral-beaked waxbills wing from room to room. Bouncing frogs and slithering lizards roam the house at ease, eyes rotating, tongues occasionally unfurling like party favors. At a Magritte-like Surrealist window, a bushy shrub on the inside echoes its twin on the outside. Your eye shimmies. Inside, outside—who can say where they begin or end? Glass is only liquid sand, after all, and only ever in motion, hourglasslike, pouring so slowly that our eyes read it as solid.
Blanc’s study is a green thought in a green shade where he’s walking on water. Literally. The floor is a sheet of plate glass atop a 20' x 23' aquarium, home to a lush expanse of vegetation and over a thousand tropical fish. Holding 5,283 gallons of water, it’s loaded with plants whose long white roots ripple like medusas, as they naturally purify the water and also provide grottos for the fish.
The large wall behind his glasswork table is a weave of plants with plush textures, mossy tussocks, cascading fronds, and a kaleidoscope of greens. At the base of the living walls, a narrow stream flows, providing nourishment for roots and refreshment and nesting sites for the birds. He dips a hand in as a bird glides overhead to perch in the
rhododendrons. Here and there, algae, moss, and liverworts have sprung up on their own. In a large bookcase, nearly all the books have green jackets. Only little brown bats and bombardier beetles are missing.
“I take my shower outside every day, even if it’s snowing,” he confesses. “I refuse to heed the limits between inside and outside imposed on a human lifestyle that migrated from tropical origins to colder, even glacial climates. To heighten the absurdity, life in tropical cities requires air-conditioning to cool the indoor atmosphere. Wherever one goes in the world, regardless of the season, it is necessary to either heat or cool dwellings.” This merits a hand lifted to the absurdity. “We need buildings with a better thermal balance.”
Despite his serious purpose, a spell of playfulness pervades his preferred habitat, as it does his person. His shirts all seem to be patterned in leaf designs; he wears green shoes, has a two-inch-long thumbnail painted forest green, and wears a streak of bright green in his hair. For a moment I think he might have a single leaf of
Iris japonica
growing from his skull—his green forelock is shaped like one of its long, tapering leaves. It is his signature plant: one often sees
Iris japonica
dangling down forest edges in the wild. Blanc uses it in most of his installations as an echo of gently cascading water.
“We live in an era where human activity is overwhelming,” he continues. His chilled white wine, Vogue menthol cigarette, computer, and electric lights make it clear that he does appreciate cosmopolitan life. In fact, he’s spent all of his life living in cities—while making forays to some of the wildest places on Earth.
“I think we can reconcile nature and man to a much greater degree.”
He’s not alone in that conviction. A good start may be rethinking our houses, because at the racing heart of every city is still the ancient, unalienable idea of home.
H
ome, for the Inuit, had an elemental simplicity. They used bone knives to carve bricks from quarries of hardened snow. A short, low tunnel led to the front door, trapping heat in and fierce cold and critters out. Mortar wasn’t needed, because the snow bricks were shaved to fit, and at night the dome ossified into a glistening ice fort, with the human warmth inside melting the ice just enough to seal the seams. The idea behind such homes was refuge from elements and predators, based on a watchful understanding of both. The igloo was really an extension of the self—shoulder blades of snow and backbone of ice, beneath which a family slept, swathed in thick animal fur, beside one or two small blubber lamps. All the building materials lay at hand, perpetually recycled, costing nothing but effort.
Picture most of our houses and apartment buildings today—full of sharp angles, lit by bulbs and colors one doesn’t find in nature, built from plywood, linoleum, iron, cement, and glass. Despite their style, efficiency, and maybe good location, they don’t always offer us a sense of sanctuary, rest, or well-being. And they’re not particularly healthy. A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study found levels
of twelve volatile compounds two to five times higher indoors—no matter if the home was rural or urban—due to the products we use and poor ventilation. Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we instinctively encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
No wonder there’s an impassioned push worldwide to build green homes with verdant walls and roofs, inspired by Patrick Blanc, equally green workplaces that breathe and clean themselves like street cats, and well-tilled farms on rooftops and in ziggurats. It doesn’t make sense to shut out nature in the old way. Our fundamental archetype of a foursquare, armorlike building perched on a scrap of earth is evolving from a static and ultimately disposable dwelling into one that, like a tree, mingles holistically with the world around it, not just absorbing a staggering amount of nutrients but producing even more than it consumes.
An alternative is the culture of sustainability and “cradle to cradle” design redefining the world of goods and architecture and city planning. According to the principle of “cradle to cradle” (a term coined by the Swiss architect Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s), everything we make—apartment buildings, bridges, toys, clothes—should be designed with reclamation and rebirth in mind. Instead of tossing the outmoded ephemera of civilization onto rubbish heaps, and then extracting and grinding down more resources to replace them, why not fabricate objects that will naturally biodegrade or can be recycled by industry as “technical nutrients”? Durables such as televisions, cars, computers, refrigerators, heaters, and carpets could be leased and traded in when worn out or untrendy, allowing manufacturers to recycle them and harvest the raw materials.
In 1999 the architect William McDonough accepted the challenge of redesigning Ford Motor Company’s eighty-five-year-old River Rouge factory, a project that required redesigning the ten-acre roof of its 1.1-million-square-foot truck assembly plant. He began by endowing the roof with its own weather system—acres of sedum, a
low-growing succulent that blooms dusty-pink or linen-white in the fall and the rest of the year displays large rain-swollen leaves. Then he knitted the factory and plants into the landscape with “a system of wet meadow gardens, porous paving, hedgerows and bio-swales that attenuates, cleanses, and conveys storm water across the site.”
Inspired by such models, and hoping to rank high on the prestigious LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system, architects are vying to create equally well-behaved buildings that “are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work.” They’re striving for regenerative buildings that purify their wastewater, create more energy than they use, and compost and recycle to such an extent that industry blends seamlessly with nature. “In essence,” Andres Edwards writes in
The Sustainability Revolution
, “a world of abundance, rather than limits, pollution, and waste.” This revolution stems from an ethos that’s reverberating around the world in developed and developing countries alike; as Edwards reminds us, “Brazil, Canada, China, Guatemala, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Netherlands Antilles have LEED-registered projects, demonstrating that the standard can adapt to different cultures and bioregions.”
We aren’t adhering any longer to the myth that food must be grown far away and transported on trucks. We can easily envisage restaurant rooftop farms, urban beekeeping and midtown chicken coops. We can’t grow everything around the corner—not grains, or soy, or corn, to be sure—but we can grow most of our vegetables and fruits. Local farms feed the food chain, save fuel, and guarantee a fresher and more nutritious diet. And they’re cropping up on every continent, including the last place one might guess.
In Antarctica, where the average coastal temperature is -70°F with inland dips to -180°F, the American research base, McMurdo Station, is a town of naked machines and heavily insulated people. There darkness saturates winter, inking out the sky for six months, during which occasional green auroras shoot up like magnetic demons’ tails, and indoors the auroras are falling white showers of man-made
fluorescence. There are two primary smells (sweat and diesel fuel) and two primary colors (black and white). Fresh produce arrives by air from Los Angeles and costs $80,000 to $100,000 per week in the summer. During the winter, deliveries may be months apart.
“Clearly, this is no banana belt,” says Robert Taylor, the good-humored technician who, along with many volunteers, has overseen McMurdo’s 649-square-foot greenhouse. “And there is no history of oxen tied to wooden plows turning over rich black soil. Actually, on this side of the continent, there is no soil at all, only weathered volcanic rock and, of course, ice. There is nothing in the way of organic matter to speak of, and no recognizable terrestrial plants. And yet, life blooms . . . under thousands of watts of artificial light.”
It’s hardly roomy, especially compared to gardens in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. But by using hydroponic techniques he’s been able to harvest about 3,600 pounds of spinach, Swiss chard, cucumbers, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables each year—pure manna to the green-starved residents.
“Not enough to register on the world’s export market, but nothing to sneer at if you are one of the approximately 200 people who choose to winter here,” Taylor says via e-mail.
“Lettuces grow like champs,” he notes. “There are nearly 900 lettuce heads growing at any time on tiered growing systems. Likewise, basil and parsley are herbs that need very little in the way of input.” That’s just as well, because he has to pollinate them all by hand, since insects, the natural pollinators, are forbidden, lest they devastate the small greenhouse Eden.
“It’s strange that a horticulturist would come all the way to Antarctica to grow vegetables, but as far as challenges and thrills, what better place to confront the beauty of plants than in an environment so devoid of them? . . . Each tomato, each cucumber becomes a jewel, precious.”
As if it were a laid-back bar in Key West, two hammocks and a cozy old armchair float in a humid corner, “for those who wish to commune with arugula.” Many do. At McMurdo, not only vegetation
but humidity, scent, and natural colors are rare. On the other hand, howling isolation and intense relationships are the norm. Many people thrive on the parabolic sunlight and unusually intimate community. But those beset by “polar T3,” overwintering syndrome, can find their thyroid levels askew and metabolism rocky, with sleeplessness, irritation, and depression constant bedfellows. In an all-white kingdom of ice and snow, where the only low-hanging fruit are the stars, one’s sanity can tremble on a stem slender as a marigold’s.
Fortunately, purple-and-yellow pansies and orange marigolds (both edible) grow in the greenhouse, where the rainbow stalks of Swiss chard create a small psychedelic forest, and scarlet cherry tomatoes dangle from string supports like floppy marionettes. Cilantro, basil, chives, rosemary, and thyme scent the air. The sensory repast as well as the food nourishes greenhouse visitors, and the plants lap up the CO
2
exhaled by the humans. Unlike typical greenhouses in winter, this one has no sunlight streaming through cathedral-like walls of glass. McMurdo’s urban farm at the bottom of the world is completely sealed and insulated, and, in a stark village where windows are precious, I’m told it also offers a leafy idyll for a dinner date. Even in this extreme outpost of a city, the benefits of greening ease the way.