“We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said, One that's eternal and divine, and one that's just the backyard.”
Charles Wright
O’Neil Ford and the Enduring Lessons of Honest Architecture by Miriam Sitz.
INTERVIEW Maurice Cox
ARTIST FEATURE
James Prosek
As Sky Happens to a Window and I’d Like to Be a Door by Jenny Browne
The Troop Leader by Brynne Jones
ESSAY Disappearing Rio Grande by Colin McDonald.
INTERVIEW Aaron Stottlemyer
ARTIST FEATURE Katie Paterson
POEMS
In Certain Buildings, Verbs, Building Made of Sky, and Some Houses by Naomi Shihab Nye 90
ESSAY
The Wisdom of Water by Bekah McNeel
INTERVIEW
Ivy Ross by Allison Peitz and Evan Morris.
POEMS
Burn Lake by Carrie Fountain
POEM
The Dance I Invented in West Texas by Cecily Parks
Contributors
EDITOR Meaghan Ritchey
CO-EDITORS Evan Morris, Mary Beth Lineberry
DESIGN Civilization
ART DIRECTION Denise De Leon
COVER ART Matt Morris
Notes from the Field
Thoughts on the Environment and How We Shape It
At Lake Flato, we are architects, designers, and planners. But before that, and often in between, we are environmentalists, urbanists, bird watchers, craftspeople, and art seekers. We find inspiration and respite in the landscape and draw from it the most important qualities that we bring to the buildings and settings we are tasked with designing. We seek out those who share our passion and concern for the environment and who choose to grapple with how their own work fits into the larger system of ecological relationships that shape the human experience.
Notes from the Field is Lake Flato’s conduit to those kindred individuals. It is a space for their work— which reaches across many disciplines—to converge with one another’s and our own. This collection of essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and art is intended to celebrate our core commitment to creating environments that enrich communities and nurture life.
Our inaugural issue coincides with Lake Flato’s 40th anniversary of practice. In that time, we have brought the ideas of critical regionalism to projects across the country, creating architecture that is rooted in
its place and fused with the landscape. Over those forty years, the landscapes we have been privileged to work in have changed dramatically. The climate is changing. The first order effects are obvious in the intensity of seasonal weather patterns and the dwindling levels of our local aquifer. The compounding effects are shaping global migration patterns and deepening socio-economic disparities, while upending the market for and management of our natural resources. The works assembled here share insights from people in remote land-scapes and dense urban communities—each considering the evolving dynamics of a shifting landscape.
Water provides an illustrative element and potent metaphor for journalist Bekah McNeel, who reflects on the ways her childhood was shaped by the Comal River. Colin McDonald takes on the same sinuous subject in his essay “The Disappearing Rio Grande,” exploring how water policy shapes the river’s flow more than any natural force could. Miriam Sitz's celebration of the timeless wisdom of modernist architect O’Neil Ford is complemented by Jenny Browne’s poem “As Sky Happens to a Window,” written about the craftsmanship and construction Ford made the focus of his practice.
Interspersed between these creative pieces are interviews with thought leaders ‘from the field’ who offer insight into diverse topics like neuroaesthetics, sustainable forestry practices, and the challenges of urban revitalization. Each explores the tension between awareness
and action, and the responsibility we have to bring the two into more creative and critical dialogue.
As Naomi Shihab Nye suggests in her enclosed poem, “In Certain Buildings,” to be “awakened to space” can reveal perspectives previously unknown. It’s our hope that this journal prompts similar awakenings and serves to inspire reflection on the shifting landscapes that shape your own experiences.
Thank you for forty years of collaboration. We hope our work together is just beginning.
Evan Morris Lake Flato Architects
O’Neil Ford and the Enduring Lessons of Honest Architecture
Miriam Sitz
Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Historic American Buildings Survey, Retrieved from the Library of Congress
“You see, an architect has got to fill his head with all the knowledge he can,” O’Neil Ford told a group of schoolchildren in San Antonio, Texas, more than four decades ago. “He’s got to educate himself and build inside himself an inner resource for thinking and working.” Tender though that audience was, his plainspoken wisdom—preserved in the 1981 book Lessons in Looking—has stood the test of time. A seminal figure of architecture in Texas, Ford was a voracious reader and lifelong learner who found profound inspiration in the simplicity, beauty, economy, and inventiveness of 19th century vernacular architecture. The lessons he gleaned and shared from these “honest” structures remain deeply relevant to the practice of architecture today, both in Texas and beyond. But they speak to more than just the design profession, offering a tangible reminder of the ways we are connected to—and compelled to care for—one another and our natural world.
Born in 1905, Ford started building his own “inner resource for thinking and working” at an early age. In 1924, driving through the Texas Hill Country with his uncle, the young man found himself “absolutely dumbfounded and lastingly spellbound” by the houses and structures they saw in the Alsatian and German communities of Central Texas. Made from stone, adobe, or wood, they were products of their context as much as their builders’ heritage, evolving from traditional styles with materials and forms found in and suited to their surroundings. “If it can be said that I have worked for a way of designing that is also a way of relating to the intrinsic physical, cultural, and climatic conditions of the regions I am building in,” Ford told writer William Marlin for a story published in the December 1979 issue of Architectural Record, “that trip in 1924 was what showed me the way.”
The Power of Materials
“It is refreshing...to see houses that are born of the stones and clay and trees that their respective localities produce; and one is moved to nothing less than joy to see these materials used in an honest structural way.”
From "The Architecture of Early Texas," Part 1, by O'Neil Ford and David R. Williams, published in the October 1927 issue of Southwestern Architect
When used with intention and purpose, materials connect architecture and place. They honor context and history. And they inform design choices. But truly understanding the special properties of a material, and then successfully showcasing those in a design,
Killam Ranch. Lake Flato
is a skill to be learned. Ted Flato, who co-founded the architecture firm Lake Flato with David Lake in 1984 after the two met while working for Ford Powell & Carson (FPC), recalled the way Ford would challenge emerging practitioners to pay heed to materials: “‘If you really want to make an arch, you should use brick, not stone,’ O’Neil would say.” With a soft pencil, Flato’s mentor would start to draw the full dimension of a brick, followed by another, and another, until “you suddenly felt it come alive on this piece of tracing paper.”
Ford’s preoccupation with the innate truth of materials is evidenced in the way his practice celebrated craftsmanship and the art of construction. He frequently collaborated with his brother, the gifted wood carver Lynn Ford, as well as with artists, metalworkers, and other masters of specialized trades to fulfill the promise of every component of a project. The impulse to highlight—not obscure—the thought, craftsmanship, and materials used in architecture resonates not only with those who worked under Ford at FPC, but also with the next generation of design leaders. “As architects, we get to educate people on how buildings are made by visually expressing the way they’re put together,” says Vicki Yuan, an associate partner at Lake Flato. In a city like San Antonio, with its strong tradition of masonry, exposed stone on buildings speaks to the history and geology of the area. “You gain an understanding of how something was built and see the beauty in it,” Yuan explains. Without exposure to a material, there can be no understanding of it—its properties, its potential, its beauty. Understanding begets appreciation, in architecture, and beyond.
The Virtues of Sustainability and Economy
“I think all architects and all engineers ought to be very, very serious about not wasting things—not wasting money, not wasting resources. After all, everything we have is limited.”
From Lessons in Looking, published in 1981 by the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation.
The honest application of materials and forms—in vernacular architecture, Ford’s work, and that which has come since—hinges on practicality, resourcefulness, and respect. Those values, in turn, are closely aligned with the traditionally Texan impulse to be good
stewards of the land. Dallas-based architect Max Levy is part of a cadre of designers who find tremendous delight and inspiration in the informal, agrarian structures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, regularly sharing photographs of the “roadside wonders” they discover around the state. “Most of these things are sincerely green, sincerely sustainable,” he says—no greenwashed marketing language required. A storage shed sheathed in horizontal eightfoot fence boards, because that’s what was on hand, or a horse corral constructed with old utility pole timbers, because they were cheap or free—“These arose out of necessity, and I think it’s that authenticity that just stops us in our tracks,” he says. “It’s just so good to hear somebody tell the truth.”
This type of practical, responsible mindset was a thread woven through Ford’s professional and personal life alike. Wandita Ford Turner, the architect’s eldest daughter, describes how some 70
Photo courtesy of Mark Wellen
years ago—long before recycling became commonplace—her parents kept multiple garbage bins in the kitchen for sorting different types of refuse. “They just believed in doing the right thing,” she says. “And to them, this was the right thing.”
Simplicity and Sophistication
“These houses, with the charm of their fine proportions, are the wealth that our forebears have given us, straightforward and honest, free from mannerisms and styles.”
From "Organic Building," by O'Neil Ford, the second section of "Toward a New Architecture," by O'Neil Ford and Thomas D. Broad, published in the winter 1932 issue of Southwest Review.
To Ford, the effortless authenticity of vernacular architecture lent a profound sophistication to the structures. The fact that they were built with a purpose—that their primary function was to provide shelter, shade, or storage, rather than to make any kind of statement—imbued the buildings with a quiet, almost ineffable dignity. Speaking to David Dillon for the winter 1981 issue of Arts +
Slick Residence, Tom Slick and O’Neil Ford. Photo by Roy Stevens
Architecture, Ford put it this way: “They were real, straight to the point, not copied from anything. They fit the landscape as naturally as the trees. Yet some of them were romantic as hell.”
In Ford’s view, romance and elegance came through simplicity of materials and form, “but it also had to have a functional aspect,” says Tim Blonkvist, a founding partner of Overland Partners, whose career began at FPC. “He wouldn’t do anything that was just purely a decorative element.”
Murchison Tower. Photo courtesy of Alan Karchmer
Even Ford’s design of Murchison Tower—the iconic symbol of Trinity University’s campus—is an icon with a higher purpose: “It’s the axis mundi, the thing that connects earth and sky,” Blonkvist explains, giving visitors a platform for orienting themselves within the landscape. The interior proportions of the tower, tall though it may be, feel scaled to the human body, offering a welcoming, reassuring embrace to those who ascend its 297 stairs. Trinity students (including this writer) climb it at the start and end of their college careers, bookending their years on campus in a place that purposefully makes space for reflection and peace. Behold all that you will learn, it whispers to the first year. Continue to learn from all that you behold, it encourages the new graduate. Expressing no ego and imposing no injunctions, the design makes space for pure, unselfconscious reflection.
The restrained, unpretentious aesthetic of vernacular architecture and work like Ford’s feels especially striking in a world where much of the built environment seems to scream for attention. “It’s not trying to sell us anything, and it’s not desperate to turn a somersault for us,” says Levy. Amidst the loud, expensive, uncreative buildings that pop up throughout our cities like mushrooms, there’s a gratifying irony in discovering the joy of that which is quiet, economical, and ingenious.
“We must take our land seriously, and we must take our traditions seriously. We must take our nature as human beings seriously. And we must realize, certainly now more than ever before, that one cannot take liberties in the name of art with an art that has crucial, distinguishing limitation—the limitation of use. We must always look for the elements of this limitation and reckon with them with imagination.”
From "O'Neil Ford: Musings of a National Landmark," by William Marlin, published in the December 1979 issue of Architectural Record.
Limitations Driving Creativity
Constraints make way for innovation. Compelled to operate within strict parameters—available resources, functional needs, climate, site—the mind taps into a deeper well of creativity. In design, this comes to life perhaps nowhere more clearly than in sensitive, thoughtful renovations where designers build on layers of history. “The bones of the original building are the site,” Yuan
says, “and our job is to make it the most it can be, based on what it was.”
The time scale of architecture—one hopes—is long. Since a building can easily outlive its maker, design and legacy are inextricably intertwined. This was something Ford understood and sought to recognize in his own work. David Lake, the co-founder of Lake Flato—who, with Ted Flato worked for FPC as a young designer— recalls a photo of Machu Picchu in Ford’s office: “He always would say that if you design a beautiful building that becomes a ruin, then you know you’ve done a good building.” The opportunity, and the gift, of architecture is in its lifespan. Over the years, it must weather and evolve, becoming many things for many people over time.
“So, remember to have respect for the materials and feelings of your part of the world. I think a building should help make its place in the world somehow special and important.”
From Lessons in Looking, published in 1981 by the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation.
Common Heritage
The vernacular sensibilities that inspired both Ford and Ford’s own work evoke, at once, nostalgia and hope. We are living through divisive and polarizing times, but studying these structures—taking in their simple, honest construction and meditating on their straightforward forms—can be a grounding experience. They are a reminder of our common heritage and shared values. They speak to the ways we ought to engage with our world, and with one another: devising solutions with resourcefulness and ingenuity, treating the natural world with respect and care, integrating into landscapes and communities with consideration and deference to that which has come before—simply because these are the right things to do. “That’s why we study the past,” Ford explains in Lessons in Looking. “It’s always helpful to know about how man used the earth, how he treated its resources, and how the earth, in return, treated him.” These are lessons we would be wise to heed.
Little Chapel in the Woods. Carruth Studio
“How
do you give people who have institutional knowledge access to people who have disciplinary knowledge, and bring them into the same space and have them develop a relationship of trust?”
Maurice Cox
Photo courtesy of Justin Walter Milhouse
An Interview with Maurice Cox, Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard GSD
with Evan Morris, Justin Garrison, and Ryan Yaden
Maurice Cox is a multi-hyphenate urban designer and policymaker known for his collaborative and community focused leadership in cities and institutions across the country. He currently serves as the Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His career has spanned private practice, education, and public office, including a term as mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts under both Bush and Obama administrations.
Maurice’s vision for the future of our cities combines rigorous civic engagement and commitment to design excellence. He is a consistent advocate for the inclusion of architects and urban planners at the policymaking table and has proven that design, equity, and economics are complementary and inseparable ingredients in the development of the built environment.
EVAN MORRIS: Maurice, you and I met over ten years ago, right? At the time, you were in New Orleans as the director of the Tulane City Center. You went on to serve as the planning director for the City of Detroit and then to Chicago as the city’s planning and development commissioner.
You have said that cities can benefit from “design thinking.” Can you explain what design thinking is and describe the role you see designers playing in our communities?
We start big!
The core of design thinking is the concept of problem solving in a way that requires managing different types of information to create something that is persuasive to a large group of people to implement a change.
There’s something about the education of an architect that gives them a natural facility to juggle what might appear to be disparate parts and to bring them together as a whole. When you apply that strategy to more complex problems—problems that have to do with space, place, and different constituencies—the designer has an easier time pivoting.
There are rules and policies that shape the decisions that we make as designers. The bizarre thing is that when you’re starting a design project, you might go to the zoning code to understand whether what you’re trying to do is even permissible. The big challenge comes when you find that the zoning codes and public policies don’t support the objectives of the community you are working in. And so, what do you do?
Either you play within that space or that box, or very often, you look to change the rules to achieve a certain outcome. So, effectively, you’re piloting an idea; it goes head on against the rules, and then either you acquiesce to the rules, or you break them. Breaking the rules to achieve a particular outcome has the ability to change the course of how a city evolves.
EM: What you’re talking about is changing policy. You were educated as a designer, you practiced as an architect, became a professor, and ultimately a policymaker. Could you elaborate on that trajectory and how you found your career and practice evolving?
I lived and practiced in Florence, Italy for ten years, right after I graduated. My whole professional apprenticeship was done in Italy. And so I was thrown into a climate where architects played a very different role in their community. They were instigating conferences and exhibitions, and they were writing opinion papers when something was being presented to the public. They all had a kind of entrepreneurial side practice. It wasn’t a place where you go to a large firm and spend a decade there and then perhaps branch out. Their practices are very small and they had to do everything. And it was always put in a kind of political context.
I met so many architects who were directly engaged in politics. I met architects who were the directors of planning. I’m thinking specifically about Massimo Carmassi, who was the chief urban planner of Pisa. I was shocked that an architect could have that much agency.
I might have stored that in my head. I saw that it was possible for someone to use the planning position to think about the city. When I came back to the States, I landed in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I kind of assumed that architects had a similar position in shaping American cities.
What a cute idea. Much to my surprise, the architect’s opinions on the built environment were no more valuable than the shopkeeper’s or a community activist’s. I was very frustrated in Charlottesville, coming from that Italian context where architects were citizens shaping their own communities. And so I started organizing, trying, and advocating for the community that I moved into, which was a majority African-American neighborhood on the south side of Charlottesville. That immediately threw me into the political arena: having to talk to people, speaking publicly, having to represent someone other than myself.
I found that, when I tried to speak as an architect, I had very little clout and sway. When I became the president of my neighborhood association, which had kind of fallen into a slumber, I represented hundreds of households, and my thoughts and observations
were representing others. I had more sway, more authority, because I was representing them. At that time, I started really organizing public opinion. My neighbors would call me to represent them, always on a built environment challenge—usually a developer who wasn’t doing the most inspired, innovative thing. I was also teaching architecture at the University of Virginia, and I wanted to make the academy have some bearing on the actual things that were going on in communities. I can cite a very specific example of something called transition zoning. The University of Virginia is a mile away from downtown, and there’s a ridge connected to that corridor by Main Street. The university was starting to expand onto Main Street, but the scale of those buildings was much larger than that of the adjacent neighborhoods. And so, there was a challenge of how do you build higher density on a ridge when you have communities that are in single family houses right at the base of the ridge? I suggested that there should be a transition zone. To illustrate what that meant, I moved all the students in our urban design studio into a space on Main Street. We literally did a pop-up community design center with a focus on this particular issue. Long story short, the transition zone recommendations were adopted by the city and the whole question of increasing density in Charlottesville became a dialogue between designers and the community.
JUSTIN GARRISON: And you ultimately became the mayor of Charlottesville?
People started suggesting that I run for public office. I had no idea, nor really any desire, because all I wanted to do was use the city as a laboratory to design. I ran on a platform that sounded like an architectural platform, a plan for the future—you know, something that was comprehensive. I didn’t try to become an expert in school issues or public safety. Lo and behold, I won by a landslide, and I proceeded to fill in a missing expertise around the built environment that the political bodies didn’t have.
I did several things to try to bring designers into a place where they had actual authority, like appointing design professionals to boards and commissions. There was a time in Charlottesville when there were twenty-four designers, artists, preservationists, and landscape architects on all these boards and commissions. And that’s, I think, when things really started to change.
But I’m not telling you about the pushback I received, because I received a lot of it. And it was only when I brought my colleagues into the picture that we started to have resonance across these different boards and commissions.
There’s a famous architect who teaches at UVA, W.G. Clarke, of the firm Clarke and Menafee. Well, Clarke agreed to be the Chair of the Design Review Board. Imagine, you know, design professionals having to go before him. Not easy! I appointed Ken Schwartz, who was the chair of the architecture department, to the planning commission. And there were others. I just called on my friends who were kind of armchair activists and started appointing them. So I learned that if you could bring together a cohort of conscious urbanists and get them into positions of authority, you would have an easier time creating a culture that appreciated design, because you could have conversations across all these boards and commissions.
That lesson that I learned twenty-five years ago carried me all the way through my other appointments, most recently in Chicago.
The city has never had a committee to review private development. I created the first committee on design. It had twenty-four design practitioners that reviewed all the work that the staff was expected to do, and it was chaired by Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang.
I’m trying to draw a line between that early political authority that I was given to fill boards and commissions and a little bit how it played out in terms of continuing to get designers to work, to do what they do, but to do it more publicly.
JG: Historically, most cities never had positions for a Chief Architect or Chief Urban Designer. Now cities are creating these positions because they realize how much value there is in design thinking. Council members and mayors don’t have the background, but they’re getting hit with rapid design changes, and they’re like, we don’t know anything. So, let’s create a position for someone who has that expertise.
I was design director of the National Endowment for the Arts for several years. And one of their flagship programs, which was created at the University of Virginia, is the Mayor’s Institute on City Design. And its existence is predicated on the idea that political leaders are really the chief designers of their cities, but they have no expertise. They thought, what if we created an executive session format where mayors bring a case study of a project that they have in their city, and we bring other mayors and design experts to retreat for three days to roll up their sleeves and help them rethink the questions they’re asking. And so I did that for three years, every six weeks.
And that program still exists today and it’s going strong. I think it may be like thirty years old.
That idea of bringing different disciplines together has had a big impact on how I practice. When you bring a landscape architect, an urban designer, a city planner, a real estate developer, and an architect together, you end up getting this cross disciplinary fertilization of ideas.
I have to say that the experience of advising mayors led me to feel very comfortable being a part of a mayorial cabinet. When the city of Detroit was looking for a planning director, I left my tenured position at Tulane to become the planning director of an extraordinary city. And if I had not had that early example of Massimo Carmassi, who was an architect leading a planning organization, I might’ve never been willing to do it.
Planning had all but died in Detroit. The city was losing tens of thousands of residents. They used to say they had more accountants managing these different federal block grants than they had actual planners.
Woodward Avenue, Detroit. Photo courtesy of Catherine Hughes
The mayor said, what would it take to make Detroit the most interesting place in planning in the country? I ended up hiring thirty people over a twenty-fourmonth period. They came from everywhere. We had two PhDs in cultural history on the staff. There were architects, landscape architects, preservationists, and urban designers. We ended up commissioning a study that looked at eight projects that were in the pipeline, and showed how the team of thirty could become project managers, projecting the overall benefit that the city would receive economically from hiring this team. And the economic benefit was astronomical.
With that team, we addressed the single challenge the mayor gave me: he wanted to grow the Detroit population for the first time in seventy years. Today, Detroit is growing again and it’s happening in the places where we planned.
What we piloted in Detroit, we perfected in Chicago. All the planning in Chicago’s neighborhoods was left to the market. And if the market wasn’t interested in an area, that area got nothing. So we fundamentally changed how planning is done in Chicago and refocused city planning around seven regions, each led by an architect and a small team of planners. They know all the politicians, they know all the community stakeholders, and they just work in a very proactive way in those geographies.
And to me, it points to, where are the real laboratories for innovation in cities? We’ve spent a lot of time focusing exclusively on downtowns and riverfronts, which ultimately must work. But I really think that the innovation is happening in these smaller communities. There is a willingness and an openness to innovation in the most unlikely places, in some part because they have received so little attention.
RYAN YADEN: Can you expand a bit about the role of collaboration between local leaders and outside experts, and how to tie those together?
It goes without saying that the people who have lived in a particular community the longest have the
deepest knowledge of that neighborhood—how it evolved, how it changed. Most of them can remember when it was healthier than it presents itself today. What they often don’t have is access to professional and technical expertise that can help them translate what they might appreciate most about their environment into a language that understands and operates by today’s urban planning standards.
When I talk about my own history as a professional and working in under-resourced communities, it makes some sense how quickly people have rallied around my expertise because I could translate some of their desires into an actual build form or place. My thought has always been, how do you give people who have local knowledge access to people who have disciplinary knowledge, and bring them into the same space and have them develop a relationship of trust?
EM: Two of the major issues facing our cities are lack of housing and historically high rents. So, I wonder, as somebody who’s focused a lot of time in these cities, what do we do?
Easy question, easy question! I’m so excited by the potential of this. I mean, you know, the construction industry is so arcane. We still build houses with sticks, and it’s incredibly labor intensive. And our public policies don’t support the kind of densities that you would need to really make the change here.
We’re going to be challenged by three million units in four years, which is like a moonshot. Think about the mechanics of production that must be rethought. You know, it’s a renewed opportunity for modular in ways that we haven’t historically used it. I’m talking about mid-rise buildings, modular, mass timber. Anything that helps us rethink the construction delivery process. The question is: are city’s zoning laws ready to deliver the kind of urban housing that we’re talking about, or are their laws so arcane that this may just lead to more sprawl? There’s a lot that the profession is going to have to step up to—and in a kind of activist posture—to begin to offer alternatives.
RY: It’s so regionally varied, right? I was just in Seattle, where they have something like twenty million square feet of empty office buildings, and their biggest challenge is changing zoning to convert those spaces to residential. Here in Texas, we could just sprawl forever.
I’m going to Seattle to be part of their regional American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards. And there’s an amazing nine-story mass timber building of affordable housing by Atelier Jones. They had to literally rewrite the rules of their zoning code to allow a mass timber building of that scale. But it’s a model now that can be replicated.
So my thought is, what cities have the right missing middle zoning to be ready to receive hundreds if not thousands of units of housing? It’s a political question. I like to think that the AIA’s legislative group is already chomping at the bit, already organizing. But if they’re not, I might be a part of helping.
JG: Looking into the future as a planner, as an architect, and now as an educator again, what things are you most excited about?
Part of the reason I took my new position at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is because some of the brightest, most ambitious designers come here to be educated. And so, I have to say, I’m very excited to be working with that cohort. They also just graduated their first class in real estate, and now they have the second class. I will have city planners, urban designers, architects, maybe landscape architects, and real estate developers in the same studio.
My position is affiliated with the Bloomberg Center for Cities here, which is a big part of why I accepted the appointment. The Center for Cities works with forty mayors from the U.S. and leaders from around the world each year. Former Mayor Bloomberg invites them to his headquarters in New York, and they have like four days solid of how to be an effective mayor. They ask them to articulate their top priorities that they would work on together. And two thirds of the mayors articulated built environment priorities. So,
for me, the ability to work with these leaders in more than one city at a time is like a dream come true.
My belief in the ability of ordinary people to make extraordinary choices comes from the number of touch points that I’ve had working with people who care deeply about their communities. I’m obviously a big advocate of the public sector being a leader, but my leadership role was in empowering the neighborhood base and place-based practitioners to achieve a higher level of resolution and excellence. All my experiences have instilled in me this sense that if we can really educate the broader public to understand the value of design, they will want more and more and more of it.
James Prosek
A Naturalist at Home in the World
James Prosek is an artist, writer, and naturalist whose work pays homage to the history of art and natural sciences while addressing contemporary environmental concerns. His diverse body of work is the result of extensive travel and field observation. Prosek creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures that evoke the immense biodiversity of our planet and its imaginative potential. The interconnectedness of nature, the ephemerality of boundaries, and the loss of cultural and biological diversity are major themes of Prosek’s work. He has published over a dozen books and exhibited his art globally, from the Yale University Art Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.
James Prosek: Grasslands—Painting the American Prairie
A few years ago, I began a project at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, about prairies and grasslands. The museum has a history of engaging contemporary artists in projects related to Texas, and the curators, knowing my love of natural history, and knowing the importance of grass as part of Texas history, asked if I’d like to do a project about grass.
I was thrilled to accept, but I confessed to them that I knew next to nothing about grass. I grew up in New England, a region better known for its trees.
In 2020, I made an initial exploratory trip to the Hill Country of Texas, and this began my introduction—more like an awakening—to the world of grass. One of the first sites we visited was Shield Ranch in the heart of the Barton Creek watershed, part of the Edwards Aquifer.
It was on this trip that I first learned of the four major prairie grass species—big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, and Indiangrass. The names rolled off the tongue pleasantly as we walked across an arid landscape that I had no words for. It was September, and the ranch manager showed us a sea of grasses with glittering golden tops. The brilliant golden-yellow plumes were arresting, and the stems were a gorgeous, hazy blue green. A stand of these grasses glowed like a metallic sun.
I can’t say I had ever looked at grass closely before— consciously, at least. Now I was staring at a single six-
foot-tall stalk of big bluestem grass, wondering how to paint what I beheld—leaves twisted and cascading off the stem like script, a range of violet, magenta, pale yellow, and green colors, covered with a glaucous bloom. The grasses were elegant, calligraphic, elemental. Held against the sun, they made beautiful silhouettes. I painted the violet shadows of the grasses cast as I laid them on my paper.
On that first trip to the Texas Hill Country, when I was shown the four major prairie grass species, I had a vague, almost dreamlike response. I was told that these same species were also native to New England. As a child, I had seen—I was almost certain—some of these
grasses before, growing on parts of old farms, rocky hillsides lightly grazed by cows and spotted with red cedars. They poked above the cool-season grasses late in the year, bluish green in summer, some with reddish colors in fall.
After my Texas trip, I sought out these native grasses and found them. They were vestiges of an ancient ecosystem, America’s once vast grasslands that stretched almost from coast to coast, expanded and managed in part by indigenous people using fire.
The grass story fit within my lifelong interests about the tension between the bounded and the boundless. Two natural forces had encouraged and maintained grasses in North America in pre-colonial times—migratory herds of grazing animals, and fire. These are forces that don’t obey property lines and fences; they are trespassing forces, and that is ultimately why we have lost most of our prairies—they did not fit into the structure of the new regime and were lost to fire suppression, overgrazing, and the plow.
Part II: James Prosek and Meaghan Ritchey in Conversation
MEAGHAN RITCHEY: You’ve said that the foundation of your work is a personal devotion to close observation of the natural world, the porousness of boundaries, and the limitations of certain taxonomies. Some of these personal commitments could seem to run counter to the values of the contemporary art world. How does that tension motivate your practice.
I think that paying close attention to the things around you is a form of devotion. I can look at things and try to absorb them, but until I draw them, I am not fully paying attention to them.
Drawing has been at the foundation of what I have done since I was a kid, and I think drawing has played a big role in human communication, expression, and survival. Our earliest marks made with intent, likely handprints on a wall, mimicked passive marks made by animals in the soil and sand, marks we had been reading in the landscape for millennia. Our early drawings became pictographs that carried information and eventually evolved into our abstract alphabets. So written language and recorded history can be traced to close observations of nature, and drawing—which I often refer to as intentional mark-making, as opposed to passive mark-making like a track made by an animal or a hole chewed in a leaf by a bug.
I have frequent discussions, or maybe critiques or arguments, about the trajectory of my work, with my friend and dealer Waqas. He sometimes thinks my work leans too scientific because I’m interested in natural history. I have had a deep love of the biodiversity of our planet since a young age. I look at the colors and the light and I lose myself in the form and beauty, the lyrical nature of grasses, for instance, and the shadows they cast. Science is often a dirty word in the art world, as it is associated with objective looking and clinical thinking. Art, on the other hand, is about what cannot be classified or named, personal expression and experience, the numinous.
I am not a biologist nor have I ever really studied science formally, but how can you not be awed by
the forms that evolution has made?! Evolution is the great maker of things—it is an artistic force in itself. Look at the myriad forms it has created over millennia. Evolution made us and we inherited the urge to make things—so one could say that art is an extension of the evolutionary urge to create new forms. When I started my career over twenty-five years ago, if you painted things in nature you were pigeonholed as a wildlife or nature artist. That has changed a bit of late because of the urgency of the environmental crisis. It was my love of trout as a kid, and my quest to document in watercolors the different types of trout of North America, that led me initially to my lifelong inquiry about naming and classification and boundaries. At ten years old or so, I couldn’t find a book on the trout of North America in our local library, so I decided I would make one. I started writing letters to departments of wildlife around the country asking what kinds of trout lived in Nevada, let’s say, or California. I soon learned that no two biologists could agree on how many species or subspecies of trout there were. They argued over whether the trout from this river or that was worthy of a name. Not only could they not agree on how many trout species there were, they couldn’t agree on what a species was. In time I learned that this is because nature doesn’t have words on it; we put them there. Language is a tool to help us navigate the world, and we can’t expect there to be a perfect correspondence between word and world. Essentially we create a map, a reduced and simplified version of the world in order to navigate it, and then we begin to mistake the map for the territory it describes. But the map can never be the territory. We must draw lines and boundaries in an interconnected nature—fragment and simplify things to give them names—but this gives a false impression of what nature is really like. The fact that we do this provides the conceptual framework for pretty much all of my work. Humans draw lines, but nature trespasses across those lines.
Prosek
2024 . Courtesy of the artist and Waqas Wajahat, New York.
I’m not sure what aspect of the values of the contemporary art world you are referring to, but the art world is a phenomenon that creates its own structures until someone with influence, whether it’s a curator or art historian or artist, tries to push against the boundaries that uphold those structures. Things like baskets and ceramics and works made of wood were in the past relegated to the category of “craft.” Now a lot of crafts are being subsumed by the contemporary art world. These shifting boundaries and classifications are healthy re-evaluations of what art is. If there were no boundaries, there would be no tension points for curators or artists to be subversive against. If the line between art and science, or art and natural history were not there, there would be no reason to have discussions about them. These tensions drive us forward.
MR: Several bodies of your work comment on the bounded world and the boundless world—and nature’s relative indifference to boundaries. We can see the negative effects of borders on the environment, but how have certain rules and limitations benefitted your creative life?
In my work, I am critical of boundaries but also acknowledge their importance. Limitations are opportunities to find creative ways around them. City codes for architects, for instance, or verse forms like the sonnet for poets. Wordsworth actually wrote a sonnet about how the strict form of the sonnet was a source of creative solace—the poem begins “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room…” and ends with the beautiful line “I felt the weight of too much liberty,” which I interpret to mean that it is hard to be creative unless there are limits or unless there is a structure to work around or within. Goethe wrote, “It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself.” As an artist in watercolors, I work within the bounds of the paper, and within the limits of my materials and tools, brushes, and paints. Works of art are often framed, and even if they are not, they usually live within the walls of a museum or gallery. We all have to work within certain limitations, like gravity.
The lines we draw between things in nature to name them are also important—these boundaries are part of the limitation of language, but they are also opportunities. Were it not for the lines we draw between things in the evolutionary continuum, we wouldn’t have units of biodiversity to talk about and protect under laws like the Endangered Species Act. When we name things, we put them in mental boxes and then create spaces between the lines and boxes. We try to fill these spaces between words with other forms of expression, like art, music and dance. But it’s the tension between the world of words and the world that has no words that makes things go.
Robert Frost’s famous poem, "Mending Wall", explores the ironies of boundaries. Two neighbors meet along a common stonewall that marks the line between their properties to put stones back on the
wall that have fallen through the seasons. At some point in the mending of the wall, the poet asks the old Yankee neighbor, why are they bothering to do this? They have no livestock to keep in or keep out. His pinecones aren’t going to cross the property line and steal his neighbor’s apples. The old Yankee throws out the famous line, because “good fences make good neighbors.” We often think of a wall as something that separates, but one of the ironies of the poem is that the wall provides the impetus for the two neighbors to get together in the first place. The boundary has a certain gravity that provokes thought and conversation.
Humans aren’t the only animals that draw boundaries and lines. Wolves pee on trees to mark the bounds of their turf and beavers build dams. The difference with humans is that we are so powerful and pervasive now that we have the ability to make the natural world conform, to a certain extent, to the lines in our minds. And the boundaries we draw are more indelible—dams, diversions, highways, and border walls.
MR: Can you say a bit about the synchronicities between the sport of fly fishing— its traditional methodology, rigorous precision coupled with a sort of dancerly free gesture, watchfulness and surrender—and your studio practice?
Well for one thing, in fly-fishing and in drawing, there is a line. In fly fishing the line makes arcs in the air. In drawing, the pencil makes lines on the paper. As you suggest, they are both lyrical and at their best carve out a space for movement and thought. Lately I’ve been thinking about a different commonality between drawing and fly fishing—both are a form of communication. The fly fisher makes imitations of insects to communicate "insect" to a fish. The fly is essentially a translation device between the mind of a human and the mind of a fish. And the artist makes a drawing, let’s say of a trout, to communicate “fish” to someone else, as well as their love of that fish. Representation is what allows for
this communication, and much of our communication happens through representation.
MR: What might architects glean from how naturalists and fine artists perceive the world? Can you cite an example of when a sensitive perception of the natural world affected the built environment for the better?
Well, for one thing, I think a lot of architects have been inspired by biomorphic forms. Antoni Gaudi’s cathedral columns look like the sinews of the human body. Frank Gehry has often said that his glittering metal-plated buildings, like at Bilbao, were inspired by childhood memories of buying carp with his grandmother at the Jewish Market and seeing the carp swim in her bathtub, later to be made into gefilte fish. There is no shortage of associations between architecture and nature. Anyone who builds with windows or places a pool of water around a structure is in a sense playing with representations of the natural world. The reflection of the natural environment on buildings and in the built environment, that mirroring, is an important part of architecture for me. Fortunately people are more mindful lately that the deceptive mirroring of the world not result in the death of birds, who mistake it for the actual world and try to fly through.
MR: What future projects are you most looking forward to? Do you feel an increased urgency in your work given the state of the environment? How do you maintain your hopeful stance?
I am working on an exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College about memory and land and trees. I’m excited about a large sculpture I’m making for the show which depicts the trunk of a tree that has fallen—just the stump of the tree—which will be made from bronze. But the full shadow of the tree as it was in life is still visible on the floor, cut out of ¼ inch steel. The idea of the shadow of the tree in the absence of the tree is that nature has memory of
what has gone. The bison no longer roam the prairies, but when you walk a piece of remnant prairie and see the ancient grasses and wildflowers that live there, the bison are still there because those grasses and wildflowers evolved under the influence of their presence—the plants were shaped over millennia by the bison through their relentless grazing and hoof prints. The bison are genetically imprinted in the prairie plants.
It is sad to see the rapid changes happening in the environment due to human-induced climate change. In many cases the organisms may not be able to adapt, as the changes are happening too fast. We are losing biodiversity faster than we can discover and name it, but in the long run, biodiversity will prevail. I’m not sure that makes me hopeful, but I have tried to see and internalize some of this biodiversity, in plants and trout for instance, and paint it, and that at least gives me some illusion of permanence. But the nature of nature is ultimately change, and that is hard to grasp.
As Sky Happens to a Window
Jenny Browne
written on the occasion of the Dedication of Trinity University’s Dicke Hall for the Humanities
Before describing how light moves through a room try reading a book by it. Soon enough a door opens the mind and the walls rise, turning like pages wind lifts to suggest momentum.
To construct a good sentence something must happen to something else. To construct a great building, so many happens must happen at once, including dust, including love
as sky happens to a window, as cedar and fir happen to breathing, as better answers happen to better questions. Eventually even the gnarliest oak in the old grove falls
for the future tense of mass timber the parallel syntax of brick by brick the precise diction of that smart skylight. All morning I have watched a hummingbird
hover outside, rooting hard for the electrician to connect the last wires of his plot. Yes, this has become a three-story metaphor for transformation. The best ones don’t explain.
They build new bridges to show you how a sentence is a like a building, light and heavy nostalgic and modern, detailed and spacious, the final chapter brilliant with possibility.
I'd Like to be a Door
Jenny Browne
A glass one, where the whole world goes pink at dusk, a battalion of grackles settling down on the endlessly tangled wires of war, which both is and is not a place made of words. I’d like to be this door, in particular, thorny with shadows, screen winded by waiting. And I’d like to be that door, yellow pine scuffed, stained and grainy, just barely holding itself together, like a country.
The Troop Leader
Brynne Jones
"The Troop Leader" first appeared in the Missouri Review.
The troop leader has been missing for an hour, and our predicament is clear. We are lost. We should not be out here on this backpacking trip by ourselves. After all, we are not adults. We are not even seniors. We are only cadettes. Which is not to say that we are unequipped. These merit badges, pricked into our regulation-khaki vests, prove our preparedness.
You will have heard of us because of the cookies, boxes of drizzled coconut Os and minty hard-snap biscuits we peddle on your doorstep. Such industry in young girls, you might say as you take out your wallet, gives me hope for the future. But what you won’t have heard about are the boot camps and battle tactics. The formations we drill to win cookie sales and friendship bracelets. Our fury may be muted by our neon scrunchies and sparkly hairclips, but, trust us, it is always there.
At first, we try to downplay the troop leader’s absence. A mistake, we call it. A brief setback. But the sun is only the breadth of three fingers above the horizon, and we are still a mile from the
mountaintop. We cannot wait for her return. Onward we trudge. Pitching camp, starting fire, signaling smoke: these are the things we’ve spent our middle-school years learning how to do. We even think we know where we’re going—until we reach a clearing, some campsite where we have never been before.
We gather in a friendship circle, crossing our right arms over our left. A breeze stirs the thirsty leaves on the trees around us as we wait for Aurielle to speak. The first among us to wear a training bra, Aurielle is cool and curvaceous. Short but mouthy. Her cropped hair is a mottled, bottled blonde, and this year she is our alpha. We’ve had other alphas over the years, of course: Edith, Madhuri, Zara. All of them have been decommissioned, all of them forced out by puberty’s shifting chain of command. Soon after her breasts came in, Aurielle claimed the record for most Tagalongs sold. Then, when the troop bridged from juniors to cadettes, Aurielle was the first to cross. As the troop leader draped the sash over her swelling chest, Aurielle had this look. It was the look of a general. Like she truly believed that duty outranked death. A wartime look, you might say, but then, we are always at war.
In the circle, Aurielle says, “Listen up, y’all! I know we’re tired, but we’ve got to face facts. Ms. Littlejohn has the compass, the water, the travel binder. Without her—”
A whiny voice cuts her off. “My mom says the best thing to do when you’re lost is to stay in one place! That’s the only way to be found!”
Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and Janet, the interrupter, falls silent. Janet’s red hair is pulled back in a dorky French braid, her glasses are thick and goggly, and her pale skin is so translucent it looks larval. Her sick sticky mouth is smeared in lip gloss. Her sleeping bag smells like pee. We all know that she will do whatever it takes, shoulder any humiliation, to get back to her mommy and daddy.
“Sure. We could stay in one place,” Aurielle says, resisting the urge to bite off Janet’s head. “Or we could try to find a bar of service to call and explain where we are. Whatever we decide, we need to act fast. Before it gets dark. Did anyone actually see where we lost Ms. Littlejohn?”
“I saw her sometime after we crossed the river,” says Rachel N. “She told Rachel T she left the marshmallows on the bus. Right, Rachel T?”
“Right, Rachel N.”
“Oh, that’s it. She went back for the marshmallows,” says Aurielle, squeezing the hands of the Rachels. One Rachel is tall, the other is muscular. Athletic in different ways, they are Aurielle’s deputies and forever flank her.
“But she’s been gone for almost two hours. The parking lot isn’t that far.” This comes from Marion, the new girl who moved here last year from Florida, after her parents split up. We make Marion sit on the bus with Janet, even though her shiny, black hair smells like coconut and we all envy her handwriting. How she dots the i in her name with a jagged little heart.
“Don’t be dumb,” Aurielle says, pulling a face that shows us the limits of Marion’s intellect. “Obviously, Ms. Littlejohn is at the campsite. We’re the ones in the wrong place. We need to figure out a way to tell her where we are.”
Magnified by her glasses, Janet’s eyes dart around the murky treetops, scanning the dusk-filled branches. “Are we safe here?” she asks.
“As safe as anywhere,” says Aurielle, though her tone is a question. Soon it will be dark, and none of us have our Night Owl badge yet. None of us knows what lives in these woods.
Whispers circuit the clearing. Perhaps the troop leader intended for us to follow her back down the mountain, Thanh tells Ivy. Perhaps she took a wrong turn and she is the one who is lost, says Larissa. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her phone. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her head. Her appendix ruptured. Her heart exploded. She wandered off-trail and was eaten by a bear.
Again, Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and the whispers sputter and fizzle. “Okay,” she says. “Say something really bad happened. Say Ms. Littlejohn hurt herself somewhere in the—” But at that moment the sun sinks below the horizon, and darkness wolfs Aurielle’s confidence in a single gulp.
We cry out for light, fighting to remain calm enough to recall our training. Above us, in the center of the clearing, we thread a guyline through the handle of an oil lantern, suspending it between two trees. The lantern’s metal body is painted a deep, flaking crimson, its glass sconce is chipped like a tooth, and we have been carrying it with us for as long as our foremothers have been coming to this mountain. Every year the sconce is a little more broken—blackened more by flame, beaten further by weather. We call it the torch, because it is a memento from the Great Before.
Before smartphone flashlights, before electricity. Before wildfire razed the once-forested peaks all around this campsite.
The troop leader liked to hold the torch up by the handle, her face shadow-painted and unhinged as she told us tales of what happens to little girls lost in the woods. The woods aren’t really our enemy, though we make them sound like they are. It’s what they contain. Wolves, axe murderers, frat boys. Men with hooks for hands waiting for you to wander off alone, betrayed by your bladder. Without the troop leader, we don’t know where to concentrate our fear. It doesn’t help that some of us have mothers petrified by all the wrong things: taxes, vaccines, the feastings of Hollywood elites. The flat earth’s sharp edge.
Together, we’ve been through a lot. We’ve seen baby teeth wrenched out of mouths by doorknobs, hairs sprouted like cactus needles, titties morphed from buds to bazookas. We’ve felt the sting of snapped bra straps, heard the heckles and high fives of our brothers. We’ve learned how to stilt in heels and where boyhands go when you slow dance. We’ve been catcalled and crotch-taunted by grown men while waiting for the school bus.
All of this, we’ve survived.
But the world is melting all around us, and we fear we’ll melt with it before we get our time. Where we live is all drained swimming pools and Astroturf. Some of us have never taken a bath. This summer, it hasn’t rained in weeks, and all around us the woods are brown and crackling.
“Before we do anything else, we should send a search party,” Aurielle says, her voice low and conspiratorial even though we hear nothing but wind in the trees. “To see what’s out there. Maybe we’ll even find Ms. Littlejohn.”
We deem this a good idea. Even if the search party does not find the troop leader, they will be able to survey the area and report back if any nearby campsites are occupied. A call goes out for volunteers. For several minutes, no one moves. Then, Thanh twitches. She rubs her ear against her shoulder, unable to resist an itch. She is smaller than the rest of us, and we look at her all at once, a collective head swiveling on its neck. We wonder how long she can ignore our eyes. How long she can bear the weight of this communal looking. Not long, we think, and we are right. She steps forward, shattering the circle.
“Fine,” she says, with a sigh.
We pretend that she doesn’t have to. We tell her that she is a valued member of the troop, that her good turn is appreciated. That we will not soon forget her brave willingness to charge into the sunless unknown.
“It’s whatever,” she says. “I don’t know how to start a fire.”
A good point, we concur. Anyone with a Level V Camping Skills badge should stay behind, as their expertise will be required at camp. This criterion divides us neatly into two factions: the older girls and the younger. Aurielle, whose birthday is in October, is especially pleased by this show of pragmatism. The terms are ratified, and the six younger scouts step away from the circle, their earthtoned uniforms and determined faces dissolving into shadow.
“Keep your ringers on and watch your backs,” Aurielle calls after them, as the remaining eight of us clump together to begin the work of fire-building. “And leave no trace!”
You may think of us as an institution, an American way of life. Perhaps we remind you of your own childhood, the scout you once were. Perhaps this is why you relish stories about groups of savvy, entrepreneurial children defeating the odds. Why, when you become parents yourselves, you pride yourselves on our thirteen-hour days of pushing cookies. Our hard sell. You tell us that you see the future in us, though why that is, we cannot understand.
We do not see our future in you.
The thing is we only have so many predictable seasons left— only a handful of good years until there is no camping. Before you object, we ask you to recall the hottest summer of your youth, the longest drought you faced. How many days of school you missed for bomb cyclones and thundersnow. What the air tasted like before wildfire smoke smothered us in its blanket of everlasting night.
An hour goes by, and still the search party has not returned. The tents are up. The lightning bugs are out. The fire crackles and pops like breakfast cereal, making our stomachs riot with emptiness. Our sleeping bags are piled in a great blob next to the fire, our dwindling road-trip snacks stockpiled in the middle. We try to ration, but we make ourselves sick, chasing handfuls of gummy bears and Skittles with shotgunned Pixy Stix. Our molars, already corroded by orange soda from a canteen, are caked in grit.
“What do you think happened to them?” asks Rachel T, picking licorice sinews from her braces.
“Maybe they went to the ranger station,” says Rachel N. Her fingertips are dip-dusted a neon orange that she sucks and smears on her khaki shorts.
This is fair, we reason. Success may have delayed their return. Perhaps they even found the troop leader. We continue to wait, burritoing ourselves in sleeping bags zipped to the chin. Some of us zip our heads inside too, where the air is stale and sweatdamp. We listen to the forest’s rustle. Blood beats loud in our chests, and the dark hums all around us like a massive cicada. Every minute is the minute of their return, until it too ticks by.
Finally, Aurielle says, “Maybe they’re lost now, too. A pair of us should go and check.”
“And then what?” says a voice. We poke our heads out of our sleeping bags.
Marion rises from her crouch by the fire, sharp-eyed and straight-backed. There is danger in her posture. “We send two more and they go missing? You send us out two by two until there’s no one left?”
“Don’t be a baby,” says Aurielle.
Only then do we see what’s wrong. There is nothing babyish about Marion. She is bolder than the rest of us, her straight hair smooth in its bun. Because she is the new girl, the lowest ranking member of our troop, this upsets the order of things.
“Baby,” Marion scoffs, blowing on the coals. “Please. I have more badges than anyone here.” Her face is defiant, beaked nose held high, as she faces Aurielle. “And I’m telling you, this fire isn’t high enough for the rangers to see our smoke signals. We need it higher—as high as we can get it.”
Still in her sleeping bag, Aurielle wiggleworms to a standing position. “No, it’s too dry and windy to risk it. Besides, the search party will find Ms. Littlejohn soon.”
“What makes you so sure she’s still out there to be found?” Marion asks, crossing her arms. “I heard that, in order to bridge from cadette to senior, Ms. Littlejohn just dumps you in the woods with a compass. You have to find your way back on your own.”
“What? That can’t be right,” says Aurielle, her eyebrows pinched low.
“It isn’t right, but it’s the truth.”
Something caterwauls in the woods. Coyotes. Werewolves.
The Troop Leader, Brynne Jones
Zombies. We’re all thinking it, but only Janet lets out a whimper. Her face is all scrunched, like she’s broken a rule. “I want to go home,” she says. “I want my mother.”
Shut up, Janet, we say.
Marion steps towards Aurielle, foregrounding the difference in their heights. The torch looms over them both. In its light, Marion’s irises merge with her pupils—a void we all might fall into.
“Don’t you get it?” Marion says. “Ms. Littlejohn isn’t coming back.”
“We’re sticking to the plan,” Aurielle says. She squares her ample chest until Marion backs away.
“Stick to the plan,” Marion says, walking backwards. “And we die on this mountain.”
For the record, we are not fickle. Our loyalties do not shift quickly or easily. When Marion first foments rebellion, we shun her. We shame her for defying our alpha. When she stokes the fire, we call her “beaky” and “birdbrain.” When she asks for help gathering wood, we pretend that we cannot hear her. That she is invisible. That she is dead. We hoard all the jawbreakers and hide the last stick of cinnamon gum, and finally, when she comes back from peeing in the woods, we hide ourselves.
“She isn’t missing! She isn’t coming back!” Marion calls out, over and over, as she tends the fire by herself. We huddle behind a fallen fir, careful not to give away our position. On the front line, Aurielle floats her phone’s camera lens above the log like a periscope, recording Marion’s solitary craze. We bite our fists to stifle our giggles.
“What a weirdo,” whispers Rachel T.
“Seriously,” says Rachel N. “I bet this is the real reason she left her old troop. Who would want to be friends with someone so— ?” She twirls a finger around her ear. We snigger. Marion whirls around, searching for the laughter’s source.
“Think about it,” Marion shouts at the woods. “What does Ms. Littlejohn care? Cookie season is over. We’ve made as much money as we’re ever going to make for her. She’s probably home in bed right now! Do you all really want to die out here, waiting for some selfish adult who isn’t coming back?”
We don’t answer her, but we don’t laugh either. From the way our eyes avoid each other, it’s clear that some of us are starting to listen. Some of this is starting to make sense.
“My troop in Florida used to go camping all the time,” Marion continues shouting. “Did you know that, for a camping group this size, you’re supposed to have at least two chaperones? Why are there no adults here when there are supposed to be two?”
“Is that true?” Janet whines at Aurielle. Aurielle scoffs. “She’s crazy.”
Janet tugs Aurielle’s vest. “Why don’t we have two chaperones?”
“Get off me,” Aurielle snaps, tugging her vest free of Janet’s clutches.
“Marion, you’re right!” Janet gasps. She staggers out from behind the log, no longer interested in hiding. “My mom wanted to come, and Ms. Littlejohn said no!”
Locating the voice, Marion turns slowly, her neck twisting like a possessed doll. There is no flinch in her depthless gaze as she considers Janet, the deserter. “You,” she says to Janet. “Why is it always you?”
Sensing danger, Janet shrinks back. “Marion?” she asks, her voice cracking as she searches for any remnant of her bus buddy in this deranged-looking thing.
“God, I’m so sick of you,” Marion says.
Janet can’t help it. Terror is as visible on her face as her glasses. She bites her lip. She peels a hangnail until it bleeds. When her right eyelid twitches like a rabbit, that’s when Marion springs and the hostilities begin.
Janet darts into the forest, relying on the wooded darkness to even things out. She crouches behind bushes and ducks behind trees. She shimmies halfway up the trunk of an ancient oak before she notices Marion climbing up after her. Janet’s quicksilver pulse throbs in her neck. In her panic, she loses her grip. Marion yanks Janet’s braid from behind and drags her by the hair down to the dirt. On the ground, Janet curls into a ball, battening her hatches like a roly poly. It’s no use. Suddenly, she is sprawled on her stomach, as Marion pins her down with one hand and clenches her French braid in the other.
“You know what you are?” Marion says as she fondles Janet’s braid in her fist. “A scaredy-cat. And do you know what scaredy-cats do? They meow.” Janet squirms as Marion produces her Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her khakis and flicks it open, resting the blade at the base of Janet’s scalp. “Go on, Janet. Meow.”
Aurielle crawls out from behind the log, now more interested in observing this altercation than hiding from Marion. Following our alpha, we emerge from our hiding place. We circle Janet, who cowers on the ground like the sympathizer she is.
Her back pretzeled and arched, Janet looks up at Marion in disbelief. Marion doesn’t blink, and her tone leaves no room for confusion. She is not joking. Her words show themselves for what they are: a command. “I said meow,” Marion says. The blade glints in the firelight as she pushes it to the rust-colored root of Janet’s hair. It is against our code to cut the hair of another girl scout, another sister, but we suppose what tonight proves is that our code only extends so far. And where it stops is on this mountain.
“Meow, you stupid scaredy-cat,” says Aurielle.
“Finally someone has the guts to say it,” says Rachel T.
Janet’s face crumples. Her lip quivers and she pulls her knees to her chest. “Why do you always pick on me?” she asks, her grimace baring her bottom teeth.
Do as you’re told, we say. Meow, Janet, meow.
It starts as a high-pitched whine, little more than a gargle in the back of Janet’s throat, gathering dimension and depth as it moves forward into her mouth: “MeeeeeeYOWWWWW!”
Marion slackens her hold on Janet’s hair. “That’s it! Such a good little kitty,” she says. “Keep meowing!”
There are tears in Janet’s eyes, as she curls and uncurls her spine like a cat stretching on a ledge. When Marion finally releases her, she throws her head back and mewls at the moon winking above the treeline. We laugh and clap. Huzzah, we cry.
But after a while, the spectacle of Janet on all fours, meowing at the top of her lungs and scratching in the dirt, returns Aurielle to herself. “Okay, that’s enough,” she says. “We’ve made our point.” But we don’t react, our attention still captured by Janet’s metamorphosis. Meow, we chant. Meow, meow.
Janet obeys. She meows again and again. She licks her paws and rubs them over her eyes. She kneads her claws on the log’s satisfying bark. She chases the beam of light shining from Marion’s phone. It’s a game, we know. One that Janet demeans herself to play. We won’t admit it out loud, but a part of us is excited. It excites us that we can barely see our fellow scout in this wretched, meowing creature. That we don’t know what she might do. How far she might go to satisfy the troop.
“Who’s my pretty kitty?” says Marion as she bounces the light around the clearing, sending Janet scurrying this way and that.
“I said that’s enough!” says Aurielle. She tries to block the beam with her body, but Marion ignores her until Aurielle leers in her face. “Listen to me, you pathetic weirdo!” Aurielle shouts at Marion. Her face is so close to Marion’s that her breath stirs the babyhairs on Marion’s cheeks. It feels like the prelude to a movie kiss, and we all watch, spellbound.
“You’re not the boss of me,” says Marion. She stares through Aurielle, resolute and unflappable as a beefeater. No one moves. No one except Janet, who prowls the edge of the clearing, sly and timid.
“You’re worse than Janet,” says Aurielle. The focus back on her, Janet sidles up behind Aurielle, believing herself again under the alpha’s protection. Believing herself saved. Until Marion’s gaze settles Janet in her crosshairs.
“We’ll see about that,” says Marion as she darts around Aurielle to get to Janet.
It ends in tragedy. All it takes is one good flick of Marion’s Swiss army knife to sever years of growth. We gasp as the braid tumbles in the leaves. Shell-shocked, Janet feels below her nape, her hands groping at the now-empty air and exposed skin. Her neck is naked, blotchy, and undignified. Her face is covered in snot. But she is different now. Forever changed. She sinks to the ground, lifts up the amputated braid, and drops it on the campfire. The braid flares, igniting into flame. The coyotes are quiet, and so are we, mesmerized by this burning.
We try resting our hands on Janet’s shoulder—the regretful, respectful scouts in us briefly restored—but Janet recoils. She is tight-jawed and hard-eyed, her buglike gaze locked on the fire. Watching her braid shrivel into ash, she swears to us that she will never again grow out her hair.
When the pyre is nothing but smolder, Janet again ascends the oak tree. This time, she does not come down. She does not answer our calls, our pleas for peace. She withdraws from the troop a fallen soldier.
This is why we say you expect too much. Under duress, our time here can only be what it is, bloody and imperfect. After all, how can we be more than you who raised us?
The Troop Leader, Brynne Jones
After Janet’s defeat, Marion’s rank drops lower still, and her malice returns. “This is all your fault,” she spits at Aurielle. She flashes her eyes and bares her teeth, looming at our alpha.
“You are such a freak show,” says Aurielle.
Above them, the torch sways in the wind, pivoting like a lighthouse beam, patrolling the campsite. Unlike us, it silently awaits vengeance. We grow louder and louder. Some of us, overcome by lawlessness, light branches on the dying pyre and trail them through the air like sparklers.
“Seriously. Stop it,” says Aurielle. She glances sidelong at the rest of us—but no one rallies. No one backs her up. Not while Marion circles and leers, flaring her nostrils as she considers angles of attack.
Aurielle’s hair is too short to pull, so Marion lunges at her bra straps. Marion tugs and pulls and snaps wherever she can, while Aurielle twists and writhes. Aurielle’s shirt rides up, as she tries to shield her midsection from Marion’s snatches. Instead, her bra unclasps, and out tumble two wads of crumpled-up tissue. We gasp as Marion skitters to pick up the trash. Then, she turns and holds it aloft for all of us to see: the lie that changes everything.
“I knew it!” she shouts at Aurielle, insane with glee. “You stuff! Do you even need a bra?”
Litterbug, litterbug, we chant, the spasm jumping from scout to scout.
Aurielle collapses on the ground, no longer queen. We join our laughter with Marion’s. We jeer at Aurielle’s flattened chest. Her manipulations and lies.
All at once, Aurielle seizes Marion’s bun from behind. Again, we hear ourselves cheer, slipping into something like psychosis—a violent fantasy that ends in all our deaths. We see the campsite cordoned off by yellow tape, bloody braids and severed pigtails strewn across the clearing. Our troop canonized in hushed tones on the evening news.
“Quiet!” a voice screeches from above. It is Janet. She perches on a treelimb, her head tilted a fraction. She seems to be thinking. Or listening. We are loud, we realize, so loud the whole forest echoes with our uproar. Janet makes the quiet sign. Then, we hear it, too.
A gentle whirring, like wings. A helicopter hovers over us at an impossible angle, as though leaning against the wind.
We abandon Aurielle on the ground. Following Janet’s eyeline, we peer upward at the torch. The helicopter. The sky beyond it. We are shouting again—for rescue or bloodshed, we don’t really know which—as the helicopter circles overhead. From her perch, Janet unknots and yanks the guyline that dangles the torch. It falls in the dirt with a thunk but does not break. Janet drags the torch up into her oak by its line and knots it around the lamp’s handle. Then, she dangles the torch and begins to swing, her glasses steaming up from the effort. At the top of her arc, she lets go and launches the torch into the highest branches of a neighboring tree. There is a savage shatter of glass.
We wait. We look for flames. We sniff for smoke. We hear a cracking noise, followed by a kind of thrum. Bright orange flames lick through the treetops.
Minds snarled, bodies swarming, we charge at the forest with our fiery branches and throw everything we have on the flame. The parched leaves go up like kindling and illuminate the dark woods. This summer’s historic drought means that, within minutes, a wildfire is raging and unstoppable.
This heat is our inheritance. We belong to it, every one of us riled and shrieking.
Marion empties a full canteen of soda on a woolen blanket and throws it on a fiery bush. The sodden blanket puffs out great white loops of smoke that Aurielle and the Rachels fan with their vests. Janet, still perched in her tree, shouts with all the air in her lungs, until smoke fills them and she seizes her chest, coughing terribly.
The rest of us are coughing now, too. There’s another loud crack and someone screams. We are certain the helicopter has fallen out of the sky. Maybe, despite all our badges—our preparations and our bright futures—we just can’t handle the pressures of survival. Through the thickening smoke, we squint, searching for the wreckage. We squint harder, still coughing. Finally, we see them. Silhouettes walking slowly—so slowly, they’re barely moving—their mouths and noses covered, carrying something. The rangers have come for us. Or is it the search party? Perhaps it is the troop leader, walking toward us with a bag of marshmallows cradled to her chest. All around us, the forest is engulfed in flame. Someone shines a flashlight on us, on our tangled, matted hair and our screwed-up faces. On the women we’re becoming.
Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (detail), 2016-2022. Gelatin silver prints, C-prints and inkjet prints.
Midway on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico, just upstream from Presidio, Texas, the Rio Grande is a river in name only. A veil of black salt cedar branches with neon green leaves shade the pools of stagnant water and decaying algae that are the official boundary between the United States and Mexico. In most places, the trails through the brush carved by cattle, javelina, and people are wider than the river.
This reach was once home to eels swimming up from the Gulf of Mexico, catfish the size of tree trunks, and freshwater mussels as big as a hand purse. In the 1500’s, Spanish explorers called it El Rio Bravo del Norte, The Fierce River of the North. Most years it would flood in the late spring with the snow melt from the Rockies in Colorado, and again in the fall when storms off the Pacific and Gulf hit the mountains of Northern Mexico. Like two massive heart beats a year, these pulses of water created an uninterrupted oasis from the high deserts of the Continental Divide to the coastal plains. Nowadays, anytime of the year you can hop across without getting your feet wet. Outside of Alaska, no river in the United States has or is forecasted to be more impacted by climate change. The spring melts are smaller and coming earlier because of thinner snowpacks and warmer winters. The summer rains are less reliable. The forest fires, warmer winters, and pine beetles have completely changed the plant community of the upper basin. Crops are failing across the lower basin. No longer can cities along its banks in New Mexico, Texas, or Mexico reasonably rely solely on the river’s flows to meet their demand.
In 2014, asking what this change looked like and meant for those who lived along the Rio Grande, I planned a six-month trip by foot, kayak, and canoe to follow the river from source to sea. With the help of friends and family, the Ted Scripps Fellowship at U.C. Boulder, and a good deal of luck, the Disappearing Rio Grande
Expedition started out heading downhill from 12,500 feet at Stony Pass in Colorado on the summer solstice.
Seven months and 1,900 miles later, I paddled into the Gulf at Boca Chica confident of two things: that the Rio Grande was one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated rivers in North America, and that I had started with the wrong premise: climate change is not the root issue.
The fact is, for the last century we have pumped and diverted more of the river and its aquifers than we have replenished. The result is that the Rio Grande no longer functions as a river in most of its watershed. Sediment is filling the reservoirs instead of refreshing the floodplains. Salt is crystallizing in the soil instead of being flushed to the sea. With each passing year, the entire basin becomes less secure economically and ecologically.
It is a similar story across Texas. Our rivers are overallocated. The aquifers that sustain them are declining. As a result, more springs go dry. Even in minor droughts, a pair of old tennis shoes is the best mode of transportation down the Pecos, Nueces, Frio, Upper Guadalupe, Llano, Pedernales, and upper half of the Colorado.
The health of the bays and estuaries that Texas rivers nourish have similarly declined. The most reliable rivers for boating are shaded by the pines of deep East Texas or fed by the sewage outfalls of cities.
This is not a new story or a sudden crisis. We have been warned about it for decades.
This Is The History Of Texas
Lyndon B. Johnson watched Texas change from a rural state to an urban one as the drought of the 1950s wiped out fortunes and farms in every corner of the state. He knew firsthand that unsustainable water use turns droughts from inevitable realities into catastrophic, life-changing disasters. As the U.S. President in 1968, he wrote a letter to Congress introducing the nation’s first country-wide assessment of its water resources.
Today, we are better at planning and predicting, but endlessly growing demand and a lack of investment in people and infrastructure have left our cities increasingly vulnerable and incapable of providing reliable and safe drinking water for everyone all of the time. Our major agriculture operations are not sustainable. Texas now leads the world in the number of municipal water systems that count their own sewer outfalls as a drinking water supply.
“A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of it shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.”
Lyndon B Johnson
A lush oasis in the desert?
When it was completed in 1916, the 301-foot-high Elephant Butte Dam created the largest irrigation reservoir in the world. Sitting 125 miles upstream from El Paso, it enabled farming in the desert at an industrial scale, and predictable binational water sharing.
For those living in one of the anointed irrigation districts, a large spring flood roaring out of the Rockies was no longer something to fear. It meant that behind the dam there would be enough water to guarantee farming in the desert for another decade.
The stretch of dark green squares of irrigated land in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert desert grew so large, and so stark against the reds and browns of the desert, that it was one of the few man-made things astronaut John Glenn could clearly see and identify from space as he became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962.
Cotton was king for a while on those fields; then came the pecans. In a region that gets six to eight inches of rain a year, the dam enabled trees that need at least six to eight feet of water annually to produce marketable fruit. Pecans became the top crop that banks were willing to write loans for. Buyers from China set the price. When the reservoir ran low, it was possible to use centrifugal pumps and natural gas to tap into the aquifers, and bridge the gap until the next flood.
With plentiful and reliable water, the farms and communities in and around El Paso and Southern New Mexico grew. But the schools and churches downstream and outside of the irrigation districts, which lost their reliable river pulses, melted into the desert.
Engineers were sent to the rescue.
In the 1980s, when the Rio Grande was relatively flush with water, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) hired contractors with floatable backhoes from Louisiana to dig out a roughly 200-mile-long channel and build levies to control and
Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (detail), 2016-2022. Gelatin silver prints, C-prints and inkjet prints.
restore the flows from Fort Quitman to Presidio. The hope was that the effluent spilling out of El Paso and Juarez, and the drainwater leaving the farms to their southeast, would be enough for the river to flow year round. This binational agency charged with implementing the boundary and water treaties between the United States and Mexico dreamed of a river bed with flowing water that would increase supplies for farmers and cities downstream, and maintain a channel to serve as the international border.
But the desert wore down the equipment. Repairs were impossible in such a remote reach. It became clear there was not enough water to maintain the channel or justify the project. The feds cut funding. Sediment filled the channel between the unfinished levies, leaving them higher than the floodplain. This now encourages the river channel, and thus the U.S./Mexico border, to break free and meander across the valley floor. The flood waters that now do sporadically make it from El Paso to Presidio are too salty to drink due to the intensive use upstream.
More than a decade after the IBWC walked away, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Texas state agencies wrote a report that enshrined this section as the Forgotten Reach. In 2022, a study by the U.S. Geological Survey found the annual flow at Fort Quitman, the official starting point of the Forgotten Reach, had been reduced by ninety-five percent from its native state. The heartbeat of the river has flatlined.
Meanwhile since 1990 Elephant Butte has averaged twenty-five percent full and the hydropower plant of the dam has been mothballed for lack of water. Local kids in southern New Mexico call the river the Rio Sand because it is dry most of the year, and that is all they have to play with when they visit the riverside parks.
The aquifers are in an even more precarious state. The most recent models show that in forty years the freshwater at the top that supplies half of El Paso’s drinking water will most likely be depleted if the salt water from the deeper portions does not mix and contaminate it sooner.
At the other end of the Forgotten Reach, it is not much better. One hundred years after Elephant Butte made it possible to use up all the water from the upper Rio Grande, Mexico built enough dams and developed irrigated fields to capture and use all the water from the Rio Conchos, the largest tributary in the basin. The Conchos joins the Rio Grande at Presidio, known as Junta de los Rios. Archaeological evidence suggests people have lived there
since at least 6,500 B.C. Farming most likely started about 700 A.D. After 1,300 years, there are no viable commercial farms left. The water deliveries from either country are not reliable enough for farmers to plant a crop.
The impacts keep extending downstream. It is no longer newsworthy when the Rio Grande stops flowing in Big Bend National Park. For decades, the water has been too salty and has lacked the annual flood pulses to support native fish. Farther downstream, the last sugar mill in Texas closed recently because not enough water was making it to the river’s delta to support sugar cane. The citrus harvest will likely go next if some sort of compromise between upstream and downstream interests can’t be reached.
It’s all doom and gloom until you get back to the river.
Backed by the hydrologic cycle, ensured by gravity, and with no time restraints, nothing can actually stop the Rio Grande. The small floods that course through the Forgotten Reach recharge the shallow aquifers along its banks and leave behind an ever changing patchwork of wetlands that are hotspots for the parade of migratory birds and insects that travel the length of the Americas.
The sediment continues to accumulate behind the dams. It will eventually render them useless and force a decision about what comes next. Even between the best maintained levies, the river meanders, creating new habitat in a micro-river valley.
Rain and snow will still fall. Better understanding of aquifers is making it possible to recharge them so wet years can augment dry ones without the taxation of evaporation. The rising cost and scarcity of water will inevitably curtail use to a sustainable level.
My question today is what do we want the river to be?
I have found that our current limitation is the collective will to understand, manage, and share what we all depend on. In this era, that means the will to attend meetings, learn how to pay attention to the water we once took for granted, understand the lessons of all who came before, and then act accordingly with a much longer planning horizon than ever before.
It is not a lonely affair. There is no stretch of the Rio Grande that is not deeply cared about. In the Rio Grande Valley, before the river hits the Gulf, there are a string of world famous birding
centers based largely on a habitat created by and in partnership with irrigators. In Laredo and Nuevo Lardeo, there is an effort for a binational park. In Presidio and Ojinaga, locals are studying the international aquifer that both cities depend on. In El Paso, the city is forging ahead with binational infrastructure projects and it is recreating wetlands to help ensure its own survival. Further upstream, a former dairy has been transformed into an urban wetland and nature center. The Cochiti Pueblo is reintroducing native species in restored habitat of reclaimed sacred land as part of a 500 year plan.
In Colorado farmers under the threat of being shut off from water are supporting the planting of willows and cottonwoods along the river banks to support endangered species. They would rather have the natural protection of the river banks, trout fishing, and even less water, than a ditch.
Back on the River
In early November 2014, I lucked out as I paddled out of Big Bend National Park. The air became thick with the scent of mesquite. Suddenly the temperature dropped and the rain came in sheets. Waterfalls sprang from the cliffs. When rocks the size of refrigerators started crashing into the swelling river, I found a high camp and watched the show from the safety of a dry cave on the Mexican side of the river.
“A plentiful and reliable water supply is the elixir of our national life and future growth,” wrote Johnson to Congress. From the cave, a place that had been used as a shelter for thousands of years, I saw the river reborn and that elixir refilled.
In the brown fury of rushing water, trees were ripped from the banks and devoured. The ground vibrated as the river tumbled and the newly added limestone boulders disintegrated. It was terrifying and exhilarating. One rainstorm guaranteed easy travel for the next 150 miles. Schedules and promises could be kept. The water made everything possible again.
After the rain stopped, when I thought the river was too treacherous for a canoe, two men, each wearing two JanSport school backpacks, swam across it. After finishing jobs in the U.S, they were headed south to Mexico, to their ranch on the mesa high above the river. They stopped under a nearby overhang to start a fire to dry out, and I went up to chat. Neither the storm, the swim, the wide swing of temperatures, the crashing rocks, nor
the confused gringo at this popular campsite were anything new to them. They explained that the river is always changing, and that they act accordingly.
It took a century to create the situation we have now; it may take another to find a new way. The river never stops changing and adapting. One way or another, we will too.
“Mass
timber represents a sustainable shift in construction, utilizing renewable resources in a way that reduces our carbon footprint while creating beautiful, high-performance buildings.”
Aaron Stottlemyer
An Interview with Aaron Stottlemyer, Forest Analytics Dep Head at Texas A&M Forest Service
with Mary Beth Lineberry
Aaron Stottlemyer’s passion is silviculture, the practice of managing forests and woodlands to meet the needs of society. His work as the Forest Analytics Department Head at Texas A&M Forest Service connects the science of silviculture to the strategic positioning of Texas’ timberlands for sustainable market growth. Aaron’s focus on helping develop new timber applications and products, such as mass timber, is an example of the importance of economics and environmentalism working together to sustain and protect our forests.
A versatile practitioner and educator, Aaron is often in the field—speaking with landowners, giving lectures at universities, and lobbying municipalities— while also conducting research and managing field researchers. Prior to joining Texas A&M, he served as Assistant Professor of Forestry in the Wildlife Technology Department at Penn State University, where he also completed his Bachelor’s degree in Forestry. Aaron completed his Doctorate and Master’s degrees in Forest Resources at Clemson University, is a Texas Accredited Forester, and maintains several positions with state and federal natural resource agencies as well as with the forest industry.
MARY BETH LINEBERRY: Can you explain the role of the Texas A&M Forest Service? What are your responsibilities as a forestry professional?
Texas A&M Forest Service is the State Forestry Agency for Texas. Every state in the United States has one. Our agency has two divisions: the Forest Resource Protection Division, which provides statewide fire protection, including all-hazardous emergency responses, and the Forest Resource Development Division, which I work for. As department head for the Forest Analytics Department, I lead several programs including Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA), Resource Analysis & Economics, Silviculture, and Wood Utilization & Marketing. In our FIA program, twenty-six staff, located in different field offices across the state, collect information on tree species, abundance, condition, and other information about the current state of our nearly sixty million acres of forest and woodland.
A great example of how FIA data is used is what we call “timber supply analysis.” Let’s say a new mill or increased production at an existing facility is proposed in East Texas. We use FIA data to help answer basic questions about whether adequate timber resources exist to supply the mill or support an increase in production. This analysis ensures we can sustainably manage resources while supporting new economic development opportunities.
We also work very closely with landowners through education and outreach, often connecting them with forestry professionals who can help them to achieve their forest management objectives. And we work closely with forest and industry professionals, providing them with data, information, tools, and other resources that inform decision-making or lead to increased production efficiencies.
Mass timber and other innovative wood products represent new market opportunities which are critical to ensuring good timber prices, and to helping landowners continue to afford the cost of owning the land and investing in good stewardship.
MBL: According to recent numbers from the U.S. Forest Service, the forest products industry alone contributes $300 billion annually in the U.S. and is among the top ten manufacturing sector employers in forty-five states. Broadly speaking, what are the opportunities and challenges of the wood industry?
The forest sector in Texas contributes $43 billion annually to the state’s economy and supports over 150,000 jobs. Most commercial forest production occurs in East Texas, where we have approximately twelve million acres of forest land.
It’s surprising to most people that we are growing anywhere between 40 to 60 percent more timber than we harvest on an annual basis. And while we don’t want to harvest more than we’re growing, a more ideal scenario would be that we harvest at a level closer to the amount we’re growing. Forests can support increased utilization of the timber resource.
Housing construction is the primary driver of demand for forest products across the South. During the recession of 2008 and 2009, for example, the demand for wood plummeted. During that time the price of timber also decreased to the point where many landowners could not justify harvesting, so they took their timber off the market, waiting for better prices.
Many of those forests that weren’t harvested during that time are still in need of management, while younger stands have now grown to the point of needing to be thinned or harvested. Some trees even outgrew the capacity of modern sawmills to process them. And now in Texas and across the South, we have an oversupply of timber, despite the housing economy swinging in the opposite direction.
By managing forests you increase tree vigor, which makes those trees less susceptible to drought stress, insect outbreaks, and wildfires while maximizing their growth potential for forest products.
MBL: In the South and in Texas, an overwhelming percentage of forestland is privately owned. What is the impact and opportunity of this generational land ownership on how we manage our forests?
There are different kinds of private owners. More than half of private owners in Texas are family forest landowners who manage their own land for different reasons including recreation, conservation, aesthetics, and to provide habitat for game and non-game wildlife, and for privacy.
Interestingly, when we ask forest landowners about why they own their land, timber production does not often rank among the top reasons. But it’s still important to them because harvesting timber helps them to afford the cost of owning the land. When there’s an oversupply of timber like we have now, they are not going to be paid as much for their timber when they do decide to sell. It becomes harder for them to justify the cost of ownership, and they might consider subdividing the land, or worse, selling it for non-forest uses. If forest landowners have access to good markets, they generally will continue to own the land and practice good stewardship.
We like to say in forestry that ‘conservation without cash is just conversation.’
MBL: You do a lot of outreach to diverse audience groups, including students who may be learning about the value of wood and timberlands for the first time. Can you help explain, in that educational context, how cutting down a tree is
sustainable? How do you get them engaged enough to care about wood products of all things?
One thing I try to convey is that harvesting timber using sustainable forest management is beneficial in several ways. First, periodic thinning helps to promote healthy, faster-growing trees that are resilient to stressors such as drought and insects. And of course, harvesting timber can produce income which helps landowners afford the cost of owning the land, ultimately helping to ensure that forests remain forests.
One important focus area over the last five or six years has been promoting Texas as a market for mass timber construction systems. Texas has eight of the fifteen fastest growing cities in the nation and twelve million acres of productive and sustainable forest land. To supply this growing market, we also need to promote Texas as both a resource base and potential future manufacturer of Southern yellow pine mass timber products.
Education is necessary for those two things to happen. More specifically, we’re trying to promote awareness and acceptance of new building technologies. Texas A&M Forest Service has focused on outreach to stakeholders, including architects, engineers, city planners, code officials, contractors, and others. We are also working with university architecture programs to provide students with exposure to forestry and mass timber.
MBL: What are some stories that you tell in the classroom?
It’s a real privilege to be able to teach students who might not know much about forestry what it’s all about. When I go into an architecture classroom, one of the first things I do is hold up a piece of wood and ask students, “What is this?”
Typically, someone will say, “It’s a chunk of wood, duh!”
To which I respond, “Yes, but what exactly is it? What’s in there?”
After some awkward silence, I say, “What are the molecules comprised of? … You have carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Those are the three elements, but where do they come from?”
And so, we talk about how a tree, through the process of photosynthesis, will harvest carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water from the ground, and with energy from the sun, break up those molecules and resynthesize them into cellulose and lignin—the components of wood.
It’s always fun to see those light bulbs go off for students. I hope that by recalling the basic principles of photosynthesis, the renewable qualities and aesthetics of wood spark a biophilic connection between the student and the material.
When there is such focus on sustainability as there is today, we need to look to the forest to supply the materials that we use to build buildings. Forestry is inherently sustainable, and wood is renewable. While there will always be a place in construction for concrete and steel, I suggest to students that there is also a lot of untapped opportunity for wood-based construction. And we must inform students and society about this potential.
MBL: Globally, mass timber construction projects are expected to reach more than 24,000 by 2034, which seems like a low number in comparison to steel and concrete buildings. What are the real and perceived challenges to mass timber becoming a household name? What can we do to advance the conversation, not just in the design industry, but everywhere?
I think we need to educate different types of stakeholders, not just architects, as we try to accelerate awareness and acceptance of mass timber technologies. I would argue that university curricula are an important component to this—not just architecture curricula, but engineering, construction, science, landscape, urban planning, and related disciplines.
We’re all anxious for this market to be bigger than it currently is, but its development is going to take time. Right now, the total manufacturing capacity
of Southern yellow pine mass timber products is not favorable to competitive pricing. For example, European and Canadian suppliers are currently able to outcompete U.S.-based manufacturers for projects, even considering the cost of transportation. We need more manufacturing to get competitive pricing, and that will require investment.
I have regular interactions with people interested in potentially investing in this type of manufacturing, though there is still some hesitation given how new the market is. I think it’s going to take even greater awareness and acceptance among professionals and the public, and even more adoption of these technologies before we see more investment in mass timber manufacturing. I think it’s going to come, but it will take time.
I also think continuing our education initiatives, and communicating to design, planning, and construction professionals at different stages of their careers, particularly during their formal education, is key. And we really need to see more universities using mass timber for their own capital projects and hiring faculty who focus on researching and teaching it. I think when universities lead with innovation, it inspires other parts of society to follow suit.
Texas A&M Forest Service is not just advocating for mass timber—we are actively demonstrating its potential by constructing our own mass timber office and training facility in Hudson, Texas using locally-sourced Southern yellow pine. This project showcases the feasibility and sustainability of mass timber and will serve as a trailblazing example for the industry. We will continue to lead by example, and are confident that mass timber will shape the future of design and construction while benefiting the forest sector with new economic and environmental opportunities.
Katie Paterson
An Artist of Cosmology, Geology, and Ecology
Scottish artist Katie Paterson (born 1981, Scotland) is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialized expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigor and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos. Katie Paterson has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live, mapped all the dead stars, compiled a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, created a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and sent a recast meteorite back into space. Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder, and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, Paterson’s work is at once understated in gesture and yet monumental in scope.
Working with a team of arborists, Katie Paterson arranged for 1,000 trees to be planted in a forest just outside Oslo, Norway in 2014. The trees will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years. Between now and then, one writer each year will contribute a text to be held in trust until publication in 2114. The daily tending and preservation of the forest finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer, to produce a work in the hope of reaching a reader in an unknown future. Writers to date include Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ocean Vuong, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and many others.
This immersive piece of architecture, created with Zeller & Moye, brings together over 10,000 unique tree species, including petrified wood from the earliest forests that emerged over 390 million years ago, a sample from the oldest tree in the world, and some from the youngest, as well as near-extinct species. The Douglas Fir posts that form the façade mimic the varying heights of trees in a forest canopy system. Inside, light filters through apertures in the ceiling, suggesting sunlight radiating through a forest.
A map of the entire known universe was encoded into DNA data, suspended in a drop of water and released into the Goðafoss waterfall in Northern Iceland, and carried from there to the sea.
Plants set the foundation for nearly all life on Earth yet the number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and, and amphibians combined. Evergreen is a collaboration with leading scientists, naturalists, botanists, and herbariums, collecting together all existing imagery of extinct plants from across the world and across centuries. Botanical images have been drawn and woven together in a textile embroidery representing all the extinct flowers of this moment.
In Certain Buildings
Naomi Shihab Nye
To be given space awakened to space where to look wider ways of being openings you hadn’t realized were missing in mind or sight
lifts the moment an hour changes everything you held now there’s a way to funnel sorrow elsewhere into dissolve
crowded memory let that go find another place to stand
Verbs
Naomi Shihab Nye
A poet said instead of wondering about someone’s pronouns
I’d rather know their verbs
Grow Support
Attend Nourish
Pause Stay
Maybe we feel them instantly when we step into a room
Listen Grieve
Tell
Maybe we can change them when things aren’t going well everything we need held within their pockets
Dream
Build
Connect
Protect
Building Made of Sky
Naomi Shihab Nye
As if it floated there.
Had always surrounded you.
Lacking nothing.
You took the sky inside yourself by stepping over the threshold.
A building can make you a better person. Clearer one.
A window can soothe your grief.
A ceiling can lift your spirits.
A single slant can cure a gloom.
The color silver befriended me.
Cool green, gray.
You can live this way.
Some Houses
Naomi Shihab Nye
Some houses say I am bigger than I look. Some invite a long pause from any angle.
Some say who needs to fill everything that’s empty? Some console. Some hold histories of trees as well as humans.
Some reverberate, reckon with your issues. In some, you forget your issues. Some houses turn you inside out, secret pockets now visible.
The Wisdom of Water
Bekah
McNeel Art: Carolina Caycedo
When Frederick Law Olmsted passed through New Braunfels on his famous “Journey Through Texas” in 1853, he was smitten with the German socialists who fled the Continent to find a place a little more open-minded. “The soil, climate, and the other realities found, were genial and good, if not Elysian. . . I do not know a prettier picture of contented prosperity than we witnessed in NeuBraunfels,” Olmsted wrote.
In 1904, fifty years after Olmsted’s journey, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the Rule of Capture, which gives whoever owns surface land unfettered access to the ground water beneath that land—the source of the springs, in this case, that so enchanted Olmsted and the Germans. The court made this ruling on the basis that groundwater was too “mysterious, secret, and occult” to be regulated. Now, 120 years later, the decision remains in place, even as we’ve developed the science to understand aquifers—the shared subterranean reservoirs that provide more than half the state’s water supply. Today, Texas stands alone as the only western state that continues to follow the Rule of Capture.
I spent my childhood in New Braunfels, and my memory of it is not unlike the Elysian vision of Olmsted. Like all public school third graders in New Braunfels, Texas, I had to learn the ecology and
Carolina Caycedo. Maligna, 2016 (detail), photocollage printed on cotton canvas, 59 x 354.3 in.
conservation needs of the Comal River, which, since you asked, is always right around 72 °. We, the town’s children, could locate the springs where the Comal originated, and tell you that these headwaters were home to one of only two populations of fountain darter fish in the world. You can imagine the weight our little cohort felt, tasked with the preservation of half the world’s population of a fish that grows to, at maximum, three centimeters. We, the conservationist collective of concerned nine-year-olds, learned how the limestone of the Edwards Aquifer filtered our drinking water while providing a home for the Texas blind salamander living in its karst caves. We pledged to care for all of these animals and their watery habitats, in keeping with the 150 years of German stewardship that came before us.
Water was also where we played. One of my most vivid sensory memories is an aroma I remember from childhood: the smell of drowning in fresh water. We spent most summers in lakes and rivers, either riding black rubber innertubes over spring-fed rapids or being dragged behind a boat, trying to stand on skis while a wall of lake water flooded in our noses and out our mouths. I became all too familiar with the flushing sensation—like a crusty trowel scraping through my sinuses—and the algal flavor in the back of my throat. That’s the distinct smell—and taste and touch, really—of drowning in a river or lake. It feels like being punched by a wave, not in the face, but inside the face.
None of my siblings or cousins, thankfully, ever drowned. I was about nine when my parents explained to me that when caught in a river undertow, the best thing to do is not to fight it, but to let it carry you down and back up again. The river is stronger than you are, and it’s going to take you where it’s going to take you. But it will kill you faster if you fight it, so go with the flow, literally, and there’s a good chance it will voluntarily spare you. It will spit you back out, like the big fish in the Bible who spat Jonah back out after he went against the current of God’s call to compassion.
Surfers know this. Voyagers, way finders, and sailors know this. The only way to wisely interact with water is to follow it. To learn its ways and accommodate them. In our waterlogged childhood, that wisdom meant survival. But I do wonder if it’s a wisdom that has been lost as we grow discontent with our lack of control.
In 2020, long after my salamander saving and recreational near-drowning days were over, a magazine assigned a story that would require me to spend a week walking the orchards and spin-
ach fields of California’s Central Coast and the San Joaquin Valley. I imagined neat rows heavy with stone fruit, hazy through the lens of an eternal golden hour. I would wear white. Juice would dribble down my wrist as I bit into the fruit of the labor I’d been tasked to observe. I wanted to linger among bushels of juicy apples, mountains of fragrant herbs—the abundance that we grocery store hunter-gatherers conjure when we read about “America’s salad bowl” or when we wrest our broccoli crown from the mountain of ice keeping it from wilting.
I expected to be reassured of our abundance, that our food chain was secure, and that the scarcities and pinch points I’d read about only existed in the world of macroeconomics (which I personally find even more occult and mystical than groundwater). Surely the reality would be more reassuring. It was not. Driving north on Highway 99 between Delano and Tulare, running late to the church service that was the linchpin to my story, I drove straight into the opening scene of our dystopian future.
To my left were lush and leafy orchards and their pink, fleshy bounty. To my right was dust on an endless horizon of more dust. The abundance did not fade gently into the desert the way that a creek slows to a trickle and eventually goes underground. All green abruptly ended with the orderly boundary of an irrigation line. Beyond that border there wasn’t even a bush. Tinder for a fire must have existed somewhere, however, because smoke from the 30,000-acre Fresno fire was pouring into the valley from the north. Thankfully our air was somewhat filtered by our COVID-19 masks, as we were in the early days of the global pandemic. Apocalypse upon apocalypse.
I walked my fair share of green fields for that story, and I did accept a ripe donut peach from a handsome foreman in a cowboy hat. But I spent most of my time caked in dust, listening to farmers— tired of being made the villains in stories about migrant workers’ quality of life—explain the bind they were in trying to pay workers the minimum wage required by California law, balance their crops so that irrigation costs didn’t sink them, and maintain some kind of buffer on the razor thin margins afforded by distributors. I went to the distributors and got a similar sad story about how little grocery stores are willing to pay for berries and apples. And then, a year later, I did a story about the food deserts of urban America where grocery store owners told me they couldn’t afford to run a wellstocked produce section in a low-income neighborhood.
Our food supply is a marvel of industry but reflects a meagerness of wisdom. We have innovated how to drag the water in and the fructose out in quantities large enough to maintain the appearance of abundance after the abundance itself has left.
On a soul level, we want to feel as though we are being nourished by our source. Images and ideas of sweet spring water speak to us in the same primal place as does the memory of our mothers’ arms. However, we are not, not right now at least, living as if Mother Earth is the treasured source from which we came. Where industry rather than wisdom is dictator, we will farm and harvest the earth until she has been wrung dry. We’re eating the fruit of our own stubborn will, not the fruit of wisdom.
Over my late twenties and early thirties, I drifted from a highly religious community that is hostile to science into a highly rational community that is hostile to religion. Neither seem to have inherent interest in a future of abundance for all. They both say they do, and both have their altruistic moments, but the fundamentalists who raised me keep championing the politicians and industries who are ruining our ecosystems, and the scientists keep inventing more efficient ways to do so. Or they have big ideas that benefit the same wealthy people who benefit from everything else. This leaves me to conclude that both religion and science are, at times, amoral in their pursuits. They are both tools to accomplish either the deeply moral goal of our shared thriving, or deeply immoral goal of domination.
Sometime after this realization, I was recording a podcast with my friend Frank, one of the most famous former evangelicals in the country. Frank has become notorious for walking away from his father’s very high-profile version of Christianity. As we talked, he argued (in part against the ghost of his father) that science could explain the need for morals, the impulse to care for others, and all the things he once understood to be the justification for why humankind needed religion.
Perhaps, I conceded, but science can also justify eugenics, social Darwinism, bombs, and the dystopian futures imagined by the billionaires who want to upload their consciousness to the Metaverse while the rest of us burn. The same arguments can be made for religion. Wars can be fought in the name of God, but hospitals can be built as well. Both science and religion can be used for good and evil. Both give way to the impulse to create or destroy, to nurture
Carolina Caycedo. Simulacro/Simulacrum, 2015 (detail), photograph printed on fabric, 275.59 x 50.06 in.
or dominate. The opposing currents of power and surrender flow through everything. Which current we join depends so much on how we greet mystery and enlightenment.
Groundwater isn’t the only phenomenon to pass from what is “mysterious, secret, and occult” into the more comfortable realm of science. More and more ideas like synchronicity and quantum entanglement are contesting the mystical realm, making the case that everything can be rationally accounted for. Some may find that idea comforting. If all of life can be demystified, we can slip out of the clutches of Dark Age superstition that bequeathed both clergy and charlatans their power. But if natural phenomena can be explained, they can still be exploited, in fact more efficiently, as market commodities. Science might free us from being scared, but it has handed us over to new kinds of scarcity.
Olmsted wouldn’t recognize New Braunfels now. Over the last century the rivers that were once a shared source of purpose and place have been exploited as real estate features. The political temperature of the town isn’t inclined toward conservation, and city leaders make their case based on utilities and business, not the communal flourishing, shared responsibility, or relationship to the natural world that prompted early settlers to homestead there. Partisanship has gobbled up science, religion, and even intimate relationships, so that everything has become poll-fodder. What was sacred is now simply useful in the pursuit of power.
“Water relates directly to questions about who we are, where we are, and why we are—that is, to fundamental questions of philosophy,” claims environmental ethicist Ken Shockley in the magazine of Colorado State University’s College of Liberal Arts. How we conceive of “abundance” or “quality” regarding water is dictated by where we are and what we need to thrive in our cities, towns, or rural homesteads. We find water both beautiful and necessary, a source of survival and delight. We cannot identify with a place unless our needs are met there, but we want to identify with places where we feel connected by a transcendent pull factor—beauty, inspiration, nurture, belonging.
Understanding water this way—and the entire natural world— as something biological, social, and spiritual, I think we start to get closer to the heart of science and religion. Rather than insisting that we are masters of the universe, using science or religion as a method of domination, wisdom invites us to humbly accept our interde-
pendence on one another and on the higher power pulsing through all matter and all consciousness. That subtle voice is interested in the flourishing of all life, and it is asking a transcendent question: Which way will the water flow? Toward connection or competition? Abundance or scarcity?
Philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme says that science is entering its wisdom era, and I hope so. “It is easy,” he writes in his book The Heart of the Cosmos, “to become momentarily fascinated or titillated by the wild data of the new story of the universe, but it is another thing altogether to absorb its meaning into the center of one’s being. What is needed is embodiment.” It would be a mistake, he argues, to have that knowledge, that data, and not to let it alter our lived experience in the way of philosophy and religion and art. Instead of being carried by currents of greed and ruthless ambition, can we be caught up in a current of connection, creation, and consciousness? Down the river, across the sea. Rather than science vs. religion, the question ought to be science and religion in the service of what? The direction we take is as critical to our future as the water that sustains us.
Bekah McNeel
“Nature is the most neuroaesthetic place because it enlivens all our senses with color, temperature, light, smell, and shape.”
Ivy Ross
Photo courtesy of Josh Rubin
An Interview with Ivy Ross, Vice President of Hardware Design at Google
with Allison Peitz and Evan Morris
Ivy Ross approaches her multi-disciplinary work with immense curiosity. Coupled with raw intuition, this curiosity has propelled her dynamic and shapeshifting career through many phases: jewelry designer, director of design and product development for major corporations like Mattel and Gap, and her current role as Vice President of Hardware Design at Google.
Throughout her career, Ivy has developed an abiding interest in the field of ‘neuroesthetics,’ which is a scientific approach to how sensory experiences impact health, well-being, and even our capacity for creativity. Ivy explores this topic in Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, a book she recently co-authored with Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University. The field of neuroesthetics has deep relevance to the world of architectural design, particularly how interior spaces shape our physical and emotional landscape.
EVAN MORRIS: I want to start with a quote that I included when I reached out to you about doing this interview. It’s from the forward to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.
“How does the body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? If the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape the subsequent knowledge of all other space, of any larger cosmos? Is that house a group of organic habits or even something deeper, the shelter of imagination itself?”
I love the idea that the spaces in which we grow up can expand our capacity for imagination or hold the actual imagination itself. I understand that you grew up in a house that was formative in that way. Can you tell us about it? I remember you saying that you had a purple bedroom?
My dad was a designer, and he worked with Raymond Lowey, the famous industrial designer of the fifties. Our house was almost like a Frank Lloyd Wright in that he designed every doorknob, every detail was thought about. I didn’t realize how ahead of its time it was until my Girl Scout troop wanted to meet at my house. There was no plush carpeting. It had different juxtapositions of surfaces. This was in the fifties, and sometimes, in those days, you’d have a wall painted as an accent color. But in each of our bedrooms, my brother’s, my parent’s, and my own, every wall was the exact same color—even the floor! He would match the floor! Mine was this shade of purple, and he had the carpet dyed to match the paint. I literally lived in a purple box, and my brother lived in an orange box, and my parents lived in a gold box.
It’s funny to think about it now, having studied a lot about metaphysics and the chakras. I was a very creative kid, and I used to hang out in my room a lot. I now realize that it was my own little temple, that purple room. I don’t know how conscious he was of what colors he picked, although I look back and it makes sense. My brother is a mountain bike rider— very, very orange.
Living in that house is what gave me my sense of curiosity. He gave me my way to see things beyond
what they appear to be. He would say, “Ivy, look at the way that staircase is attached, or the way that light is intersecting with the other light. What can you learn from that and how do you apply that?”
I do agree with that statement that our spaces contain us, and they form us, and they inform us. In fact, I do this work with women called Eidetic Imagery Work. It starts with imagining yourself in the house you grew up in. And really, it’s getting to the subconscious of the things that informed us and inform our behaviors.
ALLISON PEITZ: We’re going to take a little jump in time. You ended up going to design school to study jewelry, and very early on you started a line called Small Wonders that was included in museum collections around the country. You have studied Qigong, bio-geometry, Jungian psychology, and various forms of sound therapy. While doing all of that, you’ve also had a very prosperous career leading design teams at companies like Swatch Group, Coach, Calvin Klein, Mattel, and most recently Google. Your professional and creative accomplishments are staggering, and we don’t mean to compress them, but what strikes us most is how much trust you must put into following your curiosities to connect those dots over time. How does curiosity play into your creative process, and where has it taken you?
Small Wonders is the line we ultimately created, but the work that’s in museums is the work I did with my own hands as more of a jewelry artist. I invented some new techniques working with titanium, niobium, and other unique metals. But even that was because I was curious. I would stay in the studio to relentlessly answer questions. It’s interesting, scientists and artists and designers are not that dissimilar. We like to ask questions, and we are relentless about figuring out the answer, whether it’s building something to get the answer or observing something in a Petri dish. I’ve always followed my intuition.
I have lived this parallel life. One track is the design part of me, which is the artist turned designer turned corporate leader. The other track is my work discovering the mysteries of life. They have fed each other, and I see the relationship, but I’ve been careful to keep them separate and only bring them together when it
makes sense. Times are changing, and I am cross-pollinating those two sides of myself more and more.
I’m someone that never wanted to do the same thing twice. People sometimes say, “What are you, a shoe designer, a toy designer?” My answer is that I want to take me with me and apply me to the next thing. I always choose the job or the opportunity where I am going to learn something that I haven’t learned yet.
If I stay in still water, I get very bored. I chose what I did based on intuition and this idea of is this something I haven’t done? And, are they going to use me for what I do best? And, am I going to learn something? But when I look back at it, there are a lot of throughlines and the connective tissue is design, which is solving problems, but solving different problems.
I was an art major and psychology minor. As I made the transition from being an artist to running creative departments, I realized I wanted to give my team the gift of feeling as creative as I did when I was an artist. I realized you must feed yourself inspiration. We don’t ask a computer for output until we give it input. I am very conscious as I lead design teams of making sure that I expose them to new kinds of things. For example, with Coach handbags, the turn lock was a big piece of the design. I took my team to an aerospace company where they made all the fittings for airplanes. At the time, my boss was like, “What are you doing? I would take your team to X or Y.” And I said, “No, no, no. To design great handbags, you don’t look at other handbags!”
We need to find other input. As creative people we have our antennas out.
AP: We need to get out of our comfort zone to be creative, right?
I want to make sure I keep my teams curious about things beyond what they’re supposed to be creating. Both curiosity and intuition have never led me wrong. Life is a journey; it’s like playing a board game. It’s like Chutes and Ladders! I feel sometimes you chute
up, and sometimes you go back down, but you keep moving around the board and keep collecting different experiences. I’m a big proponent of having many experiences so you have a lot of input.
EM: Your most recent move on “the board” has been into the field of neuroaesthetics. You recently co-authored, with Susan Magsamen, the book Your Brain on Art, which was wonderful. Can you explain what neuroaesthetics is and the state of that field of study?
Susan Magsamen runs the Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, and she was putting together a luminary board representing music, dance, design, and architecture. She had been tracking some of the innovative work I had done in various companies. We had lots of long conversations, and she invited me to host a salon in my home. It was like Noah’s Ark. We gathered two dancers, two painters, two architects, two filmmakers, two of everything, and the neuroscientists, and had a salon all day. The result is that we had this incredible dialogue. Afterward, she said, “I’ve been wanting to write a book about this. Do you want to do this with me?” And I responded, “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.”
Neuroaesthetics is the science of how art and aesthetic experiences, the things that enliven our senses, affect your brain and body. Nature is the most neuro-aesthetic place because it enlivens all our senses with color, temperature, light, smell, and shape. So, it’s no accident that when we’re in nature we feel so revitalized, so alive. Aesthetics are not just about making things look good or look pretty.
I think we’ve gone a bit flatlined. We’ve been optimizing for productivity and efficiency and put these things that enliven our senses on the side because we felt they’re not as important. For example, a lot of us made art as kids and then stopped because we were told we weren’t any good at it, or we were never going to make money at it.
The term neuroaesthetics was coined in the eighties by a neuroscientist. So, we didn’t make that up,
the science existed, but certainly the book has helped bring it to the public’s attention. Neuroaesthetics is the science, and we’re calling the field Neuro Arts. Even during my time at Google, my team and I have been using some of these principles when designing hardware. It has never been just How does it feel when you pick an object up? How does it feel when you hold it in your hand? What emotion does it evoke? I realized that I’ve been living these principles without knowing what to call them.
AP: I want to go back to something—the idea that nature and art are universally positive experiences. By bringing nature and art into spaces, we can make everybody feel and perform better in those spaces. But there are other aspects of aesthetics that are inherited or learned over time that are more specific to individuals. Based on some of the studies you’ve done and exhibits you’ve had, we’re curious to understand how cultural and social norms shape our aesthetic preferences?
I think you’re referring to A Space for Being, an installation that we did at the Milan Design Fair. It was the first time we designed an exhibition for the public to understand how our body is feeling all the time. We created three different spaces. Each included the same living room and dining room function, but different aesthetics, different art, music, color lighting, even the curvature of the walls and the textures. We also designed a wearable band to measure people’s biomarkers. We invited ten people at a time into each space and asked them to just be in the space. No talking, no photographing, no devices, just be.
Susan’s lab at Johns Hopkins and Google had worked out an algorithm that uses biomarkers to determine the state of least stress or most ease. It was a combination of heart rate and body temperature. At the end, we collected the bands and downloaded each person’s data on the spot. We would ask people, “Which room did you like the best?” And people would say, “Oh, the second one, because I love the blue couch," or, "the third one because it reminds me of my friend’s house.” And then we would show them the data. Over 58 percent of the time, the space that
they perceived to like the most wasn’t necessarily the space where their body was most at ease or most comfortable. We were like, “Oh my God, how could that be?”
Julie Bolty Taylor has a wonderful quote that we included in the book. I’m paraphrasing, but she says, We believe we’re thinking beings who have learned to feel, but we’re actually feeling beings who have learned to think. Once I really absorbed that, it was like, whoa, if we’re feeling beings first, we must design from that place.
The installation also showed us how culture shapes our experiences. For one participant, when we told her which room her body liked the best, which was the more aesthetically playful room, she started to cry. And we said, “Are you okay? Why are you crying?” She explained that she grew up in Latin America in a very poor family. She thought all three of the rooms were beautiful, and didn’t think she was worthy of them. But the time she was happiest in her life was
Ivy Ross
Photos courtesy of Edoardo Delille
when she was playing. And so the fact that her body felt the most comfortable in this playful aesthetic, it brought her back to those feelings of where she felt most at home, which was fascinating to us.
AP: Was the big disconnect between what people thought they preferred and what their body seemed to prefer?
Fifty-eight percent had totally different physical experiences than what they perceived; what their body felt was entirely different. My assumption is that the 42 percent whose perception and physical experience were aligned may be more connected to how they feel. Or maybe it was random, maybe it was just luck. But the cultural implications are also important. When it comes to color, people love to make assumptions about what colors mean. I did it a little bit when I said orange was more active, like my brother’s room! But there are cultural differences there too. Red for us in this country means danger or stop, but in Asia it means luck and money. We have to remember it’s very, very personal.
After the A Space for Being event, the press asked me if Google was going to make a band to track our stress. I don’t want to walk around in a world where I have to wear a band to tell me how I feel. The point was to illustrate to people that our bodies are feeling all the time, because our senses are taking everything in, and you need to be in tune to that if you want to have whole health.
AP: We often talk about architectural qualities that we perceive to be universally positive. We consider biophilic qualities like access to natural light or views of nature to be equally appreciated by everyone. And that may be true. But I think what you’re describing is the idea that we all bring a unique and different set of experiences to even our own senses.
EM: I think we’re having to expand our own understanding of those sensory experiences as they relate to the unique qualities of each individual. For example, we’re just starting to explore how best to design spaces for neurodivergent individuals,
and trauma-informed spaces that are about responding to the unique sensory qualities that each of us possess. Have your teams started to grapple with those things or talk to folks about spaces that have those qualities?
We gave a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival and an architect came up to us who was designing for a family who had two neurodivergent children. She was explaining to us the level of care and consciousness required to design that home because each child needed their room to be very different. And then what happens in those common spaces? How do you find the happy medium?
I know in corporate office settings the idea is to provide different kinds of sensorial spaces so that people can find what’s most comfortable for them. But when it’s a home, the design solutions can be much more individual. As designers we are always trying to tap into the individual’s needs and create solutions around them. It’s going to be an interesting future because we are getting into a place where design solutions, spaces, and even medicine are being
Photo courtesy of Edoardo Delille
tailored to the individual’s needs. In the fifties, it was like one Charles Eames chair for everyone. Now I feel like we’re recognizing our differences in more ways.
EM: Nature and art are similar in that there’s overwhelming evidence that the presence of those things in people’s lives, especially young people with forming brains, have enormously positive impacts on their outcomes. At the same time, nature and art are being systematically removed from public education, especially in certain parts of the country, and continue to be less and less accessible to people who are at socioeconomic disadvantages. How can we increase access to art and nature in a way that would make aesthetic experiences more universal or ubiquitous?
Art doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. In indigenous tribes—and there’s still 500 of them—they don’t have the word “art.” It’s the way they live their life. It is culture. They paint, they dance, they sing. So, art sounds like it’s for the elite, but it’s not. Art is just the ability to express ourselves.
It could be art that you got at a flea market. It could be art that you’ve made or that a relative made. It’s these things that create salient connections for you. In schools, kids should make art and put it up on the walls. Once you accept that it’s a necessary part of our health and avoid judgment, I think it opens a whole new avenue. There’s no excuse in my mind for not creating even small gardens inside of buildings or spaces. You don’t need a lot to get connected to the Earth, so it shouldn’t stop us. I really believe there are always ways to bring art and nature into our experiences.
Photos courtesy of Edoardo Delille
Burn Lake
Carrie Fountain
for Burn Construction Company
When you were building the I-10 bypass, one of your dozers moving earth at the center of a great pit slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, sliced into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew was sent home for the day. Next morning, water filled the pit. Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep green, there between the interstate and the sewage treatment plant. When nothing else worked, you called it a lake and opened it to the public. And we were the public.
The Dance I Invented in West Texas
Cecily Parks
Required no music, only a gravity whose pull I felt when I spun my skirt to the tops of the mesquite. My skirt came back down, snow fell on a mountain lion’s back in the pines, and the rusted handsaw still nestled in the weeds: I had proof of gravity, and gravity was proof that the earth still held me though I’d come to believe that it couldn’t hold all of me at once. In a canyon, campground, backyard, abandoned gas station, and beside a stock tank, I was careful not to let all of my body touch the ground. In a social hall I reached out my arms to dance with gravity but caught your shoulders instead, and though we didn’t deserve a honeymoon on this earth, it held us while balloons whispered all over the floor.
Jenny Browne is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University. She has served as Poet Laureate, both of the City of San Antonio and State of Texas, and is the author of five collections of poems, including I Am Trying to Love the Whole World forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026.
Carrie Fountain is a poet, novelist, children’s book author, and screenwriter. She is the author of three poetry collections, The Life, Instant Winner, and Burn Lake, winner of the National Poetry Series Award, and the novel I’m Not Missing. Her children’s book, The Poem Forest, tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker, among many others. In 2019, Fountain was named Poet Laureate of Texas. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Justin Garrison is the Director of Urban Design & Planning at Lake Flato. He helps lead complex urban design and planning projects and teams dedicated to integrating environmental, social, and economic sustainability into the built environment with high design standards. He is driven by his passion to build inclusive communities and design memorable places that are people focused and draw on a project’s authentic context, culture, and purpose.
Brynne Jones is a writer from east Tennessee. Her fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review and The Missouri Review
Online . She lives in Austin, Texas, where she received her MFA in Fiction & Screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers.
Mary Beth Lineberry is the Director of Branding & Market Strategy for Lake Flato Architects. She works internally and externally to grow thought leadership, brand recognition, and strategy that strengthens the firm’s mission. Mary Beth has a Master’s in English from the University of Virginia and currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.
Colin McDonald is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Texas Water Foundation. While he is immersed daily in water hearings, reports, studies, and meetings, he finds the rivers of Texas to be the best sources of information.
Bekah Stolhandske McNeel is a native of San Antonio, Texas, where she works as a journalist. Her work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Sojourners, The Guardian, The Trace, The Texas Tribune , and more. Known for her ability to communicate the high stakes of politics and policy and bring clarity to complex systems, Bekah keeps the most affected human beings at the forefront of her coverage. Bekah is a graduate of the London School of Economics, where she earned a MSc in Media Studies. She is married to Lewis McNeel, an architect with Lake Flato. They have two young children who, while they do not yet have careers, are very busy.
Evan Morris is focused on exploring the most elemental qualities of architecture: space, material, light, and the processes of time. As an architect at Lake Flato, his work focuses on domestic spaces around the country where individuals and families spend their most intimate moments. His commitment to thoughtful collaboration with clients, contractors, and craftspeople leads to artful solutions that emanate from the unique qualities of each project and reflect the spirit of those who call it home.
Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet whose most recent books are Grace Notes, Poems About Families (Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins), and I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas , co-edited with Marion Winik (Texas A&M University Press). She is the recipient of the Texas Writer Award from The Texas Book Festival and The Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, both in Fall 2024.
Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Seeds , forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025. The poetry editor for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.
Allison Peitz is a Project Director at Lake Flato and specializes in higher education work. She is drawn to
public-facing projects that address public interest through architecture and enjoys leveraging technology and research to solve problems of human interaction within the built environment.
Miriam Sitz is a Los Angeles–based writer focused on the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and sustainability. Born and raised in Texas, she holds degrees from Trinity University in San Antonio and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
Ryan Yaden is passionate about connecting architecture to the natural world around it. His childhood surrounded by the wild beauty of the Pacific Northwest deeply influenced his approach to design. Prior to joining Lake Flato, Ryan was a recipient of the prestigious Rotch Scholarship, where he studied threatened forms of cultural heritage in Asia. He holds degrees in both Architecture and Urban Design & Planning.
