The Standard is Yourself.

“The Standard is Yourself” was written on the whiteboard in front of me. I was bent over the plastic and metal table with my head resting between my two forearms. Incandescent lightbulbs tried their best in the basement room of the Berkeley public library. Gabriel Cortes asked the room, “Anyone else know what I’m going to say next?”. Mouths are closed, eyes are wandering elsewhere, the silence was deafening. Gabe continues and writes directly below.

“There are no wrong answers. Come as you are.

Bring:

Your mother’s native tongue.
The languages that raised you.
Your fears, dreams, and passions.
All of it.”

This is the whiteboard that raised me.

High school poetry workshops powered by Bay Area youth and enabled by a non-profit called Youthspeaks, taught me that the greatest resistance is the truth I speak. The story I chose to tell. This is the whiteboard that I call home. It taught me the power of vulnerability, of perspective, of being arbiters of our own truths. It is because of this I am able to see the poetry of the landscape. There is no power in the severance of self and I hold that closer and closer to my heart as I now embark on this new journey of graduate school.

Landscape Armaratures

The idea seemed foreign to me at first but as the readings unfolded, the landscape began to unveil itself as almost a kind of circuitry. The highways, the parking lots, the neighborhoods, the sidewalks, the crosswalks, the waterways, the bridges, the islands. All the different forms interact with flows differently. Some retain, some act as conduits, while others are voids and blockages. I am interested in the poetry of landscape armatures and how they either enable or disable different communities towards a more healthful lifestyle and their greater societal implications.

The built environment is the product of so much strife but there also lies so much beauty. This semester I hope to enable the poetry of the landscape to speak. Speak in science, in design, in culture. I hope to have a balanced perspective and seek to identify the ways in which I want the stories to be told and work from there.

To ground this conversation further, Forman specifically talked about the heterogeneity of the landscape in regards to patch dynamics. My first thought in translating that ecological message into a humanistic one means that heterogeneity is optimal. Just as ecological diversity is important to an ecosystem, so is the diversity of human perspectives in the built environment. One speaks in science and the other speaks in poetics and in order to distill positive change they must revolve around one another. Bourke’s fairytales act as precedents for how our stories are a place-based phenomenon. How do we interact and design while understanding the insider/outsider perspectives? How do we understand the limitations of our profession while maintaining validity? How do we move towards understanding cultural appreciation and deviate from monolithic design decisions?

I am excited for this semester and I invite us all to apply the Youthspeaks whiteboard as a way to enable our own narratives within the landscape.