Agricultural Landscapes: Seeing Rural Through Design [1 ed.] 113830817X, 9781138308176

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
Illustration credits
1 Introduction
2 Rural places
3 Urban places
4 Water places
5 GIAHS places
6 Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Agricultural Landscapes

Agricultural Landscapes:  Seeing Rural  Through Design follows on from the author’s ­previous books, Rural Design and Architecture and Agriculture, to encourage using design thinking to provide greater meaning and understanding of places where humans live and work with the rural landscape. Rural areas around the world are often viewed as special places with cultural, historical and natural significance for people. Dewey Thorbeck emphasizes the importance of these rural sites and their connections to urban areas through full-​color case studies of these places with particular emphasis on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), as identified by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, to document and explore personal experiences, lessons learned, and implications for the future. Rural landscapes are part of everyone’s heritage, and the book shows these connections and the unique GIAHS land use systems and landscapes as models for a more sustainable and prosperous rural and urban future. It includes practical examples of working places where growing food, raising animals, or harvesting from the sea has been the primary economy for centuries to exhibit a clear and sustainable local relationship between humans, animals, buildings, climate and place. Aimed at students, teachers and professionals, this book investigates how design thinking can be used to integrate rural and urban sites to shape land use for more sustainable futures. Dewey Thorbeck obtained his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. He then won a Rome Prize Fellowship and studied in Italy for two years. The recipient of a number of architectural design awards, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and past president of AIA Minnesota. Because of his rural design expertise, he was selected to serve as Vice Director of the organizing committee for the creation of the first World Rural Development Committee that will be managed by the World Green Design Organization established in 2010 by China and the European Union. Thorbeck is an Emeritus Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, Emeritus Founder of the Center for Rural Design sponsored by the College of Design and College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, and now a Senior Research Fellow in the Minnesota Design Center in the University of Minnesota College of Design. His sponsored research work is focused on bringing design and design thinking as a problem-​solving process to rural and urban land issues.



Agricultural Landscapes Seeing Rural Through Design

Dewey Thorbeck

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Dewey Thorbeck The right of Dewey Thorbeck to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Thorbeck, Dewey, author. Title: Agricultural landscapes : seeing rural through design / Dewey Thorbeck. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018044664 | ISBN 9781138308176 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138308183 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315142869 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Landscape architecture. | Sustainable agriculture. | Land use, Rural. Classification: LCC SB472 .T484 2019 | DDC 712–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044664 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​30817-​6  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​30818-​3  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​14286-​9  (ebk) Typeset in Charter and FS Albert by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments Preface Illustration credits

1

Introduction

vii xiii xvii xxv

1

Urban and rural divide  3 Seeing rural through design  5 Book organization   13 Design thinking  15 Urban agriculture  17 Sketching as a way of seeing  19 Interdisciplinary design  23 Summary  25

2

Rural places

26

Rural villages  27 Wineries and vineyards  43 Farms and fields   57 River valleys  61 Special rural places  65 Summary  85

3

Urban places

87

City places  88 Cafes  107 Public markets  111 Squares and streets  115

Contents

v

Houses   121 Summary  125

4

Water places

132

Coastal villages  134 Fortified cities  138 Island places  142 Waterfront cities and towns  153 River places  163 Discovered places  175 Summary  189

5

GIAHS places

192

Chile: Chiloe Island small farm agricultural systems  196 Peru: Andean terraced agricultural system in the Cusco-​Puno corridor   199 Tahiti: understory farming system  205 Mongolia: nomadic steppes culture  208 Italy: lemon gardens on the Amalfi coast  211 North Vietnam: rice terraces  215 Indonesia: Bali rice terraces  216 China: rice-​fish culture in Qingtian County   219 Kenya and Tanzania: Maasai pastoral system  220 Summary  221

6

vi

Epilogue

223

Bibliography Index

231 233

Contents

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.8 2.10 2.11 2.12

Urban/​Rural Design diagram by Center for Rural Design Sketches of Fattoria Le Capezzine Winery near Cortona, Italy Sketches of Fattoria Le Capezzine interiors Sketch of city and valley in Sos Del Rey Católico, Spain Sketch of narrow street in Sos Del Rey Católico, Spain Sketches of street scenes in Scanno, Italy Sketch of the rural China village of Chuan Di Xia outside of Beijing Sketch of Machu Picchu, Peru Sketches of Masseria Cervarolo in Puglia Region of Italy Photograph from a community workshop with Center for Rural Design Photograph of high-​rise building in Singapore Photograph of Dewey Thorbeck sketching in the public market in Pisac, Peru Sketch of main entry to the American Academy in Rome Dewey Thorbeck explaining sketches to school children in Myanmar Aerial photograph of Minnesota Zoological Garden Sketch of Montepulciano, Italy, with valley below Sketch of street in Montepulciano Sketch of Orvieto, Italy Sketch of Orvieto cathedral Sketch of rural village of Chuan Di Xia in China Sketch of typical courtyard house in Chuan Di Xia Sketch of Matera, Italy, and river valley below Sketch of cave hotel where we stayed and cave houses in Matera Sketch of Trullo houses in Alberobello, Italy, in Puglia region Sketch of abandoned Trullo farmhouse Sketches of Colina, Uruguay Sketches of ‘Street of Sighs’ and basilica in Colina, Uruguay

List of figures

4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 16 19 20 21 22 23 28 29 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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2.13 Sketch of old village over pond in Laerdal, Norway 2.14 Sketch of old houses in Laerdal 2.15 Sketches of walled city of Visby on Gotland, Island, Sweden, and guide 2.16 Sketches of street scenes in Visby 2.17 Sketches of Tallinn, Estonia, a World Heritage Site 2.18 Sketches of street scenes in Tallinn 2.19 Sketches of Procida Island near Naples, Italy 2.20 Sketches of Ischia Island and the Aragon Castle 2.21 Sketch of visitor courtyard in Santa Rita Winery in Chile 2.22 Sketch of Museo Andino at Santa Rita Winery 2.23 Sketch of view from entry to Vina Vik Winery in Chile 2.24 Sketch of courtyard of Vina Vik Winery 2.25 Sketches of Vina Vik processing plant with fabric roof 2.26 Sketches of Lapostolle Winery in Chile 2.27 Sketches of processing sequence at Lapostolle 2.28 Sketches of entrance to Piedra Infinita Winery near Mendoza, Argentina 2.29 Sketches of interior processing areas at Piedra Infinita 2.30 Sketches of Canary Islands and our guide, Steve 2.31 Sketches of Vina Quinta do Vallado, Portugal, and hotel on Douro River 2.32 Sketches of Lyman Winery and Sunce Winery in Napa Valley, California 2.33 Sketch of Berwood Hill bed and breakfast in Minnesota 2.34 Sketch of view from Trollstigen Resort near Andalsnes, Norway 2.35 Sketch of Norcia Valley farms in Abruzzo region of Italy 2.36 Sketches of rural scenes in Norcia Valley in Abruzzo, Italy 2.37 Sketch of Two Rivers valley near Glenorchy, New Zealand 2.38 Sketch of Rees River valley in New Zealand 2.39 Sketches of Yangtze River in China from the boat Century Sky 2.40 Sketch of cave dwelling in Tonto National Memorial near Phoenix, Arizona 2.41 Sketch of abandoned metal mining structure in Arizona 2.42 Sketch of the historic Mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori in Arizona 2.43 Sketch of Woodford Reserve Distillery in Kentucky 2.44 Sketch of Buckhorn Inn in Tennessee 2.45 Sketches of historic Pierce Point Dairy Farm in California 2.46 Sketches of Park City, Utah, in the winter 2.47 Sketch of the Café in Glenorchy, New Zealand 2.48 Sketches of the two sides of Main Street in Martinborough, New Zealand 2.49 Sketch of Saint Anne’s Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, Maine

viii

39 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 47 48 49 51 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 60 60 62 63 63 64 66 67 67 68 69 69 71 72 72 73

List of figures

2.50 Sketch of the Great Wall of China at Badaling 2.51 Sketch of the view from a portal on the Great Wall 2.52 Sketch of the Borgund Stavkirke wooden church near Laerdal, Norway 2.53 Sketch of the mountain Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat, Spain 2.54 Sketch of the main plaza and city hall in Seu d’Urgell, Spain 2.55 Sketch of Siena, Italy, from window of hotel 2.56 Sketch of the city hall tower in Piazza del Publico in Siena 2.57 Sketches of city of Kazan in Siberia, Russia 2.58 Sketches of wooden houses in city of Irkutsk in Siberia, Russia 2.59 Sketches of the open-​air museum of historic buildings near Ikutsk 2.60 Sketch of the wooden Old Russian Orthodox Church in Ikutsk 2.61 Sketch of the mammoth Uluru Rock in central Australia that is sacred to Aboriginals 2.62 Sketches of the Aboriginal Cultural Center near Uluru Rock 3.1 Sketches of the colorful Caminito Street in Buenos Aires, Argentina 3.2 Sketch of tango dancers on a street in Buenos Aires 3.3 Sketches of the historic city of Buenos Aires 3.4 Sketch of modern Shanghai, China, from the Bund 3.5 Sketches of scenes on the Bund and adjacent factory with silk weavers 3.6 Sketches of Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai 3.7 Sketch of Rosenborg Slot in Kongens Have in Copenhagen, Denmark 3.8 Sketch of Tivoli Garden in Copenhagen 3.9 Sketches of Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic 3.10 Sketches of the Old Jewish Synagogue in Prague 3.11 Sketch of the Grand Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square in Prague 3.12 Sketch of Campo di Fiori in Rome, Italy 3.13 Sketch of the ruins of the historic Trajan’s Market in Rome 3.14 Sketch of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, designed by Antoni Gaudí 3.15 Sketch of Antoni Gaudí’s Parc Guell in Barcelona 3.16 Sketches of special places in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan 3.17 Sketches of Brandenburg Gate and Hotel Adlon in Berlin, Germany 3.18 Sketch of interior lobby of Hotel Adlon 3.19 Sketch of the Grand Café in Oslo, Norway 3.20 Sketch of the Bla Porten cafe adjacent to the art museum in Stockholm, Sweden 3.21 Sketch from interior of the Wintergarten Café in Berlin, Germany 3.22 Sketch of Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires, Argentina 3.23 Sketch of the San Miguel indoor market in Madrid, Spain 3.24 Sketches of the Mercat de la Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain 3.25 Sketch of the Vermont Country Store in Weston, Vermont

List of figures

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 84 85 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 100 102 103 104 106 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

ix

3.26 3.27 3.28 3.29 3.30 3.31 3.32 3.33 3.34 3.35 3.36 3.37 3.38 3.39 3.40 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21

x

Sketch of Columbia Square in Savannah, Georgia Sketch of Place du Marche Sainte Catherine in Paris, France Sketch of Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana Sketch of a street band on Jackson Square Sketches of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria Sketches of the streets near the opera house in Vienna Sketches of houses on Castle Hill in Budapest Sketches of the great promenade in Morelia, Mexico Sketch of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House in Coyoacan, Mexico Sketch of the Thomas Starkey House in Essex, Connecticut Sketches of the entrance to Casa del Las Mananitas and its birds in Cuernavaca, Mexico Sketch of the garden of Las Mananitas Sketch of two small wineries in Mendoza, Argentina, along with our guide and the people we met at lunch Sketches of the west entrance to the Kremlin in Moscow and the historic museum Sketches of things we saw and experienced walking through the Kremlin in Moscow Sketch of marina at Riomaggiore, Italy, in the Cinque Terre region Sketch of via Columbo in Riomaggiore Sketch of harbor at Vernazza in the Cinque Terre region Sketch of terraces from Cicero Restaurant in Corniglia in the Cinque Terre region Sketches from top of the walls around the old city of Dubrovnik, Croatia Sketches of the city of Hvar, Croatia Sketches of Kotor, Montenegro Sketches of St Luke’s church and plaza in Kotor Sketch of the castle walls in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico Sketch of colorful buildings in Old San Juan Sketches of hotel and harbor in Hydra, Greece Sketches of bar and restaurant on Madeline Island on Lake Superior Sketch of ‘Sea Dream’ cottage on Orcas Island, Washington Sketch of boats in Little Harbor, Abaco Island, Bahamas Sketch of workers constructing palm umbrella on Abaco Island Sketches of buildings on Minister’s Island, St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada Sketch of the Great Barn on Minster’s Island Sketch of a boat house on Lofoten Islands, Norway Sketch of Henningsvaer harbor on Lofoten Islands Sketch of Nusfjord harbor on Lofoten Islands Sketch of Viking Museum and ship at Borg on Lofoten Islands

116 116 117 118 119 120 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 130 131 135 136 137 137 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

List of figures

4.22 Sketches of Granville Island market and view of downtown Vancouver, Canada 4.23 Sketch of fishing wharf in St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada 4.24 Sketch of shops on Water Street in St Andrews 4.25 Sketch of harbor in Auckland, New Zealand 4.26 Sketch of the harbor at midnight and wooden houses in Bergen, Norway 4.27 Sketch of an alley with Hanseatic Houses on harbor in Bergen 4.28 Sketches of traditional rural buildings and the harbor in Alesund, Norway 4.29 Sketches of harbors in Nantucket and Chatham, Massachusetts 4.30 Sketches of harbors in Kennebunkport and York, Maine 4.31 Sketch of the harbor and totem pole in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada 4.32 Sketches of boats in harbor and under repair in Bayfield, Wisconsin 4.33 Sketch of boats in harbor in Sitka, Alaska 4.34 Sketch of Minneapolis, Minnesota, skyline over the Mississippi River 4.35 Sketches of the big dam on the Yangtze River in China 4.36 Sketches of lunch place on the Yangtze River 4.37 Sketches of river scenes on the Yangtze River 4.38 Sketch of our boat and others on the Ayevarwaddy River in Mandalay, Myanmar 4.39 Sketches of life in Mandalay 4.40 Sketches of Oh Ne Kyaung village on the Ayevarwaddy River 4.41 Sketch of the pathway from river landing to Minhia village on the Ayevarwaddy River 4.42 Sketches of the family business making pottery in Yandabo village in Myanmar 4.43 Sketches of the blessing by monks on the boat and farmers’ market in Megway village 4.44 Sketches of historic Ponte Vecchio and nearby courtyards in Florence, Italy 4.45 Sketch of the Palazzo Vecchio (city hall) in Florence 4.46 Sketch of Duomo on a winter morning in Florence 4.47 Sketch of the gristmill at Philipsburg on the Hudson River in New York 4.48 Sketch of Frenchman’s Bay and Cathedral Rock in Bar Harbor, Maine 4.49 Sketch of the last whaling ship undergoing reconstruction in Mystic, Connecticut 4.50 Sketch of the Dolphin Fish Market and wild chickens in Hanalei on Kuai Island, Hawaii 4.51 Sketch of Hanalei National Wildlife refuge, with taro fields

List of figures

155 156 157 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182

xi

4.52 4.53 4.54 4.55 4.56 4.57 4.58 4.59 4.60 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18 5.19 6.1 6.2 6.3

xii

Sketch of quaint shops on Spit Harbor in Homer, Alaska Sketch of the boat Majestic undergoing repair in Seward, Alaska Sketch of Nubble Lighthouse near York, Maine Sketch of Portland Lighthouse and Lobster Shack near Portland, Maine Sketches of Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior, Minnesota Sketches of Greek Orthodox Church and a winery on Santorini Island, Greece Sketches of Vederna Resort and receptionist on Santorini Sketches of pathway views from Firi to Oia on Santorini Sketches of Sydney, Australia Sketch of historic houses on stilts along river in Castro, Chiloe Island, Chile Sketch of the street side of the houses on stilts in Castro Sketch of the open-​air Achao Market on Quinchao Island Sketch of the farmer Sandra Naiman on Chiloe Island Sketches of the Naiman farm on Chiloe Island Sketch of the Pisac daily market in the Sacred Valley Sketch of the 300-​year-​old bakery oven in Pisac Sketch of historic farmhouse and animals in Sacred Valley Sketch of first view of Machu Picchu and storehouses Sketch of historic terraces and storehouses at Machu Picchu Sketch of Moorea Island in Tahiti, and granddaughters Riley and Addison Soroka Sketch of boat and tree on island in Tahiti Sketch of houses on the island in Tahiti Sketch of Ulaanbaatar and nomadic family living in gers, and of youngest girl in family Sketch of events at the Naadam Festival in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia Sketches of Rock Islands and rural farmhouse on the Amalfi coast, with guide and cook Sketches of Positano village on the Amalfi coast in Italy Photograph of rural rice terraces and village in North Vietnam, by Julia Abraham Photograph of rural rice terraces and village in Bali, by George Ceman Sketch of School of Nursing in Haiti, by Minnesota architect Jim Lammers Sketch of castle on a hill on Island of Ibiza, Spain, by Siena Ann Soroka Sketch of colorful open-​air market in Haleiwa on the island of Oahu, Hawaii

183 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 197 198 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 212 214 215 217 226 227 230

List of figures

Acknowledgments

As in my first two books, I especially want to thank the love of my life, Sharon Ann Thorbeck. She is my wife, best friend and business colleague, who organizes and manages our life together and travels. Without her love, patience and encouragement this book and the others would not have been written. Over the past thirty plus years Sharon and I have traveled extensively around the world, and I sketched along the way to record what we were seeing during those travels. Some of the sketches were included in my first two books, and in this book I use them to illustrate how an architect, educator, and author specializing in rural design sees agricultural landscapes and the relationships between humans, animals, buildings and environments. I also want to acknowledge and thank the influence of my former partners in professional practice. Landscape architect Roger Martin, a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome at the same time I was there, and a faculty member in the University of Minnesota College of Design as first director of the landscape architect program, helped me understand connections between landscape and buildings. Graphic designer Peter Seitz from Germany, whom I first met at Yale University and reconnected with later when he came to Minneapolis as design curator at the Walker Art Center, opened up the world of graphic design, exhibit design and visual communications. And systems analyst and computer specialist Stephen Kahne, who was director of the hybrid computer laboratory at the University of Minnesota, showed us how systems thinking, and the computer could become powerful design tools. Together in 1969 we established an interdisciplinary design firm called InterDesign. Because of our design ambitions and the opportunity of looking at a design problem from multiple points of view, we responded to a request for proposals from the newly formed Minnesota Zoo Board and were selected to master plan a new zoo in Minnesota. Later, when funding was provided by the Minnesota Legislature, we were again selected to design and manage the construction of the zoo. The Minnesota Zoological Garden was the first northern

Acknowledgments

xiii

hemisphere facility to be open all year round with animals displayed in their natural habitats. The zoo was designed to appear to visitors as though the animals were free and people were caged. We worked together for ten years, and I  am indebted to the three of them for their friendship and insight into their world of design and design thinking. I also wish to thank Professor Thomas Fisher, the former dean of the College of Design and now director of the Minnesota Design Center (MDC) at the University of Minnesota. He is a highly acclaimed author and educator, and wrote the Foreword to my first two books. I  am now working with him at MDC as an affiliated senior research fellow on rural issues. I also want to thank design colleagues who wrote supporting comments for the back covers of my first two books. They include Timothy Collins of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs and Western Illinois University; Timothy Borich of the College of Design at Iowa State University; John Porus, former director of the Carl Small Town Center at Mississippi State University; Dr David R. Witty, the Provost and Vice-​President Academic at Vancouver Island University in Canada; Dr Jiang Haushu in China, who is the founder of the Beijing Rural Culture Renewal Volunteers Association and curator of the World Rural Development Forum; and Blaine Brownell, an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota and author of the Transmaterial series published by Routledge. I especially would like to acknowledge the support of Dr John H. Troughton of Sydney, Australia, who has co-​authored several articles with me and tried to get an international conference on rural design organized in Australia. He keeps me informed of rural issues in his part of the world, and we finally met in Sydney during my trip to Australia in October 2017. My great thanks go to James Lammers, FAIA, a prominent Minnesota architect who specializes in healthcare planning and sketches when he travels, whose summary of his visit to Haiti is included in Chapter  6 along with one of his sketches on this recent trip, and his thinking about biophilic design and a photograph of plant covered buildings in Singapore on another recent trip; David Frame, a retired biology teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer, who provided his comments about the impact of tourism on a GIAHS site in Africa for Chapter 5; George Ceman, a retired rocket scientist now exploring the planet rather than outer space, who wrote about his visit to the rice terraces in Bali for Chapter 5; and Dr David R. Witty, now retired Provost and Vice-​President of Vancouver Island University, for his review of design issues for his region, initially in preparation for a lecture I gave on regional design on Vancouver Island and now included in Chapter 6. My great thanks also to Siena Ann Soroka, our youngest granddaughter, who is nine years old and a good artist, whose sketch from our visit to the Mediterranean region in the summer of 2018 is included in Chapter 6; and Julia Abraham, our second oldest granddaughter, who following her high school learning trip to rural North Vietnam in the summer of 2017 provided a young person’s reflections about

xiv

Acknowledgments

ancient rice terrace farming in southeast Asia and a photograph of the village where she stayed, included in Chapter 5. The professional support, creative advice and assistance of Francesca Ford, Grace Harrison, Aoife McGrath and the entire team from the Routledge/​Taylor & Francis Group, who worked with me to clarify the intent and scope of my books, has been greatly appreciated. I also appreciate and am thankful for the comments from the anonymous reviewers of my book proposals. Their criticisms were helpful in clarifying the intent, finalizing the proposal and developing the manuscript. I was fortunate to meet and have coffee with Aoife McGrath when she was in Minnesota for the Society of Architectural Historians national conference, and I was able to express my thanks to her in person for how nice it has been to work with her and with the Routledge/​Taylor & Francis Group, and for the excellent and creative way they work with you to publish a book. This book, like my others, is dedicated to Sharon Ann Thorbeck and her two children, Chad Abraham and Amy Soroka, who with their spouses are the parents of our seven beautiful granddaughters, whom we are so proud of and to whom the book is also dedicated. Chad and Mikki Abraham live in Orono, Minnesota, and have four of our granddaughters: Callie, who is now a sophomore at Northwestern University in Chicago, majoring in communications and journalism; Julia, who wrote about her visit to North Vietnam and is a creative and all-​around high school senior, and who will be soon making a decision about the college she will attend in 2020; Bailey, a high school sophomore, whose heart is in all sports and who is a good athlete, and who also loves design; and Remy, a strong hockey player with a lovable and mischievous personality, who is going to do well in life whatever she decides. Amy and Gregg Soroka live in Deerfield (a Chicago suburb), Illinois, and have three of our granddaughters: Riley, a smart born leader, swimmer and gymnast, and now a teenager; Addison, with a great smile, who is inquisitive, athletic and an excellent writer, and who can tackle anything; and the highly capable Siena, a creative and prolific young artist, whose wonderful sketch of a castle on a hill on Ibiza island in the Mediterranean Sea is included in this book. The granddaughters remind me daily why visioning through design a better quality of life and a sustainable future for both urban and rural communities is so important.

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xv

Preface

To me the most beautiful places in the world are those that express a close integration of architecture and landscape in a profound and human way. A beautiful building can evoke an emotional response, but a beautiful building that is part of nature is poetic. I have traveled extensively around the world with Sharon Ann Thorbeck, documenting through sketches the rural landscapes we see and experience. She organizes our trips, and is good at finding places to stay and researching how to get around. My collection of more than thirty-​five sketch books assembled over the years has been crucial to my understanding of the world and my professional and academic work. I have authored two books on rural design and rural architecture, and this book will complete a trilogy about rural regions where approximately half of the world’s population still lives and works. My passion is to try to design beautiful buildings that connect with nature, and to make the world a better place with these three books by:  (1) providing information so urban people have a better understanding of rural people, where they live and their culture, to try to bridge the divide; (2) helping rural regions worldwide to cross borders and jurisdictions and link with urban regions, to better resolve critical global issues; (3) presenting ideas to help reduce rural poverty and homelessness, and make rural regions more economically, culturally and environmentally sustainable; (4) promoting the design of buildings that link function with culture, climate and place; and (5) emphasizing the importance of sustainability in shaping urban and rural land uses today so that future generations can shape theirs. I am drawn to rural places around the world because of my rural roots. As a practicing architect and educator, I think rural regions are not well understood by urban people and that it is critical to link them together for a better collective future. I love cities and urban places, yet when visiting urban places I always find myself searching for their historic connections with the surrounding agricultural landscape. Perhaps the most interesting cities are those located at a place

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where land and water connect, linking human settlements with water for fishing and transportation. They are urban places, organized around water, providing a working connection between their surrounding agricultural countryside and the outside world. They may be urban places connected to a sea, or they may be located on a river where it was possible to cross and connect the two sides together, providing the reason for a city to form. One can see such a connection in the founding of Rome on both sides of the Tiber River, with an island in the middle; in Paris crossing the Seine with an island; in London crossing the narrow and wandering Thames; and in Minnesota, where the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul were both shaped by connections and crossings of the Mississippi River. During my studies as an undergraduate architecture student at the University of Minnesota, as a graduate student in architecture at Yale University, and soon after as a Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, I had the opportunity to meet many leading architects from around the world. As I think back, it was Ralph Rapson, head of the School of Architecture in Minnesota, and Louis Kahn, when he was visiting critic at Yale, who impressed me the most. Later, at the American Academy in Rome, I met Louis Kahn again, had dinner with him, and learned how he looked at the connections between culture, climate and landscape that he saw in Italy, and how he tried to reflect those connections in his powerful building designs. Other architects that influenced me were Paul Rudolph, the head of the School of Architecture at Yale, where I also worked part time in his office, and Yale critic Edward Larabee Barnes, whom I  met at the American Academy in Rome. Later, in 1971, Barnes designed the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Also, I  must mention the late great Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, whom I met when I organized an exhibition of Norwegian architecture in Minneapolis in 1984. He came to Minnesota, and made a public presentation of his work in Norway and spoke at the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. I have visited several of his projects in Norway and can feel the strong connection between function, culture, climate and place in his work. I also had the pleasure of meeting the Norwegian author and architectural historian Christian Norberg-​Schulz when I  was studying at the American Academy in Rome. He invited me to visit the villa in Italy that he and his Italian wife constructed on top of a mountain overlooking Porto Ercole on the Argentario promontory about 40 miles north of Rome. It was a simple and dramatic modern pavilion home with a wraparound porch on the second level overlooking the Tuscan coast. His first book, Intentions in Architecture, was published in 1965, followed by Existence, Space and Architecture in 1971, and his third book, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, was published in 1979. In Genius Loci he discusses why people dwell where they do, how they identify with an environment, and how they interpret the meaning of place: Dwelling therefore is more than shelter. It implies that the spaces where life occurs are places in the true sense of the word. A place is a space which has

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a distinct character. Since ancient times the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’ has been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life. Architecture means to visualize the genius loci, and the task of the architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell. (Norberg-​Schulz,  1979) Perhaps it was those conversations in Rome with Louis Kahn and Christian Norberg-​Schulz that helped me clarify my interest in rural and the spirit of place after I discovered the Italian hill town and its unique agrarian culture. The Italian hill town of Orvieto in Umbria (north of Rome) was a delight to visit and explore. Populated since pre-​Roman Etruscan times, it became in the Middle Ages one of the region’s primary cultural centers. In the morning the farmers would load up their donkeys and move down into the valleys to work with the land and grow vines for wine, returning to the safety of the community at night. Orvieto is a rural place where farmers, buildings, landscape and agriculture all link together. It is a community on top of a hill, providing a safe haven were people and animals live together in harmony. Constructed with local stone in tight arrangements along narrow streets and alleys, the buildings all looked the same when we visited, yet all were different. For me it was a remarkable expression of culture, architecture and landscape integrating humans, animals and environments in a beautiful and sustainable way. Orvieto was a rural place that was so different from what I knew growing up in a small rural town in northwest Minnesota near the source of the Mississippi River. Visiting these rural places during my two years in Italy had a profound impact on my future life and my careers as architect, educator and author. Later, through my professional architectural work designing a new zoo and other animal-​related research and interpretive buildings, and my academic work teaching design in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota and having students do projects in rural towns, I came to understand that there was something special and important about rural life. I also learned that rapid changes were taking place in rural America, and the changes were having a negative impact on rural lives. These experiences made me realize that the design professions and the design schools had fundamentally ignored rural America as they concentrated on urban issues. As a result, in 1997, I  founded the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota to bring design and design thinking as a problem-​ solving process to rural issues. The Center was in both the College of Design and the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, so we had direct contact with academic researchers working on land and food issues. Using evidence-​based rural design, the projects that the Center worked on with rural communities throughout the State of Minnesota helped me shape the first two books that I wrote: Rural Design: A New Design Discipline (2012) and Architecture and Agriculture: A Rural Design Guide (2017). This book goes beyond

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those and completes the trilogy by describing rural landscapes around the world through words and sketches. My goal with this book is to help readers better see and understand agricultural landscapes and help everyone better link urban and rural futures together.

Rural is more than farming In this book are places from all over the planet that to me reflect the ‘genius loci’ that I tried to capture and express in my sketches. In doing so, I remembered Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City that was mandatory reading when I was studying architecture. In it he described mental images that city dwellers used to understand their surroundings. They were paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Even though he wrote these images about living in a city and discussed them as urban design, I think they are equally relevant when thinking about rural landscapes, farms and rural towns through rural design. Rural regions worldwide are very different, with their unique agriculture reflecting climate, culture, landscape and environment. In addition to producing food and fiber, agriculture has shaped the cultivated human landscape with grasslands and grazing animals, grain fields, vineyards, orchards, and natural areas that provide immense scenic beauty and a wide range of social, cultural, and natural and economic benefits for both rural and urban people. There is just so much fertile soil on the planet with the right climate for agriculture and producing food. These agricultural landscapes have been a large part of the history of every culture, and they still exist today. However, rural areas around the world are undergoing profound demographic, economic, cultural and environmental change, creating considerable challenges and stress for their residents and on the ecosystems upon with they depend for their livelihood and quality of life. Rural culture and economics are being impacted since the 1960s, when the planet shifted from a primarily rural orientation to an urban one. This shift –​economic, political, and cultural –​has caused an enormous expansion of cities, with much of the urban development sprawling into the fertile countryside. The movement has also caused rural people to feel that they have been ignored by urban people, creating a cultural divide in America Today, however, there seems to be a move back to the city center as young people growing up in the suburbs are looking at the downtown areas that provide more immediate access to all the cultural, economic and recreational opportunities found in a city. This has caused a significant increase in apartment construction, leading one to wonder about the future of the suburb. A few years ago, at the Center for Rural Design, we organized a proposal to look at a transect line running from downtown St Paul south into Dakota County and counties beyond. The intent was to look at the existing transect and then to envision alternatives for design and construction to accommodate an increasing population while maintaining food

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supply from agricultural lands. We thought that there should be a rather distinct difference between urban and rural environments. The creative alternative for the transect might be one that increases the density within the current built-​up metropolitan area while allowing for urban agriculture to become an important land use designation to help ensure future food supply in the middle zone and saving the agricultural lands as they currently are. The proposal was not funded, but the need remains. It is interesting that in 2015 the Minnesota State Legislature started investigating urban agriculture as a land planning element to be used by cities in the state in their long-​term planning, but this has not yet been finalized. The urban/​rural edge, or the peri-​urban landscape, may be the most crucial region for designers today to bring design thinking to the creation of viable alternatives to haphazard sprawl. This edge could become a third land use designation that is different from urban or rural. Designers need to design and construct new mixed-​use developments at higher densities, incorporating nature and urban agriculture through biophilic design thinking into the peri-​urban development concept. With another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050, as reported by the United Nations, it is crucial to human well-​being, food and water security that we find ways to use the design process and design thinking to better shape land uses for the future –​urban, peri-​urban and rural –​and to do it in such a way that future generations can also shape theirs.

Rural design trilogy My first book, Rural Design: A New Design Discipline (Routledge, 2012), introduced the idea of rural design as a problem-​solving process while establishing the theoretical base for rural design as a new design discipline. Much of the book was related to my work as founder and director of the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota. Rural design uses evidence-​based community design as one of the core premises of its theoretical base, so it becomes a method to better connect the research academy to rural issues. From the experiences of the Center for Rural Design over twenty years, it is quite clear that rural citizens must be actively involved in the design process for them to accept the recommendations that emerge from an academic study involving their place. It also became apparent that for them to enthusiastically accept the results the community should at least partially pay for the work, and that it was always more effective if a woman oversaw the community design process. Women are more consensus oriented and effective at nurturing agreement among a wide range of people on the committee, as well as effective at monitoring and ensuring progress toward an effective bottom-​up solution. In rural regions men are more used to a top-​down decision-​making process by elected officials (usually men) at township, municipality or county government levels.

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My second book, Architecture and Agriculture:  A Rural Design Guide (Routledge, 2017), expanded on rural design to discuss the architectural connections between humans, buildings and landscape systems connected to agriculture, making a case for linking urban and rural issues together for better and more resilient futures. My purpose was to help identify design thinking that would help shape sustainable land uses that respond to the needs of humans today, without limiting the ability of future generations to shape theirs. It also discussed the design of agricultural buildings and housing in rural areas around the world, with case studies of projects by renowned architects as well as some rather nice rural places that were not designed by architects. It emphasized building form following function as well as climate, culture and place. This third book, Agricultural Landscapes:  Seeing Rural Through Design, is about seeing and understanding the human heritage of rural people, their buildings, and their landscapes as sustainable models for the future. I  think of the three books working together as a trilogy about rural environments and how design can become the problem-​solving process to help shape future urban and rural land uses, doing so in a way that will still allow future generations to shape theirs. Rural areas around the world are special because they are places where human culture and natural and cultivated landscapes are strongly and sustainably connected to help ensure food security for a rapidly increasing world population. This book’s objectives are to document and explain rural places that I have previously visited and studied as well as case studies of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) identified by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-​FAO). I  was aware of these ancient agricultural areas, but not fully knowledgeable of the UN-​FAO establishment of the GIAHS sites and their importance until I  met Dr Parviz Koohafkan, Chairman of the World Agricultural Heritage Foundation in Rome, at a meeting in Beijing in 2015. The meeting was organized by the World Green Design Organization (a joint venture of China and the European Union) to establish the World Rural Development Committee, for which Koohafkan and I were both named Vice Directors. When Dr Koohafkan was director of the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations he conceived and organized the GIAHS concept. Now retired from the FAO, he continues to frame the discussion with his foundation, and in a new book with Miguel Aliteri, Forgotten Agricultural Heritage: Reconnecting Food Systems and Sustainable Development (Routledge, 2017), he describes these ancient agricultural systems. Their new book has been helpful to me in researching these historic agricultural systems and better understanding the places that Sharon and I visited. The systems are communities of crop farmers, animal herders, fishing people and forest people who have developed complex, diverse and locally adapted agricultural systems for centuries that Koohafkan and Altieri describe as a ‘legacy for the future’ (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2011). One of the GIAHS regions is the Andean agricultural system in the Cusco-​ Puno corridor in Peru that includes Pisac and Machu Picchu that Sharon and I visited in 2005. The Andean people of this region have over the centuries domesticated a

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large variety of crops and animals. The most important are root and tuber plants, with over 400 varieties of potatoes grown on terraced landscapes while avoiding soil erosion and environmental degradation. These sustainable practices have been handed down through family connections and generations of people harmoniously living and working in the valleys and selling in village markets. In a time of rapid change and growing world population, it is critical that urban and rural futures be linked to resolve global issues and reduce poverty. This book completes a trilogy on rural design to help design students better understand the world that they will be shaping, as well as to assist a wide range of design and engineering professionals, community leaders, governments, business entrepreneurs and citizens attempting to deal with the rapid changes taking place. It is imperative today for urban and rural people to work together, and to make investments and incorporate technology to create rural opportunity for economic advancement. This could have a significant impact on slowing the migration of rural people to urban areas while improving quality of life, both urban and rural. Agricultural Landscapes:  Seeing Rural Through Design illustrates with text and sketches the unique GIAHS rural agricultural systems and communities and other special rural places providing models for integrating humans, animals and environments for a better future together. The global impacts of climate change, population increase, food security, water resources, renewable energy and wellness encompass both urban and rural regions worldwide  –​what happens in one part of the world affects us all. Since this book is written by an architect rather than an academic scholar (such as a social scientist, a plant pathologist, a geologist, a rural geographer or an agricultural engineer), the descriptions of the agrarian landscape and its buildings are from an architectural and rural design point of view. The places are rural landscapes that exhibit a sense of mystery, enticing one to explore further in more detail, while absorbing the sense of place to find out what makes it memorable. This kind of design analysis has been done many times for important urban buildings, historic plazas and heritage buildings worldwide, but never to my knowledge by an architect for rural landscapes and buildings reflecting agricultural heritage. I hope this third book makes a strong argument for urban and rural people (as well as academic researchers) to better understand rural, while helping to link rural futures together with urban futures. The problem-​solving process of rural design and design thinking can become a strategic resource to bring creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship to finding ways that limited land and water resources worldwide can be better shaped and utilized. As I wrote in the introduction to my second book, ‘We all share the same planet and it is critical to find out how it is shaped for human uses today so that we do not eliminate the ability of future generations to shape theirs.’ This will require an understanding of both urban and rural futures and how they are linked together, and we should keep in mind that we all live together on Earth and it is the place we all call home.

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Illustration credits

All the sketches and photographs in the book were drawn or taken by the author unless otherwise noted below: 1.10 Center for Rural Design, University of Minnesota 1.11 James Lammers 1.14 Evelyn Koditz, Viking River Cruises 5.18 Julia Grace Abraham 5.19 George Ceman 6.1 James Lammers 6.2 Siena Ann Soroka Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners, but the author and publisher would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to their attention so that corrections may be published at a later printing.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I  did not understand. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–​1519), Italian artist and design thinker Over the past thirty plus years, my wife Sharon Ann Thorbeck and I have traveled extensively around the world seeking rural and urban places that reflect historic agrarian traditions and rural cultures (some going back many centuries) to see, sketch and try to understand why they are the way they are. I am also looking to understand their underlying culture and way of life. Some are places at the edge between land and water, such as the seaport city of Buenos Aires in Argentina with its long history of exporting food from its surrounding agricultural landscape, its cattle ranches and wine growers, and its unique political heroes like Eva Peron. Some are ancient rural cultures with steep hills requiring extensive terracing of the land and irrigation to grow food, like the potato-​growing terraces near the city of Cusco in the Sacred Valley region of Peru where it has been going on for over 1,000 years, reflecting a beautiful harmony between humans and the environment. Others are urban places where the connection with agriculture history is not so clear today, like Rome in its relationship with the surrounding agricultural regions, yet there are places in Rome that reflect its agricultural connections, such as the historic Trajan’s Market from AD 100 and the popular public square Campo di Fiori, with its morning open-​air food market. Many of the agricultural heritage regions that are special have been declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. They are places where agricultural festivals are celebrated with food, dancing and singing, and colorful costumes, and include children participating in the celebration of planting and harvesting as they have done for centuries. These festivals are important cultural aspects of the farming communities, reflecting their intimate connection to nature and functioning as a cultural method to transmit knowledge to their offspring. Agricultural landscapes and rural cultures vary a great deal around the world, yet there is a lot of similarity in how humans interact with the land and

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water and work with animals to grow food, raise families and maintain cultural traditions passed down from generation to generation. Although the methods for cultivating the land and growing food today are quite different in North America today than in the past, the designated World Heritage Sites still maintain a strong connection between humans, animals and landscapes that may be models fundamental to the future of sustainable agriculture and sustainable urban and rural development. These traditional agricultural systems are a source of rural livelihood and agricultural biodiversity that could become the basis for future agricultural innovations and technologies (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017). During a recent nine-​day trip on a Golden Eagle Luxury Train along the Trans-​Siberian Railroad from Moscow through Siberia to Mongolia, we were surprised to see so many trees with small crop and cattle farms interspersed on the European side of Siberia that looked a lot like forests in northern Minnesota. That dramatically changed as we moved eastward into the open and rolling steppes of Asian Siberia, which were like the open prairies and rolling hills of Montana, with large numbers of cattle being raised for food. Mongolia is also a steppe landscape where many of the local farmers still live in gers (yurts) and move as nomads with their animals from one grazing area to another as they have been doing for centuries. When we were in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, we observed their National Naadam Festival where they celebrate their Mongolian heritage with dances and sport contests involving archery, wrestling and horse racing. The Trans-​Siberian Railroad line is heavily used by freight trains and its tracks are uneven, creating a train ride where you are rocking back and forth whenever the train is moving. Even though the Golden Eagle Luxury Train is a high-​class private train, you must quickly get used to walking, dining, drinking and sleeping on a rocking, bumpy track and functioning out of a small compartment with bunk beds and a bathroom so compact you can brush your teeth, use the toilet and take a shower all at the same time! Fortunately, almost every day we stopped and toured a city or important site along the way. Yet the train and the people working on it were friendly and helpful, and it was a trip that we will long remember. In both Siberia and Mongolia there are large cities with many new high-​rise modern buildings, shops, markets and museums, reflecting a growing economy and contemporary architecture. For example, Irkutsk, a Siberian city near Lake Baikal, was one of the locations where the Russian Tsar Nicholas I sent people he didn’t like. Many were intellectuals who had money and were creative thinkers with special skills, and today Irkutsk has nine scientific research centers. As a result, it may today be the intellectual capital of Russia. It was interesting and exciting to travel by train through this vast Siberian Steppes area of Russia and Mongolia. It is a part of the planet that I did not understand very well before, and I was surprised to see how it has developed over time with many modern cities in the vast Russian countryside stretching from Europe to Asia. In North America the agricultural landscape varies from the east coast to the west coast and from the northern area where Minnesota is located down south

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to the Mexican border. The Great Plains is a vast area encompassing portions of six states in the United States and three Canadian provinces. Today, much of the prairie landscape consists of large-​scale farms or ranches focusing on a single crop or animal, reflecting current economic patterns. In the meantime, the small diversified farms have either gone out of business or have been economically forced to enlarge by acquiring access to adjacent farmland and to specialize on a single farm product or animal to produce an income. Immigrant workers are providing the important help that is needed to maintain agricultural production in America today. Since the 1960s rural areas in the United States and Canada have experienced a significant drop in the number of farmers, while urban areas have greatly increased in population and size, spreading out into adjacent farmland as urban sprawl. Many small rural towns in America that developed early to serve the farming community have shrunk in population and are struggling today, with stores closing, schools consolidating with other small towns, and people having to drive long distances for services and health care. At the same time academic scholars involved in agriculture have looked at the subject solely from a production perspective with research focused primarily on enhancing large-​scale commercial farming to increase yield to feed a rapidly growing worldwide urban population. This shift in population from rural to urban and an enormous investment in infrastructure to enlarge cities and enhance urban life have contributed to a serious divide between urban and rural interests and urban and rural people –​economically, socially and politically. Another thing Sharon and I are learning as we travel the world is the importance of understanding and respecting the history and culture of indigenous people. Native culture might be greatly diminished in the United States and Canada, but in visiting Australia we discovered that there is a growing new respect for Aboriginal people, and their cultural history and connections with nature. These are becoming a model for the well-​being and health of all Australians. Like the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems discussed in Chapter  5, indigenous people have demonstrated how to live and work with the land to grow food and create a life over many generations without diminishing its capacity. They are models for how to live with the land and each other to improve human, cultural, societal and ecological health.

Urban and rural divide Working with rural communities in Minnesota through my twenty years as founder and director of the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota, it became apparent to me that there was a significant divide between urban and rural people, with many rural citizens feeling fundamentally ignored by state and national governments. With most of the national political attention being on urban issues, they were left to fend for themselves in dealing with the rapid changes taking place,

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suffering population loss, economic disadvantage, deteriorating infrastructure and lack of entrepreneurial opportunity to attract young creative people. A recent study by Professor Katherine J.  Cramer (2016), Director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison, involved surveying rural residents, and her study identified three issues (paraphrased here) that were strongly felt by rural people in Wisconsin: 1. That rural communities are not being listened to by state governments, and when state governments do provide assistance it is top down and not what the communities need. 2. That more public resource is being devoted to urban areas. 3. That rural people feel that they are not respected by urban people. This study confirmed findings by the Center for Rural Design from its projects and discussions with rural people about where they live and work. Often it seemed that there was a great nostalgia among rural people for the way things were back in the 1960s, when rural was still a dominant national force. This feeling probably carried over into the United States 2016 presidential election, where rural people provided enough electoral college votes to elect Donald Trump president,

1.1 Center for Rural Design diagram illustrating how rural design can help link urban and rural issues together to help shape future land uses benefiting both.

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embracing his theme ‘Make America Great Again’. The urban and rural divide is pronounced, yet I have recently found that there is a growing academic and political interest in developing a new approach to planning future land uses by looking at urban and rural issues together –​locally, regionally and globally. Community-​ based planning and evidence-​ based design linking urban and rural issues and people together may be the most promising opportunity to provide creative and innovative options for future land use. Design thinking involving citizens in the design process may be the most effective way to respond to global challenges of climate change, food security, water resources, environmental resiliency, renewable energy and wellness  –​human, animal, and environmental –​for both urban and rural regions. A diagram prepared by the Center for Rural Design illustrates the opportunities of urban and rural connections and how design thinking and the problem-​solving process of design can together help resolve land use issues to find meaningful solutions (Figure  1.1). The diagram shows how urban and rural futures can interconnect, and how design can help communities identify issues and be a process to innovate and create sustainable solutions for both.

Seeing rural through design Rural places around the world are special because they are social, economic and historical places with a long history of human, animal and environmental relationships that are strong and culturally connected. When we travel and visit places, urban or rural, with a high degree of human connections with their surrounding agricultural landscapes, I sketch what I see and feel. The sketches are the imagery for this book, to provide readers a new way of seeing and understanding the importance of agricultural landscapes around the world. The agricultural heritage in the book is illustrated with sketches rather than photographs, because the sketches provide much more meaning about the character of a place and its human connections to the agricultural landscape. The patterns of rural landscapes and building character involved practical design decisions by rural people as their culture developed over time. These decisions were based on inhabitants absorbing and processing agricultural information using all of their senses to determine what modifications or improvements to buildings and agricultural process would improve their quality of life. This process created the beauty and meaning of the place, and that compelled me to sketch what I was seeing and feeling about it. For example, at the Avignonesi Fattoria Le Capezzine vineyard near Cortona, Italy, the total composition of arriving along a tree-​lined entrance road with adjacent vineyard fields planted to dramatize views of the winery illustrates careful planning to embrace the arrival sequence to the winery (Figure  1.2). Upon arriving at the building complex, one discovers an architecture in tune with Italian culture, climate, site and functional purpose. When visiting this winery,

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1.2 Le Capezzine, a winery near Cortona, Italy, with sketch showing a view of the carefully arranged entry sequence and a view of the valley from the winery at the end of the sequence.

you see and start to experience the seasonal ritual of shaping the fields, planting vines, harvesting grapes, fermenting and aging in oak barrels –​all in the process of making wine (Figure 1.3). This winery is a place where architecture and landscape are closely linked together, and it is a beautiful composition in the Italian countryside. To have lunch and enjoy a glass of their wine in their outdoor restaurant under an enormous tree was a beautiful experience, and the sketch shows Sharon sitting at a table with me. Another memorable place is Sos Del Rey Católico, a rural village on top of a hill in Spain founded in the tenth century. The village is organized with humans living tightly together in stone buildings that provide a place of safety and community well-​being. Like hill towns in Italy, their agricultural fields are in the valley below. However, today the hills beyond sprout modern turbines for harvesting the wind to make electricity (Figure 1.4). This seems quite right because harvesting

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1.3 Sketches of wine aging rooms at Le Capezzine Winery, with Sharon seated under a large oak tree at a table during lunch, and the former residence in the background.

the wind, like harvesting the sun, can be considered an agricultural process. When walking in the picturesque village on narrow street, there are constantly changing scenes and places; you turn a corner and suddenly, through a narrow slot between buildings, you see the valley again (Figure  1.5). The doorways on both sides of the narrow alley opened into stables where they originally kept the donkeys that were an integral part of the farming community. It was not hard to imagine the farmer loading up his donkey early in the morning, coming out of the door and turning left down to the valley below, then returning in the evening to his family and neighbors on the hill. This village reflects the heritage of the region and has adjusted to modern life, using small tractors instead of donkeys, without destroying the historic beauty and uniqueness of place.

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1.4 Sketch from window of hotel in Sos Del Rey Católico village in Spain, showing vineyards in the valley with new wind turbines on top of hills in the background.

Similarly, the thirteenth-​century Italian hill town of Scanno in the Abruzzo region of Italy slopes and curves with the land. It is connected by streets of varying size, sometimes through narrow corridors under bridges, that then quickly open into a piazza with a church and fountain. The experience of this place strongly reflects the culture and variety of people who have lived and worked here over the centuries (Figure 1.6). Likewise, the rural village of Chuan Di Xia in rural China outside Beijing is also carefully organized, with stone houses with attached animal quarters, stepping up the hill from the lower level where the main access road and public functions are organized. This natural layout creates road access to the terraced fields surrounding the village with visual connections to the hills and forests beyond (Figure 1.7). Although similar in stone construction and appearance to Italian or Spanish hill towns, the rural villages in China are struggling to survive because in China their cultural heritage that developed over time functions today with a government system in which a rural citizen is classified separately from an urban citizen. There

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1.5 Sketch of narrow street in Sos Del Rey Católico, Spain.

is, however, a growing interest in preserving China’s rural heritage as inspired by Dr Jiang Haushu, founder of the Beijing Rural Cultural Renewal Volunteers Association and curator of the World Rural Development Forum. The World Rural Development Committee (WRDC) was established by the World Green Design Organization (WGDO) inaugurated by China and the European Union to promote sustainable futures worldwide. At the founding ceremony of the WRDC in 2015, I  was named Vice Director of the World Rural Development Committee founded by the WDO to assist in this endeavor. Dr Haushu is a strong and intelligent leader, who is guiding the effort to rethink rural development in China and worldwide. At this point in time the United States is not a partner in this global endeavor, but I hope that will change soon. In some rural places with a strong historic, cultural and ethnic agricultural tradition, the buildings are constructed as part of the land, and not on the land. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Machu Picchu in Peru (Figure  1.8). Here, the land has been shaped with stepped terraces up steep slopes constructed to incorporate natural drainage and irrigation, producing

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1.6 Sketches of the delightful combination of pathways, public spaces, and painted buildings in the thirteenth-​ century village of Scanno in the Abruzzo region of Italy, reflecting its agricultural heritage.

great quantities of food. The stone storage buildings are integrally linked with the terraces for ease of movement and functional purpose to store food for the community. Machu Picchu is a fifteenth-​century Incan citadel and one of the world’s great heritage sites as defined by UNESCO in in 1983. It is described as ‘an absolute masterpiece of architecture and a unique testimony to the Incan civilization’. It was also named as one of the Seven Wonders of the World in 2007. Even though it was abandoned in the sixteenth century, it was never discovered during

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1.7 Sketch of the rural village of Chuan Di Xia near Beijing, China, from a restaurant on the main street, looking toward stone houses with a stair pathway and the village well located along the street.

the colonial period. It first received international attention in 1911, when it was described to the world by Hiram Bingham III, the Yale University historian who explored it. Staying at the hotel adjacent to the historic site, Sharon and I were able to experience the place in the early morning mist and explore it throughout the day, and to watch as the sun set over and between the high surrounding mountains. Machu Picchu is everything you can imagine as an historic agricultural place, with incredible beauty and connection to the landscape. It is a memorable place to visit and explore and imagine what it was like to live and work there. The walled fortified farmhouse of Masseria Cervarolo in the Puglia region of Italy is quite different in that it is a farmstead carefully organized, developed and constructed by the original family farmer as a fortress. This farmstead also incorporated the trulli conical stone construction of the Puglia region to visually accent living quarters within the compound. It is now a hotel, located adjacent

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1.8 Sketch of Machu Picchu in the morning, showing the terraces in the agricultural sector integrated with buildings. It is typical of historic terrace agriculture in Peru and one of the most spectacular human-​ constructed places on the planet.

to a working farm producing olive oil, wine and produce, but it is a delight to explore and discover interesting spaces and scenes reflecting the spirit of the farming family that built it (Figure  1.9). What makes rural places like the Masseria Cervarolo so visually powerful is that they have wonderful human qualities developed over time through the ingenuity of the people living there –​ reflecting their agricultural culture and lifestyle patterns. In Puglia the soil was good for growing olives, and it became a center for olive oil in the fifteenth century; the masseria developed as a fortified farmstead for protection from raiders from the sea for a small community living and working there centered on a single farm. These are patterns based on functional purpose in growing food and feeding and protecting families that emerged out of the sharing of information and were shaped by the functions of farming as well as the climate, culture and economy of the place. These rural places that I have portrayed were never designed by an architect, but they do illustrate an architecture described by Bernard Rudofsky in his books and exhibits as ‘constructed by people involved in farming to create architecture without architects as a silent testimonial to ways of life that are heavy on acute insight, albeit light on progress. It goes to the roots of human experience and 12

Introduction

1.9 Three sketch views of Masseria Cervarolo in the Puglia region of the heel of Italy. Once a fortified farmstead, it is now a hotel. Constructed of painted stone and incorporating the Trullo construction character, it is integrated into the landscape and a delightful place to stay and explore.

is thus of more than technical and aesthetic interest. Moreover, it is architecture without dogma’ (Rudofsky, 1977).

Book organization For this book I have interpreted agricultural landscapes and the notion of seeing rural through design rather broadly. They consist of both historic and contemporary places that I sketched and are organized into four categories.

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Rural places The rural areas of the world are special because they are places that have a strong connection with the natural and cultivated landscape, illustrating the closest possible connection between land form and architecture and reflecting the character of people who live and work with the land. The sketches are of places that I have visited that illustrate this connection and are often working places where the land is cultivated and utilized as the primary economic source. They may be historic places or contemporary but, regardless, exhibit a clear and understandable relationship of site, culture and climate. These are places that I  found memorable, reflecting a strong human relationship between people, buildings and landscape that to me epitomizes living in a rural landscape.

Urban places Most people today live in cities or small towns around the world. I pick places to sketch that illustrate an architectural integration with the climate and landscape in a way that reflects their unique place on the earth. They are places where urban culture and rural landscape are closely connected. They are often historic, some are contemporary, but all are places where landscape is integrated into and with buildings in a simple and very human way. Some of the sketches are of compact urban places, such as narrow medieval streets or plazas that connect with nature only through the sky. Sometimes it is the historic integration of agriculture into the urban fabric that interests me, and that is why I sketched it.

Water places Often the most dramatic places are those located where land and water connect. Perhaps it is because all life evolved from water, providing a visceral connection to the edge between water and land. Water places may be along the sea, along a river or by a lake, but all my sketches reflect an interesting water connection that is sometimes is related to work, sometimes to transportation and sometimes to agricultural. They may be historic or contemporary, but are all to me clear, dramatic illustrations of the connection between land and water that humans have created.

Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) places Places or regions identified by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-​FAO) as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems

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(GIAHS) illustrate historic and long-​term sustainable connections with agriculture integrating culture, economics, social order, climate and landscape. These sites are identified and discussed extensively by Parviz Koohafkan and Miguel Altieri in Forgotten Agricultural Heritage:  Reconnecting Food Systems and Sustainable Development (Routledge, 2017). In the book, they write: It is remarkable that despite so many political, socio-​economic and environmental global changes taking place, a set of ancient but ingenious farming systems developed by traditional farmers has stood the test of time throughout centuries. Such complex farming systems, adapted to local conditions, have helped small farmers to sustainably manage harsh environments and to meet their substance needs, without depending on mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other technologies of modern agricultural science. (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017) Koohafkan organized the agricultural heritage program when he was with the UN-​FAO and is now chairman of the World Agricultural Heritage Foundation in Rome. I had the pleasure of meeting him in China at the organization of the World Rural Development Committee by the World Green Design Organization. Sharon and I have visited several of these world heritage places, and in my sketches I try to illustrate the connections between people and the agricultural systems they have been practicing for centuries in a way that does not destroy the land. These GIAHS sites may be the best models for how we might all live together sustainably on Earth.

Design thinking Design is a problem-​ solving process, and the designer uses design thinking to connect issues, cross borders and incorporate research knowledge through evidence-​based design into the design process to arrive at a creative solution. Evidence-​based design means that the designer draws upon the research work by academics relevant to the project. If one is trying to understand culture and shape the landscape to reflect the needs of humans and animals, one needs to adopt the skills of the designer and use the design process to work with the communities involved. It is a process to seek research evidence, link it together with the problems so that the community understands the evidence, develop and look at alternatives, and have the community select the option that best resolves the problem. I hope academic scholars will recognize the opportunity to help bring their research to more sustainable fruition by embracing the problem-​solving process of design and design thinking. Their research is necessary to provide the knowledge that the design process is based on. Evidence-​based design informs the design

Introduction

15

1.10 Community design workshop on future land use in Scott County, Minnesota, organized by the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota.

process about the research basis for alternative ideas to find the best alternative that resolves the problem. The design process can be helpful in making their academic research more meaningful and effective. The photograph of a community design session in a rural town in Minnesota illustrates a Center for Rural Design workshop, with groups of community residents working at tables formulating responses to community issues they identified as a group (Figure 1.10). The community workshop is one of the most effective ways for public engagement to integrate citizens into the design process so that the resulting solution is innovative, creative, meaningful and bottom up rather than top down. One rural design principle that we learned through the rural projects the Center for Rural Design was involved in is that when a citizens’ committee representing the larger rural community is formed to work with the Center to resolve a community issue, it works better when a woman is in charge. It seems that in rural areas men are very much connected to the ‘old boys’ club’ mentality, making decisions unilaterally, whereas as women are more community oriented, seeking to create consensus. We also learned from university researchers involved in developing nations in Africa that it is women who are primarily holding their countries together while earning income and providing food for their families and others. They are raising families, becoming entrepreneurs, running businesses and handling money in a way that promotes community. What the men are doing I do not know. This also appears to be true of the GIAHS sites where small-​scale family farming is responsible for most of the agricultural production. In many cases the farming is the responsibility of women –​planting, weeding, harvesting, threshing,

16

Introduction

and storage and seed selection. They are also responsible for milling and food preparation for the family and account for half of the farm labor force. Nurturing rural women to be community and national leaders may be the most important aspect for ensuring future food security in developing nations.

Urban agriculture I hope this book will help enhance biophilic design thinking about agriculture and community food systems and sustainable development as the world responds to the rapid changes taking place that impact all our futures. Urban agriculture is one of these food system concepts, and it can be briefly defined as the growing of plants and raising of animals within and around cities. It has been defined by the Urban Agricultural Network as: An industry that produces, processes, and markets food, fuel, and other outputs, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city, or metropolis, on many types of privately and publicly held land and water bodies found throughout intra-​urban and peri-​urban areas. Typically urban agriculture applies intensive production methods, frequently using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes, to yield a diverse array of land, water, and air-​based fauna and flora contributing to the food security, health, livelihood, and environment of the individual, household, and community. (Smit et al., 2001) Urban agriculture needs to become an integral aspect of urban land use planning by cities, counties and townships as they look at defining future land uses. Urban agriculture can include community gardens and inside vertical gardens involving horticulture, animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry and urban beekeeping. It is critical that local, regional and state governments develop policies to allow urban agriculture to be an important urban land use in their planning for the future. My Minnesota architect friend Jim Lammers, FAIA, is a healthcare consultant who recently visited Singapore, perhaps the greenest country on the planet, and he wrote a summary of his trip for this book: As a healthcare consulting architect my decision to visit Singapore in early 2018 was influenced by the convergence of two things:  The book Nature Fix by Florence Williams with a whole chapter devoted to Singapore’s nature ethic; and an article in Healthcare Design magazine on the award-​ winning Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and Jurong Community Hospital in Singapore.

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17

The taxi ride from Changi Airport into the city center was remarkable in that there were no tacky warehouses, empty lots or any of the usual clutter. Instead the landscape was lush with green grass, gardens, palm trees, shrubs and vines. Singapore is unique for being the only combined city and country in the world and with a density of 21,000 people per square mile it is the third densest country on earth. Tall high-​rise buildings abound, each in a park-​like setting. The faces of the buildings featured sun screening, balconies and greenery seemingly growing up the building from bottom to top. Nearly half of Singapore’s 278 square miles has some sort of green cover; 70 percent of the population lives within four blocks of a public green space [Figure 1.11]. The next day I  visited the Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, Jurong Community Hospital and Jurong Clinic. This 1.9 million square foot complex occupies three city blocks in a residential neighborhood and the three high-​rise towers are linked by a concourse one level above the street. Parking is underground. Well-​ manicured green space surrounds the buildings. There is a garden area with walking paths. Like the other buildings I saw in Singapore there was a green façade. Each of the 1,100 patient beds has a view of balconies with planting plus a distance view. Jalousie windows provided natural ventilation. In the United States natural ventilation in hospitals is practically unknown, yet the World Health Organization ranks Singapore’s health system 14th in overall performance while the United States ranks 37th. But the jewel in this building’s crown is sustainability. Awarded a 2017 Top Ten Award by the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment, it uses 38  percent less energy than a typical hospital in Singapore and 69  percent less than the average US hospital. Energy utilization index (EUI) is 72,000 BTU per square foot per year. Natural ventilation for 70 percent of the building is a large part of the low EUI but there are other factors including photovoltaic arrays, heat pumps, solar thermal collectors, grey water system for cooling towers, rainwater harvesting for irrigating on-​site landscaping, gardens, and green roofs. Singapore spends 0.6  percent of the national budget on parks that is five times the budget of the US National Park Service. The result is brilliant –​Singapore is a model for supporting high density urban living by bringing nature and agriculture into the urban mix making Singapore the top biophilic city in the world. Humans have an innate desire to find connections with nature and animals, and biophilic design is the shaping of land uses through sustainable design that incorporates connections between humans, animals and environments in architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and urban and rural design. Urban agriculture is an integral aspect of biophilic design and one that urban design should embrace.

18

Introduction

1.11 Photograph of a new high-​ rise building in Singapore with greenery on the façade and the adjacent garden expressing biophilic design.

Sketching as a way of seeing In this book I am using a number of my sketches of places that I have visited in which I try to record the emotion and feeling about the place that I found so compelling and memorable, such as the rural village of Pisac in the high-​ altitude potato-​culture region of Peru. The photo shows me sketching in the public market there (Figure  1.12). Throughout the book I  explain the sketches to highlight how people found ways over time to link practical knowledge about growing and harvesting food with the soils, water and climate of

Introduction

19

1.12 Dewey Thorbeck sketching in the public market in Pisac, Peru, standing near a local woman in traditional costume selling bread. She is holding a fly swatter in her hand. It is the main village in the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System region.

their place. Animals were an important partner in this endeavor, with oxen, donkeys, horses and dogs providing labor and maintaining security for the community. In my first book, Rural Design: A New Design Discipline, I discussed drawing and design, stating that architects, landscape architects and planners who draw and record their travels in sketches have a special way of seeing the world. It is a methodology where images are engraved in the mind rather than on film. The photograph shows you reality as seen through the camera lens, while the sketch records the emotion and character of place as seen through the eyes and hands of the artist. In a time when digital cameras and computer renderings dominate the design professions, the tradition of hand drawing what one sees and experiences is a valuable means of learning to understand, and design. Drawing is a way to communicate inherent ideas about people and cultures and landscapes, and it can be used to promote human understanding and appreciation of the incredible and exciting diversity of the world we live in. From my earliest childhood I liked to draw. It was a way to imagine things, places and events. During school and while working in my father’s gas station, I  often got into trouble for drawing rather than paying attention to lessons or accommodating a customer who pulled in for gas. When I left home for college I started in a pre-​engineering program at a small Twin Cities liberal arts college because I thought I might become an aeronautical engineer and design airplanes. I was taking a class in engineering drafting and told my professor that I liked to draw, but the drafting of objects and geometric figures as isometric drawings was not very interesting. He asked if I had ever considered architecture, and I told him I did not know anything about it. He said he was visiting the office of the architects

20

Introduction

1.13 Sketch of the main entry to the American Academy in Rome, where Dewey Thorbeck lived and studied for two years after winning the Rome Prize in Architecture. His studio was on the top floor far right.

that were remodeling the college library that afternoon and asked if I would like to go with him, and I did. When I  walked into the architects’ office and saw drawings of proposed buildings on the wall, I suddenly realized that people designed buildings. Up until that moment I  thought contractors just built them. That was how naïve I  was, coming from a small rural town. This was such a revelation regarding my interests that the next day I  went over to the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota to find out about the program, enrolled, and transferred into the architecture program that fall. It was my love of drawing that drew me to architecture in the first place, and after my undergraduate degree from Minnesota and graduate school degree at Yale University I won the Rome Prize in Architecture to the American Academy in Rome (Figure 1.13). It was there that I first began to record my travels throughout Italy and Europe in sketches. The American Academy is a place where you meet some of the best young artists, architects, classical scholars, art historians and landscape architects in the United States. When you tour an ancient site with a classical scholar, it comes alive and is not just an historic ruin. My two years of touring Italy and discussions with other Fellows at the Academy were exceptional and had a life-​changing impact on me. The pattern of recording places I  visit with sketches has continued to this day, and I  now have over thirty-​five sketch books filled with ink and watercolor drawings of places that I  have seen. Drawing is something I  have done throughout my professional and academic careers, and I  still utilize hand drawings to communicate architectural and design ideas to my clients and colleagues before the computer takes over the design imagery process.

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21

The travel sketch is how I  record a place that I  visited and found beautiful, interesting and emotionally compelling. Fortunately, Sharon is very patient and lets me sketch away. Design students who hand draw and incorporate the drawing into their design process often end with visualizations that better reflect their unique ideas. Drawing is a methodology that allows you to become confident in your passions, abilities and talents, and use them to dream, design and explore the world. In rural areas worldwide community celebrations at various times of the year were organized around the farming calendar as important festivals to reinforce the connections between families and the agricultural way of life forming their cultural heritage. It is the sense of place and the experience of seeing it that I find memorable and try to capture in my sketches. Sketching forms a strong human connection with other people who see you doing it, and I often find people taking photographs of the view that I am drawing. When children are around they will often come up and look closely at what I am doing. This photograph, taken by the cruise manager on the river boat, shows me explaining my sketches to an excited group of young students in a rural village along the Ayevarwaddy River in Myanmar (Figure 1.14). I hope that seeing my sketches of their place made them feel prouder of where they lived. I use my sketches to illustrate the emotion and meaning of the places I am describing, and hope readers will find this idea compelling and meaningful, so they will look at agricultural landscapes in a new way. I want them to appreciate the historic heritage and importance of rural as an integral aspect of urban and of equal importance.

1.14 Dewey Thorbeck showing his sketch book to school children in the small rural village of Minhia on the Ayevarwaddy River in Myanmar. Children are very curious, and they wanted to see what he was drawing.

22

Introduction

Interdisciplinary design I also want to make the reader aware of the impact on my life and career when in 1969 I became a founder/​partner in a new interdisciplinary design firm called InterDesign. My co-​founders/​partners were Roger Martin, a landscape architect who had the Rome Prize at the same time that I did and then returned later to Minnesota to become the first director of the program in landscape architecture in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; Peter Seitz, a graphic designer from Germany, whom I  first met at Yale and who later, after teaching in Maryland, came to Minnesota as design director for the Walker Art Center; and Stephen Kahne, a computer specialist and director of the Hybrid Computer Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. In our first year we were selected to design a new zoo in Minnesota, and we worked together for ten years designing and constructing the zoo and many other projects (Figure 1.15). My partnership with these three superbly talented professionals had a profound impact on my future professional and academic work, and I  asked each to write a brief statement about the influence InterDesign had on them. Roger Martin, the landscape architect, wrote:

1.15 Aerial photograph of the Minnesota Zoological Garden, showing the skylighted roof of the Tropical Exhibit. The year-​round cold-​climate zoo opened to the public in 1978, and was carefully designed to give the impression that the animals were free in their natural habitat and the people were confined.

Introduction

23

The greatest benefit was probably the education the experience provided that allowed me to be more effective in developing professional degree studies at the University of Minnesota while working to develop integrated educational experiences for the design professions. Peter Seitz, the graphic designer, wrote: I grew up in Augsburg, Germany, and attended the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm and received a graphic design scholarship to attend Yale University where I met architect Dewey Thorbeck. Later, after teaching at the Maryland Institute of Art, I was asked to join the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as design curator and became reacquainted with Dewey. The design approach we followed had the designer seeing design as ‘operational science’, a system thinking approach that included both art and science and actual collaboration of the various design disciplines. The lessons learned about interdisciplinary design and systems thinking during the ten years we all worked together carried on in my own projects as well as my teaching after I left the company. Stephen Kahne, the systems analyst, wrote: Each of the partners at InterDesign brought a different view of design but all recognized the value of these different viewpoints and a propensity to welcome and be stimulated by other viewpoints in projects. The Minnesota Zoological Garden design project epitomized this approach and was destined to prove the value of the InterDesign philosophy and establish the company at the leading edge of a new approach to environmental interdisciplinary design. Eventually we separated to pursue individual interests but remained good friends and collaborated on several projects after the split. The zoo project focused on design reflecting the animal and human bond and connections with the environment, and we did a great deal of research on animals and their environments around the world. A major design idea in shaping the zoo experience was to create the feeling that the human visitor is caged, and the animals and birds are free. One of the zoo elements in the master plan was an 1870s working farmstead that reflected the sustainability of historic farming in Minnesota The zoo experience led to other animal-​related projects in my own architectural firm after InterDesign was dissolved. These included an academic equestrian center, a corporate interpretive center emphasizing the animal–​ human bond, a wolf interpretive center, and several dairy research projects at academic institutions. These projects, combined with my teaching architectural design in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, established my interest

24

Introduction

in rural environments that led to my founding of the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota. The projects we were involved with throughout rural Minnesota led to my first two books to try to establish rural design as a new design discipline.

Summary I hope this book, along with my first two as a trilogy, will inspire designers, planners, scientists, historians, academics and a wide array of citizens to find a new way of using design thinking to address problems in their region or to find a new way to think about their region so that the resolution of future land uses become most effective when implemented. Everyone involved in trying to analyze a rural or urban issue becomes a designer in the problem-​solving process. When a design professional is involved, it is critical that he/​she is careful to nurture collective community thinking so that the resulting solution is one that inspires the community to act to make it happen. It is this bottom-​up approach that is so important to obtain strong citizen support for the solution so that elected officials will stick to the plan over time. It is my passion to bring design and design thinking to rural as well as urban issues, because it is critical that we deal appropriately with global issues of climate change, food security, water resources, renewable energy and wellness –​human, animal and environmental  –​and find ways to shape urban and rural land uses today that will still allow future generations the opportunity to shape theirs.

Introduction

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Chapter 2

Rural places

Rural places around the world are special and unique. They are special because they are places where humans, animals, and the natural and cultivated landscapes are strongly connected, reflecting the heritage of people who live there, work and shape the land. They are special and unique because their buildings are often working buildings where human and animal housing is closely connected, reflecting an environment where agriculture is still the primary economy of the rural region. Sharon and I  have traveled extensively around the planet, visiting cities and countrysides to see, sketch, understand and experience rural places that are memorable. The places may be historic or contemporary, but all exhibit a clear and understandable relationship between people and their environment. In this chapter I illustrate and discuss a wide range of rural places that we have visited, and that I recorded in sketches. All of these are rural places or rural villages that I found interesting, exhibiting a strong connection between people, buildings, animals and cultivated landscapes. I discuss them in this chapter to try to provide insight to readers about the excitement, interest and importance of rural places that have a sense of history reflecting connections to climate, culture and place as well as function. I hope that this chapter will instill some understanding of how I as an architect and rural designer look at rural places and agricultural landscapes. I am trying to appeal to non-​design academic disciplines like cultural geography, rural geography and rural sociology to help them better understand design thinking and the process of design as something that incorporates their research into the problem-​solving process. There are many special rural places around the world that I did not include only because I was limited in the number of illustrations I could put into the book or have not yet been there. I now have over thirty-​five sketch books filled with ink and watercolor sketches, and I selected sketches of rural places for this chapter to provide readers with a broad display of the incredible variety of beautiful rural places around the world.

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Rural places

Rural villages Perhaps the most memorable rural places for me are the Italian hill towns that I first discovered back in the 1960s when I was a young Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. The cities of Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan were impressive to visit and learn their history during my two years at the Academy. It was tours into the rural areas of Italy where I discovered the Italian hill town that were astonishing to me because they were so different from rural areas in America. Montepulciano, a hill town in Tuscany near Florence, is one of those places that still function and look much as they did 300 years ago, but without the animals that were so important then. Sharon and I were recently back in Montepulciano, having lunch sitting on a balcony of the Antico Caffè Poliziano. The view was so stunning that I had to make a sketch of the edge of the village and surrounding agricultural landscape (Figure 2.1). It shows apartment houses stepping up the hill overlooking the Tuscan Val di Chiana region, where the growing of grapes for wine and crops for food is still done as it has been for centuries. The sketch illustrates the tight connection between buildings and geography stepping up the hill blending in with wine fields in the valley below and the hills beyond. One of the nice things about traveling in Italy is the variety of places to visit, walk around, window shop in, and find wonderful restaurants and cafes in which to explore regional cuisine and wine. Montepulciano is one of those places constructed of stone and plaster with red clay tile roofs as seen on older buildings throughout Italy. It was a delight to wander around and discover its unique streets, piazzas and places that make the rural hill town so memorable. The sketch of one of the streets, via dell’ Erbe, illustrates a typical narrow street with shops on the ground and apartments above then opening to a small public square with a church and its bright horizontal contrasting stripes (Figure 2.2). It is a typical street in Montepulciano, with vehicles parked in the plaza near the church and the dark cobblestone paving on the streets. The apartment buildings on each side show doorways that at one time provided access for animals and where shops are now located with living quarters above. One unit has an ornate balcony overlooking the street. Another delightful Tuscan hill town is Orvieto, just north of Rome. It is similar to Montepulciano, with buildings tightly constructed on top of the hill and views down narrow streets into the valley below. All the buildings are constructed of similar materials with an ochre color on walls and red clay tile on roofs. They all look alike, yet each is different, with shutters on windows, clothes hanging to dry, and an occasional church steeple with a cross extending up above the apartments (Figure 2.3). When I first visited and discovered Orvieto in the 1960s, residents still had donkeys housed on the lower level of their houses, which they would load up with farming equipment and then travel down into the valley to work in the vineyards during the day, returning home in the evening. Some hill towns in southern Italy during that time still had open sewers running in troughs down

Rural places

27

the middle of the streets. That, of course, is now all changed, with underground sewer pipes and mostly shops for tourists along the streets where the animals were once kept. The relationships with the valley below for farming, however, is still the same, and in Orvieto it probably appears today much as it did back in the sixteenth century when this was one of the Italian ‘city states’ functioning as an independent territory. The plan of the city is similar to that of other hill towns, with streets and alleys linking the village together in random widths and lengths. It has a main street running down the middle like a spine, with a labyrinth of small alleys and streets connecting to it. Churches and public buildings become highlights in the spatial experience that one discovers while walking around. The Orvieto Cathedral, on top of the highest hill, dominates the skyline with its colorful mosaics. It is a beautiful, ornate structure and a place with a large plaza for the community to gather in (Figure 2.4). Orvieto was a delight to discover in the

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Rural places

2.1 Sketch from balcony of the Antico Caffè Poliziano in the Tuscan hill town of Montepulciano, showing the houses stepping up the side of the hill with the vine fields in the valley below.

2.2 Sketch of Via dell Erbe in Montepulciano, Italy, showing a typical street with shops on the ground floor where animals were once kept.

2.3 Sketch of the hill town of Orvieto in Tuscany, north of Rome.

1960s, and after several visits we have made over the years it remains a beautiful testament to rural life in the Tuscany region. Italy is a unique country, with a great variety of geology and culture from the north to the south, and one never tires of finding new places to visit and explore in this historic country. On the other side of the world we were touring Beijing, China, with Dr Fengrong Zhang, a professor of land evaluation and planning and director of the Land Use and Administration Research Center at China Agricultural University in Beijing. His daughter had attended the University of Minnesota, and I met him on one of his trips to visit her. When we were in Beijing, Zhang and one of his students drove Sharon and me to visit a typical rural village in the mountains west of Beijing. Unlike a hill town in Italy, the rural village of Chuan Di Xia is located in a valley on the side of a hill, with stone stair alleys for people and animals providing access from the houses above on the side of the hill to the main street at the bottom (Figure 2.5). Constructed of stone, mortar and plaster with clay tile roofs and paper windows, a typical house in the village is constructed with three independent one-​story structures surrounding a central courtyard that originally had a well (Figure 2.6). The buildings surrounding the outdoor courtyard are typically used for different functions. One is for cooking and eating, one for living and conversation, and one for sleeping. An outhouse is seen in the sketch behind and around the corner in the left background. Brightly colored blankets were hanging to dry in the courtyard the day I made the sketch. The village seems to be doing well, functioning as a farming community and now offering weekend visits for people from Beijing to experience rural life.

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Rural places

2.4 Sketch of the cathedral in Orvieto that can be seen from miles around and is the focal point of the village.

2.5 Sketch of a connecting stair in the rural village of Chuan Di Xia, in the mountains west of Beijing, that looks much like a hill town in Italy.

In my first book, Rural Design: A New Design Discipline, I included a study of the Beijing region that Professor Zhang conducted in 2010 where he and his research team proposed a broad reorganization of the rings around Beijing to ensure modern urban agriculture for food production, landscape beauty for residents and tourism, and ecological conservation of the natural environment in the mountainous regions surrounding Beijing. Although it wasn’t incorporated into the regional plan, it remains as a testament to the problems university

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2.6 Sketch of a typical courtyard house in Chuan Di Xia, consisting of three separate buildings: one for eating, one for sleeping and one for living. In this house sheets were hung to dry in the courtyard.

researchers have in findings ways that their research can be incorporated and utilized by society. In Beijing, as in other cities around the world, urban design deals with urban and the rural areas are left to themselves, so there was not much incentive for the urban planners in Beijing to take the study seriously. This is typical of the gap between urban and rural, and that divide is one of the reasons why I am writing this book, trying to integrate rural and urban issues and eliminate the separation between. If Zhang and his academic researchers could have linked up with designers in the process of developing and publishing the study, they might

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Rural places

have had better results in linking urban and rural design for the improvement of both and helping to ensure greater food security for Beijing. An entirely different architectural experience is found in the Italian hill town of Matera, located near the Puglia region in the heel of Southern Italy. It is a hill town where many houses are carved as grottos out of volcanic rock, while other houses are constructed in and among rock outcroppings. Sharon and I stayed in one of these grotto caves, now the Sextantio Le Grotte Della Civita hotel, with a beautiful view from its terrace of the deep valley in the adjacent ravine with a river at the bottom (Figure 2.7). The main entrance to the hotel, as well as grotto rooms, is shown at the top of the next sketch (Figure 2.8). Our room in the cave was in the middle, with its door open in the sketch. It was quite large, consisting of three interconnected chambers going back into the rock, with dining near the entrance, sleeping in the middle, and a toilet, sink, shower and bathtub in the back. The only outside light was from a small window over the entry door. Nevertheless, it was a good place to stay, quiet and pleasant, with pleasant people managing the hotel. At the bottom of the sketch I show a grouping of nearby homes that are built into

2.7 Sketch of Matera, near the heel of Italy, which is unique for its cave dwellings. The view is from the terrace of the cave hotel where we stayed, looking at the surrounding steep hills and the river below.

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2.8 Sketches of the plaza in front of the cave hotel where we stayed in Matera, and typical courtyard houses connected to caves that are found throughout Matera. It is a unique and beautiful place to visit.

the rock around a shared courtyard. This is the arrangement of grotto houses that is typical of Matera. The history of cave dwellings on top of a mountain makes Matera a unique, beautiful, and interesting rural place to visit. The village of Alberobello, further into the province of Puglia, is another unique rural place in Italy, and very interesting, beautiful and exciting to visit. The houses in Alberobello, and on farms in the surrounding countryside, are called Trullo houses and are constructed of flat dry stones and white plaster walls with unpainted flat gray stones sloping upward as conical roofs. The Trullo house

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Rural places

2.9 Sketch of the unique dry stone painted Trullo houses with conical roofs that define the rural village of Alberobello in the Puglia region of Italy.

is only found in this region of Italy, and all the Trullo houses in the village of Alberobello are closely attached and constructed the same. It is the unique character of these houses and the beauty of the village that makes it a tourism focus in Puglia (Figure 2.9). The sketch is of a small side street in the village that illustrates the character of the Trullo houses in a typical cluster. Chimneys, doorways and windows are all integrated into the stone construction, with a unique figurine on top of the dome as a form of individual identification. With cobblestone streets, blue sky and planting integrated in a variety of ways, it is a picturesque setting. Often when I am standing and making a sketch, other tourists walk up and stand by me and take a photograph of what I am sketching. I assume it is because they think it is an important view since an artist is drawing it. When I was sketching this side street in Alberobello, probably five different people came up beside me and took a picture. The village was named a World Heritage Site in 1996. The design of the Trullo house probably developed out of small shelters that were assembled by local farmers near their fields using available stone materials, and over time it evolved into a larger cluster of domed rooms to become a house for living and raising a family. The story is that to avoid paying taxes the houses were constructed without mortar, so they could be considered temporary shelters that could be easily dismantled. The village of Alberobello is constructed in a mostly open landscape that is rolling with many small farms, and as you move out into the countryside around the village you find Trullo farmhouses constructed in the same way, although the conical stone roofs are often also painted white. As we were driving out of the area toward the coast we discovered an abandoned

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Trullo farmhouse along the side of the road, and we stopped to explore and sketch (Figure 2.10). The front door was open, so we could go inside and see the small and simple rooms for sleeping, cooking and living. It was sad to see the abandoned farmhouse while thinking about the families that once lived there, and one hopes that this beautiful Trullo farmhouse might soon be restored by someone as a home or rural retreat before it collapses into total ruin. In Uruguay, South America, the historic village of Colonia is easily reached by a short ferry ride from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and with its historic walls and buildings it is a famous tourist attraction. The lighthouse dating from 1857 is constructed along the edge of the city on the ocean side, with crumbling walls at its base. When we visited it seemed to still be in use, with electrical wires extending to its top (Figure 2.11). Nearby was a typical single-​family house with a private garden behind surrounding walls. Now the Museo Casa Nacarllo, it was an admiral’s home in 1775. The home and courtyard are closely integrated inside walls to provide protection from outside while opening the indoor and outdoor connections for living between the house and courtyard. It is like houses in Portugal and Spain, brought to South America by settlers. This can also be seen in the sketch of Calle d’ Los Suspiros (Street of Sighs) (Figure 2.12) that shows typical small worker houses adjacent to one another along the street, each centering on a small interior courtyard. Walking into one of the houses that is today a shop, one can readily see the importance of the courtyard to bring light and air into the home while providing an outdoor living room. At the bottom of the sketch is the main public square in Colonia with some great trees, framed on one side by the twin spired Basilica del Sacramento constructed in 1680 and a public fountain

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2.10 Sketch of an abandoned Trullo farmhouse near Albero­bello,  Italy.

2.11 Sketches of street scenes in Colina, Uruguay, showing a lighthouse from 1857 adjacent to the original city wall at the water edge, and a one-​story courtyard house built by an admiral in 1775 and now a museum.

marked with a cross for obtaining drinking water. Colonia is a delightful village to walk around and experience because of its history and its intimate scale that is so typical along the Atlantic coastline of South America. Norway has a great tradition of wood construction with churches, houses, farm houses, barns and storehouses that are over 1,000  years old and were constructed during Viking times. The historic village of Laerdal at the end of the deep Sognefjord, north of Bergen, represents this wood construction tradition and the connection to water for fishing and transportation that is so typical of coastal Norway. This is the village that my father’s mother emigrated from to America in 1905. The old village quarter, Gamle Laerdalsoyri, was originally constructed adjacent to a small harbor called the Lieutenant’s Quay from the eighteenth century and that today is a pond. The sketch illustrates a variety of one and two-​story

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2.12 Street sketches in Colina, Uruguay, showing the ‘Street of Sighs’ with small attached worker homes, each with a small inner courtyard, and a scene of the Basilica from 1680 constructed adjacent to the central plaza.

houses with attached stables and boathouses reflected in the water of the pond and surrounded by mountains. Intermingled into the composition are a variety of small stables for horses and wagons (Figure 2.13). The next sketch illustrates one of the narrow streets in the old village with shops on the street level, apartments above and adjacent single-​family homes integrated into the street composition. The buildings are wood frame construction with wood siding painted in a variety of pale colors, and all with dark gray slate shingle roofs (Figure 2.14). The farm my grandmother emigrated from is located just outside of Laerdal along the Laerdal River, a famous salmon fishing river, and is still being operated by a cousin with a two-​story wooden house like those in Laerdal. Sharon and I have been there several times and even slept in the bed that my grandmother was born in. The farm is in a beautiful valley and mostly used today by my cousin for raising sheep for wool and meat, and growing vegetables that he loads on a truck and markets directly to city people in Bergen. He and other farmers along the river sell access and fishing rights to wealthy fishermen from throughout Europe, as they have for many years.

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2.13 Sketch from one side of the ‘Lieutenant’s Quay’ in the old town of Laerdal in Norway, showing a variety of painted wooden houses reflected in the water with the mountains behind.

2.14 Sketch of Oyvagata Street in the old town of Laerdal, Norway, with typical wooden houses and shops on the ground level.

In 2010 Sharon and I went on a cruise ship tour of the Baltic Sea with stops in various cities and countries, starting in Copenhagen and ending in Stockholm. Two notable places that we stopped at and visited are both World Heritage Sites, reflecting their medieval history and rural connections. The first was the city of Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Visby is a walled medieval city that is in remarkable shape, with many buildings from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was a delight to walk around and tour with our guide, Anna, an architectural student studying in Stockholm, and discover its interesting places and historic buildings (Figure  2.15). They included parts of fortifications and entry gates, a medieval house from the twelfth century, and several other small houses and narrow streets expressing a close human scale reflecting its water and fishing orientation. Outside the wall agriculture is still one of the main economic aspects of the island. St Mary’s Cathedral, dedicated in 1225, dominates the skyline and can be seen from all over town (Figure 2.16). It is a well preserved historic walled city that still functions as an active rural village in the modern world.

2.15 Sketches of the walled city of Visby on Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea. Part of Sweden, Visby provides a walking tour of a living city that looks much as it did in the Middle Ages and is a World Heritage Site. Our guide was an architectural student studying in Stockholm.

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2.16 Sketches of street scenes made while walking around in Visby that reflect its water and fishing orientation and its medieval character, with small individual houses, walls, gateways and a few taller buildings.

The next stop on our Baltic Sea cruise was Tallinn, the seaport capital of Estonia. It is a modern city with an old medieval quarter that is well preserved. As a tourist on a guided tour, you only see the old quarter that is the World Heritage Site and miss seeing the modern, bustling seaport. Like Visby, the old quarter has many narrow streets with medieval houses and churches and public squares that you discover as you walk around. The first sketch shows the medieval street Katarina Kaik, a black stone paved alley with houses right at the edge, including the fourteenth-​ century St Catherine’s Dominican Friary with tombstones on the wall. Walking up another stone paved street you arrive at a central square dominated by the St Nicholas Church from the thirteenth century and surrounded by trees (Figure 2.17). Most buildings are painted white or beige stucco in Tallinn, including St Olaf’s Church with its tall tower that can be seen from all over town. It has a simple white interior, with high windows among the arches bringing light into the nave. Nearby is the Town Hall and a small windowless church from 1414 with a blue clock on its wall, and a courtyard across the street from the old KGB headquarters that functioned when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union. Tallinn is a beautiful historic walled city and a place well worth visiting (Figure 2.18).

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2.17 Sketches of Tallinn, Estonia, a World Heritage Site, illustrating a variety of small streets with mostly two-​story houses on each side and the St Nicholas dome church anchoring a central plaza.

Two small islands in the Bay of Naples, Italy, that we toured with a group of friends that we hike with, are quite different to the seaports on the Baltic Sea because of different climate, vegetation and cultural traditions. Like Visby and Tallinn on the Baltic Sea, the Island of Procida is a strategic location on the Bay of Naples for defensive purposes and living that makes it an interesting place to visit and explore. When you hike around with an experienced guide, you discover many interesting places and find historic buildings with many terraces and colorful garden paths. Abbazia di San Michele is a church from the seventh century that is tightly integrated with nearby houses and still operates today with formal tours (Figure  2.19). The surrounding houses have picturesque windows and doorways that were interesting to sketch, along with views from the terraces toward the Tyrrhenian Sea and Italian mainland in the background. I also sketched our guide in the church and the hotel owner because they seemed to fit so well into the fabric of the island. After about a half-​hour ferry ride we arrived at the larger island of Ischia. Along one side, reached by a narrow causeway, is a big rock outcropping extending out of the water, with Aragon Castle and its walls controlling the entrance. At the top is the hotel La Vigna and an adjacent pathway with stone

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2.18 Sketches of street scenes in Tallinn, Estonia, done while walking around exploring the historic city, including interior and exterior views of St Olaf Lutheran Church, another fifteenth-​century church and the town hall. The old KGB headquarter was a reminder of the old Soviet Union.

walls covered in green moss. The castle on the rock is a beautiful composition linking water and land that has clearly shaped by humans for defense and living (Figure 2.20). During many of our travels we are constantly on the move in a small group with a guide leading the way, and I do not have much time to stop and sketch an image on a full page, so my sketches are often smaller images with several views on one page, as you can see. Nevertheless, the things I sketched in all the rural villages are buildings and places that express their unique national and local heritage, reflecting a great deal of respect for nature and culture and following their agrarian traditions.

Wineries and vineyards The new wineries around the world, located in regions with a climate for growing grapes, are exciting places where functional requirements, architectural design and culture all come together in a profound way, reflecting their agricultural

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2.19 Sketches of street scenes made while hiking around Procida Island near Naples, Italy; the seventh century Abbazia di San Michele, with interior and exterior views; and our guide in the church and the hotel owner where we stayed.

heritage and landscape. Because of the marketing of wine and the popularity of agro-​tourism, all the contemporary wineries we have visited have guided tours and tastings and are major tourist attractions in their respective countries. The architecture and landscape of these wineries have been carefully designed and maintained to reflect the quality of the wines they produce and help market their products to the world. Sharon and I like good wine, and Sharon is a great travel planner, knowing the kinds of wineries we like to visit and making all the arrangements –​I just drive and follow directions, taste the wine, and sketch when inspired.

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2.20 Sketches of the terrace and moss path of the hotel Albergo La Vigna on Ischia Island and the Aragon Castle of Ischia constructed on a rock outcropping and connected by a narrow pathway to the island.

A popular tourist destination for wineries is the region around Santiago, Chile. Chilean wines began when the Spanish colonized the region in the sixteenth century and brought vines with them. About 30 minutes’ driving time east from the city center is the prestigious Santa Rita Winery founded in 1880 in the Alto Jahuel area, and because it is close to Santiago it is a popular tourist attraction. Its visitor center has a walled courtyard with short rows of growing vines illustrating the different types of vines that produce the wines that are made there. Near the entrance to the information office of the winery is a beautiful old apple tree that was in full bloom the day we visited. The delightful courtyard (Figure 2.21) and

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the careful and colorful landscaping of all public spaces create a wonderful introductory experience and intimate contact with the Santa Rita historic and award-​ winning wines. Off to one side of the visitor complex is the modern and attractive Museo Andino that we literally stumbled upon. It is a well-​designed and simple building with a clear entrance portal displaying a sculpture symbol and mountains in the background. As you move inside the museum you see a great view of the Santa Rita vineyards. It is a museum organized by the Santa Rita owners with a series of exhibits of indigenous art and culture of pre-​conquest Andean people from throughout Chile. It is one of the best museums we visited in Chile and certainly one of the best at telling the story of a region’s heritage and agricultural roots (Figure 2.22). An elegant newer winery in Chile, located about two hours’ driving time south of Santiago in the Millahue Valley, is the Vina Vik, owned by the Norwegian entrepreneur Alexander Vik and his wife, Carrie. The first vines were planted at the new winery in 2006, and it has powerful architecture in a great landscape with excellent wines. The Vina Vik Winery is in a spectacular setting, with the visitor center and hotel sitting high on a hill overlooking the surrounding Andes Mountains and the fields in the valley below. The sketch is from the top of the entry stairs, looking down on the entry parking area, with a variety of differently shaped wine fields intermingled with natural hills and the mountains in the background (Figure 2.23). The visitor center on the hilltop was designed by the Uruguay architect Marcelo Daglio, and it has a curving and undulating bronze metal roof over the arrival lounge, flanking bedrooms and a central dining room.

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2.21 Sketch of the courtyard at the entrance to Santa Rita Winery east of Santiago, Chile, with a flowering apple tree and rows of vines explaining the wines that are made there.

2.22 Sketch of the interesting Museo Andino at Santa Rita Winery, and in the background a hill that is one of many surrounding the winery.

2.23 Sketch of the valley view from the entrance to Vina Vik Winery south of Santiago, Chile, showing the many different shapes of vineyards for growing grapes.

A central courtyard has two flanking rectangular sides for guest rooms uniquely decorated by different designers and with great views toward the surrounding vineyards and mountains. I was told the Viks wanted the rooms to feel as if you were staying at their home rather than at a hotel. To me the overall architectural effect of the visitor center is somewhat disjointed because it appears to be a clash of two design intents. From the rectangular floor plan and linear layout, it almost feels like a building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but the curving metal roof has the character of a building designed by Frank Gehry. This can be seen in the sketch of the interior courtyard, with the undulating roof and flowers in full bloom in the garden (Figure 2.24). The sketch illustrates the clash of styles; yet it is a nice place to stay. The rooms, each with radically different decoration, were simple and pleasant, the people were friendly and informative, and the food at the hotel was excellent. One morning, we walked down a short trail to a hitching post and went on a horseback tour in and among the vineyards in the valleys, finally arriving at the spectacular Vina Vik processing center nestled in and among the vineyards. The processing center is a stunning winemaking pavilion and the focal point of the experience of visiting the place. Selected through a competition, the winery processing center was designed by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. It has a large cable-​supported and inflated fabric roof that appears to be floating between two long walls. At one end of the pavilion is a long sloping water plaza with rock outcroppings and narrow angular walkways, designed by Chilean artist Marcella Correa (the wife of Radic), that appears to extend to the other side. Inside, under the fabric roof, is an open metal-​grill working floor providing access to the top of fermenting vats on the level below. The wine storage rooms are also located on the lower level that you walk through to arrive at an intriguing wine-​tasting room at the far end.

2.24 Sketch of the interior courtyard of the hotel and restaurant at Vina Vik Winery in Chile, designed by architect Marcelo Daglio from Uruguay.

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The experience of visiting the processing center involves walking through vineyards, from where we left the horses, toward one of the two long walls and a small entry opening. When you enter through the opening, you step into a water feature with many small boulders and walk along narrow paths through the water to the entrance of the building with its dramatic floating fabric roof soaring overhead (Figure  2.25). Though the visitor center and processing center are quite different architecturally, the vineyards and Millahue Valley landscapes are common to both and the overall effect is quite stunning and exciting. One certainly

2.25 Sketches of the fabric-​roofed manufacturing facility at Vina Vik designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic, with an entrance water feature designed by artist Marcella Correa.

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gets the feeling that the Viks and the people who work here really care about their place and what they produce and are proud of their unique location in the Chilean landscape. Lapostolle Winery, in the Colchagua Valley south of Santiago, Chile, was established in 1827 by Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle, and seven generations of her family have owned and managed the winery. It is a place quite different from others we visited because its processing center is underground. Visitor cabins and the dining/​entrance building are on separate locations on the hillside, and a golf cart is provided to transport guests between facilities. The entrance to the winery is a small round building surrounded by vegetable gardens and overlooks the vineyards in the valley below (Figures 2.26). The sketch also shows the wonderful view from one of the decks adjacent to the cabin where we stayed, with its outdoor wicker furniture. You can see at the bottom of the sketch that I was sitting on a chair with my feet on the foot rest. The cabins are spacious and pleasant, with a great view of the valley. The tour of the underground winery with host Fernando Calquin explained how the grapes are handled and processed in the making of wine. People working in the underground processing rooms clean freshly picked grapes, which are then carried to a shaking conveyor belt where the best are collected into containers. From there the grapes are carried by hand to stainless steel barrels on wheels that when full are rolled over walkways and emptied into large wood fermenting casks. Later the wine is transferred into oak aging barrels for storage. We were finally escorted to the tasting room in the middle of the wine cellar to sample the excellent wine (Figure 2.27). Fernando was very informative in explaining the winemaking process and how its being underground helped to create a more controlled environment that gave the wines their distinctive flavor. It was a beautiful place, with simple architecture connecting to a beautiful landscape illustrating its agricultural nature. On the other side of the Andes Mountains, in the Uco Valley south of Mendoza, Argentina, is the spectacular new winery constructed by the Familia Zuccardi, that has been making wine in the region for many years. Some time ago, Sharon and I  toured the original family winery near Mendoza that had a good restaurant located in the middle of the old vineyards. It provided an intimate connection with grapes growing on vines in an interesting setting. The Piedra Infinita Winery that we visited in 2017 is a newly constructed place about an hour and a half’s driving time south of the original winery and located on land shaped by melting glaciers. Because of the glaciers, the landscape surface is covered with great quantities of small boulders spread all over the property. The building and grounds, designed by Argentine architect Fernando Raganato with Eduardo Vera as landscape architect, reflect the spectacular and unique landscape setting with the Andes Mountains in the background. The building was constructed with poured concrete walls integrated with large rocks from glaciers in different colors and shapes; the rocks were set into the forms as the concrete was poured. Crevices in the concrete walls define the entrance

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2.26 Sketches of the vegetable garden and entrance structure to the underground Lapostolle Winery in Chile, and the view from the terrace of Cabin #4 at the winery where we stayed.

and window openings and are visually shaped to mimic the surrounding mountain ridges and valleys (Figure  2.28). The architectural design carries through into the interior winemaking areas and restaurant. A  two-​story wine cellar has a silver dome as the roof that you see from the entrance. Outside the restaurant the terrace, where we sat and tasted their red and white wines, is landscaped with small boulders and large rocks that spread out to visually connect with the surrounding vineyards and the Andes Mountains. The main entrance is reached by walking through interlocking pathways and pools of water, reflecting the fact that water from melting glaciers shaped the historic landscape of the region.

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2.27 Sketches of the underground Lapostolle Winery, showing our guide and host, Fernando Calquin, and the different steps in the wine-​making sequence and process for fermenting and aging, and finally tasting.

The site tour that we had with our guide Veronica was very informative as she explained the land conditions and the types of grapes grown. Veronica also took us on a tour of the interior processing areas where the architectural idea carries through into the fermenting area, with concrete walkways to drop grapes into concrete fermenting casks, then into large oak barrels for storage, and finally into the two-​story wine cellar under the dome with a large glacial boulder as the centerpiece (Figure 2.29). The Piedra Infinita Winery reflects the latest thinking about contemporary production (selecting the right site) and marketing of wines (selling with an architecture reflecting the uniqueness of place). It has an architectural and site design concept for a rugged building and integrated agricultural

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2.28 Sketches of the dramatic entrance and terrace of the Piedra Infinita Winery south of Mendoza, Argentina, that was recently constructed by the Zuccardi family in a way that reflects its rugged location, with many rocks and boulders integrated into the construction reflecting its site and the Andes Mountains in the background.

landscape that spectacularly connects with the Andes Mountains. Sebastian Zuccardi described what they wanted to achieve, saying: ‘We wanted the wines to be an expression of place and a balance with the landscape and a minimum impact on the environment’ (Barnes, 2017). From an agro-​tourism perspective, the Piedra Infinita Winery accomplishes this idea well. Even though it is a rather remote place in a rugged landscape, it has an architecture connected to place and is well worth visiting. Wineries constructed within an agricultural landscape that is entirely different are the Bodega La Geria and the Bodega El Grifo on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. The island was partially covered by black volcanic ash in the 1700s, and both wineries are constructed in an ash field with little natural

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2.29 Sketches of our guide, Veronica, who gave us a tour of the Piedra Infinita vineyard, and the processing area in the newest and most spectacular winery in Argentina.

landscape planting. The agricultural technique for growing grapes in the volcanic ash is to plant the vines individually inside low curving lava rock walls to collect rainwater and overnight dew and protect the plants from the dry winds. The Bodega La Geria, constructed in 1730, leaves the walls a natural dark gray that blends into the ash fields. The nearby Bodega El Grifo that was constructed as a villa in 1775 is quite different and has its walls whitewashed to protect from the sun so it contrasts with the ash landscape. From our visit in 2013, as you can see in the sketch, both seem quite at home on this historic and unique island (Figure 2.30). Our guide Steve, also in the sketch, was very helpful in explaining the heritage of the wines and the history of the places we visited. In Portugal, along the Douro River Valley, is the beautiful Quinta do Vallado Winery that has an architectural concept of the building integrated into and

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2.30 Sketches of the harbor at Lanzarote in the Spanish Canary Islands and two wineries exhibiting different architectural concepts for integrating into the volcanic ash landscape. Steve was our guide in the Canary Islands.

becoming part of the terraced wine-​growing agricultural landscape. When we visited the winery in 2014 we were immediately struck by its beautiful and simple contemporary design, tightly integrated into the agricultural terraces along the Douro River. Designed by Portuguese architect Francisco Vieira de Campos, it is extremely simple in its form, with the exterior finish of paving, walls and roofs all in the same thin stone slices. Its oneness with the site along with underground

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2.31 Sketch of the beautiful Quinta do Vallado Winery on the Douro River in Portugal. Designed by the Portuguese architect Francisco Vieira de Campos, it is made of marble tile and tightly integrated into the grape-​growing terraces along the river. The view of the Douro River valley was from the Vintage House Hotel in Pinhao, Portugal.

rooms for making and storing wine is an excellent example of sustainable architecture for agriculture, and it is a compelling place to visit and enjoy (Figure 2.31). In my second book, Architecture and Agriculture, I included this winery, with several pictures, as an excellent case study example of architecture and agriculture, along with other projects from around the world. The Douro River Valley in Portugal

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is beautiful and picturesque, and the sketch also shows a view of the river valley with vine fields on the hills beyond from the comfortable Vintage House Hotel in Pinhao that is located on the edge of the river. California is also a great wine-​producing area. The Lyman and Sunce Wineries in the Russian River Valley near Healdsburg illustrate the simple and relaxed way wine is often produced, bottled and sold in this part of northern California. The sketch shows the rolling fields, with crossing bands of vines, and simple wood planters for flowers and an outdoor sitting area with an umbrella at the Lyman Winery. Near the top of a hill in the background is the gravity flowing processing facility, along with a power line. It illustrates the straightforward way that wine is produced, bottled and tasted in this region. At the bottom of the sketch is the nearby Sunce Winery that has much of the wine-​making activity being done outdoors, with small buildings for aging the wine in oak barrels, and a workman repairing one of the barrels. It further illustrates this unique relaxed California region with its strong connection to the agricultural landscape and environment of its place (Figure 2.32).

Farms and fields Agricultural landscapes are all different, but they have a common characteristic in that they were shaped by humans and the land is cultivated to grow food, raise animals, and live as families and communities. The most interesting rural places in a country are found through visiting and exploring the countryside to find the intrinsic character of farming and agricultural landscapes of the region. They are places that visually communicate why they are the way they are, reflecting the heritage and history of humans living on and working with the land. In Lanesboro, Minnesota (recently named as the most romantic place in Minnesota), a farmstead near the rural town has been converted into a beautiful bed and breakfast called Berwood Hill Inn. Sharon and I stayed there overnight in the converted three-​story Victorian-​style farmhouse with a large front porch and entry gate. It is an interesting and comfortable place to stay and sleep, with nice guests and a great breakfast to go along with the great views of the surrounding rolling farm fields in southeastern Minnesota. It is still a working farm, growing corn and soybeans, that adds authenticity to the visitor experience. The barn is the largest building on the farm, but no longer houses dairy cows and horses; however, it remains for storage of farm equipment and is an important part of the architectural composition and experience of the place, with rolling hills and fields and white farm buildings in the distance (Figure 2.33). Lanesboro is a small rural town of 750 people in the bluffs of the Root River Valley of southeast Minnesota. Settled in 1856, the town once had a railroad running through it. The railroad is long gone, but the grading and right of way was turned into a major regional bicycle trail ranked as the best in Minnesota. The trail includes several tunnels and other small rural towns that make it very scenic, and

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2.32 Two sketches of small wineries in Napa Valley California. The Lyman Winery and the Sunce Winery both exhibit a relaxed approach to making wine in the rolling landscape of the wine-​making region.

it is an easy ride because of the gentle slopes of the old railroad. The rural village of Lanesboro took advantage of this transportation change and transformed itself into a central biking trailhead with shops, restaurants and places to stay. It is a mecca for people from all over the five-​state region to visit and enjoy the landscape and agricultural setting, even if they do not ride a bicycle on the trail. Many immigrants to Minnesota are Norwegians  –​including myself as third generation, following my father’s mother’s arrival in 1905 and my mother’s grandfather’s in 1892. The landscape of Norway is rugged, with only enough tillable land for a limited number of farms. That is one reason why so many came to America and settled in the northern part of the country that was opening for settlement following the Homestead Act of 1862. It is interesting that the landscapes of both Norway and Minnesota were shaped by melting water from glaciers. Sharon and I recently visited Norway and stayed at the Trollstigen Resort, located about 10 miles east of Andalsnes, a small city south of Trondheim near

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2.33 Sketch of the valley view from the front of Berwood Hill Inn in Lanesboro, Minnesota. It is located on a working farm, with an old dairy barn adding to the picturesque image.

the coast of the North Sea. The resort consists of small log cabins with sod roofs like traditional wood farm buildings and a central building for social and dining activities. The resort is at the north end of the famous Trollstigen Road. It is a scenic drive up into the mountains, through the rugged landscape shaped by glaciers, with many vista points and well-​designed tourist centers constructed by the Norwegian Government. The road has been declared the most spectacular in Norway. The Trollstigen Resort is in a valley surrounded by steep snow-​capped mountains with the Rauma River nearby and adjacent farms with old barns, old fences and cattle grazing, and small fields with growing crops. The views of the valley from the resort are spectacular (Figure 2.34). It was a delightful place to visit, and we made many trips up the Trollstigen Road and on the Atlantic Road adjacent to the North Sea near Andalsnes during the five days we stayed here. It is a region of Norway where the new and the old ways have come to be at ease and in harmony with each other. Norcia Valley in Italy, in the Abruzzo region east of Rome, is another spectacular area to discover. We are part of an American hiking group that explores Italy and were hiking with a guide in the Apennine Mountains when we came upon an overlook that provided a panoramic view of the agricultural landscape of the valley (Figure 2.35). The shaping of the land by humans is quite visible in the variety of shades of green defining fields, ownership lines, public roads and natural areas. It was laid out long before surveying tools, and the organization reflects the ownership of the land as it evolved over time. The Abruzzo region is quite varied, with wonderful hill towns, and rolling mountains and valleys. It a region not often visited by tourists. We later hiked in the mountain area, where in 1943 the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured and held captive by

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2.34 Sketch of the rural view into the farming valley from the Trollstigen Resort near Andalsnes, Norway. The interesting fence is typical of wood fences in Norway.

2.35 Sketch of farm fields in the Norcia Valley located in the Abruzzo region that is east of Rome. The seemingly random pattern of the fields reflects historic property lines that developed over time.

Italian partisans in the Hotel Campo Imperatore at a ski resort. A short time after he was transferred here, gliders with German troops landed to rescue the dictator. They quickly took command of the resort and drove Mussolini to Milano where, near the end of the war, he was killed and hung upside down on a light pole with his mistress.

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On our Abruzzo hike we were on a trail on the Great Plain (Piano Grande) of Abruzzo and came across a field with sheep grazing, and the herdsman and his dog sitting in the shade under a tree. A little while later the trail went over a ridge, and we hiked toward the rural village of Castelluccio, settled in the thirteenth century as a hill town, with arranged fields with crops and animals in the valley, and surrounded by mountains. Because of its rugged landscape and frequent earthquakes, the Abruzzo region is not nearly as highly populated as other areas of Italy. When you hike through the landscape you get the feeling that you are seeing agricultural landscapes, farming and rural villages much as they have existed for centuries (Figure 2.36). Unfortunately, I recently read that an earthquake in 2016 destroyed roughly 60 percent of the village, forcing evacuation of all inhabitants and closure of roads, but the roads are now open, and I hope the village is being rebuilt –​it is a beautiful place.

River valleys River valleys are unique landscapes where the land was shaped by flowing water. In some parts of the world it was the melting of glaciers that provided the water to form the river with a drainage basin that keeps it flowing. When the melting of the glacier is combined with rock formations the result is often quite spectacular, with the valley surrounded by high mountains –​like the fjords in Norway. Minnesota is different in that the melting glaciers scraped the relatively flat landscape, providing an undulating pathway for the formation of the Mississippi River as it winds from its source in northern Minnesota, continuing south to the Gulf of Mexico. The glaciers also formed the Red River on the west side of the state that flows north into Canada. These rivers are places that developed as transportation corridors, creating many small rural towns along their path. In New Zealand there is a place on the South Island, where the Dart River and Rees River merge. The sketch shows the surrounding mountains left from the melting glaciers that are today mostly tree covered, with a flat plain in the valley that eventually was shaped by immigrants and cultivated with tree-​lined fields for crops and animals (Figure  2.37). When you drive further up the Rees River you come to a lookout panorama view of the river valley surrounded by the snow-​ covered Forbes Mountains (Figure  2.38). Here the open areas in the valley are small, and the sketch shows Sharon sitting on the edge of the steep bank taking in the view. New Zealand is a place in the South Pacific where the indigenous Maori, who are Polynesian people, appear to be living quite comfortably with their more recent European immigrant neighbors. It is a country that Sharon and I  enjoy visiting because of the vast contrast between the rugged natural landscapes and the integration of agriculture and farming without destroying the natural character of the interesting and varied New Zealand landscape. We have been there twice and, like Italy, you discover something new every time you visit.

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2.36 Two sketches of sheep in a field and the ancient village of Castelluccio in the Norcia Valley in Abruzzo. They were made on a hiking tour of the region. The village was almost destroyed in a recent earthquake.

In China the Yangtze River is 3,915 miles long and has a river basin that is home to one third of the population. When we took a cruise on the river in 2007 the Three Gorges Project, to construct a huge dam for hydroelectric power, was nearing completion, and the river behind it was rising. As we moved up the new river basin we could see the impact of moving 1.24 million farmers from the river valley to higher ground. A sketch from the stern of the cruise ship illustrates the rugged landscape on each side, with terraced fields and boats tied up along the shore, and new houses being constructed higher up (Figure 2.39). When we stopped and had a tour of one of the new towns on top of the hill, a young woman 62

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2.37 Sketch of the confluence of the Dart River and Rees River near Glenorchy, New Zealand, illustrating agricultural cultivation on the flat landscape and the surrounding mountains of this beautiful region of the country.

who was our guide in the village told us that her parents, who had lived in the lower river valley and had to move into a new government apartment, were not happy with the situation; however, she liked it very much because she now had her own private room and bathroom. Her comment illustrated the contrast between older rural people in China and younger ones who are embracing the challenges of a new environment and rural way of life.

2.38 Sketch of the Rees River valley further upstream from the confluence with the Dart River. It illustrates the rugged landscape of this part of New Zealand, with snow-​capped mountains, glaciers and fjords that look a lot like those in Norway.

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2.39 Sketches from the back end of our Viking Cruise ship Century Sky on the Yangtze River in China. It has been dammed, requiring villages along the historic river to be moved to higher ground.

The Yangtze cruise was interesting and beautiful to see and sketch, with changing vistas constantly. One could see the enormous reshaping of the river banks to provide for a several-​hundred-​foot rise in the water level. The water level is now rising,m and in a few years the landscape along the river basin will be quite different from what we saw. I have been back to China twice since then to participate in conferences, and the enormous shift in population from rural to

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urban areas reflects modern China. Yet there is growing concern about the split between urban and rural citizenship, and how the future of China’s rural and urban landscapes should be shaped.

Special rural places As Sharon and I travel around the world we often find special places that attract our attention, and we stop to explore and sketch. One of these, in the countryside east of Phoenix, Arizona, is a cave dwelling of the Salado indigenous people who farmed in the valley of the Salt River and used irrigation to grow a variety of crops and support cattle. They lived and worked in this region from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, until they left after climate change caused a prolonged drought. Now part of the Tonto National Memorial, the cave dwelling illustrates one of their unique places with sixteen rooms. Three of the rooms are two-​storied and constructed of rocks and mud in a natural recess in the siltstone hills surrounding the valley. They also constructed mud and rock pueblo houses in the valley that no longer exist. Little is known about where the Salado people came from or where they went after they abandoned the area due to the drought (Figure 2.40). Another place we chanced upon in this area of Arizona was an abandoned mining building standing along the side of the highway in the desert. It still has electric power lines attached to the metal-​sided structure, so it is hard to tell how long it has been empty, but what caught my eye was the interesting array of colors from the rusting metal siding (Figure 2.41). Somehow the rusting building seems quite appropriate to this region where mining was once the main activity, and it acts as a memory of what once went on. I hope it is preserved and added to the National Register of Historic Places as a national landmark. Touring the desert region in southwest Arizona, we visited the Mission San Jose de Tumacacori, located near the Santa Cruz River and close to the Arizona border with Mexico, that was started by Jesuit priests from Spain in 1691. Construction with adobe brick and stucco plaster on the exterior walls that are 5 feet thick to protect from the hot sun was begun in 1752. One of the oldest missions in the territory, it was abandoned in 1848 and reconstructed from 1908 as part of a national park established by President Theodore Roosevelt (Figure 2.42). It is a building that fits the architectural idea of form following function, culture, climate and place. Its color is of the desert and its form suggests the adjacent rolling hills and dunes, making it feel as though it grew on the site, and its architecture reflects the climate and culture of the region. It is a place that beautifully reflects the influence of religion in shaping culture in the early days of America. Several years ago Sharon and I drove to southern Ohio, where I made a presentation on rural design at Kenyon College. After our visit to their beautiful campus we continued to Kentucky and Tennessee before returning home to Minnesota. Along the way we toured the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Versailles, Kentucky,

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2.40 Sketch of a cave dwelling of the Salado indigenous people of Arizona, located east of Phoenix, who farmed with irrigation in the fifteenth century. It is part of the Tonto National Memorial.

which is a National Historic Landmark. The history of bourbon in the United States is epitomized by this place that was started in 1812. The complex consists of a variety of buildings constructed of local stone and wood timbers for processing and storage of whiskey for aging. Like the mission in Arizona, it feels as if it was grown on the site with a creek flowing through the complex along with many flowering gardens and careful landscaping (Figure 2.43). Inside, the distilling room has many old copper containers that look highly appropriate for their business. With their curious shape and color, they appear very much like the excellent bourbon that is processed in them and then aged for 12 to 14 years in oak casks before being bottled and sold. The entire complex reflects function, place, climate and culture in a natural way and it was a delight to visit and taste the famous whiskey they make. On the same trip we traveled through southern Tennessee and stayed overnight at the Buckhorn Inn located on the edge of a mountain near Gatlinburg, Tennessee (Figure 2.44). Constructed of wood and stone, it is a place to explore and hike around the side of the hill below the inn. It even had a labyrinth organized

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2.41 Sketch of an abandoned metal mining structure in rural Arizona that I sketched because it was so colorful in the brown desert landscape.

2.42 Two sketches of the Franciscan mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori in Arizona that dates from 1828. It is a beautiful building that blends into and becomes part of its desert site.

with small rocks in the landscape that reminded me of a drawing I had seen of an octagonal labyrinth in the floor of the cathedral in Amiens, France. The food was great, and the views from the dining room of the surrounding hills and mountains were very attractive. I was struck by the sense of intimacy and belonging that it had with its site, and that was what I tried to capture in the drawing.

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2.43 Exterior and interior sketch of the Woodford Reserve Distillery in Kentucky. Dating from 1812, it is a National Historic Landmark as well as a producer of excellent Kentucky whiskey.

Point Reyes National Seashore in California is located along the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco and west of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a national historic area, and as you drive around you discover its array of interesting places ranging from old lighthouses to mule deer running wild, to dairy farms with cows grazing on fields behind fences. A highlight was a visit to the Pierce Point Ranch that is on the National Register of Historic Places (Figure 2.45). The ranch house was built in 1858 with additions in 1869 along with a blacksmith shop, bunkhouses, school house, horse barn, and a large cow barn for milking 300 cows twice a day. It is in a low area surrounded by rolling hills and trees, with access to 68

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2.44 Sketch of the Buckhorn Inn near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that feels as if it grew like a white plant on the side of a hill with the river valley behind and below. It was a delightful and beautiful place to stay and explore.

2.45 Two sketches and a site plan of the historic Pierce Point Dairy Farm in Point Reyes National Seashore Park, California, just across and west of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Constructed in the 1850s, it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

a dock area that in the nineteenth century provided boat access to San Francisco and other areas along the coast. The sketch includes a site plan that shows the typical organization of a farmstead, with the buildings clustered around a central open space providing separation and connection among all the buildings and the variety of activities going on. There are a few other dairies on Point Reyes that are still operating, with their cows grazing outside on fields most of the time. This is the region that is often featured in television ads for milk from California dairies. A totally different special place is Park City, Utah, that is the gateway to winter skiing and summer hiking in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. Its Main Street in the winter is a kaleidoscope of color, with shops and painted structures all in contrast to the white snow that was everywhere the day we were there (Figure 2.46). It was fun to sketch, and I think I captured the character of Park City’s Main Street in its white winter landscape. It was a place that reminded me of the main street in my home town in northern Minnesota that also had a lot of winter snow, with piles all along the street restricting parking. I don’t often sketch winter scenes, but this was an interesting one to do. A special place Sharon and I discovered in the New Zealand South Island, when we were driving around exploring the two islands of the country, is the small rural town of Glenorchy about 23 miles north of Queenstown. It is a small settlement on the south end of Lake Wakatipu that is surrounded by snow-​capped mountains. The landscape of the region is famous for its scenic hiking trails, boat rides on the lake and camping areas. The settlement is quite small and spread out, with gas stations, a few pubs and a colorful restaurant called Café along the main road, where we had lunch on its outside porch. Café is a place that felt quite at home with the surrounding agricultural landscape and mountains in the background, and it still had a hitching post where riders could tie up their horses. It seemed to reflect well the laid-​back character of the New Zealand rural town and its people and lifestyle. The lunch and glass of beer were great, and we could not leave until I had sketched the restaurant and its surroundings in the rural landscape (Figure 2.47). Where Glenorchy is spread out with a lot of space between buildings, the nearby rural town of Martinborough, with a population of 1,600, is compact and has shops, banks and hotels lining the two sides of its Main Street  –​much like many typical rural towns in America serving nearby farms. In this case the farms are heavily involved with rearing sheep and beef cattle, growing olives, and fishing along the coast (Figure  2.48). The sketch illustrates two sides near one end of Main Street, with covered canopies on almost every building to protect pedestrians and store fronts from the hot summer sun. The Mobil gas station near the intersection with a canopy shelter over the pumps again makes it seem just like a small rural town in America. These two sketches of rural towns in New Zealand are included because they reminded me of similar small towns around the world that are serving nearby farms –​and in New Zealand a lot of tourists. The buildings in both towns express a close understanding by their builders of their functional purpose along with a design that reflects climate, culture and place.

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2.46 Two sketches of the colorful historic Main Street in Park City, Utah, in the winter. It is located at the gateway to Utah’s skiing center.

On a trip to New England on the east coast of the United States we were driving along the coastline in Maine visiting Kennebunkport. We suddenly saw this attractive church as we drove by and turned around to get another look. It is the St Anne’s Episcopal Church, constructed of large rocks and boulders in thick walls with gray metal roofs. The Bell Tower seems to grow up out of the church that also functions as the main entrance at its base. I was impressed by how appropriate the rugged architecture was to its rugged location. With vines growing on the stone and its location in and among trees, the building almost looked as if it had been shaped by nature rather than built by humans (Figure 2.49). Recently I saw a photograph of the large Bush family, with two presidents of the United States and a home in Kennebunkport, posing for a group photograph in front of the church. They looked right at home.

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2.47 Sketch of the Café on the main highway of the rural village of Glenorchy, New Zealand. It gave a great lunch and seemed to be the center of activity in this picturesque region. It still has a hitching post for locals who ride their horses to the Café.

2.48 Two sketches of each side of Jellico Street in Martinborourgh, New Zealand, with canopies over the sidewalks to protect people from the hot January sun.

Following the cruise up the Yangtze River that I discussed earlier, we flew to Xian to see the full-​size terracotta warriors and horses that were buried in underground pits along with Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 200 BC after he died. The pits were discovered in 1974, and excavation has been going on ever since. The collection is impressive to see, and it is hard to believe that so many terracotta sculptures were assembled and buried with the Emperor with no expectation that they would ever be seen again. We then flew to Beijing and, like all first-​time tourists, we toured the Great Wall at Badaling. The 13,170-​mile wall

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2.49 Sketch of the St Anne’s Episcopal Church near Kennebunkport, Maine. Constructed with large stones mixed with concrete, its thick walls gave the visual expression of a welcoming place of refuge.

was constructed primarily during the Ming Dynasty in 770–​221 BC, and it still stands almost totally intact over its entire length. The first sketch focuses on the top of the wall, illustrating its curving construction as a series of fortifications up and over hills (Figure 2.50). The second is looking back at the wall through a battlement portal, illustrating the wall winding its way up the mountains with periodical higher watch towers for signaling (Figure 2.51). The wall was originally constructed to protect China from raids by nomadic groups from Mongolia and the Eurasian Steppes, but it also was a way to control access in and out of China and collect taxes on goods being transported. It is remarkable that it was built and still survives, and it is certainly one of the great wonders of the world. Beijing has many other historic sites constructed during the Ming Dynasty, like the Sacred Way with full-​size sculptures of horses and elephants marking the path, and the great Shengong Shengde Stele Pavilion at the entrance to it. Other memorable ancient places are the Forbidden City, with its courtyards, gardens, and pavilions; and the vast Tiananmen Square that is the central gathering place in Beijing. When you visit Beijing, you become acutely aware of the ancient history of China and its historic place on the world’s stage. Norway, on the other hand is a small country in Northern Europe that was not much known until oil was discovered in the North Sea. As a result, it is today one of the richest countries in the world, with vast revenue deposits preparing for the future when oil revenues are gone. Like other European countries and Russia,

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Norway has a long history of construction with wood, and houses and churches that have been around for centuries. The Borgund Stavkirke, constructed in 1150, near the town of Laerdal, on Sognefjord, is one of these buildings (Figure 2.52). It is a special place along the river valley approximately 5 miles upstream from the family farm that my father’s mother emigrated from. We have toured the ancient Borgund church several times, most recently in 2012 when I made the sketch. It shows the wooden church behind a stone wall, with the new visitor center in the right background and the mountains flanking each side of the river. The design and construction of the wooden church, with fourteen masts supporting the roof along with tarred wood shingles and dragon heads at the corners, reflects the craftsmanship of historic Norwegian shipbuilding that carried over into its wooden architecture. It also illustrates wooden architectural ideas that the Vikings voyagers brought back to Norway from their trips into Russia, where log construction was highly developed and articulated in the Middle Ages. Gunnar Bugge and Christian Norberg-​Schulz, in their 1969 book Stav og Laft I Norge: Early wooden architecture in Norway, discuss the importance of log and wood construction historically for farm buildings and churches throughout Norway, ending with a challenge for today: Today it is no longer possible to tackle our problems by traditional means. Nevertheless, we believe that the book may have a purpose beyond the presentation of a national heritage. Perhaps it may inspire the architects of today to solve their problems with the same respect for nature, man and culture as the anonymous masters of the past.

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2.50 Sketch of the Great Wall of China at Badaling, near Beijing. Dating from 770–​ 221 BC, the wall is 13,170 miles long and constructed to protect China from the Mongols. It is an impressive construction, crawling up and over the mountains with lookout stations along the way.

2.51 Sketch of a portal view from the Great Wall of China at Badaling, showing the rugged landscape that it was constructed upon.

They also quote the legendary modern Chicago architect Mies van der Rohe and what he said about historic wooden buildings: Where can we find greater structural clarity than the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs. What better examples could there be for young architects? (Bugge and Norberg-​Schulz, 1969)

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The historic wooden buildings on farms and constructions for churches are well worth a trip to Norway. There are several museums where farm buildings have been moved and maintained so that you can see first hand what life was like in Norway at that early time. On a driving trip through northern Spain starting in Barcelona, we stopped and took an aerial cable car up the mountain to visit the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat (Figure 2.53). It is one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Spain, and since the twelfth century people have come to see the Black Madonna that was sculptured in AD 50 and found in a cave near here. The focal point of the Sanctuary is the Baldachino with the Black Madonna off to the side. It was a dramatic place to visit. Not far away, near the border with France, we stopped at the Spanish town of Seu d’Urgell. The Ohm Square is small, with cobblestone paving, but it is bordered by the twelfth-​century Cathedral of Urgell on the right and the Sant Demenete church on the left. The sketch focuses on the city hall, with the Pyrenees Mountains in the background (Figure 2.54). The attention to detail in the design of the city hall, with color and form, planting growing on the wall and the open door, made me feel that this was indeed a welcoming place and a destination serving the region as well as visitors who hike in the mountains. It was a beautiful city to visit and walk around. Later on the driving trip we visited Bilbao and the Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum and stayed at his Hotel Marques de Riscal constructed at a winery in the Basque region. Both buildings are typical Gehry and beautiful objects that seem to

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2.52 Sketch of the historic wooden Borgund Stavkirke near Laerdal, Norway. Constructed in the 1150s, it follows Norwegian shipbuilding patterns and expresses both purpose and ritual, with crosses and dragon heads along the ridge lines. It is surrounded by mountains on either side of the Laerdal River. In the right background is the new modern visitor center.

2.53 Exterior and interior sketch of the mountain Sanctuary of our Lady of Montserrat in Spain, northwest of Barcelona. It is a place of pilgrimage, and you take a cable car to reach the sanctuary high in the massifs of this part of Spain.

have dropped down out of the sky. The museum seems to fit well along the river and into the urban fabric of Bilbao, and it certainly has had a big economic impact on the city. The hotel is beautiful; however, it seems so out of place even after I sketched it from a nearby rural village on top of the next hill that I decided not to include it in this book on agricultural landscapes. During one of our many trips to Italy we stopped and stayed in the famous historic hill town of Siena at the Grand Hotel Continental. When we got up to our room I  discovered that from our window there was a beautiful view of red roof tops and ochre-​colored stone walls, and the Duomo that dominates the city (Figure 2.55). Later, as we walked around the narrow streets, we turned toward the Piazza del Campo and saw the fourteenth-​century Palazzo Pubblico and its tall brick tower framed between buildings on each side of a narrow street. It was a powerful view of a famous historic building (Figure 2.56). The Piazza del Campo is a famous gathering place that is on a gradual slope. It is beautifully proportioned, connecting people, buildings and landscape, and reflecting Italian culture and architecture at its best.

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2.54 Sketch of the City Hall in Seu d’Urgell, a rural village in the Catalan Pyrenees region of northern Spain. Located on a small cobblestone plaza adjacent to the cathedral, the form of the public building with green vines growing on it reflected, I thought, the shape of the mountains in the background.

In the summer of 2017 we took an interesting and exciting nine-​day train tour from Moscow through Siberia to Mongolia on the tracks of the Trans-​ Siberian Railroad, with stops at cities along the way. Kazan, on the European side of Siberia, was the first place. Located at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers, it is the eighth largest city in Russia, and its whitewashed Kremlin is a World Heritage Site (Figure 2.57). The sketch shows a series of quick drawings made as we were quickly guided through the large complex, ranging from a young girl in traditional costume handing out treats to the people on our bus before we entered through the main gate under the Spasskaya Tower. I quickly sketched an old wood house on the street, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral with excellent acoustics where an opera singer sang several Russian arias for us, a corner of the surrounding wall with a turret and adjacent artillery horse stable, and near the exit the leaning brick Soyenbika Tower constructed during the reign of Peter the Great. During World War II many industrial plants were relocated to Kazan from Moscow, and as a result it has become a major industrial center with much renovation going on. The city is known as the center of Tatar culture in Russia. Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia on the Asian side of Russia, was another stop on our tour. Located on the Angora River that flows into Lake Baikal, the city became an exile center for many artists, army officers and nobles after the Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nicholas I.  As a result, it evolved with the quality of people who were exiled there, and nine scientific research institutes emerged. It is today the intellectual capital of Russia, and I  had to make quick sketches as we were guided quickly through the city. The sketch includes the public market, with a young woman in sunglasses selling fruit, and details of the many wooden houses

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2.55 Sketch from the window of the Grand Hotel Continental in Siena, Italy, the famous Tuscany hill town. The red tile roofs and the striped Duomo and hills beyond was a perfect view to record in a drawing.

that remain and are being restored. At one of these wooden houses we were entertained by opera singers and a pianist, much as might have taken place in this house in the eighteenth century (Figure 2.58). Later that day we traveled outside Irkutsk to visit an open-​air museum that has many reconstructions of wooden houses, a farm house with attached barns around a courtyard with wood planks on the floor to avoid dragging mud and manure into the buildings, wooden churches and a log fortress (Figure 2.59). As is the tradition in Russia, they have performers dressed in traditional costumes to introduce you to the museum, and they sing Russian folk songs to further enhance the impression of their historic culture. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable display of wooden construction, and it reminded me of something Christian Norberg-​Schulz wrote about wood construction in Norway,

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2.56 Sketch of the tower of Siena’s city hall on Piazza del Publico, framed by buildings on both sides of a narrow street.

saying: ‘from their travels eastward in old Russia, the norsemen brought home log-​construction, a technique allowing for more solid and tight houses’ (Bugge and Norberg-​Schulz, 1969). Also near Irkutsk we stopped to visit the wooden Old Russian Orthodox Church constructed at the edge of a forest. Painted yellow with white trim, it is an interesting composition that celebrated the uniqueness of place, and the human relationships with the land and each other in building community. It is an excellent example of wood church design and construction in Russia. We saw a lot of color on wood homes and churches throughout Siberia, and when I saw this Russian Orthodox church it looked so much a part of the landscape that I had to quickly sketch it (Figure 2.60). Since most tourists take photographs, the tours stop long enough at a place for that, and then move on to another site. That’s why a lot of my sketches have several small images on one page. This sketch of the church on one page was an exception.

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2.57 A series of sketches made while touring the historic Kremlin in Kazan, Russian Siberia, with a young girl in costume handing sweets to visitors, an opera singer in the cathedral, and the leaning tower constructed of brick.

A few months later Sharon and I  were traveling in Australia and flew for two and a half hours from Melbourne to Uluru in the desert in the middle of the vast country, to visit the enormous rock outcropping that used to be called Ayers Rock after the English explorer who first discovered it. It is now called Uluru, the name the Anangu Aboriginal people of the area had given it, and is recognized as a sacred place. To the Anangu people Uluru is the place they came from and where they will return after death. A World Heritage Site since 1987, it has rock caves and ancient paintings, springs and waterholes. We drove to a vantage point

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2.58 A series of sketches of colorful wooden houses and the public market made while touring the city of Irkutsk in Russian Siberia. This was a city where the Tsars sent many educated people they did not like. Today there are nine scientific research centers operating here.

to see the rock at sunset, when I sketched it as it glows with a distinctive red color (Figure 2.61). It is an impressive natural site, and it is easy to understand why it is a sacred place. Roughly 1,200 feet high and about 2 miles long, the rock has many different characteristics to see and explore as you travel around it, visiting special places along the way. We recently heard that climbing on the rock is now prohibited, and that is good. It reflects the understanding that the indigenous Aboriginal people, who have lived on the continent for 60,000 years, and the people who moved to Australia from Europe have reached about the importance of indigenous culture to understanding the history and life in Australia today. During our visit to the

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2.59 Sketches of the Open-​Air History Museum near Irkutsk, with reconstructions of a Russian fortress, churches, farmstead and houses. The singers in costume greet visitors in the fortress by singing several Russian folk songs. This was the kind of wood architecture the Vikings discovered and brought back to Norway.

Uluru rock we also visited the Aboriginal Culture Center, where photography was not allowed but I was able to sketch two Aboriginal women artists painting with colored dots on canvas while sitting on the ground (Figure  2.62). The Cultural Center is very interesting, with its curving roof and indoor and outdoor rooms explaining the Anangu Aboriginal culture and the rock of Uluru in the background dominating the setting.

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2.60 Sketch of the wooden Old Russian Orthodox Church near Irkutsk, located on the edge of the forest. Painted a bright yellow, it is like a flower in a garden and is a beautiful example of historic wooden architecture in Russia.

2.61 Sketch of Uluru Rock located in the middle of the Central Australian Desert that is a sacred place to Aboriginal people. About 2 miles long and 1,000 feet high, it is a sandstone monolith that glows a bright red at sunset.

Later we visited Sydney and then flew to New Zealand for another week. Australia and New Zealand are similar beause of their European and British history, but quite different in landscape and agriculture and how farming is done. Yet they may well be two of the most important countries in the world, illustrating how to live in sustainable harmony without destroying the landscape. The Deepwater

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2.62 Sketches of the Aboriginal Cultural Center at Uluru in Katatjuta National Park at the base of Uluru Rock. Two Aboriginal women artists sitting on the floor were creating paintings with small jars of paint that they used to place drops of color on the canvas.

Woolshed near Wagga Wagga, Australia, designed by architect Peter Stuchbury and that I discussed in my second book, Architecture and Agriculture, is an excellent architectural example that illustrates a sustainable rural building with a form based on function, climate, culture and place.

Summary When I started this book, as the last of a trilogy about rural design and agricultural landscapes, I was thinking that it would all be about rural places that Sharon and I have visited. However, as I got further into it and was preparing the outline for the publisher, I realized, after going back through my sketch books to pick out the ones for this chapter, that I had to expand my thinking. The chapter includes sketches of architecture as well as landscapes, expressing the wide range of rural development over time to provide food and clothing. The word rural is derived from the Latin ‘ruralis’, and from my search of definitions it generally relates to the characteristics of the countryside rather than

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a town, and country people and their life and agriculture. During my twenty years running the Center for Rural Design at the University of Minnesota and working with communities in rural Minnesota, however, I discovered that rural was much more than countryside, involving a lifestyle and relationship to the planet that urban people do not understand very well. There are exceptions, however, and in the following chapters I will explore agricultural landscape connections in a wide range of ways through my sketches of places around the planet that Sharon and I have visited, including urban places and places where land and water meet. Perhaps one of the most exciting experiences we have had was to discover the new ways that rural is now being celebrated and promoted through new wineries in grape-​growing regions around the globe. The best of these wineries utilized architecture and landscape architecture in the design of their special place for growing grape vines and producing wine. They are all different, but equally fun to visit and sketch. If I only took pictures with my camera and used them to portray the places we have been to, this book would not be as interesting and informative as I think it is. The sketches give you an entirely different way of seeing and understanding how a designer looks at a place and records it through drawings. It has been interesting and a lot of fun to go back and study the sketches and experience the place in my mind once again. I hope that readers will find this to be equally true and will find a new way of seeing and thinking about rural and agricultural landscapes when they visit a new country.

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Chapter 3

Urban places

Urban places that express an architectural and cultural integration with their landscape and their agricultural heritage and rural people have a special historic character. They are places where urban culture is closely connected to rural culture and the surrounding agrarian landscape. They can be historic or contemporary, but all are places where landscapes, building materials, economies, climates and topography have fundamentally influenced the architecture and urban and rural design in the making of the city. They are generally places where historic buildings have a human, social and community quality, constructed in a simple way using local materials and local building systems. An urban place that has not embraced its rural roots and rural surroundings has a bland character that will not successfully attract talent. Young people want a place that feels real and offers opportunities, diversity and an environment closely connected to nature. Young people today are spurning the suburbs for urban living and the opportunity to escape into the natural mountains, forests and lakes on weekends to balance work and play (Miller, 2014). When you visit modern cities around the world and see contemporary buildings that all look similar, you get the feeling that most of modern architecture ignores climate, place and culture. They may be beautiful in their design and stunning to look at, but as an architect I  struggle to find a reason for their appearance other than that it is where the land is, and building developers and their architects seem to be the ones most responsible for the rapid change and loss of heritage in the character of the modern city. I believe strongly in modernism in architecture and that buildings should reflect the time when they were designed and built, but should also have a timeless quality reflecting climate, place and culture in addition to function. There are many urban places that are exceptions, and in this chapter I discuss those urban places that I think best reflect their rural agricultural heritage and unique place on the planet. Arriving at a new city today that you have never visited, the transition into the city may take place in a variety of ways. If you fly, the trip from the airport into

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the city is where you first start to get a feel of the place. If you drive, it is at the end of a long trip through the adjacent countryside following the main highways into the city. If you come by water, you first see the harbor and its shipping operations that are usually near to the city center. If you come by train, the track shows you the back side of buildings, your introduction is the passenger depot, and then you step out into the city. Whatever way you arrive, it is often through industrial neighborhoods with commercial and manufacturing buildings along with a variety of apartment buildings leading into the historic city center. It is the historic center that is often the clearest expression of agricultural heritage and connection to the culture and climate of place. For me, when I first visit a new city, I instinctively try to look beyond the apartments and the commercial, manufacturing and industrial buildings for historic connections between rural and urban that were impacted by geology and landscape. Even after visiting a city many times, as with Rome, I continue to find new connections between urban and rural even as the city has changed over time. The urban-​oriented sketches that I  have selected for this chapter may not seem to the reader to have any direct connection to rural, but if you look closely you will see the spirit of place that has helped shape the city and is the reason why I made the drawing and included it in the book. To help explain my seeing and thinking I  have organized the urban sketches by categories  –​city places, cafes, public markets, squares and streets, and houses –​that I hope will assist the reader in understanding the spirit of place and the connections between urban and rural that I see as an architect and design thinker.

City places Every city that Sharon and I visit has something unique and in some cases, as with Buenos Aires in Argentina, one immediately discovers many things that were not expected. When we first visited Buenos Aires in 2009, we were aware of the impact of Eva Peron and the romance that went with her life, and one of the first places we visited was the unique urban La Recoleta Cemetery in the center of the city, where she is buried. The cemetery has above-​ground burial vaults that range from the flamboyant to the simple, and is interesting to walk around and explore the architecture of death. There are also other places in Buenos Aires that one discovers, like Teatro Colon, the great opera house considered one of the finest theaters in the world. We had a very informative tour of the opera house and learned about its design and construction. It is famous for its acoustic and artistic values, and is a great place to attend opera, ballet and concerts and enjoy people-​watching in the grand lobbies during intermissions. Another place we discovered was the unique and colorful La Boca neighborhood that is home to the tango. La Boca is a relatively small neighborhood that one can easily walk around and explore. Its main corridor, Caminito Street, has

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3.1 Two sketches of the colorful Caminito Street in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, that was home to the tango. It is an interesting neighborhood to explore.

a distinctive character, with a great variety of colors painted on metal-​clad wood buildings. The story we heard was that the Italians from Genoa who first lived there constructed the buildings and then painted them with leftover paints from the harbor. The buildings are rather haphazard constructions, but with the array of shapes and the different ways the buildings are painted on Caminito Street, the La Boca neighborhood comes alive with a distinct atmosphere that is fun to explore and sketch (Figure 3.1). It is a delight to walk around and have a coffee, but at the same time we were advised to keep a close control of our belongings and not to wander into side streets. La Boca is the birthplace of the tango, and in front of cafes there were couples performing the dance for visitors that was fun to watch. From its beginning in the La Boca neighborhood, the tango has spread to many places around the city center where street dancers perform. It was at one of these places early one evening that I had a chance to sketch a couple dancing (Figure 3.2). He was dressed in a striped brown suit and she in a black silky and flowing dress, and they danced the passionate tango very well. We enjoyed

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3.2 Sketch of tango dancers performing on a sidewalk in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina. The tango is a powerful dance to see and listen to.

watching them perform, listening to the music and sensing the feelings that are integral to the tango in Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, like other historic cities, has restricted the height of buildings in the city center so the scale of public space and the connections to parks and trees is carefully retained and you are never far from nature. Near the famous La Recoleta Cemetery there is a small park with several huge Banyan trees. The one I sketched is estimated to be over 300 years old, and 60 feet tall and 150 feet wide (Figure 3.3). The sketch also shows the Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar, with its bright interior and blue tower that faces the Plaza Francia –​an open park area and gathering place in central Buenos Aires –​and a view of the blue tower from the La Recoleta Cemetery. Like all major cities Buenos Aires has another darker side. One day during our visit we were walking on a busy boulevard toward MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art, in the middle of the afternoon. We passed under a big tree near a park and suddenly discovered that bird droppings had landed on us.

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3.3 Sketches of a 300-​year-​old tree, the cemetery where Eva Peron is buried and the beautiful Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar in central Buenos Aires, Argentina. They show how varied the historic city is in places to discover and explore.

A young man and woman in their early thirties rushed up to help clean us off with water from bottles and paper towels. We were unaware of the ruse, and the young woman, while pretending to clean up the droppings, was feeling around to find the wallet that I had in my front pants pocket. Suddenly, I realized it was gone as she and her partner ran away and jumped into a car waiting at the curb. There was nothing much we could do and we were a mess, so we turned around and walked back to the Sheraton Hotel, where the staff were helpful and understanding and told us they would clean our clothes. We went to our room, changed clothes and notified the credit card companies, and continued our walking tour of the beautiful and interesting city. We found out later that these thieves who spray people with a foul sticky liquid to make them think it is bird droppings are called the ‘Bird People from

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Peru’, reflecting the unique approach they utilize to relieve tourists of some money. A few months after we returned home to Minnesota I told a lawyer friend of mine, who was planning soon to travel to Buenos Aires with his wife, about the trick and warned him to be careful. During their visit the same thing happened to them, and since I had alerted him he yelled at them to stay away. They did not lose anything but the cost of cleaning their clothes. The city of Shanghai, China, is different from Buenos Aires, yet it still has many similarities. It is an historic city near the waterfront, with a great harbor. A  contemporary neighborhood on one side of the Huangpu River without any height restrictions has a collection of modern high-​rise glass buildings and a tall observation tower near a bend in the river that looked like Seattle, Washington, from the water. Along the river on the other side is a relatively new one-​mile walkway called The Bund that was designed by the Dutch architect Paulus Snoeren, and it has become a favorite focal point and gathering place for tourists in Shanghai. The sketch I  made is from The Bund walkway near the History Museum, looking toward the modern skyline on the other side of the river (Figure 3.4). As I was drawing, a group of young Chinese schoolgirls came by and rushed over to see what I was sketching. Since I was copying the Chinese letters on a sign near the entrance to the museum, one of the girls called to the others and said in English, ‘He can write in Chinese!’ And then they quickly went on their way. The Bund is an interesting place for people-​watching, with an array of Chinese people of all ages doing different things, such as an old man stretching, a group of people enjoying the promenade and buying something from a vendor, and in a nearby factory silk weavers busy at work (Figure 3.5). On the old city side of the Bund there are height restrictions to maintain the historic texture and

3.4 Sketch across the Huangpu River from the Bund walkway in Shanghai, China showing the modern city on the other side.

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3.5 Three sketches of a variety of scenes on the Bund, a walkway along the Huangpu River in the city center of Shanghai, China, that is a gathering place filled with people.

scale of old Shanghai. This was where we visited the classical Yuyuan Garden (Garden of Contentment) that is one of the best historic urban gardens in China, dating from 1559–​1577 when it was constructed during the Ming Dynasty. It suffered great damage during World War II but was reconstructed and opened to the public in 1961, and in 1982 it was declared a national monument. The

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3.6 Two sketches of the Yuyuan Garden (Garden of Contentment) in the old city part of downtown Shanghai, China. It is an urban garden reflecting historic China in the heart of a modern city.

Garden consist of six areas separated by ‘dragon walls’ with doorways leading to different pavilions, ponds, landscaping and rock outcroppings. The sketch shows one of the flamboyant dragon walls defining a garden area with its round entrance doorway. As we entered through the round opening we discovered a small historic bridge over a pond and a tiered pavilion on an island with integrated plantings. It was so picturesque an image of old China that I  had to draw it (Figure  3.6). Even though Yuyuan is an urban garden it beautifully illustrates Chinese historic traditions and connections with nature. It is a place that modern Shanghai people seek out to enjoy their history and it was quite crowded the afternoon we were there.

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3.7 Sketch of Rosenborg Slot (castle) in Kongens Have (King’s Garden) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Surrounded by canals, it is entered over a bridge and through a gateway. There were many more windows than I had time to draw.

Copenhagen is the major city in Denmark, and a waterfront city where everything seems to be shaped by water and connections to the Baltic Sea. As we were walking around exploring the city we came upon the Rosenborg Slot (castle), located in the large public Kongens Have (King’s Garden). The castle is located on an island surrounded by a water canal, with a bridge entry to the gate in the wall surrounding the castle. It was constructed as a summer house in 1606 by King Christian IV. The sketch (Figure 3.7) shows the sequential connections between the park, the bridge over the canal to the gate in the thick wall guarded by stone lions, and the castle’s vertical construction on the island with trees and plantings. There are many more windows than I had time to incorporate into the sketch, but I think it does accurately portray the fortress nature of a summer house for a king, surrounded by water, in the middle of the city in the early part of the seventeenth century. We saw this sequential layout again when we visited the famous Tivoli Garden, constructed in 1843, and experienced its amazing jumble of activities, including oriental pavilions, rides, restaurants, theaters, fountains and shade tree planting, that all hang together as a popular amusement park and gathering place

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3.8 Sketch of Tivoli Garden in the center of Copenhagen, Denmark. The yellow tent, people sitting, food and drink, landscaping, signage and lighting all add up to a unique gathering place in the heart of a city.

in Copenhagen (Figure 3.8). It is also quite spectacular at night, with exotic lighting creating a unique visual experience as a popular gathering place in the city. Prague is a beautiful historic European city filled with surprises. Located on the Vitava River, the city has gone through many political upheavals but today functions as the capital of the Czech Republic. The Old Town Square, with the Old Town Hall and its astronomical clock, and adjacent St Nicholas Church is the focal center of the city. It is a square that reminded me of Campo di Fiori in Rome as a city gathering place with an open-​air market selling fresh food from the rural areas surrounding the city. It was filled with people sitting under umbrellas, outdoor restaurants and shops, along with historic buildings. Nearby is the Art Nouveau Municipal House and concert hall constructed in 1905 and the adjacent Powder Tower. The tower was constructed in 1475 as one of the gates in the wall surrounding the city, and later in the seventeenth century became a place to store gun powder (Figure 3.9). A short distance away is the highly interesting Old New Jewish Synagogue, with its brick and stucco exterior construction integrated into the landscape on a small city block in such a way that one side of the building looks completely different from the other (Figure 3.10). Located in the Jewish Quarter, it was constructed in 1270 in gothic style and is the oldest active synagogue in Europe. On Prague’s Wenceslas Square, the location of many rallies and demonstrations, you find the Grand Hotel Europa, constructed in 1883 and remodeled in 1905, which is a World Heritage Site. It has a beautifully proportioned façade, with graphic images and fine details reflecting Art Deco patterns integrated into its window texture with subtle colors (Figure 3.11). The hotel has a

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3.9 Two sketches of the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic. It is the central gathering place in the city and reminded me of Campo di Fiori in Rome.

wonderful, unique design that helps create the character and ambience of Prague, reflecting its culture and place. Rome is the one of our favorite cities to visit and Sharon and I  have been there nineteen times, starting with our honeymoon in 1985. With so many layers of ancient Roman architecture, along with St Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City and many other beautiful Catholic churches and museums, it is a city filled with

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3.10 Two sketches of the Old Jewish Synagogue in Prague, Czech Republic: one from the entrance (ghetto) side and one from the street side. It is a beautiful building firmly rooted into its place, with trees reflecting heritage.

interesting and historic public places. One of our favorites, and a unique place to visit and experience, is the Campo di Fiori that I sketched one afternoon while we were having coffee at a table along one of several bars on the plaza (Figure 3.12). It is a popular gathering place, filled in the morning with people shopping at the vegetable and fish market that is dismantled and removed around three in the afternoon. It then quickly evolves into a meeting place for friends in the late afternoon and evening. When visiting Italy, you learn quickly that Italians do not often meet people or entertain in their apartment homes because they are small and often

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3.11 Sketch of the wonderful Grand Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czech Republic. It is a World Heritage Site, reflecting art deco design at its best.

up long stairways. It is the outdoor cafes and bars and indoor restaurants that function as living rooms and places to meet friends. The Campo di Fiori had its darker moments as a place of executions in the Middle Ages, and the tall statue in the center of the plaza is of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive on that spot in 1600 for heresy against the Roman Catholic Church. His dark, brooding statue looms over Piazza Campo di Fiori, only adding to the intriguing character of the place that is defined so well by its history and the scale of buildings around it, creating a wonderful public space in Rome.

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3.12 Sketch of one of my favorite places in Rome. The Campo di Fiori is a public market for farmers selling in the morning; after they leave in the afternoon it becomes a gathering place for the city.

3.13 Sketch of the ruins of Trajan’s Market in central Rome illustrating the importance of the public market in early Roman times as a gathering place for rural and urban people to connect.

Not too far away and near the Roman Forum are the ruins of Trajan’s Market that was built in AD 107–​110 at one end of the Forum when Trajan was Emperor. The sketch (Figure 3.13) shows the curved exterior of the grand multi-​level market, with shops on the ground level and living quarters above, as was common during Roman times. Not shown is the labyrinth of alleys behind the curved wall that also

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had many shops. There were about 150 shops in the market, and later during the middle ages apartments were constructed on top. Trajan’s Market attests to the historic importance of providing a public space for bringing food from the country into the city. During Roman times every rural village and city had a large public market that continues to this day in many smaller neighborhood markets like the morning open-​air vegetable and fish market in Campo di Fiori. William L.  MacDonald, in his book The Architecture of the Roman Empire, wrote: The Trajan Markets were the creation of a brilliant and audacious designer, a master of architectonic form and the new structural technology. The scale of the design is generous. The rise is steep, the levels numerous, and the plan complex. (MacDonald, 1965) I was fortunate to have known Bill MacDonald when he was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome while I was there, and I prepared several drawings for him that are in his book. Later, during a visit to Minnesota and over dinner at our home, he provided me with information about a Roman floor mosaic that depicts life on a farm during Roman time in Tunisia and that I included in my first two books. It is one of the few images of life on a farm during Roman times. At the end of his book on Roman architecture, MacDonald wrote: The principles of this architecture, for centuries an effective instrument of Roman culture, were not lost when the political framework of ancient society collapsed. They survived the transition to the early middle ages, and together with Roman literature and law have continued ever since to give inspiration and instruction. And Roman architecture has never ceased to be relevant to the study of the nature and meaning of architectural form, for it was expressive and powerful art, defining a critically important experience of Mediterranean and Western man. (MacDonald, 1965) It is the powerful organization and symbolism of Roman architecture that I found so compelling when I was at the American Academy in Rome, and the city of Rome continues to this day to be fascinate me, and I discover some place new every time Sharon and I visit. Sometimes a city becomes known worldwide by the design and construction work of one person. In the case of the city of Barcelona the architect is Antoni Gaudí, who designed the famous Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia (Figure 3.14). Construction was started in 1882 and continues to this day, as you can see in the sketch with four cranes for facilitating the construction process in the densely urban environment adjacent to a small park with a pool. I made the

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3.14 Sketch of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain, designed by architect Antoni Gaudí. After sitting unfinished for many years, it is now being completed even though some historians feel that it should have been left alone.

sketch standing in the wooded park overlooking the pond in the middle, across the street from the main entry, to show all the activity going on. This was quite different from the first time I visited Barcelona back in the 1960s, when the unfinished church was quietly standing without much hope of ever being finished. In 2018 when Sharon and I  visited Barcelona again and toured the church, it was astonishing to see how much construction had taken place over the past five years. The interior beautifully expresses the tree forest that Gaudí envisioned, and I think when completed the Sagrada Familia will become identified as one of the great architectural wonders of the world. The other famous Gaudí project in Barcelona is Parc Guell that incorporates many of his trademark design thinking and design details, with colorful broken pottery, porcelain tiles and intriguing forms all waiting to be discovered and explored. It is a park that has a lot of mystery and intrigue and that is a delight to visit and wander around. The sketch (Figure 3.15) is of a view looking down toward the main entry from a colorful viewing platform above.

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3.15 Sketch of Parc Guell in Barcelona, also designed by architect Antoni Gaudí. It is a wonderful people place filled with Gaudí’s unique decorative approach to materials and forms.

Japan is a country that to a first-​time visitor seems almost like one continuous urban area with rural agriculture interspersed between urban development –​at least that is what it looked like as we rode the high-​speed rail from Tokyo to Kyoto. Both cities would have to rank among the most organized urban places on the planet. Even with a lot of people living there, they are clean and accessible by subway as well as taxi to visit historic sites. Our hotel, Andaz Tokyo Toranomon Hills, was in the center of the city on the top two floors of a 52-​story glass building with wonderful views. In Tokyo we explored many parks and sites, like the Tsukiji Fish Market with its crowded alleys lined with vendor stalls selling everything you can imagine as well as fish on each side of the narrow passage. Over several days we also visited several temple and shrine sites, including the Senso Ji Temple and the Imperial Palace Garden, that were quiet, beautiful oases in the middle of the city. I did a lot of quick sketching as we moved around the city with our gracious guide, Kinuyo Watanabe, who maneuvered us into and off the efficient subways that connect with every neighborhood. The next day we took the bullet train to Kyoto, one of the most interesting and beautiful cities in the world, with wonderful human-​scale architecture, friendly people, and extensive nature gardens with integrated pavilions interspersed into

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the fabric of the city. We stayed in the wonderful Kyo​Suiran Hotel that is partly a traditional Japanese house on the Katsura River in an historic area, the Kyoto Arashiyama neighborhood, near the Bamboo Forest, with several temples that are World Heritage Sites. The hotel is in a Japanese garden that you enter through a framed gate in a wood wall and then move along an inner walk with small shrines and several buildings framing the garden spaces. Inside the main building you have a beautiful view of the garden from the dining room. Later we walked through the Kyoto Imperial Park in the center of the city that has the former Imperial Palace located within it. It is a large green oasis in the middle of the city, where I sketched the wall surrounding the palace and one of its gateways. The Imperial Park is beautiful and one of many parks throughout Kyoto that bring nature into the city while providing a home for historic buildings and sites that are very crowded on weekends. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Kinkaku-​Ji Park, with a series of treed gardens, temples and ponds culminating in the Golden Temple on an island. Originally constructed in 1397 as a retirement villa for the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the residence became a Zen Temple after his death in 1408. With the upper two levels covered in gold leaf, it is a spectacular shining symbol of architectural integration with landscape and water that is a World Heritage Site and effectively carries its name as the Golden Temple and a symbol of Kyoto (Figure 3.16). One of my longtime friends, Kazuo Matsubayashi, studied architecture with me at the University of Minnesota is, and went on to become a professor of architecture at the University of Utah. He was born in Peru, where his father worked for a Japanese tire company. When World War II began the Peruvian government

3.16 Sketches of parks in Kyoto, Japan, including the Golden Temple in Kinkaku-​Ji park constructed in 1397, where one can discover the grandeur and elegance of historic temples and elements that epitomize Japanese connections between water, architecture and nature.

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exiled the family to the United States, where they spent the time of the war in a concentration camp in Colorado. After the war the family went back to Japan, and his father became an interpreter for the US Army. Later Kazuo came to Minnesota to attend the architecture school. Now retired, he lives in Los Angeles in a house he and his Japanese wife built behind the traditional California house where their daughter lives with her husband and family. The house is very Japanese in spirit, but very modern in form. So it was fun to finally visit Japan and see the heritage that makes my friend Kazuo such a good architect. I  remember vividly one fall day when we returned to the School of Architecture to begin our second year and I saw Kazuo standing and talking to some mutual friends. I crept up behind him and gave him a hug, and suddenly I flew over his shoulder and landed on the floor. I did not know that he had a black belt in Judo, and he reacted instinctively. I was unhurt, but from then on we only shake hands face to face when we meet! Berlin is an exciting city to visit because of its history and the changes that are taking place since the unification of Germany, starting in 1990. When I first visited Berlin in 1964 it was with Wesley Balk, a friend from my home town who had a Guggenheim Fellowship to study opera in Europe. Berlin was a divided city, and in his used Volkswagen we drove through Checkpoint Charlie, a major east–​ west gateway in the dividing wall, to attend an opera in East Berlin. The opera was Othello and directed by the renowned Walter Felsenstein, who during that time lived in West Berlin and crossed through the wall every day to work at the opera house in the east of the city. The opera was incredibly well performed, with great singers and musicians, and incredible staging. When we were returning to Checkpoint Charlie we could see many East German troops moving about, troop trucks, several tanks, and bright lights illuminating the side of the wall in East Berlin. After we passed through the Checkpoint, with no difficulty, we stopped and asked the American army officer in charge on the American side what was going on, and he responded: ‘Oh, nothing much, they’re just moving the wall out an inch to let us know that they can do what they want on their side.’ Nevertheless, it was a rather scary departure, not knowing if something bad was going to happen. Later, when we left West Berlin, we had to stop and take our luggage into a building at the border, where an East German guard saw a copy of Time magazine inside my luggage. He pulled it out and spent a number of minutes going through it one page at a time, then put it back in my luggage and said it was okay to leave. This was also the trip when I  first rode on the German Autobahn highway that later became the model for the freeway system in the United States. In Germany they have unrestricted speed limits, and you quickly learn to stay out of the far-​left lane when driving in a rented car or else they flash their lights to tell you to get out of the way –​and you better move right now! On our trip to Berlin in 2007, Sharon and I  stayed in the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, located on the famous Unter den Linden Boulevard near the Brandenburg Gate on the old East Berlin side of the wall (Figure 3.17). The original hotel was constructed in 1907 but was demolished in the 1950s. The hotel as we see it now was rebuilt following the original design character and aesthetic

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3.17 Sketches of Brandenburg Gate and nearby Hotel Adlon Kempinski on Unter der Linden Boulevard in the old East Berlin side of the once divided city. It was wonderful to see what is happening in Berlin since the wall went down and the country of Germany became united.

and is today one of the top hotels in Berlin. We visited the nearby site where Checkpoint Charlie was once located, and today they have a replica of the guard house and a museum of what things looked like when Berlin was a divided city. For me, the visit was a rather emotional experience: to stand at that same spot, where I crossed the border in the 1960s, and observe the changes that had taken

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place. When we walked around Berlin on both sides of where the wall had divided the city, it was hard to remember how bleak East Berlin looked at the time when I was first there. I recalled going into a department store on the day we went to the opera: the shelves were bare and the place looked cheap –​quite different from the shops we saw and visited in West Berlin. Since unification, however, Berlin has undergone extensive reconstruction and is today an important and exciting global city. The sketch of the interior lobby of the Hotel Adlon Kempinski shows Sharon siting at a table near the magnificent animal fountain, with elephants keeping order and frogs spitting water. The fountain, I thought, attested to the grandeur of the hotel and Berlin’s transformation (Figure 3.18).

Cafes Cafes in a new city are always fun to visit, to see people and to have something to eat and drink related to the agriculture of the region. Cuisine is the most direct connection with the agricultural communities surrounding a city, and the following are three cafes we patronized that seemed to reflect strong urban and rural connections expressing agricultural culture and place. The food and drink were good in all three, but what I wanted to express in the sketches was the unique character of each cafe that related to the landscape of the region. For sure, the cuisine in a cafe in Norway could easily feature smoked salmon, in Germany it could be Braunschweig sausage, and in Sweden one might select pancakes with lingonberry jam. Yet each cafe is unique in how it expresses these relationships and connections with the rural countryside. The Grand Café in Oslo is located on Karl Johans Street on the ground floor of the famous Grand Hotel. The hotel opened in 1874, and early on it became an artist’s hangout and an Oslo focal point that included patrons such as playwright Henrik Ibsen and painter Edvard Munch (Figure 3.19). Since we patronized the cafe in 2005 it has since been renovated to historically restore it to the way it originally was but with some modernization. It is once again the top restaurant in Oslo. The sketch was made in the month of June from the outside table where we sat looking toward other tables and chairs, with people sitting and eating and drinking on the edge of the great central park. The park is the gathering place in Oslo, with many trees that extend from the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) to the King’s Palace. The street and park are very active, with people milling about and enjoying a warm summer day in the downtown area of Oslo. The Grand Café fits into the atmosphere of its place as part of the historic Grand Hotel, a beautifully maintained nineteenth-​century building that forms an edge to the park. Walking by the King’s Palace I remembered my Norwegian aunt telling me about her son who, a few years back, was graduating from high school and was a little too much involved, she felt, with young ladies. She was so glad that he would have to go into the army for a year after graduation and hoped that he would end up

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3.18 Sketch of the interior lobby of Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin and its wonderful fountain.

way in the north of Norway at Kirkenes, on the border with Russia. As fate happened he went into the army but became a member of the King’s Guard and spent the year in Oslo at the King’s Palace  –​making him even more attractive to young ladies. Nevertheless, he survived his military duty and emigrated to the United States. He became a pilot with a major airline and is now married with two children.

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3.19 Sketch from an outdoor table on the terrace of the Grand Café in Oslo, Norway, showing the strong connection that Oslo has with nature, food and the central green as a gathering place in the city.

In Sweden, the Bla Porten (Blue Door) Garden Café in the Liljevalchs Konsthall (Art Museum) in Stockholm was also a great delight to discover when we visited Sweden for the first time. The cafe is not located along a major street, but rather inside in a courtyard of the historic art museum constructed in 1916 on an island in a waterfront bay. The art, garden and food were excellent, as one would expect in Sweden. The Bla Porten cafe was a wonderful place to sit quietly, converse about the art we just saw and connect with nature in the courtyard (Figure 3.20). The sketch was from a table near the street entrance, looking into the garden that was the focal point of the museum and cafe experience. It is pleasant to be able to visit a great art museum and then have lunch in its restaurant overlooking nature. The connections I felt between art, food and nature at the museum compelled me to sketch the courtyard. In Germany, the Wintergarten Café in the Literaturhaus in Berlin is one of the top ten restaurants in the city. Located in an historic mansion that since 1986 has been the center for literature discussions and book readings, the Wintergarten

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3.20 Sketch of the courtyard of the Bla Porten (Blue Door) cafe in the art museum in central Stockholm, Sweden. It’s a place to eat and drink and to connect with nature after viewing and enjoying art.

Café is a wonderful place to sit, eat and drink a German beer overlooking a beautiful garden (Figure 3.21). The sketch shows one of the large trees in the garden through the window of the cafe, with three people sitting at a table next to us. When we were there in late October it seemed too chilly to sit outside, so we went in and sat at a table where we could look out through the large windows. The cafe seemed highly appropriate as an intellectual oasis in Berlin, and with its visual indoor and outdoor connection, along with the tree outside, it seemed a perfect place to have lunch and discuss books and authors. In every great city, there are only a few restaurants that are famous for their cuisine, atmosphere and a history that symbolizes the history of the whole city. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Café Tortoni is one of these. Established in 1858 by an immigrant from France, it is a delight to visit, to look at people and have a great meal with a bottle of their famous Malbec wine (Figure  3.22). The restaurant looks much as it did when it first opened, with wood paneling and tile floors, and stained glass panels in the ceiling. Colorful light fixtures, now with electric bulbs, create a unique atmosphere that makes it a must-​visit place. It is in the downtown area, not too far from the central square, Plaza de Mayo, where Eva Peron spoke to the crowd from the balcony of the presidential palace, Casa Rosada. If you are visiting these cities for the first time, these cafes are well worth visiting. They all have high grades from patron reviews posted on websites that we agree with. We would certainly go back again –​to visit and participate in the culture and offerings of the cities as well as for the cafes. Food is one of the best ways to understand the agricultural heritage of a region, and it is one of the unique things about a place that all humans can relate to.

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3.21 Sketch from the interior of the Wintergarten Café im Literaturhaus in Berlin, Germany. I was struck by the connection through the glass to the huge tree outside and people eating on the inside. It seemed like the perfect place to discuss books.

Public markets Public markets have existed in cities ever since people started to congregate in one place and live near other people, creating an urban place. The search for fresh and local foods has been an urban characteristic ever since. A few years back I worked on upgrading the existing farmers’ market in the City of St Paul, Minnesota. It was a delight to try to find a way to improve its location in the city center and its operations. Originally, the market was constructed as a transportation center to which farmers would bring in their produce on wagons and later trucks, unload and organize it, then have it picked up by other wagons or trucks and distributed to grocery stores all over the city. The design of the existing market was based

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3.22 Sketch of the interior of the historic Café Tortoni in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina. Established in 1858, it is a famous gathering place in which to find food from the region.

on the old transfer concept and on a 5 percent sloping surface. However, today when farmers arrive with their produce loaded on trucks and then go back into the center aisle to set up tables to display their goods to market patrons, they put blocking under the legs of the tables to level the tops. They then cover the tables with produce and market directly to customers who walk up and down the aisles. The farmers’ market in St Paul might not exist today if it were not for the influx of immigrants from Vietnam and Cambodia who were farmers. They were able to find fields in the outskirts of the Twin Cities that they could lease, and they quickly learned how to plant, harvest and sell food at the public market and compete in America, just as all immigrants have done since the nation’s founding. Public markets around the world are similar in bringing local fish and produce and baked goods to the public, and here are three that Sharon and I visited and sketched. The Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid, Spain, with its glass exterior and exposed metal structure, reopened in 2009 after a six-​ year restoration (Figure 3.23). It has become one of the liveliest culinary places in the city, with thirty-​three stalls selling fresh produce alongside tapas bars. The sketch shows its

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3.23 Sketch of the exterior of the glass-​enclosed Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid, Spain. It a public market that exemplifies an urban place connecting with agriculture in the surrounding rural landscape.

location along a street with glass walls, providing a strong visual connection to the interior to draw you in. It is a light-​filled metal structure that is open all year and a delightful place to walk around and look at the wide assortment of things sold, including fresh fish and meats. We had a few tapas and a beer when we were there and felt quite at home in this market in the center of Madrid. The La Boqueria food market in Barcelona is one of Europe’s most famous and easily accessible for tourists, with its location on the wide La Rambla boulevard that is filled with pedestrians and performers and cars. In the summer of 2017 the street was the location of an attack by terrorists in a vehicle that careened down the sidewalk and killed or injured many people. Nevertheless, one cannot help but believe that the spirit of the Barcelona people will reclaim ownership of the street with barriers to prevent this from ever happening again. Food is an integral part of Catalan culture, and the La Boqueria market is a wonderful place to visit, wander around, and sample the Barcelona food and drink (Figure 3.24). The sketch is of one little corner of the vast interior space, with several of the food displays and a bar. The fish on ice and the hanging hams were so integral to the market that they caught my eye as we wandered around, and I included them in the sketch. Back in the United States, the Vermont Country Store in Weston, Vermont, is a place where the feeling of a rural general store is expressed in the architecture and

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3.24 Three sketches of the interior of the Mercat de la Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain. It is a large public market all under a glass roof, and certainly one of the best in the world. The drawing shows a vendor stall, a display of fresh fish on ice and hams hanging on display.

the adjacent garden space with many small shops clustered around it (Figure 3.25). The sketch was from under the covered walkway along one side of the garden, where I tried to show the number of different vendors working together as a public market, but in different buildings rather than from open tables as at the other two public markets. The New England states have maintained a strong rural character because of the area’s early history with many small farms. It is also a region where a lot of people still live and work in rural areas. The Vermont Country Store we see today was founded by the Orton Family and opened in 1946 along the lines of their first family store that opened in a single building in 1894. The current store perfectly reflects their rural tradition. Vermont is a beautiful state with many hills and valleys providing an ever-​changing scenic environment, with a close link between buildings, farm fields with stone fences and landscapes. As you drive around the New England region it is not hard to imagine what things looked like back in the nineteenth century because the rural character is so well preserved and promoted to tourists to come and visit.

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3.25 Sketch of the Vermont Country Store in Weston, Vermont, where one can experience an historic New England shopping area.

Squares and streets The quality of design and character of city squares and important streets has a strong connection between rural and urban. It may be historic, in that it developed over time, or in some cases it was deliberately designed into the city plan to provide green space for people living in the city. Columbia Square in Savannah, Georgia, is one of those that were deliberately designed. Founded in 1799 by British General James Ogelthorpe, the city plan was based on the Enlightenment philosophy impacting city design to create public meeting areas and connections with nature. The plan for Savannah provided six wards with twenty-​four squares distributed equally among the rectangular grid of streets, so that no resident would be more than a few blocks from a square (Figure 3.26). The sketch shows two historic houses that are similar in size to others surrounding the park, with large oak trees and a fountain that was relocated to the square from a plantation in 1970. Savannah is a city with both natural and designed scenic beauty, and it represents Colonial city planning and urban living at its best. The entire downtown of Savannah is on the National Register of Historic Landmarks, and it is a city that strongly reflects its historic southern heritage and a strong linkage between urban and rural. Place du Marche in Paris, France (Figure  3.27), is one of many little places where humans and nature meet each other in the grand city. That is one reason why Paris is such a beautiful city and a delight to visit. This square was dedicated in 1784, and today has four-​to six-​story apartment and office buildings surrounding it with restaurants on the ground floor and outdoor patios adjacent to the square. Place du Marche is a charming, pedestrian-​only city square with mulberry trees from China and a food market with vendors selling in the afternoons. Our California friends, Merl and Bev Griesert, with

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3.26 Sketch of the historic Columbia Square in Savannah, Georgia, illustrating the integration of public parks and nature into the planning and layout of an early city in America.

3.27 Sketch of Place du Marche Sainte Catherine in Paris, France. It exemplifies the importance of integrating open public space and greenery into an urban residential area along with outdoor cafes and gathering places.

whom we traveled on a barge down the River Seine to Normandy, stayed in a hotel around the corner, and we ate in the Le Marche restaurant. Featuring French cooking, it was good and not expensive. While we were in Paris with our friends, they were visited by their granddaughter who was studying in Amsterdam. On one of the nights she attended the Bataclan theater concert venue that just one week later was the location of the terrible terrorist attack that killed many people. Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana (Figure 3.28), is the focal point of the city at the southern end of the Mississippi River and a National Historic Landmark. New Orleans is known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and multi-​lingual and cross-​culture heritage. In 2012 the American Planning association named Jackson Square as one of America’s Great Public Spaces. It is a green oasis in the city, with a statue of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle for New Orleans and the seventh president of the United States. Dominating the square on one side is the St Louis Cathedral; the other sides are defined by four-​story buildings. Indicative of the pedestrian orientation of the square as a gathering place, the streets on three sides are closed to vehicles. As we were walking around the square we came upon this interesting street band playing while sitting on benches on Charles Street and its audience sitting on the curb watching and listening (Figure 3.29). New Orleans is a beautiful historic city and never fails to delight as a place to visit and walk around outside –​except maybe during the hot and humid summer months.

3.28 Sketch of Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana, flanked on one side by the St Louis Cathedral and by French-​style apartment houses on the others. It is the gathering place for all kinds of events in New Orleans.

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3.29 Sketch of a street band performing along one side of Jackson Square in New Orleans, Louisiana, with an audience sitting on the curb and many others standing like me.

Vienna, Austria, is a capital that is quite unique as a European city, with a long and varied history that has a strong connection with the surrounding agricultural landscape. The heart of the city is Stephansplatz, the city square with St Stephen’s Cathedral. The Vienna city center area is now a World Heritage Site, and the cathedral, with the tallest bell tower in Europe and its beautiful colored mosaic tile roof, is the dominant building. The basilica organization of the cathedral, with a central aisle and flanking functions, was developed by the Romans for many public buildings, including the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, and used extensively throughout the Middle Ages by monasteries for designing and constructing a structure for worship. The basilica form was also used during the Middle Ages for organizing barns for livestock, providing a central service aisle and stalls for horses and cattle on each side. The Coxwell Barn in England, that I featured in my first book Rural Design, was one of those barns. It was a monastic barn that today looks much like many churches in the United States that followed its form. St Stephen’s Cathedral was located on the ruins of two earlier churches and constructed over a long period from 1368 to 1433. It has a magnificent high altar at the end of the interior nave, with a large painting of the stoning of St Stephen (Figure 3.30). Vienna has a strong music tradition, with many famous musicians such as Strauss, Beethoven and Mozart living and performing there. It was also the home of Sigmund Freud and his legacy. The musical center is the State Opera House

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3.30 Sketches of the exterior and interior of the impressive St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria, with its colorful tile roof and tall vertical tower in the center of the city.

(Wiener Staatsoper), one of the best in the world. Sharon and I attended an opera in the building when we were there, and I sketched the opera house along with horse carriages in front of the Albertine Museum (Figure  3.31). Nearby is the famous ‘Looshaus’ designed by architect Adolf Loos that expressed a significant shift away from classicism, making it rather controversial when it was constructed

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3.31 Three sketches of Vienna showing the famous Staatsoper (opera house) at the end of a major street, horse carriages lined up in front of the Albertine Museum and the Adolf Loos home dating from 1911.

in 1911. Loos is considered an important pioneer of modern architectural design, and I included it in the sketch. Budapest, the capital of Hungary, is a city with two distinct personalities. On the west side of the Danube River is Buda on the high river terraces and with its castle on Castle Hill, and on the east side is Pest. The two cities merged in 1873 and today Budapest is one of the most thriving and beautiful cities in Europe. On the Pest side is the Basilica of St Stephen, completed in

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neoclassical style in 1905 on one side of a central square. In contrast, on the Buda side there are many interesting medieval streets with houses overlooking green parks (Figure  3.32). Castle Hill is a beautiful area to walk around and explore how interesting urban living can be when it is connected to culture and landscape. The public market is located nearby, making all necessities available within walking distance. When you cross the river into Pest, you must take the subway to get around. Budapest is constructed on the site of an early Celtic settlement where the river was able to be crossed. Its location on the Danube, with transportation and traders coming from many different parts of Europe for millennia, has made it a melting pot of influences. One way this shows up is in the wide range of excellent food offered in restaurants. The downtown area is a World Heritage Site, and I made many sketches as we walked around but selected only one to illustrate the character of the city. In Mexico one of the most interesting pedestrian promenades we have visited is the Calzada Fray Antonio de San Miguel in Morelia (Figure 3.33). The 1-​kilometer stone walkway connects the beautiful Sanctuary of Guadalupe at the east end, with its highly decorated and golden colors on the interior, to the Plaza des Armas and the enormous Cathedral of Morelia at the other end. The tree-​lined stone walkway, constructed in 1732 by the bishop that it is named after, was a delightful experience to absorb on a bright and sunny day and to look at the houses along the way. Morelia has one of the best collections in Mexico of Spanish Colonial Architecture, and the downtown area was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1961. Along the walkway one can feel the rural heritage of the city with its greenery and gardens. The food in the city is also different, with a bean soup and enchiladas that were unlike anything we had in other parts of Mexico. There are also ten Monarch Butterfly Reserves in the region surrounding the city, adding to the strong feeling that one gets about Morelia and its connections to nature. Mexico is a country of wide contrasts and places, and is a delight to visit. It has Aztec and Incan ruins, Spanish heritage, and a history of martial conflicts before it gained its independence that all add to the mystery. Perhaps most apparent now are the criminal cartels that operate in the region around Morelia, and this may be the reason why it is not as heavily visited by tourists as other tourist meccas in Mexico. However, we saw nothing to make us worried, and if you haven’t visited the city you are not seeing one of the most beautiful cities in the country.

Houses The Frida Kahlo house in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City is a fascinating place to visit and explore the complicated life and art of Frida Kahlo, who was born in 1907 and died in 1954. She was a painter who was inspired by

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3.32 Two sketches of residential streets and houses on Castle Hill in Budapest, Hungary, illustrating fine urban living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

popular Mexican culture and used a folk-​art style in her paintings to try to define a Mexican identity. The house, constructed in 1904 by her parents, is called La Casa Azul (Blue House) because of its bright blue outside color. Frida was born and grew up in the house, and after her death in 1954 it was turned into a museum celebrating her life and work. Leo Trotsky also lived in the house from 1937 to

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3.33 A sequence of sketches of the great promenade in Morelia, Mexico, stretching from the Sanctuary of Guadalupe, constructed in 1701, to the Plaza de Armas and the Cathedral. It is a carefully designed promenade with stone and planting and is filled with people in the evening.

1939, when he was exiled from Russia by Stalin. It was during this time that Frida joined the Communist party and met the muralist Diego Rivera; and they had a tumultuous life together. The sketch is of the original gray stone house, with primary living spaces, and an outdoor courtyard with a pond and fountain (Figure 3.34). It is interesting to see the formal organization of the house behind the blue enclosing walls and how tightly interwoven it is with nature in the courtyard. During the early 1930s the couple lived in Detroit, Michigan, when Diego Rivera was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. An interesting movie, Frida, was made in 2002 and won several Academy awards. In the movie Selma Hayek played Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina played Diego Rivera, and both did a great job. Near La Casa Azul are the two houses the couple built and lived in together that were designed by a former student of the French architect Le Corbusier. Called

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3.34 Sketch of Fria Kahlo’s Blue House in Coyoacan, Mexico. This was where the artist was born and later lived with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The interior courtyard has a water fountain and planting, creating an urban oasis near Mexico City.

the ‘Double House’, the building was constructed after their return to Mexico. Frida and Diego lived and worked there, he in one house and she in the other (also painted blue), with a roof top bridge connection between the separate house/​studios. It was interesting to see how these two artists lived and worked and how much their places connected with nature, reflecting changing Mexican art and culture in the twentieth century. In 2001 Frida was the first Hispanic woman to have a United States postage stamp printed in her honor . The Starkey House in Essex, Connecticut, was built by Timothy Starkey in 1800 in the federal style with a Palladio window above the entrance. Essex was one of the centers of shipbuilding in the eighteenth century, and Starkey was a sea captain as well as a business entrepreneur and a leader in the Revolutionary War for America’s independence from England. The house is on Essex’s main street

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3.35 Sketch of the historic Thomas Starkey house in Essex, Connecticut, that illustrates the scale and character of wood architecture in colonial America and its integration into the landscape of place.

(Figure 3.35), and has a two-​story barn, wagon shed, garage and tool shed and a small office building behind, reflecting the character of many early houses in small towns in colonial New England that were constructed on farms as well as in rural towns. In Cuernavaca, Mexico, a city just south of Mexico City, the Casa las Mananitas is today an elegant and lovely hotel and spa. Originally a colonial residence of the Mananitas family with elaborate gardens, it was transformed into an urban oasis where humans, animals and the environment are closely connected. Staying there now provides a unique experience of the climate and culture of this historic residence in Mexico. The sketches show the entrance to the house through a small doorway in the surrounding pink-​painted wall along the street, with an interesting array of the colorful birds found inside (Figure 3.36). The interior gardens and pools are closely related to the hotel, and the sketch of the garden shows the landscape inside the wall and some of the many peacocks roaming around (Figure 3.37). The pool is integrated into the hotel and spa with landscaping, and the architecture and spirit of place extend into the interior and the hallway to the rooms. Sharon and I found this hotel and spa to be one of the most relaxing places we have stayed in, and it reflects Mexican hospitality, culture and place at their best.

Summary Urban places that have a strong historical connection to nature, and the agricultural landscape surrounding the city and its impact on the design and landscape

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3.36 Sketch of the entrance doorway in the street wall to the Casa de Las Mananitas in Cuernavaca, Mexico. When you go inside you discover many colorful birds that are making their home there.

of the city, are exciting to visit and explore. The agricultural heritage of the region they are in is often found along natural features that provided the opportunity for the city to develop historically. For example, in Minnesota the city of Minneapolis and its sister city of St Paul are both located along the Mississippi River and about 10 miles apart. The downtown centers of each city started where there was a place where one could more easily cross the river or where there was easy access to the river as a boat transportation corridor. The flour industry, with many grain mills being powered by the flowing Mississippi River, provided the economic engine for the city of Minneapolis to develop above the waterfalls that prevented boat traffic from reaching the city center. St Paul, with its easy access to river transportation as the most northern city on the Mississippi River, grew as a transportation center for moving supplies and people up and down the river and became the capital of Minnesota. It also became a land transportation hub, with entrepreneurs like James J. Hill, the railroad baron who expanded the Great Northern railroad from St Paul to the West Coast, opening settlements in North

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3.37 Sketch of the garden of Casa del Las Mananitas, with colorful peacocks and the lush landscaping of the home that is now a hotel.

Dakota and Montana along the way. The railroads assisted the milling industry in Minneapolis to quickly expand as its products could now be shipped all over the world. The sketches I  selected for this chapter are all related to places where it seemed to me that there was a strong overlap of rural with urban. The sketches are of places where one can feel and see the connections that historically shaped the city, but also how it maintained the unique characteristics that made it happen. The places have an exuberance and love of life that one finds in the people and their culture, and that is one of the main reasons tourists like to visit them. For example, one day in Mendoza, Argentina, we toured several wineries in the morning with our guide Veronica. A highlight was the Bodega Cavas de Weinert, founded by a German in 1890. It had an excellent Malbec wine, and a gigantic wood cask stood alone in one room in an old converted warehouse with an interesting combination of arches and stone walls. We then walked over to the Cava de Camo, a small micro winery located in a reddish-​pink colonial building and making an excellent Syrah. You enter

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through a gate in the surrounding wall, walk down a vine-​covered trellis and arrive at a beautiful informal courtyard with red walls and dark blue trim. We climbed a stair to the excellent restaurant that is considered one of the best in Mendoza. We were seated around a long table for the fixed menu meal and were joined by other visitors that I  included on a sketch (Figure  3.38). They were Pierre and Aurelie from Paris, France; Frank from Stockholm, Sweden; and Anna and Aurino from Goiania, Brazil. The sketch includes the interior of Bodega Cavas de Weinert, the courtyard entrance to Cava de Camo with its restaurant on the second floor, and the people from around the world that we had lunch with. They all spoke a little English, and Veronica helped translate when necessary. The food and wine were first class and it was certainly a place that one could recommend, with five stars. It was one of those times when you realize

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3.38 Sketches of two small wineries in Mendoza, Argentina, that we visited with our guide and the lunch where we met people from around the world.

how easy and exciting it is to travel all over the planet, visit interesting places and meet people. This happened again in the summer of 2017, when Sharon and I traveled around the world starting with a visit to Russia. We first flew to St Petersburg, then to Moscow, where we boarded the Golden Eagle Luxury Train for a nine-​ day ride through Siberia, ending in Mongolia. From there we flew to Japan and then took a long flight back to Minnesota. We had been to St Petersburg before, arriving on a cruise ship anchoring at a harbor connected to the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, and then during the day we were escorted into the city center by boat on the Neva River. This time we were picked up at the airport and driven into the city to our hotel. We found that the experience of seeing the city the second time arriving by air was like visiting St Petersburg for the first time! It is a beautiful and interesting historic city, and the tours covered many of the same historical places, but things had changed, and the perspective we perceived of the city was different this time driving by a minivan from the St Petersburg airport compared to arriving from a harbor on the sea and traveling on the water into the city center. Not having been to Moscow before, we flew by plane from St Petersburg and were met at the airport by a guide, and then traveled by a small van into the city center to our hotel. The next day we got up early and left on a tour of the city with the guide, driving around on broad avenues along the Moskva River. One of the reasons Moscow was founded at this location in the eleventh century was that the river had a bend where people could more easily cross it . We started with a tour of the Kremlin through the west gate and immediately entered the Armory Chamber museum with its broad collection of historical Russian costumes, relics and armor, including a sled pulled by twenty horses, a knight mounted on a horse, and St Catherine’s coronation dress with a 15-​inch waist (Figure  3.39). After walking through the Kremlin, visiting the Annunciation Chapel constructed in 1589, seeing a huge 200-​ton bell and a canon, and walking along one side of the Senate Building where Vladimir Putin has his office, we left through the east gate and arrived on Red Square. We toured its colorful Saint Basil’s Cathedral and were serenaded by a men’s ensemble quartet. Later, at the train station, we were entertained by a military band (Figure 3.40). Moscow, with the Moskva River and the many urban forests and gardens within its boundaries, is a city where one could easily see and feel connections to nature and the surrounding rural region, and how it changes from summer to winter. We were surprised at how similar the tours that we took in Moscow were to tours in any other city in the world. It did not seem much like the foreboding Kremlin we had been reading about in newspapers over many years. The Russians in Moscow seemed to be trying to adjust to population increase, changing transportation, climate impact and economic conditions, just like people in every other important world city. From our limited discussions with them it seemed that they liked the way Russia is today and the freedom they now have to shape their lives, and did not want to go back to an earlier time.

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3.39 Sketches of the west entrance to the Kremlin in Moscow and artifacts in the historic museum.

From our brief visit we felt that St Petersburg and Moscow are functioning very similarly to other historic cities in Europe, such as London, Paris and Rome, that have grown and expanded with most of the new development on the outskirts and contributing to urban sprawl into the agricultural landscape. It is often the historic city center that provides you with the clearest link to the agricultural and to history because that is where the buildings best reflect local culture, climate and function, creating the spirit of place or genius loci as defined by Christian Norberg-​Schulz.

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3.40 Sketches of scenes as we walked through the Kremlin, leaving through the east entrance to Red Square and Saint Basil’s Cathedral, with its brightly colored domes.

Because of my research and interest in the connections between rural and urban, I find it hard to not seek out the places in a city where the connections seem most apparent. In this chapter I have selected those places that exemplify historic and contemporary relationships to place that I  hope will help the reader better understand how a designer can see rural when visiting an urban city.

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Chapter 4

Water places

The most dramatic places on the planet are often those located where land and water meet. The places may be along the ocean or on a river or a lake, creating an interesting connection between people, buildings, water and land. Sometimes the place began as a human settlement with a specific purpose that was socially, economically and environmentally related, as with a fishing village, or a farmstead near the water with a combination of ocean fishing, cattle raising and crop farming on adjacent lands. The combination of food sources could enhance opportunities for living and working. As time went on settlements emerged, and sometimes the purpose of a settlement was directly connected to transportation: a place where crossing a river was more easily accomplished with an island and short bridges, allowed for marketing a broader range of agricultural and commercial commodities. Other times it was where the landscape created a natural harbor, providing protection from storms, and sometimes the geographical location of the settlement was political, resulting in the construction of fortifications to defend the settlement from marauders and maintain shipping lanes to markets. As Sharon and I have traveled around the world, the most beautiful places we have seen are often where water and land provided an opportunity for people to build a community connecting the inland agricultural landscape with water for transportation and commercial fishing. Since all the continents on the planet are surrounded by water, many of the countries within them developed with human activities and buildings closely connected to water, on a natural harbor later shaped and enhanced for protection from storms, or as a harbor of interchange between water transportation and land transportation. The land adjacent to the harbor functioned as a platform for buildings that were home to a wide range of human activities. How they historically connected their culture to the landscape and water, expressing the economic and social character of the community, is what created the wonderful places we can visit and see today. This chapter discusses and illustrates those places that exhibit a strong living and working connection between people, buildings, water and the land.

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They are places where the edge between water and land has created a clear identity and feeling about the historic connection with water. Yet being near the water creates the danger of being impacted by storms. Hurricane Harvey emerged out of the Gulf of Mexico and devastated Houston, Texas, and the surrounding region with nearly 4 feet of water as well as strong winds and tornados. Then the strong Hurricane Irma came out of the Atlantic Ocean, hitting Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands before moving on to Florida. Both storms came in just a two-​week period, causing great damage, and at the time of writing the islands are still trying to recover and restore power to all residents and businesses. In my home state of Minnesota and the Twin City metropolitan area, the temperature average increased by 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2012 according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. They say that it is changing rapidly and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future, resulting in larger and more frequent precipitation events in both summer and winter. Climate change is happening, and there needs to be some decisive planning to outline alternatives for coping with the potential of rising sea levels and the impact on coastal cities and towns. The issue of storms and storm surges has always plagued coastal cities, but in a time of rapid climate change it is hard for people to know what to do and where to live. Nevertheless, as Sharon and I  have traveled the world, it is these places where the land and water meet that are interesting and beautiful to sketch, and we certainly hope that plans will come into effect to protect them from rising sea levels. Architects, planners and engineers around the world are now becoming more active in devising ideas to handle sea levels that might rise by 4 to 5 feet by the year 2100. This sea level issue will have a major impact on the coastal cities and towns that I am discussing in this chapter, and I hope that creative and entrepreneurial solutions will be developed. The Dutch have long dealt with this issue and installed flood gates in Rotterdam that close to prevent high tides from flooding the city. The flood gates have become a tourist attraction, attesting to an interesting side result of dealing with the water issue. I will not be discussing storms in my descriptions of places in this chapter other than to emphasize the importance of climate change, because the world does need to become serious and inventive in developing ideas to deal with rising sea levels. I understand there is an idea in New York City to construct an U-​shaped earthen berm to protect the lower east end of Manhattan island. Efforts apparently are underway, and one hopes that plans will emerge and funding become available to preserve the beautiful coastal cities and towns that we have visited, and I sketched. This is an issue that will affect coastal areas all over the planet and an issue that architects, landscape architects and planners should be working on with the cities and towns impacted. The places I discuss in this chapter include coastal villages, fortified cities, island places, waterfront cities and towns, river places and discovered places that Sharon and I have visited all over the world.

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Coastal villages A place where the city connection to water is clearly expressed is in the Italian Cinque Terre region in the Provence of La Spezia, along the Mediterranean coast north of Genoa, Italy. It is a World Heritage Site consisting of five coastal villages that were quite inaccessible, except by water, until the railroad was constructed in the early 1900s. Today they are a major tourist destination for people who want to hike the dramatic Azure Trail that was originally a mule path and is now used for hiking between the five villages. The trail winds its way along the steep coastal cliffs, providing changing vistas and scenery that is exciting and challenging. Unfortunately, heavy rains and landslides in 2011 forced the closure of several sections of the hiking trail, but tourism is still the major economic source. The five villages are still quite busy, with the railroad providing the primary form of transportation between the villages and its tracks going through several tunnels on the way. Commercial fishing is still an economic force, along with agriculture in the surrounding landscape, modified over the centuries with stepped terraces that provide flat areas for growing grapes, and producing wine and olive oil. The most southern of the five villages is Riomaggiore. It has a dramatic setting, with its buildings springing up from steep rock cliffs along the edge of the water. The tight connection between the cliffs, housing and water, with terraces on the edge of far hills, is captured in this sketch of the coastal landscape looking down on the small harbor with a group of boats tied to the dock (Figure 4.1). It almost looks like the architecture grew out of the rocks because it is so closely connected. From the small plaza near the fishing harbor the main street, Via Colombo, winds its way up a valley between hills with three-​and four-​ story apartment buildings constructed tightly along the edge of the street. The buildings back into the hills and climb up with additional buildings on adjacent hills and the old castle way on top, providing many viewing contrasts as you hike around the village. Since the five villages are auto free, the main street in Riomaggiore is preserved for pedestrian movement, allowing for a wide range of activity. I  stopped to sketch the street, with people bustling back and forth and others sitting on a bench and talking (Figure 4.2). Clothes are hanging to dry from windows of the upper apartments, along with colorful awnings and signs related to shops on the ground floor. Standing there, you could see that Via Colombo is the outdoor living room of the village. It is a street with all kinds of social activity for living, eating, shopping and working. The nearby village of Vernazza also has a beautiful protected harbor, and this sketch from the fishing dock shows the harbor beach with boats pulled up on it and others tied to the dock, all anchored by a church and its steeple next to the plaza (Figure  4.3). The apartment buildings, shops and restaurants adjacent to the church and harbor plaza are also constucted into the rock outcropping along the rugged coastline and work their way up into the surrounding steep hills, with ancient terraces stepping up the side of hills for agricultural production of wine

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4.1 Sketch of the marina and bay at Riomaggiore, Italy, in the Cinque Terre region, that seems to extend up out of the rocks along the coastline.

and olive oil. It is an Italian village where water-​based activity and land-​based activity are closely connected, providing a wonderful illustration of the meaning of a fishing and agricultural community where water transportation makes it all work. The many shades of yellow-​and ochre-​colored stucco and natural rock integrated with the natural environment provide a beautiful place to visit and sketch. The village of Corniglia, on the other hand, was constructed on top of a hill and not directly connected to the water like the other four villages, requiring a considerable upward hike from the railroad station. This was probably because there was no natural harbor for fishing, yet the stepped terraces for growing vines for wine and trees for olives provided ample economic incentive to create the

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4.2 Sketch of via Colombo near the top of the valley in Riomaggiore, showing the multi-​story apartment buildings with shops on the ground floors, colorful signs, and clothes hanging from windows for drying.

settlement. Corniglia is the place where we stayed while exploring Cinque Terre, and this sketch from the terrace of the Cicero Restaurant and Hotel illustrates the beautiful surrounding hills with their stepped terraces and the San Bernardino monastery on top of one of the hills in the background (Figure 4.4). The sketch shows stepped terraces with connecting ramps all constructed of stone. The agricultural landscape producing wine and olive oil adjacent to the village is like the terraced landscape around all the villages of Cinque Terre. The villages of Monterosso al Mare and Manarola are also located on the water. Monterosso is different in that it has a wide swimming beach and buildings more spread out individually rather than as a cluster as they are in the other four. It is the farthest north village of Cinque Terre and is dominated by a medieval convent up on the hill that is visible from all over the town. It is also known for its many lemon trees. Manarola is the smallest and oldest of the five villages, constructed

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4.3 Sketch of the harbor at Vernazza in the Cinque Terre region, with a church and colorful buildings integrated into the landscape reaching up to terraces on the hills beyond.

on large outcroppings with stepped terraces and buildings all around the natural harbor that is protected with a man-​made stone breakwater. Cinque Terre is a unique cluster of beautiful villages located where the water and land provided a natural harbor and the opportunity to construct a breakwater and buildings at the connection between the surrounding agricultural landscape and the sea for transportation, fishing and shipping.

4.4 Sketch of ancient terraces for growing vines and crops, from the Cicero Restaurant in the village of Corniglia in Cinque Terre.

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Fortified cities Unlike the open commercial fishing harbors of the villages in Cinque Terre, the walled city of Dubrovnik in Croatia was constructed as a fortified town in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to preserve its independence and ensure access to the Adriatic Sea for maritime trade. Today it also is a World Heritage Site and a beautiful place to visit and explore. The damage from extensive bombardment by Serb and Montenegro forces in 1991 during the Croatian War of Independence has been mostly repaired so what you see today reflects Dubrovnik’s original historic character. The most interesting way to see the city of 21,000 people is to walk along the top of the wall that encircles the historic town. The walk is 1.2 miles in length, providing many interesting and beautiful views of the connections to the rugged coastline as well as views of the harbor and the rolling hills surrounding the city. My sketch shows two views from the walk that illustrate the fact that it is a lively city lived in today in much the same way as it was hundreds of years ago (Figure  4.5). It is a place that strongly illustrates the character of a walled village adjacent to water with a fortified castle. While visiting Dubrovnik one can reflect upon, imagine and absorb its long history and linkage between water and the land. Further down the Adriatic coast is the village of Hvar, Croatia, on a small island in the Adriatic Sea. The town has a large natural harbor and wraps itself around the harbor with a central square (Figure 4.6). The village is also a World Heritage Site and a popular tourist destination along with being a commercial fishing village and growing lavender on the terraced hills of the island. The sketch shows the Stella Maris Chapel, with an interesting tree, on the side of the harbor, with the Trg Sveti Stjepan square that is the main gathering area of the village on the other side. Hvar is a place where people of all ages like to visit and mingle because of the hospitality of its people and its beautiful setting. When you arrive on a cruise ship small boats transport you to the harbor and back, allowing the tourist to experience the traditional arrival to the village by water in a small boat. It is a water-​related village that has many different places to explore and discover. Along the way I saw this statue of a Franciscan monk praying that I sketched because I thought it appropriately expressed the difficulty the nation went through back in the 1990s. In Montenegro, at the end of a long fjord that is similar to those found in Norway, you arrive at the fortified village of Kotor, with walls that date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries during the Venetian period. The village has been a fortified enclave since the early Middle Ages and because of its accessibility, with a deep harbor, it has today become a favorite stopping place for cruise ships. The village is part of the Kotor Region World Heritage Site and is located behind stone walls with several entry gates (Figure  4.7). The sketch shows the walls from the cruise ship, with the hills and green ways zigzagging up to the top.

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4.5 Sketches from the top of the old walls surrounding the historic city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The old town is one of the best-​preserved medieval towns on the Adriatic and a delight to walk around and explore, with many historic places like the twelfth-​ century Church of St Luke on a small square with restaurants, adjacent apartment buildings and the surrounding hills beyond (Figure 4.8). The interior of the church reflects its simple medieval architecture beginnings, with stone arches and white-​ painted stucco walls. It has a beautiful altar at the end of one apse, with gold trim highlighting Jesus on the cross up on the wall.

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4.6 Sketches made while walking around the medieval city of Hvar, Croatia.

The city of Old San Juan on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico is a quite different walled city reflecting a different culture and heritage, yet the island is a delightful one to visit and explore. The first sketch is of the walls of the old Castle San Felipe del Morro, one of three integrated with the city that were constructed by the Spanish when they controlled the region (Figure  4.9). Its powerful simplicity and massive form contrast with the tightly clustered streets of the old town. The second sketch is of one of the intersections of two streets in Old San Juan that caught my eye while walking along the edge of the city, with its varying scale of buildings, haphazard construction and bright colors so typical of the Caribbean Islands (Figure 4.10). San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, is a

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4.7 Sketches of the fjord leading to the medieval walled city of Kotor, Montenegro.

thriving city with an historic center connected with the water, and we explored this. We visited the island in 2016, but it was, unfortunately, pummeled by strong winds during Hurricane Maria in 2017. Since then the island has been slowly restoring essentials and rebuilding with heavy installation of solar energy fields. San Juan is working toward becoming a city of the future as a tech hub. I hope it succeeds. We stayed at the St Regis Bahia Beach Resort on the island of Puerto Rico and had a room on the ground floor looking directly out to the ocean. It was a delightful place to stay, with wonderful people and an architecture that fit the landscape and climate with a variety of swimming pools, restaurants, and a great variety of flowers, trees (including the beautiful Silver Birch Palm that I had never seen before) and small animals and birds. The resort is now open again after restoration following the effects of Hurricane Maria, and I am confident that it will be even nicer than before. We would like to return someday soon. One interesting side trip was to the El Yunque National Rain Forest, which is well maintained with waterfalls and dense planting unique to its climate and place.

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4.8 Sketches of the exterior and interior of St Luke’s church and plaza in Kotor. This is a delightful medieval city that is still much as it was in the twelfth century.

Island places The Greek island of Hydra is just south of Athens and today is a yachting destination as well as a tourism center because of the short ferry or high-​speed hydrofoil ride from Athens. With its crescent-​shaped harbor filled with boats and yachts and numerous restaurants, shops, markets and galleries surrounding the picturesque

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4.9 Sketch of the castle walls and surrounding Atlantic Ocean in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

harbor, it easily caters to tourists. On the small streets extending up from the harbor are residential houses and many small hotels like the Orloff Hotel where we stayed (Figure 4.11). As is typical of buildings on the island, planting is integrated into the construction to further its connection with water and the island flora. There are no cars on the island, so transportation is either on foot or with donkeys, and because of its picturesque beauty many movies have been filmed there. The harbor is a colorful array of boats and buildings, with red clay tile roofs so closely connected to the mountain landscape that it looks as if it is one with the land. The island is a delight to walk around, and every corner opens ontoa new experience or scene. Nearby, and behind where the sketch of the harbor was made, there is a large boulder jutting out into the water that people who are swimming climb up on to jump into the ocean. The island of Hydra is a wonderful introduction to the many Greek Islands, and later in this chapter I  discuss the island of Santorini that is gorgeous but somewhat overrun with tourists as many cruise ships now anchor there. During the day it is even difficult to walk around in some of its villages. The proliferation of cruise ships around the world has made it easy to visit these places, but at the same time it has had a great negative impact on the experience. So we chose to stay in the countryside away from the major towns. Crowds are not a problem in the unique and historic city of Bayfield, Wisconsin, on the edge between the fresh water of Lake Superior and the land. About a mile offshore is Madeline Island, along with the Apostle Islands, a group of small islands in Lake Superior near Bayfield that are great for sailing and

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4.10 Sketch of a street intersection in Old San Juan, illustrating the casual and colorful array of buildings, umbrellas, and places to eat and drink.

anchoring for an overnight stay on a sailboat. Both Bayfield and Madeline Island are highly visited places in the summer for camping, hiking and sailing, but never crowded. In the winter the area is a mecca for outdoor sports, and people drive across the ice to Madeline Island. In the summer it and the Apostle Islands all have the distinct flavor of a Caribbean island with their relaxed, informal, and colorful characteristics. The sketch shows the fabric-​covered Tom’s Burned Down Bar on Madeline Island, with people sitting at the bar and others looking at items in the shop (Figure 4.12). If you look closely, the table in the foreground has a statement on the cloth cover that I agree with: ‘Women make the world go around!’ The sketch suggests an open-​air bar that could have easily been located on the Bahamas Island in the Caribbean. At the bottom of the sketch and only a block from the water is Maggie’s Café in Bayfield, painted in red, yellow and blue colors, that also has good food. These were two places that we found attractive and interesting and that reflected the relaxed atmosphere of Bayfield and Madeline Island. It is such a good area for sailing, and we have chartered sailboats in Bayfield several times and spent long summer weekends sailing around the Apostle Islands and out into Lake Superior.

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4.11 Two sketches of the island of Hydra, Greece, showing the Orloff Hotel where we stayed, and the harbor filled with boats. This is a popular tourist destination because it is close to Athens.

Like the Apostle Islands, Orcas Island is part of the San Juan Island group near Seattle, Washington, along the border with Canada. Orcas Island is rural and hilly, with many old barns and fields with sheep. We stayed in the Sea Dream cottage that we rented on the west side of the island, located high at the edge of the rocky shoreline. I sketched the cabin from down near the water near an old Madrone tree that appeared to sprout out of the rocks, with a wild mink running along the base and the ocean and an island further out to sea. The Madrone tree is an evergreen along the Pacific Northwest that grows on the rocky, well-​drained

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4.12 Sketches of Tom’s Burned Down Bar on Madeline Island near Bayfield, Wisconsin, on Lake Superior, and Maggie’s Restaurant in Bayfield. They are typical of the laid-​back character of places on the Apostle Islands.

soil in areas with a lot of sun. This old stump was a twisted and sculptural shape that seemed right at home on this rocky beach. The cabin was simple and rugged, with a great view, and we enjoyed a spectacular sunset sipping wine on the deck (Figure 4.13). The Bahamas consist of many islands in the Atlantic Ocean north of Cuba, and are a great destination for tourism and people who like boats. The Little Harbor on Abaco Island is one of those places where water, land and boats intersect in a beautiful setting (Figure 4.14). I like to sketch boats at anchor like this because they are such an ancient method of traveling for work and pleasure, and maybe because we like to sail and enjoy being on the water. This harbor is in between two land areas, so it is well protected from most storms. Seeing the boats just sitting there waiting for someone to come was picturesque, and I decided to sketch it. We visited Abaco Island as guests of our son, daughter-​in-​law and four granddaughters, and stayed in a house that they had rented right on the beach. As we moved around the beautiful island we discovered many interesting places

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4.13 Sketch of ‘Sea Dream’ cottage on Orcas Island, Washington, with gnarled tree below on the beach and an otter running by when I was drawing. It was a beautiful place to spend a night.

and people that I  sketched, including these three local maintenance workers building a palm umbrella on the beach (Figure  4.15). The Bahamas became a British colony in 1718 and a haven for freed slaves. Today 90  percent of the population identify as black. Tourism is the most important economic engine, followed by international finance and agriculture. It is a delightful collection of islands, with beautiful scenery and friendly people connected to island life and the water.

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Ministers Island is a unique small island lying off the shore near St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada. It can be reached by car during low tide. Consisting of 500 acres, it was purchased in 1891 and became the summer estate of Sir William Van Horne, the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Called Covenhoven, the large house, along with a bathhouse and windmill, were designed by Edward

4.14 Sketch of boats at anchor in the Little Harbor on Abaco Island in the Bahamas. There is something about water and boats that is compelling and beautiful.

4.15 Sketch of maintenance workers building an umbrella shade structure with palm branches on the beach on Abaco Island.

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4.16 Sketches of Minister’s Island near St Andrews in New Brunswick, Canada. The buildings all relate to ‘Covenhoven’, constructed with stone and wood for one family, including the old stone house that belonged to a minister.

Maxwell, a Montreal architect. The architecture of wood and stone feels very right for its place (Figure  4.16). Soon after the house was completed, Maxwell was asked by Van Horne to design a large barn to house his collection of Clydesdale horses and a prized herd of Dutch Belted cattle (Figure 4.17). The mammoth barn is constructed, like the house, of stone and wood, with three different levels: the lowest level for cattle, the second level for horses, and the upper level for storing

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hay, with many roof cupolas and dormers for light and ventilation. Nearby and separate was the milk house and silo for cattle feed. also constructed of stone and wood. The overall composition is beautiful, with the low curved stone retaining wall and gateway in the foreground. While sketching it I was thinking of what it must have been like to see it in its prime, with the cattle and horses and workmen bustling about. Also on the island is the small Minister’s house dating from 1790. The island, with its architecture of wood and stone all designed by a good architect, celebrates well the historic relationship between humans, animals and crops in the rural environment that once was the most common lifestyle in North America. The Lofoten Islands off the rugged west coast of Norway is a place of great scenery, with small bays, boats and colorful buildings reflecting its ancient connections to Viking history, water and the commercial fishing industry focusing on cod. The waters between the islands and the mainland are the region that my mother’s grandfather and father fished and farmed many years ago before emigrating to the United States through Canada ending up in northern Minnesota. They had a farmstead on the mainland with direct access to the water, and it was hard to understand why they left such a beautiful place. The Lofoten Islands, about 20 miles out to sea, are a delightful group of rugged mountains, with small bays and waterways between creating places to visit and explore. At one of the many small harbors we visited I sketched this small two-​story boathouse reflected in the water along with a small boat tied to it. The quietness of the water and the reflection of the boat house in it speaks to human constructions and connections

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4.17 Sketch of the great three-​ story barn and silo at ‘Covenhoven’ on Minister’s Island, constructed for the prized horses and dairy cattle of the owner.

4.18 Sketch of a boat house on the Lofoten Islands of Norway, with a small boat and reflections in the water.

to water in Norway that typify their historic rural culture based on fishing and farming (Figure 4.18). Nearby is the busy commercial fishing harbor of Henningsvaer (called the Venice of Lofoten) that illustrates the commercial side of a harbor, with its large wooden building painted white and the small individual houses on the other side of the harbor nestled at the base of adjacent mountains (Figure  4.19). It is a business-​like harbor, with the red crane mounted on a steel structure showing workers unloading sacks of something from the upper-​story warehouse. As we drove around the Lofoten Islands we stopped to explore another harbor called Nusfjord. It is more informal, with a variety of smaller wood buildings of different shades of color all with a hoisting projection under the roof ridge on the harbor side for loading and unloading products into the second floor of the warehouses. That system is similar to old barns in Minnesota that had a rope and pulley system for lifting hay up into the hay loft and then sliding it on a track to a storage space within the loft. Nusfjord also has several small boats tied to the dock, reflecting the variety of scale of activity going on. In the background the treeless mountains of the islands come straight down into the water, illustrating the dramatic contrasts you find in the Lofoten Islands that make it so interesting to visit and tour (Figure 4.20).

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4.19 Sketch of the harbor at Henningsvaer on the Lofoten Islands of Norway, showing the contrast between harbor activity and small houses across the bay.

Near the small village of Borg we discovered the Viking Museum, with a replica of a Viking long house that we toured. It had an interesting array of open spaces under the spine of the long house for various living activities  –​cooking, eating, sleeping and meeting. The replica illustrates how a Viking leader might have lived in the twelfth century, and it was constructed with hand-​hewed timber like the wood construction extensively used for churches and farm buildings that Christian Norberg-​Schulz wrote about and illustrated so well. The long house is shaped with earth berm walls and a steep sloping roof to deflect winds and shed the weight of snow in the winter. A short walk down the hill from the house to the harbor you come to a wood dock with a 78-​foot replica Viking long ship and a small Viking boat tied up to the pier. The sketch shows the long house and Viking ship in a small bay, with a farmstead across the water and mountains beyond (Figure  4.21). It is not hard to imagine that the Viking ship is the long house turned upside down. Both the house and the ship illustrate the incredible wood construction skills that the Viking explorers brought back to Norway from their expeditions into Russia. They quickly learned to use the knowledge they gathered to create a unique wooden Norwegian architecture reflecting climate, culture and place that has stood the test of time.

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4.20 Sketch of the harbor at Nusfjord on the Lofoten Islands of Norway, with docks on stilts attesting to the tide difference.

Waterfront cities and towns The great city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, is on an island with bridge connections to adjacent lands surrounding the downtown area and water on all sides. The sketch is from a dock on the north side of the small Granville Island that is in a deep bay on the south side of the downtown area (Figure  4.22). It shows the downtown area of Vancouver across the bay and one of the high bridges connecting it to the surrounding metropolitan area and countryside, with one of the small taxi boats that make connections to landings up and down the city center area. The sketch also includes a stand within the famous Granville Farmers’ Market of a vegetable and fruit store displaying the wide range of colorful products it had for sale, and a 1970 replica of the famous Gastown Steam Clock on one of the main streets downtown that dates from the 1870s. Vancouver is a delightful and beautiful city that has many tall buildings that were the result of restrictions on land use (the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) program) along the Fraser River on the south side of the metropolitan area that

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4.21 Sketches of the Viking long house and Viking ship in the Viking Museum at Borg on the Lofoten Islands of Norway.

is good for growing food. Vancouver’s population expanded quickly in the 1980s when China took over control of Hong Kong and many of its residents immigrated to Canada, most staying in Vancouver. The skyline in the sketch shows the tall 20-​ to 40-​story hotels, apartment buildings and office buildings that resulted from the ALR planning decision. On the other side of Canada, in New Brunswick, is the small town of St Andrews that has not changed much from its founding in 1873. St Andrews is located at the southern tip of a peninsula extending into Passamaquoddy Bay. Nearby is Ministers Island, described earlier, that is connected by a causeway at low tide. In our exploring we walked out onto a busy pier near the water where sacks of feed that would be taken out as feed for salmon farms were being loaded into boats by a crane mounted on a truck (Figure 4.23). I thought this was interesting, so I sketched it. We continued exploring the main Water Street, where I sketched several shops functioning in original wood buildings from the eighteenth century. St Andrews, as a commercial fishing center, has maintained and preserved much of its original architecture with a scale and atmosphere much as it was that still functions today (Figure 4.24).

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4.22 Sketches of produce displayed in the famous Granville Farmers’ Market and a view over water of downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from Granville Island. Also shown is an historic steam-​powered clock on a downtown street.

The urban harbor in Auckland, New Zealand (Figure 4.25), that Sharon and I first visited in 2001 is like many waterfront cities in Southern California. It was a working harbor with all kinds of boats, including yachts, tied to long wharfs that had a combination of warehouses, hotels and apartments constructed on them. We visited Auckland again in 2017, and the city and its many harbors had dramatically developed, with many new apartment buildings and hotels on the waterfront. As in most places in New Zealand, you are not far from water and as a tourist you experience the careful maintenance of the natural landscape even as the cities and towns have changed over time as they have expanded. Auckland, with a population of 1.4 million, is home to roughly one third of the population of New Zealand. It is a city, like those in Southern California, that spreads out into the surrounding landscape with buildings clustered around its many bays and inlets. Auckland, the capital of New Zealand since 1841, is ranked high as a place to live and thrives as a multi-​cultural hub of cuisine, music and art. Bergen, Norway, in northern Europe, is also a waterfront city and was founded in 1070. Like Auckland, it has a compact harbor filled with ships and surrounded by wooden buildings for transferring fish and trade goods from water

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4.23 Sketch of a working wharf in St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, transferring feed for salmon farms from land to a ship.

to land and vice versa. It is the second largest city in Norway, behind Oslo, and is known as the City of Seven Mountains because of the many mountains surrounding the city. On the north side of the harbor the wooden houses and storage buildings were constructed by the merchant guilds of the Hanseatic League in Bergen that flourished from 1360 to 1754. These wooden buildings were constructed in the early 1700s after several fires destroyed those from earlier times. Painted different colors, they are dramatically reflected in the water at midnight and are a World Heritage Site (Figure 4.26). On the south side of the harbor the early wood buildings have been converted to shops and office uses but are mostly painted white, as seen in the bottom of the sketch. One of the many alleys on the north side of the harbor between the wood buildings is shown in a sketch illustrating architectural constructions for

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4.24 Sketch of historic shops on Water Street in St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada.

4.25 Sketch of the busy harbor in Auckland, New Zealand, from the Euro Restaurant where we had lunch.

loading and unloading, with roof overhangs and balconies related to the transfer of imported goods into Norway as well as the transfer of fish to markets in Europe (Figure 4.27). The sketch was interesting to do because of the variety of twisted walls, forms and openings that happen with wood structures over time, and the variety of colors used that added to the array. Alesund, Norway, is north of Bergen and a smaller waterfront city reflecting more of a nineteenth-​century character with multi-​story stone buildings along its Brosundet Harbor. The harbor and related canals reminded me of Amsterdam,

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4.26 Sketches of the harbor in Bergen, Norway, at midnight and Hanseatic houses on the other side with Norwegian flags.

and it is a busy place with a variety of boats and merchant buildings, and also restaurants and apartment buildings. Alesund is home to the Sunnmore Museum with its collection of old log barns and boat houses reflecting the historic wooden architecture of Norwegian buildings in rural areas (Figure 4.28). The museum is a nice place to visit and explore to understand the way local topography, climate and vegetation influenced the construction with logs and sod roofs of a wide range of houses, barns, storehouses and other rural buildings on farms in Norway in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Harbors in the waterfront cities of Nantucket and Chatham, Maine, resemble Norway’s waterfront cities, with wooden buildings constructed on top of wharfs consisting of houses, small offices and storage buildings for the transfer of commercial fishing catches to trucks for land transportation to inland food markets (Figure 4.29). These buildings date from the nineteenth century and are primarily wood construction that is so common in New England, reflecting the availability of forests for timber, and the immigration of people from waterfront cities in Europe to America with the fishing and carpentry skills they brought with them.

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4.27 Sketch of an alley between the Hanseatic houses in Bergen, Norway, showing the amazing jumble of roof extensions to lift cargo, stairs and bridges, attesting to the history and the activities that took place.

Kennebunkport and York, Maine, are two other harbor cities in New England that reflect the character of early waterfront settlements in the United States, with simple several-​story wooden buildings used for a range of commercial and office uses and as apartments and shops overlooking their harbors filled with a wide variety of boats (Figure 4.30). The Yorkshire House from 1743 and Yorkshire Harbor Inn were interesting to sketch because of the timeless architectural character of the wood buildings and their interesting forms overlooking the harbor. The Kennebunkport pier was also interesting because of the colorful sailboats anchored in the water and along the pier, reflecting the wide range of commercial and recreational boats used by people who live there. Back in western Canada the inner harbor of Victoria, the capital of the Canadian province of British Columbia, is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada’s Pacific coastline. The inner harbor is filled with a wide variety of boats and ferries, with whale-​watching places on the docks at its edges. Almost hidden in the array of boats is a red-​colored float plane like those that are

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4.28 Sketches of traditional rural buildings with sod roofs at the Sunnmore Museum, and the boats and buildings along the Brosundet Harbor in Alesund, Norway.

used so much in Canada to reach distant hunting and fishing areas (Figure 4.31). The harbor is surrounded by office buildings, retails shops, the grand Empress Hotel and the provincial Parliament building. The Parliament Park in front of the Parliament building overlooking the harbor is dedicated to the indigenous people of British Columbia and has a ‘knowledge’ totem pole as the focal point. Carved by Cicero August and his two sons, the totem pole was erected in 1990 to honor the Salis indigenous people of the region and symbolize their lessons of the past and hopes for the future. Victoria is an interesting waterfront city to visit and explore, dine in and stay. It provides a gateway to the inland areas of the island, and the

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4.29 Sketches of the harbor on Nantucket Island and the fishing pier in Chatham, Massachusetts, showing the scale and character of typical New England architecture.

opportunity to visit Butchart Gardens and many other places with an architectural character that is unique to the agricultural landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Like many small waterfront towns in the Great Lakes region of North America that developed around fishing, Bayfield, Wisconsin, has a small harbor with a fleet of commercial fishing boats. They are quite different fishing boats in that they are mostly enclosed to compensate for the colder climate of Lake Superior (Figure 4.32). Some of the fishing boats were in the water and ready to move out to the fishing grounds when I sketched them, whereas other were sitting on the land undergoing repair. The contrast between the two clusters of boats was

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4.30 Sketches of the harbor in Kennebunkport, Maine, and the historic Yorkshire House and York Harbor Inn located in York, Maine.

stunning because a boat out of water is like a fish out of water. It was this contrast that compelled me to sketch them. Sitka harbor in Alaska also caught my eye when Sharon and I first visited the state in 2000. The cluster of colorful fishing boats quietly resting in the harbor and tied to floating wood docks was an interesting composition. I drew the boats

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4.31 Sketch of the inner harbor, showing the variety of boats and an airplane in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and the totem pole depicting knowledge in a park in front of the Parliament Building.

in the harbor when we stopped in Sitka as one of the ship ports on our cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to Anchorage, Alaska (Figure 4.33). The variety of boats, designed and constructed for different functions, were all sprouting vertical masts or antennas and I  thought the interesting array of verticality, boat shapes, and the color of the water in the harbor was a moment that I had to try and capture in a sketch.

River places The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are located along the Mississippi River in central Minnesota. This is the region where Sharon and I live south of the river on the St Paul side. The metropolitan region has two other rivers that converge into the Mississippi. The Minnesota River enters from the west and merges at historic

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4.32 Sketches of the unique enclosed fishing boats in the water and being repaired on the land in Bayfield, Wisconsin, on Lake Superior.

Fort Snelling, and the St Croix River along the east side of the metropolitan region defines the border with the neighboring state of Wisconsin. These three rivers have long been a dividing line between land uses, neighborhoods and multiple cities, but that is now starting to change with a new emphasis on connecting and sharing development to improve the quality of life today while preserving the natural and developed landscape so that future generations can shape theirs. To me the Twin Cities is an exciting urban place to live, with many different lakes and scenic natural areas in addition to the river valleys, as this sketch of downtown Minneapolis across the Mississippi River attests (Figure  4.34). Like many cities that were settled in America, rivers were important to their founding. Usually there was an island in the river that provided an easier point for crossing, and bridges and harbors were important for transfer of goods from rural areas to distant markets. Minneapolis grew because of the milling and flour-​making industries, with companies like General Mills becoming world centers for food. St Paul was settled first because of its natural harbor for transportation and shipping,

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4.33 Sketch of colorful fishing boats in the water of the harbor in Sitka, Alaska.

and it became the home of James J. Hill, who became one of the leaders in development of the railroads that extended across the nation. The 3M Company was organized and founded in St Paul. The Twin Cities has the University of Minnesota and other private colleges and universities, along with five professional sports teams and new stadiums and arenas for major league baseball, hockey, football, basketball and soccer. It is an interesting place to live, with a lot of small lakes and rivers providing dramatically changing seasons while offering a wide range of job and living opportunities for young people. The Yangtze River in China is a national river that has greatly contributed to the Chinese economy. Sharon and I toured the river in 2007, starting in Shanghai and then riding on a Viking Cruise bus out to the immense Three Gorges Dam that was just finishing construction (Figure 4.35). Now complete, the dam will cause the river on its back side to raise a great deal, and when we visited the China government was rebuilding cities that were near the river edge up high on the adjacent hills. On the upstream side of the dam we boarded our Viking Century Sky river boat on which we traveled for several days up the river to Chongquing, from where we flew to Xian and then on to Beijing. As we traveled up the river we stopped for a picnic lunch along a floating dock where vendors were busy selling food to people traveling on the river (Figure 4.36). When we stopped at Wusau I sketched boats and docks with the

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4.34 Sketch of the skyline in the morning of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, looking over the Mississippi River.

4.35 Sketches of the huge Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China.

long, sloping embankment that had been recently constructed to accommodate the future depth of water on the river (Figure 4.37). At the top of the embankment the sketch shows the reinforcement to resist erosion after the river rises, and above that is where the new communities have been constructed. Across the river you can see farmhouses that will eventually be covered with water. A few years later, in 2014, we took a Viking River Cruise on the Ayevarwaddy River in Myanmar. We were one of the first international cruises allowed into the

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4.36 Two sketches of a Viking River cruise stop for lunch on the Yangtze River in China, showing food vendors at the shelter on the hillside that will eventually be under water.

country after the military dictatorship relinquished partial control. The sketch shows our boat, the RV Indochina Pandaw, at anchor in the river near Mandalay along with several other local boats (Figure 4.38). Mandalay is a river city, with a wide range of people and activities, that we explored on tours and that I sketched along the way (Figure 4.39). I even tried to write my name in their language, as you can see at the top of the sketch.

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4.37 Sketches of river views and our Viking ship Century Sky, stopped at Wusau on the Yangtze River in China, showing modifications to the river bank to accommodate rising water due to the construction of the dam.

4.38 Sketch of our wooden Viking river cruise boat on the Ayevarwaddy River at Mandalay, Myanmar.

The next day we stopped at a small village, named Oh Ne Kyaung, where I sketched houses on stilts and interesting people and places as we traveled around (Figure 4.40). The young girl with a bicycle saw me sketching and rode up to see what I was doing. After I sketched her she said something and quickly rode off on her bicycle. She returned a short time later with a piece of paper and gestured for me to sketch her again, so she could take it home. I did and gave her the sketch, and she quickly sped off on her bike. The villages along the Ayevarwaddy River are places where families, animals and nature have worked together for centuries. The pathway from the boat landing at the village of Minhia was unique because of the huge trees along the river bank with exposed roots (Figure 4.41). We toured a school here, and as I was sketching near the river a large group of students clustered around me to see what I was drawing. The cruise boat program director took the photograph of me showing the children my sketch book that is in Chapter 1. While we were anchored there, a variety of people came down to the river to discreetly bathe and wash clothes. Another village we stopped at, Yandabo, was a place where they focused on making pottery. It is a village where families have been doing this together for a long time, and I tried to sketch the family members and the different things they did. Their methods were rather ancient, but the products were practical and quite beautiful (Figure  4.42). The people in the sketch are all from the same family, and I  drew the grandfather as well as the youngest grandson peeking around the corner watching me as I sketched him. Later we got back on the boat, and a group of Buddhist Monks came on board for a blessing (Figure 4.43). They were polite and gracious in the way they handled themselves among a group of tourists. Downstream we stopped at the village of Megway and toured the local farmers’

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4.39 Sketches of a variety of scenes that I sketched while touring Mandalay, Myanmar. On the top right is my name in their language.

market, seeing the wide range of products, vegetables and fruits that were being grown and produced in the area. Myanmar was a fascinating trip, like a step back in time. At the beginning of our trip in Mandalay we saw a group of men in their traditional wraparound clothes, called longyi, working on a road using a lot of hand labor with pickaxes. The work looked much as it might have done a century earlier, yet tucked into the back sides of their tight longyi were cell phones. It was a stunning reminder of how much the world is changing, and how people in developing nations are communicating. Mandalay was also full of automobiles maneuvering for space on roads that were designed for donkeys. Traveling around on the tour of the city was slow

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4.40 Sketches of people and of houses on stilts in the Oh Ne Kyaung rural village on the Ayevarwaddy River, and Sharon on a trishaw bicycle in Magway city.

going, but it was fascinating to see the ancient country starting to emerge into the modern world. The Arno River in Florence, Italy, is integral to the history of the famous medieval city because it becomes a strong connector and divider defining the city’s two sides. The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) is the major link across the river at its narrowest point (Figure 4.44). It is located where a Roman bridge was once constructed, but in 1345, after several floods, the present stone arch bridge was

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4.41 Sketch of the stepped pathway from the river to rural village of Minhia on the Ayevarwaddy River, showing the huge trees and exposed roots that evolved over time.

constructed. Ponte Vecchio has a series of small shops along it, with vista points on the bridge for observing river traffic. It functions today much as it did when it was constructed, with merchants selling their products to travelers. Sharon and I have been to Florence many times, and it never fails to be a fascinating and interesting place. I  sketched the bridge from the north side of the Arno River near the Uffizi Gallery. I  also sketched several nearby courtyards, including the Cloister of San Lorenzo, with its green garden, and Palazzo Strozzi, with its courtyard surrounded by arches. The courtyards open to the sky, to bring light down

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4.42 Sketches of scenes at the rural village of Yandabo on the Ayevarwaddy River and the family that has been making pottery for generations.

into the surrounding spaces. The courtyard is an important feature of the Italian Renaissance and integral to the palazzo in Florence. Florence was one of the wealthiest cities in Italy during the Middle Ages. The birthplace of the Renaissance, it was declared a World Heritage Site in 1982. When you walk around Florence you discover little streets, then when you turn a corner you are suddenly faced with a great viewpoint. In this sketch the focus is on the tall spire of the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace) that was the medieval city hall,

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4.43 Sketches of Buddhist monks providing a blessing on the boat while anchored on the river at Magway and the farmers’ market in the city with shade awnings and a wide range of food for sale.

with the Uffizi Gallery on the side; you see the palazzo down a narrow alley, and its towering presence draws you toward it (Figure 4.45). Not far away, on a later trip, we were walking down a street near our hotel and at the intersection we stepped out onto the major avenue. The great Florence Duomo become an imposing vista that I  was compelled to draw (Figure 4.46). The sketch was done on a cold winter day, and I tried to capture the season with cars parked and people wearing winter coats on the sidewalk and the famous striped belfry and dome in the background. It was an exciting moment, and an opportunity to see the cathedal from a very different viewpoint in the winter.

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4.44 Sketches of the historic Ponte Vecchio over the Arno River in Florence, Italy, and several interior courtyards that bring light and air down into important historic buildings.

Discovered places When rivers are integral to the development of a settlement, it is exciting to discover a place where there is a dramatic connection. Sharon and I were on a driving trip through New York State a few years ago and stopped along the Hudson River to visit the historic town of Sleepy Hollow. We were walking down a tree-​lined

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4.45 Sketch of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, with Uffizi Gallery flanking the street.

path and came upon this eighteenth-​century gristmill powered by flowing water, along with a narrow bridge crossing and the house and several other buildings. The place is called Philipsburg Manor, and it was a farm owned by the Philipse family who settled in the area in 1750. The place was a thriving farm, milling and trading center that relied on twenty-​three enslaved Africans to operate the complex. It was exciting to discovery, and an interesting place to stop and sketch as a reminder of how things were done in the eighteenth century using the river as a power source that still functions today (Figure  4.47). It was sad, however,

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4.46 Sketch of the Duomo in Florence, Italy, drawn on a cold winter morning, with the white and gray striped building integrating with the colors of the sky.

to realize that slavery was also an integral part of the north at that time, yet it was a strong reminder of the broad and important legacy that Africans brought to America and continue to bring to our nation in this rapidly changing world. During our trip we also drove up into the eastern seaboard, with a stop in Bar Harbor, Maine. We stayed at the Inn at Bay Ledge and hiked down to Frenchman’s Bay, where we discovered this unusual rock outcropping with a dramatic wooden stair climbing up between a crevice in the rock. Called cathedral

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4.47 Sketch of the eighteenth-​ century gristmill at Philipsburg Manor in Hudson Valley, New York, showing a working connection between water and food production.

rock, you can walk through it or climb up on it, and it was an interesting and historic natural place to draw (Figure 4.48). The stair led back up to the Inn, and when we walked out to the rock’s promontory overlooking the bay it was a good illustration of how humans have celebrated landscapes for business as well as viewing pleasure. Another surprise was a walk through the seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, that is filled with many boats, historic and new, where we stumbled upon the last wooden whaling ship in the United States. It was exciting to see such a large wooden ship, the Charles W. Morgan, undergoing reconstruction in the drydock. It was interesting to see it propped up on the shore and seeing how large, bulky and unseaworthy it looked; yet it seemed like it wanted to be quickly released back into the water, and that is why I decided to draw it (Figure 4.49). The fish market in the village of Hanalei on the north end of the island of Kauai, Hawaii, is another one of those unique places that you discover when traveling. In this case the small fish market in the village had a large fiberglass swordfish hanging upside down on a pole. I was attracted to the simple way the Dolphin Fish Market advertises its products and decided to sketch it (Figure 4.50). Nearby we stopped for lunch at the St Regis Princeville Resort, and these colorful wild chickens wandered by so I  quickly sketched them on the same page. Also near Hanalei, we stopped at a highway vista point overlooking the National Wildlife Refuge to see the famous taro fields in the valley below on each side of a river (Figure 4.51). The taro plant is used in many traditional Hawaiian meals, and the root is used to make starch. The irrigated fields are worked by farmers all year round while wading in knee-​high mud. It was a beautiful view, illustrating a landscape both cultivated and natural.

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4.48 Sketch of Cathedral Rock on Frenchman’s Bay near Bar Harbor, Maine, showing a human connection with nature’s sculpture through the wooden stair.

One of the most interesting trips that Sharon and I took was to Alaska in 2000, with the opportunity to travel around to visit some of the harbor cities. We traveled on a passenger ship from Vancouver up along the long the Alaska coastline, with stops in Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau (the capital of Alaska) and Skagway before we finally arrived in Valdez, sailing through Prince William Sound. We were there for a family reunion because an uncle and several aunts on my mother’s side settled there after World War II. The reunion was in the town of Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, and during the visit we rented a car and drove out to the end of the peninsula to the town of Homer on the Cook Inlet. The harbor in Homer extends out into the water as a land pier with a wide variety little shops for fishing, gift shops and food vendors.

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4.49 Sketch of the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship, undergoing reconstruction at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. It is an image of a boat’s sordid past contrasting with the beauty of its design and construction.

It was a colorful array of buildings on stilts at the water’s edge, illustrating the connections between land, water and human activity, and I sketched it because it looked so appropriate in Alaska (Figure 4.52). At the harbor in Seward, Alaska, we saw some boats under repair, and the elegant Majestic was such a nice wooden boat and looked so out of place that I sketched it also (Figure 4.53). Later we traveled by bus to Anchorage and then took a train to Daneli National Park, where we were able to see Mount McKinley and grizzly bears in an open field. I also sketched several wooden Russian Orthodox churches along the way that were constructed when Alaska was still controlled by Russia before it was purchased by the United States in 1867. Lighthouses have a dramatic connection with water and are exciting to discover. They are usually located on a promontory that extends out into the ocean, and I  always find the composition of man-​made lighthouse on the natural landscape and the surrounding water attractive. The Nubble Lighthouse on Cape Neddick was constructed in 1874 and is perched on a small rock outcropping island adjacent to the shore. The sketch shows the picturesque character of the lighthouse, warden’s house and a few outbuildings, with power poles and lines, later installed, extending out to the island in a way that almost humorously expresses the lighthouse’s reliance on the mainland (Figure 4.54). One wonders how the power lines hold up when some of the wicked winter Nor’easter storms batter the coast with snow, ice and wind. The lighthouse at Cape Elizabeth near Portland, Maine, standing on a rock outcropping, is so picturesque that a food vendor constructed a restaurant on the mainland near the lighthouse, providing outdoor picnic areas with umbrellas for tourists to sit and eat local lobster while looking out toward the fancy warden’s

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4.50 Sketch of the Dolphin Fish Market in Hanalei, Kuai Island, Hawaii, and wild chickens at the St Regis Princeville Resort. The sketches illustrate unique places and things one sees when traveling that catch the eye.

house and the lighthouse. I thought the combination of activities reflecting two different water connections was amusing and interesting, so I  sketched both (Figure 4.55). The famous Split Rock Lighthouse along the Minnesota north shore side of Lake Superior has been one of the most visited lighthouses in America for many years due to its dramatic location high on a 133-​foot sheer cliff. It guided freighters safely across the strong and cold water of Lake Superior for over 60 years from

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4.51 Sketch of the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge and taro fields in the valley below Hanalei on Kuai Island in Hawaii. It is a beautiful connection between cultivated and natural landscapes.

construction in 1910 until 1971, when it was turned over to the Minnesota Historic Society. It continues to be a major destination for tourists along Lake Superior and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2011 (Figure 4.56). It was a cloudy day when I made the sketch, and the lake was quiet, but the view from below as well as above shows the grandeur of the place that is very apparent. There were no roads when the lighthouse was constructed so everything had to be brought by water to a landing place on the beach below and then lifted to the top of the cliff. The next four sketches are all from one of our favorite places connected with water. It is the Greek island of Santorini, located in the southern Aegean Sea, which we have visited several times over the past 30 years. It is a delightful place to walk around, and to look at views out to the grouping of small islands around a former volcanic caldera and experience its white buildings in many different 182

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4.52 Sketch of a grouping of colorful and quaint shacks for fishing, shopping and supplies along the earth pier of Spit Harbor in Homer, Alaska.

4.53 Sketch of the beautiful wooden fishing boat Majestic undergoing repairs on the land in Seward Harbor, Alaska. It seemed to be resting a bit before heading back out to sea.

4.54 Sketch of the 1879 Nubble Lighthouse and Cape Naddick Light Station near York, Maine, illustrating a beautiful architectural connection to function, place, climate and culture, with precarious electric power lines from the mainland.

shapes clinging to rock outcroppings. Its villages are usually dominated by a central Greek Orthodox church along with a variety of windmills, hotels, restaurants and circuitous pathways connecting it all together. The foothills adjacent to the villages are filled with vineyards, small farms and wineries, providing a scenic pathway for hiking or walking around (or at least until many cruise ships started dropping off large numbers of tourists, making it crowded and, in some places, difficult to even move). It is still a gorgeous mountainous island, with vineyards and buildings all constructed of stone with white stucco on the exterior and interior. The churches stand out with their larger and more muscular form, blue-​colored dome and cross on top. The last time we visited Santorini, in 2015, we avoided the larger villages of Fira and Oia and stayed in the small inland village of Megalochori. The entrance to the Vederna Resort was near the blue-​domed Panagia Greek Orthodox Church of Mary, and not far away was the Boutari Winery sitting in a vine field and nestled under a large domed roof. I sketched both (Figure 4.57). The resort was constructed along a pathway that had a series of small houses with rooms, a central swimming pool and restaurant. The resort is also partly in an old underground winery, with a second restaurant in one of the caves. It provides a variety of interesting places and views as you walk around, and Christina, their beautiful receptionist, was very helpful (Figure 4.58). We also hiked the island pathways connecting the villages of Fira, Imerovigli and Oia. These are beautiful to walk along and enjoy the scenery, with blue sky and water and buildings of stone almost entirely in white, except for an occasional dark stone granary or former windmill (Figures 4.59). Santorini, with its green landscape and its white buildings integrated into the rock, is a special place among the Greek Islands and one of the most unique, beautiful and pleasant islands on the planet to visit and stay on for a few days.

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4.55 Sketch of the Lobster Shack on Two Lights Road at Cape Elizabeth and the adjacent, rather ornate, Portland Head Lighthouse, where people eating can sit and observe with the Atlantic Ocean in the background.

During the fall of 2017, Sharon and I  visited Australia and toured both the beautiful southern city of Melbourne and the wonderful waterfront city of Sydney. They both stand out as places where water and land meet in a dramatic fashion. Sydney is dominated by the Opera House, designed by the Danish architect Jorn Utson and completed in 1973. Sitting on a pier extending out

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4.56 Two sketches of the famous historic 1910 Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior, north of Duluth, Minnesota, showing the entrance to the lighthouse and its adjacent power building, and seen from the shore below.

into the water and adjacent to the soaring arched Harbor Bridge, there are five different performance venues under tile-​ covered concrete shells, providing many different spaces to walk around and explore (Figure  4.60). The sketch shows the famous Opera House and arched Harbor Bridge near the downtown, and a view of Jacobs Ladder, a rock outcropping near the entrance to the Sydney

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4.57 Sketches of the Panagia Greek Orthodox Church of Mary and the Boutari Winery on the Greek island of Santorini.

harbor from the Tasman Sea. It also has a quick sketch of the historic Macquarie Lighthouse, designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway, that was constructed in 1818 and rebuilt in 1883. It is the oldest lighthouse in Australia. The other image is of a 7-​pound opal gem called Olympic Australius that is displayed in the Altman & Cherry jewelry store in Sydney and that I  thought was interesting.

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4.58 Sketches of the wonderful Vederna Resort on the Greek island of Santorini, where we stayed, and the resort’s receptionist, Christina. The resort was constructed on top of and in the caves of an ancient winery in the inland village of Megalochori.

I sketched a lot in Australia and in New Zealand. They are both interesting and scenic countries, but quite different. Australia is vast and varied, with rain forests and deserts, whereas New Zealand is compact and mountainous, with fjords and glaciers. Both have well organized and managed agricultural landscapes befitting their climate.

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4.59 Sketches along the pathway from the villages of Firi to Oia on the Greek island of Santorini. It is an island where architecture and landscape are so closely integrated that it is only the white walls of the buildings that visually separate human activity from nature. The blue domes are all churches.

Summary Human settlements that are located where water and land meet are unique because of their origin as places of commerce connecting the land with water for transportation and fishing. The shaping of the settlements was strongly influenced by human responses to the geography, climate and landscape of place. As Sharon

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4.60 Sketches of scenes from a tour of the harbor area in Sydney, Australia, showing the famous Opera House, entrance to the harbor from the Tasman Sea, historic lighthouse and a large opal gem in a jewelry store.

and I  have traveled around the world, we have visited many interesting water-​ oriented places that I have described and shown in sketches in this chapter. There are also places like Rome, connected to water only by the Tiber River. However, 2,000 years ago Rome did have direct access to the Mediterranean Sea along the Tiber River to Ostia Antica, the ancient seaport of Rome, located about 18 miles southwest of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber. In Roman times it had a man-​made harbor along the river and adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, but over the centuries it silted in so that today it is about one and a half miles from the water. It is an interesting historic place to visit because it provides a good idea of what living in Rome was like 2,000  years ago. It has stone streets with well-​preserved multi-​story apartment buildings, or Insula as they were named in

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Roman times, with shops on the ground level, an apartment for the shopkeeper in a loft, and two to four levels of apartments above. The Casa di Diana was one of the Insula that I studied when I lived at the American Academy in Rome, and it was arranged with a series of apartments on four levels around a central courtyard space bringing in light and air as well as giving access to the units. It had a central heating system, with tile flues to deliver heat vertically to the apartments above, and indoor public latrines. The latrines, with many round openings in a long seating ledge in a single room, were used by both men and women and can be seen today. Aqueducts provided continuous flowing water in troughs beneath the seats that would discharge into the Tiber River. The apartments on the lower levels were most expensive and got cheaper as you moved up. In Rome, there was so much housing development that they had to enact the first building codes to control the height and construction materials of apartment buildings to try to prevent fires. Today the world is more accessible and easier to get around for travelers to unique places than ever before. With excellent river and ocean cruises by companies such as Viking Cruises, founded by Norwegian Torstein Hagen, now is a good time to tour and visit places connected to water that you have read about but never experienced. Sharon and I have traveled on their cruise boats on the Yangtze River in China, the Ayevarwaddy River in Myanmar and Seine River in France, and over Christmas 2018 we will sail on one of their ships from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal to Miami. Several years ago we also took a relaxed and interesting barge trip on the Canal du Midi and Rhone River in southern France. It was a slow trip along vineyards and the Carmargue National Park, where we saw galloping as a herd the ancient breed of wild white horses that with their large wide hoofs have adapted to the marshes. The barge trip was organized through the Barge Lady of Chicago and took place on a long commercial barge that had been converted into a luxury inn. There were five rooms, each with a toilet, for the nine of us (mostly family) and a crew of four. The food and wine were as good as the spectacular scenery.

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Chapter 5

GIAHS places

This chapter focuses on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), with case studies of places that were defined by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to have the characteristics of a living, evolving system of human communities in an intricate relationship with their territory, cultural or agricultural landscape or biophysical and wider social environment. The chapter describes and illustrates the GIAHS sites and other similar places that my wife and I have visited and documented with sketches and photographs to record their agricultural heritage. It’s how a designer looks at and records the people, architecture, animals and crops, and landscapes of these special places where people have been living with and shaping the landscape for a thousand years or more without destroying it. The UN-​FAO defines GIAHS sites as follows: Remarkable land use systems and landscapes which are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving from the co-​adaption of a community with its environment and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development. GIAHS represent a unique subset of agricultural systems, which exemplify customary use of globally significant agricultural biodiversity and merit recognition as a heritage of humankind. (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2011) In this chapter I  include a great deal of information from the writings of Dr Parviz Koohafkan, former director of the Land and Water Division of the UN-​ FAO that created the GIAHS designation, and now president of the World Agricultural Heritage Foundation located in Rome, Italy. The GIAHS sites I have visited and others I have not yet visited for this chapter are extensively discussed in his new book Forgotten Agricultural Heritage:  Reconnecting Food Systems and Sustainable Development (Routledge, 2017), written with Miguel Altieri,

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Professor of Agroecology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Koohafkan in Beijing at the October 2015 founding of the World Rural Development Committee by the World Green Design Organization when we were both named Vice Directors of the Committee. As the son of a family farmer in a small village in Iran, Koohafkan has been involved for much of his professional and personal life in supporting family farmers and indigenous communities, first when he was with the UN-​FAO and now with his foundation. I have a similar background as the son of a crop farmer who also owned a gas station, and I grew up living and working in the gas station and on the farm in a small rural town in northern Minnesota. With my professional architectural work, teaching design for many years, and my rural design interest in rural landscapes and rural people, I strongly support the goals of UN-​FAO to identify and safeguard GIAHS and their associated agricultural heritage. They are special and beautiful landscapes that include agricultural biodiversity and knowledge systems passed down from generation to generation. The FAO hopes that by catalyzing and establishing a long-​term program to support such systems it will enhance global, national and local benefits derived from the GIAHS by honoring the people and their dynamic conservation and sustainable management. I share that hope. From the travels that Sharon and I have made to visit some of the GIAHS sites, we quickly discovered that you cannot help but admire the authenticity of the agricultural systems and the people you meet. Even when traveling on a small group agro-​tourism tour, where the visit to the farm and meeting with the family had been pre-​arranged, the people were friendly and open about their lifestyle, work and family. It was a privilege to be able to visit and see the place where they live and work. Even though it was only for a short time, we were able to obtain some insight into their interesting culture and history and could easily discern the pride they have in their place, what they do and the people they work with. In the Preface to his book, Koohafkan describes GIAHS sites as having outstanding robustness and resiliency that have passed the test of time, and as offering solutions for the present and for future generations regarding social, economic and environmental sustainability. GIAHS are not about the past, he says, but about the future. Humankind faces many challenges today, and the foundations of our modern civilization are threatened. Population increase, urbanization, climate change, unsustainable natural resources management, changes in diet and lifestyles, and globalization are creating many distortions in resource use and local values. If this direction continues, future generations will not be able to see and experience our diverse, naturally nutritious food crops or understand the associated evolving rural culture. Koohafkan goes on to write: It is evident that there is wide recognition of and growing concern that agriculture systems worldwide must become more productive and less wasteful, and that sustainable agricultural practices must be pursued from a holistic

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and integrative perspective. I am certain that safeguarding and cherishing our GIAHS will contribute to many of the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the pledge that no one will be left behind. (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017) As described by Koohafkan and Altieri, the selected GIAHS prototype sites were carefully identified and analyzed by the UN-​FAO using the following criteria, which I have paraphrased from their book: The general criteria used by the UN-​FAO to designate the agricultural systems are similar to the criteria for designating World Heritage Sites, to clarify the global importance of the GIAHS sites. People take pride in the value given to their heritage and are extremely gratified when their place or system is selected. The criteria were based on a GIAHS site’s intrinsic resilience and capacity to strike a social-​environmental balance, its historic and contemporary relevance for human development, and whether the site is a unique or outstanding example of an agricultural system. The five basic criteria for the identification and selection of a site are summarized here as: 1. Food and livelihood security for most of the people living and working in the rural community. 2. Biodiversity and ecosystem function that integrates wildlife and native landscape into the agricultural system to maintain diversity and genetic resources. 3. Knowledge systems and adapted technologies that are integrated into the community and passed down from one generation to the next on the agroecological management of the land. 4. Cultures, value systems and social organizations where the community identifies the gender roles, inheritance systems, forms of leadership and decision-​making and recording, and the ceremonial and religious beliefs into the knowledge systems that are critical to managing the functioning of the agricultural system. 5. Remarkable landscapes that demonstrate diversity in land use layouts, irrigation and water management, terraces, unique adaptive architecture, and habitats that provide for recreational, spiritual, educational, artistic, and scientific values of the ecosystem. The landscape features of the selected sites were the result of human management to provide a particularly ingenious or practical solution to environmental and social constraints, such as land use mosaics, irrigation/​water management systems, terraces, particular adaptive architecture, which might provide for resource conservation/​efficiency or provide habitats for valued biodiversity, recreational values; and the aesthetic, artistic, educational, spiritual and/​or scientific values of their ecosystems.

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In their book Koohafkan and Altieri also describe the past, present and future of agriculture, food systems, and the concept and initiative of the UN-​ FAO GIAHS. They go on to list the typologies of GIAHS with ten different characteristics and where they are generally located, summarized here as follows: 1.

Mountain rice terrace agroecosystems that often are coupled with fish and ducks as integrated forest, land, and water systems especially found in East Asia and the Himalayas. 2. Multiple cropping/​polyculture farming systems that are remarkable combinations of crop varieties with or without integration of agroforestry as developed by the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in the Andes region of Peru. 3. Understory farming systems that are integrated forestry, orchard, or crop systems under the tree canopy. These are common in New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and other Pacific small island developing countries. 4. Nomadic and semi-​nomadic pastoral systems that are based on the adaptive use of pasture, rangeland, water, salt, and forest systems. These include dryland and arctic systems such as Tibetan plateau in India and China, Mongolia and Yemen, the Maasai culture in East Africa, and reindeer-​based systems of the Saami in Scandinavia and Siberia. 5. Ancient irrigation, soil, and water management systems that are ingenious and finely tuned systems most common in drylands including:  a) using underground water distribution for crops found in Iran, Afghanistan, and other Central Asian counties; b) the oases of the deserts in North Africa and Sahara; c) traditional valley bottom and wetland management in Lake Chad and the Niger River basin and delta; and d) other areas like the Bamileke region, in Cameroon, Dogon tribes country in Senegal, and village tank systems in Sri Lanka and India. 6. Complex multilayered home gardens with wild and domesticated trees, shrubs, and plants for multiple foods, like in China, India, the Caribbean, and the Amazon. 7. Below sea level systems that create arable land through draining delta swamps, like in the Netherlands and the floating gardens in Bangladesh. 8. Tribal agricultural heritage systems that feature tribal agricultural practices and techniques integrating indigenous knowledge, like in the Darjeeling tea system in the Himalayas and India. 9. High-​value crop and spice systems that feature management practices of ancient fields devoted exclusively to specific crops or crop rotation and harvesting techniques that require handling skills with extraordinary finesse, like the saffron systems in Iran, Afghanistan, and India. 10. Hunting-​gathering systems that feature unique agricultural practices such as harvesting wild rice in Chad and gathering honey by forest dwelling people in Central and East Africa.

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The pilot sites that were selected for the GIAHS initiative are in a variety of countries of the developing world. The sites all have one thing in common in that they embody the principles for sustained provision of multiple goods and services, food and livelihood security and a certain quality of life that maintains a close connection with nature. They are all interesting landscapes where people, architecture, and nature are in harmony with each other. They are beautiful places that were developed over the centuries by people who live and work with the land to grow food and sustain life as a social, cultural and artistic community. At many sites tourism is bringing new income into the community, but at the same time what impact will people from other places and learning about the larger world have on the people who live and work there? It is a question that needs to be studied, and from my experience working with rural people at the Center for Rural Design it is critical that the people who live and work there must be involved in analysis, study and making decisions about their futures. The following are GIAHS sites that Sharon and I  have visited and that I sketched. They are included to try to give the reader a sense of the emotional connection that I  felt when visiting them. It is the historic living and working relationships that people have with their climate and landscape and the long-​ term development of knowledge that they pass on from generation to generation over the centuries that make their agricultural and living systems work, and so interesting to see. We toured these sites as tourists, and were contributing to a new income source and also reflecting during the visits on the question of our effect on them. What we learned from the visits is something that I discuss in the descriptions of the sites.

Chile: Chiloe Island small farm agricultural systems The group of islands of southern Chile’s Los Lagos region is considered the most valuable ecosystem in Latin America by Koohafkan and Altieri. Chiloe Island, the largest island, and the other smaller islands possess a numbers of farming practices based on the cultivation of numerous varieties of potatoes, garlic and apples, as well as herding traditions. It is a community of Spanish-​speaking people of mixed European and indigenous descent, with 40 percent living in rural areas. It has a certain mystique that is expressed in the diverse cultural heritage. When Sharon and I were visiting we stayed at the beautiful Tierra Chiloe resort hotel that was in a rather remote place that you arrived at after a one-​hour drive from Castro, the capital of Chiloe. The hotel provided interesting meals reflecting the cuisine of the region, including apple cider made with a hand press, and oysters, clams and potato pancakes baked in an underground oven. This all took place outside, where we were accompanied by a glass of beer and a local accordion player-​singer. We were part of a small group tour that included couples from Holland and Argentina that zipped rather quickly around the islands with Ignacio, our guide, visiting churches, waterfalls and small rural village on rivers. As usual, I had to sketch rapidly as we moved about. The largest city on Chiloe Island is Castro, 196

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5.1 Sketch of historic stilt houses along the river in Castro on Chiloe Island, Chile. The view is from a window in a restaurant in one of the old houses at low tide, and the section shows the tidal difference and purpose of the wood supports.

which has a crazy assortment of houses on stilts constructed over the water along the edge of the river (Figure 5.1). It is an interesting array of indigenous design and construction on land that was claimed by the habitants because houses that were constructed over the river did not have to pay taxes. In the section drawing at the bottom of the sketch you can see the incredible 15-​foot-​plus variation in the height of the river and how the wooden houses were sited and constructed on stilts to stay above it. We had lunch in one of the houses, now a restaurant, where I made the sketch looking out of a window. The stilt houses reflect the ingenious character of a place where people have creatively responded to a situation linking economic and social opportunity. When you see the same houses from the other side, adjacent to the road along the river, they seem more traditional yet equally interesting, with an array of color and form (Figure 5.2). We traveled by ferry to the small island of Quinchao and stopped for a short time at the public market in the village of Achao that was a bustling place with GIAHS places

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5.2 Sketch of the street side of stilt houses and power pole in Castro on Chiloe Island, Chile.

5.3 Sketch of the colorful open-​air Achao Market on Quinchao Island near Chiloe Island in Chile, connecting farmers and village people.

a wide range of products being sold (Figure  5.3). Like public markets all over the world, it is an exciting focal point where farmers and village people come together for business and social and cultural dialogue. In the market one could see many different varieties of potatoes and other vegetables along with clothing being offered for sale. The potato is central to the livelihoods of rural communities in the remote islands, and many of the farmers’ practices for seed selection

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5.4 Sketch of the sustainable organic farmer Sandra Naiman on Chiloe Island, Chile.

and conservation processes may be three to five thousand years old. Their crop diversity has proven quite effective in providing security against diseases, pests and drought. They also customize the knowledge to respond to the different agroecosystems in each region of the islands, which are different in soil quality, altitude, slopes and available water (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017). The highlight of our visit to Chiloe Island was a tour of the small farm of Sandra Naiman (Figure  5.4), who is typical of many Chiloe women working to conserve agro-​biodiversity on small farms growing vegetables (including many different types of potatoes) and raising sheep to rotate onto the gardens to provide organic fertilizer. In Chiloe it seems to be primarily the job of women to pass on the knowledge of seed conservation and potato-​based recipes and cooking methods from generation to generation. We had a wonderful lunch in Sandra’s home, sitting at a long table on her porch and eating food grown on the farm. We then went on a walking tour of her diversified farm, where I sketched the fields and animals and flowers found along the way (Figure 5.5). It was a delight to meet Sandra and to visit her beautiful place and see the variety of things grown and raised on her farm. Evidently, she is becoming well known among the local people for her leadership in preserving the ancient traditions of sustainable farming on Chiloe Island.

Peru: Andean terraced agricultural system in the Cusco-​Puno corridor This GIAHS site is a high-​altitude region stretching 350 kilometers in the southern area of the Peruvian Andes Mountains. With many valleys and stepped terraces

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5.5 Sketches of scenes on the Naiman farm on Chiloe Island, Chile, where Sandra rotates potatoes and other vegetables, sheep and a wide variety of flowers on her small fields.

on the hills for planting a variety of crops, it is considered by the UN-​FAO as ‘one of the most heterogeneous ecological environments on the planet’. The Andean people who have lived here for several thousand years have developed a wide variety of potatoes domesticated by generations of Aymara and Quechua indigenous people, along with a variety of fruit trees, corn and animals for food and clothing. The altitude ranges from 3,400 meters in Cusco to 2,400 meters in Machu Picchu, and the geography is such that the human-​constructed landscape is composed of many stepped terraces built with stone retaining walls and irrigation methods

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for growing small patches of crops that are rotated yearly. Working with these terraced farms, the farmers provided tillable land, controlled erosion, irrigated with canals, and produced vast amounts of food for the Incan people (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017). As time passed small village communities emerged as the farmers clustered their houses together to share social, cultural and farming traditions. The village of Pisac on the Willkunuta River in the Sacred Valley, at 2,900 meters above sea level, is one of these settlements. On the day we were visiting, the Pisac Public Market was busy with a wide range of foods and products being sold to both nearby farmers and townspeople (Figure 5.6). The Coca-​Cola truck in the sketch shows one aspect of the modern world integrated into the culture of this historic place. In the public market we discovered a 300-​year-​old bakery that was still operating and working busily to provide fresh bread to village and farm patrons. Many folks are dressed in traditional clothing, like the woman on the left side of the sketch who was tending an open fire on the ground with pots being heated (Figure  5.7). The oven itself is enormous and when sketching it I wondered how many loaves of bread had been baked in it since it was originally constructed. We continued our tour of the Sacred Valley countryside around Cusco and visited this traditional Incan style farmstead located on a stone terrace (Figure  5.8), along with some of the animals grazing near it including llama

5.6 Sketch of the daily public market in the rural village of Pisac in the Sacred Valley region of Peru. It is a contemporary market that is much like it has been for centuries.

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5.7 Sketch of the 300-​year-​old bakery oven in the public market in Pisac in Sacred Valley of Peru, with a woman in traditional costume tending a small fire.

and alpaca. The stone building, with stucco walls and thatched roof, seemed to be integral to the stone terrace it was constructed on, and like other farmsteads around the world part of the building is for animals and the other part for living. It was hard to imagine what the landscape looked like before human intervention and creation of place. The farmstead and landscape appear to be a very natural assembly, blending in so well with nature that it looks like it has been this way forever. As we traveled around the Sacred Valley our tour guide, Maria, took us to an historic Incan place, Ollantaytambo, that has preserved the stone terraces and storage buildings on the side of a mountain. It is now a national monument that reflects the way farming was developed by the Incas, with monoliths (how they were moved and what they were used for is unclear) and stone storage buildings constructed along with the terraces (Figure  5.9). It shows the sophisticated system of terraces and water channels for irrigation that reflect biodiversity in planting and growing in the Andean environment. We also visited several other ruins before taking the Orient Express train from Cusco to the sacred city of Machu Picchu, where the same terraces and storage buildings are preserved. Machu Picchu is an incredibly dramatic and beautiful place located high in the mountains, where it was undiscovered for several

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5.8 Sketch of an historic Incan-​ style farmhouse, barn and animals typical of the Sacred Valley region around Cusco, Peru, that is about 11,000 feet above sea level.

centuries after it was abandoned. We arrived late and stayed overnight at the only lodging adjacent to the site. The next morning I  was able to sketch our first view of Machu Picchu, looking toward the terraces with the citadel high on an adjacent mountain and all the other rugged mountains surrounding it. It was hard to believe how this place was constructed at this high altitude on such a steep slope. On the same page I sketched one of the many storehouses integrated into the terraces. The sketch was done the next morning when it was misty and foggy (Figure 5.10). Machu Picchu and the surrounding area is a unique place that can only be fully appreciated for its beauty and history by visiting it over a two-​or three-​day period. You must see it early in the morning and later at sunset and in the middle of

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5.9 Sketch of my first view of Machu Picchu, Peru, on a misty, foggy morning, showing the ancient terraces, rugged mountains and a typical food storage hut.

a moonlit night. It is a hauntingly wonderful place that best exemplifies the sacred and spiritual relationship between architecture and landscape. Constructed in the fifteenth century as an estate for the Inca emperor who ruled at that time, it was abandoned a hundred years later during the Spanish conquest. The site was selected because of the sacred landscape relationships it had with astronomical events that were considered ritually important to the Incan civilization. We also visited several other historic Incan sites including Saqsaywaman (pronounced ‘sexy women’), a citadel constructed high on a plateau near Cusco, with enormous stone blocks that are cut and fitted together without mortar. Its construction was begun in the twelfth century, but how the huge boulders were brought to the site, cut to fit and raised into place is unknown. Some archeologists speculate that the workers used long ramps, using ropes to pull the stones on rolling logs, cutting the stones to fit and then slowly pulling away the logs to lower the boulders into place. I sketched this incredible place but do not have space for it in this book.

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5.10 Sketch of stone storehouses with straw roofs and growing terraces at Machu Picchu, Peru.

Tahiti: understory farming system In 2016 we took two of our seven granddaughters to the South Pacific islands of French Polynesia over New Year, and toured Tahiti and some of the other islands on a small cruise ship. We had never visited an island in the South Pacific before, except for seeing a very good Guthrie Theater production of South Pacific in Minneapolis. Landing in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, and driving around the island, it seemed very much like a place where many World War II movies involving the islands in the South Pacific were made. The sketch is from the ship at anchor in Opunohu Bay in Moorea Island, considered by some travel books to be one of the most beautiful islands in the world (Figure  5.11). The sketch shows Moorea Island with the high volcanic Mount Tohivea extending up into the clouds, and Riley and Addison eating ice cream in the afternoon on the ship. Moorea is an interesting island, and as we explored it I  sketched a young man feeding eels in a small creek, a man up in a tree chopping branches, a rooster and hen running around, several scenes of boats on the land, craft sellers under an open structure at the small harbor, and the nearby 1822 Protestant Ebenezer Church in the village of Papetoai, the main village on Moorea Island.

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5.11 Sketch of Moorea Island in Tahiti, with our granddaughters Riley and Addison eating ice cream in the afternoon on the cruise ship.

The next day the girls went snorkeling off one of the small islands in the bay with two young women naturalists, Nicole and Estelle, from the Jean-​Michel Cousteau Ocean Futures Society, that were headquartered on the boat. We had signed the girls up for their programs, and I tagged along to experience the island. I found this wonderful spot that I sketched. It was a nice place in the shade on the beach that had an interesting tree with a small boat tied to it and Mount Tohivea in the background, on the island on the other side of the bay. There were also many flowers on the island, and I sketched some that were near where I was sitting (Figure 5.12).

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5.12 Sketch of the volcanic Mount Tohivea from a small island in Tahiti, showing an interesting tree on the beach with boat attached and flowers on this idyllic place in the South Pacific.

While the girls were swimming with sharks and sting rays, I was able to walk around the island and observe understory cultivation and planting of gardens under the palm tree canopy by people living in several homes along with their little ‘guard’ dog (Figure  5.13). This island is one of a number of popular snorkeling destinations in Tahiti, and the visitors from cruise ships who often bring lunches and soft drinks to the island are supposed to take everything back to the boat with them. However, you can see in the sketch a string of cans that the people living in the houses had collected and strung up as decoration, or perhaps as a reminder to visitors to not leave anything behind on the island.

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5.13 Sketch of several houses on the beach of the small island in Tahiti with its scary guard dog and decorative hangings of beer cans in the trees.

The island was a beautiful place to walk around and explore, and to try to imagine living there, just as it has been for a very long time, without changing or destroying it. Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora and the other islands of French Polynesia are worthwhile to visit and experience. It is a place quite different from any other we have visited, and it was obvious that in Polynesia the understory under the palm trees is where everything happens.

Mongolia: nomadic steppes culture When Sharon and I first visited Mongolia, after a long nine-​day Orient Express train ride from Moscow through the southern part of Siberia (described in Chapter 2), we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. During our visit we observed their annual National Festival Naadam that was just getting underway. The festival this year was dedicated to the 2,226th anniversary of the founding of the state, the 811th anniversary of the great Mongol Empire, and the 96th anniversary of the Mongolian People’s Revolution when they became independent from China. Not knowing much about Mongolia except for its nomadic people, I was surprised to see the country’s wide open rolling landscape that looked very much like the open hills of North Dakota. On the first full day of our visit we traveled with a small group into the countryside near Ulaanbaatar and had lunch in a traditional ger (yurt) at Terelj Lodge. It is an overnight place and had several gers available for urban tourists. Later we drove to a nearby site and met with a nomadic family living in several gers, with their cattle and horses tied to stakes. I was able to sketch one of the gers with the family’s youngest daughter in the doorway. She had a shaved head and was curious about

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5.14 Sketch of gers (yurts) at Terelj Lodge near Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and sketches of a nearby nomadic family living in gers and of the youngest daughter in the family.

my drawing. I sketched her close up to show her how she looked, and she seemed to like the sketch but just ran away. The gers are highly adaptable living units that can be disassembled in an hour or so, and packed on small two-​wheel trailers that are pulled by horses as the people migrate with their cattle and horses to another pasture area (Figure 5.14). It is a lifestyle that has continued for centuries. The next day we attended the Naadam opening ceremony and watched some of the events, including the horse race with two-​year-​old horses and riders as

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5.15 Sketches of the annual Naadam Festival in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, showing events of wrestling, archery and horse racing traditional to the history of Mongolia, and gers in the market place.

young as eight years old. All of these events celebrate the Mongolian people’s historic culture and nomadic way of life. They are quite proud of Genghis Khan and celebrate their historic nomadic culture and heritage with tournaments during the festival that focus on the sport of men –​archery, horse racing, and wrestling. Girls, however, are today allowed to ride in the horse race (Figure 5.15). Ulaanbaatar is an interesting city, with modern high-​rise buildings along with new low-​rise public builds, shopping centers and museums. As you move out into the countryside, you see many gers surrounded by small gardens with

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wooden fences interspersed with industrial buildings and manufacturing facilities. Evidently, if someone were to fence in a land area and construct a ger on the site it would belong to him. As a result, the countryside surrounding Ulaanbaatar is filled with hundreds of gers with wooden fences randomly organized in and around industrial and commercial buildings. The feeling one gets when visiting Mongolia is that the people who live and work there will continue to support their small farm and nomadic heritage because along with a lifestyle that has existed for centuries it defines who they are as a nation.

Italy: lemon gardens on the Amalfi coast Lemons were brought from China to Italy in the first century BC, during the Roman times, as a delicacy connected to foods. Later, in the sixteenth century, it was discovered that if sailors, who often suffered from an illness called scurvy on their long sea voyages,drank the lemon juice, it prevented and cured the disease. This led to the intensive cultivation of lemons on the Sorrento-​Amalfi peninsula along the Amalfi coast in Italy. This is an area where lemons were extensively grown because the soil and climate conditions were good, and there was also good market for shipping them to northern Europe, where they were considered a luxury fruit. On a visit to the region in 2014 with our hiking group, led by Peter Hoogstaden of Genius Loci Travel based in Sorrento, we hiked the peninsula to an ancient farm estate. We began in Naples and ended our excursion on the Amalfi Coast, after taking a boat from the Isle of Capri. We stopped off near the famous Rock Islands (Faraglioni), where many of our group went swimming. Sharon was one of them, and she got connected with six jelly fish that attached to her arm and shoulder. She screamed and worked her way back to the boat, brushing them off. When she climbed up into the boat the staff immediately rubbed her down with a creamy lotion to take away the sting. Sharon has found that ever since that incident her memory has become very acute and things pop into her mind. I was sketching the outcroppings while she went swimming, and I missed her experience. After we left the boat at Amalfi, we boarded several vans and drove to the small village of Nerano where we started a hike up the side of a mountain, climbing on narrow trails and over rocks to a plateau and arriving at a small historic farm estate. The sketch shows the rock outcroppings, and also Antonella De Angelis, our guide on the hike, and Salvatore, the cook, who had prepared a good lunch with red wine for us on a long table under a shade pergola. Next to the long table was the ancient farmhouse, now used for olive oil production. On the left side of the sketch is one of the pergolas that had lemons growing on it, along with nearby olive trees (Figure 5.16). For this book I contacted Peter Hoogstaden about the farm estate (Baia di Ieranto) and he put me in contact with Antonella, the manager of the estate, whom we hiked with. She provided some information about the farm estate property

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5.16 Sketches of the famous Rock Islands near Capri, Italy, and a rural farmhouse (Baia di Ieranto) on the Amalfi Coast, with our guide Antonella and Salvatore the cook. The farm estate is now operated by the Italian National Trust, and Antonella is the manager.

that is owned and operated by the Italian National Trust, the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI): This type of farmhouse in the Baia di Ieranto is typical of the rural architecture of the Sorrento peninsula and the Amalfi coast, which has generally remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. Of the rural architecture in the Campania region the Italian architect Roberto Pane (who also was

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passionate about sketching places when he was traveling) in his 1936 book Rural Architecture in Campania wrote about the farmhouses: These houses seduce us by their character of rudimentary necessity. Alien as they are from every superfluous element, and naturally set in the landscape as any fruit of the earth, to feel like a living product of nature rather than art. They appear to be built without the aid of rigorous geometry, but with a sense of approximation that is perhaps the greatest factor of their picturesque. One observes that the meter has been substituted by steps, the level and plumb line have been ignored, and the patterned walls are affected by the same vivacity as a clay object produced by the hands of a craftsman. In recent years we are working to enhance the agricultural vocation of the Baia di Ieranto and the traditional cultivation practices that we keep alive, like the olive harvest and the production of olive oil. In the month of May 2018, we are planning a third edition of a workshop dedicated to training on the care of the elements of rural landscape: pruning, grafts and construction and restoration of dry stone walls. The workshop is called ‘scuola di passaggio’ and we organize it in collaboration with the Italian Association of Landscape Architecture (AIAPP) that is affiliated with the International Federation of Landscape Architecture (IFLA). We will also talk about the traditional structures used to protect citrus crops in the Sorrento peninsula (like the pergolas you remembered in Ieranto) and –​marginally –​about the rural architecture. Antonella went on to say that her father, who is a member of the AIAPP, was involved in the preparation of information submitted to the Italian Ministry of Agriculture to enroll the citrus groves of the Sorrento peninsula as a GIAHS site. In their book about GIAHS sites around the world, Koohafkan and Altieri describe the global importance of the Sorrento peninsula: There has been a co-​evolution between landscape development, soil creation (terraces) and human presence in an appropriately sustainable system. These features should be preserved and appraised as an example of integration between anthropologic activity and nature conservation. (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017) After the wonderful lunch that Salvatore prepared and served, and several glasses of red wine, we hiked back down the trail to Amalfi and continued to Positano, the major city on the Amalfi coast (Figure  5.17). We stayed at the Albergo Le Sirenuse overlooking the harbor. The sketch is from the dining terrace

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5.17 Sketches of the coastal villages of Amalfi and Positano on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, where the architecture and landscapes are typically Italian, with vague differentiation between urban and rural.

of Ristorante La Sponda, with the green and blue dome of the parish church dominating the view of the city below. Our meal included spaghetti puttanesca, consisting of chicken with lemon, pine nuts and raisins blended with spinach. It was an excellent example of Italian cuisine that mixed well with red Italian wine from the region. The Amalfi Coast has a great deal of interesting history and wonderful places to visit, including the village of Ravello. At a hotel located in the Gardens of Villa Cimbrone where we stayed one night, there is a beautiful garden with a series of terraces overlooking the sea below. In one of the terraces is a sculpture of a nude man sitting on a rock, with an inscription by D.H. Lawrence, that I sketched. It is

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indicative of the things you discover and the fun you can have while hiking in a part of the world that you have never been to before.

North Vietnam: rice terraces The second oldest of our granddaughters, Julia Abraham, who was then in the 11th grade in the Blake School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, traveled to Vietnam for two weeks in the summer of 2017 as part of a school program and visited both urban and rural areas. She provided me photographs (I selected one for the book) of her time visiting a small rural rice-​farming village in the northern part of Vietnam. During her visit she met and engaged with local people and even worked on a rice terrace for a day (Figure 5.18). She said it was a memorable visit and I asked her to write a summary of her experience: The Blake School, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, offers a variety of global immersion summer experiences for high school students one of them being a trip to Vietnam. Over the summer of 2017, twelve of my classmates, me and a few of my teachers traveled to Vietnam where we spent three weeks immersed in the diverse culture of the North and South, and urban and rural areas. The purpose of this trip was to expand our worldviews beyond the Eurocentric cultures and histories we learn about in school. The trip also helped me understand more about myself because it pushed me out of my comfort zone in a way that I  never expected.

5.18 A rural farming village along a creek with stepped rice-​ growing terraces in North Vietnam, taken by Julia Grace Abraham, who visited the village in the summer of 2017 as part of a Blake School study trip.

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One of the areas we traveled to was a small rural village that is home to the Red Zao people, an ethnic minority in North Vietnam. This four-​day excursion contrasted to the two weeks we spent in Vietnam’s bustling cities. In Hanoi and Saigon, we visited museums and other historic landmarks. However, in the rural areas of the country, I was able to learn more about Vietnam’s agriculture. The most rewarding aspect of my homestay experiences was the relationships I was able to develop with a few Vietnamese people. I got to play with the children and spend hours talking to adults about their lives and our differing experiences. From these conversations, we realized that though we live in opposite ends of the world, we still had many things in common like our worries, hobbies, and eagerness to learn. The main difference was the way we each associated happiness and work. In the village, materialism was valued much less than it is in America, yet the families I met in Vietnam seemed happier than some of those from my hometown. This stark contrast opened my eyes and taught me that I don’t need physical objects to be happy. In many ways, it is better to lead a simpler life, focusing more on values and family than technology and objects. Another thing that I learned while in the village was about the hard work that went into the farming and production of rice. We spent one day working in the rice terraces, and it took us one whole day to plant one small terrace. We had to hoe, flood, and plant the rice –​tasks that were extremely physically demanding and left us exhausted. I was shocked that people in the village did this day after day during planting season to provide food for their family. Yet, regardless of the draining work, they still found ways to make their days enjoyable by playing games in the rice terraces. My favorite game was one where we threw mud at each other when we weren’t looking, then we would have to guess who threw mud at us! This experience demonstrated that just because we were doing hard work didn’t mean we couldn’t still enjoy ourselves. This trip has opened my eyes to realize how fortunate we are in America and the opportunities that I have. I am immensely grateful for the beautiful sights I got to see, the extraordinary people I got to meet, and the priceless lessons they taught me. Because of them, I have realized that there is so much more in life to live for than tangible items. The rice terraces in the northern part of Vietnam are similar to the Hani Rice Terraces in China and the Ifugao Rice Terraces in the Philippines. The Hani are one of the ethnic minorities in China and they have been farming and living in their region for over 1,300 years. I was hoping to visit the Hani region on one of my trips to China to include it in this book, but that did not happen.

Indonesia: Bali rice terraces A family member and good friend that I  have traveled and hiked with, George Ceman, is originally from Minnesota but has now lived in Southern California for 216

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5.19 Stepped rice-​growing terraces in Bali along the road to a village, taken by George Ceman.

almost fifty years. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and worked for many years at TRW/​Northrop Grumman on satellite and missile systems as a rocket scientist and system engineer involved in exploring outer space. Now retired, he spends a lot of his time exploring the planet. On a recent journey to Bali he visited Jatiluwih and its historic rice terraces, and since it is a World Heritage Site I asked him to write about his perceptions of the place (Figure 5.19): One of the highlights of a recent ‘learning and discovery’ tour of Bali was a visit to the unique irrigated terraced rice fields of Jatiluwih, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From a traveler’s perspective, this agricultural landscape is dominated by verdant and terraced hillsides for growing and harvesting rice. The incredible natural beauty is overwhelming and compels a sense of harmony and well-​being. A Zen-​like feeling abounds, and small water temples pepper the hillside showing the reverence and devotion of the local people (primarily Hindu) to the most basic elements of their lives –​ food and the spiritual harmony of God and nature. Water from volcanic lakes is diverted through rivers and channels to end up in the rice terraces. Water channels within the terraced fields have been implemented over the millennia to insure consistent, evenly distributed, and repeatable water supplies throughout. Water flow control gates are simple and easily managed by the farmers and priests using flat shaped stones that are sized to fit in the flow channels and that can be readily moved in/​out of place. And finally, in-​line reservoirs are integrated throughout the water system at multiple levels, and they are staged and managed to enable a consistent and adequate water supply GIAHS places

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As you become more immersed in this incredible landscape and start to learn more about its agrarian history, you begin to realize that the sustainment of these rice fields that are over a thousand years old is mostly due to a symbiotic culture that balances religious, social, economic, ecological, and environmental elements. In fact, the Balinese term for this system is Subak which is a direct manifestation of the philosophy of Tri Hita Karana. Subak embodies a balance between humans, God, nature and each other, and in this Balinese construct, represents an idealized convergence of community needs (rice for life), community resources (land and water), and community welfare (culture and way of life) intertwined with a spiritual core. Beyond the spiritual and socio-​economic elements of this system, however, the principal factor that successfully integrates the hillside terraces is the amazing and well-​planned irrigation system (one of the oldest in the world) that is managed throughout by the self-​governing associations of farmers for a common good. The essential and precious life-​giving water resource is shared universally across the landscape and not hoarded, blocked, or diverted by any one farmer or community. This egalitarianism fundamentally demonstrates what can be accomplished and sustained when common goals and a common understanding take priority over the diverse needs and the routine agrarian challenges faced by the individual farmers. Instead of one farmer or community exploiting their first-​in-​line or prime access to water, for example, they follow a broader humanistic munificence often expressed as ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’. Jatiluwih is a time and place in harmony historically managed by the Subak philosophical concept that brings together the realms of the spirit, the human world and nature. Any visitor is imbued with a sense of serenity and overcome by an omnipresent balance that evokes feelings of tranquility and well-​being. However, there is also an underlying sense of fragility, of potential vulnerability. Will modern day tourism imperil the balance achieved over the millennia? Can this Subak system survive the encroachment of tourism and the concomitant infrastructure development required to accommodate the multitudes resulting from the inevitable mass media marketing? Can progress and threats such as reassigning land use (e.g., roads, hotels and restaurants versus terraced rice fields) and non-​traditional demands on precious local water resources (e.g., tourism needs for plumbing and sanitation versus well managed communal rice-​farming needs for irrigation) be effectively controlled and adverse effects to these ecosystems avoided? Hopefully the answer is Yes! The local communities and the Balinese Government have established legal protection and broad control over these areas. Conservation and planning are codified to provide a management framework for sustainment of these unique ecosystems and to preserve the

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unique cultural heritage they signify. Only time will tell how effective these efforts are, but persistent vigilance and acknowledgment of the greater good are critical. The following are some of the GIAHS pilot sites that we have not yet visited but have some knowledge about from people who have been there.

China: rice-​fish culture in Qingtian County Rural people in China have a long history of living in harmony with their environment and taking full advantage of the diversity of their ecosystem without depleting the natural resource base. With one of the oldest agricultural civilizations, China has many different examples of environmentally friendly and ecological knowledge and wisdom that achieve sustainable agriculture and rural development. In the southeastern China province of Zhejiang along the Oujiang River is Qingtian County, with a long-​established rice-​fish farming culture that has existed for hundreds of years enduring droughts, famines, plagues, floods and wars. The region was declared a GIAHS site in 2002 and has been studied for the way its agricultural heritage is reacting to the forces of modernization, particularly to the loss of youth and labor to urbanization. In a paper published in 2016 in MDPI Journal, four researchers from China and one from Canada discussed their findings about three villages in Qingtian County and documented village efforts to sustain the rice-​fish terrace farming through (1) capital from outside sources to sustain their system through self-​organization, (2)  tourism with farm labor from distant places to maintain the landscape as an attraction by establishing a co-​operative, and (3) utilization of modern farming technology and scientific techniques as an example of technological adaption. They end their paper by asking ‘if the persistence of rice-​fish farming is normal, is the modernization context in which the farming system is now embedded a new normal?’ They go on to say ‘what is needed are more penetrating techniques to answer these questions and learn more about resilience and the sustaining of such systems into the future (Jiao et al., 2016). Similarly, in my second book, Architecture and Agriculture: A Rural Design Guide, I included a discussion about the Dong community in rural China that has an agricultural system combining rice, fish and ducks. This was declared a GIAHS site in 2011. In that book, I included a study by Dr Xiaomei Zhao, a lecturer at the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture that I met in Beijing at the founding of the World Rural Development Committee. She was looking into the impacts of tourism and how it was changing traditional ways of doing things, and argued that the best way to preserve the heritage of the GIAHS is to let the locals decide and manage it.

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Kenya and Tanzania: Maasai pastoral system Our good friends David and Claire Frame were in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and recently visited Tanzania, where they observed the Maasai people. In my second book, Architecture and Agriculture: A Rural Design Guide, I included their description of the changes that had taken place over forty-​eight years. The region where the Maasai live and move around was declared a GIAHS site, and several tour operations are now bringing tourists in to observe their lifestyle. I  asked David Frame, who is a retired biology teacher, to comment about the impact of tourism on the Maasai traditional way of life for this book: My thoughts are based on very short and generalized observations that I have had of the Maasai in their environment from a recent visit to their region in Tanzania. I believe that many of the positive and negative results of tourism are somewhat universal and affect the distinctive cultures in many of the same ways. The changes that tourism brings are most likely influenced by the size of the cultural group, the number and frequency of tourists, the physical isolation of the cultural groups, and how well change improves the life of the people in their group. I feel that tourism speeds up the change in the culture but is not the reason that change is taking place. With cell phones being used worldwide and television and computers found in every remote place on earth, change will sadly take place, and unique cultures will blend together with the rest of humanity. The changes that I detected taking place with the Maasai were: (1) Their traditional diet of milk and blood has changed as more Maasai are now tending gardens and eating a variety of vegetables and maize; (2) The practice of getting their food by hunting has diminished; (3) Their nomadic lifestyle is more restricted as vast areas of land are protected as game parks and reserves and not available for Maasai to graze their cattle; (4) As Maasai children are attending schools (many financially supported by tourists) and becoming better educated they are leaving the villages, finding jobs in the cities and living there; and (5) Many of the Maasai no longer dress in native attire. Tourism has fostered some traditional practices that continue such as: Men and women in the villages continue to wear the traditional dress; The age-​old skills of building, repairing and roofing of their houses are still being used; Their ancestors’ songs and dances are performed for tourists so they will not be forgotten; Artistic talents are being retrained because they have a market for their beautiful baskets and beadwork; and Tourist dollars provide income for villages to exist and the pastoral way of life to continue. In conclusion, I  believe that change will take place in most Maasai groups because of local social, economic and population pressures. Tourism is not the cause of the change, but only modifies the direction and the speed at which change takes place. Tourism is a huge industry bringing in much

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revenue that enables many Maasai to live in two cultures at the same time, such as our tour guide. Furthermore, from other visits, it is my thought that change does take place, does not take place, or takes place at a much slower pace in:  Very isolated remote communities like the hunter gatherers in the Amazon Basin; Groups that occupy very specific niches in the environment like the reindeer herders in Mongolia; and Groups that have very strong belief systems and actively resist change such as the Amish (religious) and the back to the earth groups (environmental).

Summary Dr Jose Graziano da Silva, Director General of the UN-​FAO, writes in the Foreword to the Koohafkan and Altieri book: The GIAHS initiative was conceived during the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development that was part of the Agriculture and Rural Development program. It was created to identify and safeguard numerous agricultural systems of global significance –​systems which are at the heart of local food security and the livelihoods of millions of poor and remote rural communities which harbor ample biological diversity and are depositories of a wealth of traditional knowledge and cultural values. The distinctive features of GIAHS serve as powerful reminders of the human capacity to leave a rich cultural imprint on a region’s landscape, and by doing so, they demonstrate the error of disrupting or altering the environment’s natural balance and the ecosystem services it provides. (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017) The UN-​FAO designations of GIAHS sites and World Heritage Sites are extremely important global designations. One aspect of their importance that has been put forth by Koohafkan and Altieri in their book is the concept of ‘twinning’–​ the coming together of two communities seeking to respond to a problem by developing closer ties of friendship and cooperation. They go on to describe that twinning was the basis for cooperation among European countries after the Second World War, to enhance friendship and mutual awareness between the countries and try to avoid future conflicts. The United Nations is an outgrowth of that twinning concept, as is the European Union. I think it is also important to promote twinning between urban people and rural people. As described by Koohafkan and Altieri, ‘twinning suggests a long-​term commitment between the partners to face crisis and changes in political leadership and short-​term difficulties of one or the other partner and support each other in time of need’ (Koohafkan and Altieri, 2017). They go on

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to say that ‘the local and regional authorities should be the driving force behind the establishment of twinning and partnership programs that emerge out of it for the dynamic conservation of agricultural heritage systems and sustainable development of their communities’. One aspect of twinning that we discovered at the Center for Rural Design in working with rural communities is that local citizens must be involved and projects at least partially paid for by them, or the results of a funded research project will not be respected and sustainable. One other thing we learned is that if you are working on a rural project with a local citizen committee you should make sure that a woman oversees it. Women are much better than men at managing and ensuring agreement by consensus among the participants. Although urban design has been utilized by cities to develop long-​term planning, rural design is still not understood or utilized by rural communities as working in the same way, but with a rural perspective. Urban and rural design and design thinking is a problem-​solving process that I have written about, and I have suggested that urban and rural communities create twinning opportunities and utilize design and design thinking to communicate, look at options and identify solutions that best resolves short-​and long-​ term issues. The GIAHS provide an opportunity for modern rural communities to rethink where they are and where they want to go, and to cross borders to find solutions that best exemplify economic, social and environmental sustainability, and promote entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation.

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Chapter 6

Epilogue

The sketches in the book are of places where people, buildings, landscape and animals have coexisted for centuries. It is this history that jumps out at you when you visit a new place, and when I see something interesting and reflective of culture or climate I sketch it. To me these agricultural landscapes that I have discussed are exceptional cultures where humans, animals and environments make a unique and understandable statement about living on the land without destroying it. The notion of agricultural landscape or ‘place’ is interpreted quite liberally in the book. Sometimes it is the climate, sometimes the cultivated landscape, and other times it is topography, but all the sketches exhibit a strong relationship between people, architecture, climate and landscape that are interesting and compelling. Many of these places are models for how the modern world must learn to live on the planet and shape buildings and land uses to meet the needs of today without diminishing the opportunity for future generations to shape theirs. Design is a problem-​solving process, and design thinking is an effective way to see and understand the world and the agrarian traditions contained within it –​urban and rural. Because of their unique role in shaping buildings and land uses, architects and landscape architects have a special responsibility to work in an interdisciplinary way to make the world a better and more resilient place for future generations. This challenge and opportunity is for all designers, professionals and citizens involved in decision-​making and design: to accept this responsibility and strive in everything they do to make this world a better place for all –​now and in the future. Sharon and I  have been fortunate to visit many places around the world to see and sketch. We have a large map of the planet on a wall in our home, with pins marking the places, cities and countries we have visited. Today we have over 260 pins in the map, and the number will increase as we continue traveling. I also have over thirty-​five sketch books filled with ink and watercolor drawings of the places we have visited. When I perused the sketches for this book, each drawing would bring back vivid memories of the places we visited. I believe that looking

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at a photograph of the place will tell me clearly what is in the photograph, but a photograph does not convey the emotion and meaning of experiencing a place that a sketch does. That is why I  am always encouraging design students and professional designers to carry a sketch book and to visually record the places they visit with drawings. If they do, it will have a great positive impact on their personal and professional lives. It will make them better designers and help them better to contribute to the making and shaping of the future world. One of my Minnesota architectural colleagues and a good friend, James Lammers, FAIA, experienced first-​hand life in Haiti, the country that is on the western end of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, with the Dominican Republic on the east side. It is truly one island with two different worlds. The Dominican Republic is today a representative democracy, with a growing economy where the natural environment has been preserved. Haiti, on the other hand, has floundered for many years with a dictator and lack of planning to preserve natural environments, resulting in most of the trees being cut down for firewood. The Haiti government is now planting millions of trees to replace those that were cut to help improve the economy of the nation. James is an esteemed health planning and architect consultant, and recently visited Haiti to get a close-​up view of healthcare delivery in the country. He had prepared preliminary drawings for a surgery center in a suburb of Port-​au-​Prince and wanted to make sure he understood the situation. Here is his summary of the trip: We were the Blan –​ a Kreyol term applied not only to whites but to foreigners regardless of skin color. We came on a mission trip with a nursing Non-​ Governmental Organization (NGO). We bivouacked in the coastal town of Leogane, not far from the epicenter of the magnitude 7 earthquake which struck Haiti in 2010. We sequestered at a nursing school, a gated compound which is protected by razor wire atop concrete block walls and a 24/​ 7 uniformed guard armed with an assault weapon. Haiti presents the picture of poor countries the world over  –​street vendors, partially constructed concrete buildings with rusty re-​bar sticking out, men just standing around (unemployment at 40  percent), garbage and skeletal vehicles littering the roadways, badly broken or nonexistent tarmac, fences and walls all over topped with rusting razor wire. In most other underdeveloped countries, the scene improves toward the center of the city, but not here. The nursing students and nursing educators in our group spent their days working with translators alongside the Haitian nursing school students and local doctors. They visited homes, villages, schools, orphanages and did assessments on the locals. They diagnose and treat (or recommend treatment by a specialist) but, of course, there is no follow up. On the nurses’ first day at the hospital a patient in a wheelchair somehow presented

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in the in the Emergency Room dead on arrival. Although the hospital has a morgue, his body was wheeled out and sat in the sunny courtyard in front of the main entrance –​healthcare (and death) is strictly cash on delivery. Fortunately, there is an undertaker right across the street. The sting of this death moved the younger nurses in ways unimaginable. In the native Taino, Ayiti means ‘mountainous place’, and indeed the mountains are its saving grace, rising above the squalor and folding into angry storm clouds most afternoons. The serenity of the surrounding sea offers much needed relief, a sense of peace. The profound impoverishment of Haiti brings a tear to my eye. It is one of the most poverty-​stricken countries in the world, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the tenth most fragile state in the world. Half of the population lives on less than $1.00 a day, but their Voodoo infused Christianity gives them some hope. Haiti has suffered from colonialism, revolts, revolutions, wars, earthquakes (most recently in 2010), hurricanes, crushing debt and repayment, unstable governments, missionaries, corrupt and oppressive dictators who looted the treasury, cholera (brought to Haiti by UN Peacekeepers in 2010 and now endemic) and US involvement. In 1915 the US sent in the Marines and for the next 19 years took control of Haiti’s finances, security and government, initially backing ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Haiti’s most brutal dictator, as a bulwark against Communism. The US later cut off all aid, and in the 1980s imposed a crippling embargo that convinced Haiti to drop their import tariff, thus stifling Haiti’s agriculture. Since Haiti’s 2010 earthquake there have been from 3,000 to 10,000 NGOs operating in the country independently. The theory is good but the reality less so. The NGOs bring supplies with them rather than boosting the Haitian economy by purchasing locally. Classic examples of this misdirection are the distribution of free soap after the Cholera epidemic, bankrupting the major Haitian soap maker; and the sending of US peanut butter, thus undermining the Haitian peanut industry. It is said that 70 percent of US aid is spent inside the beltway, benefiting the US economy but doing little to help Haiti’s. We took a hair-​rising ride across the Massif de la Selle to visit the resort town of Jacmel, which was once a popular tourist destination; however few tourists frequent it now despite its art community and beautiful beaches. The mountains are much too steep for crop farming. The residents live in hovels, keeping a pig or some goats if they’re lucky. When the swine flu epidemic hit Haiti the United States Agency for International Development and the Duvalier government came up with a scheme to kill all the Kreyol pigs and the pigs are just now making a comeback. Compared with most Haitians we had plush accommodations:  air conditioning, fans, bottled water (only 6 percent of Haitians have properly treated water) and plenty of food including excellent Haitian peanut butter and coffee (once the world’s third-​largest coffee exporter, Haiti no longer grows much coffee thanks to the US embargo).

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What should be the future for Haiti? It must start with enlightened US policy and support as well as coordination of the NGO efforts. There are three primary objectives: (1) industry to employ Haitians, (2) exports to bring in outside money, and (3) taxes to support healthcare and education (average education level is fourth grade). Industry will take outside money, Haiti’s investment rating must improve, and there must be a stable government without rampant corruption. Beyond this Haiti’s agricultural potential must be harnessed. Although chickens are seemingly everywhere the Dominican Republic provides chickens for the table. Pigs can do well on the steep mountain slopes. Coffee growers can form co-​ops to gain market access. Jovenel Moise, a banana grower who has never held public office, perhaps a benefit, has been sworn in as president in an unusually peaceful transfer of power. We’ll have to wait and see how he fares. In the meantime, aid to Haiti must focus on helping the Haitians become self-​reliant and NGOs should quit doing work that the Haitians could and should do for themselves. Haiti’s fix under the very best of circumstances may take generations, but its beautiful natural environment, climate, renewed agriculture, and good-​hearted people can turn the tide. James also sketches when he travels, and here is a colored pencil sketch that he did of the School of Nursing in Leogane, Haiti (Figure 6.1). During the summer of 2018 Sharon and I visited Rome and took a cruise on the Mediterranean Sea with our youngest granddaughter, Siena Ann Soroka. She was nine years old at that time, a talented young artist with a strong design sense who wants to be a fashion designer. She and I sketched along the way and I selected one of her sketches to include in the book (we first drew with ink and added color later). It is

6.1 Colored pencil sketch of the School of Nursing in Leogane, Haiti, by Minnesota architect and health planning expert James Lammers.

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6.2 Ink and watercolor sketch of a castle on a hill on island of Ibiza, Spain, from cruise ship, by 9-​year-​old Siena Ann Soroka.

from the cruise ship where we sat looking toward the twelfth-​century fortified castle on a hill in Ibiza on the Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea (Figure 6.2). The castle is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city of Ibiza is a beautiful place to visit. It was wonderful to observe the passion Siena has for making art and drawing that first became clear to me when she was four years old. On my office wall I have one of her first color drawings. It is of a dog wearing underpants with little hearts on them; they were like hers, and she thought the dog should wear them too. This story is a reminder for readers to encourage children to sketch when they are young and to continue to do so if art and design are their passion. Who knows what great things they may accomplish as artists or designers in this rapidly changing world? Since we humans live on Earth, it is also the place we all call home. We may reside in a large urban city or a small rural town, but we really are all inhabitants of the same planet and we must learn how to live together and bridge the divide between rural and urban. They are one and the same, and must be thought of together in shaping the landscapes and designing buildings for the future, connecting function, climate, culture and place.

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I was recently reminded why the shaping of future rural land uses is so important. Dr David R. Witty, a professional planner and retired Provost and Vice-​ President of Vancouver Island University in British Columbia, Canada, provided some insight on rural/​urban issues on Vancouver Island for a presentation I was making on rural design at a regional conference. Even though his observations were related to Vancouver Island, the issues are like those I found in Minnesota and could be literally found anywhere in North America. They are issues that can only be resolved through integrated design and planning, and I am paraphrasing his comments here: •

•

•

•

•

•

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Increasing land costs due to people moving to the milder climate of coastal areas in retirement or lifestyle choice, and building houses on agricultural land, making it costlier for young farmers to purchase farm land while making it desirable for existing farmers to sell. Large grocery chains focusing on low-​cost produce and products bringing goods in from afar rather than supporting local producers. Forty years ago, on Vancouver Island approximately 80 perent of consumed produce came from the island and now it is something like 5 percent. This points out the need for a food system that is locally as self-​sustainable as possible. Careful nurturing of timberland is critical to maintain timber supply as population increases. Much of the timberland in Canada is owned by forestry companies, and as land values increase the pressure for development increases. The public needs to be vigilant that the development of these lands is undertaken carefully. The Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) that was established by the British Columbia provincial government is the best land use planning accomplished in the past 50 years. It forces local government to protect valuable agricultural land and is an easy way to prevent development, but at the same time there are wealthy people moving into the region who purchase ALR land and remove it from food production by building rural estates. Regional versus local planning issues can make it difficult to reach agreement as to how to manage land uses. The different points of view illustrate a common theme in that urban people do not trust rural people (and vice versa), making it sometimes impossible to have positive referendums for integrated land use planning. In the past, planning has been done by a piece-​meal process, focusing on issues individually rather than studying them collectively as an integrated urban/​rural planning issue. Planning needs to cross jurisdictions to nurture collaborative visions. Climate change is impacting water supply and becoming an increasing land use issue. Decreasing access to potable water, as ground water resources are depleted with detrimental effect on water for growing food, creates a conflict between irrigation, rural residential dry wells, and lower river flows impacting fish.

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•

Good public transportation in low-​density rural areas is needed to provide access to employees for lower-​end service jobs and farm workers. This also has had an impact on First Nation people who live in rural reserves, making it difficult to find and manage jobs. Wild fire suppression will be an increasing issue, with drier summers and rural housing in forest areas. (Wild fires in California are raging as I write this, with many homes destroyed.) The interface between rural residential and forest lands is problematic in terms of exposure to wildfire threat.

Dr Witty’s observations further the argument for evidence-​based rural design that crosses jurisdictional borders and nurtures integrated planning and design so that rural regions and towns can find a way to work together to shape land uses in the future. These issues are like those in Minnesota as definitions of what is rural and what is urban become more complex, creating questions about the future and how regions can deal with critical issues. The only effective way to do this is to look at urban and rural land use issues systemically and holistically. Rural design offers a new way of design thinking in creating ideas to shape land uses at a wide range of scales in order to preserve rural cultural, architectural and agricultural heritage. It is also a methodology for finding creative, innovative and sustainable concepts for a healthy and prosperous future for both urban and rural people. Because of their skills and experience, architects and landscape architects should work with planners and engineers to become global design leaders in this transformation process. They can do this by linking urban and rural issues and designing for human, animal and environmental wellness while working with urban, peri-​urban and rural communities. Buildings should reflect function, climate, culture and environment. Even though I  am writing for the future, I  was recently struck by a statement by Liberty Hyde Bailey in his book The Holy Earth, published in 1915. He is considered the Father of American Horticulture, and his thinking about the connections between urban and rural land use is even more relevant today: The great cities will grow larger; that is, they will cover more land. The smaller cities, the villages, the country towns will take on greatly increased importance. We shall learn how to secure the best satisfactions when we live in villages as well as when we live in cities. We begin to plan our cities and to a small extent our villages. We now begin to plan the layout of the farms, that they may accomplish the best results. But the cities and the towns depend on the country that lies beyond; and the country beyond depends on the city and the town. The problem is broadly one problem, the problem of so dividing and subdividing the surface of the earth that there shall be the least conflict between all these interests, that public reservations shall not be placed where it is better to have farms, that farming developments may not interfere with public utilities, that institutions may be so placed and with such area as to develop their highest usefulness, that the people desiring outlet

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and contact with the earth in their own right may be accorded that essential privilege. We have not yet begun to approach the subject in a fundamental way, and yet it is the primary problem of the occupancy of the planet. To the growing movement for city planning should be added an equal movement for country planning; and these should not proceed separately, but both together. No other public program is now more needed. (Bailey, 1915) This statement supports my reason for writing this book and the other two as a trilogy to bring design and design thinking to rural issues. If there were one image that best summarized my feelings and experiences about visiting agricultural landscapes and places around the world, it would be this sketch of a colorful open-​ air market on the North Shore of Haleiwa on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It has a sign that says ‘Buy local, buy direct, know your farmer’, emphasizing one of the critical issues of food security facing the future of all humans on the planet (Figure 6.3). It is an issue that can only be properly addressed when we connect urban and rural. I hope that writing this trilogy of books on rural design will help rural design become as important as urban design and bring urban and rural communities together to bridge the divide between urban and rural in a time of rapid population increase. Design is a problem-​solving process and can nurture community involvement to find solutions the help shape future urban and rural land uses while allowing for future generations the ability to shape theirs.

6.3 Sketch of a colorful open-​ air market in North Shore of Haleiwa on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

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Bibliography

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Thorbeck, D. (2017), Architecture and Agriculture:  A Rural Design Guide. London and New York: Routledge. Thorbeck, D. and Troughton, J. (2015), ‘Rural Design: Connecting Urban and Rural Futures through Rural Design’, in Maheshwari, B., Singh, V.P., Thoradeniya, B. (eds) Balanced Urban Development: Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities. Cham: Springer. Wilson, E.O. (1984), Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bibliography

Index

Note: Page references in italic refer to figures Abaco Island (Bahamas) 146, 148 Abraham, Julia Grace 215 Aboriginal Cultural Center (Australia) 83, 85 Aboriginal people 3, 81 Abruzzo (Italy) 8, 59–​61, 62 Achao (Chiloe Island) 197–​199 Adlon Kempinski Hotel (Berlin) 105, 106, 108 Alaska 162–​163, 165, 179–​180 Alberobello (Italy) 34–​35, 36 Alesund (Norway) 157–​158, 160 Altieri, Miguel A. 15, 192, 194–​196, 213, 221 Amalfi Coast (Italy) 211–​215 American Academy in Rome 21, 27, 101 Andalsnes (Norway) 58 Andes Mountains 50 Apostle Islands (Wisconsin) 143 Arizona 65, 67 Arno River (Italy) 171 Auckland (New Zealand) 155, 157 August, Cicero 160 Australia 3 Avignonesi Fattoria Le Capezzine (Italy) 5, 6, 7 Ayevarwaddy River (Myanmar) 22, 166, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174 Bahamas 146, 148 Baia di Ieranto (Amalfi) 211–​213 Bailey, Liberty Hyde 229 Bali rice terraces (Indonesia) 216, 217 Balk, Wesley 105 Baltic Sea 40–​42, 95, 129 Bar Harbor (Maine) 177, 179 Barcelona (Spain) 76, 101–​102, 103, 113, 114

Index

Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar (Buenos Aires) 91 Bay of Naples (Italy) 42 Bayfield (Wisconsin) 161, 164 Beijing (China) 30–​33, 72–​73 Bergen (Norway) 155, 158, 159 Berlin (Germany) 105–​107 Berwood Hill Inn (Minnesota) 57, 59 Bingham III, Hiram 11 Bla Porten Café (Stockholm) 109, 110 Blake School (Minnesota) 215 Bodega Cavas de Weinert (Argentina) 127, 128 Bodega El Grifo (Lanzarote) 53, 55 Bodega La Geria (Lanzarote) 54, 55 book organization 13–​15 Borg (Norway) 152, 154 Borgund Stavkirke (Norway) 74, 76 Boutari Winery (Santorini) 184, 187 Buckhorn Inn (Tennessee) 66, 69 Budapest (Hungary) 120, 122 Buenos Aires (Argentina) 1, 36, 88,  89, 90 Bugge, Gunnar 74 Bund, The (Shanghai) 91, 92, 93 Café Tortoni (Buenos Aires) 110, 112 cafes 107–​110 California 57, 58, 68, 69, 70, 105, 115 Calquin, Fernando 50 Calzada Fray Antonio de San Miguel (Mexico) 121, 123 Caminito Street (Buenos Aires) 89, 89 Campo di Fiori (Rome) 1, 98, 99, 100 Campos, Francisco Vieira de 55, 56 Cape Elizabeth (Maine) 180, 185

233

Casa las Mananitas (Mexico City) 125, 126, 127 Castelluccio (Italy) 61, 62 Castro (Chiloe Island) 196, 197, 198 Cava de Camo (Argentina) 127, 128 Ceman, George 216, 217 Center for Rural Design 3, 4, 5, 16, 25, 86 Chatham (Maine) 158, 161 Checkpoint Charlie (Berlin) 105 Chiloe Island (Chile) 196 China Agricultural University (Beijing) 30 city places 88–​107 climate change 133 Chuan Di Xia (China) 8, 11, 30, 31, 32 Cinque Terre (Italy) 134 coastal villages 134–​137 Colonia (Uruguay) 36, 37, 38 Columbia Square (Savannah) 115, 116 Copenhagen (Denmark) 40, 95, 96 Corniglia (Italy) 136, 137 Correa, Marcella 48, 49 Covenhoven (New Brunswick) 148, 149, 150 Cramer, Katherine J. 4 Cuernavaca (Mexico) 125 Cusco-​Puno Corridor (Peru) 1, 199, 203 Daglio, Marcelo 46 De Angelis, Antonella 211, 212 design and design thinking 4, 15–​17 discovered places 175–​189 Douro River Valley (Portugal) 54, 56 Dubrovnik (Croatia) 138, 139 Duomo (Florence) 174, 177 Estonia 41, 42, 43 farmers’ market (St Paul) 111 farms and fields 57–​61 Felsenstein, Walter 105 Florence (Italy) 171, 175, 176, 177 Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-​FAO) 14, 192 fortified cities 138–​142 Frame, David and Claire 220 Gaudí, Antoni 101, 102, 103 Gehry, Frank 48, 76 Glenorchy (New Zealand) 70, 72 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) 3, 14, 16, 192 Grand Café (Oslo) 107, 109 Grand Hotel Europa (Prague) 99 Granville Island (Vancouver) 153 Great Plain (Italy) 61 Great Wall of China (Beijing) 72, 74, 75

234

Griesert, Merl and Bev 115 Golden Eagle Luxury Train 2, 129 Golden Temple (Kyoto) 104 Hagen, Torstein (Viking River Cruises) 191 Haiti 224 Haleiwa (Hawaii) 230 Hanalei (Hawaii) 178, 181, 182 Haushu, Jiang 9 Henningsvaer (Norway) 151, 152 Homer (Alaska) 179, 183 Hoogstaden, Peter 211 Hotel Campo Imperatore (Italy) 60 houses 121–​125 Hvar (Croatia) 138, 140 Hydra (Greece) 142, 145 Ibiza (Spain) 227 InterDesign 23–​24 interdisciplinary design 23–​25 Irkutsk (Russia) 2, 80, 82, 83, 84 Ischia Island (Italy) 42, 45 island places 142–​153 Jackson Square (New Orleans) 117, 118 Jean-​Michel Cousteau Ocean Futures Society 206 Kahlo, Frida 121, 124 Kahne, Stephen 23, 24 Kazan (Russia) 78, 81 Kennebunkport (Maine) 71, 73, 159, 162 Kenyon College (Ohio) 65 King Christian IV (Copenhagen) 96 Koohafkan, Parvis 2, 15, 192, 213, 221 Kotor (Montenegro) 138, 141, 142 Kremlin (Kazan) 78, 81 Kremlin (Moscow) 129, 130, 131 Kyo Suiran Hotel (Kyoto) 104 Kyoto (Japan) 103–​104, 104 La Boca neighborhood (Buenos Aires) 88, 89 La Casa Azul (Mexico City) 122 La Recoleta Cemetery (Buenos Aires) 90, 91 Laerdal (Norway) 37–​38, 39 Lammers, James 17, 19, 224, 226 Lanesboro (Minnesota) 57, 59 Lanzarote (Canary Islands) 53, 55 Lapostolle, Alexandra Marnier 50 Lapostolle Winery (Chile) 50, 51, 52 Lawrence, D.H. 214 Lofoten Islands (Norway) 150, 151 Loos, Adolf 119, 120

Index

Looshaus (Vienna) 119, 120 Lyman Winery (California) 57, 58 Maasai pastoral system (Africa) 220 MacDonald, William L. 101 Machu Picchu (Peru) 9, 10, 12, 203, 204, 205 Madeline Island (Wisconsin) 144 Manarola (Italy) 136 Mandalay (Myanmar) 167, 169, 170 Martin, Roger 23 Martinborough (New Zealand) 70, 72 Masseria Cervarolo (Italy) 11, 12, 13 Matera (Italy) 33, 34 Matsubayashi, Kazuo 104 Maxwell, Edward 149 Mendoza (Argentina) 50, 128 Mercado de San Miguel (Madrid) 112, 113 Mercat de la Boqueria (Barcelona) 113, 114 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 48, 75 Minhia (Myanmar) 22, 169, 172 Minneapolis (Minnesota) 126–​127, 163–​164, 166 Minnesota, University of 3, 20, 86, 104, 165 Minnesota Zoo 23–​24 Ministers Island (New Brunswick) 148, 149, 150 Mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori (Arizona) 65, 67 Mississippi River (Minnesota) 61, 126, 163–​164, 166 Mongolia 2, 208–​210 Montenegro 138, 141 Montepulciano (Italy) 27, 28, 29 Monterosso al Mare (Italy) 136 Morelia (Mexico) 121, 123 Morgridge Center for Public Service (Wisconsin) 4 Moscow (Russia) 129 Munch, Edvard 107 Museo Andino (Santa Rita Winery) 46, 47 Mussolini, Benito 59 Myanmar 2, 22, 165, 166 Mystic (Connecticut) 178, 180 Naadam Festival (Mongolia) 2, 208–​209, 210 Naiman, Sandra 199, 200 Nantucket (Maine) 158, 161 National Historic Landmarks 66, 68, 117, 182 National Register of Historic Places 65, 68 New Brunswick (Canada) 148, 149, 154, 156, 157 New Zealand 61, 63, 70, 72, 155, 157, 188 Norberg-​Schulz, Christian 74, 79, 130, 152

Index

Norcia Valley (Italy) 59, 60, 62 North Vietnam 215–​216 Norway 37, 39, 58–​59, 60, 73–​74, 76, 107–​108, 109, 150–​152, 153, 154, 155–​158, 159, 160 Nubble Lighthouse (Maine) 180, 184 Nusfjord (Norway) 151, 153 Oh Ne Kyaung (Myanmar) 169, 171 Old Jewish Synagogue (Prague) 96, 98 Ollantaytambo (Peru) 202 Opera House (Sydney) 185, 190 Orcas Island (Washington) 145, 147 Orvieto (Italy) 27–​28, 29, 30 Palazzo Vecchio (Florence) 173, 176 Pane, Roberto 212 Parc Guell (Barcelona) 102, 103 Park City (Utah) 70, 71 Peron, Eva 1, 88, 91, 110 Philipsburg Manor (New York) 176, 178 Piedra Infinita Winery (Chile) 50, 52–​53, 54 Pierce Point Ranch (California) 68, 69 Pisac (Peru) 19, 20, 201, 202 Place du Marche (Paris) 115, 116 Point Reyes National Seashore (California) 68, 69 Ponte Vecchio (Florence) 171–​172, 175 Portland Head Lighthouse (Maine) 180, 185 Prague (Czech Republic) 96, 97, 98, 99 Procida Island (Italy) 42, 44 public markets 111–​114 Puerto Rico 140–​141, 143 Qingtian County (China) 219 Quinta do Vallado Winery (Portugal) 54, 56 Radic, Smiljan 48 Raganato, Fernando 50 Riomaggiore (Italy) 134, 135, 136 river places 163–​174 river valleys 61–​65 Rivera, Diego 123, 124 Rome (Italy) 1, 21, 88, 97–​101, 190–​191, 226 Rome Prize in Architecture 21, 23 Rosenborg Slot (Copenhagen) 95 Rudofsky, Bernard 12 rural villages 27–​43 Sacred Valley (Peru) 1, 201–​202 Sagrada Familia (Barcelona) 101, 102 Salado Indigenous People (Arizona) 65, 66 San Juan (Puerto Rico) 140–​141, 143, 144

235

Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat (Spain) 76, 77 Santa Rita Winery (Santiago) 45–​46, 47 Santiago (Chile) 45 Santorini (Greece) 143, 182, 184, 187, 188, 189 Saqsaywaman (Peru) 204 Scanno (Italy) 8, 10 seeing rural through design 5–​13 Seitz, Peter 23, 24 Seu d’Urgell (Spain) 76, 78 Seward (Alaska) 179, 180, 183 Sextantio Le Grotte Della Civita hotel (Matera) 33, 34 Shanghai (China) 92–​94 Siberia (Russia) 2, 78–​80, 81, 82, 129 Siena (Italy) 77, 79, 80 Silva, Jose Graziano da 221 Singapore 17–​18, 19 Sitka (Alaska) 162–​163, 165 sketching as a way of seeing 19–​22 Sleepy Hollow (New York) 175 Snoeren, Paulus 92 Soroka, Siena Ann 226, 227 Sos Del Rey Católico (Spain) 6, 8, 9 special rural places 65–​85 Split Rock Lighthouse (Minnesota) 181, 186 squares and streets 115–​120 St Andrews (New Brunswick) 154, 156, 157 St Paul (Minnesota) 126, 163 St Petersburg (Russia) 129, 130 St Stephen’s Cathedral (Vienna) 118, 119 Staatsoper (Vienna) 119, 120 Starkey House (Connecticut) 124, 125 Starkey, Timothy 124 Stockholm 40, 109, 110 Stuchbury, Peter 85 Sunce Winery (California) 57, 58 Sydney (Australia) 185–​187, 190

Uffizi Gallery (Florence) 174, 176 Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) 2, 208–​211 Uluru (Australia) 81–​83, 84 Urban Agricultural Network 17 urban agriculture 17–​19 urban/​rural divide  3–​5 Uruguay 36–​37, 38 Utson, Jorn 185

Tahiti (French Polynesia) 205–​208 Tallinn (Estonia) 41, 42, 43 tango dancers (Buenos Aires) 88, 89, 90 Thorbeck, Dewey 20, 22 Three Gorges Dam (China) 62, 165, 166 Tivoli Garden (Copenhagen) 95, 96 Tonto National Memorial (Arizona) 65, 66 Trajan’s Market (Rome) 1, 100–​101 Trans-​Siberian Railroad  2, 78 Trollstigen Resort (Norway) 58–​59, 60 Trullo Houses (Italy) 13, 34–​36 Tsar Nicholas I (Russia) 2, 78 Twin Cities (Minnesota) 163–​165

Xian (China) 72

236

Van Horne, Sir William 148, 149 Vancouver (British Columbia) 153–​154, 155 Vancouver Island (British Columbia) 228 Vederna Resort (Santorini) 184, 188 Vera, Eduardo 50 Vermont Country Store (Vermont) 113–​114, 115 Vernazza (Italy) 134, 137 Victoria (British Columbia) 159–​160, 163 Vienna (Austria) 118–​120 Vik, Alexander and Carrie 46 Vina Vik Winery (Chile) 46, 47, 48, 49 Vinci, Leonardo da 1 Vintage House Hotel (Portugal) 56, 57 Visby (Sweden) 40, 41 waterfront cities and towns 153–​163 wineries and vineyards 43–​57 Wintergarten Café (Berlin) 109–​110, 111 Witty, David R. 228 Woodford Reserve Distillery (Kentucky) 65–​66, 68 World Agricultural Heritage Foundation (Rome) 15, 192 World Green Design Organization 9, 15, 193 World Heritage Sites (UNESCO) 1, 2, 10, 35, 40, 41, 78, 81, 96, 104, 118, 121, 134, 138, 156, 173, 194, 217, 221, 227 World Rural Development Committee 9, 15, 193, 219 Wusau (China) 165–​166, 168

Yale University 20, 23, 24 Yandabo (Myanmar) 169–​170, 173 Yangtze River (China) 62, 64, 165–​166, 167, 168 York (Maine) 159, 162 Yuyuan Garden (Shanghai) 93–​94 Zhang, Fengrong 30, 31–​32 Zhao, Xiaomei 219 Zuccardi, Familia (Chile) 50 Zuccardi, Sebastian 53

Index