Oh, the Ennui!

Arrol Gellner, an Emeryville, Calif. architect, lecturer and author made some interesting comments about streetscape design in a June 15, 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Streetjacketed: Too many landscapes bound by contrived uniformity.”

“Near my office there’s a stretch of sidewalk that typifies what passes for urban landscaping these days,” he begins. “It’s a laser-beam-straight ribbon of concrete almost a quarter-mile long, with trees marching rigidly along one side, all of the same species and spaced exactly the same distance apart, seemingly poked into the ground like so many Tootsie Pops.”

While he applauds the cooperation between developers and public works departments to get the work done, he thinks cities “could do a lot better, at the price of little more then a bit of careful thinking.”

“Your brain is not at all used to seeing mind-numbing sameness in nature,” he offers. “When we see a line of trees rigidly arrayed and spaced equidistant like points on a number line, our minds rebel.”

Why not vary the tree spacing and the species? he avers.

He blames uniform designs on “blind habit, laziness and hurry,” and warns about idolizing the speed and precision of computer drafting programs that so quickly and neatly lay out a perfectly symmetrical landscape plan. “Urban landscapes aren’t printed circuits,” he says. “Our world, like ourselves, is always a little bit off-center, unpredictable and imprecise, and I believe most of us like it that way.”

“We have to try even harder to do what Mother Nature does with ease,” he concludes, or as Voltaire intoned back in 1759: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”