Please Happy

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Part I.

The assignment in my architecture class (The Natural Landscape) this week was to go out into the world: “Go out and document physical evidence of natural forces and how those forces have impacted human-made objects.”

I went to the L.A. River. I looked for visual patterns. Throughout the day, as Jake and I tried to find evidence of the recent storms, we started noticing how the green has pushed its way up through the concrete. How the water patterns flow in beautiful chaotic lines, despite being channeled into a concrete trough, and how even the L.A. river can look pristine during the magic hour just before sunset.

Here’s a slideshow of some of the photos I shot yesterday. The ending is a nod to some of the solutions I discuss later in this post – driveway drains and non-grassy landscaping, for instance.

Water Nature Pavement from Lauren M. Whaley on Vimeo.

Here’s a map of the places we visited. We wanted to go to parts of the river that were fully in the city. And we did. We stopped on the side of the road when we saw clogged storm drains or green sprouts growing in unlikely places. We stopped when we saw fence openings that would take us down to the river. We walked across overpasses and hiked down to underpasses.

View Larger Map

A. 2 p.m. Chinatown. North Main Street and the L.A. River. No trespassing. No access to the river. Viewed from above.

B. 2:16 p.m. North Main and Avenue 20. Photographed a lone tree in a parking lot, trash in a storm drain, ladies waiting for the bus next to a non-grassy landscaped lot.

C. 2:45 p.m. L.A. River at Oros Street. Steelhead and Egret Park/ Highway 5/110 interchange. Photographed debris caught by the plants, retaining walls as seen from the river, a company with trees in individual pots. Thought about water, nature and concrete.

D. 3:45 p.m. San Fernando and Figueroa. Walked down to the river under an overpass. A few sleeping spots tucked away on the slabs. Muddy. Got our feet wet. Deeper river than it had been the first time I walked down in November. Wanted to jump into the trough. How deep is it? Loved the light down there. Got a whiff of actual water smell. Wondered if anyone had put on a public dance party on the concrete river bottom.

E. 4:42 p.m. Highland and Beverly. Other plans brought us to Hancock Park to finish our day (Jake is helping tear up his aunt’s lawn to put in a greywater irrigation system and drought-resistant plants). He had noticed the upheaved sidewalks. Wanted to show me the power of the tree roots. Very impressive. Note how humans have chopped the roots to save the sidewalks.

Part II.

The second part of the assignment was to make suggestions for “improvement to the physical and emergency response infrastructure of Los Angeles.”

I say, respond before the emergency.

I want to use the water that rushes down the concrete river once a year when the monsoon comes. “That is cleansing at least a year’s worth of unwashed, grimy, filthy streets,” an architect friend said last night. “Get it out of here.”

She told me she once saw a shopping cart stuck in a tree down by the river. “It’s just gross,” she said.

With that sentiment goes my idea of harnessing (harvesting?) the water from the L.A. River during flash floods.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to take the water that is going into the ocean and use if for something? Like toilet water? I would love to stop pooping into clear potable water and start pooping into grey water. Is this possible?

Or, we could capture the water before it even enters the river. Either put in permeable driveways into every residence and street corner in L.A. or encourage people to set up their own water catchment systems. Isn’t this trend big in Tucson? Why not here?

Another suggestion would be to make permeable roofs (do these exist?) that percolate the water through a building – again, using it as grey water – and the refuse goes back into the ground, into the water table. There has to be a way to do this.

It’s a super difficult design requirement to build in a city that is picture perfect every single day but about five, when it pours and floods and mudslides and earthquakes and burns…. How do you design for that? Do architects and engineers always have to make the worst case scenario structure?

And, what role do we play in the creation of the worst case scenario? (Isn’t a lot of this flooding due to the concrete world we’ve created? There’s nowhere to go).

Another question I had while trolling the river bottom yesterday was what to do with all the stuff the trees catch. In some ways, the trees in the river bottom are serving their purpose. They’ve caught plastic bags and toys and wrappers. They used stuff now hangs on the flood-swept trees like Christmas ornaments, or even worse, like a parasitic fungi. We could have a neighborhood cleanup and recycle the stuff, melt it down. We could have a city-wide effort to use that stuff in roads or clothes or the next plastic playground. We could outlaw plastic bags. Or plastic altogether.

The assignment’s flaw, which correlates to our thinking in general, is that we’re supposed to improve “the response.” How about we seek to improve the causation, the mechanism? How about we get neighborhoods to meet and come together to build – or retrofit – permeable driveways. How about we make a citizen’s referendum to stop producing plastic bags and to start reusing the millions we have and picking up the ones that end up in the water? How about the city makes a contest to see who can come up with a river plan to use that water. Can we use the water to water lawns? Can we use it to flush our refuse? Can we route it back to the water treatment plant? Can we start by analyzing what’s in it? What we’re sending to the oceans and what we can start reducing?

“You really shouldn’t surf after it rains here,” a fellow journalism student told me. “It’s nasty.”

So, we all know that. And we wait on the shore with our boards, watching the shopping carts and plastic bags roll in, not to mention the grosser stuff, the unseen toxins. And we wait and wax our boards watch. And then, magically, the ocean rejuvenates itself. Someone cleans up the beach. And we go surfing again. Forgetting what just happened.

We need to start doing something. Earlier than the emergency response. How about now.