Urban Water Studio 2008; Embarcadero Refugio San Francisco 201 Graduate  Architecture studio, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2008, Available for credit as a comprehensive studio subject to individual application and satisfactory completion of a comprehensive design document set approved by a panel of faculty and peers http://refugiosanfrancisco.pbwiki.com/

Mark S.T. Anderson, markand@berkeley.edu

 

Studio Introduction                

San Francisco has long been a city of refuge and radical confrontation with the unexpected. Arrival, departure, sanctuary, nurturing of the unwanted or endangered, unnatural juxtaposition beyond the wildest imagining are all deeply woven into the landscape, ethos and desires of San Francisco. In the 1980’s San Francisco began the city of refuge movement in the United States, offering official city support and sanctuary for illegal refugees from U.S.-supported right wing violence in Latin America, placing a slightly more official, but no less controversial, imprimatur on the historical reality of San Francisco’s dynamically counter-cultural ebb and flow. This largely forgotten program of social refuge is back in the city’s front page news again today, and under attack, linked to juvenile crime, the specter of terrorism, and the current resurgence of anti-immigrant rumbling in national politics. But there is more than this, with points of departure for architectural imagination far more interesting than ho-hum metaphorical background to some lame studio brief. What can be built? Social refuge has become interwoven with issues of eco-system refuge for the native flora and fauna of California, increasingly threatened by the quickening creep of dramatic climate change. Traditional wildlife refuge concepts of the past century are no longer adequate as climates and eco-systems in California have begun to travel—upward in elevation, northward in latitude, and toward the coast. Wildlife refuge is no longer an issue of preserved natural real estate, becoming instead an issue of climate-driven migration with potential need for engineering life support in transit. Within biology, active human interference in support of eco-system preservation—moving species and eco-systems rather than preserving them in situ—is no less controversial than San Francisco’s contribution to social refuge. These questions are scientific, philosophical, and political, and will certainly form the ethical and inspirational background for our work. But we are architects, and as practical people, most interested in rolling up our sleeves and—if we can’t fix or even fully understand the underlying disease—we can certainly help invent an urban infrastructure and strange family of machines to deal creatively with the symptoms. And incidentally, it’s not unlikely that something practical to address these problems is likely to make for some totally unexpected abutments and pretty cool architecture.

 

Plants and animals with all of their wild baggage are already on the march toward San Francisco. Many scientists, from UC Berkeley and elsewhere, are gearing up to help them carry through on their long strange trip. Our own Professor Jill Stoner is an early theoretician of architectural possibility for just such an urban enterprise, inspiring our collective imagination toward a wild new city. Many other of our immediate faculty—Lisa Iwamoto, Susan Ubbelohde, Raveevarn Choksombatchai, René Davids, Keith Plymale, Harrison Fraker, Galen Cranz, Tony Dubovsky, Nicholas de Moncheaux, Jean-Paul Bourdier, Walter Hood, Linda Jewell, Cris Benton, and others—have also been working on surprisingly related issues in their own creative work and in studio collaboration with students, beginning to suggest a creative depth of potential centered at UC Berkeley that will make a larger and more coherent contribution to these issues than may first be apparent to each of us alone as we pursue our individual design inquiries. Wilderness infected by single-minded human interference is fast becoming inadequate to sustain traditional forms of natural life in familiar habitat. Unnatural humanity is killing the earth—unnatural imagination invigorated through unlikely human mating surely must save it!

  

The City of Saint Francis, that wacky patron saint of the animals, is ideally situated as a transshipment point in this migration through California to points north, offering more than passing experience as an urban zoo of unnatural bedfellows, fellow travelers, and all manner of lost and wandering organic souls. No work of human life support offers quite the raw power and possibility of the city as a new platform of artificially preserved natural diversity in transit. Imagine what San Francisco might become by rejuvenating our once great Embarcadero and again overlaying this long-hibernating, politeness-strangled former incubator of the unexpected with all manner of transitory plants, animals and foreign people, barged in and out, washing forth across the city a far greater diversity of fecund interbreeding life forms than ever previously encountered in historical civilization. Imagine the squirming, dirty life of a thriving medieval city intertwined with the forest primeval, yet thoughtfully elevated to a higher level of conscious appreciation and positive structure enabled by the miracle of modern engineering.

  

But what will we do in this studio? There are three phases to the project. First we will research and discuss the issue and imagine the possibilities (about 1 week, with lots of drawing). Next, with research continuing, we will work as a team designing a master urban plan for this migratory wildlife overlay of San Francisco and its embarcadero (about two weeks, with lots of drawing). The final physical product of this phase will be a single large wall model of the city, and a series of layered digital maps. Finally, the majority of the semester will be devoted to individual or small team design projects focusing on one significant detail emerging from the group master plan. Studio participants will be encouraged to explore a range of design media, including particular emphasis on physical models and digital modeling, as well as any other personally interesting form of experimental writing, drawing and representation. This detail project will be selected and programmed by each individual student or team. The detail may be the design of a building, dock, barge or combination thereof, contributing to an overall conception of the new city function.

 

The detail design project should thoroughly develop the concept, structure, systems and materials necessary to propose a practical, realizable construction project on the San Francisco Embarcadero, using currently available and immediately practical methods of construction. The instructor will support individual projects that are developed by the student to fully satisfy the expectations of a required Comprehensive Studio project. This qualification will not be automatic, and studio participants may also elect to work in other formats of design investigation without the comprehensive focus. Those students wishing to design this project for Comprehensive Studio credit, must submit a work plan and schedule outlining a comprehensive design process and proposed document product. Credit for the comprehensive studio will then be approved after the end of the semester, on approval of the completed set of comprehensive design documents, which will be reviewed for adequacy and completeness by a group of faculty critics and student peers.

 

Mark Anderson  

 

What I'm Talking About: 

Climate change threatens two-thirds of California's unique plants, study says

 

Michelle Cloud-Hughes

Found throughout the mountains of Southern California below 5,000 feet and in the central foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Woolyleaf ceanothus may be restricted to low-lying areas, most of which are highly urbanized. It also could expand across wide areas of the coast range as far north as Humboldt County.

The state's plants are at risk of collapse unless they migrate or are moved to refuges, scientists say. Animals may also be separated from plants on which they depend, according to researchers.

By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 25, 2008

» Discuss Article    (26 Comments)

 

Two-thirds of California's unique plants, some 2,300 species that grow nowhere else in the world, could be wiped out across much of their current geographic ranges by the end of the century because of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, according to a new study.

 

The species that cannot migrate fast enough to higher altitudes or cooler coastal areas could face extinction because of greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet, according to researchers.

 

 

                  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-species-pg,0,6880171.photogallery

Photos: California flora threatened

 

California's flora face a potential "collapse," said David Ackerly, an ecologist at UC Berkeley who was the senior author of the paper. "As the climate changes, many of these plants will have no place to go."

 

Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in the Golden State, from towering redwoods to slender fire poppies. And under likely climate scenarios, many would have to shift 100 miles or more from their current range -- a difficult task given slow natural migration rates and obstacles presented by suburban sprawl.

 

The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed on-line journal PLoS One, is the first to analyze the effect of climate change on all of the plants unique to one of the world's most biologically diverse areas. Previous models have focused on fewer species in areas such as the eastern United States, Europe, South Africa and Australia.

 

"The climate is changing 10 times faster than it did during the last ice ages," said ecologist Scott Loarie, who has a doctorate from Duke University and who conducted the study over five years with Ackerly and other collaborators. "The first thing we need to do is to reduce the pace of change."

 

The study, which was based on more than 80,000 specimens, was hailed as groundbreaking by leading scientists in the field. "It is a timely analysis of the likely fate of the plants of California in the face of climate change," Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and coauthor of seminal texts on California flora, said in an e-mail.

 

And in Southern California, given water shortages and habitat disruption, he added, "lots of the populations are right on the edge. . . . The balance could easily be tipped so we could lose many of them in a very short period of time."

 

As California's unique species migrate, they could be separated from the creatures that pollinate them. Animals could be divided from the plants on which they depend, the researchers noted.

 

"Individual plants can't pick up and fly away like birds," Ackerly said. "A seed grows into a tree. Then the adult tree drops another seed, which can be carried by the wind or an animal. And that seed grows into another tree."

 

The state may also have to set aside new refuges and corridors, and prepare to move some plants if necessary. "Planning for plant refugees will become a new but important concept for natural reserves to think about," said biologist Brent Mishler, director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley, the state's most important flora collection.

 

The study is likely to add urgency to a decades-long movement to protect the state's flora. The California Native Plant Society, which has 33 chapters, warns that less than 10% of the state's original coastal sage-scrub land and less than 1% of its native grassland remain intact.

 

But the paper foresees even more dramatic changes. Coast redwoods may range farther north, it said, while California oaks could disappear from Central California in favor of cooler weather in the Klamath Mountains along the Oregon border. Many plants may no longer be able to survive in the northern Sierra Nevada or in the Los Angeles Basin.

 

It also predicts that plants of northern Baja California will migrate into San Diego County ranges. Meanwhile, the Central Valley could become the preferred habitat for plants of the Sonoran Desert.

 

And what would replace Southern California's native plants? "We don't know what will move into the void," Loarie said. "Possibly desert plants similar to those in Nevada and Arizona, but more likely unpleasant agricultural weeds."

 

Coauthor Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University scientist who serves on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, prepared projections under a scenario of a relatively rapid rise in global temperature of 3.8 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and under a conservative estimate of 2.3 to 3.3 degrees Celsius.

 

The study looks at eight scenarios that used different rates of warming and of species mobility. Loarie cautioned that there were uncertainties in the analysis, such as the known range of individual plants, the precise microclimate each plant prefers, and the magnitude of predicted changes in rainfall patterns.

 

"But there is a clear trend," he said. "The climate is outpacing these plants."

 

Under the worst-case scenario, plant diversity would decrease everywhere by as much as 25%, and 66% of all species unique to California would suffer more than an 80% decrease in range.

 

In the most optimistic scenario, under which governments move to rapidly decrease greenhouse gas emissions globally, and plant species prove able to move into new habitats, diversity might increase along the state's northwest and central coasts, the study concluded.

 

But even under this scenario, many species would disappear from Southern California and the Northern Sierra.

 

The authors steered clear of predicting specific extinctions.

 

"If a plant loses 80% of its range and goes from 100 to 20 square kilometers, it is hard to say if that plant is extinct or not," Loarie said. "In a hot year, that plant's gone."

 

Native plants often support 10 to 50 times as many species of native wildlife as nonnative plants, and biologist Philip Rundel, a California plant specialist at UCLA, noted that the effects measured by the study "will surely be paralleled by what we can expect to occur with animal species."

 

"This article is a wake-up call for all Californians that global change impacts on our environment are more than just a theoretical issue."

 

margot.roosevelt@

 

latimes.com