a smoggy day in...

After the weekend rain, my drive to school on Monday was gorgeous. The mountains on the horizon were crisp and sharp, the sky was clear blue, and all the plants had the dust and grit washed off so their leaves shone vivid green.

It was smoggy today, and i could tell. Today the mountains, although quite visible, didn't seem quite as close, and haze hung in the air. Nonetheless i saw Catalina Island and another one behind it (San Miguel?) as i drove over the hill on Colima, so the air must not have been that bad!

Why are they called "parkways" when we drive on them?

Reading The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, i think i've learned why they are called "parkways". They were designed for passenger vehicles and, in New York, they were the main routes to public parks and beaches. Tree and lawn plantings along the road were supposed to be park-like in contrast to expressways that were solely meant to get from one place to another and allowed truck traffic. So, there's the answer to that!

We need more parkways in Southern California--having ivy and concrete stamps on a wall is nice and all that, but you're still sandwiched between to walls of concrete and thousands of pounds of fast-moving steel. On top of that, i hate it when gravel trunks are on the freeway because invariably little stones come whizzing by and scratch my poor car and chip the windshield, arg.

I didn't find an answer to the driveway part, but maybe "driveways" are called that because the original ones, for large homes, were the carriage drive and not merely the short distance from the curb to the garage.

back to class

The fall quarter began on Friday. My first impression is that i hate sitting still for hours and hours inside! Ack! I began this program so that i can have an inside-outside career, but a good portion of the prep for that career is sitting inside. :-( Helping my mother rearrange plants this afternoon and assembling stuff at my apartment reminds me of how much i like to play in the dirt and work with my hands.

After being merrily scatterbrained Friday night and running around today, my second impression is that these profs are stellar, they are going to stretch us in a variety of ways, and they bring very different strengths to the program. It's going to be a tough quarter (why am i taking 14 grad-level units!?) but it's going to be good.

So, back to school it is. We do get to walk around the studio, we have a quiet sun-speckled courtyard with very nice teak bench samples, and we will have lots of field trips all over Southern California and the Southwest. Yay for school!

Pura Vida: a new stamp in my passport

My most recent adventure was a trip to Costa Rica with a two-fold purpose: to have a mini vacation in-between quarters, and to see & encourage a friend who lives and works there. I'll grant that the above photo is not what one would normally think of for a vacation photo, but it was one of my favorite spots: the La Paz Waterfall Gardens. We didn't stay there--it's very posh--but you can visit the waterfalls and creature exhibits without being a hotel guest. I have other photos of steps and walkways for landscape architecture ideas--some people take travel photos of people. I take travel photos of rocks, railings, and bugs.

The butterfly sanctuary is breath-taking, almost literally. The interior is full of natural light and very warm and steamy to provide a good environment for the butterflies and the plants they need. There are stands holding ripe bananas and guavas for them to snack on, lots of lantana and other plants, and signs explaining the twenty species and the plants they require. Most amazing are all the gorgeous butterflies fluttering around. One brushed past my cheek. Another brand-new one landed on my friend and didn't want to get off her arm.

The butterflies seem to know they are inside. Even though the windows were impermeable, they hovered around the windows as if they wanted to get out. I didn't see any 'butterfly paintings' in Costa Rica like there are in Cameroon (i.e. pictures made of butterfly wings: very lovely, but very sad). Nonetheless, even though Costa Rica apparently does a good job in habitat conservation, there is still less land for butterflies. Weather, such as the 1987 El Nino, also can do in a species. Because of this, the butterfly sanctuary raises butterflies through the entire life cycle, hence the chrysalises above. They find where the chrysalises have formed and carefully pin the bit of leaf or whatever to the sticks, sorted by species. The added advantage to not having chrysalises stolen or stepped on is that visitors can watch butterflies emerging!

Did you know that butterflies emerge with their wings all wrinkled up? They have to struggle out of their chrysalis shell in order to pump blood-fluid through their wings to open them up. Then they hang & hover for a while, letting their wings dry out. If you help a butterfly out of its chrysalis, the wings will remain wrinkled and it will never fly. Besides, their wings rub off onto our fingers and that damages them, too.

Here is a photo of an emerging Myscelia cyaniris butterfly:

Below are two photos of the Morpho peleides limpida "Blue Morph" butterfly:
Camouflage side
Iridescent side

City of (our Lady of the) Angels

I'm not an Angeleno: I don't live in Los Angeles. I don't even live in LA County, although it is just 100 yards to the north. I don't think LA looks like a city where angels live and i don't think it looks like a city where Mary, the mother of Jesus, has much influence. Nonetheless, i do find it kind of fun to take the metrolink downtown and hop on the subway to go to the library and have cheap ice cream & great Lebanese food at Grand Central Market while i'm there. There are lots of nifty buildings to gawk at: Grand Central Station, Olvera Street, the Bradbury, the Biltmore, the DWP...

This is a view of the Bunker Hill area from the DWP building. The shiny building is Walt Disney Concert Hall and the tall colonnade building on the far left is the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I don't know the names of the other skyscrapers.

Since two of the summer's projects involved redesigning a park in downtown Los Angeles, we had several field trips out there. I'd been on a walking tour given by the Los Angeles Conservancy when i was a lot younger, too. I talked about LA a lot, and one of my friends wanted to see what downtown was like, so we went yesterday to walk around. I took her everywhere my professor took us except i forgot the new cathedral. How did i do that!? I thought it was one of the friendliest buildings downtown, and i really liked the architecture and the tapestries. Oh well. Next trip. I also didn't take her down the government building section, because it was hot (over 100F) and my feet hurt. Somehow, even wearing flip flops, her feet didn't hurt until we sat down on the train to go home!

The cathedral is probably my current favorite downtown building, right before the Bradbury. The stone is a warm color, and the building is thoroughly modern in shape although ageless in function. I like all the tables with patio umbrellas too. The Bradbury is the kind of office building i would build if i was going to build an office building--a huge skylight for a roof, and beautiful wrought iron, so that you don't even really feel like you're inside. I guess it had been used for lots of movies but i haven't seen any of them.

The Millennium Biltmore is lavishly decorated and wonderfully hushed inside, even when lots of guests are coming through. My friend and i saw someone famous, but we don't know who it was--a musician of some sort who must be a regular guest because a desk person said "Nice to have you back, sir." And everyone is polite--even though i wander around downtown in rugged sandals and a straw hat, they've politely answered my questions about the tours (LA Conservancy does them) and they don't turn up their noses. Very elegant. Someday i want to dress properly and have afternoon tea in the Rendevous Court.

And then the library. It's air-conditioned. There are drinking fountains in mosaic-covered recessed nooks. The bathrooms are clean. There are comfy reading chairs, well-lit study tables, and tons and tons of books. It's also a nifty building, going down into the ground instead of going up, and a large atrium of natural light brightens all those subterranean floors.