Larry DeMartino Interview, Part 1 of 3

TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEWEE: Larry DeMartino (LD) INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT) DATE: February 20, 2006 LOCATION: San Antonio, Texas TRANSCRIBERS: Melanie Smith, Jennifer Gumpertz, Robin Johnson REEL: 2350

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. You can select Interview Start on the left to skip this section.

DT:My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and it's February 20th, 2006. Were in San Antonio, Texas and we're at the home of Larry DeMartino, who is a landscape architect here in town who's been involved in a number of civic efforts on everything from flood control to sign review, water quality and many other issues as well.

I just wanted to take this chance to thank him for spending time with us. I thought we might start by asking if there was a point in your childhood where you were first maybe introduced to the outdoors, to landscape, to protection of green things.

LD:Well, yes, you know, I was born in 39 and that was when everybody was having victory gardens and I had two grandfathers, both born in Italy, that had turned the backyards of their houses into extensive vegetative plots where they were growing things to eat. So I remember my grandfathers, both of them, who grew fruits and vegetables in the backyard and roses in the front yard. And I was always helping them and always intrigued about things that grew. I loved plants and the ground that they grew on and that came from both my maternal and paternal grandfathers, who were avid gardeners.

DT:Were you given jobs to do in these gardens?

LD:Yeah, to a certain extent. They were always very trusting of me or, as most gardeners aren't, of help. But I remember being involved in the watering and then some of the harvesting and in the cleanup before winter came and in the spring to get things ready for planting.

I was tormented as a youth by one of my grandfathers gardens that was full of snakes and I still have a hatred for snakes to this day because the garden just seemed infested with them. They would stake the tomatoes so that they grew vertically and so that the fruit would ripen properly. It was western New York; you didnt have that many good days of sun. And one day I went to get some tomatoes and there was a snake coiled around every tomato stake and it scared me. I know snakes are our friends, but as a child, it was terrifying.

DT:I understand that you grew up in Niagara Falls and I was curious if the mix of a very industrial town and also one of the most scenic spots in America had any influence on your interest in landscape?

LD:Well, I grew up witnessing air pollution to the extreme that leaves were very damaged by the belching of the factories. And of course, as a child, I had chronic bronchial asthma. But of course, my father worked in those factories and so it did provide an income for our family.

So there was always this issue of yeah, those plants areyou cant breathe the air and the and the leaves are turning brown, but we've got to earn a living. And, but it was primarily an industrial town and I didn't leave till I went off to college in Michigan State University in East Lansing. It was the first time I didnt have asthma and I slowly began to realize that it was that bad air that I had been breathing every day, all day long, day in and day out that had caused these respiratory issues that I was chronically involved with.

Of course, years later, Niagara Falls became famous for the Love Canal scandal, one of the worst pollution extravaganzas in America. I don't think there was a paper or a newspaper that didn't cover the Love Canal, which was perpetrated on the citizens of Niagara Falls by Hooker ElemicElectric Chemical Company, who, by the way, my father worked for. But stuff was dumped and actually leaked into the creek behind our house. It was pretty, pretty dicey and now novelists are getting involved in this, not just the news.

My sister is the curator for all of Joyce Carol Oates writings and papers and plays and things and Joyces recent book was called Niagara. And it details in novel form the implications of the Love Canal and the folks who lived and resided there. My mothers 89, she doesnt live too far from that major, super clean up site. And of course, it led to the demise of the factories and also the demise of the town. I think the population has probably shrunk by forty or fifty thousand people. Thats had a profound influence on me as I, as I think back on it.

DT:After growing up in Niagara Falls, you say that you went on to Michigan State for your training as a landscape architect. Can you talk about some of the influences there and some of your professors or the other students?

LD:Well, I went to Michigan State to study horticulture. My interest was primarily plants andand I had a very strong background in the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology. And horticulture was the thing that I was interested in when I was looking for a place to go to college and Michigan State University East Lansing had a very, very good program. And of course, I was also looking to get far away from home. And so I went to Michigan State and while I was there working on my degree in horticulture, I started taking classes over in the school of landscape architecture.

And I just became intrigued with the notion of being able to shape the earth and... and the things that you put on it in such a way that mankind and the earth are not just sympathetic with one another in their in their co-relationships, but that mankind can also improve the situation of-of-of the earth, which I see as mankind's role. I'm not just interested anymore in-in landscape efforts that are neutral toward the land and the earth.

I think everything we ought to do ought to be aligned with improving the situation. Just creating a neutral situation isis not something I'm interested in. But landscape architecture is a way to improve the situation of man and land and earth. I always believed that, I still believe that. Anyway, my training there was in those aspects of the landscape. Not just pure design, but looking at those factors in the shaping that improved the situation.

And I'm not just talking about derelict and worn out landscapes, I'm also talking about coexisting and improving situations in raw nature, which is a whole, completely different thing. When I was at Michigan State University, there was a design professor there by the name of John B. Fraser and John had just graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. And he brought aan interesting design aesthetic, one which you could probably call the latest thing out.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design always turned out these cutting edge people. And he had a great influence on me. One of the things that he taught was really interesting. It was the seminar and he got this book called Mans Role in Changing The Face of The Earth. And the book was a compilation of seminaror symposium, symposium papers presented at a yearlong symposium hosted by the Werner Green Foundation. (misc.)

LD:And, but this book, I still have it here. Its still very valuable to me. It's this little Michigan State University, 1960. Mans Role in Changing The Face of the Earth. University of Chicago Press. Edited Lewis Sauer, Marsten Bates, Lewis Mumford. So in 1960, there was huge amounts of information put out by scientists on mans tenure of the Earth and all over the world.

It's interesting that if you look at some of these articles today, they're still they still apply to todays situation. So in this seminar group with Professor Fraser, we got to look at not just the design of gardens, but the design of everything involving the planet. And we came up, we started to learn about geomorphology and a whole bunch of other unpronounceable names. But they began to form a scientific basis for looking at and understanding the world and mans tenure of it and what he has done to it, good or bad, over the course of that tenure.

Everything from little African villages to major metropolitan areas, what people did there. What was their relationship? And subsequent to that also, I became very intrigued with the writings of J.B. Jackson. J.B. was a wonderful person. I loved him dearly. He traveled around the United States on a motorcycle, which I felt was suicidal and he's from New Mexico. I've done quite a bit of work in New Mexico and hung around a lot of the places in New Mexico that he hung around at. I try to see parts of New Mexico the way he saw it in order to better understand J.B.s writings.

When I was teaching at the University of Texas, I brought him here to speak to the architecture students. He presented a whole different world to them. With the establishment of this Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at UT Austin, I like to think that perhaps J.B. and his great insights and hishis readings andandand just the manifestation of who he was and what he said had some impact on that. I think you need to have a school of landscape architecture in this day and age if youre going to have a good school of architecture.

DT:So if Im following you, in the late 50s and early 60s, you saw in Michigan State that there was a kind of a broadening of landscape architecture to include environmental design and studies issues, is that right? That landscape architecture was seen more broadly than just designing gardens?

LD:Yeah, I think in a way thats true, but, and historically, landscape architecture was that broad view. The person who coined the term landscape architect was Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, who did the Boston Park system, who designed projects all over the United States. Stanford University, parks all over America.

But his approach was not one of an isolated little garden, his approach was one of looking at the urban form and mumuwhat made it work? Olmsted was interesting in that he never practiced alone. He brought and created landscape architecture out of the interdisciplinaryas an interdisciplinary effort. He always used the best architects. He always used the best geologists. He always used the best water and soils people. He always used the best engineers that he could find in putting his work and his efforts together.

And it's interesting to note that before Olmsted was doing all of this, he had come to Texas. He was a great masterful journalist and writer and his book on Travels Through Texas is an important document because it, in a sense, is landscape architecture because the essence of Travels Through Texas is the descriptions of the land and the people on it that he wrote. He had a way of writing and a way of recording what he saw that was phenomenal.

And the basis of landscape architecture right now is what do you see? How do you record what you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you feel? Not to the extent that you develop analysis paralysis, but that you identify the features and record them. Now within Olmsteds writings, its important. For instance, one of the things that he talked about was the difficulty of hunting buffalo in Texas. And you say wellwellwell, why is it hard to hunt buffalo in Texas? You go out to the hill country right now and you can see a buffalo or a deer and get a shot at them. You couldnt see them because the grasses were taller than a buffalo. Now those grasses are remnants, theyre gone. Those blue stem grasses you no longer see.

I once traveled around San Antonio trying to find a stand of blue stem grass. I virtually had to go five or six miles along a railroad right of way to find a stand of blue stem. You want to know why the Indians burned it? So that they could hunt the buffalo because they couldnt find the buffalo. Buffalos this high. This whole place was covered with grass. If there hadnt been the grass there, there would be no Edwards Aquifer because its the plants, the grass, the blue stem that collects the rain and, with its roots, transfers this water to underground storage systems. We know that.

These grasslands go from Texas all the way up throughto the Great Lakes and recharge all of those aquifers. Not just the Edwards, but the underground aquifers that are a little bit west of the Ogallala, a little bit west of the-the Mississippi River. The grasslands are extremely important and they harvest water. Not only rainfall, but think about it. You know how our temperatures change here drastically? In the morning, it's cool. In the summer, its hot. But if you go out and look at grasslands in the mornings, what are those leaves, those millions of leaves, that huge area covered with?

It's covered with mist, condensation and as it heats, it condenses, goes into the crown of the plant and into the ground and into the aquifer. So its not only harvesting rainfall, but its harvesting the humidity in the air each and every day, even the days that it doesn't rain. Olmsted was important because we virtually had no record of how tall those grasses were unless you looked through that book, Travels Through Texas.

So he was a recorder of what he saw and to me, Olmsted, who founded the profession of landscape architecture, knew back then what this profession had to do. It was not until perhaps in the 60s that landscape architecture rediscovered itself as a group of individuals or a profession that assessed the conditions of land and worked with people who wanted to put something on it and how you reconcile what youre doing to the lland in terms of what you want and not denigrating it. And how to be socially responsible in your use of that land. And thats pretty much what the profession does.

Years ago, somewhere along the line, landscape architects got known as garden designers, posy planters. But thats not a landscape architect. A landscape architect is a person who deals with the land for social benefit. Were not here to design the gardens for the rich of Europe. Those are not landscape architects. The landscape architects are the ones who go into cities and establish parks and parks all over the place and the linkages between parks.

Olmsted, of course, had people who followed what he, what he prescribed. One of the greatest was in Kansas City and Kessler. George Kessler. And George Kessler from ttraveled fromfrom Kansas City to Dallas and did work in Dallas. Kessler Parkway is a community development which he did. And Kessler really understood Dallas more than even Dallas understands itself today because he understood what the Trinity River and its tributaries were all about.

And the City of Dallas has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on flood control and water quality issues because they didnt take the advice of Kessler, George Kessler. The things that he told them to in reports that you can still find today along the streams of the Trinity River are still valid. So its this great continuance between Olmsted and Kessler down to people right now. In a way, it's reconnecting with the formation of the profession. Olmsted called landscape architecture the practice of architecture in a democracy. So it's interesting then to me that most of his biographers are attorneys.

Most of his biographers and his earlier biographer, Albert Fine, was an attorney out on Long Island. I brought him also to UT to speak to my students about Olmsted. So that was, that was their, you see, Olmsted was interested in democracy. He was a phenomenal man, close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Headed thefounded the Red Cross, headed the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. These were social issues that he was involved in. His park, Central Park, was a place-a breathing space, the lungs of the city.

You can say well, Europe had great parks. Europe did not have great parks. Europe had hunting preserves for the rich that were open to the public at the discretion of the rich. They were not designed as places for public recreation. Those were invented here in the United States by Frederick Law Olmsted. So theres this great tradition and I like to think that theres an awakening on the part of people as to what landscape architecture actually is.

I think many of the architects now, I think thats why you're beginning to see more and more schools of landscape architecture, particularly on a graduate level, opened in schools of architecture. UT desperately needs a school of landscape architecture. You can't just keep turning the tools out.

DT:Now how did you come to Texas? Youd been at Michigan State in East Lansing. And then I understand, later worked in New York for the Rockefeller family and for Nelson Rockefeller, for one of his agencies when he was governor. Is that correct?

LD:Yeah. I left Michigan State and I, of course, wanted to go to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which back in those days cost ten thousand dollars a year. You have no idea how much ten thousand dollars a year was back in those days. Getting admitted was not particularly a problem because of the head of the school at that time was Hideo Sasaki and I had studied under Sasaki while at Michigan State.

In fact, while I was at Michigan State, I probably saw more of him, of Sasaki, than the students at Harvard did. But anyway, I went back to Niagara Falls to work and found the bland-blind ad in the newspaper looking for some nebulous kind of person and I applied for the job. The job was for an organization that was just getting established that had been identified as a public benefit corporation by the State Legislature of-of New York.

It was one of the super programs that Nelson Rockefeller put together. He had a superfund for cleaning up the Adirondacks. He had a superfund for cleaning up Lake Ontario, where there was not one foot of public property along the entire shore of Lake Ontario. He was dying to clean out the Adirondacks, which were one little, little family cottage right after another and all these little outtakes in the middle of this vast state park that was in the process of being turned over into private use.

It's got, and he had a number of other programs, mental health facilities, urban development corporation, which I helped him form. But the program that I went to work with was called the State University Construction Fund of New York. And the state university system was very new in New York. It consisted of a few teachers colleges, but most of the schools in New York were private and Nelson wanted to establish a state university system. It was actually the youngest state university system in the country.

So through some kind of magic mirror act, the money appeared to do all of this. So I went to work for the State University Construction Fund. I think I just got lucky. I was hired by a bunch of people doing the interviews who were all retired military. And I had worked for a retired military officer one summer when I was with the National Park Service out in Utah.

And anyway, they had to have me and I went to work there for the enormous sum of 7500 dollars a year. And to put that in perspective, I think I was making more per year than anybody in my graduating class from Michigan State University. And I went into this super agency, who-who thought they needed a landscape architect and they, or maybe they liked this young, acidic whippersnapper. They used to call me the infante terrible of the construction fund.

I dont know whether, I have to still think about that. But anyway, we were to vastly increase the size of the state university system, which was to build four major state universities in the state, each with a population of 25,000. Buffalo, Stoneybrook, couple of others, and 35 college campuses in 35 different towns.

And so the task was daunting, daunting. And so I really cut my teeth on that program. It was important in that we put design teams together to develop campus plans for every one of these sites. So it was a long master planning process, the process of which hadn't been defined. Somebody had to write the process.

Besides hiring all these architects and engineers and landscape architects and all the host of, but you have a blank check to do this. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. It was like, you know, government by edict. And we never had to worry about the state legislature. Nelson Rockefeller was a very powerful man and the state legislature was sort of an appendage of the governors office. Nelson got what he wanted and he wanted to build a major state university system and he did.

So we signed all these contracts to do these master plans and do all these studies. But we actually had to publish documents and write contracts to put all these different interdisciplinary teams together and get them to work together and they had traditionally not worked together.

Of course, New York City had a vast treasure trove of name architects. But to go and tell Yo Ming Pei that has to work with a landscape architect sort of gave him a, you know, a case of the yips. Or Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill who didnt want to do that. I remember we kept going to him about following the procedures and this land was sensitive that you had to build on. And old Gordon put the cigar in his mouth and say give me enough money and Ill put the whole fucking thing in one glass box.

Well, that comment caused the cancellation of the largest contract an architect ever signed in history. So we got very lucky and I was at the right place at the right time to bring this program to volition. You have no idea how big that program was. This is the largest construction program at its time on the face of the earth. University of Buffalo, which was one unit, was larger than Brasilia and it's there today.

It's still pretty good looking. We accomplished a lot. We had a motto that said good design doesn't cost extra and every time an architect had to sign a contract that he would bring the building in on time and under budget, or on budget or he had to redesign it at his own cost. We were the first agency ever to do that.

But that takes responsibility in house. You have to have the procedures and the mechanisms and the support to show them how to do that. The interesting thing, I think, about the construction fund was that, including secretaries, this program never had more than 100 employees managing the largest construction program in the world.

And we built those 35 college campuses in seven years. Seven years. And made a lot of front covers of architectural magazines. So in a sense, what happened was that for a person who wasnt even 30 years old, I was now heralded into the world of design in New York and design in other places and because I was the client for some of the biggest name architects in the country.

And we stuck pretty much to New York architects, but later on, we branched out to some of the other ones around the country who were really good, like Harry Wiest in Chicago andand some of the others. We damn near ran out of good architects in the state of New York and nearly leverything had to be drawn in those days. You know, there was no CAD and so everybody had to hand draw andandandand create drafting offices forfor doing this. But it was a fabulous experience. I was...

DT:How did you get these interdisciplinary teams to strike a balance between something thatd be aesthetically pleasing, something that would work well and something that would deal with these sensitive, ecological areas that these construction projects were being dropped into?

LD:Well, we had processes for the design teams to bring their work into our office for review and the process was extremely important. And it was a predetermined process and they were bound to the process by the contract. Actually, the contract that we wrote was one of the most significant things we ever did.

We didn't use any standard AIA contract. We were looking for architects and design professionals to do more than they traditionally did under AIA contracts. Bind them contractually to the full job as we described it.

So we would bring these projects in for review and then we would give them written comments from the interdisciplinary teams we had in the office, including the construction teams. And during the various phases of a project, they would get these written comments. And then they would, their report would either be returned, say okay, or returned with comments or redo this section.

But while you're redoing the section, continue work. And so the first thing was the written comment. If that didn't work, some of us would get on the plane and go to New York and have a little conference with the design teams in New York or some other city or on the site. If that didn't work, we would have what we call the come to Jesus meeting in the office in Albany.

And everybody would sit around the conference table and we would talk. And if nothing worked, quite frankly, I'd spend a week doing drawings and I'd go and pin them up on the wall and say draw that. A few times it got down to that. Sometimes some of us had to go and worked out of people's offices. Leave the office in Albany and go to New York and work out of peoples offices there. It's amazing, the lack of training that a lot of well-known architects had in dealing with buildings that are going into small communities: thirty-five small communities in the state.

You know, in some cases, the population of these schools was larger than the population of the town and nobody even bothered to think what the towns sewage capacity was all about or what the politics of the town was, much less what the geography was all about. So it became that kind of a process. So in a lot of ways, in addition to being a client, we were an educator and eventually I headed up the research section and we would contract for research with some of the top practitioners.

People in the, at MIT, we did research documents, performance specifications for a whole bunch of things. Site design and site budgeting, the acoustical environment, the luminous environment. The Acoustical Environment was a fabulous book that we published with Bo, Brannock and Newman, Bob Newman. Top-top-top acoustics engineer in the country at the time. Bill Lamm from MIT, William Lamm Consultants and Lighting. Everybody's talking about how to get natural light in a building.

Bill Lamm wrote our document called The Luminous Environment, which is an important document to this day and everybody's still using those performance criteria instead of the performance criteria for lighting from the IES that were written by General Electric. I mean, the whole notion that you can heat a building with light bulbs is gone and the whole notion that you have to look into day lighting in a building is new.

But in 1965, at the State University Construction Fund, getting natural lighting into a building was not new. So we looked at a whole bunch of things. Even the materials in laboratories of the bench top and also the psychological issues that are important in design. A lot of people feel uncomfortable in laboratories, we found out, because there was no place for the eye to focus. The minute you put something for somebody to focus on... so we went into a lot of those kinds of psychological issues related to architecture.

We did that with the University of London and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. So we did an enormous amount of research, even in perception. And then we took these documents and packaged them in with the programs for the buildings so that they had a huge base. They had a program, a budget, a time schedule and stacks of research to go and do and design your buildings. It's unfortunate that this agency no longer exists.

But on the other hand, we were set up to do a job and when we did the job and it was over with, we shut down. How many people do that? So that was a learning experience for me for about eight or ten years that was phenomenal. It allowed me to go on the lecture circuit for quite a while.

DT: And this took you through much of the 60s and I assume that shortly after that, you came to Texas, is that right? Can you talk about how you came here?

LD: I came to Texas in 1970. You know, Texans are really interesting people in a lot of ways and two of the most interesting people I met were ONeil Ford, the architect and Sam Zisman, the planner. These people seemed to have an approach to design and doing things the right way that a lot of people didnt have. And I dont know quite how that came about, but it probably came out of this whole notion of growing up in the Depression and being poor.

But I came here to look after Sam's three adopted children in 1970 (he unfortunately got a heart attack and died) and started teaching here at UT Austin in the school of architecture under Alan Taniguchi. I taught a course in landscape architecture to 140 students seated out in this vast lecture hall. And shut my office and practice in New York. Kept one job that I had in Puerto Rico and put the car in the moving van along with my holdings and moved into this neighborhood where I am in 1970.

So I looked forward to-to being with ONeil Ford. I wanted to figure out how he did what he did. You know, ONeil Ford was idolized by architects in New York. He was far more famous in New York than he was in Texas. And I remember him getting up at an AIA convention to speak and everybody in the place stood up and applauded. And maybe because he wasnt in competition with them for their work in New York, but people idolized what he said and the work he did. And the opportunity to come here and be a father, even though I was a bachelor, and also be associated with ONeil in some of his projects was very exciting to me. Of course, also teaching at UT had its appeal. But UT Austin was not anything like some of the other schools that I had been lecturing at particularly in the, in the 60s.

DT: What was it that ONeil Ford was so admired for?

LD: You know, ONeil could speak so beautifully. He mastered the English language. He had a tinge of the blarney and he was an iconoclast. And he could rip just about anything apart and do it nicely. I've heard him and he was a historian. I've heard him actually rip apart Hellenic and Hellenistic architecture and talk about how those architects back then didnt know what they were doing. And he could be convincing about it. Now when he did a hatchet job on his contemporaries, that was even more penetrating than humorous.

ONeil was a person who knew how to cut to the quick and he didhe didnt much go along with the fashion, shall we say. Post-modernism, I remember, just about dro- and he had all kinds of names for that sort of stuff. And he was, he didn't care who he insulted. Do it to their face or in public, but if he thought your architecture was banal or trendy and not serious, hed tell you about it and everybody else within earshot. So I found him honest and I liked what he did and he seemed to have a wonderful approach and a good set of values toward what you have to have to build a building on the land.

He was very sensitive man in what he did. And very careful about limited use of resources. I think that came upcame from growing up in Pink Hill, Texas during the Depression. No education. Damn near starving to death. And how you establish an architectural practice with all those things, all those limitations and then just as soon as things get going, having World War II hit and lose offand have to go off to war and then get restarted again.

I think you learn something in that process about trying to get the biggest bang for the buck and doing good things with the least amount of materials or wearing out or things that have deleterious effects on the land. He was very sensitive to those kinds of things. Course, like the rest of us, he was more sensitive verbally than he was in practice, but we all suffer from that.

DT: So one reason for coming to Texas was to work with ONeil Ford, but I guess the other was to be teaching at UT Austin and I guess to restart your practice here in a new state for landscape architecture. Can you talk about how you both taught and practiced and how you tried to maybe bring some environmental concerns to your students and to your clients?

LD: Well, for me, in a sense, I dont know whether they mixed, teaching and practicing. It's pretty tough, at least for me. If I'm teaching, I'm so absorbed in preparation for classes and lecturing that other things fall by the wayside. And then of course, the time pressures of large amounts of practice is just... they did not mix well for me. But I was adamant about teaching here. I needed the money. Didn't have a job. But I was adamant about bringing landscape architecture as I knew it from the Olmstedian tradition here to a school of architecture in Texas.

I mean, can you imagine teaching about aquifers in 1970 to a group of architectural students in Austin? Aquifer, whats that? You know, you should've seen the spellings of aquifer that I got back on tests. What's an aquifer or this or that? They had trouble with-with the language. Architects for-for a profession thats so full of buzzwords, they have real problems with any other professions language. And so... but that's another story about English proficiency among professionals.

But I sought to bring landscape architecture to these students innot in the garden design sense. I mean, they fully expected me to get up there and start showing pictures of plants and that they were going to have to learn the names of these plants and these flowers. That's what they thought I was going to do because thats what, thats what had been given to them beforehand. But the issue was not what you plant around the building; the issue was whether the building belongs on that particular piece of land at all.

And to get students to realize, especially architecture students, that the most important decision that you make is not what to build or how to build, but where not to build? Where not to build? Sam Zisman wrote a wonderful book for the Bureau of Reclamation. Sam was my mentor. Called Where Not To Build and its the most important decision that we can make because the cost of-of reclaiming lands that we shouldnt have built on in the first place is going to bankrupt America.

DT: Can you give us some examples of why you shouldn't build in one location or another?

LD: Absolutely. You know, we have to be very, very careful of building in flood plains because if you build in flood plains, somebodys going to have to buy up all that property. Its cheaper to buy the flood plain when there's nothing in it than when its full of buildings. So it's that kind of stuff. To go in there and make decisions about where not to build. Lot of these areas where you dont want to build areare extremely what we would call high sensitive environmental areas.

A lot of them are related to water. Theres areas that I'm willing to work in and then theres areas that I, as a landscape architect, am not willing to work in, in terms of superimposing a certain density of human development. I think any landscape architect thats willing to put, say, a resort community in an estuary is a fool. And an estuary, visually, is a wonderful place to build because you have this usually freshwater stream intersecting with a saltwater body of water. Well, New Orleans. Ninth Ward. You know, thats one extreme example.

But I've done work in Mexico with tropical estuaries that are even more sensitive and... because these-these estuaries are rich and they need to be understood. Most of them are bird rookeries. So you not only have matters of the land and sedimentation and water quality and vegetation, but youve got issues of-of-of birds, rookeries and thats, you know. So the landscape architect, or anybody whos going to go and do anything there, or an architect whos going to put up a building needs to have this information so that he knows what to do.

But in a lot of cases, the issue of where to build, where not to build is, is the most important decision. Now, in New Mexico, where Ive been working, New Mexico is very fire prone and there are areas that are going to burn up whether you have a building in there or not. And fires are wrecking havoc all over America. It wasn't an issue when they burned and there wasnt anything there, but now that theres a bunch of high priced houses that dont belong in them, everybodys making it an issue.

Or what about these idiots that go on these mountain views along the Pacific Ocean in California and then go, oops, my house fell down in a mudslide. Well, you know, I'm not too sympathetic to these people and under Disaster Relief Act, how much of that do we have to continue to pay for? It's up to somebody to say you cant do that, you know? I think we've reached the limit of how many disasters the federal government, we know that the cities and the states and the counties can't pay for cleaning up this mess. Now we're going to the federal government.

And now, the state of, the state of, everybody's complaining, includes the state of Texas, that Washington isnt paying its bill for hurricane relief. Well, it's no surprise to me. In Dallas, at Bachman Branch, which was the first stream that I studied in Dallas or in this state, is interesting because Bachman had been studied by Kessler from Kansas Sta- Kansas City. Kessler told them Bachman Branch, which flows into the Trinity, the Trinity River drains all of Dallas. Its got two-two major forks, the West Fork that comes out of Fort Worth, which is about was, when I was working there, the most polluted stream in America, and the East Fork comes out of Dallas, which was probably the most pristine. And it all meets in downtown Dallas.

So [coughs] but at Bachman Branch, Olmsted said define the land that floods. The hundred - you might say, lets say thats the Hundred Year floodplain. Put a parkway on one side and a parkway on the other side. Build homes only on one side of the parkway and leave the stream in the middle that floods between the two parkways as a park strip and you make this continuous. And you do this all over Dallas with all your streams that flood.

And you get an open space structure of where not to build for the whole city based on this study of its natural features. Well, the City of Dallas didnt pay any attention to Kessler and people built really expensive houses on Bachman Branch where they shouldnt have built. And then they expanded Love Field and they, oh, God, Dallas has done some of the stupidest things. Dallas extended one of the runways into the upper part of Bachman Creek and filled in the floodplain.

By that time, nothing was working. Everybody was getting flooded out and the city was spending millions of dollars on pumps to pump storm sewage and-and-and sanitary sewage out of this low-lying area. Finally, when I was studying it with Health Associates, we looked up what they asked us to identify what the alternatives were. And we identified the fact that the City of Dallas has already spent more than what the value of the real estate was along Bachman Branch in public improvements to keep those people there.

And we suggested that they buy the floodplain and buy these people out. And that was the first time, to my knowledge in Texas, that a City Council voted to buy impacted people out as opposed to going in there and deepening the channel, concrete lining it, putting in more improvements. Well, what the hell, you going to go and concrete line these peoples scenic beauty? That had gotten down to be the only solution. So the solution was instead of conveying more water, buy out the flood prone areas.

Course, these people didnt want to sell because they, you know, they want to live there. So the city was smart, they took the value of the house and put it in an escrow account and they said whenever you want to sell, here's the money. The offer still stands. So the critical decision is where not to build. The City of Dallas could've saved billions in costs to municipal improvements just by paying attention to Kessler and not building where he said. (misc.)

[End of Reel 2350]