Fakes

Author(s): Ellen Grimes

Source: Log, No. 5 (Spring/Summer 2005), pp. 15-20
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765020
Accessed: 30-11-2016 22:13 UTC

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 Fakes
Ellen Grimes

i. Dead Bodies

So this past September, I'm riding my bike along Ston

Island Avenue in the southeast side of Chicago. I'm on
route officially recommended by the city, surrounded
dense marshland, loud with insect, bird, and water no
buildings. Hardly any cars. Occasional trucks.
A white-and-blue cruiser makes a U-turn and pulls
over. There's no sidewalk or median, so Pm sinking in
wet grassland, wondering if Pve violated a bike ordina
The window rolls down and one of Chicago's finest
yells: "What YOU doing here? What you doing HERE?
out. Clear out now! We find a lot of dead bodies around

here." So I say, "Okay."

Problem was, clearing out meant a long ride. I had
visited the site for Chicago's new "economic-ecosystem
project, the Lake Calumet Initiative, and I was in the m
of a stretch of marshes, dead steel mills, port facilities
landfills, more than ?0 times the size of the Loop. A r
of Chicago's original marsh landscape ran along one sid
the road. On the other, a toxic waste incinerator, aban
ever since it exploded in 1991. Since then, swamp gras
taken over the incinerator site, making it almost indist
guishable from the marsh. Where were the dead bodie
the pristine wetland to my right, or the toxic wastelan
my left? Or was the cop just playing with my scrawny
pie -white ass, faking me out?
Lake Calumet is one of those French-voyager place
names you find all over Illinois. A calumet was the ree
to make the ceremonial pipes Midwestern Indian group
passed around at meetings. Calumet makes some sense
name for this place, since the landscape is overrun wi
reedy plants, and the air can stink. But it's hardly a lak
Never has been. It was always just the wettest excuse f
territory that real estate could claim.
Lake Calumet might be the ultimate postindustrial
scape: it's one of the largest wetlands in North Ameri
the site of the most contaminated brownfields in Chi
It's an impossible, inseparable mix of purity and toxic
density and vacuity, bio tic and machinic productivity.
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1. City of Chicago, Department of En-
vironment, search "Calumet Initiative."
http:/ / www.cityofchicago.org.
2. The $7.6-million project was awarded
to StudioGang Architects after a public
competition in 2004. As of this date, the
project is on hold.
]. Kari Lydersen, "Your Mayor Could
Clean Up This Mess," Chicago Reader ,
June 18, 2004.
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most diverse ecological zone in the region, it became the
city's manufacturing center after the Civil War, its mucky
real estate cheap, offering easy and unlimited access to water
for transport, processing, and waste disposal. It was the
source of factory jobs that drew people from the American
South, Eastern Europe, and northern Mexico, and produced
the Southside's peculiar accent. In 1880, Lake Calumet's port
was the busiest in the world. By 1959, with the opening of
the St. Lawrence Seaway, it had become an international
port, extending Chicago's economic and ecological footprint
around the globe.
The complexity of the area's economy reached its limit
in the 1970s. Advances in management systems generated by
new uses of information for quality and cost control, com-
bined with the aging of the area's century-old production
facilities, rendered Calumet's steel less viable in global mar-
kets. When the last steel plant closed in the early 1990s, the
region went from being Chicago's largest employer to the
site of the city's highest unemployment rates.
About this time, the city's mayor, Richard M. Daley,
newly elected in 1989, decided he missed all the trees he
remembered from his childhood, when his father was mayor.
Thus began a citywide greening campaign that has evolved
from odd bits of beautification to the Calumet Initiative, a
demonstration of "economic and ecological rehabilitation in
a complementary process" that was unveiled five years ago.1
It sought to preserve most of the existing open land, bring-
ing it under a "new ecological management strategy" that
offered a variety of new public amenities, including an edu-
cational facility or "environmental center."2
But before the Calumet Initiative can even begin, an
incredible amount of toxic waste needs to be remediated.
And that costs money. If the city accepts federal Superfund
dollars for a comprehensive clean-up, area businesses believe
they will have to shut down and that the value of their prop-
erty will drop to nothing, and the remaining industries in
the area will be lost.* EPA officials (the administrators of the
Superfund) refuse to address these concerns because they
feel that they have no expertise in questions of insurance and
land values. The standoff continues: no one is willing or able
to connect the dots between real estate economics and "eco-
logical disaster." Environmental remediation and economic
development are placed in conflict, and - for all the usual
reasons - short-term economic and political constraints win
out over long-term environmental benefits.
Technocrats would find a classic rationale for regulatory
16
Abandoned port facilities at
intervention in this split between short-term costs and
Lake Calumet, Chicago, 2005.term benefits. Neocons would count on the invisible hand of
Photo: Ellen Grimes.

the market to devise the optimal solution. But we can't pre-

tend that these two choices - between control and laxity,
between pessimism and optimism - exhaust the possibilities.
Don't these issues offer a new species of design opportunity,
connecting events across time, constructing alignments
between the flows of resources through economies and
ecologies? Promising to "remake the way we make things,"
this is precisely the terrain that Bill McDonough and his
partner, Michael Braungart, would seek to occupy.

2. Buddha with a Bow Tie

A friend of mine is negotiating with William McDonoug

Partners, hoping to arrange McDonough's appearance at
seminar on biology and design. Everything's going smoo
until McDonough's assistant realizes that a client's compe
tor will also be involved. A short pause only slightly soft
the abruptness of the assistant's adamant decision: "I'm
sorry. Mr. McDonough is a Buddhist. He does not believe
conflict. He will not appear."
William McDonough & Partners designed the green r
for Chicago's City Hall, but in effect, McDonough has co
ered the entire city with a green roof. In Cradle to Cradle
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4. William McDonough and Michael
Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the
Way We Making Things (New York:
North Point Press, 2002), 83, 136.
5. Ibid., 122.
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latest book written with Braungart, McDonough recounts
his role as "advisor" to Mayor Daley in creating "the green-
est city in the United States."4 There is no conflict in Cradle to
Cradle - everything can be made green and good simply by
relying upon "a coherent set of principles based on nature's
laws" and developing a "rich connection with place."5 Long-
winded and derivative, the book presents a vision of the
world that is postideological and resolutely free-marketeer-
ing. (An example: regulation doesn't work because it doesn't
offer a "positive engagement with nature.")
Cradle to Cradle is a collection of preachy business pre-
scriptions and tired success stories. Its big idea for decision
making: every business decision should have a "triple top
line" design strategy, where economics, equity, and ecology
all play an equal part in determining the result. But it's hard
to imagine how this would actually happen. Instead of solv-
ing the problem, they invent a kind of voodoo (or is it Zen?)
accounting, mindlessly ignoring an enterprise's responsibility
to carefully and systematically manage the allocation of its
resources among competing agents and objectives.
While you've gotta love the idea of Buddhist business
practice - reminder to self: buy one of those Hermes saffron
silk bow ties - it doesn't excuse naivete. Cradle to Cradle fails
to offer a coherent alternative to conventional business deci-
sion making. Instead, the complex decisions that determine
how or where or when production happens are effectively
dismissed. In much the same way that the Superfund admin-
istrators refuse to engage the economic consequences of their
decisions, McDonough and Braungart ghettoize their prac-
tice by ignoring the everyday complexities of economic deci-
sion making. You can't pay for everything you want. You
have to make trade-offs and compromises. And the impor-
tant question is: how?
Here's what they could have done, Buddha-style. Let
go of fixed ideas, bear witness, and penetrate the unknown
(this is actual advice from an actual Buddhist, Roshi Bernie
Glassman, founder of Greyston Mandala and author of On
Zen Practice I & It). A few questions McDonough and
Braungart might have asked: Why did their clients decide to
get green? How did their client organizations find the money
to pay for their services and the other resources devoted to
their projects? What were the short-term and long-term eco-
nomic consequences of their design interventions? How
could these decision-making practices be extended to more
complex problems that aren't under the control of a single
corporation? McDonough and Braungart may have found an
18
 engaging marketing strategy with the "cradle to cradle"
brand, but their superficial approach to the determination of
value and the catalysts for exchange means all that's on offer
is more of the same. For architecture, the result is a new new
urbanism, one that may celebrate the local and the authentic,
but also attaches a premium price tag to an exclusive prod-
uct. Remember, green is also the color of money.

3. Owning the fake

There are three of us, and we're doing some postindustrial

sight-seeing, driving around one of the old Calumet steel
plants, which is now a recycling operation that sends scrap
metal off to China. We park at a slip along the canal. On the
opposite bank, an ocean-bound freighter with a Caribbean
flag is being loaded with a white powdery substance. We
spend some time watching because the white powder is driv-
ing a bunch of gulls crazy and their flocking behavior is
mesmerizing. A Big Guy in a big truck drives up, says he's
security (no uniform or ID), and then asks, "Have you heard
of the Homeland Security Act? This is a restricted area in a
federal port. You can't be here." We tell him that we are
teachers interested in the area's architecture (sort of true).
He buys the story but needs to enter us into "the database."
He takes our IDs, and we stand around while he does some-
thing with a laptop in the big truck. He follows us out of the
plant, and as we pass the empty guardhouse at the entrance,
a Mexican scrap hauler crosses our path, barreling through
the gate at full speed. Big Guy doesn't even bat an eye.
We laugh, assuming that the scrap hauler, whose truck
was held together with wire and decorated with a Mexican
flag, had won the game with a truly beautiful fake. This
game was about the expediency of the fake: Big Guy's use
of fear, our tentative, ashamed reliance on privilege, and
the hauler's blissful ability to move beneath the radar. The
hauler had the resources, the scrap that would travel to China,
and the rest of us were peripheral to the bizarre scene of an
industrial infrastructure cannibalizing itself.
Is McDonough faking it? Refusing to share a stage with
a competitor is pretty competitive. Sustainability pays as a
marketing strategy because people are afraid that resources
have limits, that nature isn't bountiful, that conflict happens,
and scarcity reigns. Everybody knows nature sucks. Your
body gives out eventually; you're never good-looking
enough; your taste buds prefer candy bars to cabbage. And
all the daisies, kitties, and rainbows have to share the world
with poison ivy, sharks, and lightning.
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 The benign abstraction we know as nature is a kind of
fake similar to the benign abstraction called the market . Both
console the stewards of the "ownership society" by idealiz-
ing certain distributions of resources. Nature and markets
are wild, out-of-control cultural constructions. Calumet's
wastelands - the history of their incredible productivity and
chaotic decline - lay out one scenario for the interaction of
biological and cultural exchange. People like us - architects
and planners - were among the catalysts that made it all
happen. What's left to us is to decide why and how we would
take on that responsibility now.
As the egregiously short offspring of a professional bas-
ketball player, I was introduced to the theory and practice of
the fake early on. There was just no other way to get into the
game. Old-school amateurs like me can fake with their eyes,
hands, and feet. Real players can fake it with everything
they've got. McDonough and Braungart theorize about de-
sign and production like I play basketball - with the chump
fake. But we all know that there can be good fakes, and that
design, as artifice, as a projective practice, can produce good
fakes. Architecture and urban design help determine the for-
mats for our patterns of production and consumption. Why
not fake out nature and the markets? Put on your orange
bow tie and imagine. Let go of fixed ideas and discard the
curiously atemporal formulations of orthodox economics so
we can abandon the dusty distinctions between short term
and long term. Bear witness, and find forms of exchange
that elide the flows of economic and environmental
resources. Penetrate the unknown and play with scarcity and
waste. And always remember what Bill Russell, the Buddha
of basketball, used to say: "The idea is not to block every
shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you
might block every shot."

Ellen Dineen Grimes is an

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER WHO

PRACTICES AND TEACHES IN

Chicago.

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