The built environment: variations on a theme
I don’t leave Chico very often. I’m content to spend most of my days here. Sometimes, when I do leave, I have my regrets.
My wife and I took a trip to Ashland last week. We had a great time, but it meant I had to miss out on meeting Witold Rybczynski, who visited Chico State University as a presidential scholar. Rybczynski is an architect and the author of the books “City Life” and “The Most Beautiful House in the World.” They are a cherished part of the “urban studies” shelf of my home library. Rybczynski, along with the late Jane Jacobs, is one of the best-known critics of American cities and urban renewal projects. I quoted some of his comments about architecture at the start of the series about good and bad buildings that ran in “But this is Chico,” my weekly column in the Enterprise-Record.
Rybczynski visited Chico at the invitation of Chico State’s Humanities Center, which is sponsoring a year-long series on “The Built Environment.”
This sort of program is right up my alley — or lacking an alley, it is right up my cul-de-sac. I was thrilled to hear the Humanities Center is going to spend an entire academic year discussing this topic and that it brought Rybczynski to Chico. The program is funded by a grant from Tom DiGiovanni of New Urban Builders. DiGiovanni and his business partner John Anderson built the Doe Mill Neighborhood. They plan to build a much larger project, called Merriam Park. They are proponents of the “new urbanism” movement. While Rybczynski was here, DiGiovanni and Anderson took him on a walking tour of The Esplanade. I wish Jane Jacobs could have come out to Chico. She kept writing until the end of her life. She died in April, at the age of 89.
I may have missed Rybczynski’s visit, but I hope to be here to catch a lecture by Mike Madison, one of the speakers featured in Chico State’s “On the Creek” series. He’s the author of “Walking the Flatlands,” a book about the Sacramento Valley’s landscape. The book is a valued part of the “California” shelf of my home library.
Madison will be speaking at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 in the Rowland-Taylor Recital Hall on campus. It’s a free Chico Performances event. His lecture will focus on the human landscapes of the Valley. This is a variation on the theme of the built environment. Farming has completely altered the natural landscape of this region.