Preview: Designing the New West
What We Can Learn from the Great Western Ranches
By Courtney Lowery, 4-08-09
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| Photo by Cheryl Ungar. | |
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Ekaterini “Kat” Vlahos left her native Colorado as a young architect and when she returned after more than a decade, she found a landscape markedly changed.
The wide-open spaces that so epitomized the Colorado she grew up in had been filled in with houses. Ranches had given way to development and not necessarily “good development” either.
As an architect, she saw an opportunity to learn from the built landscape that was there before the new construction. As a new academic, she saw a need to curtail what she calls this “loss of culture” through research and education.
“What it turned into was rethinking my practice as an architect,” she says. “And teaching architecture through a very different set of eyes.”
Vlahos, a featured speaker at next week’s Designing the New West conference, is now the director of the Center of Preservation Research at the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning, where she has been a professor for the last 13 years. Her work centers on studying the vernacular architecture of Western ranch settlements and what that can teach contemporary planners, architects and developers about how to live with the Western landscape instead of just on it.
“It’s about going back to the basics in a sophisticated way,” she says.
After studying rural architecture across the globe, Vlahos still finds it Incredible that the first settlers of the West moved to such an unhabitable place and were able to make it habitable. There are lessons to be learned from that, she says.
Among them:
- On Western ranches, “there’s a response to the environment,” Vlahos says. The buildings are in “context” with their surroundings and work with the topography instead of against.
- Homesteads are resource efficient, meaning they are often built from and with what is there on the site already, incorporating wood, dirt, water or sun.
- And they are “energy efficient” in a basic way, meaning the buildings are built to support the tasks they are meant for, i.e. shops, sheds, livestock, storage, living, etc.
“Given where we’re going, more and more, we’re coming to the conclusion that that is the best way to live,” she says.
Vlahos grew up on a ranch in Northwestern Colorado, where, as she puts it, her father was a “sheep man.” Her career has allowed her explore that background in unique way.
“There’s something that is kind of tied to your heart when you’re brought up that way ... when you’re tied to the land,” she says. “It’s taken me back to my roots in a way I never expected.”
It has also allowed her to help preserve that culture by exposing her students to it. Vlahos works with about 30 students, most of them of suburban or urban backgrounds.
“They don’t always know where their food or their clothes come from,” she says. Often architecture students are pushed to focus with high design, she says, and that puts them mostly in tune with urban landscapes. By exposing them to the architecture that personifies the nature-influenced culture that us Westerners often take for granted, they begin to see the relationship among the land, the environment and their everyday lives.
That connection to landscape, Vlahos says, “Is vital if we’re going to learn how to build in this New West.”
Kat Vlahos will be speaking about these issues and ideas next week at our 2nd annual Designing the New West conference April 16-17 at the Gallatin Gateway Inn in Bozeman. Visit www.newwest.net/design for more information or to register.
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Comments
I spend some time with a friend at his ranch, and it is so much more friendly to wildlife than public land, while running cows at the same time. And he has all the apex predators and maybe more than most places, but has yet to have the big problems some seem to suffer. The cows stay out of some areas, on their own volition, and maybe rightly so. Smart cows, smart bears and smart wolves, and life is great. That could change. But he tells me you have to work the averages, and it would take some predation even to get up to average range loss, which his cow boss seems to not have. His ranch and range is open space NOT available to anyone. That is why the wildlife does so well. Few people on the land each year. He is providing critical habitat, water, and security that establishes a critical mass of critters to radiate out onto public and other private land. That area would be less if his ranch were to be used in a more commercial way. And there are many more like his. The one good thing about a 10,000 acre farm is that is it not a 10,000 acre subdivision, and the same goes for ranches. Just as nature abhors a void, so do developers. We ought to love the ranches for the voids they allow us to enjoy from afar.