Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sor active in the national parks movement in Brazil, who used it to win
national park status for Glass Falls. They completed their Peace Corps ser-
vice late in 1968 and spent the rest of that year traveling throughout South
America on Jon's Weideman Fellowship, looking at national parks and his-
torical cultural landmarks in eight countries.Among their most memorable
experiences were brief visits to an African settlement in a remote, arid area
of Ecuador and to an Indian fishing village in Chile's Tierra del Fuego. Jon
wanted to understand how the confluence of geology, topography, climate,
and history made each place unique. He kept notebooks of sketches and
observations as he learned firsthand about the biological and cultural zones
of South America. Those notebooks, along with other volumes of notes,
sketches, and poems chronicling his travels since then to twenty countries
on six continents, have served as a resource for design ideas.
After seven months of hard travel, the Coes were ready to settle down
but not yet ready to return to the United States.They responded to an offer
from two old friends who had started a firm in Calgary.Wanting a change
from the tropics and eager to learn about the far northern latitudes, they
moved to Alberta and worked for the Lombard North Group for 4 years.
Living at the base of the Canadian Rockies, Coe expanded his experi-
ence with biomes though work on projects on the prairies, in the moun-
tains, and in the Northwest Territories. One of his first projects was a site
plan for a community college. He persuaded the college to add to the plan
several gardens that were re-creations of local native habitats.They included
a dune with native prairie grasses and a black spruce bog. It was the first
time Coe had taken a flat site and actually created regional habitats instead
of conventional ornamental gardens, anticipating a trend that has since
become popular. Environmental science classes at the college helped plant
the bog and used the areas as learning laboratories.
Coe also played a leading role in two innovative housing projects. For
Rundle Lodge, a home for the elderly, he collaborated with the architect
Jack Long in using behavior as a basis for design. For example, hearth areas
were created to serve as gathering spaces or as places for solitude. Garden
plots were raised so gardening could be done from a bedroom window seat.
Decorative elements recalled the rural communities where residents had
spent most their lives, and the large building itself was designed to appear
small from any viewing angle, on a scale with the small towns of their child-
hoods. In the second project, a low-income housing complex, Coe and
Long substituted irregular, crescent-shaped arrangements of townhouses for
