Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Next, the officials asked what kind of professional help I needed. I responded that
I needed a bioengineer/wetlands person, a landscape design company, and an artist to
help me make the sculptures. They appointed the needed people and gave us food
and housing but no salaries. The landscape design group assigned to us was the same
group that had created a previous, but unaccepted, design. Unfortunately, but under-
standably, they had a little bit of resentment toward me.
Nonetheless, it turned out to be a collaborative process every step of the way.
Haung Shida, the bioengineer, told us that a water cleaning process needed seven
steps. Margie and I walked and walked the park site until in the third week she blurted
out, “FISH!” and then began to rough out the size of the seven features. I stayed ten
weeks, completing the conceptual design and making a model that was sent around
the city for citizen response. Our design to remove the floodwalls to create places for
fish to feed and to give people access to the river met with great resistance from the se-
nior engineer. Nevertheless, after a very lengthy public and private approval process, I
learned through e-mail that the park would be built. Quickly abandoning everything
I was doing, I set off for Chengdu. There, I discovered that the blueprints were based
solely on the concept plan with few or no accurate details. A two-month trip became
a year as we designed the details in weekly meetings. We were the first foreigners to
work within the government, and it was not easy. My son, Jon, worked as project di-
rector with me and a dedicated staff of four bilingual Chinese. Many Chinese wanted
this park to be perfect, and an exceptional dialogue had been initiated with the public.
Many people participated in the design, including a forester who persuaded the plan-
ning bureau to make a forest with more than one hundred species of plants and trees
from nearby Mount Emei.
Construction began in February 1997 and was finished in April 1998. Five differ-
ent Chinese companies worked together on the project. Halfway through the con-
struction, when I asked directors of the companies if they knew what they were build-
ing, unbelievably, they said, “No.” This precipitated a twelve-hour meeting that
finished with food and dancing. The garden was built without any high technology.
The head of construction said to me, “Look, Betsy, we are going to build this park so it
works; we do not have money to make beautiful buildings, but we can make a plan
that will be good for two hundred years.”
There were only two bioengineers in China. Miraculously, one, Huang Shida, was
in Chengdu. He tested the wetlands plants and set up a lab overlooking the site to di-
rect the construction for one year. He tested the garden's effluent for a year after com-
pletion, finding that the filthy river water was indeed returned to a drinkable quality. I
learned after the garden was complete that he had written thirty-four letters to the
mayor urging that the garden become a real biological system. I also learned that
Zhang Jihai, the special assistant to the mayor, had said that he would risk jail to build
the park, although the mayor said that he would not risk jail. That is how the park was
built (fig. 21.2).
When we tested the system and it worked, everyone breathed audibly. Yu Guan
Yuan, an eighty-three-year-old, revered intellectual and director of the Academy of So-
cial Science in Beijing, asked to be carried around the park because he couldn't walk.
