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Fred Astaire as Landscape Architecture






Imagine a mountain ex-urb of catching dams, deflection walls, earth sewers and mesh-bracketed hillside roads. Single-family deflection-dam houses with self-raking zen rock gardens. A fog of pulverized boulders billowing from the occasional rockslide giving the place a touch of the arcadian. Debris basins as community parks braceleted through a creeping city.

When the mountains have been denuded of vegetation and the torrents are on their way, everyone in this precarious city will go about their daily business as usual, sleep peacefully while boulders and mud flow around them. Should their homes topple when the ground beneath gives way, remember that all the buildings here were designed like earthbound space stations inhabited by floating astronauts, or Fred Astaire.

4 COMMENTS —
  • C Neal
  • May 22, 2011 at 11:16:00 PM CDT
  • That first video needs a soundtrack of old-timey piano music played extra fast.


  • Alexander Trevi
  • May 23, 2011 at 2:54:00 PM CDT
  • Or the theme from The Benny Hill Show.


  • Anonymous
  • February 18, 2012 at 3:58:00 PM CST
  • I keep forgetting to mention this, but your blog is beautiful. Quality writing and sublimely provocative. Excellence!


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