Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925-2006

(Annotated photograph by Richard Demarco. Source.)

Ian Hamilton Finlay — artist, poet, moralist, and “avant gardener” of Little Sparta — has died aged 80.

Obituary:
The Guardian

Boy Soldier Gardener

While on a recent clicker-happy run through the interweb, I stumbled upon this beautiful photo taken by Flickr user “haupthase.”



Of course, I can't resist quoting J.B. Jackson. On his time as an intelligence officer in World War II and how that experience had given him a heightened sense of environmental awareness, he writes: “the military landscape provided us with a spatial order dedicated to sudden and violent movement, a set of relationships based on total subordination and anonymity, and a sensory experience based on death and the premonition of death; it was the ugly caricature of a landscape. Nevertheless, it functioned, and even its horrors instructed us in what a good landscape, and a good social order, should be.”

In other words, to train better landscape architects, reinstitute the draft and send them off to boot camp. Embed BLA, MLA I, MLA II, and PhD candidates in combat missions, for in order to understand landscapes, one must experience how they “satisfy elementary needs,” how they “establish bonds between people, the bond of language, of manners, of the same kind of work and leisure, and how [they] should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relations; spaces for coming together, to celebrate, spaces for solitude, spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them.”

You might object, arguing 1) that you're a pacifist; 2) that you can probably acquire similar range of skills from somewhere else; and 3) that it all sounds very much like touchy-feely psychoanalytical drivel.

However, 1) landscape architecture is not a pacifist profession; 2) you can, but probably not in the very short amount of time available to you in college; and 3) the visceral, concrete quality of experience afforded by combat -- for instance, your best friend dies right in front of you, a bullet through his head, simply because someone had misinterpreted the topography, exposing the entire platoon to an ambush -- should translate into actual results, conditioning students to read landscape more critically and with keener perception.

So how about it?

The Ice Show

To postscript an earlier wintry post, here are some awesome icy stalagmites sculpted by members of the Alaskan Alpine Club, where one can learn all the “non-standard stuff about mountain climbing.”



Admittedly, my interest in mountain climbing goes only so far as highly recommending the documentary Touching the Void and the neglected bergfilme of Leni Riefenstahl. I simply want to learn how to construct these monoliths.



And fortunately, the instructions seem pretty straightforward: first you attach your choice of nozzle head at the end of a garden hose and then “mix random parts of water and freezing air.” Sub-zero landscape architecture in no time.

Or if you adopt their uncompromising individualist philosophy and contempt of authority: arctic guerrilla gardening.



And then there's the upcoming 2018 Chicago Winter Olympics. Expect several of these colossal frozen spires standing side by side with the city's historic skyscrapers — one of which will be the venue for an as yet nonexistent winter sport. A skyline second to none. And for the sideshow, how about a WTC-esque twin installation at the mouth of the Chicago River? The site should still be empty.

Or farther afield, ridiculously vast fields of ice towers standing as a memorial to past and future glacial ages, where you can either do some climbing or ponder the question, what is the sound of an ice tower falling in the middle of a forest of ice towers?



It's amazing that no one has yet appropriated this freezing process to create X-treme Winter Vacation Hotspots. Better but still no less safer than K2. In Antarctica or Siberia or back in Alaska.

(All photos courtesy of the Alaskan Alpine Club.)

ike™, or: The Amazing Geospatial Intelligence Mobile Mapping and Photographic Tool

With ike™, you can gather incredibly rich, georeferenced spatial data sets with point-and-click precision and ease. Packed inside its relatively tiny but rugged casing reside a mobile GIS with a GPS, a digital camera, a compass, an inclinometer which eliminates the need for a tripod, and a laser distance meter. The laser, in fact, also eliminates the need to be on site, allowing for data collection to be conducted from as far away as 1km. The perfect accessory for The Bleex.



In a disaster scenario, for instance, you can photograph and map out the location of breached levees, downed electricity pylons, impassable points on roads and bridges, pockets of survivors, etc., all at a safe distance, then quickly disseminated at headquarters or analyzed on the field by yourself. And the photos, hopefully, should prevent, or at least reduce, the lies and obfuscations at future congressional hearings.

All it needs then is a blog editor and a wireless internet connection. Bloggers embedded as citizen soldier-engineers in post-apocalyptic disaster zones. Reading the terrain, directing aid relief traffic.

Once, for a school project, I was tasked to delineate the border of a large waterbody in a wetland using an ancient GPS device, getting as close as possible to the water's “edge,” whether accessible or not, and shouting at frequent intervals the coordinates to my partner. This had to be done a second time, in fact, after originally misreading the “edge” entirely — only to end up with mildly accurate, incomplete data sets, which someone then painstakingly entered into ArcGIS. Suffice it to say, with ike™, the entire process would have quickly produced far more extensive and far more accurate information. And also been a lot less wet.

Landscape Architecture: The Musical

I wish. But in the meantime, there is the just released Busby Berkeley Collection, which packages together five of the visionary's greatest works: Footlight Parade (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames (1934), Gold Diggers of 1935, and 42nd Street (1933).

And it's got everything: dancing skyscrapers; gravity-defying pianos in deterrestrialized spaces; abstracted, disembodied, and dematerialized nubile bodies; ornamental, self-organizing crowds; Depression-era urbanism; hotels and arcadian watering holes teeming with pre-Code connubial bliss; Renaissance perspectives on acid; phantasmagorical stage sets; and a bitchless Bette Davis. You'll feel like singing and dancing afterwards. Marvelous!

In the Archives:
MILF:02 Spatializing the Marvelous: The Musicals of Busby Berkeley

Prunings XIX

(Aerial view of a Marsh Arab floating village near Nasiriya, Iraq. Photo by Nik Wheeler.)

On the marshes of Iraq, three reports from Laputan Logic.

On ike, a geospatial intelligence mobile mapping and photographic tool. I want a dozen. (Expanded a bit here.)

On the history of geology. (Spotted at BibliOdyssey.)

On soil, an upcoming exhibit at the Smithsonian. (Spotted at transect points.)

On a wave-driven sea organ in Zadar, Croatia. (Spotted at The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.)

On hedges, cattle and tuberculosis.

Chand Baori

(Photo by Tom Rovers. Source.)

A recent clicker-happy night on Flickr brought me to the incredible image above. Tom Rovers writes: “This temple is in the middle of nowhere, after you enter it's just a giant hole in the floor with stairs all arround.” Though I suspect it's not the temple proper but its stepwell, the self-similar subterranean hydrological architecture of the Subcontinent.

It's water conservation at its most magnificent.

A Google Image search for step-well, stepwell, and stepwells returns quite a few more awesome examples. Requires sifting through the results. And of course, check out the mother of all stepwells.


POSTSCRIPT #1: Title changed from Harshshat Mata. See comments.

POSTSCRIPT #2: Can we build a few of these stepwells atop the Ogllala aquifer? Robotized and with built-in AI computers, so that as the aquifer continues to be pumped dry, they would automatically dig down to follow the receding water table. Or perhaps even instinctively go in search of other aquifers. A landscape, architectural and infrastructural divining rod. And maybe centuries later, landscape architecture students on field trips can go spelunking through a karst landscape not unlike an Escher print. Of course, I would then wonder how deeply would they be willing to go? How much of the wilderness would they be able to handle?

POSTSCRIPT #3: Meanwhile, they would be the perfect venue for productions of Don Giovanni and Faust. As the opera progresses, the company slowly descends to the waters of the Styx below, one heavy, measured, ominous step at a time.

POSTSCRIPT #4: How about an avant-garde staging of Dante's Divine Comedy?

POSTSCRIPT #5: The Fall, directed by Tarsem.

Into the Wild

(Photos by Paul Kreft.)

Because being wild — or even Nature, according to some — was never part of its program, Central Park had to put a stop to a coyote's sojourn within its precint. And so with reporters, photographers, and news helicopters in tow, New York policemen went on the hunt, finally capturing the intruder this morning. Of course, it would be an entirely different story if “Hal” the Coyote had settled just outside the park's boundaries.

Rest easy Frederick!


POSTSCRIPT #1: Another coyote article from The New York Times. Count 'em two! Two articles from the Times. Of course, they will soon be followed by a PBS special and then by an independent feature-length documentary directed by Werner Herzog. And finally a Hollywood sequel, Coyote Ugly II: about a girl's wild adventure in the big city, with dreams of becoming a songwriter, but one encounter with a tranquilized coyote changes all of that for the best and worst; the soundtrack will be awesome. So months go by, and a park ranger discovers another coyote who has somehow evaded detection all these time. And it's a female...with Hal's babies! An instant cult of Fauna Davidians is formed, rivaling Pale Male's own fan club. Hysterical coyote-watching day and night. Street vendors will start selling stuffed coyotes and t-shirts. A reunion of Hal with his mistress and offsprings is cooked up, and it will be televised live on The Today Show. Ratings through the roof! Madness! Madness! And Central Park, long the bastion of manufactured nature, will be decreed a wildlife sanctuary by mob rule, forever off-limits.

POSTSCRIPT #2: Or how about a new cable channel, sort of a cross between The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, providing current news reports and analysis at the intersection of human and animal cultures. A round-the-clock, real-time coverage of flu-infected birds entering Alaska, alligators on the prowl at a new Florida ex-urban development, the teaching of orphaned birds the ancient art of flying, pet hyenas and baboons, etc. And I would expect some of these stories, the migration of infected birds in particular, be treated like major weather events, “structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.”

POSTSCRIPT #3: Hal the Coyote died 30 March 2006. Cause of death: “heartworm infection and internal bleeding caused by his ingestion of rodent poison" and exacerbated by the “stress of captivity and handling during the release.” Poor fella. (16 July 2006)

POSTSCRIPT #4: There is another coyote on the loose in the park. (5 February 2010)