From Earth Science Picture of the Day, the amorphous, self-organizing and self-destructing parkless park as breathtakingly enacted by a million European starlings: “During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night.”
Ken Smith here suggests possible topiary tactics for the landless and absurdly style-conscious urban dwellers to get a leg up on their fashionable rivals.
Says the landscape architect: “Hair design and garden design have similarities. They are both organic, grow and are manipulated. They have to do with style, fashion and pretense.”
So quite possibly a trip to a Alexander McQueen boutique would also merit a stop at a Home Depot afterwards.
Of course, these photomontages hint at even more provocative acts of body modification: the self-mutilation of actual living tissues as spatialized in the Transgenic Zoo and the Brave New Edible Estates. Michael Jackson as a legitimate landscape concern.
On the announcement that no landscape architect sits on the London 2012 Olympic Delivery Authority's design panel, Kathryn Moore, president of Landscape Institute, responds on Building Design.
On PARKitecture. “The idea of designing with nature flourished in the National Park Service during the early decades of the twentieth century. Architects, landscape architects and engineers combined native wood and stone with convincingly 'native' styles to create visually appealing structures that seemed to fit naturally within the majestic landscapes.”
On Toronto's major urban projects and such: 1) the Central Waterfront Design Competition was won by West 8; 2) Bruce Mau's incoherence (and perhaps inexperience with large-scale landscape design) is turning Downsview Park into a fiasco; 3) just recently realized how great Spacing Wire is; 4) no progress yet on the zoo and sky tunnels unfortunately.
From the European Space Agency comes this “multitemporal” satellite image of Dhaka, Bangladesh at the confluence of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers. Prismatic, incandescent, and curiously, palpably supple. Tissue-like. Soon after discovering the image (and also this image), the BBC reported on the factory riots in Dhaka earlier this month, one of the many civil, political and religious unrest in the country this year and last. So if anything, this synchronicity highlights the often jarring contrast between the somber, lived experience on the ground and the hypnotic beauty of satellite imagery: the paradox of Icarus.
Here are some übergadgetries that may facilitate the visualization and manipulation of complex data sets while simultaneously fostering more meaningful collaborations. That is, of course, if your office can afford their steep price tags and have the space in the studio to put them in.
The TouchTable is “an easy to use display device that detects the location and movement of users’ hands on its surface to dynamically change a projected image in real-time.” And while standing with the design team, perhaps even with the clients, everyone can interact with the screen with simple, intuitive gestures.
So imagine a shoal of hands and fingers recontouring swales and berms, rearranging town centers and Olympic venues, erasing entire neighborhoods with the fanatical zeal of a developer, and even plotting out evacuation routes during times of natural disasters.
With gentle pressures and soft caresses.
But for something that's immersive, try a CAVE, such as the one in the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago. As the name somewhat implies, the CAVE is a “surround-screen, surround-sound, projection-based virtual reality (VR) system. The illusion of immersion is created by projecting 3D computer graphics into a 10'x10'x9' cube composed of display screens that completely surround the viewer. It is coupled with head and hand tracking systems to produce the correct stereo perspective and to isolate the position and orientation of a 3D input device.”
If you like, have a look at this landscape architecture thesis in which a CAVE was used to design and code a virtual landscape of an Australian Aboriginal creation narrative.
For something that's completely immersive, try the Cube at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign. “The viewer/subject in the Cube enjoys a completely untethered visualization experience. A twenty-four sensor wireless Ascension MotionStar tracking system transmits 6DOF information from the subject. Active stereo is viewed through a Stereographics LCD shutter-glass system. Spatialized sonification is afforded each subject through head-related transfer function-generated sound, based on information from the Motionstar system.”
Anyone drooling yet?
“Additional data gathering/presenting devices, such as hand-held wireless computers, wireless microphones and wireless cameras can be incorporated in an individual experimenter's research.”
“When Ages grow to Civility and Elegancie, Men come to Build Stately, sooner than to Garden Finely: As if Gardening were the Greater Perfection.” — Francis Bacon, 1625
“Son los despojos abiertos de la habitación del hombre, el mapa vertical de sus diferencias, la obscena muestra de lo que las paredes ocultan (duchas, papel pintado, manchas de grasa en la cabecera de un lecho).
“Las lluvias, la intemperie dulcifican los colores en una misma paleta pastel. Los azulejos resisten heróicamente, y sólo caen uno a uno.
“En fuerte competencia con los edificios que vendrán, las medianeras duran poco tiempo.”
For more on “medianeras,” read (or BabelFish) Millán's article El arte de las medianeras. And for a bit of provenance, I stumbled upon the photographs via Millàn's wonderful article on pictorial stones, which I linked to in an earlier post.
One early morning last April, a mudslide buried landscape architect Walter Guthrie behind his hillside house in Mill Valley, California, outside San Francisco. He was 73.
Embarrassingly I've never heard of Walter Guthrie before posting about his interview with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and soon afterwards, he passed on quite easily into nonmemory. After a second chance encounter, however, I've not been able to avoid thinking about the circumstances of his death.
Last March, “when the rains started falling and didn't stop, Walter Guthrie's concern grew for the hillside he cherished behind his Mill Valley home.”
After cracks formed in the soil, he hired a contractor to install a piping system to handle runoff from the saturated canyon.
Then, on Wednesday, in the predawn darkness while he was checking to see if a backyard culvert was clogged, an avalanche of mud coursed down the steep slope and buried the 73-year-old landscape architect.
A steward of the land suffocated by his own ward.
Particularly heart wrenching is this account of Guthrie's wife by one of the rescuers: “I was told that she was shining a flashlight out the window to give him light to work and she turned away for a second and when she looked back the slide came down and hit the back of the house.”
And then “neighbors above the slide say they could hear Lisa Guthrie screaming.”
As in any disaster wherein landscapes and lives are momentarily or permanently become out of sync, the aftermath and the scenes of rescue later that day must have been charged with frenetic incomprehension; with anxiety over a still moving, still lethal earth; and with inconsolable grief.
But perhaps therein one could interject a thought, a possible way to rescue Walter Guthrie from his inopportune demise: He did not go out at 3:00 in the morning to inspect some backyard drain! Rather he ventured out to make one last landscape, his greatest work, the one to be called his masterpiece — himself!
To graduate from a “yeoman farmer” to be landscape.
And let's even rescue this new landscape from the rescuers themselves, from an eternity hermetically sealed in satin and cement, and transport him away from that hillside to somewhere secluded, say, western Montana — forever undiscovered, forever floating inside the earth like an Archaeopteryx in akimbo, progressing silently in darkness from zoology into botany into geology and, given enough time, say, a few billions of years, into astronomy.
Meanwhile, there'd be new gardens in rich efflorescence, ossified bedrock dislodged from the living, new fields where carrion feeders can graze. And there'd also be new caverns and pits, a karst terrain of vessels and intestines and bronchi to be explored by the indigenous population. Guthrie, of course, would at first seem to be an intruder, but once the initial apprehension by the shy and the nervous critters that dwell in this place subsides, he would then be fully welcomed.
If one objects to a terrain unseen and unknowable to the human species being considered a landscape, then we can suppose to transport Walter Guthrie from that hillside — or for that matter, other landscape architects as well, and here we're talking dead ones, obviously — to the Body Farm. This infamous forensic anthropology research station isn't entirely accessible but it's not completely isolated either and thus enough for our own purposes.
There, as the body begins to liquify — to flood the earth with itself, as it were — a team of surveyors will keep a close watch, reporting everything that happens in this new geography. Lodge now above ground on one or several contour lines, amongst real vegetation, there will be new fountains to witness, the uplifts and subductions of anatomical landforms, the successions and regressions of ecologies. And all of that lovingly recorded, annotated, analyzed and discussed amongst colleagues and friends alike like cherished memories.
So if one were to say that there was only death and grief on that hillside that day, they would certainly be mistaken.
