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If you simply must be alerted whenever an earthquake erupts halfway across the globe, or for that matter just about anywhere, then head on over to the USGS Earthquake Center and subscribe to one or all of their RSS feeds. New landscapes and extinguished geographies syndicated and delivered to you in real-time.

Beached

Some weeks ago Pruned discovered Chicago's North Avenue Beach — and its tideless, shimmering blue-green waters; its unsalted offshore breezes; nearby multi-billion dollar seawalls as sculpted by the Army Corps of Engineers; the immigrant lakefill; and Lake Michigan's low E. coli count.

Clearly there were just too much to keep us entrenched along the shoreline and away from our blog. But we simply have to come back and share with our readers this satellite image of the groynes seemingly jutting out like spinal projections from Lake Shore Drive to keep the relentlessly drifting sand at bay.

These are the self-replicating, self-similar geology of the city's mercurial edge.



Groynes, or groins, are built to control and modify beach erosion. Usually constructed perpendicular to the shoreline and with timber pilings, steel sheet pilings, concrete and/or rock barriers, they act as dams to block the flow of sediment. Unfortunately, this also reduces sand replenishment on the downdrift side, necessitating the construction of another groyne. And then another and then another and then another, conceivably down the entire stretch of coast, domino-like.

Which really makes us wonder what monumental earthen hydrotactics will be devised to fight off the coming post-glacial Flood. And whether they'll set up the opening scenes for La Jetée II.

Strandbeestmovie

Many of our readers leave comments to posts published weeks or months earlier, and as such often go unnoticed. Or so we suspect. Therefore, we're moving one recent comment to the front, an announcement by Alexander Schlichter alerting us to an upcoming documentary about Theo Jansen and his strandbeesten. The shooting starts today.

“From 22nd June until 6th July we accompany Theo Jansen to London,“ writes Schlichter. “There he has an exhibition at ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) and the strandbeesten will walk on the Trafalgar Square. I try to write an article each day about our shooting.”



Perhaps it's entirely possible, if one loiters long enough in the general production area, that you could come away with a cameo appearance in the finished film. But anyway, while the team is shooting in London, their diary will be published here.

Link:
Strandbeesten

In the Archives:
Animaris geneticus: or, Intergalactic planetary landscape architect

The Parkless Park Resurfaces

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.”





Gorgeous beyond compare.

In the Archives:
The Parkless Park
Counting Crowds

Bouffant Topiary, or: 7 “terrestrial activities of aliens,” Part V

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.


(Ken Smith, “Bouffant Topiary,” Hair Gardens, Max Fish Gallery, 1998. Photomontage.)

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.


(Ken Smith, “Chest Hair Maze,” Hair Gardens, Max Fish Gallery, 1998. Photomontage.)

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.

Other “terrestrial activities of aliens”:
The Technolicious Arboretum
Extreme Horticulture
Revival Field
Woof!
Protoflorafauna
Edouard François

(Much thanks go to דוד בן יהכין for the images.)

(The title of this seemingly forgotten series comes from a comment at Le Fils de Shamgar, precisely and beautifully describing Pruned.)

Prunings XXI

(Michael Kenna, Fifty Fences Taisetsu, Hokkaido, Japan, 2004. Source.)

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. (Full article in comments.)

On André Le Nôtre.

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. (1 & 2 spotted on Archinect and Land+Living and elsewhere)

On gardening on NPR.

On Moon River, n.e.w. y.o.r.c.k., drosscapes, urban scar tissues, the Kiley Gardens, synthesized integrated peripheries and de-differentiated open-ended niches, typo-hedges, manufacturing waterfalls, arches and giant sequoias, avian surveillance, Graz, Austria's real time mobile landscape, and an IDM-rescored Fantastic Planet. (Spotted everywhere.)

Dhaka

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.

Link:
Satellite Images from the European Space Agency

The Cube, the CAVE and the TouchTable

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.”

So are you getting the image of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, conjuring monumental earth-moving tricks, re-knotting the floodgates of New York to relieve itself of its teeming masses, coaxing the sea to perform arabesque self-similar geogenesis, or maybe divining intercontinental migrating wave gardens from the plains of Illinois just as Paul Dukas' score begins its final tempest? Or perhaps he's bewitching an army of guerrilla gardeners to haunt the urban hinterlands, or maybe just presiding over the future Panoptic Arcade? Or like some zoning board urbicidal maniac, rampaging through historic city centers, ethnic enclaves, squatter cities, and urban Edens?

Future Tense:
Multi-Touch Topography