Animal Architecture. With an interesting niche claimed, all it needs are more projects to post. Help them out with tips.
Delta National Park. John Bass blogs about the contested terrain of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, through which approximately 40% of water in California flows before entering San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific. Liberally covered are aquapolitics, agriculture, hydro-infrastructure and other spatial systems, from small to large scales. Also be sure to check out the non-blog part of the site.
Subterranea Australis. One of those copy-paste blogs but we're glad it's returned after a summer hiatus, with a changed name, to copy-paste some more.
Tommy Manuel Blog. This interview with the photographer Harald Finster should help you dig in into the archives. The discussion centers on the aesthetics, documentation, preservation and rehabilitation of industrial installations.
There are still two weeks left in this year's International Garden Festival at the Jardin de Métis/Reford Gardens in Quebec, but organizers have already sent out the call for proposals for next year's festival.
Since time immemorial mankind has re-imagined the idea of paradise on earth through the garden and has imagined places of great beauty. These places, by evoking our senses, have pulled us out of our everyday world to experience the sublime.
What does paradise look like today?
By reading paradise in different directions (not only the religious one), designers are invited to frame the theme by using, for example, the notion of the landscape or garden as a metaphor and framework to support a story or myth, whether religious or not. Another direction to explore would be to frame paradise within the technical or pragmatic imperative to recover the world in its primeval state prior to the destructive forces that are perceived to be undermining the environment; the notion of the lost state of “nature” as a kind of environmental and technical ideal. It would also be interesting to explore the notion of Utopia, bringing the metaphoric ideas of paradise within the realm of the real.
Building on emerging practices in landscape architecture, we ask you to imagine your garden of paradise; a creation that will speak to the history of gardening, to philosophy, to religion and to history in general, as well as to contemporary society and to your own personal history. This contemporary garden should be considered as an exploration, an experimentation and a strong expression of community. It will be a complex landscape, living and responding to the human condition, a composition of natural and artificial elements that will give meaning to everyday life. Proposed projects must demonstrate through the use of new practices the role that landscape architecture may be expected to play in our current historical and social context.
The deadline is November 6, 2009. If selected, you will be given a budget of C$25,000 to develop and construct your installation.
We have already published the above photo on this blog, just yesterday in fact, way at the end of Buttology 2. But we're reproducing it here, as it is possibly the most haunting photo we have ever posted. It deserves its own entry.
Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.
A bit later, he directs the reader to another person in this wrenching scene.
This far-gone case of destitution and misery is not the only one in this last retreat of human agony; you see another in the distance, probably a new arrive, as he yet has the strength to sit erect.
Transfixed as we were with the man in the foreground, we hardly noticed at first the other figure in the background. Even the camera seems to have cast him aside.
