[Photographs from Christoph Engel's series "Exterieur", which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out. Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the [...]
A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software [...]
April 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[Colonnade Park, photographed by Brett Milligan.] Free Association Design reports from Seattle’s Colonnade Park, an “urban mountain bike skills park” constructed by volunteers from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance: It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is [...]
[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.] This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or [...]
[Photo of Global III, by Alan Berger via NAi Publishers] Approximately seventy-five miles due west of the gleaming towers of Chicago’s Loop, Union Pacific Railroad, the United States’ largest railroad company, operates the Rochelle Global III Intermodal Facility, twelve-hundred acres of switching yards, train tracks, loading facilities, and container-sized parking spaces. Rochelle, a small Midwestern [...]
February 21, 2011 – 8:00 pm
FASLANYC posts an interview with pioneering Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, who I’ve heard speak a couple times and always been impressed by. They talk about the origins of Yu’s firm’s name (Turenscape), how Yu worked to convince Chinese officials that landscape architecture was a useful discipline, what defines a productive landscape, and the relationship [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Fantastic Norway's 2005 installation "Polar Night", built in the Arctic town of Bodø. A total of 40 daylight lamps -- bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy -- were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted [...]
December 3, 2010 – 5:27 am
On his blog, Rory Hyde interviews Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young at Thrilling Wonder Stories 2. I’m particularly taken by an idea the three converge on at the end: GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be [...]
November 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm
[An image from Mark Luthringer's "Ridgemont Typologies"] In an excerpt on Slate from his latest book (Makeshift Metropolis), Witold Rybczynski asks the question: what kind of cities do we want? Judging from the direction that American urbanism has taken during the second half of the 20th century, one answer is unequivocal—Americans want to live in [...]
October 26, 2010 – 6:21 am
[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic's "Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed. There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette [...]
September 27, 2010 – 10:27 pm
FASLANYC writes about the possibility of re-thinking the constitution, role, and importance of the maintenance manual, an idea which seems to me to be wholly appropriate to the practice of landscape architecture. Surely the languid pace at which the commands contained within a maintenance manual are executed (as FASLANYC suggests, “manual” need not be read [...]
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm
[Detail from Andrew tenBrink's "Staging Ground"; all images in this post are from "Staging Ground"; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink. In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent [...]
["City Market", a photomontage of the negotiated space of flower market in Bangalore, from Mathur and da Cunha's 2006 book and exhibition Deccan Traverses; image via Places] In addition to describing a theory of the transactions that govern the interactions between property owners, Roger Sherman’s “Counting (on) Change” also makes the broader argument that architects [...]
FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy. Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors [...]
This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter [...]
[Aerial photograph of sludge mats swirling in the Los Angeles River by flickr user Vision Aerie] As we’re about to jump scales in our reading of The Infrastructural City — from the post-natural ecologies and mining operations of the first section of the book, “Landscape”, to the networks of cell towers and cable lines featured [...]
[Prepared Greenaid seedbombs, awaiting dispersal; photograph by Fletcher Studio via Sustainable Cities Collective] Design Under Sky wrote about this a month or so ago, but given that we’re talking about the Los Angeles River, lo-fi landscape interventions, and that Brett Milligan brought it up again, it’s probably worth taking a moment to mention the Greenaid [...]
You’ve arrived at week two of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here — taking particular note of the index of contributing posts for the first chapter, which tracks the sprawl of the discussion across other blogs. [The lower reaches of [...]
April 23, 2010 – 12:00 pm
[A model built by Alan Berger, Harvard graduate student Gena Wirth, MIT professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf, and CEE graduate student Jeff Rominger, to test for the optimum design of pollutant-removing vegetated channels, as part of Berger and P-REX's Pontine Systemic Design; image via MITnews.] I love this: [T]he Pontine Marshes project [...]
For various reasons (vacations, other projects, et cetera), I have failed to direct readers of this blog to the interview with Kate Orff (of SCAPE) that FASLANYC posted about a month ago. The interview touches on, among other things, SCAPE’s “Oyster-tecture” project for the Rising Currents exhibition, strategies for expanding the engagement of (landscape) architects [...]
