mammoth » asla http://m.ammoth.us/blog the herculez gomez of architecture blogs Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:00:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 insert and instigate http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/05/insert-and-instigate/ http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/05/insert-and-instigate/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 20:53:03 +0000 rholmes http://m.ammoth.us/blog/?p=218 A couple exceptionally fresh projects slipped into the ASLA awards this year (which were just released yesterday), both by CMG Landscape Architecture of San Francisco:

“Panhandle Bandshell”, a temporary structure, composed entirely of recycled materials, erected in cooperation with the design collective Rebar.

“The Crack Garden”, which Pruned has an excellent post on, under construction.

As Pruned notes, CMG’s work seems out of place in the ASLA awards, situated amongst “projects whose budgets seem crass in an age of credit crunch and foreclosure”,  a “cabal of slick hyper-modernity and conspicuous designery”. Both the Crack Garden and the Bandshell are undeniably fresh and creative, perfect examples of the sort of user-generated urbanism (backyards, after all, are as much a part of the urban ecosystem as sidewalks) aimed at generating a diverse (social or botanical) ecology which Rebar outlined in their too-brief five minutes at the recent Ecological Urbanism conference.

]]> http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/05/insert-and-instigate/feed/ 0 a state of crisis http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/04/a-state-of-crisis/ http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/04/a-state-of-crisis/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:30:03 +0000 rholmes http://m.ammoth.us/blog/?p=116 I could be wrong about this, I suppose, but I’d say that the ASLA’s continued fixation (“a state of crisis”, “international embarrassment”) on the quality of the turf grass at the National Mall (which remains, despite the patchy grass, a perfectly functional space, as demonstrated recently by the Inauguration) is symptomatic of the kind of thinking (we shrub up and decorate) about the profession of landscape architecture which will ensure that the profession remains irrelevant and impotent for decades to come.  If, at a moment when there is more opportunity to affect real change in national transportation funding priorities than at any other time in my lifetime or to reconsider both the social and spatial consequences of an economy based on the mirage of ever-rising suburban housing prices or to confront problematic infrastructures which treat water as a problem to be shunted rapidly away from cities, rather than as a resource, the primary body representing landscape architects as a whole chooses to focus on the quality of the carpeting in a symbolic space, then we deserve our irrelevance.

And continued irrelevance would be a real shame, because landscape architecture possesses a combination of disciplinary interests (ecology, urbanism, infrastructure, a history of subtlety, etc.) and a set of the analytical tools which could give it real relevance to the challenges designers and cities will face in those coming decades.

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