Friday, October 16, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Taking Down the Fences
Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.
from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.
This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/
A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.
What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.
Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.
from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.
This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.
What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.
Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.
Stretch
While me and Yoshi were wandering around the soccer pitch this morning, the only place that allows for something approaching mindless wandering in my immediate neighbourhood, I caught myself stretching the grass outside the fences and up to the neighbours' front doors, and thinking - well, why is there a road there? The grass should keep going, and the cars could drive on the grass. (And so on) And I realised that's what I do: see a site, and apply a solution. It's what drove many of my projects: the water in the laneway was an opportunity to plant something, the void under the park in projekt square got me thinking about storing storm water there, the grass on the edge of the railway lines makes me think of herds of cows. Sand blowing up and making hills at Middleton Beach makes me wonder how to us the process to build a useful new land form. It's how I think. Is it how all designers think?
THE NOT-SO-RADICAL CENTRE
extracts from
PRACTICE REVIEW
In reviewing a landscape practice, the statements of the practitioners can be used to measure their practice against the evidence that they themselves give of their work.
...Temporality: a nice idea, a seductive idea. It’s seduced a lot more landscape architects than these two[1].
In a landscape context the use of plants makes it a given – what grows, decays: implicit change over time… temporality is also a claim set against notions of fixity, the building, the white gallery space and the museum all fitting this category when the category was named[2]; the pot, the garden bed and the street curb are their landscape architecture cousins. “The Garden in Movement interprets and develops the energies found in the place...its name refers to the physical movement of plant species on the land, which the gardener interprets in his own way. Flowers grown [sic] in the middle of a path oblige the gardener to choose: should he conserve the passage or the flowers? …The design of the garden, which constantly changes, is the result of the work of the person who maintains it, not an idea developed on the drawing board.”[3] In this context, unmediated use of hard materials is a practice against temporality: sure they break down, but everything breaks down eventually. In the words of a master of change, “Everything passes/Everything changes/Just do what you think you should do.”[4] To respect the claim we would therefore ask what is the time frame referred to, what do you mean by change, who/what are the agents of change? How does the stone wall of the emergency services memorial “unfold like a blanket”? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered.
How close do the two sides of the triangle come together?
…if they are not close enough, then there are a number of options. You can change the story or be better at the practice. Perhaps that is about being brave. To claim a radical practice requires that I check my success against the claims I make with clear and transparent processes, if not to the world at least to myself.
[1] A project that has engaged with it in a real way, I would say, is Section 8. This project was a short-term act, that because of its success as a space remains, and the ‘built’ form that was otherwise (supposedly) destined for the site has been either canned or indefinitely postponed. It remains in place because it is interesting. Apparently when it ceases to be interesting it will cease to be. There are many others, like Sue-Anne Ware’s road side memorials, Act Two, and many I just can’t think of right now.
[2] There should be a reference here, but sorry, I haven’t got one. My guess is that it rose up with land art, systems art, performance etc in postformalist late 1950s/early 1960s, along with the break out of art from the white gallery space.
[3] Gilles Clément quoted on p13, Alessandro Rocca (Ed.), 2007,
[4] Bob Dylan, To Ramona. Copyright ©1964; renewed 1992 Special Rider Music
2008_pre-major
I just realised how this relates to small gardens: another type of public parkland._Oops, just realised those labels are back to front. The verge is of course the public parkland - for now, anyway.
mcShed_2007
McShed was a way of using opportunities on site to bring more intensity and interest to the urban environment. Any food supplier could be the organisational centre for laying out the suburb: mcdonalds works because it is currently so disconnected from site, that it looks radical to use it rethink growing food in the city. My favorite design moment was the glass-walled abatoir next to the drive-thru. I think it's nice to be able to give the mcDoanalds customer something back, and this is a moment of theatre. It's a drive thru theatre...
MVRDV are the obvious precedent for thinking about urban systems. What my work does differently is tries to engage with a history of farming that is pre-industrial, and formally has an organic lyricism.
This image from MVRDV's project Pig City, sourced from: www.nextnature.net/?p=147
Saturday, October 10, 2009
taking down the fences
Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.
from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.
This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/
A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.
What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.
Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.
from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.
This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.
What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.
Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Bringing architecture and nature together
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Quest for a Radical Centre
Noel Pearson, 2007:
We are prisoners of our metaphors: by thinking of realism/pragmatism and idealism as opposite ends of a two-dimensional plane, we see leaders inclining to one side or the other. The naive and indignant yaw towards ideals and get nowhere, but their souls remain pure. The cold-eyed and impatient pride themselves on their lack of romance and emotional foolishness. Those who harbour ideals but who need to work within the parameters of real power (as opposed to simply cloaking lazy capitulation under the easy mantle of righteous impotence) end up splitting the difference somewhere between ideals and reality. This is called compromise. And it is all too often of a low denominator.
I prefer a pyramid metaphor of leadership, with one side being realism and the other idealism, and the quality of leadership dependent on how closely the two sides are brought together. The apex of leadership is the point where the two sides meet. The highest ideals in the affairs of humans on Earth are realised when leadership strives to secure them through close attention to reality. Lofty idealism without pragmatism is worthless. What is pragmatism without ideals? At best it is management, but not leadership.
As one rises above the low-denominator compromise, it takes skill, creativity, strategy, careful calculation as well as bold judgment, prudence and risk, intelligent analysis, insight, perseverance as well as preparedness to alter course, belief and humility, great competence and an ability to make good from mistakes to bring ideals closer to reality. One must be hardheaded in order to never let go of ideals.
Idealism and realism in leadership do not constitute a zero-sum game. This is not about securing a false compromise. It need not be a simple trade-off where one splits the difference. The best leadership occurs at the point of highest tension between ideals and reality. This is the radical centre. If the idealism is weaker than the realism, then optimum leadership cannot be achieved. And vice versa. The radical centre is achieved when both are strong.
Otherwise, you get the problem of skewing. This occurs when one side of (what I will call) a classic dialectical struggle is weak and the other pronounced. Skewing occurs not just because the intellectual analysis is faulty or weak, but because of the issues involved in working out interests in the real world and the great challenges of reality for any policy and leadership seeking a better resolution in the radical centre. No leadership is immune from the forces that impel confrontation with reality and ideals. Leaders are buffeted by reality and must contend with it - they cannot choose it. Leaders' ideals are not just innate qualities: they are often forced by events and by those around them who most ardently press such ideals. Some of the greatest leaders achieve their apex as much by being compelled by external forces as by their own preferences.
pp283-83 Noel Pearson, 2007, White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre. From The Best Australian Essays 2007, ed Drusilla Modjeska, first published as a longer essay in
Like all simple and true insights, this clear analysis that Noel Pearson makes within a critique of Australian politics may usefully be applied to other situations. Redrawing the apparent polarity of ideal design in an academic context and real-world practice through this model places good design at this apex of two sides: for myself, I find that while I am a student, although learning a great deal about design, I am not a designer until I practice, and the rough carborundum of reality smooths out some of the flaws in my concepts in a physical/practical sense and a political sense. I do not believe that I am a "designer" until I am involved in action in the world.I might also say that I am not a thinker until I speak.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
sustain 7
a collection point for ideas, processes, plans and actions to create a sustainable community in the south west of west australia, with an underlying principle that what we do will make a positive contribution to place in the year 2220: seven generations in the future.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Scale of the new garden.
Yep, there's a lot of differences. Some too obvious to mention. Most obviously they look different. One is a stinking great palace garden manicured, managed, loved and cultivated carefully and systematically by a huge squadron of horticulturalists, aware of the full import of their every action on the history of France and landscape architecture in the western world. The other is four square inches of weeds growing in a footpath somewhere in Brunswick (or was it Preston?) about which probably no human being would care if it's not even there anymore. Quite a lot more people would be fussed if the Versailles gardens got a damn good dose of agent orange.
Chance: the chance events of viable seeds somehow managing to land in an hospitable soil in a vast desert of cement, and the chance of history preferencing one species over another for a complex planting of human-preferred geometries.
Design next to nature makes an interesting question: does nature design? To bring it a more manageable size I'll use Bill Mollison's axiom: everything gardens. This is as true of plants as it is of us, rabbits and ring tailed possums: everything tries to modify the conditions that it finds itself in to be more amenable, more capable of meeting its needs and comfort and ensuring the continued survival of itself as an individual and a species.
To get to the point, it's probably more fair to ask what's the same?
Because I'm tempted to say there's no difference, from this point of view:
both of these gardens are a whole bunch of plants and other animals (insects, microbes...) struggling to survive in a hostile environment managed by human beings. What we describe as difference is often around how we, as aesthetically focused, historically minded cultural animals feel, how we consider what are the histories of these styles of garden, on the one hand the intensely managed royal gardens that speak of power and privilege, on the other the vertiginous survival despite the odds: the wandering suburbanite, roundup in one hand, lawn mower in the other, how much odder do you get than that?
I don't know about the French floral condition, but here we know these little plants as garden weeds. And weeds in our bush. From their point of view they are living organism doing what living things do: their best to survive in the condition in which they find themselves.
As far as the concept of garden goes, is it too big of a leap to consider these little gardens with as much fidelity to the notion of garden as the Versailles gardens, to the notion of public parks as a botanical garden, as a soccer field, a reserve, a suburban park, a regional park? As the garden in the main street? As the front yard? It's about scale.
Chance: the chance events of viable seeds somehow managing to land in an hospitable soil in a vast desert of cement, and the chance of history preferencing one species over another for a complex planting of human-preferred geometries.
Design next to nature makes an interesting question: does nature design? To bring it a more manageable size I'll use Bill Mollison's axiom: everything gardens. This is as true of plants as it is of us, rabbits and ring tailed possums: everything tries to modify the conditions that it finds itself in to be more amenable, more capable of meeting its needs and comfort and ensuring the continued survival of itself as an individual and a species.
To get to the point, it's probably more fair to ask what's the same?
Because I'm tempted to say there's no difference, from this point of view:
both of these gardens are a whole bunch of plants and other animals (insects, microbes...) struggling to survive in a hostile environment managed by human beings. What we describe as difference is often around how we, as aesthetically focused, historically minded cultural animals feel, how we consider what are the histories of these styles of garden, on the one hand the intensely managed royal gardens that speak of power and privilege, on the other the vertiginous survival despite the odds: the wandering suburbanite, roundup in one hand, lawn mower in the other, how much odder do you get than that?
I don't know about the French floral condition, but here we know these little plants as garden weeds. And weeds in our bush. From their point of view they are living organism doing what living things do: their best to survive in the condition in which they find themselves.
As far as the concept of garden goes, is it too big of a leap to consider these little gardens with as much fidelity to the notion of garden as the Versailles gardens, to the notion of public parks as a botanical garden, as a soccer field, a reserve, a suburban park, a regional park? As the garden in the main street? As the front yard? It's about scale.
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