Green wall, green house.

Some more found images:

Where is the city square?

Does the city work as a place where public life is engaging, active, interesting, sometimes exciting, sometimes reassuringly familiar and always full of the ritual of the everyday that makes us feel part of a place, that makes us feel connected to this community, our home?

We need shared public places to sit, to engage, to be together.

We need shared places to sleep, to skate, to party, to protest, to plant, to grow, to argue and to bump into each other, to read, relax, stretch, breathe, perform, observe, survey, shelter, retreat...

A community needs spaces that all members of the community can use, young and old, parent and business person, cafe owner and graffiti artist, busker and builder, painter and procrastinator alike. We have to have places where we can engage the conviviality, the discussion and debate that forms the public life of a city. These are things that happen in the public square.

If I ask myself how are the spaces in this town organised? then I cannot help but answer: apparently without thought. Albany is an unplanned city. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say it is an overly planned and controlled city which lacks any sense of vision. Often it feels in this place that one enjoys it despite the built environment, not because of it.

How can we engage in the reformation of this city as a machine for living? How can we create a shelter that nurtures our community?

We can begin by playing, by experimenting with form and space, by imagining the possible, by messing around with ideas...

...by beginning from where we are.

Now THAT is a green roof!

Look here for more inspiration: http://www.lostateminor.com/2010/11/12/norways-turf-roofs/

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, Planetary Garden – the Landscape Architecture of Gilles Clément. Birkhäuser. Basel, Boston Berlin, Broome.

[4] Bob Dylan, To Ramona. Copyright ©1964; renewed 1992 Special Rider Music

Middleton beach regrade.

image from Leon van Schaik's Idoegoram exhibition catalogue.

This image works for me because it shows what I've been trying to draw, imagining a redesign of the grassy area next to Middleton beach (the Ellen cove end.)


It's a simple idea.
You have to imagine the wall out of the picture:
The idea is to cut the grass back down into a hollow that allows the sea to occasionally wash in,
Oh no, hang on! I can photoshop that out for you. (So don't worry about exercising yr imagination muscle.)

That is a photo of the real Middleton beach under the borrowed grass.

If you go for a walk down there, you'll notice that the edge closest to the water has become quite a hill. This is due, I think, to wind blowing sand off the beach and dropping its load as soon as it hits the grass.


Cutting this open changes the relationship between the grass and the ocean - at the moment the hill running along the wall blocks visibility and access. It is a real barrier between the beach and the play area. Let the high tides to wash in and see what new spaces result. What kind of vegetation will grow?

The design potential offered by these process is really exciting.
How can the site be redesigned to take advantage? The wind is already an active agent in the ongoing redesign of the site, but how can it be used more effectively?

Dendroremediation

Dendroremediation is an emerging phytoremediation technology for cleaning up environment contaminated with organic or inorganic pollutants by using living trees to remove, sequester, or chemically decompose the pollutant.
From the point of view of dendroremediation a tree may be considered as a solar driven pump-and-treat system, which may contain a contaminant plume and prevent the spread of contamination by reducing the movement of contaminated water and the erosional transport of contaminated soil. The efficiency dendroremediation has been proven in cleaning up soils polluted with crude oil, explosives, landfill leachates, metals, pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and solvents.

DENDROREMEDIATION: THE USE OF TREES IN CLEANING UP POLLUTED SOILS
TAMAS KOMIVES AND GABOR GULLNER
Plant Protection Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
Herman Otto ut 15, 1022 Budapest, Hungary, FAX +36-1-4877555,
E-mail: tkom@nki.hu

internialities

some thoughts going through my head tonight:


embedded practice_working directly in the community in which you are living
hold the whole system in the mind; is this future a system small enough to fit?

intensity_of settlement.
(what is a city?)
regarding settlement patterns as areas of intensity and dispersal how can we reconfigure our settlement patterns in a more effective, creative and sustainable way?
on a continuum most least intense dispersed
moments of intensity within boundaries which limit geographic spread.
boundaries in time, boundaries in space.
without boundaries, but within "zones" of intensity. i don't like that word here, sounds too geographically deterministic, but moments is too ephemeral. it is geographic, it is fixed in a place for a time, and it reflects temporal opportunities
refiguring the urban/rural binary as moments of intensity in a field of possibilities.

all to the purpose of allowing other species to flourish for their own sake.

maintenance is the most import pattern information we can use to define the use and uselessness of the landscape.

what is landfill but an opportunity for life, an intensity of potentials, millions of potential sites for organisms so flourish?