twitter new york

Ever wonder what happens to all the data you supply online? Maybe someone makes a pretty map of it.

Eric Fischer did with twitter location data in New York.

animalnewyork.com via this isn't happiness

Looks Del.icio.us is a collection of different Delicious bookmark visualizations. They’re created with a python-based graphics library and layout engine:

webdesignerdepot.com

Green wall, green house.

Some more found images:

...goats optional

from Winter Street Architects

I'm inspired by the colours of these wildflowers carpeting a city roof, a delightful hibridity of soft clothing for the urban hardscape; a colourful coat for a building. Gentle, beautiful.

These images from the USA, from Green Grid Roofs

All images 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/

Sleeping with the enemy

After more than half a decade in Melbourne studying design, I made the big trip back across the Nullabor with not much more than the carload I left with, but a lot of other stuff in my head.

Back to the south west; I like it here.

I came back here to work. I was back here to get experience of real practice...a job with a large landscape architecture practice was surely what I had intended for myself. I applied, got interviews, wondered whether these jobs were as boring as they sounded. I looked for an opportunity to be the thing I thought that I had been studying to become. I talked to the council and I took advice. I went to interviews, refused job offers...because I didn't study four and a half years to spend nine hours a day in front of a computer screen. I did enough of that while I was studying. Sitting in a dark room by a blue screen when outside the sun is shining might be the norm, but that aint my fault!

I wondered what the hell I was doing. I wondered if it is true that I will I always be an outsider, and as someone suggested to me recently – always be one of the maladjusted unemployed.

I shifted my focus, and in so doing, took some of the dilemmas of the practice into my own mind. What had been externalised now became my issue. What I had felt resistance to externally became an internal corruption. I perhaps might have realised this if, when I put in a quote for an entrance statement, I had noticed a little bit of my discomforture; when a friend refused to even talk about a constructed wetland in the middle of great big housing development that I'd spent a good deal of the afternoon finding things to like about, I had felt a little bit disrupted.

Is this making sense?

The problem is not in the conclusion, but in the slightness of the signs...so many questions were sitting unanswered behind a pile of books that were overdue for return:

Was I being o, blase - or is hard-line green an anachronism?

Is it the transient nature of design thinking that allows this kind of distancing from the subject?

Does design research approach the impartiality of scientific research, where ethical decisions get left to someone else to deal with?

Suspend your judgement, yes, to design (in the process of designing), but not indefinitely. What is happening in Albany is so very wrong. People know it, people care about it, people are trying to change it. Sitting on the fence using landscape architecture as an excuse really was not my original intent. The kind of work that I had come to imagine, (how?) the kind of 'traditional' landscape architecture I thought I should be doing, shooud instead have felt like a moral crime, felt like flirting with the Darkside. Surely that wasn't what they'd taught us at one of the best design courses going? Surely speculative design isn't just something you do in the hallowed halls of academia? Haven't I always been a dreamer? Isn't it possible to live and dream into the world wonders of great beauty and exquisite design, that don't destroy the things that people love? Nor the myriad of non-human species. All this I couldn't put into words, couldn't put my finger on, but I could feel the resistance, and I wasn't rolling anywhere with it. And what exactly was this thing I was imaging? What was this 'conventional' or 'traditional' landscape role I thought I should be taking on? Had I perhaps allowed myself to be confused by too much post-structuralist theory, and stopped caring. Did I need to question my ability to care?

Now that I’m a graduate, I’ve been wondering what that degree will be useful for in this little old town where developers have such a powerful voice; where precious habitat is still being cleared, where harbours are still being dredged, where the urban is still sprawling and where those dedicated individuals who care and who are doing so much are often forced to work against the system.

Too many of the opportunities which I seemed to be contemplating were a temptation to undertake a practice that would see me sitting on the fence where perhaps too much landscape architecture practice sits. Working in cahoots with developers suggested compromising the very values that drove me to open my mind to the university in the first place, and would mean betraying those very people who were working so hard, so tirelessly, to protect the fragile, threatened environment that had birthed me, that had let me breathe, that had given me wings.

It was time to let something slip from my fingers and break.

So I took an unplanned holiday.

It's a useful thing to do, when things don't seem right. Go somewhere that makes you feel really good. And take the time to forget. Sure a couple weeks is nice, but even half a day can do it.

Talk to the I Ching perhaps, open the passageways for the great grey rat-headed hamster. [1]

And really give yourself to it.

Consciously holidaying makes you experience what you wouldn't ordinarily appreciate, like new smells and tastes. Bird shit, rotten barnacles, they're good fodder. Some people visit exotic overseas destinations...edges and shorelines work for me.

A really good holiday takes you somewhere that allows you to loosen the grip on your sense of self. It lets things crumble slightly. It lets you fall. As Hannah said a couple days ago, sometimes some things have to fall apart for other things to fall into place.

This might seem like an obvious statement, but you have to go to the Darkside to come home again, equipped with more effective tools.

I've been back in Albany since spring; it's taken me a while to feel out the narrative that sits in me, waiting to be told. And to answer at lease one of the questions that this blog asked in the first place, while I was still studying: What am I going to do? I'm joining forces with the many, many other brave and caring people in Albany and in the world who are attempting to protect the diversity of life.

I'm using my skills as a designer to participate in change, transitioning from oil dependency, transitioning from relying on planet-warming processes.

Landscape architecture practice can be, IS so much more than decoration.

[1] Hexagram #15: QIAN: the receptive on the mountain, Humbling/the Grey One.

"The literal animal is the great grey rat-headed hamster...with a human stance. It lives in an extensive system of burrows that suggest the underworld, where it hides a great store of stolen grain. It will attack and eat other rodents and can appear suddenly and ominously, standing on its hind legs with forepaws folded." p161 Stephen KARCHER,Total I Ching, Myths for Change. 2003, Time Warner Books/Piatkus/Little, Brown Books, London.

Bruce Mau: an incomplete manifesto for growth

#5 Go deep.

The deeper you go the more likely you are to find something of value.

#8 Drift.

Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgement. Postpone criticism.

http://www.ludosabato.com/mau/

an incomplete manifesto for growth.

http://www.ludosabato.com/mau/

Landscape Architecture and Urban Design.

Landscape architects and urban designers engage critically with the landscape and its processes.

Through analysis, research and design they seek to protect and enhance the cultural and ecological resources of the site.

Design is a process of active involvement with place making; the design process seeks to make visible the various forces acting in and on site, to understand and manipulate what is occurring there and so arrive at a design outcome that is responsive as much, if not more, to the spaces between than any point within the landscape.

In design for the public realm, landscape architecture and urban design bring an important critical awareness to site use and redesign, acting on a scale that is beyond the object and is concerned with force and activity, attempting to create functional connections.

Quality landscape architecture begins at the very beginning of new works, before decisions of placement and form have been solidified. It must be engaged at the front of the place-making process.

The design process unfolds slowly, requiring commitment from all parties – clients, the public and users. It must be resourced fully – both time and money are necessary to obtain top quality new, critical design outcomes.

DESIGN IS...

I had 5 thoughts driving from Melbourne to Albany.
Hearing what goes through your mind when that's all you've got to do is an exercise in forbearance, seven days to do not much else but stare and think. Thoughts like planets just go round and round and round in you like you're the sun.


There's plenty of time/space to work at refining an idea.
I was wondering how to describe my landscape architecture practice hopes, what I want to do in Albany and what landscape architecture is to me. First I had to define design. It took a few days...

"Design is the conscious and deliberate consideration of form/system/process."

And then I arrived.

http://www.thesweetmelissa.com/sweet_melissa/2009/05/constant-readers-so-at-yesterdays-board-meeting--the-supes-passed-that-solar-energy-contract-that-leases-land-to-a--company.html?cid=6a00d83514497653ef01156f7ff88d970c

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, 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

2008_7-12% deviation

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

projekt square_2005

diverting storm water into underground storage.

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.

Bringing architecture and nature together

This is by Terunobu Fujimoi.
I took the photo of a slide at his lecture on Wednesday night. He has a piece in the "Shelter: On Kindness" exhibition at RMIT gallery for the Melbourne fringe festival.

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 Griffith Review 16.

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.