Look here for more inspiration: http://www.lostateminor.com/2010/11/12/norways-turf-roofs/
Showing posts with label maintenance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maintenance. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Friday, November 6, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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 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.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
what's the difference?
From: http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0508/images/versaille.jpgHere's a little puzzle for you...what's the difference between the formalist garden at Versaille, and this little garden in Brunswick?
el loco
A tarot card might seem like a strange thing to post here where I’m supposedly examining landscape architecture practice, but this card has today summed it all up. The Fool is for being "liberated by free will and trust, which lead [one] to explore simple speculations for their own sake. I don't know where I'm going, and I don't care where I've been. I only know that, as the hero of my own story, it's for me to find out. For, like Alice, I'm on the verge of stepping into a rabbit hole; unless I stop short and play it safe, I'll know soon enough where following my own feet has landed me on this curious venture."
It's true, it's true it's true! This is just how this exercise is going at the moment. I'm not sure how I'm going to practice or exactly what I want to achieve in any sphere right now, and that does make me feel like a bit of a fool, especially in the university system. Nonetheless I am completely happy with my process, a carefree wander, a dérive, if you like. It's an exploration taking me to places I would otherwise have bypassed unnoticed and I feel pretty safe in the knowledge that sooner or later I am going to get where I’m going, wherever that is.
In regards to "expanded field" I am glad I had to go look that up for myself, because it gave words to what I was on the verge of doing. Without the words for this I just couldn't get into it.
Expanded Practice Offers Greater Choice For Dental Patients In Williton
The Stoneleigh House Dental Practice, based in High Street, has recently undergone major improvements and expanded so that alongside Dr. Andre Louw there are now three other dentists working part time.
The practice opened its doors to the public some weeks ago, but the formal opening was held last Wednesday, May 6th.
It’s a great relief.If only I lived in Williton it would all make sense.
The fool asks you not to take yourself too seriously - and that has got to be the best advice to me, ever, who is far, far too serious. (Just ask anyone who’s ever played scrabble with me!)
To talk about my practice today in tutorial, as usual I made a pretty good job of avoiding the issue. I’m not finding it easy to be clear about what it is.
Should I ask myself the hard questions... or just carry on following my nose for a little while longer...?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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?
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?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Green Gutter
Walking the streets and laneways, coming across one of these beautiful gardens is such a joyous moment!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
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