The Highline as greenroof

The Highline "before"

and after.

All 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.

AEC greenroof

For those of you have averted your faces, maybe it's time to take a new look at the Albany Entertainment Centre:

Now THAT is a green roof!

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

Things I like about melbourne

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

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.

this side of pinaroo_2007

using landfill on site to create an active topography.

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.

projekt laneway_2005

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.

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.

D.I.R.T.

check these guys out, they've got me very excited!

http://www.archinect.com/features/article.php?id=45200_0_23_0_M


Also, Phytoremediation,
and Duisburg-Nord



Looking at DIRT through the question "What can this practice teach me that will help my own practice?"
a) a precedent for working on site at a powerful and proactive community level.
b) phytoremediation as a valid action
c) a new way of thinking about site: as part of the ongoing process of globalized capitalism.
d) whose voices do we hear, when we design this site?
e) This project forced me to look at Robert Smithson in a new light: he is actually really interesting! And what I am reminded to do from this is to question my assumptions!

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?

Green Gutter

Walking the streets and laneways, coming across one of these beautiful gardens is such a joyous moment!

Ella's site

Discaria pubescens, Hairy anchor plant.


Ella and I went for a drive to get out of the city today, to visit her site, near Marmsbery.