The Highline as greenroof

The Highline "before"

and after.

All 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.

Things I like about melbourne

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.

home ec

...the things you find in the corners of your bathroom.
home ecology.

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

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!

Inefficiency

Inefficiency is inherent to sustainable design.