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.

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.

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

Kinjarling Walk Trails

I'm not in Albany, but I can't stop thinking about getting back and how great practicing there as an embedded landscape architect will be. My latest excitement came when Sarah Toa told me there are moves afoot to establish Kinjarling walking/story trails around Albany. I think "through" Albany. Lines that cut across York street, through the middle of Woollies, lines that walk you next to the war memorial on Mt Clarence...
How to show these on the ground? A bit of dirt where you least expect it, a section cut through the asphalt, a tiled pattern meandering past the deli counter that reminds you of a songline that still exists, and will still exist long after honey ham is no longer sold there.

Connect this image with parks and gardens breaking their boundaries and getting smeared across streets and through corners of buildings.

Maybe a paving type like this


in a 20m wide strip across York street, just at the cross walk:



Alison Hartman Gardens breaking free from her confining edge.

a week in albany

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?

A line made by walking.

"...he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line."

Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking 1967

Photograph and pencil on board


Hearing about Richard Long's Line was one of the first things that made me realize I was a sculptor. Such banal everyday practice was what people were calling art? Then ok, I am an artist! This guy, and all those British land artists like him, Hamish Fulton, Ian Hamilton Finlay etc, were so influential on my gentle practice, and what I love.

Pick a daisy, one for each day of your life (this makes an empty green spiral in a field of yellow cape weed daisies, and your hands are sticky with yellow pollen and white sap)

So how come this didn't come out in four years of design exploration studies? It is a gentle, subtle thing, and I never felt like being a design student was either gentle or subtle. Even the word designer sounds hard to me, smooth, grey and perfect... none of those things is me. I like the process of designing, but don't want to be one. I'd much rather be a sculptor, rough hands, moving clay around and hammering chunks of wood. Or a land artist, walking in the dewy grass. Walking in circles.
And what has happened to my sculpture practice? Ah, now that is a long secret... some stupid idea about not documenting stuff. But if you can't show it to someone, maybe they don't believe you did it. So just occasionally you feel like maybe you didn't do it. And sometimes that thought spills too far, and you just stop talking about it, and then you stop doing it all together.
And do you stop loving it, too?

Quote and photo from the Tate Modern website: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=8971, Accessed 21st August 2009

the Arithmatic of the Suburbs

But examples of sustainable gardening in suburban situations are of limited value. In the arithmetic of the suburbs, where each positive sits between two negatives, opposite at least one negative and within an infrastructure of negatives, the net gain is never greater than zero. What is of greater importance is to change the infrastructural numeric.