Odlandscape

Zen Venn Garden

2011-08-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

Venn diagrams are graphic representations of all logical relationships of a finite group of sets. What we see most often are two set combinations that show two sources, such as people interested in plants and people interested in venn diagrams. Where they overlap you have people who are interested in plants & venn diagrams.

This idea of overlap got me thinking about hybridization of plants that has been practiced by farmers and nurserymen since the dawn of agriculture to produce more desireable varieties for human consumption, whether edible or visual (see Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire). Why not celebrate this hybridization with a garden that starts with a finite set of plants each with a featured trait (ie. variegated, dwarf, purple-leaf, etc.) and then add additional plants where these traits overlap. So you end up with your very own Venn garden. In my Venn garden experiment I decided to take the planting bed layout very literally, because I think that Venn diagrams themselves have interesting shapes. Here are some diagram examples for different types of sets:

3 set

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram

4 set

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram

6 set

source: http://warpinghistory.blogspot.com/2010/04/finding-antipodes-mathematical.html

7 set

As you can see, they can become quite complex, and I decided to start off with examples of three and four sets. Some CAD drafting and Sketch-Up importing left me with these two raised planter diagrams:

Thinking about how one would view the garden, I decided that I it might be better to incrementally sink the overlapping beds so you could get an overview of all the plants when standing at the top. I also had to choose some plants to fill those beds with. When I really started thinking about the overlapping plant traits, it was harder to think in terms of larger plant sets than I thought it would be, so I decided just to detail out a 3-set Venn garden. Agaves came to mind because I'm fond of their sculptural qualities, and they're the types of plants obsessive collectors really get into producing or discovering unique versions of plants with unusual traits. Here is the final, annotated rendering:

The overall effect of gazing down at a grouping of plants and focusing on their qualities, I think has a very Zen Garden quality of meditation, hence the moniker Zen Venn Garden. I guess the next step is the Euler Garden.

time-lapse audio

2011-06-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

Last fall the office space I was working in had a metal roof and above that the canopy of a very large oak tree full of acorns. The plink and plunk of dropping acorns on the metal during that autumnal season became an ambient soundtrack to our day. I started to wonder, though, was there a percussive pattern to the dropping of the acorns that we were not aware of because it happened so slowly? And if so, how could you capture a time lapse version of that sound?

R. Luke DuBois' developed the phrase "Time Lapse Phonography" to describe his systematized compression of previously created musical pieces into time-lapse tone pieces. His version of Handel's Messiah was his first well known piece that he created using this technique.

But my sound question involves not a previous piece of music, but the daily sound we hear. The internet delivered a couple of examples of such aural compressions. The first of these is 24 hours of normal living compressed to 1 minute.

The second is a more selective splicing of vocal excerpts from the first 13 years of a girl's life compressed into two minutes.

My time frame is somewhere in the middle, but I'm not certain that a microphone would be the best tool to record this oak acorn drop pattern. Instead, I began to think of the nets placed to catch the natural drop of olives in some groves.

photo by Koene G. de Boer

What if such a net was placed under the oak tree and acted as a sort of midi capture device. The pressure of the acorn hitting the net would trigger an input to be recorded, almost like a seismometer reads slight ground motion. Maybe a seismometer would even be the best tool for this process. Anyhow, after after maybe a week of recording you'd have your source material that would then need processing. Other "noise" would need to be filtered out from the data, such as movement from wind on the net, the pressure from a squirrel running on it. At the end of it you could play back the sound as a drum or maybe sample the sound of an acorn dropping on a metal roof and use that as the playback "voice" for the percussive piece. Then we have a partial soundtrack to this time-lapse video of an oak tree changing over a year.

Floating World Cup

2010-12-04T18:51:00.000-08:00

In a surprise result, Qatar was awarded the chance to host the 2022 World Cup, beating out favorites Australia and the United States. What makes it a surprise to many is that the technical assessment of the country shows that they'll have to build most of the 12 stadiums needed to host the event, at an estimated cost of about $4 billion dollars. They've then pledged to dismantle the stadiums after the event and transport them to less affluent countries in the region to spread the love of the game. This got me thinking, why not make the stadiums portable to begin with, and since Qatar is right off the Gulf of Oman, how about constructing floating stadiums?

The floating soccer pitch is not without precedent. There's one in Singapore called The Float at Marina Bay that appears to be a tourist destination as well as a place for sport.

But it's not really a stadium that you could easily transport. Many cruise lines do have some sports on their ships. Shuffleboard, volleyball, and swimming usually pop into mind, but a couple of cruise lines including Norwegian and Royal Carribean have some more elaborate plans for sport on their ships as seen in these renderings:

Still, the question is, will a regulation international football (soccer) pitch fit on a cruise ship or other such vessel? The international football association board sets the dimensions of a standard international field at 330-360 feet long and 210-240 feet wide. As of 2010, Royal Carribean's The Oasis of the Seas, is the largest cruise ship in the world. It is 1,181 feet in length, which is plenty long for several soccer pitches, but the width of the ship is only 154 feet. So, that won't work. How about an aircraft carrier? The flight deck on those seems like the perfect opportunity for introducing sport. Someone else agreed and came up with this Photoshop rendering of a golf course on a flight deck.

If we look at the dimensions of the US aircraft carrier CVN-77 it is 1,040 feet long and 252 feet across. Success! Our World Cup soccer field will fit, although with very little room for bleachers. But they would have room below deck for plenty of concessions and lodging. So, instead of being sore losers, maybe the US can let Qatar borrow a few of our carriers for the event. I'm certain we already have several over there protecting our oil interests anyhow.

Local Sweet Tooth

2010-01-25T20:49:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite lunch places near work in Austin is Phoenicia Bakery and Deli on South Lamar. While I wait for my falafel or gyro to be ready, it's fun to browse through the wide selection of import groceries from around the globe. A lot of the food is Middle Eastern and Persian, but they carry Mexican and British imports as well. The soda cooler is a microcosm of this variety, and this means some exotic beverages you won't find at HEB. The other day I picked out a Materva Yerba Mate soda to go with my sandwich, and it was pretty tasty. The green-tea quality of yerba mate cuts through all the sugar. Looking at the label, Materva is bottled in Miami, but where does the recipe originate? One Wikipedia search later, and I find that it started being bottled in Cuba in the 1920's, but after the revolution the rights were bought by the Cawy Bottling Company in Miami, who still produce it today.

Materva is certainly not the only regional soft drink out there. When I lived in Los Angeles, I found this great place called Galco's Soda Pop Stop that specializes in small label sodas and beers from around the world. Galco's started diversifying their soda selection partially in protest against the high wholesale prices that Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc. were charging them. Now the huge variety you can find there is clearly driven now by the passion of the owner, John F. Nese, who I met and who is a font of knowledge about all things soda. It feels like a living museum when you visit there.

I did notice that BevMo started carrying some of the same sodas a number of years ago, but it's sad to me that you don't find them elsewhere in other stores. When people talk about the "lovavore" food movement it's usually just referring to locally produced healthy foods. But what about local junk food and sodas? Can't our sweet tooth can be local as well. This can also preserve the local cultural history of these products. For example, Big Red, popular in Central Texas, began production in Waco, TX in 1937. There's Fago Original Rock & Rye from Detroit,Red Ribbon Cherry Supreme from Natrona Bottling Company in Pennsylvania, etc. So much history! So much to drink! What's your favorite local junk food or drink?

The Geography of BBQ

2010-01-08T16:10:00.000-08:00

BBQ is big business in Central Texas, and here it's not about the sauce, it's about the smoke. Most of the BBQ at serious joints (Smitty's, Kreuz, Salt Lick, etc.) that I've been to around Austin are smoked with Oak wood. And most of the meat that is smoked is beef. When my mom visited we went to the Salt Lick down in Driftwood, and even though she doesn't normally like beef brisket, she really liked theirs. So, this combination of Oak and beef is important. Beef are grass feeders, so you need not only the Oak, but lots of good grasses. That's a combination we have in spades in the Hill Country.

Oak smoking at Smitty's Market in Lockhart, TX

This got me thinking about the geography of BBQ. Why are certain towns and states most associated with BBQ? You have St. Louis, Memphis, North Carolina, and Kansas City as big hubs of bbq meat in the US, and why is that? And why are certain meats or sauces associated with these places. Kansas City has its thick sauce and pork spare ribs. North Carolina has a clear vinegar sauce and pulled pork.

Looking up St. Louis on Wikipedia, "before the founding of the city, the area was prairie and open forest maintained by burning by Native Americans. Trees are mainly oak, maple, and hickory." This gets back to the hardwood and grassland combination that you find in Texas. Then you also have the influence of manmade elements such as the railroads that made St. Louis at one point the gateway to the American west. And farmers who grew corn crops found that one of the best ways to transport the caloric value of corn was to fatten up pigs and then ship them in railcars. So maybe that's one reason why pork ribs are big in St. Louis still to this day.

Leaf Blow(ers) Your Horn

2010-01-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the mow, blow and go maintenance crew was outside my office in full force. The gas powered blowers are so loud, that I can't help but be annoyed. Why can't they just use rakes and brooms which have quiet, rhythmic, scratching noises that I find kind of relaxing? I know it's because they're too damn slow. But is there an opportunity in the blowers to develop something less annoying to me?

If you think about it, the gas blowers have a droning noise similar to the vuvuzela horn that's popular at soccer matches, and arguably also irritating. And during soccer matches at large stadiums I've thought how much more interesting the sound would be if each horn had it's own tone, ideally spread out among the horns so you have different notes in a triad scale with the root, the third and the fifth (for example C, E and G for the C Major scale).

Well, why not apply the same idea to the leaf blowers? Provide them with a tonal resonance and then give the option to buy attachements to change the tone of the blower so if you have a whole crew out you could have an a simple chord crew, like your earlier mentioned C crew (C-E-G) or your D minor crew (D-F-A).

A more interesting experimental music maintenance option might be to rig a single unit to switch tones as it revs up. It's never a constant stream of blowing, there's always that pulsing to slowly push the leaves and debris. Now, you could have the unit switch in a linear fashion and play a simple melody, like the rotating cylinder of a music box. Or, perhaps more avante garde, you could have the notes randomize, but maybe just for a limited number of notes all in the same scale (such as A minor 9th: A - C - E - G - B). Get a few of these leaf blowers going and you just might have some experimental fusion jazz going as you clean up the landscape.

The Personalized Landscape

2009-02-16T19:23:00.001-08:00

I saw a headline the other day about how a new wave of smaller GPS chips was coming out that was going to make all sorts of personal electronic devices "location aware". This got me thinking about how the actual locations might become aware of the electronics. That sounds a lot like privacy intrusion, so maybe we step back a little and have it more that you opt-in to be in a database (like a grocery store discount card), and when you're in a location and communication links to your cell phone then the location knows you are there. This might already be happening for all I know. I remember in the movie "Minority Report" Tom Cruise is running through this mall and the Gap electronic billboards start trying to sell him personalized items, and science fiction tends to be not too far ahead of reality in things like that.

Anyhow, what I think would be really interesting in terms of this concept in public space is how an environment might alter to accomodate your personal tastes. For example, the outdoor lighting at night might shift to your favorite color.... or maybe the dominant favorite color based on the group of people connected. So, if the space is green, and then it starts to shift to red you know something about the people around you. Or maybe the color isn't based on a favorite color, but is instead a mood indicator based on your Facebook status... such as "Aaron is feeling jubilant." So the night lighting works like a public mood ring.

What if actual elements in the landscape changed, such as the shifting of various plaza levels. Maybe for the person into parkour, you get a crazy terraced landscape, but for the wheelchair bound visitor the grades shift back to ADA compliance.

Landscape Sharding

2009-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article on scaling in games and virtual worlds, and two of the most common strategies for dealing with large volumes of users in such worlds are geographic decomposition and sharding. The goal of both of these is to minimize the response time between an action on the user side computer and the response from the server side host computer. Nobody likes to sit around and wait. I thought this somewhat analagous to waiting in line for a ride at an amusement park. Nobody likes a long line.

Getting back to the scaling concepts, geographic decomposition breaks down the game world into different areas, each of which is mapped to a host server. So, a specific island in the game might be hosted on a server, and anyone visiting that island would communicate with that specific server. In our amusement park analogy, Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland might be such a geographically decomposed area. The second technique is called sharding. In this strategy each shard is a copy of a part of the game or virtual world. So players who exist in one shard can only interact with only those players and objects that exist in their shard. Getting back to amusement parks, this reminded me of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. There's a single ride environment, but it is shared by several sets of tracks that offer slightly different ride experiences. You and your friends better get in the same set of cars if you want to stick together.

Scaling of landscape is certainly an issue that long pre-dates online games, but I do think these terms of "geographic decomposition" and "sharding" are evocative ones that are worth co-opting. The types of space that pop into my mind for applying them are amusement and theme parks, Olympic venues, festival sites, cemeteries, security checkpoints, etc. Aren't the airport security lines a form of sharding? Neighborhood parks might be more geographic decomposition instead of sharding. With a cemetery, how do you divide the site into more intimate scaled units. Again, maybe more geographic decomposition. What about box superstores such as Target and Home Depot. Those seem more sharding to me. You go there and it's almost like walking into the same floor plan no matter what city you're in. Are recreation parks with ball fields and courts a similar form of landscape sharding?

Stop-motion, Scale & Landscape

2009-01-21T19:49:00.000-08:00

This past month's issue of Metropolis magazine had an article on the stop-motion animation version of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline" that should be out later this year. The director is Henry Selick, who also directed "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach". Both of these are also primarily stop-motion animation features. I've enjoyed this style of animation for a long time now, probably first getting introduced to it in the form of the Rankin & Bass produced TV Christmas specials such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".

There are a couple of features of stop-motion animation that I think make it uniquely interesting to me. The first of these is that you're taking these physical, real-world objects and injecting life into them. In some ways, it's like a magician's creation of a Golem, and there truely is something magical in the illusion of life given to these inanimate things. The second feature of stop-motion that I find really intriguing is how it plays with our pre-conceived notions of scale. Miniratures shot close-up with a camera look huge on the screen. So you can either create doll-house sets to represent the "real" world (as you find in the amazing "Wallace & Grommit" films by Nick Park), or you can abstract existing "real" scale objects to create the landscape of the film. One animated short I remember that did this very well in an animation festival I saw years ago was called "The Potato Hunter" by animator Timothy Hittle. In it, baked potatos become buffalo roaming the plain (or plane in this case) of the dinner table.

There's also a hybrid abstracted-dollhouse landscape that seems to be what I enjoy the most. The animation of The Brother's Quay fall's into this category. They bring an incredible graphic design sensibility to their animated worlds, transforming a packaging barcode from the "real" sized world into a wall paper pattern. The characters and stories they introduce often create a nightmare dollhouse world with its own dream logic in the landscape they have crafted.

This dream-like quality and landscape abstraction also can be seen in Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas". That film presents some beautiful examples of traditional landscapes abstracted into a dream-like spaces. The traditional cemetery is warped into a jack-o-lantern filled, rolling hill graveyard. That they were minirature sets blown up to full-size on screen somehow connects back to that magic of the golem creation myth.

I think this abstraction of scale is something that can have a strong impact on people's imaginations. In gardens the creation of bonsai comes to mind as one of the most popular forms. To shrink a tree down to such a compact form in a way compresses the landscape into minirature. The whole world is contained in a single pot. We hover over it like a giant. On the flip side of scale, there have been many artists who blow-up mundane objects to gigantic size, such as this saftey-pin sculpture at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco that I took a photo of. The re-scaling of the object not only makes us rethink about the aesthetic shape of the object, it also shrings us down to the world of the object. We are the size of insects. Thinking about these things, it is clear to me that scale can be a powerful tool in affecting how people experience a space. I'll try and be more conscious of it in the future.

Urban Bird Warfare

2009-01-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

Every weekday evening near sunset I take the bus up Lamar Boulevard here in Austin, TX, and as the weather started getting colder the concentration of roosting birds started to increase near downtown. The trees in front of BookPeople just past 6th Street are packed with Grackles, and when the bus door opens at the stop there, the vehicle is flooded with a cacophony of bird sound. It's an amazing noise in passing, although perhaps not so charming if you hear hours of it everday. Then there's the poop speckling the sidewalk along this stretch. The uric acid in the feces can corrode the material over time. Then you have the potential clogging of gutters and pipes with nests. So, while I enjoy my moment of the bird roosting ritual in passing, I also understand that it's a nuisance for many business owners.

So, how does one manage such a nuisance? One option is a range of active bird warfare techniques that involve pyrothecnics, bird fog, gas-operated exploders, exploding shotgun shells, visual scaring devices, recorded bird distress calls, and falconry. Here are some sample images of such equipment as can be found on sites such as ABC Advanced Bird Control.

The Gas Operated Exploder

Super BirdXPeller PRO

Scare Ballon

Double-barrel Gun for Exploding Shells

Bird Fogger

Then you have your standard range of design options, such as bird spikes or netting, or the electrical tracking if you want to get fancy.

The Spikes

The Shock

But could we as landscape architects and urban designers take things further? Could we design bird-resistant landscapes? First you bury all the power lines so they can't sit on those or the poles. Then you get rid of the trees so there are fewer nesting options. Plant only noxious shrubs so they've nothing to eat. Building rooftops might need to have tight eliptical radii edges that provide no perch. Throw in lots of randow bird spikes here and there. Float a bunch of the scare balloons, or place animatronic owls on every rooftop. Encourage local after-school falconry groups. Sponsor civic fireworks shows every evening at sunset. I can see it now...

Concrete Trolls (not Trowels)

2009-01-07T19:03:00.001-08:00

My friend Sandy posted this photo of the Fremont Bridge troll in Seattle on flickr a long while back, and I really enjoyed how LARGE a sculpture it is. Please note the VW gripped in its left hand should you think that the person sitting on said hand might be just a tiny doll.

Jump forward a few years, and I am at work flipping through some very old Landscape Architecture magazines at work when I come across a short article and some photos describing the construction of the troll. I misplaced my copy of the article, but I have these pictures to share with you. I apologize for the lack of photo credit, but that's missing with the copied article.

The base form of the troll was wire mesh that the artist then covered with layers of shotcrete, with hand-trowelled layers added later. If you've not seen shotcrete in action, it's like if a powerwasher was spitting out a thin concrete mix instead of high pressure water. Gunite is the same type of thing, with shotcrete being the umbrella name for such processes. Typically, shotcrete is, as I said, a very thin mix with a fine mortar-like aggregate and a high percentage of cement compared to sand. So, you still have the three main concrete ingredients: cement, aggregate and sand.

I was looking for more good examples of shotcrete use, and it's definitely more of an industrial product than an artistic one. Swimming pools, skate parks, erosion control, and hobbit-hole wine cellars seem to be some of the more popular uses. The skate parks produce some of the more interesting examples of shotcrete use, in my opinion. Here's a cool one in Reedsport, OR designed and built by Airspeed Skateparks.

In my search for interesting shotcrete images, I stumbled upon ferrocement, which is shotcrete's close cousin. Unlike shotcrete which has all three usual component of concrete, ferrocement doesn't have any aggregate. It's just cement and sand on a wire mesh. It's also not shot out through a high pressure nozzel. Instead, it's typically hand-troweled onto the mesh surface. So, it's a lot more labor intensive process to create a ferrocement structure or sculpture, but the results can be very cool. A lot of Gaudi's organic architecture, for example, is based on ferrocement. In places with cheap labor, it also seems to pop-up as a popular construction technique. Here are some shots I found of projects in India and Mexico over on the ferrocement.com website:

All of this has me wanting to come up with new ways to use concrete and cement in future landscape architecture projects. I challenge you to do the same as we kick off 2009!

Off Roading

2008-11-19T20:05:00.000-08:00

Alaska has been in the news a lot lately, thanks mainly to the exploits of Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens. While I'm happy to let them drift away from memory, one news show comment that has stuck with me is that Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, is inaccessible by road. And it's certainly not alone. Many cities and towns in Alaska have no roads that go to them or have seasonal ice roads. So much of the United States has boundaries and roads demarcated by the rigid Jeffersonian grid (explored so nicely in James Corner's "Taking Measure Across the American Landscape") that you can feel confined in it. Environmentalists who opt to live "off the grid" could in many ways be referring to the Jeffersonian grid instead of the utility grid.

I think the rise of Google Earth and Google Maps has had a similar impact on our sense of the known, except on a world scale this time instead of a country scale. Sure the images aren't always the highest resolution, and they can be years old, but they do make the whole surface world feel very knowable. There is no uncharted Africa of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".

So where do people go to really escape to the unknown? They need to shift vertically to underneath the aerials and the roads. The oceans remain largely un-surveyed. There are still caves to be discovered, and underground urban infrastructure to be reclaimed. Eventually, though "off-the-planet" may become the new "off-the-grid".

Infrastructure as Art

2008-09-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

I found this link on a comic images blog that had some photos of Brazilian stormwater gutters that inject a bit of whimsy into the urban fabric, something that I certainly enjoy.

I don't know if this was a commissioned art project or just an extensive art graffiti undertaking. It reminded me of research I did on art bollards for a public plaza space that I was working on for my previous job. There was money in the budget for artist-created elements in the plaza, and at the same time there was a need for bollards to control circulation. Plus, maybe a unique bollard would catch the eye and keep cyclists from accidentally hitting it. Anyhow, here are a few samples that I found during a more recent online search.

Bollards by Oliver Creed in Norwich, UK

Baywalk Bollards in Australia

Banksy stencil bollard

Glasgow, Scotland mosaic boallards

UK graffiti hummingbird bollard at night

I think with this sort of commissioned personalization of standard landscape element you get a couple of positive things out of it. First off, it helps to establish the identity of the location as someplace unique. The Baywalk Bollards in Australia certainly have become something that people photograph, sketch, and probably know well in the community as a landmark. Of course, there are over a hundred of them, so that scale of things certainly ratchets up the impression made. The second benefit connects more to community involvement, and it is predicated upon a certain development process that not only involves artists, but also community members. If you can get those people directly involved in producing objects that are part of the space that they will use, then they will have a personal connection to that place and are more likely to be protective of it. This can translate to spaces that are better maintained because of that sense of ownership. There were several projects at my last job where this process was brought to fruition. One of them was a playground renovation where local high school students created art tiles that were then incorporated into seatwalls and the paving.

I guess what I really like about the art becoming the infrastructure or vice versa is that the art does not become just an object in the space. It becomes a functional component of the space. Certainly as a designer, I want my design to be the thing defining the space, and the art should work with me, not against me. So, I guess the goal should be to either be the landscape artist yourself in the design or do your best to develop a constructive collaborative relationship with the artists involved as early as possible.

Where does the graffiti art fit into this? My favorite graffiti art by Banksy and others seems to have a dialog with the space where they have implemented it. But how would I feel if they decided to comment on my space I designed and add to it? Should I prepare for this? Should landscape architects purposefully create blank canvas spaces for such work? Is it even possible to do so? Can the spontaneity of graffiti be anticipated? That's probably a hard thing to do, but what about going back later to a space and responding to such things in a spontaneous redesign? That's one funny thing about landscape projects... that they end, but certainly the landscape keeps changing. Maybe the contractor gets a 2 year contract to keep plants alive, but the landscape architect may never be involved again once they sign off on the final punch list. I guess that's why some landscape architects and designers work more on personal estates and gardens where they can have this long term relationship. For the rest of us, it's just landscape architecture one night stands.

Artifical Hippo

2008-09-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects just announced their 2008 National Award winners, and I spent some time perusing through them last night. There's lots of EDAW in there, incidentally. Anyhow, the one that I was most interested in was project by Urban Initiatives that developed a wetland infrastructure design for the Kubu River Hippos' Exhibit at the Werribee Open Range Zoo. Traditional zoo water enclosures use a huge amount of energy in their constant water recirculation, and Urban Initiatives came up with a bio-filtration system that not only provided a more energy efficient solution but also helped connect the design conceptually to the Okavango Delta wetland in Botswana that is the natural habitat of the hippos housed in the exhibit. Here's a constructed view of the wetland followed by a design diagram of the system:

Now, the rest of the exhibit starts to look like Disney's Jungle Cruise Adventure as they delved into replicating some of the human cultural elements of Botswana region, but I guess zoos aren't that far away from theme parks to start with.

Anyhow, this project's water filtration system connected with my interest in this type of plant-based human infrastructure. It's a popular landscape architecture topic these days as cities try and tackle non-point source water pollution. Portland, OR is the poster child for this with their Sustainable Stormwater Management Program. But while you see bio-swales (aka. planted water filter ditches), water quality ponds (aka. larger planted stormwater holding basins) and the like all over the place, few places take the infrastructure to that next level, such as purifying sewage. And the hippo pond is, of course, treating a lot of hippo poop. When I was in Spain last year I picked up a book called "Waterscapes" by Helene Izembart and Bertrand Le Boudec that presents a lot of conceptual examples and specific case studies of mainly European projects that use plants systems to treat wastewater. So, if the hippos example interests you, I recommend checking out that book.

luaka bop bicycle racks

2008-08-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

CityRacks is a design competition in NYC to develop a new standard bicycle rack that will replace the old standby loop rack that is currently used throughout the metropolis. David Byrne was involved in the competition as a judge (who knew he was a big cycling enthusiast?), and he also got in on the design work, creating temporary, bicycle rack art pieces:

I think that some of these could be much more fun as clustered objects, such as a group of the people bicycle racks standing around or the same with the cars. And shouldn't there be at least a pair of shoes? One of my main complaints with bicycle racks is the lack of quantity. In San Francisco I felt like I was always hunting for the one bicycle rack on the block, and this would be in areas like the Lower Haight where you have a ton of bars, bicycles, and, of course "The Wiggle". My other pet peeve with bicycle racks, especially with commercial box developments, is that they put them in stupid, out of the way places. Or if they don't do that, then they only leave about foot of space between the rack and the wall of the building. Clearly the people designing these things don't ever park bicycles themselves.

Anyhow, back to CityRacks. I'm not blown away by the finalists, but then again that's the case with most racks I ever see in site furnishing catalogs. My favorite was this one:
They did a good job with the NYC branding, and they thought about locking folding bikes and even unicycles for god's sake. What's your favorite? And do you have any favorite bicycle rack designs you've seen or perhaps you have a gripe about bicycle parking? Please share.

Map Your Mind

2008-07-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

I took a seminar workshop called "Groundworks" my last year of graduate school with Professor Jennifer Brook that explored the concept of "site". It was a small group of us, and during several class sessions we were presented with short exercises to complete, present, and then discuss in relation to the day's lecture topic. One exercise that I enjoyed most was a simple cognitive mapping task. Jennifer asked us all to draw a map of California. We had about five minutes to do so, and when we taped them all to the wall they were totally different. Some people focused on geographic features such as mountain ranges and rivers. I had an awful lot of structure defined by freeways (a result of my time spent driving the roads of Los Angeles, perhaps?). Most everyone had some political boundaries with other states, and many of them, including mine, were very poorly located. I still don't know if I could place where Nevada ends and Arizona begins.

So try it. Next time you have some friends over for drinks or something have them all draw a map of the town you all live in. If you want to keep drawing, borrow some ideas from the Surrealists.

Garden Zombie Attack

2008-07-08T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is a link that I found over on boingboing for a Zombie Garden Sculpture in the Toscano catalog. It's a shame there's only one variety. Zombies usually attack in large groups. And what exactly would a group of zombies be called? A gaggle? A herd? A brood? A mob?

There's lakes, and then there's "lakes"...

2008-02-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

A recent Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego article about the possible drying of of "Lake" Mead above the Hoover Dam had me curious about the fate of Arizona and the rest of the southwest, but mainly it got me thinking again about what bodies of water we call "lakes". We need some better word that describes large manmade, reservoirs and other engineered water features that, generally speaking, have ecologically dead (if existent) shorelines. This characteristic is a shame, as the wetland transitions between land and water that should exist are very richly diverse in terms of ecology. Sometimes these "lakes" are not as arid or artificial looking as Lake Mead or Lake Powell, but they never look quite right. Lake Merritt, in Oakland, CA, for example, has a hard-edge shoreline that just drops off into the water.
There's one little swatch of beach that I can recall around the mile plus perimeter, and then there's the backflow dam to prevent tidal flux from affecting the water level too much and to let stormwater push its way out.

Anyhow, I don't know these constructed Fake-Lakes, Flakes, etc. should be called, but don't try and confuse people into thinking they're lake ecologies because you can drive a jetski in them. We shouldn't take for granted such large engineering feats, or else we start to forget about them as artificial, and the next thing you know we assume the water will always be there. Then you wake up one day and the "Lake" is dry.

Dr. Eugene Tsui's Eighth Wonder of the World

2008-02-10T23:01:00.000-08:00

A co-worker of mine used to work at Eugene Tsui's office, which is in Emeryville, CA. Judging from the text on the Tsui Design & Research website, Tsui is definitely a character, and it's hard for me to tell if there's any validity in some of his ideas because that constructed persona gets in the way. Anyhow, when he's not playing flamenco guitar, winning senior gymnastics medals, and designing sci-fi clothing, this renaissance man is developing biomorphic architecture. The planning project that caught my eye is for a bridge spanning across the Strait of Gibralter. Here's an aerial view of a model of what it would look like:

The spans are actually underwater, arched tunnels linked by a floating island in the middle. Here's a section view:

These fish-shaped tunnels would not only have car lanes and train tracks but linear parks for people to move through, complete with trees, pools, waterfalls, and areas for music and dance performances. The whole project would, according to Dr. Tsui, double Spain's tourists, increase Morocco's by 2600% and would "no doubt be the Eighth Wonder of the World".

The (Landscape) Architecture of Happiness

2008-01-24T21:42:00.000-08:00

About a year after I received the book as a gift, I finally got around to reading Alain de Botton's "The Architecture of Happiness". The main idea in the book as I read it was summarized in one of the photo captions that states "The buildings we call beautiful contain in a concentrated form those qualities which we are deficient." Earlier in the book, the author writes that "what we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects that touch us through their beauty." And what of the notion of what is beautiful? Is that not subjective, or are there universal patterns which our minds strive to see realized? In Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near", he talks a lot about the great facility for the human mind to recognize patterns. Something in the parallel structuring of our brains allow for this. In his book, de Botton suggests that these patterns of beauty are not universal, but rather cultural constructs. He cites the extreme difference between western ideas of beauty to those found in the Japanese idea of "wabi". In wabi there is a"a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate." Decay and weathering are not shunned, and this reminds of J.B. Jackson's essay "The Necessity of Ruin". In it, Jackson (one of the father's of the study of cultural landscape), writes about how there must be an interval of neglect to provide the incentive for restoration. He says it is "religiously and artistically essential". This is more of a linear view of things than the parallel existence that I interpret from the eastern idea of wabi, but still there is a connection. Maybe the eastern and western ideas are not always so different.

Near the end of "The Architecture of Happiness", de Botton writes that "we owe it to the fields that our houses (and our landscapes?) will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced." I think this is true, although I also think we should strive to improve our non-virgin land in a similar fashion. There's no excuse for bad public design, and our decisions on how we construct the public realm can have a lasting impact. The author also states that "the same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which are visible from outer space." So go out there an strive to create beauty. It will make people happy.

Ha Ha Funny, Not "ha ha" Cow Barrier

2008-01-01T18:05:00.001-08:00

For some reason I got it in my mind that it was important to develop some landscape architecture jokes, so here's what I've got so far:

How many landscape architects does it take to screw in a light bulb?
-How many?
-We have a very qualified electrical sub-consultant for that.

What's black, white, green & striped all over?
-What?
-A Peter Walker landscape.

What do landscape architects call a Brazilian wax?
-What?
-A Roberto Burle Marx

Why did the landscape architect cross the road?
-Why?
-To get to the other bulbout.

Your momma's so fat she can't fit in paper space.

Knock, knock
-Who's there?
-Kobori Enshu
-Kobori Enshu who?
-Enshu glad I gave you this borrowed view?

wakka, wakka, wakka....

3 Quotes from Isolarion

2007-09-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Levi sent me a book by James Attlee called Isolarion. It's the author's extended, personal pilgrimage down Cowley Street in Oxford. There are lots of tangential ramblings of thought to go with the physical pilgrimage. Here are three short parts that I dog-eared as they captured my fancy:

p.199 "I am usefully reminded that sometimes, when there is no train or plane fast enough to transport you beyond the reach of your troubles, a long walk may be your only way out."

p.273 Quoting Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques: "Humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilisation in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet. The same dish is to be served to us every day."

p.26 Quoting from A.C. Grayling's The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life: "--for our moods are like tunings on the wireless, picking up truths at different frequencies, so that if we don't know the gamut of human feelings, neither can we know the gamut of human truth."

Sustainable Play Structures

2007-06-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

Landscape Structures is one of the main manufacturers of play equipment in the U.S. It was encouraging to read this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that highlighted how they're family run, and now that's transitioning to being owner operated. We talk a lot in landscape architecture about sustainability, and social sustainability is certainly part of that. Sure, just because someplace is owner operated doesn't mean they have values that promote green building practices, but individuals do have ethical standards. In private, publicly-traded corporations ethical standards are something that can suffer as accountability becomes muddy. So, it does make me feel a bit better to specifiy a product in a playground that is produced by people who have a personal stake in things.

Hundertwasser Wine

2007-02-14T22:19:00.000-08:00

The NY Times just had an article on the Quixote Winery in Napa Valley which was one of Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s last buildings he worked on. Hundertwasser was an eccentric Austrian artist turned building designer whose felt the mechanization of building was killing modern homes. His structures try to integrate the built form and nature more closely, including all of the messiness that comes along with complex natural systems. The grid was to be scorned, as were right angles and solid swathes of color. I had never known anything about him before, but I had seen pictures of his Hundertwasser House in Vienna, and I really enjoyed the integration of the plant material into the building with vines, trees, etc. high up from the ground. His “Forest Spiral” building in Darmstadt, Germany doesn’t intrigue me as much. The scale of the green space doesn’t feel as personal as the house in Vienna. Still, I like the idea that you could walk up the height of the entire building. That ground floor to roof green access is nice.

Hundertwasser House in Vienna

The "Forest Spiral" building in Darmstadt, Germany

Chicago's Deep Tunnel

2007-02-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

How could I live in Chicago at one point and not know that there were 109 miles of tunnels being built under it? Not just small tunnels, but big ones, 9 to 33 feet in diameter. It’s all part of the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) also known as “The Deep Tunnel”. It is pretty deep, as much as 350 feet below the surface, excavated through limestone since the 1970’s using similar equipment to the machines that drilled the Chunnel between the UK and France. But this tunnel system does not transport people. It carries and stores sewage and storm water overflow from the area to reservoir sites until water treatment plants can catch up with the peak flow during big storms.

It’s curious to me to read different descriptions of the project. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago who runs the Deep Tunnel thinks it’s the best thing ever, and touts all the engineering awards it has won. Most of the $4 billion in funding has come from the EPA, and the project has helped improve the water quality of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River by keeping storm runoff from going directly into those bodies of water. Chicago has a mixed sewage and storm water system (like many cities) so that means sewage isn’t overflowing into the river or lake as well.

What I don’t like about the project is that it’s such an energy intensive/ engineering intensive solution. That’s such a 1950’s way of thinking to me (although I guess this did start in the 1970’s). Not only do you have to build and maintain all of the tunnels and reservoirs, but there must be some huge pumps to pull the water back up from 350 feet down and treat it. Hopefully future projects to deal with runoff in Chicago incorporate more greenroofs, bio-swales, reduced permeability of surfaces, etc. You know, Portland stuff.

Then we’ll have to think of some NEW use for the Deep Tunnel. Fresh water storage for drought? Future “L” routes? Underground linear museum? What else?

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Zinfandel

2007-01-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

A diocese in Hayward, CA has converted some of their surplus cemetery space into a vineyard, growing Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir grapes. The nearest graves are about 60ft from the grape vines, which would worry me a bit if I was the grower. This is mainly because god knows what embalming fluid and other preservative chemicals might migrate underground through the soil. I would generally think that formaldehyde does not go well with food. Another consideration is how the breakdown of the bodies affects the soil. What nutrition is added? What unusual chemical concentrations are created? A British Environmental Agency report gets into great detail about this, including nice tables like this:

Maybe this will produce some unique wines with unusual flavor qualities. It’s about time the blood of Christ had some competition.

The Naming of Things

2007-01-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

This Thursday I went to the Castro Theatre to see Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s The Animation Show, which consists of a number of animated shorts from the past year or so. It’s traveling around the country, so if it makes it to your town, I’d recommend it.

The first short was a piece called “Rabbit”, which is actually posted on Atom Films. It brings to life a bunch of 2D images form a children’s vocabulary book, with all of the objects in world of the film being labeled. "Rabbit" brings to life a bunch of 2D images form a children’s vocabulary book, with all of the objects in world of the film being labeled. You can get an idea of what I’m talking about from this image:

It’s a darkly funny piece, and it got me thinking about how when you have a bunch of nouns presented to you the verbs that they engage in can be quite unexpected. There’s a lot of creative potential in not being too limiting in your expectations of how an object will act or, if it’s inanimate, how it will be used. Lars Lerup describes this in his book Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action. In it, Lerup uses the example of a staircase that a child plays on and imagines as a mountain to climb or a cascading waterfall when sliding down the stair in a box. An elderly woman may put flowerpots on the stairs and think of it as a plant stand. Lerup describes the stair as a “lump” that has “inherent patterns common with many things.” By naming it and only thinking of the object or noun in one way, as a staircase, we limit the object. Lerup states: “the singular designation by the culture reduces the object to a one-dimensional concept, when in fact the object is a lump of material… in order to know an object we must embrace and study all its sides… we must also act if we want to see.”

This concept connects to another idea I remember from a landscape architect on a review jury of mine who said that you shouldn’t start with defining what objects a client wants, instead you should start with what verbs they want to engage in. For example, if they say, “I want a bench”. Then you should counter with, “so, you want a place to sit?” This strategy leads to a lot more constructive questioning of desires and activity in a space. It also allows for more flexibility of use, and that can be very important in the design of public spaces where you have various groups of people with different desires and wants.

Interchange

2007-01-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

There’s something that’s very grand about freeway interchanges in the US. It’s the scale combined with the overlapping planes and the curving shapes, and the motion of the vehicles. Actually, I think even if you took the vehicles away they’d still work well… maybe even better because you’d have some silence instead of constant traffic drone. These ramps and interchanges are very photogenic, as you’ll find in this flickr group on Highway Overpasses and Ramps.

I was doing some research the other day at work on the development of city forms, and I came across this image in Gallion & Eisner’s The Urban Pattern.

I had never seen a diagram that broke down the different type of interchanges, so I thought the image intriguing. Doing a web search after that pulled up several other images that are pretty great. This site has aerial images of Los Angeles interchanges.

Greenroof Gardening

2007-01-23T22:04:00.000-08:00

One thing that is amazing to me is that Germany has had legislation encouraging greenroof development since 1989, but it’s just now that the thing is catching on in the US. I guess we finally paved enough that stormwater management costs have opened the door for this “natural” technology with its additional benefits of energy savings, habitat value, heat island reduction, etc. It seems like the value-add of alternative infrastructure is an area where landscape architecture can continue to grow.

Anyhow, back the greening of roofs. The most popular green roof option these days is the extensive green roof. That is one with waterproof barrier, topped by a shallow growing medium profile, and capped with planted plugs of low water use plants. The plants fill in after about a year or so, and succulents are a very popular variety because of their suitability for the conditions on top of roofs: increased wind, little shade, etc. But, rooftop gardening still captures the imagination (and stomachs) of many city dwellers. If you think about how global populations have been shifting away from rural areas into more concentrated urban environments, it makes sense that a desire to grow some food in cities might travel with that migration. But where do you find the space available? How about flat roofs? Of course, there are challenges: not only the climatic ones mentioned earlier, but access, structural integrity, and water sources are also big questions. How do you get on the roof? How much weight can it hold? Is there a water faucet or will you be hauling up buckets?

The Rooftop Garden Project in Canada has come up with some innovative, low-cost solutions to rooftop gardening. Most of their plantings are hydroponic for the main reason that it combines low weight with high moisture and nutrient delivery, perfect for lettuce and vegetables. Two of my favorites involve pipes and tin cans:

Green Those Bus Shelters

2007-01-14T20:25:00.000-08:00

A link to these Soviet era bus shelters has been floating around, and I enjoyed browsing through the photos. They range from very modern concrete form to folk-art mural inspired to Route 66 attraction marker. Looking at them, the shots make the landscape around them so lonely, although some of them show some obvious care and maintenance from people in as much as the paint looks to be in pretty good shape. There is only one picture with a shot of a person in it, and I do wonder more about how the shelters get used. How often does the bus come? How long do people wait there? What do they look like in the winter?

This got me thinking to bus shelters in general, as they're one of those small sturctures that I feel as a landscape architect I could probably design without killing someone. It's kinda' like a trellis or something, after all. They let me build those. But I don't think landscape architects often do design these shelters. Reading on the industrial design site Core77, sounds like industrial designers and architects duke it out for the chance to build them. But I think landscape architects should step into the ring more often.

After the Rebar Group here in San Francisco had their Park(ing) event, I started thinking about what other elements of the urban environment were under-appreciated. Bus shelters soon came to top my list. They're a place to sit and wait, to step out of the rain, etc. Clearly their visual impact has a value or else advertisers would not pay good money to advertise on them. What if some more of that money was put back into making them more hospitable? They also are good potential placemaking structures for a neighborhood. Each district could adopt their bus shelters in a city and the unique design elements would represent place.

Where specifically do landscape architects get into this? Well, what I have found to be pretty rare is a bus shelter that has any plantings or greenery at all. Not that landscape architects are around just to shrub things up, but I think plants can be used to help differentiate areas, provide seasonal change, shelter from wind, shelter from sun, allow some sun in, etc. Here are a few examples from the Project for Public Spaces photo gallery:

Plants:
http://www.pps.org/imagedb/image?image_id=20147&image_id=20147
http://www.pps.org/imagedb/image?image_id=25408&image_id=25408
http://www.pps.org/imagedb/image?image_id=20034&image_id=20034

Vines:
http://www.pps.org/imagedb/image?image_id=39821&image_id=39821

Beyond aesthetic purpose, maybe each shelter has a mini-greenroof that mitigates a little bit of stormwater impact. If you add up the surface area of all bus shelter rooftops in a city, that's probably a decent amount of runoff slowed captured and/or slowed down. Maybe on top of that you get some habitat value, some visual value, etc. There are options. We just need to explore them further.

A Road Ain't Supposed to be Sometimes Thing

2007-01-08T21:43:00.001-08:00

According to a recent AP article, during construction of a train line in the Netherlands, a section of the ancient Roman "limes" were uncovered outside of the town of Houten.

"The Limes" were ancient Roman fortified roads, with this stretch operating from A.D. 50 to A.D. 350. Other stretches are found throughout Germany, into Israel, etc. This ancient border line is Europe's largest archeological monument, and it has been a UNESCO-World Heritage Site since 2005. The path of many limes are known from medieval copies of ancient maps, but the changing course of the Crooked Rhine near this Netherlands site has made the location of sections there difficult to locate.

The Latin noun "limes" (the plural is limites) has the root of "limit", and "limes" has many meaning around the idea of path, limit, and boundary. Wikipedia has a pretty informative entry which gets more into the etymology.

There are a few intriguing ideas to me in this story. The first of them is the idea that a road can be lost. It's like the physical reverse of a Richard Long art project, although conceptually it's a very similar thing. A road or path is the result of action and movement. If this human impact is taken away, then the road vanishes. I guess it's just that roads feel so permanent in many ways, or somehow in my mind it seems more likely that destination will change, but roads keep on going.

Another thing that interests me is that "The Limes" have this "world heritage" designation. It's seldom that I think of infrastructure as something deserving such a title. I suppose the Roman Empire did shape Europe in lasting ways, and these roads were its limit. But is a road really something worth preserving in this way? I like the idea of the train taking the same path, so the road comes back to life in some different way, but I don't like the idea of some tourist stop while driving on some other road. And what about all of the roads we build in modern times? Will the American freeway system someday be equally important? Or are there just too many roads now for it to matter? A shift seems to have happend in how roads define posistive and negative space. It used to be with a few roads that the line itself was the positive space, and that was important. Now there are so many roads, that they define the negative spaces, or land parcels, which are the important space. At least that's how it seems to me.

The Last Public Execution in the US (1936)

2006-12-29T20:46:00.000-08:00

The execution of Saddam Hussein got me thinking about spaces for public executions. I know his was not of that type, but there have been many through out history that have been. Most of my mental images of them are from movies, but I do remember standing outside the Tower of London and finding it a bit strange to know that people had been executed on that spot.

Anyhow, this train of thought led me to looking into the United State's last public execution back in 1936. It was in Owensboro, Kentucky where Tainey Bethea was hanged before a crowd of 20,000 mena, women and children. According to the post on Widipedia, "Bethea left the Daviess County Jail at 5:21 a.m. and walked with two deputies to the scaffold. Within two minutes, he was at the base of the scaffold. Removing his shoes, he put on a new pair of socks. He ascended the steps and stood on the large X as instructed. He made no final statement to the waiting crowd. After making his final confession to Father Lammers, of the Cathedral of the Assumption Church in Louisville, the black hood was placed over his head, and three large straps placed around his ankles, thighs and arms and chest..." Here are some images from a NPR story on the event.

This is an aerial image of former site of the Daviess County Old Jail (110 Saint Elizabeth Street). It was demolished in July of 2003. It looks like there's some sort of outdoor ampitheater that has been built right on the river nearby. I wonder what happens there? Do people think about that execution when they're watching Sunday concerts by the river?

LA's "Steel Cloud" (1988)

2006-12-28T21:18:00.000-08:00

Back in 1988, Los Angeles had a competition to build a $33-million monument sculpture over the Hollywood Freeway between Olvera Street and the Civic Center.

It was supposed to rival New York's Statue of Liberty and St. Louis' Gateway Arch. The selection committee chose the "Steel Cloud" entry by New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture (now of Asymptote).

The glass-and-steel structure was to rise up to twelve stories above the Hollywood Freeway in
downtown Los Angeles and was to be linked by bridges to the city's ethnic neighborhoods. Passersby wouldl peer at 140-ft.-high aquariums and view scenes from Hollywood films projected on large silver screens. Asymptote's website describes it:

"The Steel Cloud, a monument to Pacific Rim immigraionto the United States, occupies a zone directly above the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles. In an attempt to situate the monument in the context of the late 20th century an episodic architecture is proposed that is inspired by the optical phenomena, surveillance technology, telecommunication advances and the proliferation of information. This is a living monument, accomodating galleries, libraries, theaters, cinemas, parks, and plazas that are intersected by the fluid and transient spaces of the city."

Asymptote offers some model photographs as well:

Maybe Frank Gehry's billowing metal Disney Hall drew some inspiration from this idea?

Sweet Dreams Security

2006-04-28T22:10:00.000-07:00

Razor wire and fence points have never been so cute.

http://www.sweetdreamssecurity.com/

Giving More Life to Plants

2006-04-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Alien plants as envisioned by 1st Ave. Machine, a NYC based CG Animation company.

http://www.1stavemachine.com/alias/

San Francisco That Was

2006-03-09T22:53:00.000-08:00

Back in early 2004, the art/science collective Still Here created a series of billboards and bus shelter posters to guide viewers through part of the dramatic historical ecology of San Francisco. This Fifth Street "tour" started at Fifth & Market and headed past Fifth & Mission to the former open bay at Townsend Street.

Edward Burtynsky photos

2006-02-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

Oxford Tire Pile No. 1,
Westley, California 1999

China Recycling #9,
Circuit Boards, Guiyu, Guangdong Province, 2004

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian landscape photographer whose work explores nature transformed through industry. It's an interesting post-industrial geology that he captures, where the transformed raw materials of the earth reform new landscapes through a man-made process of accretion. More on toxic high tech waste in China.

700 Mile Fence

2006-02-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

An infographic from the SF Chronicle about the proposed 700 mile fence along the US/Mexico border. It's good we're spending billions on such clever things and not on solving other barrier problems, such as the levees in the Sacramento Delta.