time-lapse audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"...

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

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

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

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....