Mark Jenkins Hijinks

I love this guys work. Many more installation photos on his website.
Be sure to check out the 'Street' page. (fyi - they are mannequins)

GPS Eye In The Sky

I've been using an Iphone app called Everytrail for the past couple of weeks to log my walks with Tempo (my Australian Shepherd). It's a cool little app that uses GPS to map my course and record data about it (time, elevation change, pace, etc.). I can also take photos along the way and it records their location on the route. I then upload all of these to the Everytrail website where they can be viewed by the public. There is the option to make them private, but where's the fun in that?

Here are a couple of my recent walks... (you may have to click "hybrid" on the map)

Payton County Park

Bicentennial Park

The Everytrail folks also have a blog and the latest post was pretty interesting. The post refers to a New York Times story about GPS drawing. In a nutshell, GPS drawers map out and follow a course that will result in an image when viewed from a satellite.
Here is what it looks like...

(images from Everytrail Blog)

Jigsaw City - 4,619 Pieces

3D reconstruction of Dubrovnik, Croatia, containing 4,619 images and nearly 3.5 million 3D points. Very similair to Photosynth (which I have never been able to get to work properly) but obviously with much more data and complexity.
While the puzzle comparison is obvious, I think sewing memories into a quilt captures the process and product more accurately.

Conveyance

A fine example of urban design on the Ohio River in Louisville,
Kentucky.

PPS vs. Frank Gehry

This evening at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the celebrated architect Frank Gehry talked about his life and works under the questioning of Thomas Pritzker. Until nearly the end, it was entirely captivating. Gehry was funny, illuminating, vivid, unpretentious-seeming. Over the years I've highly valued chances to hear people at the absolute top of their fields, to compare the experiences of hearing them speak about what they do. Some of them are as good to listen to as they had been to admire from afar. Others (often actors, athletes, visual artists) have no way of conveying in conversation what makes them so impressive in their own metier. Gehry is in the "good talker" category. Then the questions from the audience began. The second or third was from a fairly insistent character whose premise was that great "iconic" buildings nonetheless fell short as fully attractive and effective "public places," where people were drawn to congregate and spend time. He said he was challenging Gehry to do even more to make his buildings attractive by this measure too. Gehry didn't like the question and said that the indictment didn't apply to his own buildings. He said that the facts would back him up -- and as the questioner repeated the challenge, Gehry said that he found the question "insulting." Fair enough. The guy did keep pushing. On the other hand, anyone who has ever appeared in public has encountered questions a hundred times as personally challenging as this. But the questioner asked one more time, and Gehry did something I found simply incredible and unforgettable. "You are a pompous man," he said -- and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, much as Louis XIV might have used to wave away some offending underling. He was unmistakably shooing or waving the questioner away from the microphone, as an inferior -- again, in a gesture hardly ever seen in post-feudal times. I was sorry that I witnessed those thirty seconds. They are impossible to forget and entirely change my impression of the man. I was more amazed when part of the audience, maybe by reflex, applauded. When the video of this episode goes up on the Ideas Festival site, judge for yourself.
(From James Fallows blog for The Atlantic)

Gehry's famous quote "I do not do context" may cause many landscape architects and urban designers to cringe. Not me. I am glad he does not "do context" because he does not know how. Thats o.k.. He has trained and developed as an architect, and that should be his focus. As a landscape architect, I may have some thoughts and ideas concerning architecture, but I am not ready to design a building. I have no desire to and I might "wave my hand in a dismissive gesture" at anybody who would suggest it falls within my role as a landscape architect.
Now unless Gehry is taking on the site design and demanding his way, I say the blame for the disconnect between architecture and landscape falls on the shoulders of whomever hired him and city officials reviewing the site drawings.

The question asked of Gehry at this forum (by Fred Kent, President of Project For Public Spaces) was a perfectly valid question. It was simply asked of the wrong person.

What do you think?

Bruni and Barbarit

You Want Some Crack In Your Garden?

There are lots of ways to introduce "garden" into the urban fabric. Street trees, container gardening, green roofs, vertically planted screens (green walls), seed bombs, etc.

CMG Landscape Architecture has put a twist on the practice.

The Crack Garden

A brilliant idea in concept and execution.


CMG's description...The hostile takeover of a concrete urban backyard by imposing a series of jackhammer "cracks". Inspired by the tenacious plants that pioneer the tiny cracks of the urban landscape, the formal rows of this garden create order in the random and mixed planting of herbs, vegetables, strange flowers, and rogue weeds.


(Photos from Inhabit)