Archinect - Some of My Best Friends are Landscape Architects

Ocotillo

2012-08-30T03:00:20-04:00

I was designing a garden for an ex-boyfriend who moved out west and proposed an Ocotillo fence for a garden to be inhabited mostly by his dashschund. Nothing ever happened of it (as far as I know), and I shelved the idea for a couple of years. With the prospect of doing work in Texas, I'm ready to revisit the idea. It's a pretty neat little plant. Cacti fences, like the one at the Kahlo/Rivera residence in Mexico City, sometimes look a little, well, flaccid, though there are some gorgeous ones.

DITCHING WORK TO SEE "THE CLOCK" TOMORROW

2012-07-18T00:39:46-04:00

Ladies of the Lower Colorado River Authority

2012-07-16T23:28:00-04:00

They say there are few natural lakes in Texas - some say none, but I'm not in the business of lake counting. . . The Texas Highland Lakes are undisputedly manmade, created as the Lower Colorado River authority (LCRA) slung a series of dams down the Colorado River (no, not THAT Colorado River) during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. In doing some research on the construction of these dams, I came across some remarkable photos on the LCRA Flickr page. They're remarkable in their earnest and patriotic faith in the manipulation of the natural environment - and some are beautiful photos, to boot - and radiate a sense of pride and excitement in the potential of infrastructure that is hardly present these days.

Work Songs, Part 1

2012-07-11T23:29:27-04:00

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

!A man a Plan a canal, Panama!

2012-04-24T00:15:00-04:00

Just got back from Panama. The Panama Canal blew my fucking mind. I guess the funny thing about sublime experiences is that they, well, really depend on experience. . . Sometimes artists attempt to approach a certain kind of psychological or perceptual immensity. I can remember the first times I really looked at a Mark Rothko color field painting (a gauzy, yet heavy feeling - like a late spring cotton mouthed high) or could not escape the reverberations of an Agnes Martin grid (a buzzing, ebullient trance) or was pummeled by X or NOU before getting weighed down again by taste or situating the work in this or that cultural context. Other kinds of art addresses capitalism, technology, technologies of modern capital, important but blah blah blah. . . But the experience of seeing ships transit through the Panama Canal was so much more instructive, all encompassing, and yes, a technologically sublime experience . . . I dunno, I'm gushing. . . . Just imagine a continuous tracking shot...

INVASIVE OF THE HOUR - Starlings

2012-01-13T23:08:00-05:00

Starlings: Introduced as part of a plan by the American Acclimatization Society to introduce to the U.S. all birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare

(via Mason White: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mc_white/172912245/)

"The year was 1890 when an eccentric drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin entered New York City's Central Park and released some 60 European starlings he had imported from England. In 1891 he loosed 40 more. Schieffelin's motives were as romantic as they were ill fated: he hoped to introduce into North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare. Skylarks and song thrushes failed to thrive, but the enormity of his success with starlings continues to haunt us."

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/01/opinion/100-years-of-the-starling.html

COLOR - Part I.a (Rhus typhina time lapse)

2012-01-12T01:01:54-05:00

from:

http://www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/phenology/2006/arbo2006_rhutypSequenceAug16_oct18.jpg

INVASIVE OF THE HOUR

2012-01-12T00:55:00-05:00

Invasive species. Usually defined as something like a non-native plant (or animal) that outcompetes its native counterparts. There are your native plant hardliners, who not only promote the use of native species, but advocate for the active removal and eradication of non-natives. The majority of landscape architects have a slightly more relativist worldview, planting non-natives that are less prone to rapid spread and reproduction, but talking about Euonymous and Euphorbia like white flour or smoking - a now unfashionable youthful indiscretion. At the other end of the spectrum (I suppose I fall somewhere around here) is an attitude based in endless relativism and turned off by whiffs of jingoism. If it survives, especially in hostile urban environments, why not? Aren't changes in the natural environment often caused by serendipitous movement of flora and fauna and/or catastrophic, large scale change? Many of the arguments for biodiversity have undeniable ecological services - prot...

COLOR - Part II

2012-01-07T20:40:28-05:00

OK, so you don't need to be in color to be amazing

COLOR - Part I

2012-01-07T20:21:00-05:00

Color. It took a while for me to begin to see and understand color in the landscape. Part of it was a bias against "garden-y" landscapes, which seemed somehow inferior - less urgent, less important, harder to conceptualize - to the BIG infrastructural projects that are still the current aspirational territory (and rightfully so, I think!) of landscape architects. But while LAs were forging ahead with Landscape Urbanism, this very same vanguard tried to ditch the aesthetic language of old school gardeners. Sure, we whip out abstract diagrams of seasonal colors, and diagrams that are beautiful to my eye are lauded for their clarity and analytical prowess. But the subtlety of observation that requires the eye of your mom's garden club or a 19th Century dandy seems bourgeois, quaint, small-minded.

(Spirea japonica)

I dunno, there's just something that smacks a little bit of a double standard; maybe it's just because architecture was so devoid of color for so long and th...

Dear Abby

2011-10-31T19:41:43-04:00

Also, please ask all the questions you've ever wanted to ask a landscaper and were too afraid to ask. Is it REALLY called a "tight crotch?" What's the difference between form and habit? How do I get things to grow on my folded parametric crumple planes? Think Sheldon Brown meets Dear Abby and other grumpy but enthused advice-givers who make subjective things sound like they're common sense.

Mel Bochner "Measurement: Plant" (1969)

This is How We Walk on the Moon

2011-10-30T22:01:30-04:00

It's funny, there are a lot of sharp architects out there who, despite exquisite sensitivity to matters of form and function, couldn't describe a tree to save their lives. I will admit that I am completely ignorant to matters of mullions and scuppers, but I also don't care. In other words, I would defer to the architect in matters of structural and interior details, but in practice and casual conversation, architects often have opinions (whether explicit - "that pine tree thingy is blocking views" or implicit - rendering a carefully thought out planting plan with generic trees) on the expression and execution of planting

I'm hoping that this blog will forge a shared language for planting and ecology that is free of buzzwords and horticultural jargon. To kick things off, I'll be posting some things in the coming week that, though beautiful (in my opinion), reduce living media to a graphic motif.

Hopefully, these will be paired with images or comments that will help reveal ...