Design Public

Many years ago, I went to the movie “The Full Monty” with my friend Chris Reilly, who is from Long Island. I remember at the end we could not stop laughing, and she was in tears, saying “the gnomes! That’s SO LONG ISLAND!” I thought the gnomes were great characters, or at least very important symbolically. Then again, I was an English major, and I tend to read a lot more into things than is actually intended. Bottom line is, I always get a kick out of a gnome or a pink flamingo.

Martha Schwartz’s Westfalia Germany exhibition, 51 Garden Ornaments, highlighted the meaning of these yard trinkets, and her words on the subject are much more eloquent than mine:

Our gardens have become increasingly important in our everyday lives. The reason for this may be our increasing need for an escape from our information society. This is true for the United States as well as Germany, two places where I have been working and spending time. The importance of our gardening activities is made evident through the fact that in the USA gardening is a billion-dollar industry and gardening our #1 hobby.In addition to being a beloved past-time spent nurturing our immediate home environments, our gardens are, in fact, a vehicle of expression through which we broadcast our individual message or image to the world. It is the picture window through which the world sees us. To this end, our gardens are a highly manipulated piece of nature in which the choice of ornaments placed in the garden reflects the home-owners character, and in turn, collectively, a national character.51 Garden Ornaments displays the ornaments which Americans and Germans often choose to place in their gardens. The ornaments have been purchased at garden-store chains which sell high volumes of these artifacts. I have chosen ornaments which also seem most popular and typical. Because of the sheer numbers and ubiquity, these ornaments therefore reflect who we are and how we would like to be seen. They come to characterize a larger collective landscape as we see them often in people’s yards. They represent areas of cultural similarity as well as difference.

• Images from marthaschwartz.com 

Has anyone else been following the controversy surrounding the design for The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in D.C.? It’s interesting, and I’m not sure I have the latest update, but here it is in a nutshell. The designers selected a Chinese artist, Lei Yixin, to sculpt Dr. King. This artist is well known for a sculpture he did of Mao Zedong. A group calling themselves King Is Ours opposes the choice of artist and materials, and  has stated “The People’s Republic of China has the worst human and civil rights records in the world”, and “the granite used for the statue probably will be mined by workers laboring in unsafe and unfair conditions.”

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I was just flipping through the stack of books I leave in my guest room and reacquainted myself with Home Swell Home: Designing Your Dream Pad by Cynthia Rowley and Ilene Rosenzweig. Before there was Anti-Depressive Living, there was Swell Living. Now that the weather is warming up, here’s a fun tip from the book:

I imagined including one of the beautiful photos of outdoor chandeliers I’ve seen around lately, but I can’t seem to find any today! If you have any outdoor chandelier photos to share, please leave a comment and a link!

Also, if you don’t have a copy of Home Swell Home, they start at under $5 at amazon right now - click here to order a copy!

I just read about this project in Good Magazine. It’s called Re:Construction, and it’s a public art project spearheaded by the Alliance for Downtown NY in collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Here is the idea:

“Re:Construction channels the energy of Downtown’s rebuilding process by recasting construction sites as ‘canvases’ for innovative public art and architecture. This initiative comes at a time when Lower Manhattan is experiencing one of the largest public and private construction undertakings in the nation’s history. In response, Re:Construction bridges the efforts of multiple public partners and the creative community to both highlight and enliven the process of rebuilding while improving the quality of life in Lower Manhattan through the creation of places of attraction, curiosity and anticipation.”

Some of the pilot projects include Best Pedestrian Route by GRO Architects:

photo by Adam Kleinman

Tattfoo Tan’s Concrete Jungle, where the orange construction safety paint on jersey barriers has gone Dior:

(before)

(after)

photo by Tattfoo Tan

It’s interesting, obviously lots of graffiti and guerrilla artists have been taking advantage of these types of sites for a long time, and doing a great job. It will be interesting to see if the organized version can compete. Any time there is a chance to create art, I say go for it, whether through a bunch of red tape or illegally.

http://www.downtownny.com/news?nid=98

http://www.reconstructionnyc.org/

I was thinking about how famous Ken Smith has become in the years since I heard him speak at my school. I think I missed his visiting professorship with the fashion and landscape studio by about a year or two, which will always haunt me. However, my class was lucky enough to visit his office and take a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge with him in 1999. I remember the walls of his office were covered in bubble wrap and there was this strange gong music playing. We were drinking beers while Ken presented some of his work to us when my hilarious friend Lucia leaned over and whispered “this is my favorite song” to me and I about died trying not to bust out laughing. Anyway, I pulled out my Ken Smith book yesterday and his P.S. 19 dumpster planters brought a smile to my face. He is always coming up with creative ways to think about gardens, whether they are vertical, blooming from the pubic area (no, I am not kidding), involve chandeliers hanging over famous avenues, made out of light cones, providing specific aural and other sensory experiences, or are blooming from unexpected receptacles.

P.S. If anyone can find Ken Smith’s website, let me know so that I can provide a link. I can’t seem to find one anywhere, not even over on ASLA’s website. Thanks.

Photoshop by the offices of Ken Smith, Landscape Architect.

Photographs by Albert Vecerka. Both are from the book Ken Smith Landscape Architect Urban Projects.

I took my own advice this week and started to pull down and enjoy the books that had been trapped at the bottom of my stacks.  Today it was Andy Goldsworthy: Wall.    The relationship between his work and its surroundings is transformed by the seasons, the weather, and environmental changes like succession.

The temporary installation created from sumac leaves in the fall:

Sketch and the resulting built work:

The Storm King’s serpentine wall in the winter:

Andy Goldsworthy sketch

Andy Goldsworthy pictures by Andy Goldsworthy and Jerry L. Thompson

I have a ridiculous amount of beautiful design books, and I realize that I don’t pull them down often enough. I’m making a conscious effort to keep the coffee table real estate in rotation, so that I can pick up a different book every few days and enjoy it all over again. I was enjoying my favorite Barragan book so much that I decided I had to share some images with you (the subtitle is Armando Salas Portugal Photographs of the Architecture of Luis Barragan)*.     The collaboration between architect and photographer featured in this book is as good as it gets. Luis and Armando worked together for forty years.

As I studied the images, I immediately thought of Donald Judd, Martha Schwartz, and Ed Bye, just to name a few. Barragan’s mastery of use of materials whether for commentary, contrast, practicality or as ruled by site remains unrivaled by anyone practicing today (IMHO!). As someone with training in landscape architecture, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone with such astute mastery of outdoor spaces - the way he responds to the context and immediate site, frames views, considers scale and contrasts with color continues to blow my mind. Anyway, here are is a smattering of some of my favorite photographs of Barragan’s work, taken by Armando Salas Portugal:

I should also add, well, you know on design shows how they will put a stencil of a leaf on something or hang a bay leaf wreath and then say “yeah, we’re really CONNECTING THE INDOORS TO THE OUTDOORS!”? It’s become an embarrassing bad cliche. However, Barragan is one of the best examples of a designer who understands architecture, interiors and landscape, and how to balance and maximize these relationships in his site planning. If you want to see true connection among these elements, look to Barragan’s work.

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Ahh, a place where the green trend is not getting on my nerves in terms of its trendiness and actually is effecting change*:  Chicago is greening its alleys. This is the type of move I would expect from a landscape architecture studio student thesis, perhaps completed in Portland Oregon, or somewhere deep in Vermont. Yippee, these forward-thinking ideas are moving west!

Chicago is chock-full of non-permeable alleys, a major source of non-point-source pollution, and they are in the midst of changing that. In today’s New York Times, there was a fantastic article all about it - check it out here. As I am sure I won’t be able to stop myself from boring you with Atlanta drought stories in the upcoming weeks, I promise to send a copy of this to Mayor Shirley Franklin and Governor Sonny Perdue. While Mr. Perdue seeks to hoard water away from other states within the watershed in court case water wars and make a big show of praying for rain, let’s see if he actually will try to do something about our situation like Chicago is doing.

*I have nothing against the green movement, but the way I feel about it was summed up perfectly in 30 Rock’s NBC Green Week episode that featured David Schwimmer as Greenzo. It’s starting to get like the grunge trend; sometime after the movie Singles was released, Blaine Trump started showing up at fundraisers in haute couture wool and flannel, and soon after the trend went away while glamour made a big return. I don’t want the trendiness of the green movement to reach the tipping point and cause the backlash return of hedonistic wastefulness.

photo by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Sometimes inspiration is right outside your own door, other times you have to travel far and wide to find it.  I am a cruddy photographer and was waiting to snag my travelmate Christina’s pictures from Prague to share with you, but we just can’t seem to get it together, so you’re stuck with mine for awhile.

I get inspired by little things, like the color of this wall and the shape of these windows:

As a landscape architect, I am obsessed with paving and patterns in the stones… (more…)

Remember when I told you about Rebar’s PARK(ing) Day last year?  This year, it has continued to spread nationwide here in the states and even oversees (the above photo is from London in 2006). PARK(ing) day will take place on on September 21st.