Ludic Guerrilla Gardening Drone Warfare

{The weapon of future Landscape Architects, seed bombs deployed by man-operated drone}

Amidst two seemingly unrelated activities of gaming and guerilla gardening comes a new video game titled Seeds of Revolution (found via @eatingbark). The games allow you to virtually green empty spaces in the urban realm while avoiding restrictive authorities, without the real-life fear of detection and municipal punishment.

This is a cute game and at the very least provides attention to guerrilla gardening efforts, but with recent advancements in augmented reality and virtual gaming, I can't help but imagine that a new style of drone based urban landscape replenishment isn't a far off possibility.

{Future Landscape Architects at Battle Command. On yet another urban sortie on abandoned space.}

Take the recent Parrot AR.Drone, an iphone controlled machine, equiped with cameras allowing you to interact with other players. We had mentioned previously that this might replace sight visits, sending the drone instead to record information. But what if we were able to equip this drone with seed bombing capabilities? At your base of operations equiped with real-time city maps of abandoned spaces, which were created by research such as the Local Codes project. You send out the drone in an all out attack on city dead zones.

The Landscape Architect becomes a virtual Urban Commando, environmentally "tagging" their territory, the designer's identity unknown until their calling card is revealed through their signature plant growth. Competition ensues between architects battling for bragging rights to the most planted areas.

A new actual game of similar spatial combatancy is Greed Corp. A game described as:

finding the delicate balance between harvesting the land for resources and preserving it to stay alive. Will you defend your territory or sacrifice it to keep it out of enemy hands? Manage the finite available resources to build your army and use the collapsing terrain to your advantage. Destroy your enemies, or destroy the very land they stand on, before they do it to you.

{The drone in action, target acquired, ready to fire.}

This interaction of mapping and potential robotic deployment reveals possible scenerios for future practice of urban design and landscape. The idea is an evolvement of games like The SIMs, adding the excitement of real results and the danger of bypassing city codes.

Architecture for Humanity to Host Landscape Architecture Competition for famous Surf Spot

Architecture for Humanity has just announced a Landscape Architecture competition for unobtrusive access to one of the most famous surfing spot in the US. Informations here. Bjarke Ingels in the jury.

http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/competitions/trestles

Access to Trestles, one of North America’s most celebrated waves, is under threat due to safety and environmental concerns. Currently, over 100,000 people each year follow informal trails through wetlands and over active train tracks to gain access to the surf breaks at Trestles. These impromptu manmade paths present a safety hazard with passing trains and threaten the fragile ecosystem of Trestles.

In response, a coalition of concerned groups organized by the volunteer non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity, are launching “Safe Trestles,” an open-to-all, two-stage design competition to create a safe pathway to serve surfers, the local coastal community and day visitors to San Onofre State Beach. This coalition is looking for cohesive designs that eliminate the danger of crossing active train tracks, help to restore wetlands that have been damaged by the present path, preserve and improve vistas, and offer education about the history of the site and the beach marsh environment. The new path should ensure continued access to the resources by all members of our community and adhere to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

While placing no limitations on the originality or imaginativeness of design ideas, we are looking for tangible low-impact solutions that can actually be built at a future date. Ideally, the winning entry will be sensitive to the remote and undisturbed nature of the area—providing safe access without compromising the pristine environment and views of this rare example of natural Southern California coast.

Entry is $20 and there are two categories; Pro for teams of professionals designers/environmental scientists/landscape architect and Amateur for the rest of us. The competition jury currently includes pro surfers, local community members, world renowned architect Bjarke Ingels, Urban planner and recent Colbert Report interviewee Mitchell Joachim and co-founder of the Omidyar Network and avid surfer Pam Omidyar.

Links in the Landscape Realm

{Project Image by Wen Ying Teh}

I've read some recent great posts on the interwebs and originally intended to expand upon them in a few DUS posts, but time has been limited as of late. Below are a few quick summaries and links of recommended reading:

The Dead Sea Works | Mammoth

If Mammoth isn't in your RSS feed then quickly remedy that. Architect authors Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker have and continue to produce several expansive posts of the landscape infrastructure persuasion.

The conveyor belt, at 18 kilometers the third longest in the world (at least at the time of its design), was planned to create a more efficient means for Dead Sea Works company to convey over a million tons of potash each year from the extraction site (400 meters above sea level) to the Dead Sea Works’ main factory on the banks of the Dead Sea (400 meters below sea level). The plan for a conveyor belt was established, but due to it's intended path(which would span the entire South Judean Desert Nature Reserve) was opposed by Israel’s Nature Reserves Authority, unless, a Landscape Architect was employed to design the conveyor belt.

Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson was selected by Dead Sea Works for the job. The main objective, minimum impact to the desert ecology. More....

The Gardens of the Delta National Park | Delta National Park

An aerial summary of some of the various gardens of the DNP, and as they may soon become a open to the public, a comparison on the transition of French gardens, hunting grounds began as royal enclaves, but ultimately became beloved public parks. More....

An Augmented Ecology of Wildlife and Industry | Wen Ying Teh | dpr-barcelona

Born from from three week trip following Darwin's southern voyage to the Galapagos Islands and South America, 2009 President's Medal Student award winner Weng Ying Teh mutually includes salt mining, flamingo habitats, and tourism into what Teh calls a "symbiotic designed ecology; a pink wonderland, built from colored bacteria and salt crystallization, dissolving and reshaping itself with seasonal and evaporative cycles. The building becomes an ecosystem in itself, completely embedded in the context that surrounds it." More....

We Can Play Our Cities Like Instruments

{Image via Non-Fiction}

With a deep fascination with the digital age and the viral effects of social media, I am finding the ever more importance of the facilitation of the landscape as a medium for the transition of the consumer to producer society. Soon enough we as citizens will have extensive control over our environments. 

Using our digital tools ubiquitous infrastructure will exist that will allow us to play music, control light, communicate, and perhaps even one day, manipulate weather.

The mission of VURB, a design research group founded by Ben Cerveny and James Burke recently wrote a proposal for a new project that will “enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones.”

The city becomes a useful digital playground of information. Cities would be designed to allow for citizen environment manipulation. Controlled from your phone turned remote control, transportation, dinner reservations are queued to your exact needs, a personal ambient soundtrack is sent through airwaves as you walk through the street.

Some things still left to understand, is how these personal manipulations react to others and the community in its entirety. Will my manipulations be affected by the person walking opposite of me down the sidewalk.

These are old concepts, but now the technology is catching up with the ideas:

In the 1960s, Constant Nieuwenhuys, an Amsterdam-based Situationist artist-architect, imagined a New Babylon made of linked transformable structures that allowed its inhabitants to freely reconfigure their environment to fit their needs and desires in realtime. This Utopian fantasy was certainly provocative at the time, but also held hints at a new relationship between citizens and their context. The citizen can be an active participant in shaping her environment everywhere she goes. Together, we can play our cities like instruments.

“The age of ubiquitous computation is condensing around us even as you read this.  The various systems throughout a modern city that you probably interact with everyday are beginning to maintain persistent memories of their own use, communicate with each other about their status, and even reconfigure themselves based on your dynamic needs.”

This is the opening statement of VURB, a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. VURB was founded in July 2009 by Ben Cerveny, design strategist and data visualization theorist, in collaboration with James Burke (Roomware, Narb) and Non-fiction’s Juha van ‘t Zelfde.

“In the same way that social networks and digital representation have had profound consequences on the cultures of print, music, and video, so too will the urban fabric of the city itself be transformed into an information layered, collaboratively shapable medium.”

“The modern city is built not just upon physical infrastructure, but also patterns and flows of information that are always growing and transforming. We are only now beginning to develop the tools that allow us to see these patterns of information over huge spans of time and space, or in any local context in realtime.

Just as the industrial age transformed cities with the addition of towers to the skyline and far-reaching transit networks, the digital age will bring new urban-scale infrastructure into everyday experience.  Where the products of industrial urban evolution were huge physical manifestations that celebrated the magnitude of urban culture, the digital era is instead producing equally impressive manifestations that live in the cloud.”

What this tells me, is the importance of landscape architects to immerse themselves in this technology and social innovation. To gain an intimate understanding of it in order to design within it's capabilities. The tools of the past are still relevant, but we need better understanding of the larger scale ecologies and addressing complicated environmental issues from more then merely the aesthetic dressings. Together, ecological design and ubiquitous community social interaction tools will empower landscape architects to design to allow all citizens to become environmental designers and informants.

+via Non-Fiction

Reading | Sketch Landscape

{Cover}

The final completion of any project is an amazing accomplishment in itself, considering the rigor of work, time, and bureaucratic hurdling that accompanies almost any significant landscape architecture project. For those outside the studio, we are presented with grandiose concepts, then see nothing until the landscape is eventually realized.

Sketch Landscape, is a visual narrative of the creative process of landscape architecture. The book is made up of 500 pages of scribbles, sketches, quick model prototypes, and multi-layered trace paper drawings giving insight to how some of the world's most influential architect's approach design.

(Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Sketches)

{Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Sketches}{Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Model}

Though visually stimulating, I think the book is important because it shows that a design doesn't come from one brilliant flash of the "a-ha" moment, but involves serious study and translation of spatial thoughts. It can be a intense process of fitting creativity into real-world influences, and the sketches shown communicate this.

{Acconci Studio. Mur Island sketches}

Just to give you a quick glimpse I took a couple rough snaps of some of my favorite projects and studios featured. Landworks Studio out of Boston, who I've mentioned here on DUS before takes us through their process of three of their projects: Court Square Garden, Crackle Garden, and Macallen Rooftop. Acconci Studio shows beautiful early concept sketches of Mur Island. And a young new studio NIPpaysage who is doing exciting work, illustrates projects Green Shift and Impluvium.

{NIPpaysage. Green Shift sketches}{NIPpaysage. Green Shift sketches}{NIPpaysage. Impluvium rendering and sketch}

Whether a veteran architect or a designer with an interest in landscape and it's design process, I think you'll find the book a resourceful piece of inspiration. A book, that will spend more of it's time open on your desk then on a shelf.