Category: plants
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Jean Nouvel: Veg.itect
From Curbed LA a series of articles on Jean Nouvel‘s current work in Los Angeles, and beyond. This project is slated as luxury condos in Century City, which judging from the existing skyline is not a hotbed of zoomy vegetated architecture. I appreciate Nouvel’s use of vegetation on this project as a mediator between indoors…
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Veg.itecture: Defining Moments
Vegetated Architecture (aka Veg.itecture, VegArch, Building/Landscape Fusion) is a common theme on L+U. The working definition of this fusion of architecture and landscape has been swirling around in the back of my brain for some time, and I thought it appropriate to give some further definition of what this is. :: Terreform Treehouse – image…
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Fakery is the New PoMo
Paper or Plastic… Fake or Real. No, these are not the perennial Christmas question, or a variation of the paper or plastic debate, but another round of abstractions of all things landscape. I stumbled upon an old post on Strange Harvest that had some amazing images of design for Montreal’s 1967 World’s Expo (aka Expo…
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Net Zero Effect
One of the plethora of terms floating around the design-o-sphere is Net Zero Homes (aka ZEB or zero-energy building). Another fancy term for the same thing? Sort-of, but with a slightly different spin. Simply, it is a building that has a net energy usage of zero over the course of one year. Spawned by the…
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Reading List: Vertical Gardens
Arriving last week, one of many books to come in the next year focussed on green walls and vegetated architecture. Vertical Gardens, authored by Anna Lambertini with an introduction by Jacques Leenhardt and photos by Mario Ciampi. Much like the gardens themselves, the photos of projects are full of variety and almost moist to the…
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Elements: Air
Save politics, air seems to be the issue on everyone’s mind these days. From global climate change to carbon sequestration and offsets – air quality is a significant urban landscape feature. Buildings, and landscapes (alongside appropriate technology) can be a part of the solution, in addition to being less of a part of the problem.…
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Veg.itecture: Super Sized
The next in a continual series of Vegetated Architecture, including some large scale examples from Pittsburgh, Singapore, Moscow, and Paris. From Inhabitat: “Architect Vincent Callebaut’s latest project balances public galleries, meeting rooms and gathering spaces over canals and abandoned railroad tracks in the 19th Parisian district. The prototype uses green technologies and techniques but is…
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Materiality: Plant Knowledge
There has been much discussion lately on the L-ARCH listserv regarding the role and knowledge of landscape architects regarding plants and planting design. (ah, a listserv, how 1997, but i digress). To sum up, there’s a persistent theory that Landscape Architecture suffers from a deficiency of plant knowledge. Is this true? Well, I personally know…
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Bio-diversity
A meditation on plants, picking up on some earlier threads of vegetated abstractions, whether they be sculptural or metaphorical, aesthetic or functional. First is the idea of global warming, and it’s impacts on the biological functioning of plants. While often reported as a purely negative or neutral, the shifts of hardiness zone allows for greater…
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Tree | TREE | tree
As we have seen, trees occupy a litany of places in our senses and psyche – and just beg to be used as fodder for sculptural and architectural abstraction. Some recent adaptations of the theme take on some interesting forms, due to the use of material (a future topic) form, and function. Three examples of…