Category: science

  • Botanical Neurobiology

    A TED Talk on Plant Intelligence by Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso will leave you on the edge of your seat and asking all sorts of questions of both your house-plants and about the wide-ranging implications for landscapes.  Mancuso operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Italy.   A brief synopsis of the talk:  “Does the Boston…

  • Landscape Performance Series

    Interesting link to the Landscape Architecture Foundation‘s new resource – the Landscape Performance Series – which is sort of an adjust to the Sustainable Sites Initiative which is “…designed to fill a critical gap in the marketplace and make the concept of “Landscape Performance” and its contribution to sustainability as well known as “Building Performance” is…

  • Restoring the Garden of Eden

    A great feature from Spiegel Online covers the work of Azzam Alwash, a US/Iraqi hydraulic engineer aiming to restore what were once vibrant wetlands flourishing in the cradle of civilization through an organization called Nature Iraq. While most news coming from the region focuses on bricks and mortar rebuilding, it’s important to note the power…

  • Alan Berger on Landscape Waste

    Via World Landscape Architect a two-part video of Alan Berger: “CUSP Conference organisers recently posted a two part video of Alan Berger’s presentation at the 2009 CUSP Conference on Landscape Waste. An interesting look at landscapes waste resulting from industrial processes.” Check out part 2 here.

  • Vertical Agriculture (From Outer Space)

    While I continue this impromptu study of the current state of Vertical Agriculture – it’s important to realize that the ingenuity of humans is always a factor. Industrialization of growing food is a long-standing feature of agriculture – which has probably simultaneously done the most good for productivity and the most harm in severing our…

  • An Experimental Landscape Architecture

    Coverage of some of Alan Berger’s work with P-REX on the Pontine Marshes has appeared on mammoth, the most refreshingly non-architectural of architecture blogs, borrowing a note from BLDGBLOG and Pruned in their fascination with the large-scale landscape infrastructural interventions that don’t seem to make the pages of all but a few ‘landscape architecture’ media…

  • Transparent Cells

    Arch Daily offers some great imagery from a project by Aristide Antonas, along with collaborators Katerina Koutsogianni & Yannikos Vassiloulis called ‘Transparent Cells’ which shows a proposal for proposal for a the Architecture School at Delft featuring pixelated spatial arrangements that can be reconfigured as necessary to accomodate new programs. The Hundertwasser-esque vegetal compartments are…

  • Modelling Dynamic Processes

    One of the interesting links I found on Bradley Cantrell’s site showed a very cool project being developed by the UC Berkeley to simulate river dynamics, which have notoriously been difficult to replicate. Via Science Daily: “Christian Braudrick, William Dietrich and their colleagues are the first to build a scaled-down meandering stream in the lab…

  • Metropolitan Field Guide

    University of Oregon landscape architecture graduate and now Seattle resident Kelly Brenner has an interesting blog called ‘The Metropolitan Field Guide’ which focuses on design for urban wildlife habitat. As a self-professed generalist which tends to take me on ADHD-addled tours of pretty much everything, I’m a big fan of folks who aim to provide…

  • Personal Infrastructures

    Working on some link house-cleaning and came up with a few posts that seems to thread together in an interesting narrative. The first of this was a beautiful installation for the ‘Flower Street BioReactor’ via Dezeen: “Los Angeles architects Emergent have designed an installation filled with green algae that produce oil by photosynthesis.” This sort…