Category: water
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FLOW: A Competition
Winners of the international competition „FLOW“ arrived via an email today. The european competition is: “… for students in the last two years of architecture, engineer, art, landscape, town planning, sociology and young architects were born after December 31st, 1975 in Europe.” The subject area of the competition is the City of Brussels, covering the…
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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…
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Hydrological Infill
As an adjunct to the recent post on the abstract ‘Blue Road’ that attempts to restore in spirit hidden waterways, the inverse process (proposed, but thankfully not implemented) of river removal from in NYC, circa 1924 as a way to alleviate traffic congestion – via Gothamist: “In this issue of Popular Science, circa 1924, there’s…
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The Blue Road
A link worth checking out is from Dutch artist Henk Hofstra who painted roadways vibrant blue to symbolize hidden watercourses in the 2007 piece entitled ‘The Blue Road’.:: images via Henk Hofstra “In April 2007… a road in Drachten, The Netherlands, is painted blue to symbolise the water. It is 1000 meters long and 8…
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Where the Revolution Began
The passing of Lawrence Halprin has close ties to an upcoming book that is being released this weekend celebrating his legacy in Portland. This Saturday is a chance to celebrate the legacy of Halprin in Portland, with the release of ‘Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space’. On…
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As We Found Them… As We Leave Them
A provocative image found in an email from the local Audubon Society email offers the visual of ‘As We Found Them… As We Leave Them’, a Jay “Ding” Darling cartoon from 1923, as a statement about the state of our rivers in the face of urbanization. The reason for the email was an upcoming hearing…
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More from the Ecotone
I am a fan of the conceptual parti of the ‘ecotone’ as seen from the Integrating Habitats competition award winner ‘Urban Ecotones’ from 2008. The use of this landscape ecology principle, which is defined as a transitional zone between distinct plant communities, offers a lot of mileage as an evocative strategy within it’s original sphere…
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Two if by Land, None if by Sea
Just last month, a strange site appeared in Portland, docked at Waterfront Park. The area, chain-linked off from anyone getting too close, gave a vision of a spectacle equal parts Rose Festival Fleet Week and kitschy episode of the The Love Boat, spawned from gigantism of the engineering prowess and the ego that could only…
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Spanning: Bridge Houses
A couple of projects, picking up on the recent post ‘A River Runs Through It‘, feature a pair of amazing buildings spanning waterways. I guess the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright is alive and well in architecture. The first via Arch Daily, is Bridge House, a design in Adelaide, Australia by Max Pritchard Architect. This…
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Seeing Daylight
The idea of daylighting streams is compelling as an urban intervention – unearthing the natural drainage from the buried pipes and. A new project from Seattle offers a unique vision of the potential in action. Some background: “A large, paved lot once devoted to overflow mall traffic and RV parking has been replaced with a…