New Blog Sites and Online Publications 1.2
Recently discovered sites that fly low under the blogosphere radar....
Landscape 2.0. Musings on landscape architecture and urbanism with a manifesto to incite!
Competition: Ipswich Goes Green
Call for a miniature golf course hole design with a theme of environmental preservation. Artists/Landscape Architects/Tinkerers/Architects all encouraged to apply.
This will be a part of the Ipswich Goes Green Festival, to be held on July 12th, 2009 (rain or shine). This event is free to the public.
Citizen Architect Interviews: Kian Goh
As a follow up to the BLANKSL8 posting, architect Kian Goh of super interesting! architecture.design.strategies was interviewed last month by the AIA's program, Citizen on the Move. Kian discusses her current work with LGBT youth, the Audre Lorde Project and the tangible intersections of community activism and architecture.
http://info.aia.org/nwsltr_angle.cfm?pagename=angle_nwsltr_current&#camove
BLANK SL8 Exhibition Space at Port Authority
A press release from the Times Square Alliance about the Pop-Up shop at Port Authority, designed by super interesting! architecture.design.strategies and on display until May 30th.
Kian Goh and John Bruce transformed a long unused storefront in the Port Authority Bus Terminal building into a temporary fashion retail and art exhibition space. The new space, developed by the Times Square Alliance and The Fashion Center Business Improvement District, provides young fashion designers and artists an exciting and highly visible stage to display and sell their work.
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Landscape Throwdown?
Last night, Jim Corner, George Hargreaves and Michael Van Valkenburgh met to discuss the "21st Century Park and the Contemporary City". Hosted by The Forum for Urban Design, held at MoMa and moderated by Ken Greenberg, it promised to be a good discussion. I was able to score a ticket - though many I knew were booted off of the wait list after they had RSVP to make room for members. The auditorium was small, though a handful of the persistent who showed up without tickets were able to get a seat.
So, it was no throwdown, with each landscape architect largely reinforcing the positions of the other through their ten minute presentations. The big themes of the evening were the ecological/environmental, the social and the economic aspects of parks. In short, contemporary parks are on brownfields sites and so serve to clean up polluted land, and then provide habitat and recreation, and parks are efficient economic drivers of urban development. Parks are expensive to build and maintain, and so new forms of public/private collaborations are emerging that purchase the lands for parks, build them and maintain them. New parks are productive, in terms of ecology, energy, food production and other traditional forms of economic revenue. Identity was another theme of the evening. On brownfields sites that are razed and flat, how do you create "bones" as Hargreaves called them. Corner sited the new appearance of parks as one way, with distinctive furniture and contmporary design elements. A really captivating photo of the Highline under construction behind him made his point clear.
