Taking Place

Scanning back over Toby’s recent photos, it’s clear to me that each one is more compelling for seeing the interplay of ordered form versus organic form.  The mausoleum’s stepped wall sets off the scatter of euonymus leaves; the billowing trees in Central Park provides a foil for oh-so-formal pool and fountain.  You get to choose: [...]

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These last few posts about the nature of a central space as opposed to a central object lead to a question:  are we looking at places from a formal standpoint (the void as center, with building mass and plants as enclosing elements, for instance), or from a personal-experience standpoint?  
The answer, of course, is both; [...]

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I certainly enter those spaces in my imagination, and would love it if I could enter and stand in them myself. Of course, if I can, then it’s likely that others could as well, and then it wouldn’t actually feel like a pure volume of space, but one that’s jangled up by people milling around [...]

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Last week I joined two friends from Kansas on a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  It’s a stunning building, and houses an astonishing collection of Western art.  The collection ranges from a slew of Italian Renaissance paintings (including a Piero della Francesca ‘Hercules’ in which Hercules holds a wooden club in [...]

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As a little break from talking about landscape architecture, I’m posting a few photos from a flight my husband and I took over the marshes and coast of Massachusetts’ South Shore three weeks ago.  To take them I had to tip the flexible viewfinder on my camera up, see what the graphic abstraction looked like [...]

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This just in — my friend Craig Verzone, a talented landscape architect and teacher based in Switzerland, has started an online audio series called Terragrams.  Here’s Craig’s description of Terragrams:
Terragrams is a podcast designed to capture the voices of those responsible for forming our constructed landscapes. It is an open digital archive aimed solely at collecting [...]

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One picture deserves another, or perhaps two.  Your words about the aerosol effect of repeated forms in a relatively diffuse volume reminded me of the most recent version of my streamers project.  On New Year’s Day a couple of years ago I hung some red streamers from saplings behind one of the much-noted Norway maples, [...]

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Paul Goldberger recently wrote in The New Yorker about the work of Thomas Heatherwick, an English designer of objects.  Heatherwick’s one design in the US is the Longchamps flagship store in New York City.  In it, a series of parallel orange ‘ribbons’ courses through the building, from outside front sidewalk to outside back roof, warping [...]

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The idea of ‘place’ in urban landscapes often has to do with nature in stripped-down form, ‘nature’ at its most abstract.  That header photo of the Tuileries:  monocultural collection of trees, stone dust  or grass ground plane, sky.  Everything is simplified, codified, representative of something bigger and more complex.  In some way, we consider these [...]

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