Nearly 15 years in the making, I’m thrilled to share the cover and publishing date for #stagingurbanlandscapes with @Birkhauser. The publication examines the activation of public space with events and installations, asserting the designer’s role in creating flexibility and change.
The book features 27 case studies with original drawings and diagrams of spaces on multiple continents, at various scales and within different contexts.
Foreword by Charles Waldheim
Discursive essays from:
Gina Ford
chris reed
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Chris Wangro
Alex Wall
Insight into the creative process from:
Adriaan Geuze West 8 urban design & landscape architecture
Ken Trew Argent
Renée Daoust Daoust Lestage Inc
Richard Kennedy James Corner Field Operations
Philip Barash Sasaki
Kirsten Bauer ASPECT Studios
Afterword by James Corner Field Operations
In bookstores Fall/Autumn 2018 with Birkhäuser+GBC AG
As special effects budgets continue to grow, the architectural wonders that TV, film and video game producers create seem to get more and more impressive.
From the castles of Westeros to the imaginative, colorful designs of Studio Ghibli, they compiled some of the most iconic and interesting architectural feats that they feel best represent six of their favorite fictional universes. In order to capture the finer details and the feel of each building, they’ve illustrated each one with a pen and paper – and they are pretty happy with the results!
Okay but I don’t think ya’ll appreciate this as much as you should! Figuring out the places of ancient buildings — Roman, Celtic etc — tends to be a bit of a challenge. You have to consider the fact that the land has changed quite a lot over the centuries, with buildings popping up here and there, the topography changing dramatically, rising and falling like no one’s business, forests and cliffs being cut down or collapsing into the sea.
Basically, the descriptions we have of sites in old ass texts can be a nightmare to match up to modern day locations. Some, like Chester and London, are easy. We kept building on them. It’s why there’s an amphitheatre in the middle of Chester and the Roman Wall.
But in other parts of the country its a heck of a lot harder to locate and identify places.
There’s this show called Time Team (or sth like that, it’s been a long long time) and they basically went around the UK digging up ancient sites that they tried to find through radar and aerial imagery etc etc. That requires a fair amount of planning and technology (aka the bane of field budgets everywhere). And even with those and all the nice little people digging away and the photographs and radar imagery, they still had issues figuring out the direction a building went in, which way the wall ran, if this was part of a house or not and so on.
The heatwave and drought about to happen if it doesn’t frickin rain, is useful in that it allows us to see these sites without loads of planning and resources as they are today. We can identify places we’ve not been able to identify, locate sites we’ve wanted to locate for ages, because of the nifty little thing the dirt does when it gets hot and dry and like Satan’s breathing on everything.
And that means that those sites can be logged down, and the modern topography won’t be such a bitch to try and figure out for locations because that heatwave has saved a lot of time and effort!
Basically, don’t be surprised if in the next year or so, there are more reports and research papers about archaeological digsites in the UK from the Bronze Age or the Iron Age because this right here, this damned benighted hellish summer heat, will have been the cause of it all.
Which makes me a little more tolerant of Satan and his dick ass breathing.
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, urban artist SpY has transformed the square into grassy park. The temporary park titled Cesped, or “Grass,” was created by bringing in more than 35,000 square feet of sod, which formed a perfect green circle at the centre of the pedestrian plaza.
