Dalki Theme Park is an interesting place in South Korea built by Slade Architecture in the year 2000. The theme park is geared towards children and is based around a cartoon character, Dalki, who is a young girl who lives in a garden with her friends and posseses a wild imagination as well as a heightened sense of fashion. The characters were actually created to help market fashion products.

The building itself consists of primarily shopping but also areas for eating and playing as well as exhibits where children can play with the Dalki characters. According to the architects:

“Learned dichotomies (imaginary/ real, shopping / play, natural/ synthetic, site/ building, culture/ commerce) and scale differences create ”disbelief” and impede users from fully engaging the realization of this imaginary world. Borrowing literary strategies for ”suspension of disbelief”, our fluid organization of space and program blurs these dichotomies and eases users into the ‘story’ of Dalki.”

“The building defines three zones vertically; scale-less artificial garden and sky at the ground level, flowing mixed program space on the main level, on the roof a garden and lounge extend the natural landscape, referring to four lush surrounding hills. Rather than abstracting from nature, the building is a synthetic hyper-representation of nature (meta-real): mimicking while questioning the nature of nature.”

images via Slade Architecture

In other words, most everything is fake and there are no lush gardens here. The only real landscape is seen of the hills beyond. In fact, the grounds look pretty barren and boring which make the characters, at least to me, look a little scary. And the so-called garden on the roof has got to be the saddest green roof I’ve seen. The pictures are just depressing.

If you look at the model image and compare it to the real pictures…they don’t exactly exhibit this lush, whimsical character. Unfortunately most things from the model that I would’ve thought to be vegetation are instead built and take on more of that cartoon look. And then check out a picture of some kids playing on the roof garden. This is just sad. The tree has been reduced to a colorful mount and the roof garden is splotches of grass, a few shrubs and a fenced area for people. Very sad.

imagse via pushbullbar

The building, architecturally, seems to posess to interesting spaces within but the spaces surrounding and on top of the building fall flat and are uninviting. For something that is supposed to portray the imaginary world of characters living in a garden, I think they could’ve done so much better.

Anna Garforth is an artist in London who has been working on a project which was inspired by guerilla gardening groups who aim to enrich dilapidated public spaces along with fellow British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Poet and friend of Garforth, Eleanor Stevens, wrote a poem which Garforth has decided to display one verse of in different parts of the city and at different times. And she has chosen to display them in moss.

The first verse reads “In this spore borne air,” This living, breathing graffiti acts as a healthy alternative to spray paints. Instead the moss is attached using organic materials and the hope is that the moss would eventually colonize and take over the whole wall.

According to the artist “spore borne air represents the winds of change, feeling of movement, setting seeds, moss spores in the air, moisture, potential”. The word borne is larger than the rest of the word, putting emphasis on that feeling of change and movement, both in awareness of environmental issues and in the shift in perspective given to the “transitional” area of east London where the art was placed.

images via abe

The second line says “watch your skin peel” which is not at all intended to sound morbid but rather as metamorphosis It is a “metaphor for consious change, the human body being in a constant state of flux, the casting aside of dead matter, and regeneration.”

“The quote can be seen as an invitation to watch your skin peel and consider our connection to the earth, how you can shape it, and also, how it shapes you.”

You think stuff like is not only cool but you actually want them. While landscape architecture is my first love, I’m a total graphic design geek on the side. And since I’ve been feeling was too serious lately, I feel the need to be a bit silly. I actually bought a shoulder bag in London that had a big A3 on it because I thought it was cool. You know, because Europe uses that size of paper and we don’t. See, it’s funny. Right.

The Pantone coin purse and messenger bags, made by two different companies by the way, remind me of my London bag.

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Although my all-time favorite bags are definitely the ones from Vy & Elle (play on words meaning Vinyl) that takes old billboard ads an turns them into bags. They are all different in color and design and each one is fabulously pixelated. And some are even made with old-fashioned recycled seat belt buckles!

How about a nifty t-shirt? This one cracks me up and makes me think of the days when I was putting together a magazine on the side a couple years back and InDesign was totally pissing me off. That’s right…take that you stupid fonts! Ha!

And the Emergency Clown Nose could be totally useful. I mean, I can think of several occassions where I was working around the clock and seriously got a bit loopy. Why bottle it up and keep it to yourself? Let everyone know that you’ve worked a bit too much. Or, if your studio mate is having a rough day and you need to cheer him up…you’re always prepared to launch into action.