I am thankful that I live in an area where there are definite seasons and I enjoy them all. I associate each one with different sights, sounds and smells and definitely tastes (as I sit here sipping my hot apple cider). Last Saturday my husband and I drove out into the country and went on a long autumn walk. I was so excited about it that I got up early, for a Saturday, and put on my festive burnt orange down vest, packed up the dog and was ready to go. The morning light was amazing as it came streaming down through the trees and the colors of the leaves falling on the path as we walked were beautiful, like they were laying down a colorful carpeted path.

Aside from the landscape turning brilliant reds, oranges and yellows, a large part about the change into fall is the difference in the light. The days grow shorter, the nights longer and the mornings darker. Even a bright sunny day has a subtle difference from that of summer or spring. To some people it can feel depressing, this lack of light and onset of various hues of gray, gray and more gray but there’s something personal about it that I love. To me it’s cozy and it’s in this time that I feel more inclined to read, write and even just sit and think. I also enjoy waking in the darkness. I feel like in the early morning it’s just me and my thoughts…me and the city…me and the world. Everything takes on an intimate beauty with the city lights glowing and the sun just over the horizon. The moment is mine.

Over on Portlandize, I saw that I wasn’t the only one enjoying this change in light and finding beauty in the morning darkness. He even shot a video of his bike ride along the Portland waterfront on his way to work one morning. The videos on Portlandize are always great and this one fit right into my very autumny zen mood. Check it out.

image via gucky

The people of Osaka, Japan apparently prefer a bit of green space over watching a live game of baseball. Due to poor ticket sales, the stadium that once inhabitated Osaka proved unprofitable and in 2003 shut it’s doors forever. The image above shows the interesting, organic mix of shopping center, office complex, park and garden spaces that became the next generation of the baseball stadium after being converted into what they now call Namba Parks. The design is by Jon Jerde of Jerde Partnership Architects.

images via Jerde

According to the designer, “Given the location [near the railway station], owner Nankai Electric Railway asked Jerde to create a gateway that would redefine Osaka’s identity. So Jerde conceived Namba Parks as a large park, a natural intervention in Osaka’s dense and harsh urban condition. Alongside a 30-story tower, the project features a lifestyle commercial center crowned with a rooftop park that crosses multiple blocks while gradually ascending eight levels.”

imaga via milosch1029

“In addition to providing a highly visible green component in a city where nature is sparse, the sloping park connects to the street, welcoming passers-by to enjoy its groves of trees, clusters of rocks, cliffs, lawn, streams, waterfalls, ponds and outdoor terraces. Beneath the park, a canyon carves an experiential path through specialty retail, entertainment and dining venues. Namba Parks creates a new natural experience for Osaka that celebrates the interaction of people, culture and recreation.”

image via anthonygrimely

I thought this picture of the Namba Parks entry was pretty amusing. The fact that they require dogs to go in carry bags just gives you an idea of the average size of a typical Japanese dog.

image via mrlederhosen

The legendary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin died on Sunday, October 25th at the age of 93. He left behind amazing spaces that will live on. OregonLive wrote about Halprin’s life and the impact his design work had on Portland’s urban landscape. More about Halprin’s life and some of his fabulous sketches can be found on the website of the Portland-based Halprin Landscape Conservancy with videos of interviews with the designer to be posted in the near future.

Below is a short video from OregonLive…

Update: A new post about Keller Fountain as well as more Lawrence Halprin links.

Barcelona-based studio Miralles Tagliabue (EMBT) has been chosen to design the massive 7,000 square meter Spain Pavilion for the 2010 World EXPO in Shanghai. The sensual curves of the frontage portion of the pavilion will be wrapped in wicker, inspired by the craft of wicker baskets rooted in both the Spanish and Chinese cultures. The rest of the organic structures will be made from semi-transparents paper overlayed on an panel system as well as bamboo.

The design by lead architect Benedetta Tagliabue is meant to encourage free flowing pedestrian traffic and create various open spaces within. The cities of Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, Santiago de Compostel and Zaragoza will be featured inside the pavilion. The exhibition will cover three areas: “From nature to city,” “From our parents’ city to our current one,” and “From the current city to the future one.”

images via dsgnwrld

These fluid curves and shape reminds me of the insect-inspired Termite Pavilion from the 2009 Pestival in London.

For those of you in Portland, my friend’s film Forge looks like it should be out around January. Maybe it’ll show up elsewhere…hmm! Looks pretty good to me. Check out the cool trailer he recently finished. The movie is explained as “A man tries to save his scientist brother from slipping permanently into madeness with the power of a stolen technology”.

On September 8th, 2007, the City of Kent in Washington state celebrated the 25th Anniversary of Earthworks Park designed by Herbert Bayer. This celebration coincided with the one-day art installation, Chromatic Levee by Brice Maryman, as part of 4Culture’s Site-Specific program, that year the program was titled “Art Unearthed”. Brice explains it best in his own words on the City of Kent’s website documenting the piece:

The notion that design should be incorporated into the everyday—that aesthetics and humanity should be a consistent portion of our experience—is about as foreign to contemporary culture as are hand-cranked sewing machines. In an era where an almost surgical efficiency rules, we are quick to circumscribe times, objects, thoughts and beliefs into boxes. They define our commutes, our children, and our cities. It’s cleaner that way, we think; with so many neat compartments, it’s easy to know when something is out of place.

Given the stereotypes, you would think that an Austrian, who worked for the Container Corporation of America, would appreciate this ordered efficiency. But Herbert Bayer rebuffed this channelization of thought; above all else, he was a humanist of the highest order and embraced the overlaps, inconsistencies and the floodplains of thought that make the human experience richer. Of all of his Bauhaus brethren, it was Bayer who carried the ideals of integrated design the furthest. Whether wielding this power through typography or product design or exhibitions, Bayer’s raison d’etre seems to have been to dissect the boxes that were being formed all around him—to move away from the mechanical—which he saw as a tool, not an end—and to allow for the sediment of humanity to accumulate in order to see what might take root.

I wonder then, what Bayer would have thought about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina? The boxes that held people in at the edge of the Mississippi Delta were so starkly apparent after August 29, 2005. The Black Box. The Poverty Box. The Boxed Culvert of the Mississippi River, draining an increasingly urbanized America. The Box of White Consciousness. The Box of the Superdome. The Box of Apathy. The Box of Underfunded Education. Each was laid bare, scattered about for all to see when the waters receeded.

With his perpetual hope for the human species, Mr. Bayer might have sought to find ways to used those banged up cubes as the raw material for a new start. He would have believed that the inviolable shared culture of the swamps and bayous of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi could coalesce around a new infrastructure that honored economic, social and environmental considerations as a system, rather than as discrete boxes, without relationship to each other.

On a lesser scale, these are the same questions and themes that surround the future of the Earthworks. Mill Creek, a modest unassuming stream within the Puget Sound basin, would not give anyone pause if not for two quite consequential human choices. One happened largely before Mr. Bayer’s time, the other largely afterward.

When Kent was established, Mill Creek was a reliable power source for the booming logging industry, driving the whip saws that would rip timber to boards. In time, those boards formed the raw material for building the town around the mill. Decades later, the mill was gone, but the town remained, resting on the floodplain of the Green River Valley with the nozzle of Mill Creek aimed directly at what was now downtown Kent.

Gradually, the land that had been denuded by the lumbermen regained its forest, and the torrent of Mill Creek was slowed by the naturally regulated flow provided by the rich duff and canopies of the native forest. For a time, the walls between nature and culture were weakened and both were serving the same purpose–as it had been for 10,000 years before Euro-American settlers came.

But the siting of Kent, like the siting of New Orleans, already placed it in a precarious situation, hemmed in by natural systems that were beneficent for much of the year, but that could turn ruinous during a long rain. The careful planning and understanding of upstream impacts on the waters of the streams and rivers of the Kent Valley should have been of paramount import, but it was not. Like everywhere else in America, sprawl took root with little thought about how the dedritics of development would affect the hydology of the place. So Mill Creek flooded, salmon drowned, and downtown Kent sat waterlogged in the winter. Indeed, it was into this sad position in our history that Bayer entered the scene.

Bayer’s intention, again, was to obscure the traditional boxes by creating something previously unknown: a hybrid ecology where the boundaries between nature, art, landscape and infrastructure blurred into a coherent whole–separate from and greater than its parts. He states, “a dam in the ordinary sense constitutes a radical interference with the natural configuration of the land. My intent was, therefore, to give the dams a natural appearance conforming to the landscape (surroundings) and to become integral parts of the landscape being created.”

Breaking down barriers and establishing new frames was part of the intention of Chromatic Levee as well. Hovering between the ideas of art and infrastructure, social and economic identities, inertia and entropy, nature and art, the natural and the artificial, performance and sculpture, history and the present, I sought to portray a continuum of place—a richly layered stratigraphy, both lithic and dynamic, yet extricably borne of its endemic geography. Most directly, the piece is an homage to Bayer’s color explorations, which find their resonance in the colors of the Chromatic Levee. Reflected in the waters of Mill Creek, Chromatic Levee attempts to meld art, nature and infrastructure to remind us of a future we have only to articulate to achieve.

Afterword

On the other hand, like the Earthworks themselves, it was not solely the eidetic, but also Bayer’s humanistic ideal, that needed to be attended to. In achieving this, Catherine Eith’s assistance could not have been more welcome or timely. As I moved through the process of sorting out the materials and methods of construction, she suggested purchasing a particular, high-quality fabric. This modest investment would prevent us from sending this material to the landfill; instead, we could send these items to the Gulf Coast. We fashioned the sandbag modules here, used them once for the installation, then shipped them to our friends in the Gulf Coast. By the time you are reading this, the victims of Hurricane Katrina who lost so much are now sleeping under quilts and blankets made from the sympathetic reverberations found in Kent and King County, Washington.

images via Brice Maryman

This fascinating and beautifully executed forest of pvc pipes designed by Supposed Design Office is oddly enough part of the Diesel Denim Gallery in Aoyama, Japan. The store is an interesting one in that it also functions as an art gallery for emerging artists, showcasing new talent through installation and exhibits.

This particular installation has transformed the space into a sort of art exhibit for the Diesel clothing line, fusing both art and fashion in one space. The installation is titled Nature Factory and consists of a series of plumbing pipes that run along the walls in different directions yet in a somewhat orderly fashion before breaking character and branching out into natural, tree-like forms.

According to the designer Makato Tanijiri, principal of Supposed, via Arch Daily, “Denim as recognized work clothes formerly had, at times, shown different expressions as fashion items to the people. Equally, a group of plumbing, usually unnoticed, shows completely different expressions in the installation.”

images via Arch Daily

The Morristown Building in New Jersey, headquarters for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has installed a 3-story vegetated wall, or “bio-wall” as they are calling it. With 38 ft in height and 14 ft wide, the system was built to assist with internal air filtration in addition to it’s luscious looks. The plants have been inserted into pouches slit into the air and water permeable media without the use of soil. The built system is similar to the construction of Patrick Blanc-designed living walls. The plants are watered by water slowly cascading through the system from the top to the bottom where it is caught in a trough and then pumped back up to the top.

images via Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

The wall doesn’t just rely on the tropical plants and hydroponics system to passively pull toxins out of the air. The vegetated system has been constructed in conjunction with the HVAC system that sits behind the wall such that the air can be pulled directly through the wall media, allowing the roots to actively filter the VOC’s and carbon dioxide. Since the system takes advantage of recycled air, there is no need to re-cool or re-heat the air as it passes through the system. The air is returned to rooms through the raised floor duct system.

This experimental ventilation and heating system based on natural systems is also part of the Dodge Foundation’s support of biophilia research. A video below explains more about the bio-wall…

With the rains descending upon the Pacific Northwest and everyone settling in for the darker, wetter months of the year, I couldn’t help but recall an installation I saw at the Tate Modern in London almost exactly a year ago, on Halloween to be exact. The installation titled TH.2058 by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster explores a time 50 years in the future when the rains never stop in London and the people are forced to take shelter in the Turbine Hall of the art museum.

When approaching the entrance, the sound of heavy rain is heard and large text above explains the installation before moving through hanging strips of plastic and emerging in a room that feels anything but comfortable. The text explains:

“It has been raining for years now, not a day, not an hour without rain. This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. They have started to grow like giant tropical plants, and becomes even more monumental. To stop this growth it has been decided to store them inside, among the hundreds of bunk beds which, night and day, receive refugees from the rain…Turbine Hall / 2058 / London”

Upon entering the room, the sounds of rain could be heard from the other side. At first there seem to be no sounds inside but then, venturing further in, a song can be heard playing from a casette player that lays on one of the bunks. The song is a bossa nova medley titled The 1958 Song by Art Lindsay. People moved about slowly and the sounds of creeking beds could be heard as people sat down and stood up, occasionally picking up the books that were scattered about the bunks. The books included such titles as Dead Cities, Fahrenheit 451, The Ware of the Worlds and The Drowned World to name but a few.

On the far wall, a huge screen played The Last Film, an assemblage of clips from several films of science fiction, experimental works and urban expectations with visuals flickering and flashing with an eerie Clockwork Orange feeling, but without the sounds of Ludwig van. Scenes were taken from such movies as, to name but a few, Zabriskie Point, Fahrenheit 451, Soylent Green, Repulsion and The Last Wave.

images (c) Lisa Town

The most dominating figures in the room are of course the oversized sculptures which, like the people, are also said to have taken shelter from the rain. The sculptures had grown to large versions of the themselves from the rain as if they were alive. They themselves seem to feel like shelter although unsettling. Lights frequently pierce the room and strange LED’s are found in a somewhat random pattern around the walls. The eerie feeling is enhanced by this odd sense of surveillance. As a viewer wandering through the installation, one can’t help but feel small and helpless in the strange world with no sense of what the future might hold.

Below is a video from Art Review that speaks with the artist regarding this installtion…

Find more videos like this on artreview.com

With footage from the late 1940’s, this documentary titled “In The Street” by James Agee, Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt captures the poetry in the streets of urban New York. The text at the beginning reads, “The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence. The attempt in this short film is to capture this image.”

It has been divided into two parts, both of which are below…

Helen Levitt, a New York photographer known for her amazing work in documenting the urban experience within the streets of New York City, passed away this year at the age of 95. She truly had a way of seeing and through those eyes she saw a vibrant place, bursting with life. She had a way of capturing the culture through film. Her photos will live on and continue to inspire.

images via stephen daiter gallery,masters of photography and ground glass