COMING SOON... CHAINROCK: USERS' GUIDE

...an alluvial island in the Thames Estuary, recently.

Never go back, they say. They say a lot of things, however, and it's best to lead by example. It's best not to lead at all in fact. Going back is not necessarily negative, it depends what way we're facing. Going forwards, looking backwards.. or the reverse... this is dangerous.

We cannot go back. We can revisit, but it's different. It's not the same. So when I revisited Canvey Island for my final project at Greenwich, I found myself redoing the project in its entirety. Predictably, I made many of the same mistakes in execution as I had the first time around. The process was no less rewarding. Repetition is, after all, a form of change. In Leonard Cohen's novella Beautiful Losers the mantra is "I change, I stay the same... I change, I stay the same..." a Leonard koan?

A ship at rest, at last, on the muddy banks of the Thames Estuary.

 Setting process aside and looking at product, two Canvey projects left me with a bundle of loose ends and untethered threads. There is a certain mindset that obtains enormous pleasure from untangling knots. It is not a mindset that I possess: I lack the patience and am insufficiently conscientious. However, I'm proud of some of what was produced and would like to share it with others. There are enough ingredients to put together an interesting meal. But this is not fine dining, and instead of neatly contrived courses it is more likely to resemble a one-pot stew, possibly with some bread to soak up the juice.

As a quick recap, the (second) project was concerned with the reclamation of Canvey Island's Occidental Jetty ("Chainrock") by a group of convicts in order to create a self-sufficient self-governing penal colony. The armature performed the role of conduit, connecting land and sea, and as vector for the landscape processes responding to the prisoners' hierarchy of need (water-shelter-heat-food etc.)

Shipbreaking: not the redemptive power of forced labour, but a necessary subsistence strategy in a new colony.

The concept of the "users' guide" was initially explored as a framing device for the detailing of the project: since the project did not lay out an immutable final design (the site would be continually undone and remade by its users), the "detailing" would consist of helpful suggestions for the site's occupants (i.e. biotopic filtration beds, reclaimed furniture templates, improvised fixings etcetera). Chainrock:  Users' Guide was thus intended to faithfully recreate a document that might exist in the fictional universe of the project.

Time constraints meant this ambition was not realised and ...Users' Guide joins the other confused Canvey concatenations. Of all the unfinished projects it may have the strongest individual case for completion, but in a plebiscite it would win a plurality, not a working majority... I cannot ignore the needs of the other parties and their constituencies, and instead we must enter some kind of coalition.

Hence the one-pot meal approach. By first of all accepting that whilst the initial concept of ...Users' Guide may well have been realised in one version of the Chainrock universe, it exists as a partially finished project in this universe. Likewise, the project exists in multiple forms, in this and other universes. A new realisation of ...Users' Guide might thus serve as a portal into these parallel worlds and also as a psychocartograph of the creative processes that led to the various realisations of the Canvey Project.

In conclusion, the text Chainrock: Users'Guide is currently under production. It may/may not be available online and/or offline any time soon.

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT AREA III

These past few months I have been desperately attempting to complete my landscape architecture diploma, hence the lack of blog activity. The end in sight, I thought it pertinent to share some of the work I will be presenting to the external examiners next week.

The following images were all produced for the third design development area, the occidental colony.

The purpose of the third development area was to produce a cogent planting scheme whilst remaining true to the underlying concepts espoused in the original master plan. Native species were utilised in accordance with the ecological imperative of the master plan, with the plant list drawn from the Natural History Museum's postcode analysis:

As with the other development areas, I produced AUTOCAD models prior to refining the design, the better to understand the spatial relationships engendered by the layout.  With the addition of materials, these rendered reasonably well within Autocad and represent interesting concept models:

With the assessment criteria for this development area focussing principally on technical execution and plant knowledge, it was right that the majority of drawings produced were planting schemes. As I was producing vector drawings in plan, I elected to invert the colours to white on black to make them stand out more. This scheme was replicated in the title sheet (top). 

Unifying the third development area drawings with a white-on-black colour scheme inspired me to carry a similar theme with the other two development areas. In contrast to the black gloss used for this area I used a buff/grey and mauve/blue sugar paper for the hardworks and wetland areas respectively. The rough texture also permitted the use of chalk and charcoal to augment the vector drawings. I will post here Monday or Tuesday.

Masterplanning Canvey

We begin with the site and its context: 7.2 square miles of alluvial island on the South Essex coast:

Most of the island sits below sea level:

Some quick zoning. for some reason this image is horizontally flipped:

The beginnings of a context board with satellite image...

Sketch ideas for landscape features...

The workspace...

A work in progress...

Layer one...

Layer two...

The two drawings combined in Photoshop...

Just a sketch design, lots of work to do... the main issue being that my chosen site is over 100ha in size. The idea is to create 4,000 new homes in South Canvey that are sensitive to the unique environmental and cultural issues facing the island.

Much more to follow. Stay tuned.

Gillett Square- Art and Context in Urban Spaces/ Places

In the quest to uncover what makes a 'space' a 'place', or if there's any real difference between the two terms I elected to explore Gillet Square in Dalston, Hackney.

Dalston is renowned as a vibrant cultural and social hub concentrated principally along Kingsland Road. There is are few open spaces or public squares. Gillett Square was devepoed on the site of a former car park as part of ken Livingstone's public space strategy.

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The scheme consists of a 1500 sqm open space fully enclosed by built mass on three sides and a one metre high fence partially enclosing the north side. There are three entrances to the site, indicated below:

The scheme was initially devised to act as a cultural hub for the area, with the construction of "Dalston Culture House" on the western perimeter, now serving as the home for the Vortex Jazz Club (previously sited on Stoke Newington's Church Street). The block on the southern edge is owned by the Hackney Community Cooperative and comprises a parade of shops and a bar on the ground floor (all of which face out of the square and on to neighbouring Bradbury Road), with apartments and artist studios on the first and second floors. Balconies from the uppermost floor overlook the square., as indicated below.

The scheme has been criticised by the local free press as being contrived and clinical, with critic referring to it as "Stasi Land", presumably referencing inhuman eastern bloc urban design.. Certainly, on previous visits to the site I have found it to be lacking human activity in spite of the cultural programme. for this reason I thought it would be an interesting site to critique in terms of the space-place axis. It is also popular with street drinkers, who are widespread feature of city life, if often considered a negative aspect.

The social acceptability of street drinking (or lack thereof) is an interesting consideration in the use and design of public space. The gentlemen in the image above might be considered negative or undesirable, but are certainly enjoying a bit of landscape architecture. Public perception does tend to hinge on valued judgements concerning social class: ultimately, the two men above ware no different to a mature couple enjoying champagne from their Fortnum and Mason hamper on Parliament Hill.

Hoping to observe how street drinkers used Gillett Square at night I ventured there on Monday evening, expecting to witness one or two seedy groups of middle-aged men sharing cans of cider. Instead, a quite different scene unfolded before me.

A group of four or five skateboarders, aged 25-40 had monopolised the centre of the square, skating around an upturned plastic crate. It was a constant ballet, with the skaters using the raised deck in the west as a kind of launch platform, rolling around in wide circles observed by other users of the site.

The atmosphere was warm and pleasant. Outside the Vortex groups of people sat on tables drinking, talking or watching the skaters. Beside the skateboarder-launch pad-cum deck a group of seven or eight middle-aged men gathered, drinking from cans and talking about nothing in particular. I tried to record their conversation on my phone but haven't quite worked out how to upload it here. Additonally, there were scattered couples enjoying the evening, some on the steps by the southern edge and some on the raised deck.

Along the southern perimeter some kiosks have been erected, housing a phone/ internet shop, a coffee stall and an Afro-Caribbean barber shop. The coffee stall was shut but two quite separate but adjacent groups of young men congregated outside the two other stalls, sat on deck chairs, drinking and smoking.

To complete our mise-en-scene, the most curious addition of all: a ping-pong table (sometimes referred to as a "table-tennis-table", which strikes me as a pleonasm). Two young men were playing table tennis, watched by a kid of a bout ten or eleven.

Two things struck about this the square...

Firstly, most people were drinking alcohol. In terms of the social acceptability of this, there was definitely a hierarchy. The group outside the vortex imbibed cocktails purchased from a licensed bar, on seating provided by the venue. To their right, the men outside the kiosks were somehow affiliated to the business operators of the kiosks, and were lent some degree of legitimacy by this. Finally, the men drinking beside the skateboarders were using informal seating, had no business connections and drank alcohol of higher potency.

Of course, I'm breaking the ethnologist's golden rule by immediately imposing my own value system upon the study group (or at least what I consider to be the value system of the society I inhabit).

SECONDLY, I felt very much that this was a "place", because Gillett Square was somewhere something might happen.Indeed, something WAS happening. The skater, as I've stated, were engaged in a kind of impromptu performance- as I described earlier, a ballet. And like every good performance, they had their own audience. The ping-players were performing, too. Gillett Square was something where people did something in time.

Whilst this same argument could equally be considered as an argument in favour of labelling Gillett Square as "space" (in euclidean terms, the four dimensional matrix in which physical processes occur), maybe space can be considered as something where an event or performance might happen, whereas place is where something has happened or is happening.

I think of a court room drama: the defendant is asked where the event occurred. It is more likely that s/he would be asked to describe a place rather than a space, unless of course they were being asked to describe the dimensions of the box in which they had been unlawfully imprisoned.

Space/ event/ performance/ place- there's a lot of this in architecture theory, with performance and event often being synonymous with any human element, and gave rise to the concept of space being people. Like the tree that falls down in a forest, if no-one's there to see the landscape does it actually exist?

Of course, Gillett Square is also a cultural centre, and when the programme dictates the performance of everyday life is often subsidiary to programmatic performance. This was the case on my visit the previous Sunday, when a concert and film festival was held at Gillett Square to... celebrate (?) World Mental Health Awareness Day.

As part of the day's events a very good reggae band were performing on a stage erected on top of the deck in the western part of the square. Family groups had gathered to watch. It was interesting to see how the centre of the square remained relatively empty, dominated by the performers sound in the same way the skateboarders had colonised it with their performance.

I'm interested in the idea of everyday life being a performance, and unfolding ballet or play exercise by members of the public, with the landscape operating as their stage. As I explore this site further, i'd like to look into graphic scoring and notation to document how people use elements of the landscape and how their actions define the space or create places. I'm also keen to look into how sound and acoustics define an area by providing the soundtrack, how this can be scored.

I'm told Lawrence Halprin is worth reading on this particular subject.

As a footnote, here's the blurb about the square the Gillette Square website:

Gillett Square

A public space animated by the creativity of the surrounding community

Formally opened in November 2006, Gillett Square is a simple, hardwearing and flexible urban space for Dalston. It is bordered by the Dalston Culture House - home of the Vortex Jazz Club, the Bradbury Street Workspace and a number of small retail units. These have been developed and are managed by Hackney Co-operative Developments. On its northern side there is a public car park.

The square has been developed by the Gillett Square Partnership, which currently comprises Hackney Co-operative Developments, Groundwork East London, Hackney Council and Design for London. This partnership operates as an overarching strategic body for all aspects of the square’s function and development. Whilst this space is owned and maintained by London Borough of Hackney, its cultural and enterprise uses are the responsibility of the ‘Gillett Squared’ management group led by Hackney Co-operative Developments as its public entertainment license holder.

Gillett Square is a genuine community asset. It provides an accessible outlet for this area’s abundant creative talents and energy, promotes social cohesion, invites cultural exchange and education, and presents market opportunities. The process behind the building of Gillett Square, its current usage and prospects, are the foundations upon which a remarkable transformation is taking place in Dalston.

"Our ambition to take our programme outside the Centre's walls to audiences in the east reached new heights this year...with Hackney Co-operative Development's Gillett Squared project."

1:50 planting plan detail area 1

Here's the second revision of my planting plan for detail area 1:

It's a really simple scheme- not going to worry Piet Oudolf or anything but I think it's consistent with the overall concept of the design. Carpinus betulus and Pseudosasa japonica provide varying degrees of enclosure whilst tiered planting of perennials (and grasses in particular) provide movement. To the right hand side, partially cropped, raised planters accommodate existing London plane (beyond the boundary of this area). Under-storey planting comprises a carpet of Vinca minor 'La Grave' interspersed with Geranium sylvaticum 'Album', Luzula sylvatica 'Marginata' and Polypodium vulgare 'Cornubiense'.

One recent, spontaneous addition was the inclusion of wisteria at the four corners of the corten folie.

Roll-on resubmission...still completely heartbroken not to have at least had the option of going to graduation. Everyone look so happy! I'm really pleased for everyone who came through the mangle.

Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be holding a graduation ceremony of my own!

See also: rendered plan area one

area 1 rendered

Time to shut up. And move on, right?

facebook landscape architecture haiku competition

“Not a gardener!”
…protested the l.architect:
“I’m a designer!”

Submit your haiku at:

http://www.facebook.com/TheUnderstory

the sky is mine

Lorie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park

designed by Piet Oudolf and Kathryn Gustafson

Image courtesy http://laptopgardener.com

I recently read a fantastic interview with Kathryn Gustafson by Michael Watts. The first two paragraphs, I feel, provide a fantastic explanation of what it is landscape architects do- as well as expanding the concept of landscape beyond the garden or the countryside. At times I struggle with public ignorance of my chosen profession: I have worked as a gardener and landscaper for nearly six years; I'm not spending four years at University to carry on doing the same thing!

It seems a curiously British ignorance...

The subject of landscape teems with chroniclers of every kind. There are psycho-geographers, deep topographers, poets and explorers of urban edgelands like Paul Farley and Iain Sinclair, land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, as well as the scholarly figures of Richard Mabey and Simon Schama. But the constant figure in the landscape is the landscape architect, entrusted with the design of our outdoor and public spaces, and in consequence an important civilising influence down the centuries, from André Le Nôtre and his gardens at Versailles in the 1660s to Frederick Law Olmsted and the Central Park he created in New York 200 years later.'

'To the layman, the job of a landscape architect may be just to fill in the green bits around a new building (television gardeners have much to answer for). But in the contemporary language of this discipline, the design and care of an environment is expected to manifest nothing less than a society’s identity, culture and technology. To meet a practitioner as focused as Kathryn Gustafson is illuminating. It’s not often that you encounter someone who proclaims, “the sky is mine,” or who says, unblushingly, “it’s almost like I pull out from the earth what is its essential thing.”'

-Michael Watts interviweing Kathryn Gustafson

The Sky is Mine? Wow. Read what else Gustafson has to say at the link below:

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/sky-mine

detournement Tschumi

Text manipulated: Pleasure of Architecture in Tschumi (1994), Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge: MIT Press

There are numerous ways to equate landscape with language. Yet such equations often amount to a reduction and an exclusion. A reduction, insofar as these equations usually become distorted as soon as landscape tries to produce meaning (which meaning? whose meaning?), and thus end up reducing language to its mere combinatory logic. An exclusion, in sofar as these equations generallty omit some of the important findings made in Vienna at the beginning of the century, where language was first seen as a condition of the unconscious. Here, dreams were analysed as language as well as through language; language was called 'the main street of the unconscious'. Generally speaking, it appeared as a series of fragments (the Freudian notion of fragments does not presuppose the breaking of an image, or of a totality, but the dialectical multiplicity of a process).

So, too, landscape when equated with language can only be read as a series of fragements that make up the reality of a landscape.

hardworks key plan

hardworks key a photo by joey.donovan on Flickr.

Here's the draft key plan- as with structural planting plan, this is incomplete. I don't have the detail annotations and even the key is incomplete BUT I have the layout and the surfaces and levels resolved.

Drawing wise, it certainly grtabs attention but is next to useless as a construction plan! The dense hatching reduces legibility, discussed with Paula the benefits of resolving everything in pencil before inking, and line weight needs to be more defined ( I need to add one lighter pen and make the heaviest line heavier)

Really think making the hatching less intense would allow the structural definition to breathe. Thing is, it's about surfaces so I sort of got lost in that.

Oh well. Getting there I guess... at least it will be an adequate template for when I turn it into an autocad drawing...

Draft gradients

level level drft a photo by joey.donovan on Flickr.

This was thrown together a few weeks ago but deserves a place on the blog even though prosaic.

The development area is framed by avenues to the North, South and west and a retention basin in the east (bottom page).

Some contours are extruded at level across the grade to create new design features.

Beyond the avenue, a skate park and children's play area disturb the regimented topography.

structural planting plan (draft)

structsoft key drft a photo by joey.donovan on Flickr.

Once again, to maintain a record of pin-ups I'vve posted this incomplete structural plan.

The main avenue comprises Quercus Robur f. fastigiata at 7.4m centres in two single rows 15m apart.

Avenue running from London Aquarium, across stage and towards courts comprises Malus floribunda

A stand of Betula pendula occupies top middle section.

A line of 9 alders at 5.4m centres stands in front of Shell Downstream with a generous gap

Feature trees inc.lude:

-Betula papyrifera

-Acer palmatum vitifolium

-Acer pseudoplatanus "Brilliantissimum"



All existing trees maintained (inclusive of cherries on avenue to London Eye) except two planes in bottom left to accomodate water.

water, water... everywhere?

The continuous process of overlaying, re-drafting, overlaying and re-drafting is always augmented by research and re-consideration of existing precedents. My drainage strategy for the site involves the harvesting and re-circulation of rainwater and grey water combining organic filtering (reed beds and grey roofs) and more traditional,, grey infrastructure (gullies, rills, storage pounds and pumps.

(This image and all subsequent images- except where noted- courtesy Dreiseitl, H. & Grau, D. 2009. Recent Waterscapes. Berlin: Birkhauser)

Jamie Liversedge directed me towards Potsdamer Platz earlier on in the term, but I was unable to find anything in the library or on the web with any degree of detail. I raised the issue at a tutorial today, and Julia Fogg handed me a book:

"Potsdamer platz- might be in there. think it was Herbert Dreiseitl"

"No... that doesn't sound familiar... I'll have a look anyway..."

And, of course, i opened the page on Potsdamer Platz... the humanity...

Okay: here is the site in plan form. The brief was to re-design this urban plaza in the heart of a very corporate area that provided leisure facilities for the general public. In addition to these concerns, the design had to "come close to meeting ecological aims".

Dreiseitl does not specify what these initial aims were: reading between the lines, one can infer that perhaps corporate interests were keen to have "something environmental" within the design to address corporate-social responsibility factors. Examining the site and its proximity to the Landwehrkanal, it seems Dreiseitl (and the other planners, designers and engineers not mentioned in the text) concluded that water management and rainwater harvesting were the best ways of giving the design an "ecological edge" (my quotes) without compromising the other areas of the brief.

Herein I think there are strong parallels with Jubilee Gardens. Like the Potsdamer Platz, there is an active corporate presence fringing the site (Shell etc.). Like the Potsdamer Platz, the site has to provide programmatic leisure facilities. Of course, the heavy volume of tourists at Jubilee Gardens (and the fact that businesses seem to face away from the site) mean the bias is much more towards leisure rather than business, but still worthy of consideration. And finally, the two sites both abut an important watercourse.

(an aside- is it me or do European cities have more waterways than London? Central London is crossed by the Thames and the Grand union canal, with the River Lee running down the eastern extremity... compare this aerial view of Berlin)

The original master plan I drew up for Jubilee Gardens (which I am hoping to revise in light of recent design developments) was very much concerned with reconnecting with the river specifically and water generally. The idea of harvesting rain and grey water, filtering and redistributing was a very attractive one. Potsdamer Platz in Berlin sets a very useful precedent, especially as it combines some biological (soft?) techniques in a "hard" environment... I want my designs for Jubilee Gardens to complement (and compliment) the aesthetic of the South Bank, which is essentially urban.

Above is a simplified diagram of the water management strategy at Potsdamer Platz: grey water is collected from adjoining buildings along with excess rain water from green roofs, and collected in underground cisterns. These cisterns act as both a storage buffer (capacity of 2600 cubic metres, with "900 cubic metres left free in their turn for cases of heavy precipitation") and repository for accumulated solids (presumably the cisterns have to be cleaned on a scheduled basis). This water is pumped back through the site and cleansed via "planted purification biotopes"

The precise nature of these planted biotopes is not fully explained and it is this area that i shall have to research if i want to implement the scheme at Jubilee Gardens, and the effectiveness of these is really the deciding factor. The text notes that "technical filters can also be used", with the implication that this is a necessity to avoid algal build up in summer months. Essentially, the "green-ness" of this method hinges on the amount of energy that this system consumes.

People love water. As some of the (admittedly small) images show below, water is utilised beautifully in Dreiseitl's design. Its interaction with light offers infinite possibilities- in a sense, water and light offer third and fourth material categories beyond the traditional hard and soft designations.

How the human race manages water supply will prove to be crucial over the coming decades. Even disregarding their impact of climate change the burden on supply precipitated (pun intended) by increased food production (demanded by the exponential growth in human populations globally) will severely stretch resources. recently, drought in China has damaged their wheat crop, leading to increases in price as China has sought to import grain (see this article in the guardian). Water is also used for cooling and cleaning in industrial processes, and water consumption by the rapidly industrialising eastern economies is increasing exponentially,

I believe it is the role of landscape architects to demonstrate- even if only on a small scale- how old and new technology can be incorporated cheaply into their designs. In the United Kingdom, from whence I blog, the first heavy downpour is accompanied by dramatic flooding. Conversely, hosepipe bans implemented nearly every summer. It is estimated that a third of Thames Water's (an Australian owned firm supplying most of the water in the south east of England) mains supply is lost before it reaches the faucet. 33%! and yet we still deem it necessary to flush our lavatories with high quality, filtered drinking water! (See BBC News article from 2005 )

Yet again I have deviated on my derive... fun as these meta-literal psychogeographic ramblings are, I have a degree to (barely) pass. In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of a Berliner appreciating the tactile qualities of water... (if that's what floats your boat)