Communicating Science
David Maddox over at Sound Science LLC wrote a fine blog post recently about the dangers of oversimplifying science – and science policy – for the sake of marketing. David makes a good case for trying to hold both clarity AND complexity in any effort to communicate about science. It isn’t easy, but most things worth … Read more
Goldsworthy Trash Pt. 2
Goldsworthy Trash Pt. 2, originally uploaded by SpaceOfFlows. I snapped this a few days ago on Washington Avenue near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Clearly someone got an iPhone for Christmas and decided to purge. I couldn’t help but think of this as a similar arrangement to the sticks in Prospect Heights a week or two … Read more
Andy Goldsworthy in Prospect Heights?
GoldsworthyHeights, originally uploaded by SpaceOfFlows. Just before last week’s snow storm, I caught this bit of accidental sculpture on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It looks an awful lot like Andy Goldsworthy was roaming through the neighborhood.
Minetta Map Manipulations Pt. 1
I can’t hope to recreate the impressive archive of maps and histories of Minetta Creek amassed by Steve Duncan at Watercourses. I’m just playing around with tools like the NYC OASIS map to expand on what Steve has already discovered. What can we learn about the West Village today by looking at the landscape ecology … Read more
A Little River Runs Through It
I was in London recently visiting with faculty in the geography program at University College. Most of the week-long trip was actually a quiet vacation, nestled between taking the GRE in mid-November and the Thanksgiving holiday. I walked around the city looking at bits and pieces of landscape urbanism in between half-hearted visits to the … Read more
Fun With Google Earth + Viele Map
I’ve been playing with a Google Earth overlay of the 1865 Viele Map (officially known as the “Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York”) all afternoon instead of, you know, doing productive stuff. I keep telling myself that I’ll use the results in the class I begin teaching in a … Read more
Made of Paper: A Mini-Promo for UNCOMMON GROUND
I spent the better part of this afternoon parsing through the introduction to William Cronon’s foundational book, Uncommon Ground, going back and forth about whether to make it a required reading in the class I’m teaching this spring at The New School. It’s been a few years since I sat down with this book, and now … Read more
Landscape Architects Cannot Predict The Future
I’m re-reading (for what seems like the tenth or twelfth time) the first essay in Charles Waldheim’s Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim edited the collection and wrote the piece I’m referring to). The premise of the essay is pretty simple: traditional forms of urban planning, design, and architecture are too clunky to grapple with the complexities … Read more
Screw You and You’re Feeble Landscape Image!
I don’t really have the time to explode all of the ideas that come out of the passage I’m about to quote, but I hope I’ll get back to it soon. In the meantime, I leave it here as a placeholder for things to come. The passage is from “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes” by … Read more
