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
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
Performance Art
The process of taking care of street trees is a kind of performance. It’s a spectacle. You stand in the middle of a sidewalk and go through a choreographed sequence of elaborate gestures. People stop and stare. They ask you what you’re doing. The act elicits emotional responses from the audience that range from doubt … Read more
Secret Highway
I snapped this picture at the junction of Routes 34 and 537 in Monmouth County, NJ during an apple/pumpkin picking expedition two weeks ago. My childhood memories of this area are filled with horse farms and apple groves. Little wonder that I got lost on the way to the farm and accidentally drove the Zip … Read more
Catching Up
I haven’t written here in over two weeks and I’m beginning to doubt my ability to keep up with the rigor of blogging. Who really has time for all this? Maybe I’m a little old fashioned. It’s difficult for me to write without the comfort of drafts and revisions. So why “Ecotone Projects?” It’s an … Read more
Natural’s Not In It
The NY Times grapples with the challenge of restorative landscape architecture in a recent article on coastal pollution in a region of Italy sandwiched between Rome and Naples. The article covers Alan Berger’s efforts to re-engineer the regional lanscape in order to arrive at a site that is ecologically functional without negating the thousands (millions?) … Read more
