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Harvard Graduate School of Design —
Landscape Infrastructure Symposium: Systems & Strategies for Contemporary Urbanism
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Forum of Granada by Federico Wulff Barreiro & Francisco del Corral
In the limit where the city edge of Granada merges with the agricultural landscape of its surroundings, the new Forum public space is developed.
The French artist Philippe Ramette believes nothing should ever be faked. His improbable, gravity-defying poses might look like classic Photoshop, until you notice they are peppered with little incongruities. “You see a tension in my hands, my red face is far from serene as the blood rushes to it, my suit is ruffled.”
A sculptor, Ramette rose to fame in the 90s as part of the French contemporary art scene, creating strange wooden and metal instruments and objects. Photography was the logical next step, and through it he has created an odd, neo-romantic universe, using a carefully planned, rational approach to create totally irrational situations. In France, his bizarre images have been compared to the work of Buster Keaton and the world of silent cinema. For him, they are a statement about gravity, weightlessness and man’s relationship to the landscape.
Ramette, who still sees himself a sculptor rather than photographer, goes to extraordinary lengths to create his implausible set-ups, building hidden metal supports that he calls “sculpture-structures”. Metal rings tether him by the ankles as he hangs motionless from the Grimaldi Forum building in Monaco (previous page), his trousers and tie strapped down and his hair gelled flat to give the impression of being upright. Above a winding road in southern France, a metal seat hidden by his suit juts out from a slab of rock, holding him up. Both photos are then turned on their heads. Every image is the exact reproduction of one of his drawings; sketches that he considers to be film storyboards, reconstructed by his faithful team while he directs the image. “I never question whether it’s going to be complicated,” he says.
In Balcony 2, he is standing on a balcony in the middle of Hong Kong harbour, contemplating the sky while seemingly managing to levitate above the water. He says the image first came to him in a dream in the mid-90s. For the shoot, a watertight tank served as an underwater float for the balcony, put in place by a barge and crane. Ramette then secured his feet on supports, leaned back and clung to the wood. During the initial attempts, he was soaked by waves and had to swim to safety.
He craves an effect of absolute, implausible serenity. For the series Rational Exploration Of The Undersea, he wore lead weights under his suit and around his ankles, having convinced a team of divers to work with him in a minutely rehearsed underwater escapade off Corsica. When Ramette needed air, a diver would swim over with an oxygen tank, but before shooting his team had to wait for the whipped up sand and bubbles to clear in order to achieve the effect of stillness. “There I was in a suit on the seabed, weighed down and able to walk underwater as if on land, unaffected by the currents. For me, that was a real pleasure,” he smiles.
—Text by The Guardian
GravityONE: A Choreography for Militarized Airspace.
“GravityONE” is Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu‘s architectural diploma, presented in the summer of 2011 atThe Architectural Association [AA] School of Architecture, London.
“The remote territories of the Australian Never Never are anything but empty. The history of these landscapes is one of nuclear testing, rocket launches and black military technologies. The skies over this red earth are scarred with the contrails of experimental weapons flights and charged with the militarised electromagnetic waves that reach out to US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Forgotten, somewhere in this landscape, is an abandoned missile tracking station. From here something else is being launched, a choreographed flock of autonomous gliders, to drift through the air in silent protest. Floating on engineered thermal currents their wingspan antennas broadcast white noise through the electromagnetic landscapes over Australia’s Pine Gap military base, momentarily jamming their telecommunications signals.”
—Read complete description at SOCKS
Venue — a pop-up interview studio and multimedia rig traveling around North America through September 30, 2013 — is a project of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, Future Plural, and Studio-X NYC, with funding provided by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Nevada Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
—text from Venue
Multicolored Salt Ponds at San Francisco Bay
If you ever fly over San Francisco Bay, be sure to peer out of the window to catch a glimpse of one of the world’s most incredibly coloured landscapes - the salt evaporation ponds operated by Cargill, Inc.
Salt evaporation ponds are shallow artificial ponds designed to produce salts from sea water or other brines. The seawater or brine is fed into large ponds and water is drawn out through natural evaporation which allows the salt to be subsequently harvested. During the five years it takes for the bay water to mature into salt brine, it is moved from one evaporation pond to another. In the final stages, when the brine is fully saturated, it is pumped to the crystalizer where a bed of salt 5 to 8 inches thick is ready for harvest.
Reblogged from ryanpanos
The Creative Process Behind New York’s Iconic High Line
James Corner is one of the premiere theorists and practitioners of landscape architecture, a field that emphasizes the design of outdoor and public spaces to achieve specific environmental, socio-behavioral, and aesthetic outcomes. The principal designer at James Corner Field Operations, a New York-based architecture firm, Corner focuses on landscape urbanism, an amalgamation of a wide range of disciplines including landscape architecture, ecology, and urban design. In a conversation with associate editor Jared Keller, Corner discusses the creative process behind New York’s now-iconic elevated park, The High Line, whose second section opened in June.
With the High Line, we had this extraordinary artifact that in some ways was an ugly duckling, something with potential. At the turn of the century, it was derelict; the concrete and steel and tracks were obviously in disrepair, the rails rusted, the wood cracked. Most people at the time thought it should be torn down. But where some people saw dereliction, others saw inspiration. It was in the landscape running along those broken tracks. The photographs of Joel Sternfeld (fine-art color photography and publisher of Walking the High Line (2002), an anthology focusing on the railway) had a remarkable influence in allowing people to view this thing as something with potential rather than something to be skeptical of. Running for a mile and a half through the west side of Manhattan, there’s a remarkable dialogue between nature and industry—or rather, post-industry—suspended 30 feet in the air.
Photographs, schematics, landscape ecology, and more at The Atlantic
Reblogged from theatlantic
mfdp:
‘Architect’s brother’ a comment on the relationship between man & nature.
Reblogged from polychroniadis
