Listing Details
| ID: | 1278 |
| Title: | Pruned |
| URL: | http://pruned.blogspot.com/ |
| Category: | Arts, Art & Artists: Architecture |
| Description: | Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it. |
| What is (non-)essential knowledge for (new) architecture? - 2012-01-30 01:46:00 |
 For the next306090book, guest editorDavid L. Hayswants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?” This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice,the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable. 306090 15is thus calling for “contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.” This edition, then, will not be about the state of the art; instead, it's about what the state of the art could be, should be, would be, if... The deadline is30 March 2012.  |
| Where is Alloura Zion? - 2012-01-27 18:08:00 |
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| Gravity Base Stations - 2012-01-26 23:53:00 |
 When I first stumbled upon these poorly scanned data sheets of so-calledgravity base stations, I thought they were actual “stations,” that is, actual gravity sensing devices that are constantly taking measurements of local geodetic conditions. Compact machines like those humidity monitors you see in museums and galleries that are sometimes mistaken for art installations. To protect them from the environment and public tampering, I imagined each device encased in a metal canister, permanently embedded in concrete or stone and topped with abenchmark disk, itself stamped with an identification number and a warning of a fine or imprisonment to anyone who disturbs them. I also imagined them forming a pointillist sensor network, just another sedimentary layer of a much more totalizing enviro-veillance network superimposed on the surface of the earth. Deployed in the most unassuming corners of the built environment, they pique little interest outside the insular worlds of geologists and geocachers. But I was giddy with the possibility that they might be like buoy stations set adrift by NOAA not in the open ocean but on “solid” ground. Instead of ocean waves, they surf on invisible gravitational swells and troughs. And instead of the hyperactivities of the weather, they monitor something beyond our lived experience and even beyond their operational lives: gravitational fluxes caused by the million- or billion-year-long gyrations oftectonic storms. Then I read up more on them, and...  |