Next time you are frustrated with the hours you put into CAD renderings and tours, think about 18th century landscape designer Humphry Repton. Repton, a famous designer of gardens and private parks for English country estates, created a series of before and after illustrations of his projects. Like flipping a pop-up book page, these illustrations showed prospective clients how much more bucolic and beautiful Repton's designs would make their homes. Now the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections has digitized many of Repton's drawings in high resolution. Check them out here, and click over to the excellent Pruned blog to read more on their reactions to Repton's work.

Interesting use of disused public space: In Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Washington, D.C., a group of artists has created a temporary public art project aimed at raising awareness of global warming. The project, called CO2LED, is made up of more than 500 plastic water bottles, culled from local government employees, attached to white plastic poles ranging from 5 to 13 feet high. Inside each inverted water bottle is a bright white LED light. At a distance, the stems look like gently bobbing cattails in the median of a busy intersection. The high-efficiency LED lights are lit by solar power.

As the Washington Post reports, "...[U]nused medians are the perfect place for the transformation [of public space] to begin: 'You don't even notice those funny little pieces of land,' says Cynthia Connolly, a photographer and artist....'They become spaces that aren't spaces anymore. They're like lost terrain.'

The CO2LED project will be disassembled and recycled in September.

The good folks at Inhabitat have posted an entry to remind us that December is the last month to check out the Dallas Arboretum Ultimate Tree House exhibit. Our colleagues over at LAND Online wrote about the exhibit a while back, with particular attention paid to the "Leaves of Imagination" house conceived and built by the landscape architects at the local HNTB office and Brad Bell Studios. The design was part of a study to use 3-D rendering software to take a design directly from the computer screen to fabrication. The team also used the project for some nice community outreach by leading a charrette at the Windsong Montessori School to brainstorm ideas for a tree house "beyond the traditional 'box in a tree.'" If you're in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, go check this exhibit out.

As we've noted previously in The Dirt, San Diego is creating a park that will run along 14th Street between Island and J Streets and overlie the Rose Canyon fault. Essentially, the fault has created a place in the city where only a park can exist. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Po Shu Wang and Louise Bertelsen, chosen to create the artwork for the park, have released their preliminary plan, which includes two stainless steel spheres that will allow visitors to "eavesdrop" on the fault that lies below. According to the paper, one sphere will include "a small microphone lowered into a tube ending near the fault." The microphone would transmit the sounds coming from the fault, which could then be heard in the park through a loudspeaker mounted inside the sphere. The artists would also use cell-phone technology to allow people from around the world to call the Rose Canyon fault and hear what it's up to. The second sphere would line up with the first when the park was built, but shift over the years as the tectonic plates below shift--providing a visual reference for what's happening at the park. Commenting on the artwork, Martin Poirier, ASLA, told the paper, “The engineering and scientific side of San Diego has never done anything like this. It took artists to do it.”

We here at The Dirt believe in this basic tenet, so we were psyched when ASLA helped cosponsor, along with our friendly neighbors Lee and Associates, Street Scenes: Projects for DC, a public art initiative to bring "contemporary art into the public domain and insert art experiences into unexpected places." The most recent unexpected place was near the ASLA headquarters and was part of the Art & Elements display, which showcased the works of two artists--Cal Lane and Linn Meyers--who usually work in different mediums. Using sand and dirt, they created temporary art works at different times and different locations throughout the city over the course of seven days. Cal Lane, an artist and a welder, has created large-scale outdoor sculptures. Most recently, she created a work for the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY. Linn Meyers is well known within the Washington art world for producing precise and colorful line drawings.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist John King gets the last word on San Francisco's PARK(ing) day, which we've pretty much covered like a wool blanket here. But we bring your attention to King's take, because we've always found him to be brilliant and because of his solid thinking on what PARK(ing) has to say about existing and future parks, which is that bigger isn't always better. Rather, he says, "the important thing is to craft something that people can cherish -- and more often than not, the snug spots are the ones that work best." King notes that civic leaders always push for big plazas and parks because they make impressive photo-ops. However, he says, what dense downtowns really need are "bits of landscape we can make our own. ... In other words, what counts isn't landscape design so much as the initial intent. If the creators genuinely want a place where people want to be -- as opposed to something that looks good from a window, or something that keeps something else from getting built -- the rest will fall into place."
 

NPR's All Things Considered has a great piece on yesterday's PARK(ing) day, during which members of San Francisco-based art collective Rebar fanned out through the streets of San Francisco (and apparently Cleveland, Sao Paolo, London, and Glasgow) to set up temporary parks in public, metered parking spaces to prove a point about a lack of open space in the city's downtown area. (Regular readers of The Dirt know how much we love the PARK(ing) concept.)

Rebar's John Bela explains the project: "Streets can by hybridized in terms of their function," he tells NPR. "What we're trying to do here is shift the balance a little bit from private vehicles more towards pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass transit."

PARK(ing) day was helped along with funds from The Trust for Public Land, and we can only hope it will get more support in years to come, and that next year's PARK(ing) day will spread to more cities. Click here for more on Rebar and PARK(ing).

Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron has today's must-read in her review of "Fertilizers: Olin/Eisenman," an exhibit that celebrates the collaborative work of Laurie Olin, FASLA, and Peter Eisenman,  which has yielded up to two dozen projects, including the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Saffron notes that Olin and Eisenman defy the stereotype that landscape architects and architects mix like oil and water and seemingly share little more that "a penchant bow ties." "Eisenman's inspiration comes from the dark corners of Piranesi and Freud," Saffron writes, "while the easygoing Olin sees himself as a descendant of Olmsted's gentle naturalism." Olin explains the close collaboration as "warming up" Eisenman," while Eisenman says he makes Olin's work "less friendly."

We won't go into it here, but "Fertilizers" sounds darn interesting--and weird. You can check out information on the installation at the ICA website. The exhibit runs through December 17. Olin and Eisenman will discuss the installation on September 20.