Landscaping Design Quotes

Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.

How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?

it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less then normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, lockkeepers's lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice in the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.

The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” — THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

All buildings have a psychological as well as a purely visual effect on the landscape.

In merging nature and culture the most successful cities combine such universal needs as maintaining or restoring contact with the cycles of nature, with specific, local characteristics.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.

In town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.

Single-purposism, as we have seen, tends to create projects that harm the environment. Instead, we should design projects with as favourable an environmental impact as possible. This is the objective of environmental impact design.

The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century.

We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.

We should not be afraid of mathematics. If you already understand nature, you understand mathematics.

The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design.

It was remarkably, horribly easy to make people accept terrible things if you made them part of the normal landscape. If you designed the world around them so they didn’t stick out. People were easy to dupe into thinking that powerful meant benevolent, especially when they had no way out, no recourse but to live beneath something unfair. Reduce their sense of choice—make it seem like they could accept what was, or have nothing—and they’d fall in line. Because sometimes, finding another way felt impossible.

The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the work­shop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Per­haps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

Nature is an increasingly influential part of building design—we are being guided by trees, rather than overwhelming them. New architecture is finding innovative methods to incorporate natural landscapes into, onto, and around buildings.

Nature already uses the language of mathematics, so why not work with the environment instead of against it. We need to start mimicking the mathematical logic that occurs in the landscape, identify existing systems, and out of those concepts create new ones.

Trying to design or reclaim places is, therefore, rather like trying to make or modify life itself. In this effort, it is wisest to adopt the gentle patient manner of an environmental midwife, while rejecting utterly the machine-driven arrogance of some environmental equivalent to a genetic engineer. By such gentle means places might flourish again, but also the world might become less threatened.

Chinese and Japanese horticulturists have been aware of the primacy of relationship for centuries. Sakuteiki, the eleventh-century Japanese manual of gardening, possibly the oldest written record of landscape design, exhorts people to open themselves to the disposition of mountain streams, to wind and emotion.

When you think of Eden, don’t think of a public park with a lawn, a play set, and a flowerbed or two, where God hands Adam a lawnmower and says, Keep it tidy, will ya? Think of a violent, untamed wilderness teeming with beauty, but no infrastructure, no roads, no bridges, no cities, no civilization, and God says, Go make a world. Adam wasn’t a landscape-maintenance employee. He was an explorer, a cartographer, a gardener, a designer, an architect, a builder, an urban planner, a city-maker.

Bottom line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that’s when it is working to design. Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon.

Carrero’s First Law of Landscape Mathematics Mathematics is the language of nature. If you understand nature, you understand mathematics.

Mathematics needs to be taught using nature!

designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

The moon garden of the mansion was famous, having been designed with night-blooming flowers lining the pathways and hillocks of the landscape. They stepped through open doors, went down the wide stone steps, and were greeted by the heady perfume of late-blooming autumn flowers. The pale blossoms were lit from below, setting a mood of mystery. A fountain of natural stone rose up out of a pond surrounded by terra-cotta sculptures.

When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.

An architect is a generalist, not a specialist-the conductor of a symphony, not a virtuoso who plays every instrument perfectly. As a practitioner, an architect coordinates a team of professionals that include structural and mechanical engineers, interior designers, building-code consultants, landscape architects, specifications writers, contractors, and specialists from other disciplines. Typically, the interests of some team members will compete with the interests of others. An architect must know enough about each discipline to negotiate and synthesize competing demands while honoring the needs of the client and the integrity of the entire project.

native: a plant or animal that has evolved in a given place over a period of time sufficient to develop complex and essential relationships with the physical environment and other organisms in a given ecological community.

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything.

Ecosystems function locally, not globally. Local extinction, the disappearance of a species within, say, the woodlot down the street, or even your front yard, is now predicted to compromise the productivity of that woodlot and your yard.

The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker’s more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you. In short when a Peacemaker’s bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don’t curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh. Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operator’s table, was the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadn’t varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins.

Why should this matter? Why not accept the little fake church as a playful, harmless, adorable architectural oddity, as the lovers of kitsch do? Because it's a bad building, cheaply cute, out-of-scale, symbolically false, and stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a little noplace that contributes to the greater noplace. Because if the town had not been degraded by other bad buildings and bad design relationships, there would be no need for its mendacious symbolism, which cheapens the town a little more.

Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.

The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete. Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force… All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture. When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough (Simon and Schuster, 1972) The Roebling Legacy by Clifford Zink (Princeton Landmark Publications, 2011) Silent Builder: Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge by Marilyn E.

You seem strangely knowledgeable about grass.” “My dad’s a landscape architect,” Jason said. “Is that what it sounds like?” Humphrey asked. “Pretty much,” Jason said. “He designs big fancy gardens.” “So he’s a gardener,” Liana said. “Pretty much,” Jason said. “A well-trained, highly-paid gardener, but yeah.

We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices—if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided munitions are all products of Western expertise. Even the jihadists’ most innovative and lethal weapons—improvised explosive devices and suicide belts—are cobbled together from Western-designed explosives and electronics.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain. I do not expect a miracle Or an accident To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent. Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain; A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of the kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- Thus hallowing an interval Otherwise inconsequent By bestowing largesse, honor, One might say love. At any rate, I now walk Wary (for it could happen Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical, Yet politic; ignorant Of whatever angel may choose to flare Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook Ordering its black feathers can so shine As to seize my senses, haul My eyelids up, and grant A brief respite from fear Of total neutrality. With luck, Trekking stubborn through this season Of fatigue, I shall Patch together a content Of sorts. Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

With this exponential growth of robots, we could soon have a fleet large enough to do the work of altering the desert landscape. They would mine the soil, construct new factories, and make unlimited copies of themselves cheaply and efficiently. They could create a vast agricultural industry and propel the rise of modern civilization not just on Mars, but throughout space, conducting mining operations in the asteroid belt, building laser batteries on the moon, assembling gigantic starships in orbit, and laying the foundations for colonies on distant exoplanets. It would be a stunning achievement to successfully design and deploy self-replicating machines. But beyond that milestone remains

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man's ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, "You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older," says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks ‘modern’; ergo, Japan is supremely modern.

The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history (Geoffrey Jellicoe, Landscape of man)

To achieve these goals [of making good landscapes}, there is but one necessity: when preparing and approving plans for new places, or spending money on old places, we must look beyond the confines of each and every project. Gazing at these wider horizons, we shall see that development projects are initiated by specialists who have been imprisioned within "closely drawn technical limits" and "narrowly drawn territorial boundaries" (Weddle 1967; vii).

Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them in energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about. We inherited “a mind on the hoof,” as Andy Clark puts it: a brain that was built to pick a path through a landscape and to find the way back home. Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process and store information—even, or especially, abstract information—in the form of mental maps. We can work in concert with the brain’s natural spatial orientation by placing the information we encounter into expressly spatial formats: creating memory palaces, for example, or designing concept maps. In the realm of education research, experts now speak of “spatializing the curriculum”—that is, simultaneously drawing on and strengthening students’ spatial capacities by having them employ spatial language and gestures, engage in sketching and mapmaking, and learn to interpret and create charts, tables, and diagrams. The spatialized

For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

One night, returning to the house, he went into his father’s shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father’s hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again.

When people look at my work, they often say, “Your picture is so good. I can’t even draw a straight line.” I think everyone can learn to draw. The important thing is to keep trying, keep drawing. […] Young children make marvelous pictures. There is nothing they can’t draw. They paint and draw from their imaginations and the world around them. And they are not afraid to draw anything. I saw a child’s picture, a country landscape. It had fifteen trees that looked like lollipops, both a sun and a moon in the sky and a crazy river running through. It wasn’t very realistic, but it was a miracle of design. … And when children draw people or portraits of themselves, even if they are only stick figures, they have an animate quality that a professional rarely gets.

European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.

unlike birds, for instance, who keep building the same nest over thousands of years, we tend to forge ahead with our projects far beyond any reasonable bounds. Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.

What is most dystopian about all of the digital houses designed for customized consumption is the implication that the entire landscape could be covered with new houses lacking any social or economic neighborhood context. Designers minimize the need for family or neighborhood interaction if they plan for digital surveillance as a route to ordering mass-produced commodities as well as handling work and civic life. If many external activities, such as paid work, exercise, shopping, seeking entertainment, and voting, are able to be done in-house through the various electronic communications systems, reasons for going outside decrease. The residents become isolated, although the house continues to function as a container for mass-produced goods and electronic media. In a landscape bristling with tens of thousands of digital houses and cell towers, where the ground is laced with hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, neighborhoods may not exist. Car journeys involving traffic problems may disappear, although the roads will be clogged with delivery vans.

Sam scanned the orchards. U-Pickers laughed and posed for photos with apples on their heads, babies in the baskets, hugging trees. She lifted her head to study the sky, blue as her eyes. The clouds moved across the sun, blocking it out for long distances at a time, causing the landscape in front of her to become illuminated one patchwork piece at a time: the rolling hills lined with grass and endless rows of trees, peach, tart cherry, apples of every variety; blueberry bushes sitting at the bottom of the hill where the rain pooled; the old red barn where high school kids doled out baskets for fruit, which Sam's father weighed when they returned; the old shed where more high schoolers handed out free donut samples and sips of apple cider to arriving cars; the farmhouse with shutters- designed with apple cutouts- where her grandparents, Willo and Gordon, lived; the blue-green waters of Suttons Bay stretching out beyond the trees, the Old Mission Peninsula jutting into it; the family cornfields that sat across M-22 and would soon be cut into an intricate corn maze filled with spooks and goblins to scare fall visitors. This slice of northern Michigan was Sam's home, her whole world.

The billboards ruin everything. The historical flavor, the old-time architecture, even the beauty of the wooded hillside—all are sacrificed. Pole-lines and wires may be accepted, like fences, as part of the basic American landscape. They do their work without striving to be conspicuous, and often their not-ungraceful curves add a touch of interest, an intricacy of pattern, even some beauty. Billboards are different. . . . billboards blast themselves into the viewer's consciousness. . . . some of the smaller billboards—those advertising local hotels, service-stations, or small industries—seem to have a certain rooting in the soil, and are often modest and comparatively harmonious to the setting. The large billboards—owned by special companies, usually advertising the products of mass-production—are always placed in the most conspicuous spots, and have designs and colors carefully chosen to clash with the background. One feels a difference between a home-produced: "Stop at Joe's Service Station for Gas—Two Miles," or "The Liberty Café—Short Orders at All Hours—Give Us a Try!" and some gigantic rectangle advertising tires or beer. Large billboards are now springing up along U. S. 40 even in the vastnesses of the Nevada sagebrush country. They are an abomination! Personally, I try to buy as little as possible of anything that is so advertised.

The importance of ethical governance, exemplified by the Norwegian Pension Fund, is highlighted by a deplorable UK government proposal in 2016 to set up a Shale Wealth Fund.38 The fund would receive up to 10 per cent of the revenue generated by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) for shale gas, which could amount to as much as £1 billion over twenty-five years. This would be paid out to communities hosting fracking sites, which could decide to use the money for local projects or distribute it to households in cash. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a bribe to secure local approval of environmentally threatening fracking operations, to which there has been considerable public opposition. Beyond that, there are many equity questions. Why should only people who happen to live in areas with shale gas be beneficiaries? How would the recipient community be defined? Would the payments go only to those living in the designated community at the time the fracking started? Would they be paid as lump sums or on a regular basis, and how long would they last? What about future generations? Can cash payments compensate for the risk of harm to the air, water, landscape and livelihoods? All these questions cast doubt on the equity and ethics of any selective scheme. They underline the need for the principles of wealth funds and dividends from them to be established before they are implemented, and for a governance structure that is independent from government and business. But

On the other hand, everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple-wood, oak-wood, pine-wood, elm-wood, pear-wood, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips and splinters – and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on … Or why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke’, when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air – each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity – still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.

Wait until the truffles hit the dining room---absolute sex," said Scott. When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone. The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef's office. "In a safe? Really?" "The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible," Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials. "They can't be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town." I caught her eye. "I'm kidding." "You can't cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don't use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope." "What happened to the female pigs?" Simone smiled. "The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied." I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest's plate. Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us— of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons— a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer's part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.

THE VISION EXERCISE Create your future from your future, not your past. WERNER ERHARD Erhard Founder of EST training and the Landmark Forum The following exercise is designed to help you clarify your vision. Start by putting on some relaxing music and sitting quietly in a comfortable environment where you won’t be disturbed. Then, close your eyes and ask your subconscious mind to give you images of what your ideal life would look like if you could have it exactly the way you want it, in each of the following categories: 1. First, focus on the financial area of your life. What is your ideal annual income and monthly cash flow? How much money do you have in savings and investments? What is your total net worth? Next . . . what does your home look like? Where is it located? Does it have a view? What kind of yard and landscaping does it have? Is there a pool or a stable for horses? What does the furniture look like? Are there paintings hanging in the rooms? Walk through your perfect house, filling in all of the details. At this point, don’t worry about how you’ll get that house. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “I can’t live in Malibu because I don’t make enough money.” Once you give your mind’s eye the picture, your mind will solve the “not enough money” challenge. Next, visualize what kind of car you are driving and any other important possessions your finances have provided. 2. Next, visualize your ideal job or career. Where are you working? What are you doing? With whom are you working? What kind of clients or customers do you have? What is your compensation like? Is it your own business? 3. Then, focus on your free time, your recreation time. What are you doing with your family and friends in the free time you’ve created for yourself? What hobbies are you pursuing? What kinds of vacations do you take? What do you do for fun? 4. Next, what is your ideal vision of your body and your physical health? Are you free of all disease? Are you pain free? How long do you live? Are you open, relaxed, in an ecstatic state of bliss all day long? Are you full of vitality? Are you flexible as well as strong? Do you exercise, eat good food, and drink lots of water? How much do you weigh? 5. Then, move on to your ideal vision of your relationships with your family and friends. What is your relationship with your spouse and family like? Who are your friends? What do those friendships feel like? Are those relationships loving, supportive, empowering? What kinds of things do you do together? 6. What about the personal arena of your life? Do you see yourself going back to school, getting training, attending personal growth workshops, seeking therapy for a past hurt, or growing spiritually? Do you meditate or go on spiritual retreats with your church? Do you want to learn to play an instrument or write your autobiography? Do you want to run a marathon or take an art class? Do you want to travel to other countries? 7. Finally, focus on the community you’ve chosen to live in. What does it look like when it is operating perfectly? What kinds of community activities take place there? What charitable, philanthropic, or volunteer work? What do you do to help others and make a difference? How often do you participate in these activities? Who are you helping? You can write down your answers as you go, or you can do the whole exercise first and then open your eyes and write them down. In either case, make sure you capture everything in writing as soon as you complete the exercise. Every day, review the vision you have written down. This will keep your conscious and subconscious minds focused on your vision, and as you apply the other principles in this book, you will begin to manifest all the different aspects of your vision.

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.

Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda.

Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition.

Will the roofs of new buildings be vegetated? If not, why not?

Environmental planning has been too scientific, too man-centred, too past-fixated and two-dimensional.

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

There is no word to describe exactly what the High Line is to the non-architects among us, nor the collective reframing process required to see beyond its dingy path. 24 The promenade’s landscaping and minimal architectural interference is meant to find a balance between “melancholia and exuberance,” Diller told me. “Whatever that intermediate thing is, it’s ineffable and is kind of what makes the High Line so popular.” “Part of what is so successful about the High Line is that it looks like it’s about nothing,” Diller said. Everything is prohibited on the promenade but the act of moving forward or stopping to look at the vistas from that vantage point. A dedicated place for strolling, where there are no dogs, no bicycles, or wheeled objects of any kind, it is “radically old fashioned,” designed to let us do what we ordinarily don’t, like taking time to linger and gaze at passing traffic. There is even a “sunken overlook” viewing station with movie-theater-style rows of descending seats and a window instead of a screen to see Tenth Avenue’s traffic instead of a featured film. Looking at the path beneath our feet and the view before us are the High Line’s activities. The High Line’s path will extend up the island in nearly interminable stages, “perpetually unfinished.” 25 As if to underscore it, on the west-facing side of the High Line, with views of the skyline and the Hudson River, sculptor Anatsui erected a monumental mural, Broken Bridge II, a three-dimensional painting the size of a city block made of flattened, dull-finish tin and mirrors with expert placement and hours of scaling. The vista in its upper reaches blends sky and land “in such a way that you do not know where mirrors end and sky begins.” 26 Anatsui, known for his radiant, monumental murals with a unique luster, fashioned as they are out of recycled metal bottle caps from his studio in Nigeria, starts his work from an approximate center with exquisite discards. He then builds outward, unscrolling the once-scattered shards so that they shine in their new form, as if they could unfurl to the full extent of vision.

There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this, of course. When the writer and media critic Philip Sandifer writes that "David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who's development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show," he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. Or as Sandifer so clearly puts it, "I don't actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. Except maybe David Whitaker." From Drummond and Cauty's perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who-knows-what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore's model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. For Moore, and other artists such as David Lynch who use similar models, the role of the artist is like that of a fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present their catch to an audience. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen - anything really, such is the path of chaos. "It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn't fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it," Cauty has said. "It was like an out of control lorry, you know, you're just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching." This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. One of the most important aspects of magical practice is the will. Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in the world brought about by the exercise of the will, hence his maxim 'Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law.' The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who-knows-whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace. For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was “totally mad." All this only applies if you're prepared to accept the notion of magic, of course.

If our landscaping choices can rebuild populations of a butterfly thought to be extinct without listing it under the Endangered Species Act and without investing one dime of limited conservation funds—that is, without even trying—imagine what we can do if we include conservation as one of the goals of our gardens.

May 5th 2018 was one of the first nice spring days the beautiful State of Maine had seen since being captured by the long nights and cold days of winter. Ursula, my wife of nearly 60 years and I were driving north on the picturesque winding coastal route and had just enjoyed the pleasant company of Beth Leonard and Gary Lawless at their interesting book store “Gulf of Maine” in Brunswick. I loved most of the sights I had seen that morning but nothing prepared us for what we saw next as we drove across the Kennebec River on the Sagadahoc Bridge. Ursula questioned me about the most mysterious looking vessel we had ever seen. Of course she expected a definitive answer from me, since I am considered a walking encyclopedia of anything nautical by many. Although I had read about this new ship, its sudden appearance caught me off guard. “What kind of ship is that?” Ursula asked as she looked downstream, at the newest and most interesting stealth guided missile destroyer on the planet. Although my glance to the right was for only a second, I was totally awed by the sight and felt that my idea of what a ship should look like relegated me to the ashbin of history where I would join the dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs of yesteryear. Although I am not privileged to know all of the details of this class of ship, what I do know is that the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) first underwent sea trials in 2015. The USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) delivered to the Navy in April 2018, was the second ship this class of guided missile destroyers and the USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) now under construction, will be the third and final Zumwalt-class destroyer built for the United States Navy. It was originally expected that the cost of this class would be spread across 32 ships but as reality set in and costs overran estimates, the number was reduced to 24, then to 7 and finally to 3… bringing the cost-per-ship in at a whopping $7.5 billion. These guided missile destroyers are primarily designed to be multi-mission stealth ships with a focus on naval gunfire to support land attacks. They are however also quite capable for use in surface and anti-aircraft warfare. The three ship’s propulsion is similar and comes from two Rolls-Royce gas turbines, similar to aircraft jet engines, and Curtiss-Wright electrical generators. The twin propellers are driven by powerful electric motors. Once across the bridge the landscape once again became familiar and yet different. Over 60 years had passed since I was here as a Maine Maritime Academy cadet but some things don’t change in Maine. The scenery is still beautiful and the people are friendly, as long as you don’t step on their toes. Yes, in many ways things are still the same and most likely will stay the same for years to come. As for me I like New England especially Maine but it gets just a little too cold in the winter!

Next time you run across an unusually good designer, landscaper, mechanic, electrician, carpenter, plumber, radiologist, surgeon, orthodontist, small business owner, computer software or graphics designer, computer networker, photographer, artist, boat captain, airplane pilot, or skilled member of any of the dozens of “dyslexia-rich” fields we’ll discuss in this book, ask if that person or anyone in his or her immediate family is dyslexic or had trouble learning to read, write, or spell.

What could be the next steps in travel for Amazon? Very likely, acquisitions. Expedia stock value dropped from over 150$ to 110$ in one year and, with 1:14 stock ratio (Amazon stock reached an astonishing 1,400$), the acquisition would give Bezos the technology and know-how necessary to forcefully enter the travel landscape and compete with Google. trivago is another possible choice: last June the German metasearch engine was worth over 20$ a share, over 3 times the current value (6$). And what about TripAdvisor? It may have found a new youth with the new feed-based design, but it is still worth half of what it used to be 4 years ago. All those investments would be possible for Amazon, a company with a capitalization of over 1,000 billion dollars

A few weeks prior, I noticed a small cargo vessel at anchor on the northern end of the harbor. Every so often a stray yacht, sail boat or tramp steamer would mysteriously show up and stay a while before leaving again. Coming into Monrovia was always welcome. No one would ever pull into any of the open ports along the Liberian coast if they could help it. There was always the chance of trouble with pirates or the authorities and so it was strange for this small ship to be so far from its usual trading routes closer to Europe. The ship was beat up from years in the North Sea, with her ribs outlined through her rusted skin. Everyone had heard the rumor, that Franz Knupple came to Liberia on her but now she was quietly swinging from her hook, at the small designated anchorage near the fishing pier. Without anyone paying all that much attention to her she had become part of the landscape. Now the story continued… The vessel’s captain was inspecting the bilges for leaks, with a drop cord in his hand and as he stood ankle deep in water, a short or break in the wire, electrocuted him! Since the last time Knupple was seen in Harbel no one had seen him, but now after the death of the Zenit’s Captain, a new rumor was spawned. It didn’t sound reasonable to anyone that a seasoned seaman would be standing in water with a live electrical wire in his hand. One of the first rules of the sea was to stay away from electricity when you are wet or standing in water. Although anything is possible, no one could believe that he had electrocuted himself.

While they rested, he searched for landmarks. The mountains they’d walked into were gone, a hazy gray ceiling of storm clouds in their place. It gave him the unsettling feeling of being caught inside a box. Ash turned and looked back the other direction. His attention caught on the forked top of a pine tree and he frowned. What the hell…? That looks like the same tree we passed fifteen minutes ago. It felt for a moment like he was in a poorly designed game and had just come across a repeating landscape. His gaze dropped down to the path where they’d just passed. His stomach churned uneasily. The trail was a faded smudge, the line of it almost too faint to follow in the gathering darkness, but there was a small outcrop of rocks in the trees that also looked familiar. His attention jumped back to the pronged top of the branches. “What the…?

In all, it took an astonishing 5,127 prototypes before Dyson believed the technology was ready to go in the vacuum cleaner. The creative leap may have been a crucial and precious thing, but it was only the start of the creative process. The real hard yards were done patiently evolving the design via bottom-up iteration. To put it another way, with the epiphany he had vaulted onto a taller mountain in a new landscape; now he was systematically working toward this new summit.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

Steve could look at an open, weed-choked field and see gardens, walkways, new environments for animals. His mind buzzed with projects. It takes vision, and hard work. I would watch Steve planting trees, moving earth, and landscaping. He milled his own timber to build enclosures. He worked from dawn until well after dark, when he rigged spotlights to be able to keep working. I had never seen anything like it. He was a machine. He would go past human endurance. Often I’d catch him throwing up behind a tree out of sheer physical exhaustion. “Don’t worry about it. I just drank too much tea this morning,” he said after one such incident, when I expressed my concern. He continued with the job. Running a zoo meant being able to work with wildlife, yes. But I discovered there was so much more to it. Steve had an apprenticeship in diesel fitting, so he could operate and repair the backhoes, vehicles, and machines necessary to run the zoo. He laid brick and concrete, designed enclosures, and had an eye like an interior decorator for the end result of all his work. It didn’t just have to be sturdy and well-built. It had to look good, too. Over the course of several years in the early 1990s, I helped as Steve developed and expanded the zoo. Funds were limited. Steve did much of the work himself, making what little money we had stretch that much further. He wouldn’t even have one project finished and would already be dreaming up visions of another.

best questions. “The world of the designer changes,” explains Bass, “from the form maker to the person that creates the goals and the constraints of the object to be designed—[and that person] then no longer creates the designs, but selects the design from a landscape of possibilities. We’re going from what was once a point solution to more of a collaboration [between man and machine], because with the computer’s help, the designer is now able to understand the whole range [of any system] beyond what any human mind can comprehend on its own.” The

In 1925, a master plan was instituted to blend the French neo-classical design with the tropical background. The Art Deco movement, both in Havana and in Miami Beach, took hold during the late 1920’s, and is found primarily in the residential section of Miramar. Miramar is where most of the embassies are located, including the massive Russian embassy. The predominant street is Fifth Avenue known as La Quinta Avenida, along which is found the church of Jesus de Miramar, the Teatro Miramar and the Karl Marx Theater. There is also the Old Miramar Yacht Club and the El Ajibe Restaurant, recently visited and televised by Anthony Bourdain on his show, “No Reservations.” Anthony Bourdain originally on the Travel Channel is now being shown on CNN. The modern five-star Meliá Habana hotel, known for its cigar bar, is located opposite the Miramar Trade Centre. Started in 1772, el Paseo del Prado, also known as el Paseo de Marti, became the picturesque main street of Havana. It was the first street in the city to be paved and runs north and south, dividing Centro Habana from Old Havana. Having been designed by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, a French landscape architect, it connects the Malecón, the city’s coastal esplanade, with a centrally located park, Parque Central. Although the streets on either side are still in disrepair, the grand pedestrian walkway goes for ten nicely maintained blocks. The promenade has a decorated, inlaid, marble terrazzo pavement with a balustrade of small posts. It is shaded by a tree-lined corridor and has white marble benches for the weary tourist. Arguably, the Malecón is the most photographed street in Havana. It lies as a bulwark just across the horizon from the United States, which is only 90, sometimes treacherous miles away. It is approximately 5 miles long, following the northern coast of the city from east to west. This broad boulevard is ideal for the revelers partaking in parades and is the street used for Fiesta Mardi Gras, known in Cuba as Los Carnavales. It has at times also been used for “spontaneous demonstrations” against the United States. It runs from the entrance to Havana harbor, alongside the Centro Habana neighborhood to the Vedado neighborhood, past the United States Embassy on the Calle Calzada.

I’m looking at a different career.” “Like what?” He fed more crackers to the kitten. She pressed a thumb into her opposite palm to relax. “Maybe landscape design?” The idea had definitely taken root. He grinned. “I have a house. A real one.

Logan Landscaping Pros provides the best landscape designs for homeowners and businesses in Utah. We create beautiful garden installations, Penthouse Terrace Gardens, Roof Decks, Custom Planters, Irrigation Systems, Landscape Lighting, Creative Landscaping Styles, Hardscape Construction and Garden Maintenance for companies.

That’s what goes into park design. They’re not meant to recreate nature, but to soothe us. A small body of water in a wide-open space with a few clusters of trees to hide in if there’s a large predator. This is what we looked for when we left the jungle for the savanna. It’s what medieval landscape painters tried to represent and how manors and country estates were designed for hundreds of years.

A garden without flowers! - What an anomally to the European whose mind has been trained to regard a garden as the special home of bright-colored blossoms, the color and perfume of which diffused for his delectation and enjoyment! To him the flowerless gardens of Japan at first appear very sombre and severe, but eventually the mind yields to the subtle power of the aesthetic style of Japanese art, whose influence is about him in so many ways, and in none more than in the fascinating style of Japanese landscape-gardening, which he ultimately grows to admit is decidedly purer in taste and more satisfying to the hiher requirements of the mind, than our own. A Japanese garden is especially designed to retire into - to meditate in - and is a place where perfect oblivion of the outside world is secured.

Many great landacape gardeners have gone down in history and been remembered in a very solid way by the magnificent parks and gardens that they designed with almost god-like power and foresight, thinking nothing of making lakes and shifting hills and planting woodlands to enable future generations to appreciate the sublime beauty of wild Nature transformed by Man. There had been Capability Brown, Sagacity Smith, Intuition De Vere Slade-Gore... In Ank-Morpork, there was Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Instead of the monotonous horizons of the far north, all the landscape around K2 has the richest variety of design, the greatest majesty of form and an infinite diversity of plane and perspective… The scale is far too vast for one to receive an impression of the whole at once. The eye can only take in single portions.

We’ve built a dynamic team of DIY enthusiasts, interior designers, and industry professionals to create a go-to digital resource for all things home, house & design. Whether you are looking for inspiration or simple tips and tricks, our content can help lead (as well as construct, design, and landscape) the way! We know that your home is your most valuable asset which is why we provide our readers with the latest news, trends and advice to help them with anything house related.

In Scotland, the journey to a remote destination is part of the experience. It's as if the landscape is designed to facilitate discovery.

Oil has helped us to rebuild some of the damaged soil with the use of machinery and technology. Modern agriculture still largely depends on oil. Logically, peak oil marks the beginning of peak agriculture, but what happens when all the oil runs out? It’s up to permaculture to save humanity.

We need to turn our attention away from giant plantations that produce and then transport food worldwide.

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