March 2012
64 posts
Powaqqatsi
PO . WAQ . QA . TSI
(from the Hopi language, powaq sorcerer + qatsi life)
n., an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life. A parasitic way of living or life in transition.
WatchElectroPlastique #1
“There Chairon stands, who rules the dreary coast -
A sordid god: down from his...”
– Virgil, Aeneid 6.298–301, as translated by John Dryden
Step I: Manual Botanical Augmentation →
“If you design the object without the financing, you’re an academic; if you...”
– ‘How to Make Unsolicited Architecture’, Volume magazine, 2007
The social and architectural attributes of weeds
We began to think of what it is to be a weed, which in our own socially defined context, is simply a plant out of place, a human construct, a defect of our perception, and what is its potential function in landscape architecture.
Weeds are often synonymous with “nature.” When we see a space left unmanicured and taken over by weeds we refer to it as nature, or wildness taking over....
BEYOND MEMORY →
the greenwashed city: the apparent failure for the...
At Yale Environment 360, Christina Larson explores the fate of China’s Dongtan project and the ramifications/lessons of its apparent failure for the ‘eco-city’. The most important points she makes are probably (a) that such projects tend to “leave the population they were supposed to serve behind” while garnering “fame and money for the foreign firms and promotions for the local government...
phantom stories of China
A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a proliferation of phantom third floors on Chinese houses:
Mr. Wei reports that...
the dead sea works →
Architects without Architecture: A new chapter for... →
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are...”
– Donald Rumsfeld
Dancing in fog →
