It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.

Have a look at this blog, it looks at all the possible rail developments within Melbourne, it has in depth analysis of cost and feasibility as well as a witty response to what the government proposes to do...oh and mind the mspaint diagrams...

Link

Do you know this man?
Enrique Peñalosa...the mayor of mayors, the changer of public space, the 'yes' man...and he loves it. In his three years as mayor of Bogota he changed the whole way the public perceived and utilised public space, introducing more than just ideas and legislation but actually doing things that others have talked about. Check out the links...

Project for Public Spaces
Interview on StreetFilms
The Tyee article

Corporate Ecologies - Brett Milligan Lecture
RMIT Building 8 Level 11 Room 68 (or for those Rmit Frogs...8.11.68)
Tuesday 29th April...6pm for drinks for a 6.30pm start.

From subtle entries to fully blown propaganda...what is a corporate landscape?
Brett will present 3 projects, a open-pit mining corporation, a corporately owned hydro dam, and a design strategy for sustainablising a "big box" development...done by corporations.

Link RMIT Alumni blog

Have you ever gone driving and the idiot in front of you blatantly ran a red light? Or the idiot in front of you didn't notice how green the green light was? Well how about a laser screen that will disintegrate a car if it ran a red? Well maybe not disintegrate...but what if?

Link Yanko Design

Complex City - Urban shapes and form on a wall.

Here is another way of interpreting the aspects of a city, laying them on top of each other to create a fancy wall feature...

Lee Jang Sub started exploring the "concealed aesthetics" by overlaying the road and infrastructure layout of cities, starting with his home town Seoul he has moved onto many popular cities, the above image being Rome.

Link GDcomplexCity.com

You think the Melbourne City Council's CH2 building is the future in green design? Think again, a Primary school in Britain has a bigger greener thumb than Melbourne's CH2 building, albeit not as pretty...

Link via Independent

As landscape architects we design spaces for people, and we tend to design under assumptions and educated guesswork as to how people would actually utilise the designed space. Professor Paul Torrens from Arizona State University has been working on a program that simulates the reactions of a crowd within the urban environment, emulating human behaviour, action, interaction within social and anti-social crowds.

Link

Drivers of Change Cards
The Foresight & Innovation team at Arup have released another deck of cards that address the possibility of change and improvement for the world we live in, with pretty pictures and thought provoking facts all packaged up in a neat little box. I know the link is to the 2006 cards, but I know for a fact that the 2008 cards will be out soon, and they look just as pretty in a box made from recycled contact lens cases. And if you were to get a set you'll be continuously rearranging them into innovative colour schemes and at the same time learning about facts for your next studio crit.

Link

Where were you?

RMIT Landscape Architecture Series

High Performance Landscapes

Chris Reed- Stoss Landscape urbanism

Tuesday April 8 @ 6.30 pm

RMIT University Melbourne
360 Swanston Street, Building 8, Level 11, Lecture theatre 8.11.68

Drinks before the lecture @ 6.00pm

Come along, enjoy some cheap drinks and chat to some young budding designers.