Getting a new phone? Add your old one to the pile.
Chris Jordan is a photographer. He takes photos of things. Consumerism.

Link: Chrisjordan.com

Every morning should be started with bacon and eggs, a coffee and a comic.

Performing arts on sculptures made of recycled materials that float.
An artist going by Swoon gathered some artists, carpenters, musicians and seafarers to construct and travel down the Hudson River on boats made to the junkyard chic aesthetic.

Link: via New York Times
Link: NYT images

Did You Know That Aluminium Foil actually protects you from aliens?
Well maybe I'm making things up...But if it did then you would be very safe in this sculpture by Kimihiko Okada. Built from a frame and lots of alfoil, this sculpture or landscape is over 900 sqm and is 6.5m high...check out the link and blurb from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toyko.

Link: Via Dezeen

Here are some quick ones...

Eco Ego
I easy flash game that tests your eco credits with options to the life of one little character...that looks like a person in an onion suit.
The game meters the onion dude/dudette's comfort and greeness for the duration of the game, and no I don't think you can kill it.

Link: Eco Ego @ 9mine

Future of suburbia
An article in the opinions section of the New York Times talking about suburbia and why do Americans like it so much...has a link to a few other articles and discussions about suburbia.

Link: New York Times


Beijing Streetscape
An interesting competition for the streetscape of Beijing. This is the winning entry by Site and WaHa Studio.

Link: Bustler

After Prefab
This website/blogspot has a special uncut version of a lecture by Bill Ferehawk. He talks about the psychology, technology, ecology and sociology of such prefab developments. He also branches out to critique other designs and how we design...interesting read.

Link: Elseplace

Submissions due this Friday the 15th!!!!!!!!!

Look, Murals on the Security Walls of Baghdad.

Link: Guardian.co.uk

The Olympics In China, Is Green...Really.
You may have seen this already, but there are a lot of very elaborate hedge trimming happening in China.

Link via inhabitat.

Mapping Nature With a Pen.
Originally I found this artist, Tim Knowles, from Inhabitat and their little blurb about Tim's work with trees creating drawings. He pretty much sticks some pens on some branches and puts a canvas/paper in front of it and let the tree do the work, but then I went to his webpage and there is a lot of very interesting works that he has done. In particular are the ones in which he used apparatus of some description, looks like a richter scale, to map a journey through the Alps, and also another one where he placed a pen in a homemade drawing box thing that would draw as it was posted from one place to another...have a look...

Link Tim Knowles
Link via Inhabitat

Environmental Eyesores.

It's a start to a sunny future.
So here we have a new development in Canada that is supposed to rely solely on solar power as its main source of power. Pretty nifty, and energy efficient ain't it? So all they need now is some bioretention, rainwater storage from the roof and solar panels, dedicated bike paths, porous paving...

Link via inhabitat
Link Drake Landing Solar Community

Aila Fresh Going For Green.
A call out to all the professionals out there...Would you like to exhibit your projects? Is it leading edge sustainable design?

Submit 2 x A3 landscape pdfs with 100-200 word blurb to fresh.aila@gmail.com by August 15th.

Please do not place rubbish in skip.
This is pretty cool, a guy in the UK called Oliver Bishop has made these temporary installations all over the place. He has appropriated skips in all kinds of fun and wacky ways...check out the link.

Via Dezeen
Find a skip

PLEASE GREEN ME!
As part of our next event we will be having a competition for students...the above picture is to be 'greened' as in made pretty with unique and innovative sustainable ideas. Do it through collage, 3d modelling, stick figure men...whatever. Just have some fun!

Entries close August 15th, Entry to comprise of A3 Landscape PDF with 100-200 word blurb. Email entries to fresh.aila@gmail.com. Good Luck!

If you need a better photo...email.

So who wants to do another street tree planting?
Well actually this looks like an interesting design competition, it's for a New York streetscape, 9th Street and 4th Avenue. Registration for entries has been extended to the end of this month, not too sure if we can enter but...keep an eye on this one.

Via 21stCenturyStreet

What Happens When We Have Gone?
Nature is an uncontrollable beast, it is beyond the microlimates that we create, it is past the aesthetics that we desire. An exhibition at the New Museum in NY called 'After Nature' explores the future of a world where nature takes control. Since most of us are on this side of the world and can't afford a flight to New York before September the 21st...there is an online exhibition as well at the New Museum website.

Link via Inhabitat
Link NewMuseum.org

Victoria The Place To Be.
For all those that don't really check out what is happening around the country...including me...the Victorian design festival officially started yesterday...so check out the official website for some up and coming events...There is a lot going on. Some quite big ones and then there are always the nice small ones tucked into small little laneways.

Link: State of Design

Who Said They Hated Developers?
Bet you don't hate them as much as this guy...
He cut his head off with a chainsaw because his flat was earmarked for demolition...

Link Via Mail Online

The sweeping curves and segmented pieces represent the...
Ya di ya di ya...This thing looks pretty cool and it was designed and constructed by students as part of the London Festival of Architecture...check it out...

Link: Via Dezeen

Let's Go to Philly.Right Now.
You know Second-life? That program that you download and register, create your own avatar and then wonder around a virtual city, buying property, flirting with other online peoples...just general everyday life but you are sitting on a computer somewhere in the world.

Well GeoSimPHILLY is very close to that, and probably better, it's like Simcity with a real city. It's the same rules as above but you are interacting within a city modeled on a real city. There are tours and interactive things that reflect the real city. You can learn more about the planning of the city, see some sights that you missed on your last trip there and possibly even buy things that you forgot to get.

Link: GeoSimPHILLY

Steel Trees holds up concrete canopy.
This aviary designed for a Swiss public park by Group8 uses thin steel structures to hold up an undulating concrete roof. Birds can perch on the steel frame using them as places of rest, and to gawk at passer bys.

Link via Dezeen

Vertical Elements from Horizontal Elements.
In every landscape project there always has to be a vertical element...I don't know why, but there just has to be...people don't just walk around staring at the ground...So let me introduce you to Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, artists that used grass as a photographic medium. They grew the grass in a dark room while projecting images onto the grass, creating an effect similar to photographic paper and chemicals used with good old film.

Link Via Inhabitat

Bit behind on this one, but if you happen to be in London...
The London Festival of Architecture is an interesting one, with many talks and exhibitions around London showing the processes that created the city as we know it today. Now if only our design festival will become something as big as this...give it a few years...

Link: Official Site

Vertical Walls and Patrick Blanc
Patrick Blanc is presenting for the Design Festival at BMW edge on July 18th, 6pm. For a small fee of $10, which could get you a Veal parma at The Riversdale on a Monday evening, you can watch the french scientist and artist talk about green walls and the applications of such technology.

Link: NDC website
Link: Patrick's Homepage

7 New Natural Wonders of the World...and a Butterfly.
Click on the links to look at the pretty pictures and to find out more about the new natural wonders.

Link: New Scientist
Link: Guardian.co.uk

The Billboard of Greenwalls
With all the talk about greenwalls and the possible applications of such walls, you would have never thunk that McDonalds would do something quite unique and interesting with such technology...

Link via Fast Food News

Spot the Difference.
UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) has been documenting changes to the environment for some time now, and they have recently integrated aerial imagery of areas for comparison...from 1970-2000+. It's called "Atlas of Our Changing Environment".

Check it out...link.

Lecture Tooosday!
Hanne Bruun from Dutch landscape architectural office SLA will be talking about their projects and approach as part of the RMIT Lecture Series...usual place usual drinks...

Swanston Street, Building 8 Level 11 Room 68, Drinks at 6pm, Lecture start at 6.30pm.

Draining designs for gutters? Not this one! (enough of the bad puns already!)
This person has done something different to this edge treatment, enough of the boring black plastic or the iron grating...welcome a much prettier albeit possibly less efficient way of removing water...the 'Matrix', kind of a lame name but I didn't choose it, and frankly I can't think of a better name...yet...

Link via Yanko

(photo: ArcSpace.com)

Skyscape. Since we're on the topic of the sky.
You may know light artist James Turrell, he likes to create pretty nice light projects, and this latest project is at Pomona College Museum of Art. It's interesting stuff...check it out.

Link via ArcSpace

Sky Not Blue. Bureau of Statistic Wrong.
Taking it a bit further than necessary...BUT in The Age today there is an article on a crazy idea of pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract global warming...thus eventually changing the hue of the sky. I imagine it to be a poo-ey green...yes the image is more a radioactive green, I'm not colourblind.

Link via The Age

Sky is Blue. Australian Bureau of Statistics conclude.
Well actually they didn't say that, but they may have well said it. If you read the paper on 14th March The Age had an article reporting on the ABS study on agricultural use on water and the reported concluded that Rice was the most water intensive crop per hectare. But anyway...if you're interested in some water stats...

Link via The Age

Spatial Implications by Maximisation
Imagine a picnic setting that takes up no space, or a bench that disappears into the ground.

Well someone has done it...Sandy Lam has created a picnic table and seat that is recessed into a decking, camouflaging it when not in use but just as easy to pull it up and relax. It's almost like those hidden trapdoors and secret chambers holding archaeological jewels.

Link via Yanko Design

Interactive Windows, Plays Pong.
Shops will do anything to try get you inside and purchase their wares, from annoying scrolling LED signs to 42" Plasma tvs...well here's another one to top it all off, from what I can deduce from the google translation, the Centre for Advanced Visualisation and Imagery at the University of Aarhus have developed a window based on electrochromatic glass that essentially changes opacity depending on the position of a viewer. They have also integrated the ability for it to animate and entertain...

Link via Engadget
Link via Comon (google translated)

Some Pretty Wacky Stuff...Milan Design Week 2008
Take a look at some of the stuff that they are doing overseas...in particular the interni: Green energy design.

Via Mocoloco
Images Collection Via Designboom

Solar Lily Pads Take Over River System - Power to the People...(lame)
Remember those picture story books when you were little with images of jumping over a river by the means of lilies? Well this isn't quite it...but ZM Architects have proposed these little solar lily pads for Glasgow's Clyde River. Instead of taking up large tracts of usable land for power production these pads could line a water body, invigorating waterfront developments and looking pretty...think of the Landscape opportunities with this suckers...

Link Via Engadget

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.

***Fresh drinks - Change of date***

Fresh drinks will now be held on Wednesday 2nd April 2008 @ 7 pm @ Loop Bar.

Please join us for a drink and nibbles to discuss issues you would like explored at future Fresh events.

Guerrilla Gardening

Cycling and gardening are two of our favourite things. Why not combine both with a bit of nocturnal worm turning to boot? Guerrilla Gardening has been growing (pardon the pun) in popularity over the last ten years. This London outfit has taken the obsession to the next level and are doing some fantastic things. Strap on your Ninja mask and use all your green thumb stealth to transform your neighbourhood.

Werribee wanderings..

Right now Werribee has more to offer than its usual slightly pungent aroma.

The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award is on at Werribee Park until May 27th. Launched in 2000, this is Australia’s richest prize for sculptors and features an eclectic bunch of site-specific and monolithic explorations.

While in Werribee go check out the wild animals. No, not the ones speeding down the Princes Fwy in their hotted up WRX’s. The real wild animals of Werribee Open Range Zoo. The recently opened Kubu River Hippo ‘experience’ is well worth checking out. The zoo has had several upgrades over the years by various LA's. If you don’t go for the animals, go for the great design.

Teaching AutoCAD to sing...

Ray Bennett, an architect at McCarthy Hammers Architects in Dallas, went to architecture school on a music scholarship. And though he was aware of similarities between the two arts, that was the most direct link they had in his mind until he was inspired by a Rem Koolhaas lecture on the topic.

"The lecture was on a Thursday night," he said. "By that Monday, I had the program completed. It didn't take me very long to do, but it took 20 years to come up with the idea."

"The idea" was that he could run the numerical values that his Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) system assigned to songs through AutoCAD, and see what the songs look like when rendered. The program he wrote to do the conversion, which he calls Alchemist, won a 2002 AutoDesk iDesign award.

"I've got time in the X value, pitch in the Z value, and then pan, where the instrument actually sits in the orchestra, in the Y value," he said.
He can play keyboards; he can design buildings; and now he's linked the two. But Bennett is still looking for new challenges: "I'm teaching myself to play guitar," he said. "It's not going very well at the moment."

Olafur Eliasson

The cubic structural evolution project 2004

2 March to 13 May 2007 Ground Level, NGV International Admission free

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin. Concerned with the way we see the world, his photographs, sculptures and installations explore relationships between perception and reality, nature and technology, the individual and the environment. Inspired by the landscapes of his ancestral homeland Iceland, many of his installations incorporate natural phenomena such as ice, mist and light, often reconstructed artificially within a gallery environment.

The cubic structural evolution project 2004 is a spectacular installation that invites visitors to participate in the construction of a cityscape using thousands of pieces of Lego. For Eliasson, audience collaboration is of central importance. As he has stated, ‘I see that the person, when engaging in a project of mine, influences the meanings generated.’

Olafur Eliasson represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and received widespread attention for his installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern, London in 2003-04. on loan from the Queensland Art Gallery.

Pecha Kucha Night Melbourne Volume 02
Tuesday 20th February, 2007
Bar opens @ 6pm, Presentations start @ 8pm
The Blue Diamond Social Salon & Cabaret, Level 15, 123 Queen Street

The Creative Prison

“Creative cities where people feel engaged and involved are economically and socially more successful. Why should prisons be any different? Creative Prision is a positive attempt to look at things in a diferent way.”

The Creative Prison places the design of prison buildings in the hands of the staff and inmates themselves. Developed by architect Will Alsop, artists Shona Illingworth and Jon Ford, and led by the radical arts organisation Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation), the collaboration examines how the design of prions informs their effectiveness and challenges attitudes to current prisoner rehabilitation. The project involved a unique collaboration with prison staff and with inmates serving life sentences at HMP Gartree, Leicestershire.

Air Trees!

"The proposal for the Eco-boulevard of Vallecas can be defined as an operation of urban recycling that consists of the following actuations: the installation of three social revitalizing air trees placed along the existing urbanization, the densification of trees within their existing concourse, and the reduction and asymmetric disposition of the traffic routes, and superficial interventions within the existing urbanization that achieve reconfiguration of the executed urban development."

Where Money's No Object, Space is No Problem

The Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle
by Weiss/Manfredi Architects

"Their final breakthrough in conceptualizing the park came while hashing out the design problems at a favorite New York bar, the Odeon. "This took a couple margaritas, actually," Manfredi laughed."

Design, Crime and Cycling in the city

"A bicycle shed is a building. Lincoln

Cathedral is a piece of architecture"

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83)

Cycling is booming in London. This is now Europe's fastest growing cycling city with trips by bike up 50% in the last 5 years. But there are challenges to be faced. As increasing numbers of Londoners take to two wheels new demands are emerging for more and better cycle parking. Bike theft is an ever-present problem. And 1 in 4 people who get their bike stolen give up cycling.

Reinventing the Bike Shed was launched to encourage inner city cycling and provide a catalyst for some critical thinking on how better design can play a part.