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By the bye, we've redesigned yet again. We took the plunge and finally gone single column, though considering the vast majority of our audience read our posts via a feed reader and hardly come here for a visit, we could have plunged the opposite way and gone Jodi.org on our layout. Maybe later this year.

Meanwhile, above is a brief clip from one our favorite films of 2000s (if not our favorite) by one of our favorite contemporary directors (if not our favorite), Jia Zhangke's Still Life (2006). We're reposting it here in much larger dimensions, simply because we now can.

Our Flickr account was just unceremoniously terminated due to an NOI. You'll therefore be noticing our beautiful decorations disappear one by one as they get purged out of the system. Fortunately, most of the earliest posts will be unaffected, since their images are on Blogger's server.

We'll try to regroup as fast as we can, but in the (very very extended) meantime, please pardon the mess (or the lack of it).


(Olmsted, our mascot who's been residing on our Flickr Profile page for the past 5 years, bids adieu to Flickr.)


POSTSCRIPT #1: All done! (1 Oct 2010)

(Inter-firm competition.)

Quick blog-related announcement: we've revived del.icio.us/pruned as a link dump for our bookmarks of landscape architecture firms. We've added 15 offices so far, and 5 more will be added each weekend for you to click around during week. Subscribers to our RSS feed should already be aware of this, as these links get spliced to the blog feed.

We also have a quick request: we're looking for landscape architecture firms, offices, studios, ateliers, research labs, syndicates, cartels or one-person operations not based in the U.S., Canada or Western Europe. Those regions are ridiculous well-represented on our list while there's none representing Africa and South Asia. We don't have yet any firm guidelines of what sort of firms we're looking for (unless “whatever piques our biases” and “whatever we fancy that day” are considered helpful guidelines), so just leave any links you have bookmarked in the comments or email them to us.

(Pruned Beta with state of the art optical telegraphy.)

We recently noticed that a good number of our readers have lately been accessing our blog via an iPhone (with a few via a BlackBerry). We don't know if they're doing this on a regular basis or had simply stumbled through by accident. Regardless, to make Pruned easier to read and navigate around on (some) mobile devices, we have mobified it.

Our mobile URL is pruned.mobify.me. Mobile users needn't bookmark it, as you'll be automatically redirected to it from Blogspot. But let us know if the redirect isn't working for you.

Now that images posted here are no longer doubly constrained by borders and sidebars, we've got all this negative space to play around with.

And we are playing, first with these beautiful typological studies of some of India's famous cultural landscapes. There's the Adalaj Stepwell, the Ajanta Caves, the Diwan-i-Khas pavilion at the Red Fort and even an iconic boxshop.

They were produced by students at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville for This is India!, a Summer 2009 exhibition documenting “a journey through its Greedy Streets, an approach of its Furnished Cities and a walk though its slums where Mess is More.”

That's about the extent of what we know about the exhibition, so if you were one of the students, leave us a note.

Meanwhile, the text, as you can see if you're reading this on the blog, doesn't have to be confined to a single column anymore. In fact, the sequence of text and image in Blogger's single post format can be reconfigured to approximate the front page of a newspaper, complete with floating newsflashes of Lindsay Lohan's impending incarceration in anticipation of county jails and rehab centers perhaps becoming the celebrity architecture du jour again.

A single post, in other words, can be a mini-zine, a corpus of half-narratives, counter-narratives and pata-narratives. Rather like these illustrations in some ways.

Feed readers, unfortunately, will see a much messier clutter than usual and have to work harder to make sense of it. We don't think our readers expect the clearest, most straightforward narrative from us anyway, so there really won't be much out of the ordinary. And besides, we think you're already used to posts (not just ours) demanding that you complete the narrative, that is, to click on the links, to reread an earlier, related post, to come back for updates and postscripts, to decode the thousand words embedded in each image, to add additional meaning and interpretation, to do backflips. Like how the internet works.

Of course, we can just not even bother with readability at all. Screw the grid! Fuck 'best practices'!

Because “mess is more,” right?


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“This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans.”

(By a waterfall, I'm calling you-hoo-hoo-hoo...)

Appearing for the fourth time here on Pruned is Busby Berkeley's marvelous ziggurat of interlocking limbs, spraying jets and titillating ladyflesh seen at the climax of Footlight Parade's “By a Waterfall” musical number. It's Hollywood's secular reinterpretation of Michelangelo's Genesis and Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, those marvelous frescos with somewhat similar iconographies — interlocking limbs, spraying jets (of Divine Glory) and titillating (man)flesh.

And oh yeah, after years of trying, we finally upgraded Pruned from Blogger's Classic Template to whatever the new templates are being referred to as, and this necessitated redesigning our layout. Let us know what you think.


POSTSCRIPT #1: New layout and new look implemented today. (22 February 2011)

(The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad by NaJa & deOstos.)

To start Year 6, we're looking back briefly to some of our favorite spatial high jinks from our first half-decade.

1) The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad by NaJa & deOstos is a “a gigantic presence of a hanging funeral structure” hovering above the war torn streets of Baghdad. Floating unceasingly “from bright explosive mornings to airless night hours,” it is always lush with growth from an endless supply of dead Iraqis.

*

(Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi.)

2) Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi is a 480-acre dual-function power plant and public marine park floating off the coast of California. Made up of 1,800 Piezoelectric sheets supported by 1,800 buoys, it generates electricity during the weekdays. On the weekend, it morphs into an island (or several islands), the size of which depends on energy consumption.

*

(Seuthopolis, Bulgaria.)

3) Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev proposes uncovering and preserving the ancient ruins of Seuthopolis, which at the moment is lying at the bottom of a reservoir, using “a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis.”

*

(Transgenic Zoo by Peter Yeadon.)

4) Transgenic Zoo by Peter Yeadon is the existing Toronto Zoo envisioned as part of a mixed development in downtown Toronto, wherein humans live and work alongside genetically modified animals in their habitats.

*

(The Retreating Village by Smout Allen.)

5) The Retreating Village by Smout Allen rests on a perpetually shifting edge, a twitchy city continually repositioning and reconfiguring itself in response to a slowly unfolding disaster.

*

(A “multiscape” by Pim Palsgraaf.)

6) The City upon a Chicken is a mobile, disaster-averting city with easy access to cheap, local and free range produce, watched by the rest of the world as a model for a sustainable community. (Maybe.)

*

(CH2O by Waterproof.)

7) CH2O by Waterproof is a postcard tour through a post-Deluge Switzerland: a landlocked, Alpine country turned island nation.

*

(SpongeCity by Niall Kirkwood et al.)

8) SpongeCity by Niall Kirkwood et al. is a Dutch city embedded with cellular network of Super Absorbent Polymers. During flood events, such as when the dikes are breached, these sponges absorb the water, dramatically swelling the landscape to a height up to 20 meters.

*

(The Pleistocene Park.)

9) Pleistocene rewilding is an extreme form of wildlife conservation strategy in which close relatives of extinct Pleistocene megafauna are reintroduced in order to slow the loss of biodiversity and reestablish key ecological processes.

*

(The Berg by Jacob Tigges.)

10) The Berg by Jakob Tigges is a “euphoric” 1,000-meter high mountain terraformed on the grounds of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.

*
Stay tuned for more spatial high jinks.

(“Rînd de Hore” by Taraf de Haïdouks, from Latcho Drom, 2003.)

And that's a wrap for Year 5. Tomorrow we'll start Year 6!

To set the festive mood, above is one of the many super-energizing scenes from one of our favorite films of all time, the “docu-musical” Latcho Drom by Tony Gatlif. It's sure to bring everyone here on Pruned HQ and hopefully elsewhere up dancing on their feet, gliding a few inches above the floor, with limbs and shoulders frenetically jerked about by cosmic marionette strings. No one can resist its infectious pulse.

*
Meanwhile, as per tradition, we purchased our anniversary architectural notecard from Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Adams. Going through the choices this year, we were ecstatic to find out that some of the extant and nonextant follies of the Désert de Retz were added to the catalog last year. Rendered so beautifully in watercolor and in such small dimensions, they look so ridiculously precious.

We ended up getting the Pyramid, the pyramid used for serving glaciers.

(Two really quick notes: firstly, landscape architect Adrienne Cortez's proposal for an alternative to uncapping fire hydrants, one which preserves the positive aspects of that quintessential urban summer pastime but without sacrificing water resources, is very fine, so go see; and secondly, my del.icio.us bookmarks — recent entries include the above proposal, the global soil survey project and future Plum Islands — now get collated daily and then spliced with the blog's RSS feed. Postnote: will try to avoid such redundancies in the future.)

(Very briefly, Pruned turns 4 today. Or to inflate that number a bit, we are starting Year 5 today! Here's to 4 more years! Oh, no. The image above, meanwhile, comes from UK-based Earth Images, which sells fine art prints of these sonorous lithic Turners — cue Ligeti — and of other pictorial stones but unfortunately not the polished rocks themselves.)

(Et in Arcadia ego. Photo by James Bridle.)

A new month, a new layout (i.e., back to 3 columns again), and of course, a view from Derek Jarman's marvelous seaside garden towards the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station and its twin atomic reactors, picturesquely sited as the main focus of interest in this composed pastoral scene.

Let me know if anything's amiss with the layout.

(And yes, we are now referring to ourselves in the singular again. “Hello me!” “Hello myself!” “How's me been all this time?”)

Book:
Derek Jarman's Garden

More flickr sets:
Angus Fraser
John Siddique
Bus Stop

So it started with one very minor edit to the template, specifically, to replace the four lines from a Reginald Arkell poem with a Robert Smithson quotation, but that led to another tiny edit and then another one and then another and another. It simply snowballed from there. And after a week of almost nonstop tweaking, the tweaking still goes on.

We've been using browsershots.org to see what the blog now looks like in Windows, and because it's an easy option, in Linux as well. The site checks out fine on MSIE 7.0, but on previous versions, not so well. Fortunately, we won't be concerning ourselves with those older versions of MSIE.

However, we definitely want to resolve one problem on Firefox 2.0: the images are not loading. We absolutely have no idea why that is. Is it because they are transparent PNGs? Is it because the images are set (for the moment) to “private” on our Flickr account? Is it because of the machines and the network used by browsershots.org? Is it what?

In any case, please let us know what other problems you see layout-wise.

And postings will resume shortly.

(The photo above, meanwhile, is one of O. Winston Link's famous ghost trains. It's the Hot Shot passing through Iaeger, West Virginia, heading east, its glory days receding farther and farther behind, and for a moment crossing paths with its successors, ready to leave their own monumental mark on the American landscape. The passing of an era, as it were.)