{Image via Non-Fiction}

With a deep fascination with the digital age and the viral effects of social media, I am finding the ever more importance of the facilitation of the landscape as a medium for the transition of the consumer to producer society. Soon enough we as citizens will have extensive control over our environments. 

Using our digital tools ubiquitous infrastructure will exist that will allow us to play music, control light, communicate, and perhaps even one day, manipulate weather.

The mission of VURB, a design research group founded by Ben Cerveny and James Burke recently wrote a proposal for a new project that will “enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones.”

The city becomes a useful digital playground of information. Cities would be designed to allow for citizen environment manipulation. Controlled from your phone turned remote control, transportation, dinner reservations are queued to your exact needs, a personal ambient soundtrack is sent through airwaves as you walk through the street.

Some things still left to understand, is how these personal manipulations react to others and the community in its entirety. Will my manipulations be affected by the person walking opposite of me down the sidewalk.

These are old concepts, but now the technology is catching up with the ideas:

In the 1960s, Constant Nieuwenhuys, an Amsterdam-based Situationist artist-architect, imagined a New Babylon made of linked transformable structures that allowed its inhabitants to freely reconfigure their environment to fit their needs and desires in realtime. This Utopian fantasy was certainly provocative at the time, but also held hints at a new relationship between citizens and their context. The citizen can be an active participant in shaping her environment everywhere she goes. Together, we can play our cities like instruments.

“The age of ubiquitous computation is condensing around us even as you read this.  The various systems throughout a modern city that you probably interact with everyday are beginning to maintain persistent memories of their own use, communicate with each other about their status, and even reconfigure themselves based on your dynamic needs.”

This is the opening statement of VURB, a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. VURB was founded in July 2009 by Ben Cerveny, design strategist and data visualization theorist, in collaboration with James Burke (Roomware, Narb) and Non-fiction’s Juha van ‘t Zelfde.

“In the same way that social networks and digital representation have had profound consequences on the cultures of print, music, and video, so too will the urban fabric of the city itself be transformed into an information layered, collaboratively shapable medium.”

“The modern city is built not just upon physical infrastructure, but also patterns and flows of information that are always growing and transforming. We are only now beginning to develop the tools that allow us to see these patterns of information over huge spans of time and space, or in any local context in realtime.

Just as the industrial age transformed cities with the addition of towers to the skyline and far-reaching transit networks, the digital age will bring new urban-scale infrastructure into everyday experience.  Where the products of industrial urban evolution were huge physical manifestations that celebrated the magnitude of urban culture, the digital era is instead producing equally impressive manifestations that live in the cloud.”

What this tells me, is the importance of landscape architects to immerse themselves in this technology and social innovation. To gain an intimate understanding of it in order to design within it's capabilities. The tools of the past are still relevant, but we need better understanding of the larger scale ecologies and addressing complicated environmental issues from more then merely the aesthetic dressings. Together, ecological design and ubiquitous community social interaction tools will empower landscape architects to design to allow all citizens to become environmental designers and informants.

+via Non-Fiction

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The final completion of any project is an amazing accomplishment in itself, considering the rigor of work, time, and bureaucratic hurdling that accompanies almost any significant landscape architecture project. For those outside the studio, we are presented with grandiose concepts, then see nothing until the landscape is eventually realized.

Sketch Landscape, is a visual narrative of the creative process of landscape architecture. The book is made up of 500 pages of scribbles, sketches, quick model prototypes, and multi-layered trace paper drawings giving insight to how some of the world's most influential architect's approach design.

(Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Sketches)

{Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Sketches}{Landworks Studio. Court Square Garden Model}

Though visually stimulating, I think the book is important because it shows that a design doesn't come from one brilliant flash of the "a-ha" moment, but involves serious study and translation of spatial thoughts. It can be a intense process of fitting creativity into real-world influences, and the sketches shown communicate this.

{Acconci Studio. Mur Island sketches}

Just to give you a quick glimpse I took a couple rough snaps of some of my favorite projects and studios featured. Landworks Studio out of Boston, who I've mentioned here on DUS before takes us through their process of three of their projects: Court Square Garden, Crackle Garden, and Macallen Rooftop. Acconci Studio shows beautiful early concept sketches of Mur Island. And a young new studio NIPpaysage who is doing exciting work, illustrates projects Green Shift and Impluvium.

{NIPpaysage. Green Shift sketches}{NIPpaysage. Green Shift sketches}{NIPpaysage. Impluvium rendering and sketch}

Whether a veteran architect or a designer with an interest in landscape and it's design process, I think you'll find the book a resourceful piece of inspiration. A book, that will spend more of it's time open on your desk then on a shelf.

In the study of Biomimicry we're discovering nature holds many potential solutions to design issues, often in a sustainable manner. Early on goose down inspired insulation, cockleburrs stuck on his dog inspired George de Mestral to invent velcro, and now perhaps, slime mold can guide our approach to large scale transit and infrastructure projects.

Researchers have used petri dish scaled mapping systems, replacing Japanese cities with slime mold food targets and recorded their routes over a 26-hr time period. The result is highly efficient path system created by tendrils that interconnect the food supplies, closely resembling to the current transit system.

The trick has to do with how slime molds eat. When Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold often found inside decaying logs, discovers bacteria or spores, it grows over them and begins to digest them through its body. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear.

A nobel prize winning experiment in 2000 at Hokkaido University in Japan, showed that P. polycephalum could find the shortest path through a maze to connect two food resources. 

New research wanted to go beyond a one solution problem and involve experiment with multiple factors that would influence the path.

"The planning is very difficult because of the tradeoffs," says cell biologist Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who was also involved in the research. For example, connecting all cities by the shortest possible length of track often compels travelers to take highly indirect routes between any two points and can mean that a single failure isolates a large part of the network. Building in more redundancy makes the network more convenient and more resilient, but at a higher cost.

Without the obvious exclusion of geographic influence, it would be interesting to begin new transit studies with biologic diagramming. Taking political, economic, and social factors out of mega scale projects. The solutions at this stage are simply the most biologically efficient, perhaps making political rhetoric less influential on final transit design locations.

{Mold creates paths leading to oak flakes representing the surrounding cities of Tokyo}

In the opposite spectrum, could this non-partisan, non-emotional microbiological transit authority selection be used as precedent in eminent domain litigation. "The Physarum polycephalum has unfortunately chosen your homestead as the most efficient and direct path for the new railway, there is nothing that can be done."

{Conceptually proposed map of US high speed rail locations}

I would like to see this experiment done to compare similarities drawn, if any, to the current plan for the US high speed rail map. Have we selected the most righteous paths, only slime will tell (ha).

Imagine, seas and rivers occupied with a population of meandering creatures, charged by sunlight and currents creating both man and wildlife mobile habitats, all cleaning our water bodies through bio-filtration.

Architect Vincent Callebaut proposes such an idea in the Physalia, a self-sufficient whale-shaped floating ecosystem which cleans water as it travels through bio-filtration. Inspired by the Physalia physalis jellyfish, the design is intended to by powered by photovoltaic panels and hydro-turbines.

Instantly several adaptations come to mind. Why not extend these concepts to other water-based transports. Slow-moving cargo ships and oil tanker transports are transformed into giant floating ecosystems, cleaning our water while maintaining their purpose. Giant cruise vessels transform from a system of excess and over-consumption to becoming floating utopian-esque tropical ecologies. More eco-tourism then Carnival cruise.

This even could be a prelude to a floating housing concept in response to the impending water level rise. Floating around like algae, our homes and neighborhoods in constant fluctuation, changing demographics and social order/hierarchy, your enemy one day could be your neighbor the next. All of this happening while intensely sucking carbon from the air.

+via Inhabitat