Meadowlicious: National Wildflower Centre

Buildings that are used to celebrate botanical phenomena seem the most appopriate to become melded into the landscape in more meaningful ways. Aside from abstracted metaphor, there is a direct link between the building and the content and context in which it is meant to reference. A recent competition and subsequent announcement of winners for the UK's National Wildflower Centre had no shortage of both literal and figurative applications of vegetation from all of the finalists. The project envisioned an "...educational, conference and seed production complex at the National Wildflower Centre in Knowsley, part of the Liverpool City Region." The winning entry from Ian Simpson Architects, Adams Kara Taylor Engineers and Hoare Lea Engineers has been announced as winners of the competition for their vegetated and nautilus-inspired design.




:: images via Bustler

As mentioned, the remaining finalists showed off a variety of veg.itectural methods, from the green roofed to the visually veg.itecturally referential in my unofficial ranking of the runner's up. All images via Bustler.

DM3 Architecture


Studio Verna


Urban Salon Architects


Nicolas Tye Architects


Kirkland Fraser Moor


And another runner-up non-shortlisted entry that popped up via World Architecture Community for from Jeeyong Ann - which I liked for the site and building integration (sustainable skin system), some cool graphics, and definitely the name - Ginseng Chicken.








:: images via World Architecture Community

Host Analog

The insertion of ecological artworks into the urban patterns offers opportunities to confront our relationship in nature in new ways. Additionally, the location in proximity to density and multi-modal traffic (versus, something tucked away in a far-off location) also gives artists a significantly larger audience to express concepts to. One very central piece in Portland that sometimes hides under the radar is the simple piece 'Host Analog' by Seattle artist Buster Simpson.




:: 'Host Analog' image via Jason King (2008 - L+U)

Installed in 1991 adjacent to the Oregon Convention Center - and in close proximity to the adjacent MAX light rail stop - this piece uses the obvious analog of the 'nurse log', which falls and decays, providing a fertile media to 'host' the growth of other forest biomass. This common sight on any hike in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, this configuration of death and rebirth provides fascinating iterations of mutualistic ecologies in nature and a story of ecological systems in microcosm. See the similarities below.


:: 'Host Analog' - image via Jason King (2008 - L+U)


:: Nurse Log - image via Wikipedia

Some of the details of the installation, coupled with the descriptive (albeit dated) text from Simpson's website: "Host Analog teaches us to see the beauty found in the chaos dynamics. Transposing phenomena into aesthetics, this sculpture creates an anomaly with new paradigms. This old growth nursing log, decomposing and nursing a new landscape, is a work in progress. For over 500 years, this Douglas Fir was nurtured in the same watershed which sustains Portland today. In the 1960's, this monarch fell to the winds and later bucked to determine if suitable for lumber. No harvestable, the eight sections of the old growth trunk, measuring eight feet in diameter by eight feet long each, lay host to way become the Bull Run watershed. Rediscovered by the artist in 1990, the nursing log was moved to rest adjacent to the Oregon State Convention Center to continue its regenerative processes. Over the past nine years, the Host Analog has re-established itself in this new context, nursing both its original indigenous plants, as well as a new 'invasive' plantscape from the adjacent urban landscape."






:: 'Host Analog' - images via Jason King (2008 - L+U)

And the other interesting aspect of 'living' installations is to see the evolution over time, creating art that is never complete. The piece is now over 18 years old, and has grown new vegetation (as mentioned, some native and some non-native), as well as continuing further deterioration of the host pieces. See some flash evolution sequences on Simpson's website, as well as this evolutionary set of stills from the City of Kent website:


:: images via City of Kent (click to enlarge)

The interpretive elements are relatively small, and often overlooked... it'd be interested to see a poll of users of the Convention Center and surrounding environs to even know this piece exists... but that is part of it's beauty. It doesn't confront users in an overt way, but is differentiated slightly from the more traditional landscape treatments by a vastly different plant palette, the irrigating 'frame' and some simple signage.




:: 'Host Analog' images via Jason King (2008 - L+U)

Reading List: The Infrastructural City

The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
edited by Kazys Varnelis (Actar - 2008)


:: image via NetLab

If not for the impeccable timing of the release of this book, and the fact that the content within has inevitably been in progress for some time - I would say that 'The Infrastructural City' was a direct and specific response to the predominance of recent discussion around infrastructure in our urban areas. Instead, I would chalk it up to the vision that Varnelis and his contributors have in previously discussing what is only now becoming a mainstream conversation, leading to the growing piles of money funneled towards stimulating job creation and rebuilding of said infrastructure. Much like the crowd of 'sustainability' writers who led the wave of discussion - this will go down as one of those books that addressed infrastructure before infrastructure was cool.


:: image via The Infrastructural City

That is not to say there hasn't been similar endeavors in the past, but this is a book with a singular topic (Los Angeles) and a broad scope (Infrastructure) maybe more appropriately is going to be the one text that actually lauches infrastructure from the mundane to the 'cool'. With a simple enough premise of explorations of infrastructural systems and the new configurations: "...networked, codependent ecosystems of environmental mitigation, land-use organization, and service delivery..." Much like the 2007 publication 'Blue Monday' by Varnelis and fellow AUDC collaborator Robert Sumrell, this book is imminently readable, tangential in a good way, and totally engaging. The short(ish) essays lead the reader to absorb - then continue on with the next chapter and essay - staying up way too late for what is practical in getting to work the next morning.


:: image via The Infrastructural City

Encompassing, in no particular order: water, rivers, oil, gravel, traffic, telecommunications, landscape, cell towers, land use, distribution, and the film industry - along with aerial photo essays from Lane Barden illuminating the nature/artifice that is Los Angeles, the book offers contributions from a wide range of thinkers that gives it a variability of tone and topic that makes for fascinating reading. It is all tied together with common mapping conventions and the main character of the play, the unique City of Los Angeles - a city like no other, but also with elements of commonality to everywhere and everyone.

:: images via The Infrastructural City

Varnelis, formerly with Sci-Arc, and the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, is currently at Columbia University with the Network Architecture Lab - which is continuing the explorations of the non-profit architecture collective AUDC to address the infrastructural and social in our cities: NetLab: "...embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design. Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of telecommunications, digital technology, and changing social demographics on architecture and urbanism."

As typical in a compilation of essays, I am able to pick out a couple of stand outs for me personally - mostly due to their relevance to landscape and urbanism - but there is not one dud in the bunch and they all hold together and complement one another. The broad reach of Los Angeles in it's search for water and electricity (well documented) is balanced by the use of the available local resources of climate, oil, and geography that make the city of Los Angeles a technological and cultural city. This triality of local/regional/global is unique to LA, but also a product of our recently flattened world.

A few standouts in the concept of landscape and ecological systems include an essay by Barry Lehrman on the 'accidental preservation' of the Owens Lake basin due to the depletion of water resources as they were diverted to LA. This diversion leads to a fascinating exploration of the LA River Watershed by David Fletcher - the channelized monster snaking through the city and our imagination in movies such as Grease and The Terminator 2. Fletcher, as lead planner on the 'Los Angleles River Revitalization Master Plan' has unique knowledge and insight into this The essay, entitled 'Flood Control Freakology', alludes to the unnatural ecology that exists within the LA River Watershed's (mostly) concrete lined channels - and the additional challenges that come to restore this ecosystem back to some semblance of ecological and cultural function. The term of 'freakology' sums up many mutated ecologies in urban areas that have evolved despite our efforts - redefining what is the appropriate, what we consider weeds, and how this 'river' can be appropriately integrated into the fabric of the City of Los Angleles.


:: Another Urban Freakology - Frankenpine Cell Towers - images via The Infrastructural City

The connection to oil exploration (and the realization that there are working oil derricks hidden within structures in the middle of the city) offers a take on the historical colonization and ability of LA to become a self-sufficient (at least in terms of energy) hub - meanwhile depleting and extracting this black gold, gravel, and in alternatively scenery, place, and people through a variety of subsequent industries.




:: images via The Infrastructural City

A subsequent essay by Warren Technetin investigates the artificial landscape of palm-lined streets that define the landscape of LA - and subsequent efforts to re-establish a more expansive (and shading) urban canopy - as well as how we maintain, live with, and use these trees within urban areas.


:: image via The Infrastructural City

And the aerial tours of the rivers, streets, and other transportation networks by Lane Barden (much popularized in planning and urban literature by Alex Maclean) follow a linear pathway from the air, giving a more expansive overview of context than ground-level photography or total above ground aerials.


:: images via The Infrastructural City

This book is one to be read, then subsequently mined for new methodologies for site and urban analysis that is sorely lacking in our typical processes. I'm intrigued by the approach, and envision a series of companion volumes with similar rigor for a number of urban areas throughout the US and the world - realization of the unique qualities of each city, but also allowing for the ability to compare and contrast each in a more unified way. I'm itching to apply this approach to Portland - as it is sure to yield some of the known, but more importantly, a lot of the unknown infrastructure at work in my community. I only hope that endeavor is half as successful as 'The Infrastructural City'.