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I had the great pleasure of meeting and working with Laura Wilson in 2008 while I was living in Germany. She has a distinct sense of calm about her that instantly puts you at ease as if you’ve known her forever and I believe that her art is a direct extension of her warm personality and intimate connection with the natural elements. Laura was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina and has a BA in Fine Art from Furman University as well as graduated from the School of Sculpture at Emerson College in England. Her artwork focuses on temporary and permanent site specific public installations incoporating the history of the place and future intentions in the forms. Laura works with materials found locally within a 50 mi radius and in collaboration with the local community. She has exh...Read More

http://www.elasaromania09.ro/

Hey remember when we told you about Re:Vision Dallas? Well, if you missed it here, let me get you up to speed. Urban Re:Vision set out to make something incredible happen in downtown Dallas. With their competition, Re:Vision Dallas, applicants transformed a single block into a place that creates economies, supports community, facilitates relationships and generates resources. “The winners of Re:Vision Dallas have created plans that challenged us, engaged us, and inspired us. And their ideas, from local materials and vegetated screens to integrated greenways, will shape how people will live and work here in the future.” My vote goes for David Baker’s entry, Entry #136: Greenways Xero Energy, because he focused not only on the building but the pedestrian experience as a who...Read More

This week we are again building off of the pattern made in the water tutorial, this time to make a wetland. Wetlands are one of the trickiest things to render well in plan, in my opinion, as traditional means force you to render what looks like an open prairie field, or a lake. This type of situation, where hand graphic techniques do not allow for semi-transparency or small scale detail, at least not without a prohibitive time investment, is when Photoshop rendering can really shine. Before you can make your wetland, you will need to make a pattern for a field. NATURAL FIELD Step 1: Find a field First things first: find a photo of a field of grass, a prairie, or a wetland. The best picture will be one with some regular variation to it, and that is taken from as high as possible, to create ...Read More

This morning, as I was tweaking my website, I decided to add a mission statement of sorts to my front page: “I believe in working and designing the right way, not just the easy way. I believe that a big idea with deep meaning can always be reduced to a do-able level while maintaining its impact, while a small idea cannot be injected with meaning. I believe that every design challenge should be met like a competition, with bold, innovative ideas, with the knowledge that it can be scaled back to fit real world circumstances.” This is really the essence of what I think makes the difference between OK design and great design. The willingness to step way outside the box, into the realm of the unachievable, and then to look at how that idea can be tweaked and pulled on to get a worka...Read More

Dutch Landscape Architect Gives New Life to Death Strip After 20 years of laying barren, a Dutch landscape architect wants to transform the former no man’s land into a series of secret gardens and recreational areas. Joyce van den Berg is the curator of an exhibition, “New Light on No Man’s Land,” opening July 10th at the German Center for Architecture (DAZ) in Berlin, which looks at what can be done with the remains of the former border strip surrounding West Berlin. Her careful research helped to map out exactly where the former pieces of No Man’s land actually were 20 years ago. On what was formerly called the “Death Strip”, van den Berg wants to encourage new plant life. Her plan would see the barren strips of sand moved at regular intervals in...Read More

See what I did with this boring, flat tract home yard in Los Angeles in my before and after photo album! http://photobucket.com/ShirleyBovshow

Waterfalls and streams are things that, in my opinion, can greatly effect the quality of your overall render , even if they are only a minor component of the design. Done correctly, they can add life and movement to your rendering, done wrong and they become strangely shaped pools. Today I’m going to go over my rendering techniques for these critical items. As always, feel free to use them, tweak them, or ignore them. Let me know what you think! Streams and Waterfalls Step 1: Bite Off More Than You Can Chew… Or Need When you start the stream, the first thing you want to do is pick an area that is a decent bit larger then the area that makes up the stream, to give yourself some room to work. Step 2: Fill and Distort Take the area you selected, and fill it with the plain water te...Read More

Congratulations Bloggers Land8 Lounge Members featured in June Issue of LAM In this month’s issue of LAM, Daniel Jost features seven note-worthy blogs in his article, “The Dirt on Blogging: How can blogs change the way we communicate about Landscape Architecture?” Out of all the exceptional landscape blogs out there, I was happy to see that 5 out of the 7 bloggers mentioned in this article are members of Land8Lounge. Landscape+Urbanism – is a blog written by Jason King that focuses on the integration of ecological processes into cities. He describes his blog as, “dialogue and siftings from Portland, Oregon focusing on landscape architecture, sustainable urbanism, vegetated architecture, urban agriculture, living walls, green roofs, ecological planning and land...Read More

Note: I realize that this is Wednesday- I worked an 8 hour shift yesterday, and then went to see Transformers 2 at midnight, so I didn’t have quite enough time to finish this off before this morning, sorry for the wait. oh, and I have to admit, I am surprised that Transformers 2 has more finishing moves then Mortal Kombat… One of the things needed for a lot of renderings, whether it is for pools, lakes, streams, wetlands, or swales, is water. You by all means could get a more hand-rendered look by just selecting the area to be water, pick a color like R:52 G:90 B:187, put a wide, soft brush at say 20% opacity, paint over much of the water, then paint over the outer edges, leaving more and more of the middle alone, until you get the look you want. However, I’m going to sho...Read More

“I had recently purchased a standard Dell desktop PC for my family, which the kids used for playing videogames; it came is a terabyte internal hard drive. My children had twice as much storage as my entire staff. How did this happen? The answer is simple: We had gotten stuck thinking that storage was expensive, which in fact is had become dirt cheap. We treated the abundant thing – hard drive capacity – as if it were scarce, and the scarce thing – people’s time – as if it were abundant. The corporate bureaucracy had gotten the equation backward.” – Waste is Good, Chris Anderson, Wired – July 2009 One of the challenges that all firms have today, along with every other business in today’s world, is the decision of how much money to ...Read More

We’ve featured a variety of different shipping container homes, from a quick emergency shelter, to LOT-EK’s container home kit, student housing , and even an entire container city in London. One thing’s for sure, there isn’t a shortage of uses for containers as shelter, especially for those who like that super industrial architecture aesthetic. Leger Wanaselja Architecture finished their Container House at the close of last year, bringing a more traditional look to the container composed residence, located on top of a hill in an East Bay suburb overlooking San Francisco, Calif. The 1350 square foot, three bedroom house incorporates three forty-foot containers, two stacked on one another, and the third cut in half and stacked on itself. For their version of a container house Leger Wanaselja...Read More