Trace One

ok, this is an open site to ridicule me – I can take it! Perhaps I can draw some fire and cyncism from other site..

I did make my own t-shirts once – each individually hand painted, I made about 30 of them, and tried to sell them for $25 each at the National Arboretum in Wash. D.C. at some kind of crafts fair..Everything around me was priced…[Read more]

Thanks, Jason, that is just what I am thinking of.. Seems like an opportunity for an out of work enterpreneur (?sp?) to make some money, although not with LA logo..I have a friend who made his first big bucks selling t-shirts..I’m gonna try to track that link down..

Agree with Rob wholeheartedly..90 million humans are added to the earth every year – with a conservative estimate – it goes up to 160 million a year in the nineties, late nineties..In La Jolla, Ca., there is one tiny beach where they won’t allow a few hundred of the 40,000 harbor seals along the Ca. coast establish a rookery – they need to make…[Read more]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/world/asia/29mumbai.html?scp=1&sq=mumbai%20homes&st=cse

check this out for the future of development – urban infill, central core of super rich, surrounded by abject poverty, with the poor all voting to let the single rich guy keep all his money in the hope they will be him some day..

sorry to be such a NYT…[Read more]

: )
laughter is the best medicine..

from the good old Reader’s Digest!

Man, Boilerplater, does that seem naive..Lawyers may be having the same trouble we are having with job availablity, but they make twice as much as we do and often work on the same issues,and their determinations are the final word – have you never worked for local government? It is the lawyer who will tell you how many parking spaces you have to…[Read more]

so good design must have gone through your logical process, Andrew?

don’t think so..

I just wanted to add that without self knowledge (which is different from ‘bringing your own life experiences’) you can end up doing the same thing over and over – I know two LA’s who do nothing but circles, curves..It always looks good, but you just want to…[Read more]

good design that YOU have to accomplish is definitely accomplished by knowing yourself and with the knowledge of history – our culture suffers tremendously from lack of knowledge of history..Every action has echoes from the past in it – if you can’t recognize where you are coming from, how can you know where to go?

Andrew, I will agree to…[Read more]

I also liked to teach my students that one of the most fundamental aspects of good design is knowing yourself – you have to know where YOU are coming from, what are your predjudices, often, most importantly, what was YOUR childhood landscape – without that self-knowledge, I don’t think you can judge what is good. Self-knowledge, of course,…[Read more]

This reminds me of the experiment MIT students conducted with the red balls placed around the world, and tracking how long it took and how social networks worked to successfully find all of them..

How about the ‘green wall’ idea..Try to chart it backwards, where it started, and then how it proliferated? Or architects and their building ‘skins’ so…[Read more]

no, using the runnal at Salk for communication cables is a good example of design not meeting needs – I think Lou Kahn would roll over in his grave if he knew communication cables were put in his stark little runnal, designed for water and reminiscent of the Alhambra..
it is an example of design being too design-y, and not functioning unless the…[Read more]

I used to work at UCSD, where Salk is – it is an extremely famous design, for the “landscape” as well, and it turns out that the famous single runnal in the middle is a great place to put cables for any public event you might be having there..

: )

what books are recommended for LA theory, these days, Jason? I would be interested…

Thanks, Thomas, but that is not where I live..I am in the central valley..

I just came back to edit previous comment – Barry Lopez saw native cultures as treating nature as I- thou, and we treat it as I- it, NOT “I – me”, as I wrote…We see nature as all “I- it.” But all cultures thoughout time say nature as “I – Thou” , with great respect, an…[Read more]

and I have to add, how or why is landscape urbanism’ different that Landscape Architecture, as it has been practiced for 100 years, with some very gorgeous examples..How is it different than landscape architecture in any way, as Nick Aceto pointed out?

why do we need these words at all?

Fairly annoying – sort of like ‘meme’ – everything is a…[Read more]

I am saying that I am not fine with ‘landscape urbanism”..I means nothing, it has no immediate relevance, and reminds me of the democrats tring to stand up the the republican branding machine – the republicans say ‘man up’ and the dems are flatfooted and try to talk policy..
Landscape urbanism is to me a meaningless opaque portmanteau of…[Read more]

I am with Jason on this – ‘landscape urbanism..” ? What sort of gobbledygook is that? how about urbane landscapism – the use of thatched hair in very svelte and fashionable figures..
It’s a silly portmanteau of ideas, and not worth pursuing unless you want to become a vacuous academic..

I will never forget reading one of my high school classmates…[Read more]

I like McHarg’s word, “fit’…. fitness…

For me the word encompasses all the different levels at which a design should be judged..

And it is not in the golds Gym sense of fitness..

you are mad, David, mad..pay scales have nothing to do with the cost of living in an area..why should they? LA wages flatlined a decade ago..it has been a buyers market for decades..The pay as little as they can, unless there is a union…
“They” pay more when there are unions..We, in Ca. , are part of an engineers union..

Great Tom Wolfe piece, Russel, thank you – man he was alive back then, in his words..

I take away from that a sort of cycnicism of theory, in keeping with our general anti-intellectual atmosphere in America today (and forty years ago, thanks Mr. Wolfe..)
But unfortunately, Olmsteds designs, Prospect Park, look the way they do because of theory -…[Read more]