Oh! I didn’t expect that!

This is one of my favourite responses to the world I pass through.  Much used by many purveyors of advertising, done well it can provoke a huge range of reactions and often-times includes the production of happy endorphins!

This first photograph took only a few short steps out of the back door to achieve the enigmatic ‘You what!’ moment.  Apparently a box-load of rubber gloves had been lurking in our neighbour’s shed and she decided one morning to wash them.  Obviously the next step was to hang them up to dry.  Very practical, but a very strange sight....

The next photo is part of a series that I used in a blog post last year, but it is such a remarkable piece of craftsmanship and warm sense of humour that I have to use another from the set.  Kaffe Fassett’s murals for the Highland Stoneware company utilised broken shards from some of their very popular designs.  The sheep design just visible adorns a well-loved vase of mine as well as this rock in the bay at Lochinver.

Some sights are utterly normal to those for whom they are a part of their daily life.  For the rope-makers in Reykjavik this bobbin delivering stock for the creation of fishing nets and tough mooring ropes are part of the daily routine.  For those of us whose grandmothers used smaller bobbins, it is an insight into a world we normally take so much for granted. It also raises questions about the work done behind the scenes, in a way that many other pieces of equipment would be hard-pressed to achieve.

Not always built to last.....

Autumn.
A time of year that triggers reflection, often on the ephemeral nature of things.  As deciduous trees respond to the night frosts and the sun sits lower in the sky, leaves turn brown and fall to the ground.  This can also be a time to celebrate a spontaneity that can come from short-lived design. 
 











The plan here is to avoid the temptation to get darkly reflective on the short-lived nature of the built form, but to look at items in the landscape that are designed NOT to last, but maybe to give cover to the construction of things that will last or to celebrate an event.  Sometimes these designs are for an ephemeral experience, but most often they are in order to add to one that in days past would have been dull-thudding boredom and a trigger for an exotic variety of graffiti.  Graffiti comes in many forms and will be the subject of its own post.  There is graffiti that is many centuries old, so it is not all eligible for this blog post!

The two photos showing construction boarding were taken in Helsinki and Madrid.  In Helsinki the construction perimeter surrounding the new Music Hall was stamped with designs that were echoing the elements of the modern city, such as mobile phones and screaming babies, lawn mowers and bicycles.  All sound generators, so a subliminal message of sound went along the distraction from the cranes and steel work on the site.  In Madrid airport the construction barriers within the new Terminal 4 had various emblems on them, again with subliminal and up front messages about the future use of the areas behind the screens.  The designs interact with the highly polished floors to create patterns for the eye and cease to be about just a wall up to block people out of an area, giving something back in exchange.

Traffic wind-up schemes

Usually when I put these posts together they are to comment on small features we tend to overlook in our day-to-day lives and they are primarily rant-free zones.  No blog can be fully rant-free forever, however, their very existence is for individual expression.  Today it is a bit of a rant, but I don’t believe that it is a lonely rant....

There is no visibility to oncoming cars and streams of
vehicles head off regardless of priority

We in the UK have an expanding population alongside increased vehicle ownership.  More people mean more houses and this means roads that had developed for lower levels of traffic now bear the strain.  While attempts to force people to adopt laughably inappropriate and inadequate public transport options fail in rural areas, parallel attempts at slowing the traffic down have varying levels of success.

In our Sussex village, inside the new South Downs National Park, we have what has to be one of the most ridiculous and irritating sets of traffic calming measures ever implemented.

There is a clue in the phrase 'Traffic Calming' that ought to imply that the idea is to calm the traffic down.  It is hard to remember this through most measures experienced.  Traffic Wind-up is by far the more appropriate phrase.  There has been considerable research done on this subject in both the Netherlands and in Germany.  It is of no great surprise to learn that traffic behaviour is at its very best when drivers are calm, unstressed and not confused.

Land of Harps and Puffin'

Harpa – the new Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik, Iceland

In August, for various reasons, I found myself in Reykjavik, dropped down by a bus right outside the unexpected sight of ‘Harpa’, the soon-to-be-opened new Concert Hall for Iceland.  It was in the last few stages of construction, to get ready for its official opening a few days later.  As a result of all that has happened to Iceland over the past few years it looms out of the edge of the harbour all dressed up for a party, surrounded by blank ground where new buildings are apparently intended to turn up sometime soon.

The unfinished landscape treatment added to this strange aura, but all sense of perplexity vanishes in a flash of blue and green-gold light as you look up to the facade as you get closer to it.

The building itself was designed as a collaboration between the Danish Henning Larsen Architects and the Icelandic Batteríið Architects.  The dressing up of the facades was planned and designed by a Danish-Icelandic artist called Ólafur Elíasson, apparently to echo the variety of geological and landscape features in Icelandic terrain.  (The Harpa website is here).  Certainly the effect is mesmerising, and for anyone interested in photography and light it is a playground.  The name Harpa I gather is a result of public consultation, Harpa being both Icelandic for harp and a popular girl’s name.

Weather 1 – WIND

Level crossing sign pushed over by 1987 winds

Last month, as Hurricane Irene rushed her way up the east coast of the United States of America, quite a few people put up their two-penneth on the subject of our own 1987 UK Hurricane.  There were references to over-reaction because a few tiles got shaken in the breeze, which I found troubling on two counts:
a) it seemed a bit of an attempt to belittle the very powerful forces heading towards areas of the US that were not used to them and the action taken by politicians to minimise the risk to life of their people; and
b) it seemed an attempt to re-write the story of that time. 
Now we have inherited another US storm, Katia, this morning.  All this has woken up some very strong memories from 1987 and the consequences for the landscape of Sussex and neighbouring counties.  Needless to say the damage in the US has been substantial.  The damage in Sussex in 1987 was the worst for 200 years and in many places our skylines still bear the scars.

Tweet Tweet TWITTER

Tweeting in birds is to attract attention - and food....

It is hard to believe but only a month ago I started to embark upon the roller-coaster ride of learning Twitter, how it works and how people play the game. It has been an incredibly momentous period, with huge world events occurring in tandem, my learning curve including different aspects of how this phenomenon works and otherwise feeding an obsession to follow the Hackgate soap opera. The appalling events in Norway unfolded before my disbelieving eyes once I had spotted the first notice of trouble on the Reuters website, right down to a first tweet on the shootings.  To follow that on the same day with the news of losing a very talented musician who had suffered so much pain and be prompted by myriad users to a very fine piece of writing that was strong, compassionate and understood terribly well how these things happen was truly unexpected.  I am purposely not naming names here, those names are not why I am writing this blog.

Twitter is so young.  It was born in 2006 and took a few days of hatching before it was given such a profoundly apt name, apparently intended as much as anything else to reflect the success of Flickr (I must be one of the very few who are concerned about Flickr but that is different stuff). A collaborative effort following on from brainstorming, with development and input from users and non-users, software developers etc, it has grown into a global presence, sometimes being given credit for more influence than is quite true. Having done a lot of tour-leading and group escorting I know a lot about group dynamics, the nature of the group is frequently at odds with the individuals that make it up, a disconcerting truth that impacts on behaviour patterns. This appears to be something that happens with Twitter as well and is plausibly part of its addictive power.

Van Gogh growing outside National Gallery….

Close-up of the area of the cypress tree and the sky

Trafalgar Square in London is an alluring place to go to watch people, to watch pigeons and to look at new outdoor art.  At the moment there is a fascinating development of art and gardening combined, propped up on scaffolding outside the front of the National Gallery.  Buskers are edging their way towards it as they see the responses that it harvests from the members of the public at that corner of the ‘square’.  Tourists and locals nestle into the foliage to have their photographs taken ‘as though lying down’ and it is all great fun.

Not all is what we think it is….

Rubus fruticosus in flower

Most of us tend to look upon bramble growth with irritation and dismiss the plant as common and painful, apart from when it bears fruit.

After my previous post I made a bit of an error of judgement and promised my Facebook friends that the next one would be on brambles.  It seemed a good idea at the time, but it has taken me a long time to get not very far with it….

Rubus fruticosus leaves

….because brambles are very common and not very photogenic when they aren’t in flower.  Also because the whole topic is enormous and complicated and incredible!

At the moment the season progresses and our shed is hidden from view by a thick tangle of fast-growing thorns.  Every year it is the same.  I gave up getting to the roots when I realised that the little bits I left were enough to grow later.  Spring brings out machete-like hacking.

Now you see it now you don't....

The Modernist notion of ‘Form Follows Function’ from the turn of the 19th century, but much vaunted in the 1950s and 1960s, was taken to extremes and allowed for a block concrete world where detail and creativity were considered extravagant ‘extras’.  I am a very big fan of simple design, and new creative thinking can take detail to a further level than the fundamental starkness popular in the times of fifty years ago.  Often we take the results utterly for granted, but on the occasions when we do take notice the effect can be deeply exhilarating.  Thinking ‘outside the box’ occurs across the world and using materials of different price and robustness.

Cleveden retracting bollard - photo taken by Joanne Lloyd

Since this blog is about bollards, I will start with a form of bollard that I have loved ever since first meeting one in Brighton just outside the Fire Station.  Walking down the street, suddenly this large and solid blob in the pavement started to disappear into the ground!  I stood rooted to the spot wondering what was going on, until I realised that standing there had a pretty low life-expectancy if I stayed put any longer.  I stepped back as the doors opened and the red engines roared out into the street and off in loud pursuit of the call-out.  Often times we will see bollards that collapse on a hinge.  These are low-tech and require little maintenance, but woe the tyre that gets near to them.  The electric retraction bollard is a piece of beauty and smooth operation.  The photograph was taken by my friend Joanne Lloyd of bollards at a Marina just outside Bristol.  This bollard automatically retracts when approached from one side but not the other.  The Fire Station bollard has to have been activated remotely, since no vehicle was in sight at the time it disappeared....

Drainage in patterned paving, Lisbon

Drains.  Without drains in our wet climate we would always be paddling or slipping on ice covered pools.  In dry climates the rains can come heavily and often the drains need to be larger to accommodate the high if less frequent level of runoff.  Drains in public open space come in all manner of shapes and sizes and there can be various techniques employed to manage how intrusive they can be.  I love the simplicity of form of the drain in a square in central Lisbon, where the texture of the small unit paving and the holes in the drain echo one another and the alignment of the drain is utterly true to the design of the paving.  Never easy to achieve, but very effective

Pedestrian crossing, Helsinki

when done well. In a similar vein pedestrian crossings don’t always have to be done in paint, they can also be incorporated within the design. Problems arise if roadworks take place underneath the spot, tarmac infill can cause a moth-eaten effect…..

Cycle path, Stockholm

We have a world that is dominated by signage and so much so that most of us have developed a disturbing knack of missing some completely because we have gone into overload.  Advertisers are now trying to hit us with varying levels of “You what!” advertising, a form I have always called frictional because it creates an effective that draws attention in spite of ourselves.  Landscape designers are now using new creative techniques to enclose the signage users want to know about in the detail of their schemes.  Two special forms are shown here, an embossed metal outline of a bicycle showing which is the cycle lane on a complex of paths from Stockholm, Sweden and a surprising little disabled sign

Disabled sign, Montecristi, Ecuador

from Montecristi in Ecuador made from blue marble sitting in concrete.  Simple and effective methods of realigning our response to the clutter of signs. 

Hanging basket, Tortola Botanic Gardens

My final comment relates to a special piece of low-tech design I saw in Tortola Botanic Gardens.  The ingenious use of common materials is a major feature in the Caribbean landscape and tyres crop up as planting pots for date palms, boundary fencing and also as this very attractive hanging basket.  The same day that we saw this we were treated to a steel band whose extra piece of percussion came from brake discs!

Function and design are inter-twined concepts, but this doesn’t actually imply any rules to be adhered to at all.  So long as they work, of course.

LIGHT CHEER

Traditional lights on the South Bank in London with smoky glass blocking light upwards without spoiling the effect of the light

Candle-light in a summer garden

February is often a hard month to cope with and it is a joy to behold March, for although Spring is welling up and young snowdrops and early daffodils can make their appearance and refresh the spirit, much of the change is in terms of ‘promise’.  Buds fill and the surface of twigs and the ground change into velvet softness after the harshness of winter days and nights.  Personally I have always found my patience starts to run dry in February, and even if there has been the chance to travel to exotic climes, the very dankness of the dark days and dampness can be dispiriting.  I have also noticed that other people have a less tolerant mind in February and can get quite ‘snappish’.

Looking on the ‘bright’ side now….

Lit paving in London

On dank and dark dingy days the presence of light can be electrifying to a darkened soul.  Many more landscape schemes have been incorporating light in small spaces as technology gets more playful.  Lighting doesn’t just have to be for Christmas, our local garden centre now maintains tree lights for 12 months of the year which is cheering in the summer and instructive in the winter on darker afternoons because you know where the gate is…

Landscape lighting can be very cheering.

There is also a point where landscape light can cause problems, particularly if the wrong kind of lighting is selected.  Modern lighting is thankfully very often designed to light the places where the light is desired and to avoid the places where a sense of darkness at night to aid restful sleep or encourage astronomy is key.  There is still a long way to go, but there has been a remarkable improvement in creative thought in the past few years.  Blocking or inhibiting light up to the sky unless where building frontages are to be lit can be achieved in simple ways.

Some lighting is for security purposes and aids restful sleep through reduction of worry.

Mural of the Northern Lights on Norwegian building

In the last few weeks Scotland has had the unusual chance to enjoy some of the Aurora borealis – the Northern Lights.  One year it was possible to see them in Sussex, when it looked like vast search lights in the sky.  In Scandinavia people go skiing in Spitzbergen which doesn’t really get light as we understand it in the winter, in the same way that it doesn’t get dark during the summer.  They ski lit by the Northern Lights, which must be an incredible experience.  One comment I heard about the Scottish experience was a bit of reverse poetry.  Apparently what this person was able to see and experience was lights chasing into the sky of a subtle form in mixtures of pink and orange – “a bit like looking across the lights of London, I suppose”…..  This was a view across the Highlands in a section where very few people live and any lights are usually twinkling headlights from cars.
 

Capturing sunset in New Mexico

Some lights have cheer added to THEM

Rabbiting Year

On the third of February this year we enter the new Chinese Year of the Rabbit (according to Wikipedia).  This is supposed to be a more diplomatic and less turbulent year than the previous one, the Chinese Year of the Tiger.  Speaking personally, that seems a jolly good idea!  While I keep an open mind on all manner of notions, the mantra of things looking up is one I intend to embrace.

Rabbits are also a great deal more relevant to landscape architecture than tigers, so there is a lot more to be said.  For a start there are a great deal more of them, something they continue to achieve with enthusiasm (although the European Rabbit is now a threatened species in its own natural habitat in Spain and Portugal – see Wikipedia and IUCN red list).  Secondly they occur in many different places and often in close proximity to rural people in their working lives or in gardens.

Rabbits are voracious eaters.  When we first moved into our current home we witnessed the decimation of a much-loved pot plant on its first night in its new location with horror.  The following weekend we went shopping for some plants for the garden and bought three rose bushes and a magnolia, thinking the roses would be too thorny and the magnolia too sour a taste for them.  Ha ha!  It turns out that young thorny shoots are a favourite and they loved the magnolia equally.  Thankfully although they all suffered, we were able to put fencing around them in time and now they flourish.  We went back to the garden centre, who gave us a list of plants rabbits won’t eat.  Ominously roses were on it.  We showed it to the neighbours who chuckled and said that they knew of examples of most of the plants on the list that had been decimated over the years.  Someone forgot to give the list to the rabbits!

Rabbit proofing

As the years have passed our rabbit population has declined alongside the growth of some very large domestic cats in the neighbourhood.  Some of these cats are now so large the bird population is safe, because those dainty treats aren’t a patch on the taste of real rabbit.  It feels a bit wrong to watch this change with a lack of pity, rabbits are one of the traditional cuddly furry animals alongside bears and guinea pigs.  A landscape training distances you from the rabbit for exactly the same reasons as we suffered in our garden.  A well-designed bit of open planting has to be installed with rabbit-proof fencing as part of the specification until the thorny species have hardened up and usually for five years at the minimum.  Rabbits like to strip the bark off trees and so rabbit guards are also a feature.  The youngsters are quite experimental which can be highly destructive.  In open landscapes the presence of rabbit or deer populations is shown by a ‘skirt’ line to tree canopies that are near to the ground.  Holly bushes can also have this skirting effect, which is surprising until you look at and feel the young leaves before they harden and realise that they could be eaten and digested fairly easily.

Several years ago I worked on a historic park in Sussex which had a string of terraced lawns progressing from the balcony outside the house into the ‘pleasure grounds’ and the outer parkland.  These lawns were not balustraded as with many Sussex properties, they relied on steep banks between the lawns for a softer effect.  As a result of the softer effect, at the time we were working there many rabbits had turned the whole string into an unmanaged warren!  The extra complication was that the owners LIKED the rabbits!  It was very hard to persuade them that they were losing their lawns and that there were other areas the rabbits could live that were less destructive and less threatening to their chances of getting grants for landscape restoration proposals….. there are plenty of places where their eating habits mean benefits to keeping unwanted vegetation down - so long as where they live is more robust.

So here’s hoping for a more amiable year with the right things happening in the right places!