28 July, 2015
This article appeared in the July 2015 edition of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), with the subheading “The Milan Expo raises unsought emotions about food, cities, the world.” The text and photos are both mine. The ‘Tree of Life’ is a sound and light spectacle every evening that includes dancing waters and a techno soundtrack. A […]
11 June, 2015
“The four horsemen of the apocalypse are always saddled up and ready to ride roughshod over population growth” – scene from Mad Max: Fury Road found at http://www.rygestop.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-Mad-Max-Fury-Road-Hi-Res-Wallpaper-up8cq-Free.jpeg “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Summer 2015 issue I call for more hope, idealism, and striving […]
20 April, 2015
‘Bad Role Models for Landscape Architecture’ is a series of articles I wrote in 2012 for Landscape online and which led to much discussion (some angry) and a short appearance on the BBC where I criticised Charles Jencks’s earthwork Northumberlandia. Jencks believes that in a postmodern age any publicity, even negative, is good publicity. This, […]
31 March, 2015
This post first appeared on Homes For Britain’s ‘Fifty Blogs in Fifty Days’ here. Peter Paul Rubens, Abundantia, c. 1630 – She holds a cornucopia signifying prosperity, abundance, and the good life – all very different from the idea of austerity. [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Our housing crisis stems from a […]
14 January, 2015
Two remarkable buildings (at least) are scheduled for demolition in Fitzrovia and Soho, my neighbourhood. Their loss marks a failure to value the city as a collective work evolving over time and a failure to see buildings as part of urban social, cultural, aesthetic and even ecological context. London’s landscape will be further impoverished as […]
9 July, 2015
A strange tug-of-war between a gentrifying private world and the need for a public life and public space are being played out in tiny micro-aggressions on doorsteps in Fitzrovia. At our recent meeting of residents at the late-Victorian mansion block where I live, the other tenants expressed worries about the large numbers of people, especially at […]
25 April, 2015
This essay appeared in the Autumn 2011 issue of Landscape to accompany my talk at the Garden Museum entitled ‘Food in the Metropolis’. My research continues to explore questions of taste, prosperity, and the good life as key to a sustainable future. JacquesTati’s Monsieur Hulot in Mon Oncle comes face to face with sanitised, mechanised […]
18 April, 2015
Burberry check: the ur-blang, the ultimate in non-taste “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Spring 2015 issue I introduce the damning term ‘blang’ – where bland meets bling. A pewter-grey luxury sedan is parked on a pea gravel drive edged with tightly-clipped shin-high boxwood […]
22 January, 2015
This article is from the April 2014 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) and I have re-blogged it from The Dirt. Place de la République before aerial view / © Air-Images.net Place de la République after aerial view / © TVK A piece of Paris has been recivilized for walking (or skating, or scootering, or […]
10 December, 2014
San Francisco fire after the 1906 earthquake, Sacramento Street, image by Arnold Genthe This is an unpublished essay I wrote in 2003. I have made some small changes for accuracy, but I have left my writing style of the time intact. I’m every bit as fond of Stadler’s book now as I was then. Literature […]