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San Francisco fire after the 1906 earthquake, Sacramento Street, image by Arnold Genthe This is an unpublished essay I wrote in 2003.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 […]
29 November, 2014
A stroll in Vienna’s Rathausplatz garden. Designing for this kind of leisure, pleasure, and play is anything but a ‘bullshit job.’ Photo by author “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Winter 2014 issue I argue for a better work/life balance for landscape architects. Ebenezer […]
16 September, 2014
This is an article that appeared in last month’s Garden Design Journal in their ‘Talking Point’ opinion section. I love to travel by train, because of certain negatives – because I hate car traffic and airports and because I’m too tall to fit into the aeroplane seats that I can afford. There are also distinct […]
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 […]
3 December, 2014
A friend told me a story recently about an urban designer who derided a landscape architect with whom he was working for not understanding urban design because his insistence on planting shrubs was in clear violation of the principles of ‘designing out crime.’ Designing out crime is a tick-box approach to urban design that will […]
16 September, 2014
“… that awful loopy red thing” – The Orbit – at the site of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games in London’s Stratford. “A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Autumn 2014 issue I demolish a couple of Norman Foster buildings and “…that awful […]
4 September, 2014
The superlatives of contemporary expression reach as far as possible to the extremes of human experience. The sheer awesomeness (or awfulness) of everyday life leads us to select descriptors such as ‘epic’ or ‘iconic’ for every object or environment or atmosphere we encounter. An offhand internet search for ‘iconic pencil sharpener’ and ‘iconic toilet’ yields […]