Dear Petaluma,

At one point, it was midnight, and I started walking back to 2nd and G Street after a couple hours of red wine and tapas, reading Joan Didion for the first time over at the Speakeasy in Putnam Plaza. Before that, I'd spent a couple of hours roaming Downtown Petaluma, taking pictures of puddles in the night and getting the perfect reflection of the Grocery Outlet sign flipped onto the ground. Carefully closing some of my curtains, I made sure to become an anonymous, unmoving pile. At dawn, I walked out and got to hear the mud flats breathing in pinks and yellows. I picked up some donuts and coffee from a perfect place called Sunrise Donuts over at the unglorified shopping center and ate them on the docks while watching an egret expertly stalking a fish. Even though I'm totally over it, somehow, it was very worth the while.

Semester favorites: James Turrell, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jane Jacobs, Robert Smithson, Diana Balmori, Agnes Denes, Mary Miss, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Didion, and Cedric Price. 

torrent

POEM Of Storms and Tears by Aimee Suzara

excerpt:
...
this kind of a torrent
is less of a tragedy
and more of a relief.

List of antonyms

For every order, a disorder
For every consent, a dissent
For every tragedy, a joy

For every legitimacy, an invisibility
For every answer, a question
For every denial, a request

For every right, a left
For every root, a shoot
For every way, another way

or

For every disorder, an order
For every dissent, a consent
For every joy, a tragedy

For every invisibility, a legitimacy
For every question, an answer
For every request, a denial

For every left, a right
For every shoot, a root
For every way, another way

dis·or·der

It looks like early meanings of disorder were defined by the upsetting of an assumed order versus a lack of order. Even in my room, where entropy wins, there is an order from which the mess comes - a new order where all the different socks are mixed together in a canvas bag, and it takes me 5 minutes every morning to find a matching pair so sometimes I'll mismatch, which leads to more mismatching. But anyways, an order is formed, a new routine of identifying and procuring pairs of socks is established, and by now I've learned to more or less find functional pairs in less than a functional minute.

p.s. this is not meant to be any kind of analogy, this is literally how I create order in my room.

Sublimation

BOOK The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, 1958 (1972 Beacon Press edition)

"Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase." (Wikipedia)

very precise and very little

INTERVIEW with Michael van Gessel via Landzine



The only person I know who could say something was TERRIBLE in such a way where it felt like a blessing to hear it.

Joan and Cedric

BOOKS The White Album by Joan Didion (1979) and Cedric Price: Works II by Architectural Association (1984)

From Joan Didion, 1979:

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to those who do not have it, and the same is true of control. I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall...

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile."

Before starting, I toured a few design schools and ended up asking Richard Forman about the role of ethics in landscape architecture. I didn't know what I was asking, but he responded to me as if I did, and I pretended to understand. After having my mind delightfully obliterated by the writings of Joan Didion and Cedric Price this past week, I think I might be starting to get hints of what Forman might have been saying. 

In this case, I don't think ethics in design has to do with the right thing to do, but rather the recognition that every decision comes with a heavy, very invisible bag of values attached to it. Every line that is drawn is weighted down by the bag and everyone's got a different bag. Like the idea that science is a cultural construct, design is an ethically loaded act. Why pretend like it's anything less. 

Let's see. Some words from Cedric Price:

"The consciously planned and purposely built environment that exploits the potential of unevenness of environmental conditioning is likely to become one of the main contributions that architects and planners can make to society..." 

"Instantaneous response to a particular problem is too slow. Architecture must concern itself continually with the socially beneficial distortion of the environment. Like medicine it must move from the curative to the preventive. Architecture should have little to do with problem solving - rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible." 

ecofarm

CONFERENCE EcoFarm 2015: the hottest farmers around