Ecology and Space

CONFERENCE Ecology and Space

via UC Berkeley Center for Japan Studies - 
 
Resisting the objectification of nature as mere symbol or metaphor, the concept of ecology insists on new modes of reading, writing, and thinking about the material environment that connects the human to the organic world. The international dimensions of ecological questions are particularly suited to considering Japan within the broader fabric of the global environment:

natural disaster
geopolitics
human geography
agriculture
urban space and ecolog
architecture and the environment
film and visual art
literary ecocriticism
environmental aesthetics
environmental history
soundscape and affect 

 

point line plane 4ever

If time was not linear, what could we see?

Sea Level Rise and Local Development

EVENT Sea Level Rise and Local Development

Thursday, February 6th
SPUR Urban Center
645 Mission Street, San Francisco

via the Urban Land Institute:  

Sea level rise threatens more than 281 square miles of Bay Area shoreline. By 2100 more than 270,000 residents, 333 square miles of land and $62B of property will be at risk of inundation. Capital sources and insurers are now evaluating and underwriting this very real risk to their portfolios and considering how to appropriately hedge or price for the future impacts. To address the risk of a rising tide; policy makers, capital markets, and developers are working together to assess potential impacts and develop tools for creating better, more resilient communities. To learn how inundation will affect Bay Area coastal development construction, finance, and policy; join the Urban Land Institute for a panel discussion, featuring stakeholders across multiple disciplines. 

Kiley: February 6, 1982

EXCERPTS from The Work of Dan Kiley: A Dialogue on Design Theory

Little excerpts from the proceedings of the First Annual Symposium on Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia:

 

Starting Up

LINKS to Startup Resources at UC Berkeley

C E N T E R S
Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (engineering)
Lester Center for Entrepreneurship (business)
Berkeley Startup Cluster

I N C U B A T O R S
SkyDeck
Foundry@Citris
Free Ventures
QB3 (biosciences)

O T H E R
Startup@Berkeley


For fun, I'm going to juxtapose the above with the below:

NIGHT HIGHWAY NINETY-NINE by Lew Welch

...only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.

Path Making

PROCESS of making a path

Model of wooden path based off of the apprentice character in The Sorcerer's Apprentice = I sound + feel like a crazy person. 

For school, we were tasked this semester with the design of two paths along a creek, one on each side. Guised in familiarity and simplicity, the idea of the path destroyed us, at first. The path would manifest itself in foreign ways, confusing and testing our most basic understanding of people moving through space. First, it was a story of two characters entwined into a drama, moving together. Later, it put itself onto a map and became a thing of real consequence. The path immediately morphed into a geometry of mathematical logic, radii and angles. At our shock, the path soon became physical and practical, made of manufactured parts, two by fours, I-beams, and concrete foundations. The path formed into a powerful thing that controlled movement and perception at every scale, made of both drama and logic. 

Drama: an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.
Logic: a system or set of principles underlying the arrangements of elements in a device so as to perform a specified task.

The first pass at this task has inspired and instilled an appreciation for the spaces that exist in our world that move us in ways that free us. Whether it's a home we grew up in or a meadow in the woods, the way we move is often directed in a particular way by the entities who make, maintain, and populate these places: architects, parents, water, the footsteps of wild creatures.