So many interviews, so little time

Archinect's resident landscape architect Heather Ring interviewed Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, wherein post-industrial landscapes, phytoremediation, landfills and quarries, Duisburg-Nord, the poetics of civil engineering, and the toxic sublime are all covered. Plus more outrageously interesting topics.

Previously, Heather interviewed 3/5 of the crew of NIPpaysage, a landscape collective based in Montreal. Last year the group was a co-winner in the design competition for Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you're thinking of starting your own firm, this one's an excellent read.

We get to hear Julie Bargmann again via the brilliantly-named Terragrams, “a series of conversations about the fundamental, all too often invisible, role that landscape plays in our lives -- An open dialog with the people in charge of making, designing and thinking about our constructed landscapes.” And also Bet Figueras and Elias Torres. Be warned though that the spotty quality of the podcasts may drive you insane. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the Jane Amidon and James Corner interviews.

We're also still waiting for the complete interviews from the Landscape Legends Oral History Initiative by the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Only tantalizing tidbits of the interviews with Richard Haag, Ruth Shellhorn, Lawrence Halprin, and Walt Guthrie are available.

Care for more interviews? The Institut fuer Landscahftsarchitektur has six in its archive. The video interview of Alessandra Ponte is a must see.

And what's a laundry list of interviews without our two favorites of the year: 1) David Maisel by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Topics discussed include “Californian hydropolitics, the line between architecture and photography, 'replicant' landscapes, the dusty fate of human remains, Iceland, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Mars rovers, 9/11, and the aesthetic power of sterility.”

And 2) Wes Janz by Brian Finoki of Subtopia. Topics discussed include squatter urbanism, post-disaster landscapes, relief architecture, and low tech design tactics.

Finally, only because our post about an interview with Walter Hood by Andrew Blum for Metropolis was published a year ago almost exactly to the day, here it is again, wherein Hood confesses that he likes public space messy.


POSTSCRIPT #1: Tarnation! We forgot to mention the September edition of LAND Online Podcast, which include an interview with American Academy in Rome President Adele Chatfield-Taylor, and with Chris Hindle of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., discussing the second round of planting for the ASLA green roof.

Self-erasing Bolivia

(Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office.)

The deforestation of Bolivia's tropical dry forest continues apace as the above false-color image shows. And no, it isn't the aftermath of some boozy rampage by Michael Heizer and some rogue scientists from Dugway Proving Ground. These Suprematist geometries are actually the physical results of a massive agricultural development program and the resulting intensive resettlement of people from the Andean highlands to the Santa Cruz lowlands.


(Image courtesy Marc Steininger, NASA GSFC.)

In the scene above, “land use types are delineated with lines. Solid white lines show the locations of planned colonies, dashed white lines show spontaneous colonies, and dotted white lines show Mennonite colonies. All other regions of development are non-Mennonite industrial soybean farms.”

If you'd like to go on a scopic drive through the Tierras Bajas, download this placemark from the Google Earth Community and then fire up Google Earth.







Be sure to inspect the rather fascinating radial patterned fields. Visible Earth tells us that “[a]t the center of each unit is a small community including a church, bar/cafe, school, and soccer field-the essentials of life in rural Bolivia.” Which sounds or rather looks like a bastardization of the Green City movement.


(Image courtesy Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory at Johnson Space Center.)


(Photograph courtesy Compton Tucker, NASA GSFC.)

In case you're wondering about the sustainability of some of the cleared land, they aren't. This entry from Business & Politics in Bolivia explains: “You shouldn't be surprised by the fractioning of the land, this is a common feature of 'ancestral' altiplanic methods of production. In post-colonial altiplano, land is/was inherited in such a fractional manner, and of course, with time, efficiency began to suffer. Eventually the mini-fundio became commonplace and nowadays, some communities subsist even under a 'surco-fundio' system. The pattern is being replicated in the Bolivian lowlands, despite the availability and knowledge of alternative production methods, we can only expect the same ultimate result for any redistributed lands. The fields illustrated in the photograph are not producing soybean or any other 'cash crops' such as rice or wheat, they are too small for efficient production.”

As always, then, there is jarring contrast between the messy lived experience on the ground and the hypnotic beauty of satellite imagery.