Leona Drive - A Public Access + LOT Project

While reading Saturday's Globe and Mail I spotted this article and thought it warranted a closer look.

The Leona Drive project - An installation of site specific artwork in houses slated for Demolition.

"This landmark project brings together Canadian artists, high school students, developers, curious neighbours and local politicians to open up dialogue around urban planning and city life." via leonadrive.ca

images by Charla Jones via The Globe And Mail

The Leona Drive Project runs to Oct.31, open daily, 1-4 p.m. and 6-9 p.m. with artist talks each day at 1 and 6 p.m.
for a more in depth look at the project please visit leonadrive.ca
+ be sure to check out LOT Project + Public Access Collective

the tulip fields of Holland

The Hadspen Parabola

A design competition for a three quarter acre walled garden in the west of England.

The Parabola project at Hadspen represents a commitment to seeking out radical solutions to planting, and to exploring the links that gardening can make to other fields of creativity.

Applicants are asked for a response to the new path layout, designed by Foreign Office Architects, for the original parabola-shaped walled vegetable garden at Hadspen. The scheme is intended to provide an empty theatre-stage of three quarters of an acre; the gardener is free to direct the plants to best effect, by adding the drama of poetry, surprise, and mystery.

site survey

The new paths try only to take maximum advantage of the specifics of the site - the walls and topography, climate, drainage, access, movement and maintenance. All existing plants, trees and paths that survive from the previous important gardens in the space will have been removed.

drawing depicts access points and proposed pathways

the Hadspen Parabola climate study

6 Shortlisted Entries
Torelore - Sarah Price - UK

Beyond clarity and rigour of ideas, there are no rules to limit the gardener's approach. Any plant type is fine, as long as it grows; any planting style or diversity is fine as long as the garden can be maintained through the year, more or less, by one person. Hadspen Parabola: Competition PR

Uffa - Lucy Carter, Robert Carter, Francette Pacteau - UK

Vemish - Justine Miething, Gerwin Gruber - France

Stepford - Anne Stevenson, Bridget Snaith - UK

Kled - Teresa Koo - Australia

To attract the right applicants, and the most challenging judging process, the interview panel will itself be composed of experienced gardeners, but all of them with primary (and international) reputations in other fields : writers, set-designers, architects, film directors, artists, musicians.

Bengodi - Anouk Vogel, Johan Selbing, Eva Radinova - Netherlands

For the last twenty year the gardens at Hadspen House in Somerset were taken care of by Canadian gardeners Nori and Sandra Pope. Their retirement in 2005 was the catalyst for the Parabola competition. The goal is to find a new gardener to create and care for new, contemporary gardens within the D shaped walled garden.

www.thehadspenparabola.com

Ecologically Inspired Art - Part 3 - Lucien den Arend

The artistic development of Lucien den Arend, a Dutch sculptor and artist who takes the landscape into remarkable consideration in his environmental projects, began with painting from nature or even perhaps with the shelters he made himself of flexible willow rods as a child.

Unlike town and open space planners, den Arend does not seek to create interesting or beneficial effects with the natural elements he uses; rather his main concern is with evoking the unexpected, and thus he gives hills, shrub plantings, reservoirs and canals the form of curves, semicircles, squares, lines and grids an exercise in practical geometry.
Extract from Topos European Landscape Magazine

Homage to El Lissitzky
Lelystad Flevo Polder the Netherlands






Pieter Janszoon Saenredam Project
Barendrecht Holland




Island x-ing
Continuation of the Walburg project into the Volgerlanden






Farel
Farel School Netherlands






The Iron Pollard
Hardinxveld Giessendam Holland






den Arend's Gothic 2
Penttilä Open Air Museum Finland

For more information please visit www.denarend.com and the Penttilä Open Air Museum at www.paom.ws

Stairways to the sky

The Rice Terraces of the Phillipines, China and Japan.
These images represent a unique agro-technical method of building which was created thousands of years ago by rural village communities in arduous hard graft with primitive equipment. The final product is a breathtaking example of human ingenuity.