hinterlandscape:

Waldspielplatz

This playground is located in an urban forest in Graz, Austria. It is reconstructed on a regular basis using fallen or felled timber from the surrounding forest.

Beautiful example of how light-touch construction with local materials can be fun and informative, helping people connect with the landscape.

Photos: hinter/DM

Apple blossom

(Source: oakapples)

Magnolia ‘Butterflies’ at Nymans Garden, West Sussex. It isn’t my favourite garden in the world, but there are some amazing mature specimen trees. This is a young tree, but I loved it’s understatedness, better and more springlike than some of the big blousy Magnolia’s.

Perfect sunshine, a stiff breeze and brilliant chalky whiteness at Birling Gap. Fear of loosing children under tonnes of falling chalk and a rising tide made the senses all the more heightened! A very British sunburnt picnic of sandwiches on uncomfortable pebbles followed.

Spring visit to Great Dixter, the garden of the late, great Christopher Lloyd. The house and grounds were restored and extended by Edward Lutyens in the Arts and Crafts style at the beginning of the 20th century. The way the garden is managed today reflects this style in that every element of the garden has been the subject of precise and accomplished horticultural craft. Even the most utilitarian objects and structures, like the compost heaps or the winter straw protection for the banana’s in the Exotic Garden, are made with such sympathy for materials and form that they are things of beauty.

+ La grande cantine, Forme Publique, La Défense, Paris. (Talking Things, 2012) http://www.jbhardoin.fr/La-Grande-Cantine

Clever sticks

(Source: tumblr.thisbigcity.net)

t

landscape-a-design:

 

KIDS WHO GET DRIVEN EVERYWHERE DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY’RE GOING

It turns out vehicular traffic does something else too, more subtle but equally pernicious: It changes the way children see and experience the world by diminishing their connection to community and neighbors.

In the Heavy [traffic exposure] neighborhood, the children frequently expressed feelings of dislike and danger and were unable to represent any detail of the surrounding environment. Newell Avenue, the main road in front of the school, is a tree-lined street and yet few of the trees were drawn; instead, red (danger, cars) and orange (dislike) dominated. Participants from the Light [traffic exposure] neighborhood, on the other hand, showed a much richer sense of their environment, drawing more of the streets, houses, trees, and other objects, and including fewer signs of danger, or dislike and fewer cars. The children also drew many more places in the street where they liked to play and areas that they just simply liked: they noted playing in 43 percent more locations in their streets relative to the children in the heavy-traffic-exposure neighborhood.

Appleyard worked with children in two suburban communities. One had light traffic and infrastructure that allowed children to walk and bike on their own. One had heavy traffic and children traveled almost exclusively by car. Using a technique called cognitive mapping, Appleyard asked groups of nine- and 10-year-old kids to draw maps of their neighborhoods, showing destinations such as school and friends’ houses, and marking places they liked or disliked. The results were revealing:

In sum, as exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and his/her ability to establish a richer connection and appreciation for the community rises.

 

(via plotscape)

ryanpanos:

Bird Nests Built around Telephone Poles

This series of incredible images by African photographer Dillon Marsh titled “Assimilation”, captures the nests of weaver birds built around telephone poles in the vast barren landscapes of the southern Kalahari region. The twigs and grass collected to build these nests combine to give strangely recognisable personalities to the otherwise inanimate poles. Via his website, “In these series I seek to find things that are out of the ordinary, picking them out of the landscape where they might otherwise blend in. I choose objects that can be found in multitude within their environment so that I can depict a family of objects in a series of photographs.

(via physical-dreamscape)

A interesting point from the GDS Design Principles: DESIGN WITH DATA

“Normally, we’re not starting from scratch - users are already using our services. This means we can learn from real world behaviour”

DESIRE PATHS 

A desire path (also known as a desire line, social trail, goat track or bootleg trail) can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where constructed ways take a circuitous route, or have gaps, or are lacking entirely.

Ex: http://www.flickr.com/groups/desire_paths/pool/

• PARKS AND NATURAL AREAS

In Finland, planners are known to visit their parks immediately after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are not visible. People naturally choose desire lines, which are then clearly indicated by their footprints and can be used to guide the routing of new purpose built paths.

Social trails sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and off-limit areas, threatening wildlife and park security. However, social trails also provide to park management an indicator of activity concentration. The National Park Service unit at the Yosemite National Park uses this indicator to help establish its General Management Plan.

Trampling studies have consistently documented that impacts on soil and vegetation occur rapidly with initial use of desire paths. As few as 15 passages over a site can be enough to create a distinct trail, the existence of which then attracts further use.^[3] This body of scholarship contributed to the creation of theLeave No Trace education program, which, among other things, teaches that travelers in nature areas should either stay on designated trails or, when off trail, distribute their travel lines so as to not inadvertently create new trails in unsustainable locations.

Land managers have devised a variety of techniques to block the creation of desire paths. These can be seen alongside many trails and include fencing, dense vegetation, or signage. However, social trails still penetrate these barriers. Because of this, state of the art trail design attempts to avoid the need for barriers and restrictions and instead seeks to bring trail layout and user desires in line with each other - both through physical design and through persuasive outreach to users.

• OTHER USES OF THE CONCEPT

The image of a user created path, in seeming defiance of authority, across the earth between the concrete, has captured the imagination of many as a metaphor for, variously, anarchism, intuitive design, individual creativity, or the wisdom of crowds.

(Source: digitalbydefault)

The garden of 10,000 bridges. Created by Dutch landscape design firm West 8 and DYJG, Bejing, for the 2011 International Horticulture Exhibition in Xi’an, China.

(Source: west8.com)