I finally had a chance to read John McPhee's book La Place de la Concorde Suisse, his somewhat off-puttingly titled 1984 look at the Swiss military and its elaborately engineered landscape defenses. [Image: Swiss mountain pass, via Google Image Search]. To make a long story short, McPhee describes two...
Primary Landscapes
[Image: Around Mono Lake, photo by BLDGBLOG]. The last week has been pretty slow here as we get Venue up and running; but there are some new posts over at the Venue website that I think are worth checking out. One is a brief, image-heavy round-up from an amazing flight I took last week with photographer...
Perpetual Architecture
[Image: A "disposal cell," also visible on Google Maps, courtesy of CLUI]. It's always welcome news around here when a new exhibition opens up at the Center for Land Use Interpretation—even though, in this case, it displaces the excellent historical look at U.S. federal surveying with the Initial Points:...
Venue
I'm excited to be launching a new project called Venue, a 16-month collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment and Future Plural, the small publishing and curatorial group I'm a part of with Nicola Twilley. We kick things off this Friday, June 8, with a launch event...
Buncefield Bomb Garden
[Image: The Buncefield explosion, via the BBC]. In one of the more interesting landscape design stories I've read this year, New Scientist reported back in March that the massive, December 2005 explosion at a fuel-storage depot called Buncefield in England, might have been strongly assisted by the site's...
Buy an Underground Kingdom
[Image: The Mole Man's house in Hackney, via Wikipedia]. As most anyone who's seen me give a talk over the past few years will know, I have a tendency to over-enthuse about the DIY subterranean excavations of William Lyttle, aka the Mole Man of Hackney. Lyttle—who once quipped that "tunneling is something...
O.P. Tree
[Image: An exemplary "Observation Post Tree" via the Australian War Memorial]. The "O.P. Tree" was an Observation Post Tree deployed during World War I. Its "goal," as author Hanna Rose Shell explains in Hide and Seek, her newly published history of the relationship between camouflage and photography,...
Books Received
[Image: A riverboat library in Bangladesh; image courtesy of the Gates Foundation]. Many, many books have arrived at the home office here since the last, shockingly distant installment of Books Received, and I'm thus once again woefully behind in tallying up all the titles that have come my way. Accordingly,...
