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July 28, 2005
Landschaft & Energy
Dear London, The Victorians brought you sewers and undergrounds. The Milleniums will bring you great architecture and urban design. Celebrate.
These are Lovely... urban interventions.
John R. Stilgoe, one of the great torch bearers to John Brinckerhoff Jackson's luminosity (in addition to being a great writer of landscape himself) published a book in the early 80's by the name of Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845, and I qoute, "Christianity destroyed the ancient oneness of man and nature. Whatever the Old Religion was, and it is known now almost entirely in descriptions composed by its enemies, its tenets derived from that oneness...along with agriculture and artifice, wrenched man from his niche and made him sometime master of the earth...made him ever less familiar with the wild, until he was no longer at home in it, until he recognized it as wild, as a place other than his own." How prescient to todays religious situation, which regretfully informs the next bit of linkage...
The energy bill (all 1725 pgs.) - which passed thru the house today, and is expected to pass the senate tomorrow - has $3 billion in taxbreaks and kickbacks directly rolled out to oil companies. Thats it? Oh, and another 500m to Tom Delay's hometown drilling company for deepwater speculation. Fleecing the last grafts off the charred remains of the American public to resuscitate Rove's piggish pinkish skin. Fuckers.
Fiber Optics Bring the Sun Indoors... brilliant application[pdf] of GPS, amongst a handful of other technologies, to direct light catching dishs that channel the sun's rays into fiber optic cables, and into hard to reach interiors. At $8000, this, and some ancient windscoops, would render my shaft facing rent controlled studio apartment into a luxury accomodation. Thanks Erik, for the tip.
America's megapolitan areas, in the July issue of Land Lines. Forgotten NY on the death of New York City's Fulton Fish Market. Cityscape on the existing & proposed expansion of regional rail services in the Bay Area. GlobeSt reporting one the approval process of Uptown, the mixed-use superblock planned for 125-126th St between 2nd-3rd Ave in Harlem. Hey, Yo, you superultragiddy twits over at Avalon Communities ought to apply for New York Construction Magazine's Top Design Survey here [pdf], the only design criteria is Revenue - so surely Avalon Chrystie Place will push thru as another champion of shit design & and easy money.
Posted by jmarston at July 28, 2005 03:17 PM