Stourhead Gardens: Landscape and Perceptions

The gardens at Stourhead in Wiltshire, England provide an example of how landowners of the past have utilized their landscapes to create a stabilizing perception of wealth and establishment.  Popular 18th century English cultural trends and attitudes are drawn upon to inform the garden’s design, beautifying the space while promoting the owner’s political agenda.  Architectural elements are also incorporated to streamline pedestrian flow while simultaneously establishing the owner’s right of proprietorship.  By successfully achieving perceptions through landscape design, we see that Stourhead influences its contemporaries and becomes part of an ancient tradition in garden design.

Developed in the mid-18th century...  (go here for full article)

Fontainebleau in Migration

The Chateau de Fontainebleau, located about 35 miles southwest of Paris, provides a study in how transposition and migration within landscape architecture can have far reaching effects.  At Fontainebleau we see how the 16th century French emperor Francis I transposes the politically driven siting considerations of ancient Roman emperors to his own era in an effort to solidify the authority of his rule.  We also witness how groups and individuals become vessels that carry design languages across international borders and through time, particularly during periods of political turmoil.  Perhaps most interestingly, Fontainebleau provides an example of how these transpositions and migrations are self-propagating and can move on to influence distant areas.

In choosing to site Fontainebleau... (go here for full article)

Master of Landscape Architecture Application Process

As is typical, I'm here at a coffee shop in Austin working on my application to grad school.  I feel that I'm pretty close to finishing up my statement of purpose, although it seems like I've been 'pretty close to finishing' for quite some time.  I really need to wrap this up so that I can start working on my resume and fire it off to UTSOA by the December 15th deadline.

I have realized that it was an important move to resign from my job last month.  The application process has been time and energy consuming, and trying to produce creative work after coming home from a stressful day at the office would have affected my application's quality.  Plus there are so many little necessities of life that come up each day that it is often challenging to work on the application even without a job.  Moving out of my apartment, for instance, which I'll be doing for the rest of the week.  And too much is up in the air right now to sign another lease, so it looks like I'll be staying on a friend's couch for at least a few weeks.  This is not all bad though - my friend is an architectural designer who can probably offer some pointers on my portfolio ;)

“Nothing happens until something moves.” 

- Albert Einstein

Today I took the New GRE, ticking off another box on my grad school applications checklist.  My verbal and math scores were 165 and 151, respectively, meaning that I scored within the 96th percentile for verbal but only in the 56th percentile for math.  It would have been great to score higher on the math portion, but based on what I've gathered from the UTSOA admissions department and online GRE forums, the GRE scores will not determine my acceptance into a LA program.  Much more important - thank goodness - will be my statement of purpose, recommendation letters, and portfolio.  I really need to hit these things hard in the coming days and 'get in the zone', so to speak.

I have been slowly collecting more portfolio material, and one piece that I'm kind of proud of is this flyer for a benefit concert I'm helping organize for my buddy, Trevor.  It should be a good time.

Applying to Grad School!

I had originally posted an excerpt from my application Statement of Purpose here, but after reviewing it today I was just embarrassed by it.  Perhaps I'll post the finalized version if I am accepted ;)

Biting the Apple

Last week I ended my six months of employment with Apple, Inc.  I took this job back in April after it had essentially fallen into my lap - a random call from a contracting company led to an interview and within weeks I had gone from working as a restaurant host to helping manage accounts worth millions of dollars each day.  The Austin headquarters in which I worked was located conveniently close to the Austin Community College campus, and I took the opportunity to audit GIS courses in the evenings.  Being a contractor, my pay was minimal but it was enough to afford my own one bedroom apartment in north Austin, and living alone for the first time has been a welcomed experience.

While I feel that I served the company well and learned some useful things about account management and customer service, not a day went by during my time at Apple that I did not wish I was doing something more meaningful with my life. Throughout my six years of service in the Air Force I didn't always feel that my job was that important, but it was far more challenging and fulfilling than being an underemployed, underpaid cog in a consumer product machine.  And with just one month left to put my graduate application portfolio together and fire it off to prospective colleges, I new my time with Apple needed to come to an end.  On Friday I resigned on good terms and am now setting my eyes to the difficult path ahead.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

Dick Pierce's Permaculture Design Course

Today I attended the first class of Dick Pierce's Permaculture Design course here in Austin. Permaculture is a way of designing with nature to create self-sustaining farms at varying scales, and I've become so interested that I actually shelled out $600 and all my Saturdays from now to December to learn about it. I don't recall when or how I was first turned on to permaculture, but I believe it was when I came across the "Permaculture Pack" video collection while searching for Landscape Architecture materials on a torrent site a few months ago. 

From what I understand so far, a Japanese man named Fukuoka became critical of destructive Western farming practices imported to his country following WWII. He reacted against these new non-traditional methods by forming his own farming system centered around working with nature to do as little work as possible. Fukuoka's insight and success was paralleled by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who in the 1970s worked to develop and popularize "permaculture," a system of organizing nature's naturally occurring systems to foster self-proliferating soil fertility and yields. This type of farming has been expounded upon by highly successful small-scale farmers such as Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who was featured in the critically acclaimed book The Omnivore's Dilemma (one of my all-time favorites.)  

Permaculture seeks not only to create self-sustaining farms for personal and community use, but to begin reversing the damage being done by humans to the planet's ecosystem and to ourselves. It is also focused on developing a more harmonious and fulfilling human lifestyle and has ethical considerations at its core.  I realize that this all seems a bit hippie, and being hippie in any capacity is not something I've ever been much interested in.  Yet permaculture has strong scientific backing and empirically measurable successes, and to me it just makes good common sense. Why should we create an ultra-complex system of petroleum-based farming that is costing us billions of dollars and exploding our rate of debilitating disease? Does the sun not provide enough energy already? Can we not use the hard-won fruits of our intellectual evolution to organize natural patterns into a highly efficient system while at the same time eliminating pollutions and wastes? 

We can. If we can develop a new iPhone every year then we can figure out a way to feed ourselves sustainably, and permaculture offers a path towards that end. Ultimately, I would like to utilize the knowledge gained in Pierce's Permaculture Design course to create a sustainable farm on my father's modest acreage in Montgomery,  as well as on future clients' properties as a Landscape Architect. In the shorter term, I hope to use some of the designs I create throughout the course in my MLA application portfolio.