2011
The Internet is a candy store. In studio it is all too easy for us to approach design as a kind of “ADD to SHOPPING CART” activity. The walls and computer screens of landscape architecture schools brim with an awesome feast. There are water features, ripples, fractals, grids, circles, tangents, arcs, gathering spaces, sumps, sinks, grasses, xeriscapes, metal trees, kite flyers, barcodes, stripes, strips, bees, flowers, ruins, chimneys, checkerboards, birches, mounds, piles, rills, meadows, sea-levels, floods, folds, fragments, fiber-optics, flies, teardrops, carpets, spirals. Each of these no doubt delicious when consumed individually but when taken together might they be bad for aesthetic health? The question for us is: How to follow a healthy design diet?
‘To Design Landscape: Art , Nature and Utility’(2012) through which the concept of ‘Aesthetics of Thrift’ was developed, aims to address this question for students of landscape design.