This website was developed to support the 2008 and 2009 UCD Vertical Studios, and as such, is not currently in optimal format. It needs significant improvement to function as a truly navigable retrospective of the student work and the ideas that inspired and directed it. Please stay tuned and don’t be dissuaded from digging in. The most vital addition is your voice. Please contact me at <a href=”mailto:tender@radicalgardening.com”>email address</a> if you have thoughts to share, advice, observations. Let’s keep this crucial dialogue going! Thanks, and welcome.

I am developing RG portfolio/retrospective and polemic synopsis for the upcoming issue of Root.  Student projects will form the bulk of graphic argument.  Stay tuned to find which projects are chosen.  There is almost a decade of work now to select from!

I’ve also been invited to write the introductory piece for the issue, in which I will frame contributed content within a critical consideration of the premise of ‘memorability’ as the essential LA motivation.

This terrific essay has influenced my thinking about RG, albeit mostly in hindsight.  I am not ultimately concerned about the obvious romanticization of ‘derelict’ spaces Luc cautions against.  RG promotes tenderness to landscapes of post-human ‘consequence’ as a posture useful to deepening and broadening design responses to all landscapes.  The ‘derelict’ and ‘contested’ chic beloved by MLA post-urbanists disintegrates rather sadly when uninformed by measure, method, and other necessities of making.

Exciting news!  Adam is launching an advanced plant art and technology course at UCD this summer.  More info here.  A ‘sister’ blog, Plants In Performance will support the course and its members, and track milestones from Adam’s second summer at Denver Botanic Gardens.  Please visit!

discussing principles of his essay (in progress), “A Realm of Realities in Landscape Architecture.”  Includes provocative images from his personal garden.  

find more details here.  many student projects seem potential candidates for this exhibition:

“Constructed Territory, a juried exhibition of work integrating the use of maps, cartography, or environmental and topographical explorations.”

details here.

My submitted abstract:

Adam Clack, MLA, Licensed Landscape Architect/Lecturer, University of Colorado-Denver

Abstract for “New Posture/New Territory: Enlisting Adaptive Schemata to Authenticate Environmental Design”

Despite nascent awareness of the interdependence of human and wild networks, ‘ecological’ design has struggled to develop techniques for abstracting land processes without estranging the design process from the ground’s innate authenticity.  Continuous relation to the unfolding of land phenomena would endow design methodology with a contingent approach that might enable influence over a broader range of processes.  But engaging emergent milieus directly requires schemata ‘open’ enough to process dynamic information at a remove.

This article asks, “Are our present modes of working with environment sufficiently relational and reflexive to translate the phenomenal world into a workable medium?  Furthermore, what advantages accompany a design posture attuned to its own resonance through land’s intrinsic function?”

Towards an answer, the article asserts that to effectively regulate the phenomenal ground, a design schema should itself demonstrate self-regulating capacities for operating a within a performance continuum; process asserted as context, not merely content.  Additionally, the techniques used to mediate between design objectives and the actual ground should demonstrate the capacity to engender discovery while enforcing terms of implementation.

Metonymy is advanced as an enabling, translational device.  Metaphor construes an allegorical framework which regulates the design milieu, enforcing contingency and discovery as primary qualities of drawing and thus, production of landscape.  A reconsideration of drawing’s function as both process and artifact guides exploration of its potential to mediate between rhetorical and physical realms.  In this respect, drawing assists the emplacement of poetics, providing syntax that rationalizes discovery in spatial and temporal terms.

‘Opening’ the design theater to ground as performance enables authenticity to replace authority as the primary regulatory criterion.  The efficacy of this position is tested through a survey of professional and academic work, directed by the author, conceiving tactics for reinhabiting remnant urban landscapes in the Interior West.  Advancing the idea of garden allegorically, drawing guides revelation and reconfiguration of extant and latent site performances, a practical approach necessitated by the realities of scale, climate, and limitation of resources endemic to this project type.  The intriguing range of processes brought under design influence demonstrates an enhanced expressiveness and efficiency engendered through this integrative mode of design.

I will devote several pages to Rosy’s accomplishment in the coming weeks.  For now, go here for more info.

Courtesy of Live Search Maps and insomnia…

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