PLACES : UC BERKELEY

[IN]STITUTES in Environmental Design

The College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, is offering three summer programs that introduce the study of architecture – [IN]ARCH, landscape architecture – [IN]LAND, and sustainable city planning – [IN]CITY. The curriculum emphasizes the preparation of materials for application to graduate study in one of its disciplines.More Information 
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CHANGE OBSERVER : ERNEST BECK

Es Tiempo

A campaign to protect the health of Southern California's Latinas overturns conventional assumptions of why these women fail to seek preventive measures.
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PLACES : FRANK GOHLKE

Grain Elevators

Grain elevators have been one of photographer Frank Gohlke's recurring subjects. For two decades starting in the early 1970s he photographed these distinctive structures throughout the American Midwest and Great Plains, and he wrote about them too, describing his fascination with the "windowless, largely unbroken expanses of concrete or corrugated steel ten or more stores tall and hundreds of feet long." In coordination with Brian Rosa's review of Gohlke's collected writings, we feature selected photographs from the grain elevator series.
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PLACES : BRIAN ROSA

Frank Gohlke: Thoughts on Landscape

Frank Gohlke has been a leading American photographer ever since his emergence as one of the artists in the path-breaking 1975 exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Since then he has continued to focus on American landscapes, with photographic series that explore Mount St. Helens after the devastating eruption of 1980; Wichita Falls, Texas, after a catastrophic tornado in 1979; grain elevators in the Midwest and the Great Plains; and, most recently, the neighborhoods of Queens, New York, and the landscapes of New England along a single line of latitude, 42 degrees north. And throughout his career Frank Gohlke has not only photographed landscapes but also written about them. Here Brian Rosa, a photographer and doctoral student in geography, reviews a comprehensive collection, Thoughts on Landscape, which makes it clear that Gohlke is as eloquent with words as with images.
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OBSERVATORY : JULIE LASKY

Superbeauty

In 2002, Tord Boontje, a Dutch designer known for co-authoring a collection of vases cut from recycled wine and beer bottles, produced a chandelier for the Swarovski Crystal Palace exhibition at the International Furniture Fair in Milan. Suspended from the ceiling of an enormous kohl-black space in the city's artsy warehouse district, Boontje's Blossom mixed clusters of clear and rose-colored crystals with 240 LEDs winking on a metal branch.

Reclaiming beauty from irony, reclaiming beauty from kitsch — this has been a project of early-21st-century design.
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OBSERVATORY : ERIC BAKER

Today, 03.20.10

Here are Today's images.
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CHANGE OBSERVER : PHIL PATTON

One Car Per Family

A highlight of last month's Greener Gadgets conference in New York was a cute, emerald-colored product designed by Yves Béhar of FuseProject that is aimed at citizens of the developing world who might never have dreamed of possessing such an object.
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CHANGE OBSERVER : JASON ORTON

Tinder Boxes

Unfortunately, planners and developers frequently see landscapes likes these as blank canvases that can be cleared or leveled flat.
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PLACES : ALAN THOMAS

Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan

Earlier this week we featured Robert Taylor's review of Fumihiko Maki's Nurturing Dreams and Shigeru Ban's latest monograph. Here we present a portfolio of photographs by Alan Thomas, of images of Japanese cities. These photographs, says Thomas, "take the measure of Japan's spaces where they are most easily overlooked: the vernacular architecture of its backstreets, the layered density of neighborhoods, the ephemeral effects of constant building and rebuilding."
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CHANGE OBSERVER: PROJECT ARCHIVE

FLAP Bag

Report on the FLAP bag, a multipurpose messenger bag for developing-world populations.
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OBSERVATORY ARCHIVE

PLACES ARCHIVE: FALL 2008

Growing Water

Growing Water is a bold proposal by a team of Chicago urban designers for how cities can ensure the availability of an increasingly scarce resource.
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RECENT BOOKS RECEIVED

ecoDesign: The Sourcebook
Alastair Fuad-Luke

Reinventing the Automobile
William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird & Lawrence D. Burns

Rework
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hasson

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