OPPENHEIMER/HIROSHIMA/THE LAST SONG

68 years ago Hiroshima became the first city to be targeted by an atomic weapon.

The Last Song

I am a shadow on the wall.

My memoir- that you read now-

Is but a product of someone else’s imagining

But my story is true.

It is a love story…

…or, rather, a love song…

           When you opened your mouth

            It was not words that came out

It was music:

A melody, pitched above the baritone drone

Of propellers and engines overhead,

A melody pitched beneath

Shrill klaxons,

The air raid sirens.

I took you in my arms and embraced you.

It was music- not words-

And your smile filled the sky

And all was saturated in white light.

A moment.

A moment passed, imperceptibly.

The white light- a flash-

Frozen

And there was nothing but you

You and I

Bigger than war

Bigger than war and death and God.

But what I saw was not you before me.

Just an image burned on my retina.

                

                I was clutching at a shadow when the shockwave hit

                Turning my bones to dust and ash.

___ 

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT AREA III

These past few months I have been desperately attempting to complete my landscape architecture diploma, hence the lack of blog activity. The end in sight, I thought it pertinent to share some of the work I will be presenting to the external examiners next week.

The following images were all produced for the third design development area, the occidental colony.

The purpose of the third development area was to produce a cogent planting scheme whilst remaining true to the underlying concepts espoused in the original master plan. Native species were utilised in accordance with the ecological imperative of the master plan, with the plant list drawn from the Natural History Museum's postcode analysis:

As with the other development areas, I produced AUTOCAD models prior to refining the design, the better to understand the spatial relationships engendered by the layout.  With the addition of materials, these rendered reasonably well within Autocad and represent interesting concept models:

With the assessment criteria for this development area focussing principally on technical execution and plant knowledge, it was right that the majority of drawings produced were planting schemes. As I was producing vector drawings in plan, I elected to invert the colours to white on black to make them stand out more. This scheme was replicated in the title sheet (top). 

Unifying the third development area drawings with a white-on-black colour scheme inspired me to carry a similar theme with the other two development areas. In contrast to the black gloss used for this area I used a buff/grey and mauve/blue sugar paper for the hardworks and wetland areas respectively. The rough texture also permitted the use of chalk and charcoal to augment the vector drawings. I will post here Monday or Tuesday.

DETROIT

Image courtesy www.davejordano.com

The erotic fetishisation of Urban Decay has a poster girl/boy in the city of Detroit. This much we know, yet how rarely we consider the human cost of this process. With the announcement that control of Detroit's budget is to be passed to the state of Michigan, recent news reports paint a picture of a city in socio-economic free-fall  The state has appointed Kevyn Orr (an expert in corporate bankruptcy) as its financial manager, with attendant Draconian powers to achieve the "Olympian" task of restructuring a sprawling metropolis that has witness a halving of its population in the past twenty years. Read the story here. 

It seems timely that Radio 4's book of the week is Mark Binelli's "The Last days of Detroit", reminding all of us in the realm of urban design and landscape architecture of the human element lurking in the shadows of the abandoned industrial infrastructure and acres of brownfield land.  Serialisation of Binelli's book has taken the form of a series of sensitively drawn portraits of Detroit's inhabitants,some of whom subsist on its margins whilst others attempt to facilitate change in what was once America's Motor City. Along the way we encounter Detroit Techno, Motown, Urban Farming and the weird world of the Concealed Weapon Certificate.

Get it while it's hot right here (link goes to episode four of five). Today's broadcast looked at the delapidated education system, drawing attention to one beacon of hope at a school for teenage mothers that incorporates a fully operational urban farm (including goats that must be milked). 

I should also mention that Radio Four has also been exploring  the Baroque in Britain with an emphasis on architecture, particularly in episode two, which considers the missed opportunity of the Great Fire of London and Wren's aborted street plan for London. A potential derive- following the streets of Wren's plan that were never built?

MASTER PLAN SKETCHES

 

SKETCHBOOK PAGES

Adaptations for colonisation of water:

Fauna of Canvey Wick:

Lepidoptera:

Canvey Psychogeography: