A Design for Life

'Infrastructure is the most banal and ordinary: "invisible" to our eyes, basic and technical' - Martin Barry  'Making your unknown known is important' - Georgia O'Keefe Applying Georgia O'Keefe's belief to infrastructure, how do you then make the unknown known within that? There are a huge amount of opportunities in how we express ourselves and through art understanding how art expresses the culture of the time and how is our body part of a landscape. Denis Oppenheim: Waiting Room (service station for ideas) How do you take sexual art and bring it into the landscape? Artists tend to talk about the time of the culture they are in, whereas Oppenheim talks much about space and the conceptual use of space as Igor Mitoraj talks about the human dilemma of today. Igor Mitoraj: Florence, Italy Art is the pulse of our societies.  When Beauty Strikes by David Brooks. Beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us t...

Me taphorical Design   John Bunyan, in the Pilgrim's Progress, used landscape as a metaphor for life (Bunyan, 1678). The hero, Christian, has a dream in which he learns of his hometown becoming a City of Destruction. This caused him to depart on a pilgrimage through a series of metaphorical landscapes: the Slough of Despond, the Palace Beautiful, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Doubting Castle, the Delectable Mountains and the Celestial City. Artists have transformed these images from poetry to pictures. Finding Cities of Destruction all over nineteenth century Europe, idealist planners dreamed of replacing them with Celestial Cities. Then they looked for sites. The Finger Plan for Copenhagen, a town planning concept, was based on a metaphor and shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, that great hand has guided Copenhagen's development. The Five Finger Plan was d eveloped in 1947 through the Urban   Planning   Labratory in collaborat...

Putting our hands around nature. This carries  notions of taking responsibility, expressing care and compassion, and making things happen to achieve results; communicating both an individual responsibility to be careful with nature and the shared effort of joining hands to achieve societal, behavioural and cultural change, in the interest of our co-dependency on nature. The idea of our hands directly applied to nature, even greeting it, ‘shaking its hand’, gives a sense of connectedness, of embodied care as opposed to the bureaucratic or professionalised meanings often associated with stewardship. Putting our hands around something. It is what you do for a heartbroken friend or a neglected houseplant and it is what we ought to do with the environment more broadly. The metaphor of the hand even provides a helpful way of thinking of the different steps involved; in the friendly greeting and familiarisation, the hearty embrace and commitment, the concrete action and manual labour and ...

 Life is a fairly well written play, except for the third act. For some, grace is found, before the onset of the unpleasant destruction of the body, which is inevitable. May we deal with age gracefully and gratefully. May we feel relieved that an aspect of the struggle is over. The aspect being the ceaseless search for a companion. Finally one senses that one is alone and that it is not in fact that bad. It may even be sweet. The feeling of unbearable loneliness may well be over, whether we be partnered or not. A partner does not necessarily solve your sorrow.  A partner does allow for great times. This day we ran around naked in the park. It was awesome and elemental.

A murmur of starlings. When they fly in sequence. One of nature's beauties. I think to love you have to overlook, everything.  You have to forget, about most things, and forgive. The Sweetest Little Song You go your way, I'll go your way too.