• Should urban square be empty, without trees and disappointing like this ?

    Updated: 2011-07-30 17:10:05
    After a After a week of watching Tianjin Central Cultural Square, I found that it is empty during daytime as the photo shows, except it has few people who go through to another exit from the Sqaure. The centre of the square has a big fountain here, but it does not work now. In fact, [...]

  • Contemplative places: watching and listening

    Updated: 2011-07-27 07:00:11
    Contemplation has been defined as thoughtful or long consideration or observation. In the East, Christian contemplation has been associated with spiritual transformation. “The process of changing from the old man of sin into the new born child of God and into our true nature as good and divine is called theosis.” The process has often [...]

  • Is Forum Magnum the stupidest urban landscape design in London?

    Updated: 2011-07-25 10:47:32
    I pass Forum Magnum Square quite often and took this photo to show it at a busy period: 5.30 pm on the afternoon of Sunday 26th June 2011. Forum Magnum Square is 100m from one of Europe’s largest tourist attractions. My180° photo was taken from the white cross in the centre of this map. [...]

  • Two Garden Shows

    Updated: 2011-07-21 04:51:29
    This year Germany offers both the County Garden Show in Norderstedt and the National Garden Show in Koblenz. Norderstedt is using the show to unite an old mineral excavation site with an adjacent woodland and grassland to create a new park and Koblenz has renovated an antique military site to parkland and upgraded existing urban [...]

  • High buildings, skyline policy and the creation of a new urban landscapes

    Updated: 2011-07-19 06:10:59
    I have often noticed, from photographs, that Sydney’s urban landscape looks all the better for the way in which high buildings are clustered in the central business district. If you took the tall buildings in the above photograph and distributed them evenly across the urban landscape, which is rather what London has done with [...]

  • The hazards of street photography

    Updated: 2011-07-17 20:29:35
    This delightful crocodile of children in a park was glimpsed while cycling to work. As I pressed the button it passed through my mind that one of the teachers might use a mobile phone to call the police to check out on a cycling photographer with an unhealthy interest in children. I rarely spend a [...]

  • Impressive gardens: revisiting the Golden Age in America

    Updated: 2011-07-14 02:47:43
    ‘The Golden Age of American Gardens’ begins “In the 1880s America’s millionaires were looking for new ways to display their new wealth, and the acquisition of a grand house with an equally grand garden became their passion.” It is said that the style of architecture and gardens, evidenced in Lila Vanderbilt Webb’s 1886 model agricultural farm [...]

  • A garden built for mutual understanding of music-Heptachord Terrace

    Updated: 2011-07-13 15:19:51
    Listen to the music of \” High Mountain and water\” The Chinese painting, above, commemorates the great and famous Chinese story about a Friendship between Bo Ya and Zi Qi.  Yu Boya was a famous music master during the Spring and Autumn Period. The inspiration for his music came from nature , however, very few people could understand [...]

  • Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens are getting worse and worse and worse

    Updated: 2011-07-11 20:31:10
    Since criticising the management of the Water Gardens in 2009 I have heard that they are to be restored and read the note on the Dacorum Borough Council website. It states that ‘The ornamental water gardens, completed in 1961, were designed by architect Geoffrey Jellicoe, who created the original New Town masterplan. Today, the 3.5 [...]

  • Palácio da Alvorada, Brazil’s Palace of the Dawn – and its garden design

    Updated: 2011-07-05 16:24:03
    The home of the Brazil’s President was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1958. Its name comes from Juscelino Kubitschek, who asked ‘What is Brasília, if not the dawn of a new day for Brazil?’ The design is wonderful. But is it perfect? ‘No’. The space looks sterile, the planting is deeply unimaginative [...]

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