Posts Tagged ‘landscape’
22
Dec
Posted by palmsundae in Community, Global cities, Urban food, Walking and transit, biodiversity, small streets, trees. Tagged: bird, bird-watcher, city, clean, flock, green, habitat, Hiroo, hobby, landscape, leaf, ocean, orange, outdoor, parrot, persimmon, San Francisco, surfer, survive, urban, watchers, wild. 3 Comments
Walking on a small street in Hiroo, in central Tokyo, we heard a strange noise and saw some people staring at a persimmon tree. On closer examination, we saw that there was a flock of wild green parrots gathered in this tree. The green on orange colors perched on a leaf-less tree is sublime.
I have [...]
Continue reading »
14
Dec
Posted by palmsundae in Corporations, Culture, Garden diplomacy, Governments, Visionary, biodiversity, fellowship, public space, trees. Tagged: ARUP, fall, Gaimusho, gardener, ginko, Hitachi, Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kajima, landscape, leaf, livable cities, new urbanism, ordinary, Satoh Keiko, talk, TEDxSeeds, unknown, Visionary, 外務書. 1 Comment
Last week I gave several talks about Tokyo Green Space, including at Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho, 外務書). The 1960s modernist building and landscaping impressed me. You can see the bright yellow ginkos in the background and the last fall leaves in the foreground.
My main point to the Ministry was that Japan has not [...]
Continue reading »
21
Nov
Posted by palmsundae in Culture, parks, trees. Tagged: empty, fall, garden, Hiraga Tatsuya, landscape, park, religious, rice, sculpture, seasonal, Shin Edogawa, wedding. 1 Comment
With a few minutes to spare before meeting Hiraga Tatsuya of Landscape+, I stepped into nearby Shin Edogawa park. The colors were beautiful, and empty apart from a couple having formal wedding photos taken in traditional costume. I wonder what the small seasonal sculpture is. There were several placed in the garden, and they seem [...]
Continue reading »
16
Nov
Posted by palmsundae in Corporations, biodiversity. Tagged: Akasaka, beauty, care, compositino, construction, contrast, dream, escape, garden, hardscape, Kajima, landscape, miniature, modernist, mountain, office, pebble, pine, pruned, river, rock, traditional. 1 Comment
Recently I visited construction company Kajima’s headquarters in Akasaka to learn more about their extraordinary biodiversity program, and was charmed by the miniature Japanese garden in front of the modernist building. One could criticize the excess of hardscape, but it does make the small traditional garden pop in a dramatic way.
The perfectly pruned pines and [...]
Continue reading »
3
Nov
Posted by palmsundae in Nodai, small business. Tagged: alumni, blog, clothes, design, 鈴木北斗, Garden Design Lab, gardener, harakake, Iloha 1128, jyouba, Kobayashi Kenji, koikuchi, kyahan, Kyouen, Kyouen Store, landscape, momohiki, Satou Koutarou, Sinajina, Suzuki Hokuto, tabi, tekkou, Tokyo University of Agriculture, traditional, 小林健二, 佐藤光太朗. 1 Comment
During the Tokyo University of Agriculture’s fall festival, the Garden Design Lab of the Landscape Architect Sciences department hosted a reunion for alumni under 35. I met two fascinating alumni who had studied at Nodai in the late 1990s. Alumnus Suzuki Hokuto (鈴木北斗), has a shop called Kyouen Store that sells traditional Japanese gardeners’ clothes [...]
Continue reading »
5
Oct
Posted by palmsundae in small business, small streets. Tagged: allley, brand, bric-a-brac, cobblestone, countryside, discovery, farm house, France, Ginza, global, landscape, metal, pastry, Patisserie Qu'il fait bon, pots, recycled, rust, shop, staged, styled, wood. Leave a Comment
Walking in Tokyo always provides new discoveries. In Ginza, where global brands are housed in tall ultra-contemporary mid-rises, there are still small alleys and two story buildings. I was astounded to stumble upon this bakery housed in what seems the perfect simulation of the French countryside.
When Japanese set out to evoke a foreign scene, it [...]
Continue reading »
27
Sep
Posted by palmsundae in Global cities, biodiversity. Tagged: apple scab, architect, Battery Park City, Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, compost, design, Eric T. Fleisher, fertilizer, Harvard, Harvard Graduate School of Design, landscape, leaf spot, Michael Van Valkenburgh, microbe, organic, pesticide, public, save, soil, space, Teardrop Park. Leave a Comment
I was proud to see a recent New York Times article about Harvard making its landscaping organic. Despite some initial resistance and skepticism that the new landscaping could withstand its heavy human usage, Harvard has found many benefits from abandoning pesticides and fertilizers: soil microbes now aerate the soil, its trees receive more nutrients and [...]
Continue reading »
15
Sep
Posted by palmsundae in Visionary, small business. Tagged: bonsai, color, fall, Jiyūgaoka, Kobayashi Kenji, landscape, master, mosaic, moss, pattern, poetic, season, Sinajina, vest, wool, 品品, 小林健二. Leave a Comment
The exquisite miniaturization at Sinajina (品品) makes their modern bonsais a poetic reflection on season and landscape. Above is an image from last weekend, in which color and pattern capture the start of fall as surely as the first sighting of wool vests in the Tokyo streets.
To update my earlier post, I am also including some [...]
Continue reading »
6
Sep
Posted by palmsundae in Nodai. Tagged: agricultural, city, cookie, garden, glove, herb, intervention, knowledge, landscape, medical, Medical Herbman Cafe Project, mobile, Niigata Art Triennial, portable, recycled, rural, tea. 1 Comment
The Medical Herbman Cafe Project was one of the most inspiring landscape interventions we saw at the Niigata Art Triennial. Placed next to the school that had been closed less than 20 years after opening, the Medical Herbman Cafe Project consists of two elements: a mobile cafe that folds up into a container that fits [...]
Continue reading »
5
Sep
Posted by palmsundae in Nodai. Tagged: apocalyptic, art, chair, Christian Boltanski, cobweb, coffin, Dream House, Echigo Tsumari, furniture, gloom, grasshopper, history, Jean Kalman, landscape, last students, Marina Abramovic, Niigata, Niigata Art Triennial, puppet, revitalization, rice, rural, satoyama, sculpture, strange, Suzuki sensei, theatrical, Triennial, wood. 1 Comment
The Echigo Tsumari or Niigata Art Triennial was our last stop, and it, too, reflected the themes of history in landscape and rural revitalization. We visited a small portion of the 350 sites, mostly abandoned houses and schools, spread out in several hillside villages. This two month features world-class international art, much of it conceptual, [...]
Continue reading »
3
Sep
Posted by palmsundae in Nodai. Tagged: abandoned, agriculture, Art Triennial, ニュー・グリーンピア, Bubble, design, Echigo, field, forest, garden, greenery, hill, history, landscape, Landscape Architecture, Nagano, nature, New Greenpia, Niigata, Obuse, professor, revitalization, rice, rural, satoyama, student, terrace, trip, Tsumari, water. 2 Comments
Last week I visited Nagano and Niigata prefectures with Nodai. It was my first experience seeing the incredible beauty of the countryside, the rice fields and satoyama ecosystems, steep hills, wood houses, and small towns. The focus of the trip was rural revitalization and experiencing history, both centuries-old and more recent, in landscape.
Although I had [...]
Continue reading »
30
Aug
Posted by palmsundae in Garden diplomacy, Governments. Tagged: 1923, archery, art, billboard, black pine, borrowing, building, China, designed, earthquake, elevated, exchange, garden, Hamamatsuchou, Hangzhou, highway, island, Koishikawa Korakue, Kyu Shiba Rikyu, landscape, mountain, natural, office, pond, Reizan, sacred, Seiko Lake, spiritual, sport, station, stroll, tatami, Tokyo Bay, train, Xi Hu, Zhejiang. Leave a Comment
Traditional Japanese garden Kyu Shiba Rikyu dates to 1678 when land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay became the residence of Okugawa Tadatamo, an official of Tokugawa Shogunate. Kyu Shiba Rikyu is one of Tokyo’s oldest gardens, along with Koishikawa Korakuen. Kyu Shiba Rikyu was destroyed by fire in the 1923 earthquake, rebuilt and gifted by the [...]
Continue reading »
6
Aug
Posted by palmsundae in Community, Urban food, Visionary, small business, trees. Tagged: age, bee, beekeeper, deforestation, Edible, 銀座ミツバチプロジェクト, farmers, fear, flower, Ginza, Ginza Honey Bee Project, grass, Hamarikyu, hive, honey, honeycomb, Imperial Palace, kids, landscape, mama-san, office, pesticide, rice, roof, rooftop, sake, souvenir, Tsukudajima, World War II. 7 Comments
Last week the Ginza Honey Bee Project (銀座ミツバチプロジェクト) founders Takayasu Kazuo (高安和夫) and Tanaka Atsuo (田中淳夫) talked with me about their successful four year old honey-making project in the middle of Ginza, and showed me their rooftop hives.
We met in a unremarkable conference room in a nondescript office building behind Matsuya department store. A group [...]
Continue reading »
3
May
Posted by palmsundae in Corporations. Tagged: hollow, landscape, nature, office, reception, rock garden, rocks. Leave a Comment
Visiting a multinational in Shibuya, I was struck by this interesting rock garden in the hallway. Visible from the front reception, there are two small rock gardens cut into the carpeted floor. This seems like a cool way to bring nature in, without the upkeep of keeping plants alive under fluorescent lights and climate-controlled air. [...]
Continue reading »
Recent Comments