Corazon 1

This was supposed to be the first in a series, but it's on the back burner for the moment.

Filoli Magnolia

Inspired by one of the many floral photos I took on my field trip to Filoli.

fly

I started playing with the punchneedle again, clearly needs some ironing.

Paper Airplanes

Over my Spring Break I took a lot of my projects home and photographed them, so I'll be posting them.
This was a quick piece, I wanted to do a piece with only linework.

Be Prepared

Thinking about what to write for this post I thought about the changing ideas of danger. During the Cold War, there was a valid reason to be afraid, Mutually Assured Destruction ensured that even a mistake could trigger a global catastrophe that would end life for many and change life for whomever survived. As an average citizen, there wasn't much to be done, maybe build a bunker, make sure you could duck and cover, and hope for the best. The military though, as one of the sides that held the keys, could prepare themselves, had to prepare themselves and be in a state of constant vigilance 24 hours a day for years.

I think it was looking at a mug from one of the guard houses that I realized how much emotion an object from history can convey. Of course objects can convey emotion, looking at a well worn book or a guillotine or baby shoes, many people, even without personal experience are going to experience similar emotions. With personal experience the connection can be even greater, people don't but kitschy souvenirs the worldover because they love snowglobes and giant Señor Frog glasses. But to me, seeing the emotion of a period in a MIL-SPEC mug was strange. MIL-SPEC, also known as military specifications or a United States Defense Standard, is the standard technical requirements for things specifically made for the military or significantly altered commercial products. They ensure that military property and gear is safe, durable, usable, logistically compatible and a meet a variety of other standards.  Most everything that is at the Nike Missile site was MilSpec for the time which gives it a certain look. The use of concrete and steel makes everything look like it will last forever. It's also interchangeable, unpersonalized, standard. All the buildings, the uniforms, right down to the coffee mugs, it's all built to withstand the worst. As one of our guides said, this cup would still be around after a hurricane.

I don't like to plan for the worst, it seems like pessimism, which maybe is why when I look at the mug I see the fear and apprehension, a time when you would need a mug that you not only drop and not break but also beat violently on the floor. But also there is a determination and will to survive, that if the worst happens, we still might be worried about what we are going to drink our coffee out of. Granted a lot of what I could see in the mug can be explained by not wanting to replace coffee mugs, but I have mugs from IKEA that have survived a beating, surely MIL-SPEC designs for far harsher of a beating than Swedish children. Designing things, I don't consider that maybe it will need to survive a nuclear holocaust or that thousands of lives depend upon it. Maybe that's because of what I design or maybe it's the emotional environment. It's hard for me to picture a life where the threat of nuclear attack is an ever-present reality. Where I might take the orange terrorist threat alert seriously, where I have an everyday fear worth being afraid of.

I feel that now that the presence of danger in our lives is increasingly overemphasized. Just check out the google news results for danger and you can see that we are in constant peril from digital billboards, dirty houses, strangers, syphilis, children crawling under cars at the beach. The fears of the cold war left us with artifacts of spy satellites, smoke detectors, and bunkers. I'm trying to imagine what will be our products of fear, child leashes, portable blacklights and antivirus software?

Sidenote:
And what will our MIL-SPEC reveal to the future archeologists? Maybe the effects of globalization and contracting of defense work, counterfeit military equipment is on the rise so an increasing amount of our stuff isn't MIL-SPEC at all.

Fight Love Life

Fight for a just cause,

Love your fellow man,

Live a good life.

It doesn't look like the weather is going to hold up. As we walk across the parking lot, strong gusts of wind bend back the olive tree branches, knock about the straggler flowers on the side of the road and cause many to zip their jackets up the last few inches. There are gray skies overhead, but it's not raining, yet. For the moment, the cloud cover is providing almost perfect lighting for photographing all these flowers. So many flowers because not only are we at the Filoli gardens, but we have arrived on Daffodil Day. It took a moment to gather at the bottom of the visitor center steps, bright floral photo opportunities distracted more than a few who dispersed, eyes on their camera screens. Photographers, like cats, are sometimes hard to herd.

We met our tour guide, knowledgeable but soft spoken, and followed her through the tall deer-proof gate. The wind sounds different here, outside the landscape of roads and buildings, it rustles through leaves and bushes. Half way through a daffodil field, it starts to mist, making my macro photos twice as cliche now that it's all raindrops on petals. By the time we reach the reflection pool it has started rain so umbrellas are fetched so we can continue our tour.

It seemed that beyond each moss and vine covered wall lay another perfect garden, each path leading from one composed vista to the next, distinct in design but all equally demonstrative of horticultural skill and intensely detail-oriented planning. We followed our guide in a herd of umbrellas, winding through the immaculate beds and occasionally hearing her commentary when her voice wasn't drowned out by raindrops on nylon. She seemed unperturbed by the weather, "I've never really grown up, so I still enjoy walking in the rain".

And why should we be stopped by the whims of nature? To let it win while wandering through such a beautiful example of man's successful domination of flora would be a failure to the very spirit of the place. So we may have hastened, but indeed completed a full tour of the grounds before our retreat into the shelter of the Filoli house.

Not all seek shelter though, even when it pours the gardeners of Filoli work on. Planting, pruning, weeding, they create living art through constant effort since their masterpiece is perpetually changing. As a California State Historic Landmark, there is an understandable interest in preserving the gardens as they were originally designed. Yet of course since you can't stop living plants from growing, change is unstoppable, a quandary. So often I think of preservation as trapping a single moment in time, like a photograph of a daffodil in the breeze, like the table settings in the dining room at which no one will sit, like each page of the florilegium collection chronicled for, a perfectly preserved slice for the future. Inside the Filoli house they preserve by disuse, outside it's a constant battle to keep a semblance of history.

For me, it was interesting to see this struggle with time. I think of most designs as being manufactured in a moment, but some plants can take decades to train, and could be built into far more than just nice looking landscaping. While green design continues to gain ground, maybe building more like gardeners will lead the way.