The Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning’s LA 101 Design class came to the garden for their yearly three week project entitled “Revealing a Landscape”. Each student, undergraduate and graduate, are to find a place in the garden to highlight by creating a temporary installation using simple materials.
These Photographs of the student installations were taken at Blake Garden in October of 2008. A description of the project follows:
Project: “Revealing a Landscape”
Class: LA 101 (LAEP UC Berkeley)
Teachers: Judith Stilgenbauer, Daphne Edwards
Site: Blake Garden
The purpose of the 3 week project (Sept. 22 – Oct. 13) was to investigate the qualities of the landscape that can be captured or revealed as part of a new design. Using Blake Garden as a landscape laboratory, the students constructed and installed full scale 1 to 1 mockups of the projects (seen in these photographs), models at 1/2″ = 1′ scale, and drawings in section and in plan. Their final project boards also included photographs of the site. Among the qualities revealed by the various designs were: light, space, enclosure, paths, water features, views, growth, and geological activity.
The Bench project is complete. The students worked very hard on the final day to complete the bench just in time for the garden graduation events. (see graduation posts) We are very proud of our new addition to the garden and the garden visitors are delighted with the results.
During the month of April work has been done to repair a leak in the 1500 gallon cistern in Australian Hollow. The cistern was initially acquired by the garden in the mid 1970’s during a drought and hooked up – at that time – to the seep under the parking structure.
PHD candidate Kristen Podolak, LAEP graduate student Nathan Hodges, volunteer Peter Suchecki, and three students from ES 125 (May, Austin and Linda) fixed the leak and built a new foundation out of recycled sidewalk cement (donated by Mike Frappier) for the cistern. A zip line was rigged from the event lawn area to get the heavy cement blocks and mulch down to the cistern area.
This past Monday the bamboo aqueduct that brings the water from the seep was hooked up to the cistern and it is filling once again. The garden is exploring solar pumping options to transport the water to other parts of the garden.
