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Infrastructure animal

massive integrated network ecologies

on weeds

working as much as possible with, and as little as possible against the natural forces already present there.


a weed, like wilderness, nature, beauty, evil, and a perfectly clean shirt are all cultural constructs, a second order sign used to corral an ever changing set of beliefs, like herding cats. generally, a weed is a plant that grows better than the plants you would prefer to see growing in a particular area at a particular time. weeds are a constant ecological pressure exerted on the order & human usefulness of a given garden, pasture, or lawn. we want the system to grow like we imagined it would, and weeds often disrupt that idealized vision. so we pull them out, poison them, and curse the curse that kicked us out of the garden where apparently the noxious weeds were nil. of course sometimes weeds actually do some damage. they get stuck in our livestock's feet, poison the ground, smother the fruit trees, and grow through cracks in walls like they just don't care. billions of dollars in damage & lost revenue, a worldwide epidemic of virulent invasive species literally bringing down our homes around our heads. yet you don't hear the candidates talking about this problem do you?


well i have a solution to all your weed struggles. it's called reframing the weed debate and it's simple; instead of dividing up all the plants into two categories, weeds & non-weeds, just use one category, plants. as far as evolution goes, plants have been at it for much longer than we have and really have some pretty powerful tricks up their sleeves to avoid eradication. various government & private agencies spend millions of dollars each year attempting to remove targeted plant invaders from the landscape; arundo reed, knotweed, scotch broom, star thistle, english ivy, and as it turns out it doesn't work. the plants come back, or they will soon enough.

reframing weeds is championed by one of my favorite landscape architects, a frenchman by the name of Gilles Clement. this is a quote from the book enviro(ne)ment

This approach assumes that the garden and the gardener are totally interdependent, with the gardener keeping an attentive eye on the wanderings of the plants and animals and insects that enter into the garden. He follows the 'movement' of 'traveling' plants like Digitalis, the Mulleins, Spurges, and Hogweed, instead of confining them to "beds," which are traditionally employed to highlight flowering. This approach relativizes the notions of plants and weeds, allowing everything present in the garden to play an equal role in producing a dense and richly overlapping whole in which each development is treated as an evolutionary event

this reframing of weeds isn't just fun & games. if we were to recontextualize our notions of beauty in a designed landscape to include the wooliness of weeds & the process by which a bare patch of land becomes a forest we could save billions of dollars a year & untold consumption of resources.

This project by Clement included a large elevated island of bare dirt surrounded by a 30ft concrete wall. over time weeds & trees colonized the bare dirt and now there is a young forest floating above the rest of the ground plane, untouched & unmaintained.

another of my favorite projects is by Hans Hollein, a Pritzker Prize winning Austrian architect, where he took a good number of colored buckets, filled them with dirt from an industrial site outside town, put them in front of the local government buildings and let the weeds banked in the soil just grow.

but for the most part weeds are eschewed in landscape design, have been for 4000 years, and i doubt it's going to change anytime soon. but i believe in a guided evolution of a site where product, process, and design form three sides of a triangle, and if any side changes length the other two must shift in response.

this creates a dense pattern of ecological form & function, overlapping and changing in time. something i call ecological bricolage. François Jacob uses the term bricolage to describe the apparently cobbled-together character of much biological structure, and views it as a consequence of the evolutionary history of the organism.

i think this is applicable to site design.

fake rocks

i've been interested in this idea of copying rocks for some time. making a mold of a rock, then cast a fake rock, then making a mold of the fake rock, and casting another rock and on and on. copies of copies, feedback loops, and idealized site elements. two projects have been popping up lately:
1. the work of steven siegel, who forms garbage into new geology
2. these mirror boulders in france, just can't even describe how beautiful they are

class is out!

welcome back everybody, it's been a while, but it sure is good to see all your friendly faces smiling around our little campfire. ah. smell that sagebrush? hear that coyote? what a world friends! what a world!
a few updates:

they got the raccoon!

"RE: Dead Raccoon
Thanks, we'll get it. "

jacob perkins & the nobody are on tour
i'd recommend the takilma show if you can make it

i rode through the posey tube today. (following excerpt from a gchat conversation)

"the bike path was exactly as wide as one bicycle. on the left was a rusty handrail, then a 6ft drop to the crowded busy freeway. on the right was a dirty white tile wall that curved up over me to form the top of the tube. if i deviated just the slightest fraction i would hit either the wall or the handrail. the tube is 3545ft long. dark & dirty. the fumes were so thick and acrid that my eyes were burning the whole way and i choked as i pedaled up the slight slope. the sound in the tunnel was a huge roar with intermittent honks. big trucks passed just feet from me, but i was oddly above the cars, looking down on them. there was a pedestrian walking in the opposite direction and he literally had to climb up on the handrail and i had to brush against the white tile to make it past each other. i almost had a panic attack."

they also found out that 1km below the ocean floor there are organisms that may be 111million years old. and that 85% of snowflakes form around bacteria.

here's an idea...
some bracket fungus species exhibit nondeterministic growth, i.e. they're able to alter their growth habits, size, and form in response to environmental variables. these conk fungi have hard, wood-like fruiting bodies that are tough and durable. i suggest that bio-engineered fungus of this type may be able to provide shelter, furniture, and entire houses. a hybridized, gen-mod spore could be cultured on any bio-waste stream and assume the programmed form. grow a wall, a roof, a chair, a table. when the useful lifespan of that object had come to and end, the mushroom would produce spores, which could be harvested and taken to the next domicile or homesite, where the process could begin again. the old conk would simple decompose.

work hard and live a long time