Everything I wrote down during the Garden Marathon

 Like almost every year, I made it to London for Frieze week, thought the real reason is the always fantastic Serpentine Gallery annual Marathon, this year dedicated to Gardens, put together by great Hans Urlich Obrist. Here's everything I wrote down during the information hurricane (with some new notes inserted inbetween)

Planet as garden

#gardenmarathon
there was a twitter hashtag as this's years' marathon was hosted also by Steffi Czerni and Marcel Reichart from DLD, one of my other annual informathons. 

(the outside of the Peter Zumthor garden pavilion, which contains a garden. I could take photographs of said garden, though that could never replicate the feeling of entering. The genius of Zumthor is that he made a pavilion that does not translate into pictures, in an age when buildings tend to live as long as blogposts)


Fenced garden inside immense landscape: something small has found sanctuary inside something enormous

Polyphonic garden

Dream garden

Helene Cixous
Gardens guard themselves
Guardens?

outside of garden: exile
Always wanting to return

Jardin d'essais

Homophones
Homonyms

The first dream in mankind is the garden. A dream lost and forever missed.

There are moments during the night when you become a giant. Giants can become dwarfs in a split second.

Telepathy
Letepathy: Lithi, the river that the dead have to cross to reach Hades. They drink the water of lithi, which brings total oblivion. So they forget the horror of being dead.

Teledesire
Umbiblical cord is the first telephone line

ETEL ADNAN
its splendor spilled from horizon to horizon.


DAN GRAHAM


triangle comes from Aldo Rossi

 Chlidrens day care center for Muenster (rejected by Kaspar Koening)

Likes
Aldo van Eyck
Playgrounds

Hedge and two way mirror labyrinth
Hedge defines property lines in suburbia, 1 way mirror defines property in the center of the city (office buildings)

Rob Krier +

Gunther Vogt
Birch forest on top of a parking lot


Rodiger Schottle
Theatergarden: Bestiarium
Large maquette with theater props fantastic
Its a garden as an exhibition
A group show
W Jeff Wall, Vito Acconci etc

The entire exhibition was collected as a piece.

Zarina Hasimi
Apartment life: a place where neither the floor nor the ceiling belongs to you

Elizabeth Diller
Before High Line, train was on ground. It often ran over pedestrians, and was dubbed Death Avenue

Argument for high line was that it would actually be a development tool. Prices would go up around the HighLine, as had happened in central park. (make a river on vasby?)
HighLine: preserve melancholia

Cedric Price: buildings are Magnets and Catalysts

Fritz Haeg


Silke Otto Knapp

Cristian Phillipe
Pleasure Pavilion, Melk Monastery

Three sisters: Corn for verticality, beans grow on that, and pumkin on the ground in the shaded areas.

Architect has a vision of a completed object and works towards achieving every detail.

Gardener starts a collaboration and set down a few parameters and then lets the system take him along to its direction.

Surrender. Taken along by something. Religion Sex Art Drugs

Often we took breaks to sit outside, and chat about many things next to Hans Peter Feldmans Xmas tree. We spoke a lot about Space Syntax with Alkmini and Sotiris, and how it is interesting to twist the whole Space Syntax theory with something like Everyday Urbanism's cynical reading of Shopping Malls, or even open Source solutions and internet style crowdsourcing and randomness. There were other interesting point there, but I have totally forgotten.

•Mark Pagel: cities as gardens•
I came to london by train. I woke up went to station, where somewhere had woken up to sell me a ticket, someone had woken up to drive the train, then in london someone had woken up to check me in at a hotel.
In fact none of these people had woken up to do a single thing for me, they had all been following along, a system had emerged from the ground up and was working perfectly.

PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA (was a tropical storm of exchanges between him and great Dominique Gonzales Foerster.

Psychological states, atlantic tropical desert ocean

Burle Marx inspiration for OscR Niemeyer

Dominique Gonzalez Foerster
Forrest of concrete columns in Parco ibirapuera


Edward James amazing
Hilitla house in jungle
(by Lina Bo Bardi?)

A Parc A Museum A Poem
by Carlos Pellicuer? In mexico

Dr Atol, the lava covered the town
+  Barragan

Matthias Goerits
Espacio Sculptorico

Dominique
a desert in the middle of the jungle

Hotel Palenque

BOERI
What happens when a branch falls from the 25th floor?

david Rowan
Internet as Garden

If something is free, then probably you are the product

AOL and facebook are Walled Gardens, controlled spaces. They are not free, open internet.
When you erect the wall around the garden, all the flowers bloom outside the garden.

Catherine Mosbach (w Phillipe Rahm)
Recreational Appropriation
Porosity gradient, softness of ground, layers of superficiality,

Program follows climate:
Recreation goes to low heat areas, museum goes to dark humid areas


Charles Jencks

We are in the Mesocosm, the middle size things between the Microcosm and the Megacosm

Nature #4: rubbish, waste, what people throw away.

Avenue of Doubles

Pablo Bronstein

Postmodern classicism is the tool that corporations use to make us think that their space is public, when in fact its private. Controlled private space as faux public plaza.

For Performa, 4 Ballet performances in 4 post-modern lobbies.

A neoclassical folly turns the landscape into a picture

At Chisenhale, a performance of people sitting in chairs. They arrived waiting to see a performance and they became the performance by sitting on layed out chairs.

Zurich, scarlatti, dying in desert

Barbed artificiality, abuse is part of the piece

 colorful Japanesters doing something outside Zumthor. Was this a piece? Was it random? Kusama?

Adam Curtis