Remember to breathe:)

Just wanted to remind that it is allowed to breathe in between all the battles. And remember that there is always someone at school you can ask and discuss with:)

Good luck to the final stages everyone!

ALAN BERGER DESIGNED WETLANDS FOR PURIFYING THE PONTINE MARSHES IN ROME

Using plants to purify canal water

Researchers outline a natural way to clean Italy's polluted Pontine Marshes
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office

Just south of Rome lie the Pontine Marshes, a vexed part of the Italian countryside. In ancient times, Roman emperors tried unsuccessfully to drain the marshes, something only achieved in the 1930s through a system of massive pumps and canals that removed enough water to turn the area into productive farmland. Yet today those canals have become heavily polluted, endangering the area’s agriculture and the health of its residents.

Read more here

(thanks to Hettie Pisters for the link)

Topos 70 - Sustainability

The new issue of Topos is out in the library. I recommend you to have a look at it : especially, it shows some interesting projects dealing with water management and increasing stormwater in the cities, one on energy landscapes, and a very interesting reading of the "city as biotope".

:-)

Enjoy!

Alice

Jæren and water quality

Aksjon Jærvassdrag ( The Jæren water act ) has a lot of information concerning biodiversity and water quality. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there is an English page so all information is in Norwegian only.

For those of you concerned with water quality i recommend these reports :

Rapport RF - 2003/060 for good maps about watersheds and water pollution sources.

Rapport IRIS 2009/037 for the latest update on the water quality situation.

It seems like Orre is subject to one of the worst situation concerning nutrient loading from agriculture in the whole of Norway. There are also reports about sitings of bluegreen algae on a large scale - also called Cyanobacteria. Doing some fast research about Cyanobacteria helped me find this interesting article.

See you all tomorrow at school.

Anders

Asiaq – Greenland Survey

Asiaq operates all over Greenland, undertaking a wide variety of activities concerning the physical, non-living environment.
Asiaq’s responsibilities include; mapping, geographic information, hydrology, climate, environment, and surveying and geotechnical investigation. Their Workshop maintains a network of climate stations distributed all over Greenland for the purpose of local monitoring and international collaboration.

Look also into NunaGIS, which is a digital atlas displaying maps over Greenland. On top of the maps you can display geographical information themes such as bird colonies and sensitive areas, GPS monitored caribous north of Nuuk, hunting districts, historic buildings, territorial boundaries of Greenland and lots of other themes.

Thursday in Nuuk, we will meet Karl Brix Zinglersen and Mätzler Eva from Asiaq. They will among other things talk with us about Asiaq, mapping, WebGIS, geology, geotechnical / geophysical / soil analysis, MapInfo GIS, and Remote Sensing

Inuit tactile maps

Yesterday two of our friends tipt us simultaniously about a blogpost on BLDGBLOG about Inuit tactile maps of the Greenland coastline. Marianne Skjulhaug called from Bergen and Ross Langdon sent a mail from Uganda (!). Follow the link and learn more. It is truly intriguing.

The carving is 300 years old and shows the coastline with fjords, islands, nunataks and glaciers. The outline of the coast is carried up one side and down the other.


Aviaaja and Helena from tnt nuuk is arriving in Tromsø today. We are sure they can tell us more about these maps and maybee we can see them for ourselves when we go to Nuuk...

Using Existing Resources to Spawn a New Era in Renewable Energy

I came across a very interesting text yesturday.

The title is "Commercial-Scale Production of Algae Biodiesel: Using Existing Resources to Spawn a New Era in Renewable Energy" and can be found here. In brief this text is looking into algae farms as a means of producing the next generation bio fuels and how the "food" for the algae could be agriculture runoff amongst others. Could the future players of oil production be the farmers of Jæren?

"A completely new life"

Before Christmas I read this interesting article in Aftenposten about the situation on Greenland. I think this was a good introduction to this country of opportunities. The head- title is “A completely new life”. The children of Greenland have to search for new livings in the future because the urbanization still will go on in the country and there is no need for more workers and farmers. The melting of the ice in the arctic and the well- known housing- project in Nuuk is also mentioned.

Elisabeth

>pdf

Jæren photo album

Jæren

I spent my day all over Jæren, and I've added some photos that I and my brother took today in a photo album.
Map of captions

Kaizers Orchestra - Evig pint

Maybe Trude and Mads should extend their movie-theme to include music videos? This one is filmed in Jæren, with a band from Jæren, singing with a dialect from Jæren.

ABITARE MAGAZINE

A very interesting italian magazine, which is also using a blog as online interface to its public. You can follow daily updates on abitare.it. Welcome to its online editor - Matteo Poli - as new reader and guest author on our blog.

GREENLAND: A window of opportunity - NOW

Dear students
WE can now go on a study tour to Greenland! The fantastic Aviaaja Karlshøj here in Greenland have managed to get ca 90 000 DKR in support for our studio, to go to Greenland and the capital Nuuk. A lot of institutions here are supporting your travel, and they all want you to take part in the Appearing Nuuk concept.
The journalist Jörgen Chemnitz said that Geenland now as opened a window of opportunity, an that it is a call for action in the next five years. With a new Self Government a completely new situatation is established. You are now invited to take part in this.
We will leave from Copenhagen Tuesday the 2. of Mars in the morning, and return Monday the 8. of Mars.
We are holding at least 20 tickets with the travelling büreau until Monday at ca 13.00. To get ok prizes you have to decide NOW. With the economic support, and free housing here in Nuuk, your total costs, including travel from Oslo to Copenhagen will be maximum 4000 NKR, and it may be less because more support may appear. Aviaaja is working hard on it. So a once in a lifetime journey is open for you, following in teh path of the Jæren Viking Eirik Raude.
So contact Alice, be at the school monday morning - an the Greenland journey will take place.
From Knut Eirik and Kjerstin on a beautifull sunny Saturday. We are now going on a Nuuk Safari with a lot of people, debating Nuuk and Greenland futures.

Huaman Rights filmfestival

Film festvival at parkteateret can be interresting. Especially sunday where the team is big business- outside the law? 2 films and debate about the oil buisness from 13.00. Today the theme is migration and human wrongs. See the whole program at humanfilm.no (1film=50,- daypass=100,-)

Landart - Richard Long

Richard Long is also a wonderful artist who is engaged with landart. He has many good and inspiring projects. Recommend strongly to look at his work:)

http://www.richardlong.org/

I also have a very nice book called "Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art" written by Udo Weilacher. It is a collection of many examples of different land art artists.

Different landscape

hello, my first post on this blog, and want to recommend the film 'Manufactured landscapes' (2006). It's a film by Edward Burtynsky, a photografer, his webpage.





We tend to imagine landscape always like natural, so this film shows different spectacular views, that we even can't imagine them existing on our planet. Enjoy!


p.s. I have this film, so if anybody wants, I can give.

landart | jim denevan

thougth of jærens long sand coast and henry p's idea of a beach workshop when I saw this art from jim denevan.
check out his webpage!

http://www.jimdenevan.com/

-emilie

a project from Ellen

For your inspiration I’ll show you these illustations. They steem from a students project (Lise Hom) I was supervising and it takes its point of departure in a fast urbanized area in the northern part of Aarhus in Denmark. She walked into the mechanisms of the content trying to figure out possible conditions for growing crops, future use and management frameworks and came up with this astonishing project. (>pdf)

ON IMBEDDED INFORMATION - a gift (from Tromsø)

Remind Me from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

This video, directed for Röyksopp by the French motion graphics studio H5, features a typical week day of a woman working in London'sSquare Mile. All constructed solely through infographics, it scans across the manifold networks that our eveiday life depends upon: close-ups of most common objects expand to diagrams explaining industrial product lifecycles, usual actions are referred into a world realm of statistic charts, and connections between the parts are highlited in maps that go from the micro to the global. In a time span of less than 5 minutes, an impressive amount of complex and heterogeneous information is conveyed and illustrated in a super-simple and intuitive visual style. Isn't this what we ask you to do?! Be sharp, to the point and concise, simple but not simplicistic (and have fun!)

POWERS OF TEN

“The Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero”

(9 minutes; color, 1977)

by Charles and Ray Eames

Setting a field of view for our researches, always implies a choice on which detail/s we want to engage as our forefront. However each of these singularities is part of a continuous flow of matter and events that is the world, and life in itself, from which we cannot subtract anything as much as we cannot subtract ourselves. This beautiful short film by Charles and Ray Eames (1977) is - among other things - a tale of this story. It is then important that all our argumentations have the capacity to activate a curiosity able to travel between the scales, setting an active dialogue bewteen the particular and the multiple universes it relates to.

- from the Powers of Ten website:

“The ‘Powers of Ten’ also represents a way of thinking—of seeing the interrelatedness of all things in our universe. It is about math, science and physics, about art, music and literature. It is about how we live, how scale operates in our lives and how seeing and understanding our world from the next largest or next smallest vantage point broadens our perspective and deepens our understanding.”

visualization of complex systems

a mapping/diagramming database..
visual complexity