Garden Design

A quick summary of last week's proceedings: Brook Klausing is the senior designer for and creative director of Brook Landscape, a Brooklyn-based design, construction, and project management company. For the next few weeks Brook and his company will help us design the garden! Brook guided a discussion about design; this discussion will help us channel our creativity and energy into a focused project. Here's the plan: 1) Observe, sketch, and record the garden. 2) Each class member will create a unique garden design that considers both required and desired garden elements. 3) Discuss, analyze, and critique these preliminary designs 4)Condense, unite, and combine these designs into one coherent final design. 5) Present this final design to Brook Landscape, Principal Lerner and other members of BHSEC's adminstration, and others whose name I do not know. 6) If the designed is approved, work with Brook Landscape to build the garden! If it is rejected: frown, scowl, cry, and then redesign.

I love design. Design can be as "simple" as rearranging objects on a shelf to as "complex" as planning high speed rail routes in China. A note on engineering: while engineering is design with constraints; design is essentially art with constraints; art is imagination and creativity manifested in something (forgive the broad, generalizing definitions). You can design tennis balls, art exhibits, experiences of spaces, textiles, methods and experiments, and so on. Anything that has a purpose (and SO MANY THINGS HAVE A PURPOSE!) can be designed. When I walk down city streets and see rain puddles, littered candy wrappers, billboard advertisements; when I hear talking people, running car engine, trees rustling in the wind; and when I think about all these while experiencing them, I think: could all this be designed? I am not speaking about the religious question of "Intelligent Design." I think about my ambulatory experiences as thought experiments: if what I experience is not designed as a whole; if what I experience is the result of natural processes (wind, rain, etc) and of people living their lives (litter, driving cars, etc.), then what is designed about it? I think it is the candy wrappers, the city streets, the billboards and their advertisements, the placement of trees: anything that is created by humans is designed. Not everything we create is well designed, but because anything we create is designed, this gives us a chance to make what we create beautiful from both a formal and functional perspective! We have created our garden, so lets design it and let's design it well. I am excited for this project!