The Wonderlust Journal » wonderment

The Patient Gardener

Eliza Coleman — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:49:10 +0000

My time to work on Wonderlust has been incredibly pressed recently as things with Cultivate are taking off (very exciting, but very busy!), but I had to share this with you, it’s one of the most clever, fantastical things I’ve seen in a while.

Swedish architects VisionDivision have dreamed up and planted the beginnings of what will become a beautiful resting spot in Milan after the ten Japanese Cherry Trees have grown up and been pruned and shaped into this structure.

But it won’t be done for 100 years! Hence the name.

I actually love that it will take 100 years. Everything in our culture is so oriented towards instant gratification, and it’s a lovely reminder that some things of beauty and value, like trees, cannot be sped up or gotten to via shortcuts. They must grow on their own time and be lovingly taken care of and tended to in order to become something magnificent.

Did you notice in the images above that some of the branches will be shaped into a ladder, and others into basket-weave shapes for sitting on?

via Dezeen

Must See: Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides

Eliza Coleman — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 04:26:13 +0000

If you’re an Andy Goldsworthy fan, I’d highly recommend this documentary on him. If you’re not a Goldsworthy fan, I bet you’ll become one really quickly if you watch this film. His work is pure wonderment.

Seeing Goldsworthy at work on his ephemeral pieces, made completely of found materials, is almost meditative just to watch. I don’t know what I expected him to be like as a person, but I was enchanted in the documentary to see that he is so much a part of his work, and vice versa. You can’t imagine him doing anything else with his life, and it seems to completely consume him, so that he is completely at peace while he’s working.

I Love Maps >> I’M DYING THIS IS SO AMAZING

Eliza Coleman — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:59:00 +0000

THIS IS A REAL MAP. I saw this and thought someone had painted something pretty on top of an old map.

Not so, which means this might be the most amazing map I’ve ever seen.

In the early 1940s, the Army Corps of Engineers commissioned a guy named Harold Fisk to make a map of the various courses the Mississippi River has taken over time. He showed each course in a different color, to show when and how they happened. This is the result.

Just goes to show, the representation of practical information can be executed in a way that is also aesthetically pleasing.

I feel like I could look at these forever. I’ve searched and searched and I’m pretty sure you can’t buy any prints (original or reproduced) of this, but I wish you could*! I would frame a whole bunch and hang them on my wall!

(*If anyone can find any originals and would like to give them to me, it would be like the coolest gift eveerrrr, just sayin)

Rivers are constantly in flux, as they erode banks and make deeper curves (or “meanders”), until the meanders become so meandering that the two sides of the curve almost touch. At this point, the river cuts off the curve and so that it has a straight path again, and it leaves an oxbow lake behind.

Here’s a detail:

When all the pages, each showing a different section, of his study are fit together, they form this long continuous path of the Mississippi. I can’t get the image to load any larger, but it looks really cool when it’s shown as the same width as the pages above.

THE ALLUVIAL VALLEY OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI RIVER
Harold Fisk, 1944

via Pixels & Arrows