Zaha Hadid | Gardens of Marqueyssac | 'Dubai High' Book | Deer & Boxwood
/Garden Woes | Natural Triumph
Boxwood: Loving What the Deer Don’t NYTimes
Deer hate boxwood — all 150 kinds in every size, shape, leaf form and colors. Boxwood contains alkaloids that are toxic to deer and humans both. Speaking of boxwood’s pungent odor, Oliver Wendell Homes described it as the ‘fragrance of eternity’. Its detractors say the fragrance is cat urine.
‘My plant palette is limited to what the deer don’t eat,’ says Andrea Filippone, 50 and an accomplished garden designer and antiques dealer. With a degree in architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, she is partners with her husband in Tendenze Design, working on their property in Pottersville, NJ.
View a lovely slide show.
Natural Curves Ahead
The Beautiful Gardens of Marqueyssac in France InspireFirst
The Château de Marqueyssac is a 17th century chateau and gardens located at Vézac, in the Dordogne Department of France. The chateau was built at the end of the 17th century by Bertrand Vernet de Marqueyssac, Counselor to Louis XIV, on cliffs overlooking the Dordogne Valley.
In the 1860s, the new owner, Julien de Cervel, began to plant thousands of boxwood trees - today there are over 150,000 - and had them carved in fantastic shapes, many in groups of rounded shapes like flocks of sheep. He also added linden trees, cypress trees, and stone pine from Italy, and introduced the cyclamen from Naples. Following the romantic style, he built rustic structures, redesigned the parterres, and laid out five kilometers of walks. Château de Marqueyssac website.
Design
Womanly Architecture
The Greatest Buildings Never Built WSJ Magazine
Zaha Hadid’s proposed Dubai Performing Arts Center was a 2009 victim of the global economic slowdown.Before the global financial meltdown Dubai was on a course to make itself the global art center of the world. One of the architectural wonders in the dust heap (at least for now) is Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Center, part of the Saadiyat Island project.
The WSJ Magazine writes in-depth about lost wonders architecture, the buildings that caught the global imaginations of design devotees but ran into the face of financial or political realities.
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Nibbles
International Day of Biodiversity: let’s put conservation at the heart of politics The Guardian
Students in Africa Harvard Magazine
Brainiac
In early 2007, writer and theatre director Michael Schindhelm was appointed by the Dubai authorities as consultant on a projected opera house, and in early 2008 found himself with a broader remit as director of the newly founded Dubai Culture and Arts Authority.
From the outset there were profound cultural issues to be faced. Can essentially alien art forms be transplanted effectively? Can they be imposed top-down by the authorities? Can high culture ever be financially self-supporting?
‘Dubai High’ asks just those questions.
In a society run like a business by a tiny, unaccountable elite, in which freedom of speech is limited and 90 percent of the inhabitants are transient, expendable expatriates, can the arts realistically be nurtured as a form of social expression and self-examination?
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