The book “The Age of Man. The world created by us "
Hello! We have released a wonderful new Diana Ackerman :
People "have mastered 75% of the land surface, created many truly wonderful industrial and medical inventions, lit up the entire planet." For us, nature is not a temple, but a workshop; we have inhabited the biosphere with our favorite species of plants and animals, many of which are invasive; we even changed the climate, putting our own existence at risk. However, we are aware of our own destructive inclinations and can boast of stunning creative achievements. We collect the DNA of endangered species in the “frozen ark”, teach orangutans to deal with ipads, create high-tech wearable devices and even artificial species that may someday surpass us. Author Diana Ackerman, who has a rare gift, makes it easy to explain advanced science to non-professional readers,
As a child, Patrick Blanc loved to visit the doctor. In the reception there was a six-foot-long aquarium that teased him with its colorful tropical fish and velvety green plants that swayed in the water and attracted themselves like hands. For an urban boy who grew up in a suburb of Paris, the aquarium embodied a piece of paradise. Putting his ear to a small box attached to one of its walls, the boy could hear how the water, mixed with bubbles, runs through the tubes and passes through the filter. Hydraulics and the very technical design of the aquarium interested him not less than the fish themselves, and it took him not too much time to assemble his own small aquarium at home. For some time, he also took care of astrildah birds with coral beaks, letting them fly on a flat on Thursday and Sunday morning.
Patrick became a teenager, and his curiosity of a wanderer was transferred from aquariums and birds to aquatic plants; then, at the age of 15, he jumped over the waves and found himself in the moist and shady edges of the planet, known to us as the tropics. During a school trip to the rainforests of Thailand and Malaysia, he realized for the first time that "plants can shoot at any height - they do not necessarily grow from the ground."
Today, the green walls, which are abundantly refreshing with the vegetation of the city around the world, owe their design or at least were inspired by Patrick's ecological vision: they attract hummingbirds, other birds and butterflies — and they change with each new season.
Among the personal favorites of Blanc himself is the cult incarnation of the “green city” concept: the magnificent Museum on the Quai Branly (or Qué Branley Museum) in Paris, opened in 2006 and called by many “a revelation in the world of botany”. Meadows woven from a multitude of textures are climbing up the facade of a 13,000-square-foot building, and more than half of this area is living plants. The rest is represented by windows, and the result is a huge checkered mossy and fragrant breathable wall with fleshy leaves, soft to the touch and trembling from the birds swarming in it.
Covering the façade of the building with a wide assortment of plants to reflect the diversity of cultures that world artists represented in the museum belong to, Blanc focused on a fantastic potpourri of what grows in the temperate climate of North America, Europe, South America, Asia and Africa. He would have included Oceania in this list, but tropical plants would not survive the Parisian winters, and the facade, which is partly vegetal tapestry, partially hidden lagoons and at the same time containing no soil at all, is designed for many years: it will tease the senses of Parisians, personifying and forming a 40-foot-high and 650-foot-wide ecosystem in the middle of the city with all its stone and steel objects from scratch, at the same time helping to purify the air and eliminate carbon dioxide. On warm days, flowers bloom, butterflies flit, and birds rest or nest in dense thickets. Sometimes it even seems that you are about to see a miniature deer peeking out from behind mossy hummocks. Our horizontal life inside the premises makes the consciousness more flat, and some administrative buildings and offices are already beginning to plant vertical gardens on their walls: they can be seen from the window while working, and this blurs the line between the world inside and outside the room.
How does this tall garden on the north side of the building withstand the icy winds that run over the Seine? It is here that Blanc’s experience in the field of botany and his research cannot be avoided. This living wall is frost-resistant, as it has chosen hundreds of plants characteristic of the undergrowth, which, according to its research, are able to withstand direct light and wind in large quantities.
“When I think of geykher,” he says, referring to the family of stone-sawed plants, which also includes red and American geyher, blooming with small delicate flowers (and their leaves are like palms with very long fingers), “I always think about as their leaves emerge from under the snow in April, fresh and not spoiled by frost, along the sheer hillsides in the shade of giant Californian sequoias.
Blanc works with a palette of deep saturated greens represented in dozens of shades and half tones, from asparagus and fern to forest and "praying mantis" green, and among its working textures everything is from matte to fleecy, spongy and glossy. They all look different depending on the time of day or time of year, their age, current clouds, mists curling along the river, rush hours on the roads, light refractions at dusk. We perceive the colors of the retina receptors of our eyes, and they mix and change endlessly, as if we met them directly in the forest. Blanc prefers leaves to flowers, does not pay attention to creeping shoots - and is very sensitive to the architecture of the leaves. Thousands of individual plants, from which he weaves his canvases, grow leaves of various shapes: tousled, pointed, stellate, serrated, oval, sickle-shaped, rounded, drop-shaped, dull, heart-shaped, pointed, etc. Some grow upward, while others look downward, others grow frivolous or bloom exquisitely, and the fourth start new shoots or try to separate from a single leaf. Knowing the habits and habits of each plant, he draws a map of plantings from a variety of segments, similar to amazing fingerprints or a picture for coloring with numbered cells, and each segment is a specific plant, whose name is indicated right there in Latin.
“It's a picture first,” explains Blanc. - Then she appears texture and depth.
As in any art, which is based on science, not one muse is at the source of his inspiration. Plants are drawn on paper, because of what each design at first really looks like a picture. Then this work of art is transformed into a sensual sculpture of tangible, biological and clipped forms and colors. Leaves, flowers, stems dance in the air a kind of slow ballet. Yes, Blanc, to a certain extent, gives them choreography, but the whole ensemble will sooner or later be given to natural improvisation - not least depending on the weather. Frogs, birds and insects gradually grow roots in the plants, and the wall is filled with a chorus of croaking, tweeting and buzzing; some melodies can be foreseen, and the rest - entirely jazz variations on the theme.
Despite the fact that the plants are naturally curling, clear edges and lines give the final work a tinge of sensual elegance and no mess. The wall looks volume and intricate, but not cluttered. Plants can not be fully called wild, but they grow and bloom in a unique way. In this sense, it is even more like linear chaos — deliberate, self-contained, carefully measured, and masterfully embodied. And free for everyone!
Practical botany, hydraulics, physics and sopromat constitute the necessary backbone of knowledge for such art. Thousands of individual plants are manually placed in special pockets on a flat felt canvas stretched over a rigid frame; it will be fertilized and irrigated according to the rain principle - irrigation from a pipe hidden at the top of the structure with certain periods of time. Despite the absence of soil, the plants quickly take root and flourish, covering both the surface of the felt and the pipe. The overall effect is a big gulp of wildlife that may be stuck in the throat in the solar plexus area. This is a garden that can only be welcomed by standing, at eye level, like another person. He invites you to touch him, inhale his smell. Look up - it rises four floors above you like a vast undergrowth, but not a giant from a fairy tale. Directly close to himself, he creates his own microclimate, here it is shady and quite humid; He suggests: Stand up close and tilt your head back, looking at the dizzying diversity of the flora. Skillfully balancing on the thinnest line between taming and free will, he seems both timid and indomitable.
More detailed information on the book is available on the website of the publishing house
Index
passage
for readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - The Age of Man
Also, this discount is valid on a series of books about science: the New Science and Pop Science
People "have mastered 75% of the land surface, created many truly wonderful industrial and medical inventions, lit up the entire planet." For us, nature is not a temple, but a workshop; we have inhabited the biosphere with our favorite species of plants and animals, many of which are invasive; we even changed the climate, putting our own existence at risk. However, we are aware of our own destructive inclinations and can boast of stunning creative achievements. We collect the DNA of endangered species in the “frozen ark”, teach orangutans to deal with ipads, create high-tech wearable devices and even artificial species that may someday surpass us. Author Diana Ackerman, who has a rare gift, makes it easy to explain advanced science to non-professional readers,In the green canopy of a green man
As a child, Patrick Blanc loved to visit the doctor. In the reception there was a six-foot-long aquarium that teased him with its colorful tropical fish and velvety green plants that swayed in the water and attracted themselves like hands. For an urban boy who grew up in a suburb of Paris, the aquarium embodied a piece of paradise. Putting his ear to a small box attached to one of its walls, the boy could hear how the water, mixed with bubbles, runs through the tubes and passes through the filter. Hydraulics and the very technical design of the aquarium interested him not less than the fish themselves, and it took him not too much time to assemble his own small aquarium at home. For some time, he also took care of astrildah birds with coral beaks, letting them fly on a flat on Thursday and Sunday morning.
Patrick became a teenager, and his curiosity of a wanderer was transferred from aquariums and birds to aquatic plants; then, at the age of 15, he jumped over the waves and found himself in the moist and shady edges of the planet, known to us as the tropics. During a school trip to the rainforests of Thailand and Malaysia, he realized for the first time that "plants can shoot at any height - they do not necessarily grow from the ground."
Today, the green walls, which are abundantly refreshing with the vegetation of the city around the world, owe their design or at least were inspired by Patrick's ecological vision: they attract hummingbirds, other birds and butterflies — and they change with each new season.
Among the personal favorites of Blanc himself is the cult incarnation of the “green city” concept: the magnificent Museum on the Quai Branly (or Qué Branley Museum) in Paris, opened in 2006 and called by many “a revelation in the world of botany”. Meadows woven from a multitude of textures are climbing up the facade of a 13,000-square-foot building, and more than half of this area is living plants. The rest is represented by windows, and the result is a huge checkered mossy and fragrant breathable wall with fleshy leaves, soft to the touch and trembling from the birds swarming in it.
Covering the façade of the building with a wide assortment of plants to reflect the diversity of cultures that world artists represented in the museum belong to, Blanc focused on a fantastic potpourri of what grows in the temperate climate of North America, Europe, South America, Asia and Africa. He would have included Oceania in this list, but tropical plants would not survive the Parisian winters, and the facade, which is partly vegetal tapestry, partially hidden lagoons and at the same time containing no soil at all, is designed for many years: it will tease the senses of Parisians, personifying and forming a 40-foot-high and 650-foot-wide ecosystem in the middle of the city with all its stone and steel objects from scratch, at the same time helping to purify the air and eliminate carbon dioxide. On warm days, flowers bloom, butterflies flit, and birds rest or nest in dense thickets. Sometimes it even seems that you are about to see a miniature deer peeking out from behind mossy hummocks. Our horizontal life inside the premises makes the consciousness more flat, and some administrative buildings and offices are already beginning to plant vertical gardens on their walls: they can be seen from the window while working, and this blurs the line between the world inside and outside the room.
How does this tall garden on the north side of the building withstand the icy winds that run over the Seine? It is here that Blanc’s experience in the field of botany and his research cannot be avoided. This living wall is frost-resistant, as it has chosen hundreds of plants characteristic of the undergrowth, which, according to its research, are able to withstand direct light and wind in large quantities.
“When I think of geykher,” he says, referring to the family of stone-sawed plants, which also includes red and American geyher, blooming with small delicate flowers (and their leaves are like palms with very long fingers), “I always think about as their leaves emerge from under the snow in April, fresh and not spoiled by frost, along the sheer hillsides in the shade of giant Californian sequoias.
Blanc works with a palette of deep saturated greens represented in dozens of shades and half tones, from asparagus and fern to forest and "praying mantis" green, and among its working textures everything is from matte to fleecy, spongy and glossy. They all look different depending on the time of day or time of year, their age, current clouds, mists curling along the river, rush hours on the roads, light refractions at dusk. We perceive the colors of the retina receptors of our eyes, and they mix and change endlessly, as if we met them directly in the forest. Blanc prefers leaves to flowers, does not pay attention to creeping shoots - and is very sensitive to the architecture of the leaves. Thousands of individual plants, from which he weaves his canvases, grow leaves of various shapes: tousled, pointed, stellate, serrated, oval, sickle-shaped, rounded, drop-shaped, dull, heart-shaped, pointed, etc. Some grow upward, while others look downward, others grow frivolous or bloom exquisitely, and the fourth start new shoots or try to separate from a single leaf. Knowing the habits and habits of each plant, he draws a map of plantings from a variety of segments, similar to amazing fingerprints or a picture for coloring with numbered cells, and each segment is a specific plant, whose name is indicated right there in Latin.
“It's a picture first,” explains Blanc. - Then she appears texture and depth.
As in any art, which is based on science, not one muse is at the source of his inspiration. Plants are drawn on paper, because of what each design at first really looks like a picture. Then this work of art is transformed into a sensual sculpture of tangible, biological and clipped forms and colors. Leaves, flowers, stems dance in the air a kind of slow ballet. Yes, Blanc, to a certain extent, gives them choreography, but the whole ensemble will sooner or later be given to natural improvisation - not least depending on the weather. Frogs, birds and insects gradually grow roots in the plants, and the wall is filled with a chorus of croaking, tweeting and buzzing; some melodies can be foreseen, and the rest - entirely jazz variations on the theme.
Despite the fact that the plants are naturally curling, clear edges and lines give the final work a tinge of sensual elegance and no mess. The wall looks volume and intricate, but not cluttered. Plants can not be fully called wild, but they grow and bloom in a unique way. In this sense, it is even more like linear chaos — deliberate, self-contained, carefully measured, and masterfully embodied. And free for everyone!
Practical botany, hydraulics, physics and sopromat constitute the necessary backbone of knowledge for such art. Thousands of individual plants are manually placed in special pockets on a flat felt canvas stretched over a rigid frame; it will be fertilized and irrigated according to the rain principle - irrigation from a pipe hidden at the top of the structure with certain periods of time. Despite the absence of soil, the plants quickly take root and flourish, covering both the surface of the felt and the pipe. The overall effect is a big gulp of wildlife that may be stuck in the throat in the solar plexus area. This is a garden that can only be welcomed by standing, at eye level, like another person. He invites you to touch him, inhale his smell. Look up - it rises four floors above you like a vast undergrowth, but not a giant from a fairy tale. Directly close to himself, he creates his own microclimate, here it is shady and quite humid; He suggests: Stand up close and tilt your head back, looking at the dizzying diversity of the flora. Skillfully balancing on the thinnest line between taming and free will, he seems both timid and indomitable.
More detailed information on the book is available on the website of the publishing house
Index
passage
for readers of this blog 25% discount coupon - The Age of Man
Also, this discount is valid on a series of books about science: the New Science and Pop Science
