Branner Blog

Ian McHarg (1920-2001) founded the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1969 published his classic Design with Nature. Before computers were ubiquitous, it was difficult to store, process and display large amounts of spatial data. Many environmental and social factors were therefore ignored in planning highway and residential projects. McHarg devised a method to display multiple “factors,” such as water, forest, wildlife, residential, historic. He assigned each factor a value and created a map transparency for it, with dark tones signifying greatest value. By overlaying the transparencies on a topographic map, one could immediately grasp which areas should be preserved for agriculture, for example.

Nowadays, the same results are achieved by turning on multi-color GIS layers. But McHarg’s notions of how to balance conflicting values are as pertinent today as in 1969.

Copies of this classic work are at Falconer Biology Library, and at SAL 1-2.

In 1994, the Wiley Series in Sustainable Design published a 25th anniversary edition of the book.

The ability to add your own data to Google Earth has meant a proliferation of geologically related sites and applications. Here are a couple of sites that will give you a sense of what’s possible. I’ll note more on this blog in subsequent weeks.

San Diego State University’s Department of Geological Sciences has a whole web page devoted to Google Earth and geology. They’ve layered 30′x60′ geologic quad maps, the geologic map of California, a map from a local field trip guide, and worldwide imagery showing the age of the sea floor, and volcanoes of the earth.

The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College has created a spiffy Website based upon an impromptu talk given by Peter Selkin at the University of Washington, Tacoma. It’s choc-a-block full of useful geologic datasets, guides to navigation, and case studies of how it’s used in geologic education. Beware broken links - useful nonetheless.

If you, like me, have been waiting to hear an engineer’s take on April 30th’s MacArthur maze collapse, check out the John A. Blume Distinguished Lecture Series on Friday. Dean Frieder Sieble from UC San Diego’s School of Engineering will give a talk entitled “Protecting our Infrastructure Against Natural and Man-made Hazards.” I assume there will be some talk of the maze.

Details:
May 10, 2007
4:15pm
Bldg. 320, Room 105
Stanford University

If your life doesn’t revolve around the state of Bay Area bridges, follow the links below to read what happened and how it will be fixed:
From the SF Chronicle.

From Caltrans.

Berkeley Civil Engineering Professor will study MacArthur Maze collapse.