Thursday, September 23

Doppelstock-Containertragwagen

It's been a very Teutonic week for me. It all started when I received a copy of the August issue of Garten+Landschaft, a German landscape architecture journal. Usually I prefer to read about the newest developments in landscape in a language I can understand, but this was different: my Berkeley Master's thesis, Network-Landscape: The Internet and the Urban Site, was featured in the "Campus" section.

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The August Issue also features what I can only imagine is a wonderful piece by one of my 
thesis advisers, Professor Judith Stilgenbauer.




Network-Landscape describes a framework for understanding the relationship between physical places and flows of information over digital networks. In the thesis I describe a typological framework of Network-Landscape interactions that describe how online content can be projected into space or environmental conditions can be sampled and uploaded to the Internet. The graphic featured in Garten+Landschaft illustrates the concept of augmented reality, which is one way that media about a specific place can be projected into mobile network infrastructure. I'm hoping to delve a little more deeply into Network-Landscape in coming posts -- stayed tuned for information about crowdsourcing spatial data, commons-based peer-production, and emergent urbanism.

The arrival of Oktoberfest also delivered another German flavor to my week: beer. I was fortunate to be a last minute invitee to the Tourist Club in Marin, a cabin and beer garden tucked into the hills near Muir Woods.

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The Tourist Club

An intense fog that was initially a bummer ended up being one of the best things about the day. Nearly thick enough to swim through, the mist lent the afternoon a supernatural air -- it seemed that we had found a beer garden in the clouds.

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To get to the German beer garden, we had to hike through a forest of Australian eucalyptus.

The final German element of my week was a discovery I made as I was checking the traffic on my flickr photostream. I was getting hits from German Wikipedia -- something I had never noticed before. Upon further investigation, I learned that a photo of a freight train I took in Berkeley several years ago had been uploaded.

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A double-stack container-train. Or, as they say in Germany, a Doppelstock-Containertragwagen.


While certainly not my most prominent image on Wikipedia, (someone put my photo of the Flatiron's interior on the building's page,) I was delighted to find it. What a fitting wrap up to my German week! Prost!

2 comments:

Leed Certification said...

Wow, the tourist club seemed really packed! Is it normally like this or is it just because of Oktoberfest?

RSA Course said...

Ohh that foggy eucalyptus forest picture is fantastic! I imagine heaven is basically just like a beer garden in the clouds :P