Trees and redacted Boydism's
trees are cool
As the planet warms and burns, just think how the right trees in the right place might cool just a little bit of it. In cities and towns, trees and shrubs in streets might even become habitats where insects, birds and animals live. The street can connect these trees together, and through the network of streets, become an urban bush. We could add so much value to the places where we live....people like being outside when trees make places for us, and the crucial shade and privacy they bring to our houses makes them comfortable places to live. Trees are cool.
streets need trees
Some places seem to need trees more than other places, sometimes it gets so hot that you can’t go outside unless you have some shade. Sometimes houses are baked in the sun, in desperate need of shade, like the poorly equipped houses in the Town Camps of Alice Springs and remote communities, where temperatures can be above 40 degrees day after day. As time goes by we’re getting more and more of these places in Australia. We need to start thinking about streets not just as paved and asphalt corridors, but as habitats - habitats that connect us to our landscape, and our place in the living world. Streets need trees.
trees are not ornaments
A single tree can make a beautiful urban place, but a tree is not an ornament. Featurism, treating trees like ornaments, is the reason we rarely create living habitats in cities. Featurism is the nervous chatter of a culture that hasn’t come to terms with either its place in the world, nor climate change. The privileged status of the ornamental tree, often a non-native species, tries to make us forget where we are. They induce within us an amnesia about how we should work with this country, and in this way, their thinking is dangerous. Trees are not ornaments.
all trees are equal
In architecture and landscape architecture we sometimes make out that some trees are more equal than others, but perhaps all trees are equal. Perhaps privilege shouldn't extend to a single tree? Its not the tree itself that's important, its the connections it has to other trees, the landscape, buildings and people that's important. All trees are equal.
anti-architecture
It's been said that we need more protest movements in architecture. So, where ornamental trees are used as expensive tools to extend the privilege and exclusivity of architecture, anti-architecture is its protest. Anti-architecture stands for the planting of many thousands of nameless trees in places where collectively they may do us some good.
For as little as $3.75, for a properly selected and planted native tree, support anti-architecture with a small donation for the unnamed, non-ornamental tree.
