Eyesorit: I love lawns

My definition of an eyesorit is  ‘an urban design which makes the eyes sore but tinged with mirth’, rather as Private Eye Magazine does with its brilliant covers. Normally, they are photographs with bubble captions.Print

The architect, the town planner, the highway engineer and the landscape architect responsible for this codge-up, photographed in London’s Isle of Dogs on 19.4.2009 should only venture out wearing shame-guards. It is a stupid waste of some of the world’s prime urban land. The road and the paths are ugly and too wide. The gardens and the balconies are too small. The lawn is but an exercise ground for lawn mowers. The greenspace  has no use and no beauty. Its maintenance wastes fossil fuels. And yet this example is much better than many of the residential blocks the city has shoved up in the past decade, making London what Rasmussen might have called a ‘less-unique city’. It makes one wonder if professional bodies are worth having – and reminds one of Adam Smith’s remark that: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”


3 thoughts on “Eyesorit: I love lawns

  1. Christine

    This modern typology seems to be influenced by bungalow and flat (house) design in the US, Canada and Australia and New Zealand etc circa 1940s or so.

    The typical english suburban garden prior to these types were if I am correct
    1. the row house garden [flickr.com/photos/53499099@N00/1550656911]
    2. the semi-detached garden [http://www.flickr.com/photos/92832952@N00/1191296135/]
    3. the terrace garden [http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9746901]
    4. the roof garden [http://forums.mooseyscountrygarden.com/garden686-0-asc-0.html].

    The UK suburban garden of the popular imagination outside the UK is probably the cottage garden. [http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/gardens/article4435255.ece]

    It is probably this garden which had the greatest influence on the early suburban gardens in the US, Canada, Australia and NZ etc. My understanding is that suburban gardens in these countries (…which have been consciously designed) have since evolved to suit localised conditions, lifestyles and obsessions including greater active recreational use of the garden and either the use of mixed native and exotic plants or predominantly native or climate suitable plants and garden forms.

    In some Australian cities there is often a greater use of topography and an integration of surrounding native or neighbourhood greenscapes as a background or unconscious foil to the formality or open space of the garden.

    Is this another of the ‘modern’ types now typical in the suburbs in the UK? [www.celtlore.co.uk/garden/lfront.htm]

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