the new shirts are cooler than the baltic sea. scroll down if you don't believe me

new shirts. ready in a couple weeks. preorder now...

on the Baltic Sea

Two weekends ago, John and I ventured north to the two cities of Lubeck and Travemunde. The city of Lubeck was filled with some amazing old architecture (which is hard to find in the area because much of it was bombed in WWII). The skyline of the city is filled with spires from massive cathedrals and the whole city is surrounded by a moat.

We then went even farther north to the city of Travemunde on the Baltic Sea. In the summer months this beach community is filled with tourists and vacationers. This time of the year though, the Baltic Sea was frozen over, at least a kilometer into the water. It was amazing to explore a new type of landscape, an extreme that neither of us had seen before.

Although we are enjoying Hamburg, it was a nice escape going to a smaller and architecturally rich city and then spending time exploring in the quiet and calm solitude of nature.

Very enclosed streets

Across the water to one of the many cathedrals...this one seemed to be barely standing, many of the buildings seemed to be slumping or leaning in their age.

The gateway into Lubeck

John reaches out to the sea...

These cliffs line the coast. There were pathways along these cliffs allowing one to travel through dense woods and open plains, having an amazing view of the frozen sea the whole way.

The gray of the sky and the large white expanse of the frozen Baltic creates an interesting horizon.

Chinese New Year, Beijing 2010

Hey Guys,
Sorry I havent put up a post yet, but I have been keeping up with all of yall's posts. It looks like everyone has been having great experiences. Teitje is playing soccer, Strader is getting drunk, Garrett is burning stuff, and Ram is creating a new Empire! lol Well anyway I guess I have been waiting for something good to post this whole time and I finally have it. As you all know we were in Beijing for the Chinese New Year last week. We were kicking out the Ox and welcoming the year of the Tiger. Which all the LSU students here are very happy about. China said that this would be one of the biggest New Years celebrations Beijing has ever seen. We soon found out what they meant. Two days before the actual new year's day people start popping fireworks in the streets. We taught it was cool at first but it lasted for TWO WEEKS! We are so tired of hearing fireworks going off until all hours of the night. It really sounds like a war zone outside because of the booms echoing through the streets and buildings. Even though it was a little repetitive we really enjoyed all the festivities. We actually left Beijing for the week but stayed just in time to catch the celebration new years night. It was amazing! We were in a perfect spot to view all the fireworks going off. They estimated at midnight there were 10 million people setting of fireworks! It is and will always be the greatest firework show I have ever seen. Here is a !5 minute video I took that was condensed down to around 6 minutes. The video is good but really doesn't do the show justice.

Intern Duties

Every Friday afternoon here at Reed Hilderbrand, the intern has to go get beer for the office to enjoy in their last couple hours together for the week. Needless to say, there have been quite a few empty bottles to accumulate in the basement. Lucky for me, in Massachusetts you can get 5 cents (why is there not a cents symbol on the keyboard... maybe next to the $ sign) for beer bottles returned to the store.

So, today I gathered up all the bottles and cashed them in for a whopping $8.10. That's 162 bottles in my trunk:

Update from BR

LSU welcomed us back with open arms and a few professors willing to put us right back to work. Our first week back was like any other first week of school... project statements, syllabi, and another cleaning of the studio. In our second week back, we had the annual DESIGN WEEK of the spring semester. This year Design Week was based on LSU Tailgating! I have to admit that I didn’t know what to expect to get out of this week, but it ended up being the best Design Week I have taken part in since being at LSU. With the help of Brad, Jeff, and Kristi, 4 design professionals were brought in from all across the country to help guide us through the week. They included: Liz Burow, Scott Pobiner, Beau Tricina, and Ivan Valin. They all had some pretty interesting work, and they all came to the table with some different views on tailgating that we normally don’t think about. Here is some of their work.











At the end of Design Week, we had a huge tailgate! We cooked up some jambalaya, sausage, alligator, we roasted a 80 lb pig, and we floated 2 kegs in a matter of two hours. Needless to say, it was a good turnout.





Lastly, get a look at our studio. Its a little cleaner than you guys left it.


The pile-o-s*#t that we got rid of...


Formerly TJs desk... Now our meeting space / Coffee station (notice the "coffee table"


Formerly Trader and Baum / Now Christian and Baum


Kristi's Conference Table

Ben has already posted some pictures from the Mississippi River Basin Model, but here are a few more. This place is awesome. Everyone should try and make it up here one day. I dont know why we have never heard of this place.







Glad to see everyone is enjoying their internship, wherever they may be. This is just a little taste of whats going on at home.

Alex Ramirez

Old Elbe River Tunnel

The Alter Elbtunnel is a pedestrian and vehicular tunnel that runs underneath the Elbe River. It was built in 1911 as one of the first underwater tunnels in Europe. The tunnel allowed thousands of workers to easily travel from the main part of Hamburg across the river to the docks and shipyards. The tunnel is now open mostly to pedestrians. The tunnel begins with a 26 meter descent into the earth. For cars they have old wooden elevators that carry the cars down one by one, but I took the long flight of stairs. Once you are below the ground you travel 400 meters under the river through a tiled tunnel. On the other side, I went up almost an identical cavern and emerged into an industrial shipyard. It was interesting to see the city from another perspective. I also through in a picture of one of the many shipping canals that is full massive chunks of ice that ripple with passing of the barges and cargo ships.

<

totally not related to landscape or architecture

if you didn't know jenn and i are engaged now. we had a whitetrash themed party last weekend. costumes, highlife, keystone, and maddog 2020. the cuisine consisted of corndogs, cold pancakes, macaroni and cheese, pork rinds, easy cheese, and deep fried chef boyardee ravioli. i'd like to share this photo with all of you kooks because it's an instant classic.

...Timbeeeer

Ironically enough, I have been timbering a pine forest for an ecologically based project! The common goal for the master plan of the arboretum is to represent the different ecologies and plant communities of the Pearl River drainage basin. A few of the areas/exhibits already on site include the longleaf pine savanna, magnolia-beech upland, pitcher plant bog, and cypress hammock. I am developing the new exhibit which will be the gum pond. Once completed, the area will support a plant community that strives in semi-annual flooding events, which include dominant species of swamp tupelo and water tupelo. I have been hand clearing the slash pine, wax myrtle, and big-leaf galberry within the proposed area so that we can better analyze what is happening with the existing swamp tupelos.

Fellow Mac Users...

Hey everyone! hope work is going well . Now this might old news to many of you but I discovered a very simple way to combine pdfs if you are using a mac. I googled "combine pdfs on mac" and it came up with many suggestions but I downloaded a program called... Combine pdfs and once you download it you basically take all your individual pdfs and and drop them into the drop area and then click merge pdfs. and you re save it. it opens in acrobat or where ever.

It is simple and works good for me because I do a lot of individual documents in illustrator and the office needs everything in one pdf format to show clients or what not. talk to everyone soon!

kurt... post pictures of the wildlife (prairie dogs) soon please. oh and garrett i thought this would interest you- i was running yesterday and I literally ran through a herd of deer. It was scary. It didn't phase them one bit.

-kelly

Greetings From Beijing

Hey guys,

Sorry we havent been updating the blog. Chinas commy goverment makes it illegal to use facebook but we all downloaded a vpn blocker, sneaky sneaky. But anyway it looks like you all are doing some cool stuff and having a good time. We are having a great time in Beijing. Its too dam cold though, we cant wait to see the 40s... Chinese new year is approaching, its going to be the year of the (lsu) tiger which is pretty cool. We have all next week off as the entire country basically shuts down for a week. We are going to Xian by train, its an 8 hour ride and we are going to go see the Terracotta Warriors. We are going to be there for 4 days so im sure we will be checking out the landscape and what not. Anyway, we will try our best to update the blog as frequently as possible. I will post some stuff from work soon, i did some cool sketch-up models and made some image boards. The first pic is a wild night at about 5 am, bars dont close here so the bar scene is comparable to NOLA. The other 2 are of a frozen moat surrounding the Forbidden City. Quite stunning if you will. Till next time, take it easy...

BSLA Awards Submission

For the first couple weeks at Reed Hilderbrand, I have worked on the submission of three projects for annual awards from the BSLA. We could not submit for ASLA Awards this year because Doug Reed (LSU grad) is on the jury. Here are some of the graphics that I made for the award submittals, along with some of the photographs that we submitted.

The Clark Art Institute:

Diagram of plantings used to blend the site into the forest/meadow landscape.

Photograph of the site (bottom of pic), which was cleared in a way to fit in to the pattern of forests and meadows in the hills of western Mass.

Caplan residence:

This is sort of a color-by-elevation done in Vectorworks showing the topography of the site, along with a model (that I did not do) at the same scale.

Existing and proposed site plans created in Vectorworks.

Photograph of site, which is the home of an art collector in Baltimore, MD. You can kind of see the concrete risers in the grass, which I'm finding out is a staple of any Reed Hilderbrand design.

Updated Header

Sorry Kurt about leaving you off, I have updated the header with "Parker"! Also Garrett, Jonathan is in New Zealand ... come to think of it I don't know if he knows about the blog. If anyone keeps in touch with him can yall yet him know about the blog ... Thanks.

Chinatown

Spackman+Mossop+Michaels does a lot of governmental public works projects. This is a before and after photo montage of Sydney's Chinatown. This was given to me on my first day of work. The city of Sydney has asked us to produce to series of these types of images to show the public in a meeting on Monday. The 8 before and after montages are all due on Friday! I can show you all more as I finish them.

Parker, CO

Well Garret here you go. After a weekend of driving with my mom I finally got settled in and my mom flew home today. I am renting a room from a nice lady I found on craigslist. I am in Parker, CO which is a nice town right outside of Denver. I live about 10 minutes away from work and an hour away from some ski resorts. I had my second day of work today and it is pretty cool. I am working under the head designer for the residential division. There are other guys in the office that specialize in lighting or irrigation. There is also a commercial division. The company does everything from design-finish. We even have a nursery. They have about 4 crews that do the construction for pretty much all projects so things move very quickly. Sorry if the photos don't come out right I am new to this blog. You can see my house and the view from the back window. I also put some of the office and my little cubical. Parker is pretty wild. Every day there are geese in the little park behind the house. There are rabbits running around the office and if you drive by an open field it will be scattered with prairie dogs. I will post more later.