Professor Varady in the Netherlands

This is something of a guest post by proxy. My father, Dr. David Varady, is on his sabbatical and working at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. My mother, meanwhile, is working on visiting in person all the Dutch art she scanned from books during her tenure as the visual [...]

Day of Radiance: A Celebration of Experimental Music and Parks in Philadelphia

Although the day, month, and season Brian Eno met Laraaji Nadabrahmananda in Philadelphia’s New York’s Washington Square Park in 1979 is unknown, their meeting led directly to an important album, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980). In commemoration of this creative encounter, the Philadelphia Ambient Consortium is at the beginning stages of [...]

Post-Parks Conference Thoughts

I’ve taken more notes than I’ve been able to blog just yet, and the conference is already over. I came to the conference to see what opportunities there might be for a former researcher for a major park advocacy group to stroll back into the world of park professionals after cutting his teeth working on [...]

Urban Parks 08: Opening Session

I’ll be blogging the Urban Parks conference session as I attend them. The opening session occurred yesterday evening.

Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente, a community based human rights and environmental organization in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, and recipient of the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, provided a rousing keynote address, “Parks: [...]

Body & Soul: Urban Parks 2008

Over the next few days I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the Body & Soul: International Urban Parks Conference. Besides attending sessions and workshops, I’ll also be monitoring certain sessions to handle audio-visual and other computer issues that often arise. I promise to blog, or at least twitter, interesting ideas gleaned from the conference here at [...]