claude cormier: “pergola”.

To celebrate the inaugural year of the Arts Le Havre Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Montréal-based landscape architect and urban designer Claude Cormier constructed a beautiful impressionist tribute to one of the world’s most famous painters – Le Havre’s own Claude Monet.

Meant to mirror the wisteria flowers that showed up in so many of Monet’s works, “Pergola” is made up of 90,000 plastic balls draped into the trees outside the Le Havre City Hall. I like the weird juxtaposition of the technicolour plastic balls against the organic green of the trees. I kind of want to yank them all down, create a ball pit, and throw some children in it… but this is good too.

Via Lost At E Minor

nikola basic: sea organ.

It’s always a thrill to come across a project so unique you don’t even know what to call it. I guess this would be a landscape architecture sonic sculpture. Or at least that’s what I’ve decided to classify it as. Whatever the name, this is one of the most achingly poetic and beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It’s the personification of nature, the song of the ocean played for human ears…

Designed by architect Nikola Basic and built in Zadar, Croatia, “Sea Organ” is a set of marble steps that descend into the sea. Built inside is a series of 35 calibrated steel tubes of various lengths and tilted and various angles. The movement of the waves pushes air through the tubes and into whistles; each whistle can create up to 7 different chords of five notes each. The pitch and colour of the music depends on the strength and flow of the waves, creating a rolling, organic melody that’s, I guess not surprisingly, reminiscent of whale song.

I almost can’t stand how beautiful this is. “Sea Organ” truly is a musical instrument being played by the sea…

Basic very-deservedly won the European Prize for Urban Public Space for this sublime project.

Via The Pompomist via NotCot