Tag Archives: The 23 Club

Passion…obsession…chiaroscuro

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Landscape is all of these–all the time–stirring–changing…and so I must write.

…chiaroscuro…

And so it is, too, for Erik Chalmers, the protagonist in The 23 Club, himself strangely attracted to the mysterious Empty Quarter…despite the exhilarating life around his home in the Berner Oberland of the Swiss Alps.

Only his obsession with landscape, to build captivating gardens, could drive him to this place, the Empty Quarter, a place historically incapable of supporting life!

…and chiaroscuro…

This is Erik Chalmers’ landscape journey into the Empty Quarter. This is the Rub al Khali. With its own chiaroscuro, this beast turns obsession inside out.

The 23 Club is a landscape story. It is fiction from fact. It is chiaroscuro. Erik Chalmers’ journey through geography…through history…at best, like the story itself…chiaroscuro…always a blur, always a hope–for clarity, for an inspirational result.

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The 23 Club

Immersed in the contemporary culture of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, against the backdrop of the Empty Quarter, The 23 Club tells the inside story of how an iconic project gets built in the oil rich, Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula.

Table of Contents

  • Desertification
  • It’s 2AM
  • Spike Lounge
  • The Walk
  • Rub Al Khali Coastal
  • Rub Al Khali Inland
  • Liwa Qsar
  • The Nursery
  • Finding Majlis
  • Library Majlis
  • Villa Majlis
  • Long and Short
  • Pilgrimage
  • Wanderweg
  • Appendix 1:  Berner Oberland Back Story
  • Author’s Notes
  • Plant List
  • Colophon

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(to be continued)

Landscape…a passion, or?

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It may be a passion trying to find fertile ground, before it takes root. But then as it takes root, a strange transition occurs–passion into obsession–the roots go wild, they travel hard and fast and far…the obsession grows…and then what?

Landscape Passion

Berner Oberland: a humid, temperate, arable soil forest that I first experienced in real life in the 1960s, and it has been a landscape destination for me every decade since.

Landscape Passion

Rub al Khali: an arid, tropical, topsoil free, sand desert that I first experienced as, if you will permit me, a mesmerizing augmented reality in David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. That was also in the 1960s in the London West End. It became a landscape mystery I have explored every decade since.

Throughout my professional landscape architectural career, I have over and over, walked, drove, read, smelled, heard, felt–explored the above landscapes…they live inside me–they have taken root. They are growing.

From these distinctive landscapes has emerged a landscape obsession, an infatuation that can only be satiated by giving life to landscape stories, fictional stories that derive from personal experience, stories that endeavor to explain those landscape experiences which are…beyond words.

My first landscape story is The 23 Club, and it does unbundle those two landscape images above, revealing…(to be continued)

Three loglines: interesting or boring?

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A logline is a piece of movie jargon.  It is one sentence that tells the whole story.

So, as I continue to develop three landscape stories concurrently, I have revised their loglines:
The 23 Club: Amidst a team of unpredictable rogues and mercenary colleagues, a landscape architect has taken a challenge to build a set of luxurious gardens in the unforgiving sand dune landscape of the Empty Quarter.
Crystal Vision: An expatriate American, a mid-career landscape architect, for six years building and living in a new town in Saudi Arabia embarks on his own pilgrimage which takes him through the peculiar gardens and landscapes of Thailand and Switzerland, tracking a singular clue left by his recently deceased close friend and office colleague.
Yellow Dreams: To finish his last university class, a self directed design study, an American landscape architecture student goes to Morocco for six months where he is twisted by the deafening roar of the North African landscape complexities, endangering the completion of his study–endangering his graduation.
Interesting or boring?  Tell me.

Awkward Beauty: The 23 Club

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SirenDunes01

I have updated a teaser to the landscape novella I have written, The 23 Club.  Please take a look at it and tell me if it is attractive.

Not sure?

Well, if you like landscapes, gardens, plants, international adventure, problem solving, a dose or two of emotional uncertainty, and a good smile every once in a while…you might just give this teaser a try.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaLU30-1Y_k?rel=0&w=560&h=315]