Deformscape is by Faulders Studio, the San Francisco office of architect Thom Faulders. This post is for Paul, who misses posts with mathematical content, and @jennifergardy, who first pointed it out.

“Deformscape is an outdoor extension to a private dwelling in San Francisco. Situated in a tightly packed urban neighborhood, this limited space outdoor sculpture garden inherits a large tree, and uses this sole arboreal presence to establish a gravitational pattern of grooves that are focused towards the tree’s centroid. This asserts the valued presence of the carbon-absorbing tree and its green canopy overhead, while allowing for a maximum of usable surface area below free of other vegetation. To generate the resultant pattern, a 3-dimensional bulge is formed around the tree, and its distorted wire-grid projected onto a 2-dimensional surface. Taking into account appearance effects created by perspective views from inside, the resultant planar surface appears sink around the tree.”

The above location is about 2 blocks north of where I live and work, and if you walk down to the water another 7 or 8 blocks to the northwest, you’re standing on the birthplace of Vancouver. The Hastings Mill was built there in the late 19th century. Lumbermen skidded their logs to the mill along a “corduroy” road made of timbers and logs greased with fish oil. That road traveled along the stretch of Hastings Street that you see here and then down Dunlevy Street, as it’s known today. The road was lined with cheap shacks and hotels and is the origin of the term “skid row,” a distinction that I’m sure must give Vancouverites a sense of civic pride. Today Hastings Street frightens visitors from New York, but it’s not particularly unsafe as long as you’re uninvolved in its local economies; it just looks disturbing because it’s the headquarters of drug use, homelessness and prostitution. The city has continued to try to contain and concentrate those things here since the early 60s, so it’s just getting worse. That’s the Astoria Hotel there in the photo, with its relatively traumatizing beer-and-wine store and a bar that’s suddenly gone hipster and one of the best neon signs in the city and you can’t cross Hastings to buy a cheap bottle of wine there without getting propositioned by johns. I mean if you’re a girl. The empty lot to the right of the hotel has been sitting unused for years and is now, amazingly, going to the be the site of United We Can’s “SOLEfood” Urban Farm, below. It’s an excellent project and I’m volunteering to dig. Come by on Saturday! More info here, news story here and in the Globe and Mail.

You can see downtown Vancouver in the semi-distance at left. If you just keep walking west along Hastings for 15 minutes, you’re there. The mountains that you can see are north and northwest. Thank goodness for Google Street View, because it’s raining and I didn’t want to walk over and taken my own photos of this corner.

Karikomi – Japanese abstract topiary – from the ever-interesting ii-ne-kore blog out of Australia by way of Japan. “ii ne kore is a shorthand version of kore wa ii desu ne, an expression of appreciation or delight in japanese.” That is how I feel when I look at these.

Things for your garden, from right to left: Roman column, menacing bird of prey statue fit for a military dictator, mass-produced standing stone with Chinese inscription, birdbath/fountain with peeing cupid and his parents, cartoon meteorite.

Acutally, this is neither a meteorite nor a fake. It’s a real, naturally occurring rock of some kind. Must be volcanic but I have no idea what it is. Does anyone?. It rusts so it must have iron in it, and it’s hard. If I had the room and the money, I’d buy it.