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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Last week, The Guardian reported that Europe is looking to Africa to serve part of its energy needs by basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.
Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Of course, one is compelled to wonder here what would happen if Africa provided Europe with all of its electricity?
Most likely that won't happen; no European country would want to subject their whole energy security to regional volatility. However, one could imagine a fairly optimistic scenario wherein this energy cooperation would provide a stabilizing force to unstable states, help cure both continents' post-colonial hangover, counteract China's growing geopolitical influence in the region — and all the while reducing carbon emissions to zero.
But, as always, what we are immediately most interested in is this: in what ways would this energy pact be physically manifested in Africa?
As but one illustration of how energy consumption is spatialized, there is the so-called mountaintop mining, whereby whole mountains are leveled off, literally grounded down, to get at coal deposits instead of using tunnels. The erased geology would then be dumped nearby, chocking streams and old growth forests.
In one of the best (and certainly longest) articles on the subject that we have ever come across, Eric Reece, in Harpers Magazine, writes:
Where once there were jagged forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered grey shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale. When visitors to eastern Kentucky first see the effects of this kind of mining, they often say the landscape looks like the Southwest - a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas.
In other words, heating up your ex-urbian McMansion is right now turning Appalachia into Arizona and New Mexico.
One can easily picture Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio, like ambulance chasers circling a scene of devastation, salivating over photos of negative mountains, scheming away at plans to reclaim them from destruction, waiting for that commission.
Unless, of course, Alan Berger and his Project for Reclamation Excellence (P-REX) don't beat them to the job.
But returning back to our question: what will Google Earth tourists see when they point their vigilant eyes towards an electrified North Africa? Will they come upon vast plantations of coronal fields, perfect geometries arrayed in similarly perfect arrangement, irrespective of terrain but nevertheless finely attuned to the sky? Pure form, pure function coexisting without contradiction.
And what about the people on the ground? Where once was desert, might they now enjoy newly sprouted oases fed with water from solar-powered desalination plants?
An Emerald Necklace of Olmstedian design inscribed in the Saharan landscape.
Will foreigners descend en mass to undertake a Bowlesian journey, trekking from one incomprehensible terrain to another equally unfathomable recess of the desert, utterly unprepared for the otherness of it all but obviously so seduced that they travel on, even while in the grips of dysentery, losing themselves psychologically and literally to the sands? All bearings and comfort are lost.
And then just as things couldn't get any stranger, they will come upon a stand of solar updraft towers; there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, forming a kind of arid rainforest mechanically evapotranspirating.
But in their parched and hallucinatory conditions these adventurers will mistake them for Persian tower tombs, divining the surrounding air into a vortex, the whirring blades resonating ghostly howls.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
For the most recent issue of Vice Magazine, the mono-appellated Bahag explored a cemetery colonized by thousands of families who have transformed it into a thriving necropolis.
Tucked within the hyper-saturated Philippine capital, Manila, the denizens (opportunistic urban planners, if you will) of this supposedly counter-urban void have augmented it with some of the trappings of urban living: shared public spaces, vernacular customs, an informal service infrastructure, classrooms and even several karaoke bars.
Quoting Bahag:
Some families ended up here almost accidentally. Some inherited the mausoleums that they now live in from their great-grandparents. Others came from the provinces and couldn’t make enough money to live in the big city. In all cases, they’re basically families with nowhere else to go.
The people who live here manage to extract livelihoods from the dead. Teenagers carry coffins for 50 Filipino pesos—about 50 American cents. Children collect scrap metal, plastic, and other garbage to sell. Their fathers are employed to repair and maintain tombs while their mothers maintain the house, which could be the family mausoleum or the mausoleum of their employers. Rent-free shanties are wedged between or on top of crypts.
It's an adaptive reuse carried out at an urban scale, a reflection of economic realities and communal creativity rather than a particular disregard for the dead.
Cemeteries as Major Disaster Response Protocol
“On evacuation and atomization uses his self-energy and on drifting atomization sea waters skywards”
at 12:23 PM
After going through Josef Solc's website detailing his designs for an anti-hurricane ship, you will most likely come away unconvinced that it will actually knock off hurricanes and typhoons dead on their tracks or that his machine would at least dampen their cyclonic strength to an appreciable level — that is, kill maybe just one or two people and cause a few million dollars in damages instead of wiping off entire cities and slashing in half the GDP of Haiti.
What you might come away with instead — perhaps apart from a strange liking to the guy's beautifully whacky prose, like Yoda attempting Walt Whitman or a UN interpreter on crack — is a suspicion that the whole thing is merely an elaborate Nigerian scam to bait our grandparents anxious to protect their retirement homes from hurricanes and trick incompetent FEMA directors into parting with taxpayers' money to fund useless disaster mitigation schemes.
But in all earnestness, we don't really care. That thing should be built, regardless of buildability, scientific merit and cost.
And then instead of sending it out to sea to wait for the next Category 5 storm, you put it on wheels or, better yet, make it hover on its own aeolian power, after which you let it loose on your own private national park, totally misunderstanding the idea that disasters — like wildfires — can sometimes be beneficial and are actually an essential part of an ecosystem.
There, it will scour the landscape like a runaway garden-variety water hose, level trees as if inspired by the Tunguska event or Mount St. Helens post-1980, carve out a new drainage basin, reconfigure ecology with weather.
It's designing with nature.
Shedding all pretense of humanitarianism, then, Josef Solc will probably have to find private individuals to fund his project, for instance, a Hollywood celebrity who wants to balance out his well-publicized acts of philanthropy with something that's completely bizarre (even by the standards of Michael Jackson), something that's disgustingly but forgivably selfish like buying one humongous toy.
Why buy silly motorcycles or start up yet another nightclub where you idle your time and money away when you could divert at least a part of your generous profit-sharing deal to making experimental landscapes. And by experimental landscapes we don't mean building artificial volcanoes in the middle of some pimped out Olympic-size swimming pool — though if it did actually spew out part of the Earth's core, that could be interesting.
Not that he has shown other overriding interests apart from furthering his metrosexual lifestyle but we think it would be fantastic to learn nonetheless that David Beckham has bought a sizable chunk of Public Lands in Nevada and plans to retire there as an avant-gardener. Instead of attending present and future Spice Girls reunion concerts, he's out there playing with his anti-hurricane toy, recreating storms past, designing new landscapes.
Instead of Britney Spears as the paradigm for celebrity living, there is a shift towards François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville as a model for conspicuous consumption.
Obviously, Josef Solc need not ingratiate himself to an eccentric denizen of Los Angeles as there must be a private hedge fund manager, recently flushed with millions of dollars from rising oil prices, who is willing to patronize him, thus initiating the most fruitful patron-artist relationship of the age and engendering some of the most interesting landscape architecture ever — a collaboration not seen since the Sun King hired Le Nôtre or maybe since the popes hired Michelangelo and his contemporaries to remodel the Eternal City.
Instead of buying the latest Hermès satchel, you buy a weather machine.
Portable Hurricane
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The world is so unkind to pharmaceutical agriculture that some pharmers have gone underground to conduct their Doctor Moreauvian experiments.
In an article published a little over two years ago in Wired, we learn that a team of scientists from Purdue University, in partnership with Controlled Pharming Ventures LLC, had designed and built a subterranean experimental field inside a 60-acre former limestone mine in southern Indiana.
They did so not to escape the loud protestations of environmentalists and the uncomfortable attention from government regulators and consumer groups but rather for safety reasons, believing that pharming in an enclosed, climate-controlled environment rather than in the “bucolic, sun-dappled landscape” above ground would lessen the chance of their transgenic crops contaminating the regular food supply chain.
But apart from wanting to insure themselves against expensive civil litigation and perhaps even from criminal prosecution, the team of entrepreneurs also wanted to develop more efficient techniques and, with encouraging results, jump start a beleaguered industry suffering from bad publicity and government restrictions. Fortunately for them, the initial year-long trial was indeed very promising. Their experiment showed that their growth chamber generated an average yield of genetically modified corn (267 bushels per acre) higher than that of normal field corn in the U.S. (142 bushels per acre).
In other words, you can indeed grow cash crops in sub-optimal conditions in an underground mine — solid empirical data to excite optimism among pharmaceutical companies. (And Russian doomsday cults.)
If cave pharming does indeed catch on in the pharmaceutical industry, how would that actually be manifested in the landscape?
One could easily imagine, among many scenarios, Monsanto and Johnson & Johnson combining their expertise and their billions of cash to excavate a complex of scalable void farms, some of which are dug so deep that hydrothermal energy can be harvested to power the entire tunnel network, beneath obsolete farms that have been returned back to their pre-agricultural state or converted into either the new Yellowstone to mask the aberrant activities occurring below or a Pleistocene Park as surface evidence of a subterranean biotech utopia.
Going into a somewhat different trajectory, specifically to continue a line of speculation from a previous post on an African bridge house: can someone be fundamentally altered — like the corn they're cultivating to produce cancer cures — while living quasi-permanently in flourescent-lit dampness and hermetic seclusion, detached from the vagaries of weather, time and natural pollination, amidst pure geology?
Pharmland™
Monday, November 12, 2007
In a very recent post, I started talking about a Swiss company's snow avalanche life-jacket and then somehow ended up writing a drive-by-proposal for a migratory spa town, which the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan would set up during a wildfire event in southern California in the hopes of attaining — in the middle of a coronal maelstrom — psychic rejuvenation within its protective walls, because rehab centers, county jail cells, Starbucks and other celebrity landscape du jour have earlier failed to give them what it is that they seem to always be photographed seeking.
I then stated briefly that through their insulated windows they would be privy to “a cinematic struggle better than what is shown at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard.” Or an analogue surface of the sun.
A few days hence, I discovered some photographs from the United States Geological Survey that might as well have been taken from these imagined mobile therapeutic chambers. 
To be more accurate, these sublime scenes of wildlife escaping the fires and then returning to a devastated landscape were captured “using a 'camera trap,' a camera wired with motion sensors to automatically take photos when the sensors detect movement in the camera’s field of view.”
Quoting further:
This camera trap is on the former El Toro Marine Base, an area that burned last week in the Orange County Santiago Fire. This particular area was the southernmost extension of the fire, where it crossed over a toll road into this small peninsula of habitat surrounded on the other three sides by urban development, small agricultural fields and the main part of the former Marine Base.
It's yet another extensive surveillance system, one that monitors, in this case, “elusive, often-nocturnal animals” as they inhabit a “complex landscape of open spaces, roads and urban areas.” In other words, it isn't too dissimilar from the one stalking the streets of Los Angeles.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
In an undated BBC News photo essay, Katrina Manson writes:
During Sierra Leone's brutal 1991 - 2002 civil war, dozens of people were executed on the Aberdeen Road bridge in the seaside capital, Freetown.
Their bodies were thrown into the fishing waters below.
While most of those who could afford to get out of the country did, others hid anywhere they could manage.
And one of the places where people took refuge away from the violence happened to be the bridge itself. Over a hundred people, we read, sought shelter there as executions took place above.
Today, the bridge is home to a family of six.
For such a nontraditional house, dwelling and domesticity still take on some characteristics that are all too conventional.
The entrance, for instance, is “via a rickety wooden ladder and small rectangular hole in the concrete base.” It's a porous boundary, in other words, clearly demarcated. A spatialized event.
There is a cooking area, which is presumably separate from where the family sleeps. Concerns for ornaments and a sense of ownership are evident in the wall mural containing “images of helicopters, drums, animals and black people and white people living in harmony.”
The wife cooks.
Perhaps in another nontraditional house in a more politically and economically stable location, one hopes to hear of their inhabitants and their mode of living changed fundamentally.
Because surely it would be interesting to find out, among other things, that after living in a private space station orbiting the moon and the earth in a figure-8 trajectory, a young married couple have decided to forgo messy genetic exchanges altogether and instead rear clones of themselves exclusively. There's something in the habitation modules vibrating in concert with the solar flares that cancels out prejudices and moral inhibitions.
And that a suburban family transplanted into cave no longer waste their time worrying about jobs or the children's education or where they sleep. Their deep, dewy and spatially indeterminate abode has inspired them to follow a metaphysical lifestyle unknown to everyone in the history of monasticism. They don't eat breakfast. They can now move as if gravity is optional.
You used to vote Democratic, but after squatting in a mall undetected for years, you now vote Republican.
Living in a dam would be ridiculously fun. But to hear that the only things that have changed are your mailing address and monthly mortgage payments, and that you've made yourself a generic kitchen, bedroom and salon fitted with ornaments ordered from William & Sonoma, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Ikea, respectively, could get disgustingly boring fast.
The view may be spectacular but what if the view can cause the emergence of photogenic extrahuman abilities?
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Public Fountain by Charles Goldman is a “self-contained, portable and solar powered fountain. It is designed to bring the gathering point — that the traditional urban fountain often is — into the city's more tangential zones.”
Of course, there needs to be an army of autonomous Goldman fountains, self-aware and self-driven water features in a continuous balletic performance on the streets and sidewalks and all of the public spaces of Manhattan, replicating above ground the island's subterranean channels of sewage and contaminated hydrology, forming geometries and patterns that only the bastard petri dish love child of Busby Berkeley and Piet Mondrian can imagine.
It's a deterrestrialized river-on-wheels.
In unairconditioned neighborhoods where hacking fire hydrants is a favorite and necessary summertime activity, they spurt a refreshing frothy gaiety.
And in trash-hewn alleys and neglected parks, they offer respite — an oasis in the urban desert — to the homeless, drug addicts and prostitutes.
Or maybe they will render E8. That will be the most awesome public fountain ever!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Whether it is the spectacular result of a collaboration between Chetwood Associates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, an ancient Greek myth-maker and ILM special effects supervisors or not, the Wind Dam is truly something to behold, either digitally or when fully realized.
From Building Design:
The dam, which would be located over a gorge at Lake [Ladoga] in north-west Russia, includes a cup-shaped spinnaker sail, believed to be the first of its kind, which will generate renewable energy by funnelling the wind through an attached turbine.
The spinnaker shape is similar to the mainsail of a yacht, and is thought to be particularly effective in capturing wind.
Project architect Laurie Chetwood, said that the shape of the sail was influenced by functionality and a desire to produce something “sculptural”.
No doubt Chetwood and colleagues will next propose to gouge a network of artificial valleys in the Tibetan Plateau and then install thousands of these lepidopterian wind turbines to alleviate China's energy needs. A new kind of prayer flags billowing between jagged peaks and ridges, simultaneously symbolizing Tibet's complete colonization and echoing the last few sighs of a dying culture.
Extrapolating a bit further, why not bore a Turrellian complex of tunnels through the world's mountain ranges, specifically those soon to be depleted of their glaciers, wherein wind turbines are strategically inserted. Bolivia may not supplant Venezuela as South America's premier energy producer, but its sonic landscape will surely generate billions in tourism revenues. Andean folk pipe music writ large.
The Jersey Array
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Speaking of avant-garde wear, the Swiss company, Snowpulse, is selling an avalanche protection gear that can protect skiers and general hikers if they happen to get attacked by a mountain.
Following are some of their selling points:
Similarly to a life-jacket used in the sea, the Life Bag keeps you on your back and your head out of the snow. It’s the best solution to avoid being asphyxiated.
Snowpulse airbags offer a high added value option: the automatic deflation of your airbag. The airbag deflation creates a cavity around the victim. This cavity is a real help to extract the victim and also provides 150 Liters of air to breath if you are buried. Survival time is therefore drastically increased.
Up to 20% of avalanche deaths are due to traumas. Snowpulse airbags are the only one designed to protect your head and thorax against shocks.
What the company should manufacture next is a model that can increase survivability if you happen to be buried in a hundred feet of snow and perhaps at a deeper stratum.
Let's say you and your adventure buddies are traversing a little explored valley in the Rockies. The snow is freshly fallen, the smell of pine perfumes the air, the sun gently pricking your frozen cheeks. And then you hear a low rumbling sound, and it's getting louder and louder. But even before you notice that an avalanche is racing towards you, the motion detectors built into your Life Bags Xtreme® automatically trigger rapid inflation so that in nanoseconds you are enveloped in a protective bubble stocked with supplies to last weeks. Your companions, too, are safely domiciled inside their own caverns, to which your wearable anti-avalanche home plugs in instinctively with filamental tunnels. Under all that snow, a quaint mountain hamlet forms.
And perhaps this has been planned all along. You're a new breed of extreme property developers intent on developing a new ex-urb of Denver located deep in the wilderness. Avalanche urbanism.
Or: you're hiking through parched landscapes on the periphery of Los Angeles. And as predicted by FEMA, a perfect firestorm appears from behind a ridge, soon to engulf you and your companions. Of course, no one panics, because everyone's wearable anti-wildfire homes swell to form a protective bubble filled with supercooled air. And since there's a minibar, everyone waits out the fires.
Through insulated windows, you see a cinematic struggle better than what is shown at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Disaster tourism.
One even swears that he's on the surface of the sun.
Others think that they're experiencing some sort of therapeutic cleansing. It's the new California spa town: mobile, ridiculously trendy and a passing fad.
Sites of Managed Anxiety
Wearable Homes
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
It's All Hallows Eve once again, and this year, for my costume, I've decided to replicate Nicholas de Larmessin's design for the Fountain Maker's Costume. It may at first seem insufficiently frightful and quite campy, like Louis XV's high heels or an ancien régime beauty spot.
However, once I tell people that though the spraying jets and frothy pools are mere representations in generic cardboard but back at home all the faucets have been turned on at full flush — i.e., for such frivolity and hydrological gaiety, Lake Michigan is presently being drained of its clean waters wastefully, while the American South and Southwest are in the midst of a historic drought; while children in developing countries are dying due to the lack of accessible freshwater; mothers in China are giving birth to infants with mental defects because they had drunk tainted water; while genocide brought on by drought erupts in parts of the world; while aquifers everywhere are getting drained faster than it can be replenished, the imbalance of which will result in the collapse of global food security; and while Las Vegas and Phoenix want to turn Canada's river rich western territories into a desert.
When all this has been said, when people realize that they've wasted 30 minutes listening to me when they could have spend all that time drinking and whoring, they will surely be horrified by my Larmessin couture.
Happy Halloween!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Behold the future avant-gardener, conceived at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, “the world's only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence,” as an extraterrestrial explorer to be deployed to Mars where “[i]ts roots would explore the soil, while power and telecommunications are provided by the main stem and the solar 'leaves.'”
And when its science mission has ended, it will then prune a full scale version of Versailles Gardens out of Martian bedrock.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Here are a couple of snapshots taken from DeLaval's business presentation for its milking rotaries, the TURN-STYLES™ PR1100 and PR2100. During the brief seconds when the camera locks in on the “parlours” as they slowly twirl about their bovine passengers, industrial food production is transformed (un)expectedly into a Busby Berkeley's musical number.
In their precisely calibrated choreography, these elegantly designed machines are undeniably mesmerizing. Singularities subsumed by symmetry and repetition, merged wholly into a patterned geometry. Frolic and hypnotic spectacle together side by side with cooly modernist efficiency. And though the rotaries do not appear to conflict with Cartesian topography, any sense of site and context can be nullified if you ignore the spoken and textual commentaries in the videos.
But perhaps they can still defy gravity. Rotate them fast enough and they will detach, a gyroscopic whirligig on its way to a dairy farm halfway across the world. With cows still on board.
Or better yet, for one week each year, the cows are replaced by these bloggers plus Kazys Varnelis, who are herded daily and singly into the compartments to blog whatever they want to write about while they are turned and “pampered” until they are returned exactly one hour later. And for anyone who did not produce an interesting post by the deadline, the abattoir awaits. Such is the brutal nature of the blogosphere.
Our Daily Bread
Chicken Wing
Brave New Edible Estates
Sunday, October 21, 2007
A group calling itself the ATM Azionefuturista 2007 has turned one of Rome's most famous monuments into a bloodied protest canvas.
One of its members, in full Futurist glee, “threw a bucket of red paint or dye into Rome's Trevi Fountain on Friday, coloring the waters of the 18th-century monument bright red in front of a crowd of astonished tourists and residents.”
The man escaped, leaving the fountain, which normally runs on a closed cycle, spouting red water. Police arrived and technicians briefly shut off the water before restoring a clear flow.
Experts said the baroque fountain was not permanently damaged and the marble statues depicting the sea deity Neptune on his chariot had not absorbed the color.
At first I thought the guy read an advance copy of The New York Times Magazine's extended report on the neverending water problems of the American Southwest, and so was compelled to carry out this guerrilla attack to highlight the impending climate change disaster to an audience of intensive carbon-producing tourists. Like a self-righteous Moses to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.
But alas, based on leaflets found nearby, officials think that he was simply protesting against the “expenses incurred in organizing the Rome Film Festival.” The red waters of the Trevi, then, “symbolically referred to the event's red carpet.”
It was one simple gesture by one person, but the whole world has taken notice. So perhaps next year, another famous fountain will be made to spew vermillion waters — or preferably, made to stagnate and concoct a toxic stew of fluorescent green algae — to successfully call international attention to our present shared hydrological crisis.
Since the fountain is constantly being monitored by CCTV cameras, there is a video of the incident:
But here are some clearer photos, courtesy of Corriere della Serra:
The spirit of Umberto Boccioni still hovers over the heady waters of Italy.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Immediately after posting this photo of exposed layered deposits in Mars, I discovered these recently released images of possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory. Like the earlier one, these obscenely stunning landscape photographs were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. There are 153 in all.
One wonders if the most interesting landscape photographers aren't working here on earth and are rather spaceborne or on other planets, collaborating with NASA and government contractors. Could we be in another WPA era?
Are Opportunity and Spirit the new Anselm Adams?
Since I couldn't resist posting just one image, there will be two this time. The first one shows the swirling geology of Candor Chasma, a major canyon of Valles Marineris; the other shows a slice of East Meridiani, though it's obviously a lost texturological work by Jean Dubuffet.
Interestingly, both seem imminently palpable. If you were to decide to reach out for your computer screen, you might actually touch something other than a mechanically smooth surface. Lick it and you'll taste Martian salt.
In any case, enjoy!
Thursday, October 18, 2007
When Jardinators have lived out their usefulness, they apparently go to pasture in Ferropolis.
Located right in the middle of a former open-pit mine near the city of Dessau, in Bauhaus country, it is part open air museum and part multimedia venue inhabited by monolithic machines, perhaps belonging to the same species that had turned the surrounding landscape into a post-industrial desert.
Meant to be “an ominous monument and symbol of the extensive exploitation of the countryside and the ecological consequences of doing so,” this City of Iron “also represents a new start in dealing with nature and the countryside. It is an attempt, at the end of an epoch, to create new perspectives for a landscape depleted by industrial exploitation. It is also an attempt to find answers to what are currently two of the most frequently asked questions: where is structural change in the region leading, and what will a post-industrial cultural landscape look like?”
To both questions, Peter Latz has some great answers at Landshaftspark Duisburg-Nord.
And of course, there's Niall Kirkwood's Manufactured Sites. It's no coffee table book, and maybe a little bit technical for the lay person, but it's an incredibly important book.
Meanwhile, we read that there are only five mechano-titans. Surely that isn't enough. There should be at least 1,000, either arranged like the formal aeronautical gardens at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or irregularly, an inorganic forest waiting for Bangladeshi migrant loggers and for descendants of the Brothers Grimm to pen new fairy tales.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
No one really wants global warming. Unless you are mentally disturbed, you wouldn't want to see whole nations and cities hydrologically erased or entire ecologies and cultures go extinct. Some may find designing for climate change refugees an extremely fascinating studio project, but the growing inevitability of catastrophic displacements and their attendant economic and social upheavals must surely make everyone sleepless at night.
But then there's Greenland.
BBC News, off-grid and National Geographic tell us that higher temperatures and retreating ice caps are opening up the island's “vast mineral rich wilderness” to exploration. From the off-grid article:
The belief in Greenland’s potential riches stems from the fact that the geology is identical to that found across the now ice-free north-west passage in Canada, which has led to large opencast mining in the Arctic region.
But Greenland has other potential riches too. Gold has been discovered and is already being mined, although so far at a loss, and there are deposits of other minerals such as zinc, that could be exploited. Oil giants are negotiating licences to explore blocks of the coastline covering thousands of square miles.
The melting glaciers themselves may even have some economic benefits, as a source of hydroelectricity. In fact, according to the BBC News article, “Greenland has signed a memorandum of understanding with the US company Alcoa to build a huge aluminium smelter using the country's plentiful water reserves.”
What all these mean, then, is that Greenland could achieve financial independence from Denmark, who each year gives the province about $600m, and perhaps full political independence. So while global warming could end a traditional way of life, particularly those of the Inuit in the north of the country, they may gain a new nation with a new (and very large) immigrant population of prospectors.
A newly revealed landscape for creating new cultural identities.
In any case, a few things:
1) A new landscape needs, of course, a new breed of landscape architects.
2) What if Greenland — realizing how strategically important it will be in an iceless-Arctic-Ocean and navigable-Northwest-Passage future — rents the Thule Air Base to the U.S. for a whopping $600m+ a year? What if instead of letting Halliburton or some other sinister oil company run rampant around its virgin territory, the U.S. military somehow becomes a sort of environmental steward? There will be some fascinating examples of greenwashing, obviously, but what subtopian landscapes will come about?
3) And this is worth asking again: What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain? How about Atlanta?
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
There was an interesting article published in the August 2007 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine about Punta Pite, a residential development on the Chilean coast with perhaps the most awesome oceanside trail system.
Actually, it is more than awesome. The opening image, somewhat similar to the one above, immediately put me into a state of delirious ecstasy, a reaction no other article published by the mothership has ever elicited from me, as far as I can recall.
The article, parts of which appear online, begins thus:
Punta Pite is a 27-acre piece of land that follows the contours of a bay between Zapallar and Papudo, two sea towns located 93 miles north of Santiago, Chile. A residential development planned and built here between 2004 and 2006 takes its name from this place and is laid out in a way that surrenders to the power and beauty of the ocean. It was developed as a series of parts connected by a walking path, one part of which seems to be sculpted out of the existing cliffs, while the other part passes through a restored creed that were meant to create one single spatial experience of the site.
While the article says these Inca-like stony trails are on private property, it also reports that they will be open to the public in the coming months.
Nothing like Punta Pite's cliffside walking path would probably be built in the U.S., or at the very least minor design tweaks would have to be implemented to meet federal regulations and to appease anxious attorneys. Certainly if it's publicly funded, the Americans with Disabilities Act would swoop down demanding railings and specifying turning curves and maximum ramp gradients. And with even more certainty, developers would not want to subject themselves to expensive litigations.
There are, of course, many landscape projects that meet both ADA and attorney approvals and still look and work marvelously. Bureaucratic regulations are in and of themselves not anathemas to great design as some vocally voice.
But the incredible thing about the path, or El sendero, at Punta Pite is the possibility for multiple-compound fractures and even death. It is designed to be accessible and relatively safe, but landscape architect Teresa Moller wonderfully did not diminish the sublime quality of the landscape — and by sublime, I mean, terrifying.
Knocks-you-unconcsious-and-petrifies-your-soul-as-if-falling-eternally-into-the-abyss terrifying!
One second you're enjoying the cliffs, its geology, the ocean crashing against the rocks. You're lulled by the beauty of it all, but then exactly one second later, you slip and bash your head down below.
One second you are assured solidity and logical direction, and the next second, you find yourself unable to move, incapacitated by too much landscape, by the knowledge that your foot is but a millimeter away from the precipice and bloody ecstasy.
Or perhaps you find yourself lost, completely subsumed by the wilderness — an unintended reenactment of Picnic at Hanging Rock or a similarly accidental homage to the late Michelangelo Antonioni.
Or so I imagined, as I obviously have yet to visit the site. But the photos are quite suggestive.
Meanwhile, Moller explains in the article that she was guided in her design by “the words of a famous Chilean poet who describes Chile as 'pure geography.'” We are not told who this poet is, but one wonders if the country will now give birth to a national Romantic movement, a whole new generation writing peans to geomorphology, tectonics, hydrology and coastal erosion.
Or perhaps dark Romantic souls will haunt these cliffs, searching for a more sinister, far truer side to Nature, but in finding it too incomprehensible that even Edgar Allen Poe will have trouble expressing it in paper, will sink ever deeper into mire.
How deeply am I willing to go into the wilderness?
