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Friday, August 29, 2008
In Palm Desert, California, we read in BBC News, “$20,000 (£11,000) of golden barrel cacti have been stolen in six months.”
In an effort to conserve water in drought-stricken southern California (and money in economically anxious times), the city substituted its “lush lawns” with native desert plants. Now their xeriscaped roadside verges and median strips are lined with cactus, agave, red bird of paradise and lantana. Unfortunately, the “slow-growing varieties, such as golden barrels and agaves, have been targeted” by thieves. The large golden barrels, in particular, “can fetch up to $4,000 (£2,200)” while the smaller ones, with a wholesale price of $100, can be resold in the black market for $50 to $60.
So now “hidden security cameras monitor places where large numbers of the plants are located, while officials will start putting microchips in some cacti, so that stolen ones can be identified.”
They will also soon start recruiting migrant workers for their new Cacti Scene Investigation task force, unfortunately undoing their fiscal conservation.
This crime fighting unit, of course, will inspire a new police procedural drama on network television. CSI: Botany. In each episode, using state of the art gizmos and plain old human insight, dashingly photogenic botanists will hunt down horticultural deviants: orchid thieves; rogue pharmers hired by Iran to breach America's food security; identity theft rings hacking into the wireless networks of major retail stores using outdoor fake shrubbery; guerrilla gardeners; Ken Smith and many others.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's crop cops doing some forensic aerial photography.
The 789 Chevy is not a classic Chevy yet. However, it is one cool car that looks like a blending of the 1957 Chevrolet, 1958 Chevrolet and 1959 Chevrolet classic designs.
BMW pulled somewhat of a Shanghai Surprise with its latest creation, a Gran Turismo-styled vehicle called the Concept CS, which the automaker previewed in advance of its Shanghai Motor Show debut later today in Shanghai.
Clearly, there's plenty of Bangle in the new design, with flame surfacing and a version of the now famous rear end treatment, along with some heritage features such as the return of the 'shark nose' front end. Check out the cut line above the rear fenders, there's a little Dodge Charger in there. BMW says the CS sports potential new design themes which the automaker says signal the next step in what its design language could look like. The CS takes the four-door coupe approach with its greenhouse. With the success Mercedes-Benz CLS, that shouldn't be surprising.
The CS is longer than the 7 Series at 200.8 inches, with a super-size 78-inch width and a 53.5 inch height. In other words, long, low and mean. It rides on typical giant concept wheels, 21-inchers for this car.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Taking inspiration from Michael Jackson — that creature from a future “world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation“ — let's fantasize the modified body becoming a legitimate site for landscape architecture.
Landscape design begins to infuse recombinant DNA techniques into the creative process. To be licensed as landscape architects, interns must be well-versed in advanced genetic engineering. To be able to deform and reconstruct, they may even be required to get a medical degree.
Urban agriculture then takes a provocative turn. We become our own self-fertilizing, mobile edible estates. Locavores measure distances not in miles but in feet and inches, if not at all. Transporting food achieves zero carbon footprint, which becomes negative if the pollution-eating properties of our neo-organs get factored in.
But what of our food service sectors, such as restaurants and supermarkets and the infrastructure that supports them? What of the clothing, personal grooming and home furnishing industries? Will we dwell as usual? No, the urban grid needs to be radically reconfigured.
And what of our parks? There are still large ones, but an instant Central Park can be constituted anywhere and anytime there's a large crowd, for instance, during rush hour traffic on the “streets” or inside/outside the Olympic stadium watching the fireworks of the opening and closing ceremonies. It's the parkless park. Organize a rooftop “barbecue” summer party, and a temporary rooftop garden in the form of blobby geo-bodies gets landscaped. In other words, parks and gardens are still a physical manifestation of urban sociability and diversion.
One thing remains unchanged as well. The body, like gardens, is still a terrain manipulated by the demands of style, fashion and pretense. The body, like gardens, is the site and object of consumption. Grooming your GMed anatomy, like gardening in the aristocratic landscape of Versailles or in the cul-de-sac frontyards of Orange County, is a tactical game of social one-upmanship. No one wants to be caught dead using cheap turf or with a dry patch or having less alterations than Michael Jackson, unless it's considered au courant in your socioeconomic milieu.
In any case, if we find ourselves landless in the crowded city of tomorrow, perhaps amidst the future ultramegametropolis of New Tokyo-Beijing-Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Manila, we can cultivate our own epidermic Eden.
Bouffant Topiary
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The new Jaguar XK is elegant to behold, but it seems to lack the swagger and rakish charm of progenitors like the XK 120, XK SS, XKE and XJ 220.
The Jaguar XK's teardrop-shape headlamps and taillights are one departure. "I looked at the old E-Type elliptical headlights and said, 'It's been done,' " the designer said. "Too obvious. Let's do something different."
The coupe's liftback, however, is pure E-Type. The convertible's rear haunches look a bit swollen, but that is because the trunk had to be big enough to hold the retracted softtop and some luggage.
The Jag does not have a retracting hardtop, like rivals from Cadillac, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz. "There's more power and presence in having two cars — a convertible and a coupe," Mr. Callum said. "It's not just a choice; it's to challenge which one to buy."
Monday, August 25, 2008
Sport car picture,new VW siroco picture on paris auto show 2008.
GM just dropped high resolution images of the upcoming Chevy Cruze small four-door on us in advance of its Paris Motor Show unveil later this year. At first glance, we're quite impressed. The new car gets a striking design which mixes smooth planes and sharp lines for a surprisingly handsome design. Oddly, the tail lights on the Cruze mimic the camouflage-ensconced headlights on the upcoming Chevy Equinox while also receiving the new bold front end from the Chevy Malibu. If this is the direction GM's small cars are going, we've gotta say, our interest is piqued. But that's just the design. We're also told the new 2011 Chevy Cruze will get three engines when it launches in Europe in March of 2009; a 16-valve, 1.6-liter (112 hp) and 1.8-liter (140 hp) gasoline engine, plus a new 2.0-liter turbo diesel (150 HP).
Chevy Cruze In Full Detail
The Audi R8 is a mid-engined sports car released by the German automaker Audi. The R8 was officially launched at the Paris Auto Show on September 30, 2006.
The European Audi R8 will be the first production vehicle to feature all-LED headlights - you can see the reflection in the window..
Audi is a sponsor of the football club FC Bayern München. Therefore you can find the car in the so called "Markenwelt" (World of Brands), a shopping mall in the Allianz Arena, home of the two professional Munich football clubs FC Bayern München and TSV 1860 München.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
As reported by SciDev.net earlier this month, Namibia may soon construct its own solar updraft tower outside its capital city. This renewable-energy power plant isn't going to be a prototype to test the technology's engineering and economic feasibility; rather, it is proposed to be an actual working plant plugged-in directly to the country's electrical grid.
Not to be confused with a solar power tower, to which sunlight is focused by mirrors arrayed at its base, this one produces energy by “heating air inside a vast transparent tent, several kilometres in diameter, at the base of the tower. This hot air rises inside a tall concrete chimney, driving wind turbines linked to generators. The tent can also be used to grow crops.”
We should state that questions of its feasibility don't so much interest us as the image of hundreds of these Apollonian axis mundi dotting the desert, puncturing both sky and land. 
It may be one and a half kilometres high and 280 metres wide, but is that enough to meet the desired energy output?
Will its power be as cheap as coal power?
Can Namibia and its partners afford the $900 million price tag?
Somehow contemplating these and other issues can't be as fascinating as imagining an arid rainforest of solar towers mechanically evapotranspirating in the Kalahari, divining the surrounding air into static mini-hurricanes, their whirring blades immitating the mating rituals of imagined fauna. No one will doubt that this new landscape is as much a natural part of the country's ecology as the boabab tree. In fact, so vast is it that it may be considered a new terrestrial biome and given its own Köppen classification.
Give them a geometrically interesting facade, and everyone will want to cultivate their own rainforest, with the enthusiasm never given to wind farms.
Meanwhile, The New York Times will have to rewrite their recent Namibian travelogue to include this “dazzling geological display” and “otherworldy landscape.”
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Last week, Phronesisaical reminded us again of Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension, a piece of performance art, which they describe as “a brilliant commentary on war and the complicity of those for whom distance creates a sense of false reality and moral neutrality.”
From The National:
For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space [at Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery], while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.
While it won't be as powerful or even catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, how about installing webcams to watch over landscapes as their mineral wealth gets extracted? Next to it would be a garden hose, with which you could target passing miners. Dirt clinging onto them will be washed away; they may even be refreshed by its cool waters. And you, the direct beneficiaries of their labor, will also be cleansed of your consumerist sins. Tele-absolution.
This performance art will be titled It's the least that I could do.
Also last week (and on the same day), Design Under Sky pointed us to TRASH: anycoloryoulike, a public art installation in which “standard piles of trash are replaced with artist-created bags” to decorate the streets of New York. The project simultaneously “beautifies the city and calls attention to waste consumption.”
Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.”
Continuing on with this last week meme, here are two items posted the day before Phronesisaical and Design Under Sky published theirs.
Firstly, BLDGBLOG covered a “bouncy chapel” for the penitent on vacation on the beaches of Sardinia. It “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
It also reminded us of another inflatable church installed this May on a parking lot in Troy, New York. Though not built for traditional worship, it was a 1:1 scale reproduction of the church — “a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery” — that once stood on the same site.
According to Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald:
Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.
Seen through the diaphanous walls of this ghost church, visitors themselves appear ghost-like, ectoplasmic, haunting the same space as the past.
Lots more photos here, via Critical Spatial Practice.
Secondly, Dezeen showed some photos of a stair-like viewing platform, which the Office for Subversive Architecture attached to the 17-kilometer-long, blue fence surrounding London's future Olympic Park. Climb up, and for a moment you can infiltrate “the secrecy surrounding preparations for the 2012 Olympics.”
It recalls to mind Heavy Trash's viewing platforms for gated communities in Los Angeles. Some photos here.
To borrow language from Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, they are framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience and to suit a sociopolitical agenda.
Many have posted Michel de Broin's Superficielle before, and it was Vvork's turn last week. It's a lovely sculpture that renders the landscape into a Cubist puzzle.
Quoting de Broin:
Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror. The large stone, tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings. In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects one cannot be mislead by its presence, yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.
A horrible, horrible last sentence, but a marvelous, marvelous installation nonetheless.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Largely unreported by everyone is a fringe architecture festival scheduled at the same time as the Venice Biennale; also staged in La Serenissima, this Slamdance of the star-studded exhibition is titled Not There: Architecture Beyond Building. Advanced media previews sent to the cut-and-paste cognoscenti suggest that an installation involving a milking rotary will likely be showstopper. Displaying a surprising mastery of artspeak, the Betsky-rejected farmer-artist from Des Moines, Iowa tells us that this event performance considers the current world food crisis; the grotesque beauty of technological efficiency; agriculture as a legitimate art practice; and farms as sites of experimentations and thus possible ground zero for new and alternative theories of landscape architecture. To attract attendees, carry bags will be given away.
It Turns and Returns
On agro
The Renault Laguna Estate was recently named ‘Most Beautiful Car of the Year’ and ‘Most Beautiful Interior of the Year’ by the International Automotive Festival of Paris
Thursday, August 21, 2008
In today's weekly batch of articles on The New York Times' Home & Garden section, there is a good summary of current trends in environmental landscape design: “Over the past five years, as climate change has become more obvious and energy costs have spiraled up, a number of designers have begun to champion an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with a sensitivity to aesthetics and a flexibility that they said was missing from green-gardening crusades of the past.” Go see.
Artfully Planned Decay
