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Thursday, June 10, 2010
To start Year 6, we're looking back briefly to some of our favorite spatial high jinks from our first half-decade.
1) The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad by NaJa & deOstos is a “a gigantic presence of a hanging funeral structure” hovering above the war torn streets of Baghdad. Floating unceasingly “from bright explosive mornings to airless night hours,” it is always lush with growth from an endless supply of dead Iraqis.
2) Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi is a 480-acre dual-function power plant and public marine park floating off the coast of California. Made up of 1,800 Piezoelectric sheets supported by 1,800 buoys, it generates electricity during the weekdays. On the weekend, it morphs into an island (or several islands), the size of which depends on energy consumption.
3) Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev proposes uncovering and preserving the ancient ruins of Seuthopolis, which at the moment is lying at the bottom of a reservoir, using “a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis.”
4) Transgenic Zoo by Peter Yeadon is the existing Toronto Zoo envisioned as part of a mixed development in downtown Toronto, wherein humans live and work alongside genetically modified animals in their habitats.
5) The Retreating Village by Smout Allen rests on a perpetually shifting edge, a twitchy city continually repositioning and reconfiguring itself in response to a slowly unfolding disaster.
6) The City upon a Chicken is a mobile, disaster-averting city with easy access to cheap, local and free range produce, watched by the rest of the world as a model for a sustainable community. (Maybe.)
7) CH2O by Waterproof is a postcard tour through a post-Deluge Switzerland: a landlocked, Alpine country turned island nation.
8) SpongeCity by Niall Kirkwood et al. is a Dutch city embedded with cellular network of Super Absorbent Polymers. During flood events, such as when the dikes are breached, these sponges absorb the water, dramatically swelling the landscape to a height up to 20 meters.
9) Pleistocene rewilding is an extreme form of wildlife conservation strategy in which close relatives of extinct Pleistocene megafauna are reintroduced in order to slow the loss of biodiversity and reestablish key ecological processes.
10) The Berg by Jakob Tigges is a “euphoric” 1,000-meter high mountain terraformed on the grounds of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.
Stay tuned for more spatial high jinks.
