|
|
|---|
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
According to SciDev.Net, “swarming micro air vehicles” might soon be deployed over disaster areas to set up emergency wireless networks. Developed by scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, these flying robots will be “emitting a wireless signal” to establish “temporary radio or mobile communication networks to coordinate the search for survivors.”
“To distribute the vehicles effectively above a designated zone,” the article goes on, the research team “took inspiration from the way ants leave chemical trails to guide colonies to sources of food. Some of the vehicles hover in small circles linked to the location of rescuers and the other vehicles navigate around these markers.”
Elsewhere and earlier, we learned from Wired that, should dictators cut off their country from the internet, there are ways to restore connectivity to the populace. The U.S. military, for instance, has converted a cargo plane into an “airborne broadcasting center,” which “hypothetically” can boost Wi-Fi bars in bandwidth-denied areas to full strength. Any of the military's aircrafts can be converted into “cell towers in the sky” by attaching cellular pods to their wings or bellies.
To this arsenal, one can supposedly add the above flying robots. When the switch is turned off, they'll be released from their roost to swarm over revolutionary spaces to churn up an electromagnetic storm of Facebook schedules, retweets and Anderson Cooper's adoring visage.
But instead of hovering over disaster and conflict areas, how about urban and rural dead zones or in even more remote locales? And instead of drones and toy airplanes, you conscript pigeons, starlings and other flying weeds into a wi-fi network of cyborg fauna?
This network needn't be online all the time. The birds, after all, need some rest. So you simply let them loose, say, during rush hour to temporarily augment the network.
One imagines urban homesteaders converting a water tank into an aviary for their robo-starlings, next to their urban apiaries, urban chicken coops and urban farming tool shed. When they need to communicate with other urban homesteaders, either nearby or in another Detroit-like ruin pornscape, they only need to open the hatch. It's an artisanal wi-fi for networked off-grid living.
In order to lessen e-waste, each starling is equipped with a homing beacon, which will signal home should the animal die in flight. The homesteader simply has to trace the electronic beeps to collect the carcass and its outfittings. In the meantime, the beacon will be powered by the decaying organic matter.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
In case you need reminding, you now only have exactly one month to submit to Bracket 2.
Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
...
Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.
And in case you've yet to begin work on your submission and need a starting point, check out these videos of landslides and the infrastructural counter-measures to mitigate and manage an ever shifting landscape.
A mountain ex-urb of catching dams, deflection walls, earth sewers and mesh-bracketed hillside roads. Single-family deflection-dam houses with self-raking zen rock gardens, a fog of pulverized boulders billowing from the occasional rockslide giving the place a touch of the arcadian. Debris basins as community parks braceleted through a creeping city.
When the mountains have been denuded of vegetation and the torrents are on their way, everyone will go about their daily business as usual, sleep peacefully while boulders and mud flow around them. Should their homes topple when the ground beneath gives way, remember that they were designed in the same way that the International Space Station was designed for astronauts floating in a gravity-free environment, or Fred Astaire.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
On the landslide taxonomy above, the British Geological Survey writes:
The main classification criteria are: type of movement (falls, topples, slides spreads, flows), and type of material involved in the movement (rock, debris, earth). Combining movement and material type terms enables an appropriately descriptive landslide name to be formulated. Naming can become more detailed with the addition of other descriptive details related to activity state, water content , rate of movement, etc., if known (e.g. active, complex, extremely rapid, dry rock fall-debris flow).
Only a small selection of the wide spectrum of landslide types that may develop in nature are shown here.
Surely the image needs to be accompanied by an illustrative taxonomy of mitigative measures against landslides showing a wide spectrum of programs and strategies for inhabiting the geological wilderness.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Inscribed on that liminal space where civilization messily interfaces with the wilderness is a series of monumental earthworks protecting the Icelandic town of Siglufjörður from snow avalanches and landslides.
While the planning and construction of these defense structures were the work of a multi-disciplanary team, for our own purposes, we'll concentrate on the contributions of the landscape architects involved in the project, specifically the Reykjavík-based firm of Landslag.
These anti-disaster tumuli were built in two phases. Completed in 1999, Phase I involved the construction of two deflecting dams on the south end of town. These direct avalanches from the most hazardous locations away from the populated area. The smaller of these dams, at 200m long and 15-16m high, is not as visible as the larger dam, which measures 700m long and 18m high and runs prominently up along the mountainside to an elevation of 180m.
Completed in 2008, Phase II involved the construction of 6 walls and dikes running along the entire mountainward side of Siglufjörður. Unlike the two deflecting dams built in Phase 1, these are intended to stop the flow of an avalanche rather than change its course.
During the early planning stages of the project, there were concerns about the negative social and even psychological impact of these massive landscape alterations on the town's residents, who, despite acknowledging their vital role in preventing fatalities and property damage, might nevertheless show strong resistance to such large-scale structures. This is where Landslag came in.
Working closely with the engineers, geophysicists and meteorologists, Landslag focused on minimizing the visual impact of the project. Their solution was to approach the structures not only as fortifications against nature but also as an opportunity to create recreational spaces out of the defensive infrastructure. They were turned into an architectural statement, a positive cultural asset rather than an invasive structure. Since these gigantic structures could never be hidden, nor could they be camouflaged from view with tall-growing trees, turning them into landmarks was very logical.
The avalanche defense structure, in fact, doubles as an outdoor recreational facility. Paths weave around the structures and run on top along their ridge lines, directing hikers up the mountain. Already these trails are heavily used. At the end of the larger deflecting dam is a sloping bastion used as a public viewing platform. It's a hazard zone, but they're also occupiable.
In order to avoid the deflecting walls from looking too dominating, they were designed to mimic the natural features of the surrounding landscapes. With the additional use of natural materials, their organic, undulating forms help to blend them into the landscape. To even further soften their substantial profiles, a process has been started which in decades to come will see the natural vegetation of the area reclaim and inhabit it once again.
It is worth contrasting these with the avalanche protection structures at Drangagil Neskaupstaður and Flateyri, which look like they belong more to a Medieval walled city.
Gazex®
Wearable Anti-Avalanche Homes
Sites of Managed Anxiety
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
A newly stumbled term, which we quite like, is flood hunting, or the act of traveling to sites of inundation. What compel flood hunters are probably the same as what compel other disaster tourists: curiosity, adventure, the thrill of the sublime, Nielsen ratings points. But we like to think that they partake in such a dangerous pastime for their own edification as well, i.e., to witness hydrological and geological processes previously only experienced second-hand and to gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure. So besides the rare desert floods and the Mississippi spilling over its banks, one could add to the agenda Los Angeles' concretized river filling up, acqua alta, the formation of quake lakes and the creeping high waters behind the Three Gorges Dams.
We also like to think that flood hunting could be a subgenre of tactical tourism, a critical activity that looks at spatio-cultural conditions largely invisible or ignored during dry periods but pronounced during flood events, e.g., New Orleans' socioeconomic inequity spatially demarcated by Hurricane Katrina and levee failures.
However, if flood hunting is too much of a cardiovascular thrill, a more relaxing option might be the gutter dérive, or the act of tracing urban stormwater runoff on the surface, the positive of sewer spelunking. It may sound like a boring way to spend a rainy day when you could be dry indoors tweeting or updating your Facebook profile, but if your city is topographically blessed or if it's Portland with its green streets or if it's a city in which Marti Mas Riera has been let loose or if it's a city of experimental gutter-scapes, oh, the fun you will have!
How about bulwarking, the act of rambling through monumental flood protection infrastructure? Should be popular recreation in our future climate changed coastlines.
The Great Climate Change Park
Monday, July 27, 2009
Popular Science paid a visit to Disaster City in College Station, Texas. It isn't a city, of course, but “a vast disaster-simulation center designed to look and feel as close to catastrophe as you ever want to be. Each hairline crack, each mangled car, all the mountains of rubble are modeled on wreckage from real disasters, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 72 people and injured nearly 12,000. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired the collapsed parking garage, with cars dangling off the sides like spiders from a ceiling, while the 12-foot-deep rubble catacombs resemble those from Ground Zero.”
This “Jerry Bruckheimer set” is where search-and-rescue teams go to train.
Monday, July 20, 2009
More screen captures, this time from a trailer of Roland Emmerich's film 2012, which looks as if it's aspiring to be classified in the bukakke subgenre of disaster porn. Retinal outbursts of apocalyptic carnage will be numerous and their delivery relentless and furious, nonstop until of course the FX shops have exhausted themselves and not because of some narrative obligations.
It would great if some of the shots in the trailer each provided the basis for a landscape/architecture studio, an ideas competition or the instigation for a series of micro blog posts. For instance, Michelangelo's dome rolling over on top of Bernini's piazza could be the starting point for a studio in which students are tasked to formulate a master plan for a post-apocalypse Rome. They will be following in the footsteps of some of the greatest (or at least most interesting) builders and urban planners in history: the emperors, the popes and the fascists.
With such illustrious precedents, the pressure on students to outdo them will cause sleepless, sweaty and scream-filled nights. However, one will be soundly dreaming about Michelangelo's still decapitated dome, lying on its sides, fully restored and repurposed as public housing, then elevated on a rainforest of recycled columns above Bernini.
Another maybe could explore what urban lessons can gleaned from the floating, nuclear city of USS John F. Kennedy and speculate on their applicability to landborne cities.
If you can incorporate the aircraft carrier omelette-flipping onto the White House into your proposal without getting pelted by assorted vegetables and laughed out of your final critique, you will win a very plump traveling fellowship.
And lastly, how about landscape architecture via tectonic attenuation?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Poseidon vs. Aeolus
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, September 20, 2007
Two more disaster machines, which were also featured in this New Scientist pay-per-view article along with the shake table and the portable hurricane.
First, from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives comes the Fire Research Laboratory, the “first facility dedicated to aiding criminal fire investigations.”
The lab is so huge, New Scientist tells us, that it can fit “a three-room apartment or even a two storey office building, all beneath the world's largest stainless calorimetry hood for measuring the heat output of fires.” There, “engineers study ignition methods, the causes of electrical fires, the speed at which items burn and the way flammable liquids affect a fire's spread.”
With 3675 Americans killed in 2005, “more than all natural disasters combined,” everyone strives for precision and accuracy. “When recreating a fire, the engineers and craftsman are faithful to the original right down to the furnishings. The total amount of combustible material is crucial. If a room had bundles of laundry tossed on the floor, it is carefully replicated.”
Next is the Tsunami Wave Basin, housed in a “hangar-size building” at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
It is “seriously big: 49 metres long by 26.5 wide by 2.1 deep. It is the largest and most sophisticated wave tank in the world, and the first dedicated to tsunamis.”
A major question is exactly what impact tsunamis can have on coastal structures and sediment. So in July, researchers built miniature model of a coastal town along a sloping “beach” at the edge of the basin. They are now setting up experiments to measure the resulting forces as the water hits the shore, and to test whether buildings of certain shapes, such as cylinders, might be better than others for withstanding a tsunami.
One wonders if Architecture for Humanity has signed up for some wave time to better improve their anti-tsunami projects.
Meanwhile, since we obviously can't help ourselves, we'd like to see these disaster machines strapped onto The Jardinator©.
You then let it loose. And fortunately for all Japanese cities, it will not topple down skyscrapers and stomp on Hello Kitty; this monstrous stillborn love child of Godzilla and ThyssenKrup will actually help your home and cities avert major disasters. It will improve the quality of your life.
If you see it surfacing offshore and rumbling onto the beach, soon aftewards you will fear no more hurricanes and tsunamis. Children will come running down the streets to greet it as if it were the ice cream truck, because they know that they will no longer be in danger of getting burnt alive in the middle of the night. Everyone will deem it of monumental importance that virgins will be sacrificed along its path.
But then it becomes self-aware. Uh oh.
The 17th St Canal Physical Model
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Though this New Scientist article on “the biggest and baddest platforms for faking quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and fire” is unfortunately behind a subscriber-only firewall, there is this short video on one of the featured “disaster machines” uploaded to YouTube. It's the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table, the largest of its kind, topped with a 7-seven story building weathering a seismic storm.
Personally, we'd like to subject the Farnsworth House to a few tests just to see if it can survive a major New Madrid event. We'll seat on plush, midcentury Eames chairs, eat popcorn, and wait for the moment of disintegration. Or maybe Mies will completely surprise us, and we witness his house escape a tectonic hurricane unscathed. That too much context, apparently, isn't a problem at all.
Portable Hurricane
