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Monday, March 8, 2010
Of quarantine pieds-à-terre, nuclear-waste landfills, Ebola tours, illegal orchids, and the Zoo of Infectious Species
at 5:49 AM
If you're in New York in the next few weeks, consider stopping by Storefront for Art and Architecture for Landscapes of Quarantine, an exhibition curated by Geoff Manaugh, of BLDGBLOG, and Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography.
Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control. It is used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria and, as a result, may (or may not) be carrying the infection themselves. But quarantine does not apply only to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native—however those labels are defined.
As a result, the practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.
An opening reception will be held this week on Tuesday, March 9. It's free and open to the public.
Meanwhile, we did some curating again and hashtagged 10 relevant posts: #quarantine.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
On November 6, 2009 at the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab, in collaboration with Alphabet City, will oversee a daylong symposium and launch an accompanying exhibition that will travel throughout North America. Called Hydrocity, they will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”
If the twentieth century has been marked by our global thirst for fuel, the twenty-first century, will be defined by our collectively growing need for water. Impending water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source, collect, divert and transport water to the urban centres that hold a growing majority of the world’s population. These population centres will in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate increasingly precious water resources while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding their cities’ relationships with the complex watersheds on which they are built and upon which they depend. The resulting liquid infrastructure is poised to redefine our notion of natural and artificial landscapes, as disparate ecological environments are networked and conflated. What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?
Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, who have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.
As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but InfraNet Lab is very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.
To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6MB) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.
Send tips if you haven't a project of your own. We've suggested Watery Voids by MMBB Arquitectos and SpongeCity, which was designed by former students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Monday, August 17, 2009
A quick postscript to our previous post on the Out of Water Project: you can now browse the website that's been set up for the exhibition and its forthcoming book version. Just a few of the projects have been uploaded, though we're assuming more will be online in the coming months.
If you know of a case study or a technology for collection, conversion and distribution of water sources in arid climates — or if you have a project of your own — and want it to be considered for inclusion in the book, send an email to info @ oowproject dot com.
Meanwhile, this week is World Water Week.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The Out of Water Project is both a traveling exhibition and a book scheduled to be published by Birkhauser Publishers in 2010.
Organized by Liat Margolis, co-author of Living Systems, and Aziza Chaouni, of Bureau E.A.S.T., the exhibition currently features 24 international case studies of innovative projects and technologies for water scarcity on multiple scale, plus 10 Futures Scenarios designed by invited young designers such as Fletcher Studio, Proxy and MatSys. The book will be more comprehensive in scope and will include a set of self-generated mappings of global water scarcity, as well as an in-depth catalogue of cross-referenced case studies and future scenarios.
The exhibition will travel to Ohio State University this Fall semester. Previously, it was presented at the Daniels Faulty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. Mason White, who is a faculty member there, posted some of the projects in his blog, InfraNet Lab.
Below are some of the other projects, courtesy of Liat Margolis.
One is Porous Skin by Wayne Jenski.
Quoting the project brief in full: “Porous adaptive membrane was developed as a deployable structure for a clinic for Doctors without Borders. The membrane consists of dispersed micro-pore structures. Those form a series of self-adjusting thermal flues, intended to regulate the temperature of the air as well as the collection of air-borne moisture. The morphology of the pore was developed to open and close in response to changes in ambient temperature, solar gain and humidity. The skin, through its pores collects, then conveys condensation via an inner skin down to a large water bladder. The bladder acts as the foundation ballast but is also used to filter and store local water for sanitation and drinking use. Condensation replenishes water supply. The bladder is oriented to absorb solar energy, utilizing the water as a heat sink to filter the collected water by solar radiation. Both skin and bladder operate in accordance with solar radiation to collect, convey and convert water.”
Another documents an existing infrastructure for effluent reclamation in Israel. The main organization in charge of this is KKL (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael), or JNF in English (Jewish National Fund), which is the philantropic organization overseeing all aforestation projects in Israel for the last 50 years. In the last 20 years or so, they started building waste water recycling infrastructure for agricultural irrigation.
Again quoting the project brief in full: “Israel's reuse of wastewater accounts for 75% of crop irrigation and alleviates severe shortage of drinking water, which is comprised of 10% desalinated water (project to increase to 50% in the next 20 years). Without treated effluent, intensive agriculture would be impossible. This national program (KKL-JNF) consists of an interlinked network of over 200 open-air reservoirs, with static volume of 150 MCM and a dynamic volume (emptying and refilling) of 270 MCM of treated effluent a year. Those distribute water seasonally via an extensive pipe infrastructure. In the case of the Jezreel Valley, the most production valley in Israel, 15-20 MCM of effluent per year enable irrigation of 4000 ha of cotton . While loaded with fertilizing nutrients, effluent environmental quality is significantly ungraded due to settling and oxygenation, microbial breakdown of remaining organic matter, and UV to suppress pathogens.”
Next is a network of water storage units by Ruth Kedar. It is modeled after indigenous water management systems.
Yet again quoting the project brief in full: “The cistern is a contemporary adaptation of historical and regional desert technologies. The modular storage structure utilizes available and pre-cast concrete to offer a kit of parts that can be sized and aggregated according to the catchment area, topographical conditions, and inhabitant demand. The cistern network is modeled after the Nabatean systems of runoff agriculture, which used very low channels and surface modification to collect water from great catchment areas. The reservoir employs the principles of the Qanat, an underground tunnel that diverts runoff into a series of vertical wells. Each cistern is outfitted with an outlet to interlink them together, but also allow for diversion toward irrigation. As the need for water increases, the system can be expanded to accommodate additional catchment and storage. Specifying a smaller reservoir and a shorter exposed conveyance distance can reduce evaporation.
Last is the Dixon Land Imprinting Machine, which was covered by InfraNet Lab but it's so cool that we're going to replicate it here and enter it into our archives.
Final copy-paste: “Absorptive soil ensures against the devastation wrought by the twin desertification hazards of drought and deluge. The Dixon Land Imprinting machine restores the microroughness and macroporosity of compacted and barren soil to accelerate infiltration and revegetation processes. It is most effective in areas with low rainfall, degraded-, brushy-, rocky-, sandy-, and clayey soils, overgrazed ranges and abandoned agricultural land. The roller drops seeds onto the soil surface and imbeds them in the imprint surfaces. The imprinter forms interconnected water shedding and absorbing v-pockets, which function as rain fed micro-irrigation system. Down-slope furrows feed rainwater into cross-slope furrows where it collects and infiltrates. Revegetation is rapid because the imprints hold rainwater in place and captures seed, water and windblown plant litter, which works as mulch to suppress evaporation.”
We'll be pining for the rest of the projects, and if permitted, we'll post them here as they come in. We will certainly be posting updates on where and when the exhibition will be traveling to next. Keep a look out here for those.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year's festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.
While the gardens look rather inventive, something you'd expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:
And hyper-modern geomet-o-rama:
And everyday objects given post-modern cooptery for high designery:
And algorithmic computerary:
And volup-terra-ry (see this one with bouncing, infectiously joyful kids):
And green-goism (though this one isn't overtly treebuggery):
And pushing-it-with-the-project-statement:
And rhythmametry:
It's interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call “the soft pornography of the flower.” The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.
Go see (and play).
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Exit Art is a little gallery in New York that's been putting together some incredibly fascinating exhibitions. Like Storefront for Art and Architecture, it always seems to be beckoning us with thematically enticing programs.
A recent exhibition, for example, tackled the controversial field of bioart. We featured several projects from this show, called Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), including Richard Pell's Center for PostNatural History.
Another recent installation featured vertical farms, urban gardens and green roofs. If you follow much this trendy landscape genre, no doubt you've seen most, if not all, of the projects, but sometimes it's nice to see what previously has been just a disparate and rather messy jumble of bookmarks littering your hard drive now collected into one, easily surveyed room.
Even some of the ancillary events sound interesting, such as a lecture once given by Oleg Mavromatti, the co-founder of the art collective ULTRAFUTURO. His talk was on Russian Cosmism, which was a “philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” and how this mystical philosophy “affected the development of Soviet science and space research.”
A quick wiki-research on Russian Cosmism brought up Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a “representative” of the movement and who was “an advocate of radical life extension by means of scientific methods, human immortality and resurrection of dead people,” and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who we read “believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.”
One wonders if the early development of space exploration in America and by extension the nation's popular imaginings of the landscapes of other worlds have similarly interesting antecedents, or does everything trace back to a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists and not to some deep philosophical inquiry into the human condition?
In any case, opening today at Exit Art is The End of Oil, “an exhibition of photography, prints, videos, installations and new media that addresses human dependence on oil and other fossil fuels; the ramifications that this dependency has on the future of the environment and of global geopolitics; and the recent push towards viable alternative energy resources.”
The works in this exhibition draw attention to and investigate the violent conflicts (such as in Nigeria, Burma and Sudan) and negative environmental effects that result from mining and drilling; the politicization of the oil industry; carbon-footprinting; and renewable energy options, such as vegetable and electric-powered cars, geothermal energy, and solar power. The End of Oil does not prophesize a dystopian future, but looks critically at the way in which we use and generate energy, encouraging a dialogue on this issue for the benefit of future generations.
This exhibition is a project of SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics).
SEA is a unique endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. SEA will assemble artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series that will communicate international activities concerning environmental and social activism.
So many good things piled up on top of one another.
If you're in town, consider stopping by.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
We regret not posting this sooner, as it sounds very interesting, but if you happen to be in New York in the next couple of days, we suggest you stop by Exit Art for Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), an exhibition presenting work by artists who are “uniting science and art to challenge conventional understanding of both fields.”
This exhibition and its programming covers diverse topics, among which are the “extended” and the “obsolete” body; prolongation of life; life outside of the body; patenting life; genetically programmed life; hardwired spirituality; cyborgian and hybrid life and intelligence; male pregnancy and gender roles and stereotypes that are changing with developments in reproductive technologies; scientific and artistic ethics in relation to “the Other” that challenge anthropocentric hierarchies; and last but not the least – the ethics of the biotech aesthetics, employing techniques for mere visual effect.
One of these “recombinant mix[es] of the poetic, political, fantastic, clinical, ironic and utopian” is InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies (2008) by Jennifer Willet.
Inside a portable tent, we are told, as we haven't seen the show in person, the artist “presents biotechnological materials and techniques that normally exist only within the laboratory environment. By taking actual laboratory specimens outside of their confined and secured environment, InsideOut challenges the closed relationship the laboratory has with external or 'natural' ecologies.”
This sculptural installation has an immediate resonance for us, because our most basic medium — the enclosed garden — is itself a laboratory, a space of experimentation that is physically and conceptually detached from the larger landscape. Its quasi-hermetic condition may not necessarily contribute to a highly charged atmosphere of innovation; nevertheless, gardens are fecund breeding grounds for new forms and new theories of landscapes: horticultural chimeras, fake hills, constructed views, nature as spectacle, paradise as a garden, playgrounds as antidote to urban living, landscapes as propaganda, etc. These inevitably spill over the walls, changing not merely the “outside” tectonically but also how we then interact with what is transformed. With new landscapes come new social and political systems. Just look at the experiments in mannered irregularity at Stowe and the “imagineered” hyper-reality of Disneyland and how they have influenced the practice of landscape architecture, architecture and urban design.
One has to wonder, then, what are the landscape implications of these investigations into post-nature, these blurring of the natural and the artificial, these ever increasing confusion between biology and machine, over what is life and what is non-life? What are the spatial consequences of Dr. Frankestein's monsters busting out of the confines of these science labs? What will the world look like when even our understanding of what is the body and by extension our concept of the self gets fundamentally reconfigured?
Our future selves and our future landscapes are in those petri dishes.
Meanwhile, another piece in the show is Suzanne Anker's Shelf Life (2009) by Suzanne Anker.
“This sculptural installation,” as described by our tipster David Hays, “features LED lighting panels of differing wavelengths, such as 'red' or 'blue,' above a series of aluminum 'seed houses,'” and it “functions as a food-bearing micro-system. From glow-in-the-dark plants to grow-in-the-dark herbage, new botanical technologies are rapidly developing. Proliferating due to photosynthesis, these living food production machines — plants — turn light energy into food.”
And another one is NoArk II by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, of The Tissue Culture and Art Project.
“NoArk II is intended to raise questions about the taxonomic challenge posed by the creation of new bio-technological life forms. A cabinet of curiosity, NoArk II is constructed of an experimental vessel designed to sustain living cells and tissues, alongside museum specimens of preserved animals. In a sense, this is a unified collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms, or as the artists refer to them — extended bodies.”
A couple of things related or otherwise to this piece:
1) Seed Magazine published this week an article about our symbiotic relationship with bacteria. We read the astonishing fact that there are “100 trillion bacterial cells in our bodies, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one,” and that rather than eating us alive from the inside out and outside in, some of their biological functions complement our own.
Even more astonishing, they may even be us. They are extra-corporeal organs we have been continually implanted with since birth — or to use Catts and Zurr's term, they are our extended bodies. As the article explains, “[o]ur bodies are, after all, composites of human and bacterial cells, with microbes together contributing at least 1,000 times more genes to the whole. As we discover more and more roles that microbes play, it has become impossible to ignore the contribution of bacteria to the pool of genes we define as ourselves. Indeed, several scientists have begun to refer to the human body as a 'superorganism' whose complexity extends far beyond what is encoded in a single genome.”
2) To recycle some questions asked in previous posts: if and when geoengineering as a solution to many impending environmental crisis proves to be financially unfeasible, can we go “ultra-local” and hack our own bodies, for instance, to augment our own skins with photosynthetic cells to “grow” our own food — local and organic to the extreme? What will happen to farms and to other sites of production? And what new epicurean culture will this bring about?
How about modifying our intestinal ecologies in such a way that our biological waste is greatly reduced or is somehow “transformed” that our billion-dollar sewer infrastructure becomes obsolete or at least cheaper?
How about piezoelectric skins to harness enough energy from anatomical deformations to power iPhones for a day's worth of tweeting?
Basically, what we want to know is: where is biotechnology taking us and do we want to go along for the ride?
Friday, March 7, 2008
Continuing on with our re-exploration of the role of new technologies in the production of new landscapes, via MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.
This is Part II.
We begin with Michele Gauler's ossuary for the information age, a project which she developed as a student at the Royal College Art in London.
Digital Remains, a beautiful, personalized data-storage artifact equipped with a Bluetooth connection, allows users to log on to the digital remains of a loved one and receive their data on personal digital devices. Search algorithms dig through the data, pulling out relevant personal traces, like a photograph from a holiday spenth together or a favorite piece of music, evoking the presence of the deceased.
This is not in our archives but we have covered similar examples of electronic mourning and remembrance before, for instance, those being experimented with at Forever Fernwood as part of its green burial practices. As their website explains: “Fernwood uses GPS and GIS to collect and manage detailed information about graves on this site. Using this technology allows us to keep accurate records and link to digital LifeStories about people who are buried in natural burial areas while minimizing the impact on the land.”
Indeed, one of the appeals of these digitized rituals is that they are a sustainable alternative to the gas-guzzling, water-guzzling, space-guzzling and money-guzzling Arcadian lawns with which most (American) cemeteries are landscaped.
The following two projects were referenced in a post about a new bioengineering technique in which disembodied meat is grown in laboratories and thereby forgoing rearing livestock on a farm.
The Victimless Leather, a project by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, also casts aside traditional agricultural and textile manufacturing practices.
A small-scale prototype of a “leather” hacket grown in vitro, Victimless Leather is a living layer supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix shaped like a miniature coat, offering the possibility of wearing leather without directly killing an animal. Catts and Zurr believe that “biotechnological research occurs within a particular social and political system, which will inevitably focus on manipulating nature for profit and economic gain.” They argue that if the things we surround ourselves with every day can be both manufactured and living, growing entities, “we will begin to take a more responsible attitude towards our environment and curb our destructive consumerism.”
Similarly exploring this new form of animal husbandry is Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow by James King.
From the MoMA website:
In vitro-cultured meat production may have many advatages, but it raises practical questions, as well as some complex philosophical and ethical issues. What should this meat look like? What flavor should it have? How should it be served? King answers the first question: “A mobile magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of livestock. The selected specimen is scanned from head to toe, and accurate cross-section images of its inner organs are generated...to create molds for the in vitro meat. We...might still want to re-create a familiar shape to better remind us where the 'artificial' meat come from.”
Whether grown with features simulating cows or reminiscent of a Thanksgiving turkey from your halcyon childhood or that of your favorite celebrities, say, Michael Jackson, the landscape implication is quite staggering. Imagine growing all our meat in ultra-efficient manufacturing plants that consume dramatically less energy and resources and produce less waste. Also requiring less real estate, imagine then what all those obsolete farms will be transformed into.
Will they be converted to make biofuels exclusively or turned into vast algal ponds to produce hydrogen gas?
Will half of Kansas be covered with solar panels?
Will we have a golden age of national parks?
In any case, let's move down on the list.
Light Wind, a project by Jeroed Verhoeven and Joep Verhoeven, comes with this brief description.
With traditional Dutch windmills in mind, the designers of the studio Demakersvan have created an outdoor lamp that generates its own energy. with every breeze Light Wind stores the energy that it later uses to produce light.
We will be brief as well by simply directing you to these wind turbines embedded with LEDs and also to these Jersey barriers within which are double-stacked Darius turbines.
Moving right along, we find several examples of Google Earth mashups. These mashups, we read, “combine different sources into a single platform, making them one face of collaborative design on the Internet.”
One of the more widely reported mashups is the flood maps from flood.firetree.net that shows coastal areas prone to sea level rise due to global warming. At a setting of +14m sea level rise, you can see entire cities and towns, whole communities and landscapes become inundated in simulated disaster. If not provocative, these maps are at least informative.
More visceral though in terms of driving in the point that your home will be flooded and pulled away into the seas as though by a slow moving but still destructive tsunami is Eve S. Mosher's project that is part public art, part guerrilla theater and part Christoesque interactive installation. From Prunings XXXI:
Artist Eve S. Mosher is leaving behind a trail of blue-tinted chalk as she winds her way through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn. This chalk line, The New York Times reports, “demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.”
A somewhat similar intervention is Ledia Carroll's Mission Lake Project.
Finally, we come to the BEE'S, a project by Susana Soares.
Soares has conceived a series of alternative diagnosis tools that use trained bees to perform health checkups, detect diseases, and monitor fertility cycles. “Bees have a phenomenal odor perception,” explains Soares. “They can be trained to target a specific odor.” The Face Object has two chambers. Bees that detect certain odors in the breath--some of them even connected to forms of cancer--will go into the smaller chamber if they sense them. The Fertility Cycle Object has three chambers: The largest corresponds to the ovulation period, the second to preovulation, and the third to postovulation. The bees will fly into the relevant chamber. The Precise Object has an outer curved tube that prevents bees from flying accidentally into the interior diagnosis chamber, making for a more precise result.
Also training bees as a diagnostic tool is Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University. But instead of using them to detect medical problems, these Croatian bees are being trained to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams. In a post in which we proposed a park for North Korea's DMZ, we quoted a BBC News article as follows:
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
Also mentioned in that post is a genetically-modified weed that can detect the chemical signature of mines and a bunch of fungi that can eat explosives and neutralize radioactive substances. Appropriated as a landscape material, you could have not only a diagnostic tool but a cure to contaminated sites.
Our tour ends here but the exhibition will close May 22, 2008.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Last month MoMA opened its new exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, to enthusiastic reviews, with Nicolai Ouroussoff even calling it “the most uplifting show MoMA’s architecture and design department has presented since the museum reopened in 2004” before finally declaring — and perhaps while also trying to elicit a bit of pity for those unable to see the exhibited works in person — that “thanks to its imaginative breadth, we can begin to dream again.”
Thankfully, we the geographically displaced are able to get a sense of this “imaginative breadth” and partake in the shows unbridled optimism through the exhibition's website, which is refreshingly easy to use. Militant anti-flash website that we are, we were nevertheless disarmed by its multi-navigational interface. For over a week now, we've been madly clicking away like trigger-happy Blackwater soldiers. And we don't see ourselves stopping anytime soon, as there is this link archive provided by MoMA.
In any case, while combing through the website, we were happily reacquainted with some of the projects we have covered before and some that are conceptually similar to ones we have written about in the past. There are about a dozen of them.
We are going to archive them in two separate posts.
One of the unexpected outcomes from our recent self-linking bacchanalias is that they highlight one of this blog's overriding themes — how natural processes, like hydrology, growth and decay, become entangled with human culture.
Corollary to that is the role technology — old, new, and imagined future ones — plays in this entanglement, a role which can often lead to and indeed does result in dramatic landscape changes. This is another theme that appears again and again on Pruned. And it also underpins all the disparate choices for this MoMA exhibition, which, as the online catalogue explains, “explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.” With these upcoming self-linking bacchanalias, then, we should have another chance to at least vocalize another longstanding interest.
Here is Part I.
We'll be your docent, absolutely free of charge.
First on the list is the AMOEBA, or the Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin, “a circular basin about the size of an inflatable children's pool” that is used “to evaluate the effects of waves on ship designs.”
Using the fifty plungerlike mechanical units installed along its rim, AMOEBA can produce a variety of wave conditions and then calm the water's surface on command. One of [Shigeru Naito]'s students found another use for this equipment: creating the alphabet on the water's surface. When waves in various frequencies converge, the water's surface rises at specific points; by connecting these points, lines and shapes can be drawn.
Of course, we also found another use for it, specifically to inscribe the Gardens of Versailles in their entirety and in full scale somewhere in the South Pacific.
Hydrology coalescing into elaborate parterres, Baroque statues, and architectonic hedges and borders — all of which doubling as aquariums. A pack of humpback whales, for instance, will be gliding gently alongside as you sail down the main axis, their timeless chanting filling the breezy tropical air. Enter any one of the many bosquets dotting the landscape and you're soon surrounded by a swarm of fish. Enter another one and you're soon privy to the mating rituals of giant jellyfishes, seemingly weightless. Ethereal. Watch out for the one with the great white sharks though.
Then at night, you set anchor in the middle of a tapis vert, a simple grass lawn on land perhaps but out in the Pacific, it's a vast cultivated field of bioluminescent dinoflagelletes.
We also found how this Baroque fountain can play a role in maritime warfare.
Next is Contour Crafting, invented by Behrokh Khosnevis. This project is listed under the thematic group Thought to Action with other “new methods of manufacture and behavioral rules that establish the future of design forms and capabilities.”
A single house or a colony of houses may be constructed automatically by the process in a single run, with all plumbing and electrical utilities imbedded in each house; yet each building could have a different architectural design. An average size custom-designed house may be built by Contour Crafting within a day.
This simplified manufacturing process thus has the potential to save energy and reduce waste. Furthermore:
The implication is especially profound for emergency-shelter construction and low-income housing. This new mode of construction will be one of the very feasible approaches for building on the moon or Mars, both of which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the century.
We, on the other hand, thought that it could also be turned into a cenotaph mega-machine, capable of printing thousands of Pharaonic mausoleums based on designs by Boullée, resulting in entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting thousands of encapsulated monumental voids.
And then there is the PlayPump, a project by PlayPumps International. MoMA describes it thus:
The PlayPump water system is a merry-go-round that uses kid power to pump water. As they play, children spin the PlayPump, powering it to the pump underground water into an aboveground tank. This 660-gallon storage tank provides easy access to water with the simple turn of a tap. The storage tank also serves as a billboard, which can be used to promote messages about social issues relevant to a particular community.
By some accounts, these hydrological playgrounds are quite successful in augmenting infrastructural deficiencies in several African countries, but we did wonder last year if there was a better strategy in giving African children better access to fresh water while also greatly benefiting American kids.
Wouldn't it be better to just slice off a sizable chunk of what we in the United States spend on public water services — for instance, to recreate some sort of Edenic fantasies in the desert Southwest with water diverted from severely depleted sources — and give this piece to sub-Saharan African nations where the money will be used to improve their hydrological infrastructure, and we are the ones who get to install the PlayPumps in our school grounds and playgrounds, wherein a growing population of obese, diabetic, allergic children, the ones inured to the hardship of suburban domesticity, are forced to trim a little bit of the fat, reduce their susceptibility to diabetes and prevent future addictions to Allegra® and Claritin® and simultaneously teaching them about the incredibly, wonderfully awesome subject of hydrology and imparting a life long commitment to water conservation?
We apparently forgot to breath, but in any case, our answer then and now is a resounding “Yes!”
Grouped with the PlayPump and other methods of “local energy harvesting” are the Non-Stop Shoes by Emili Padrós, of emiliana design studio.
With Non-Stop shoes, Padrós looks at the energy potential of everyday routines such as walking, climbing, stairs, and opening doors. Energy generated during the day by these activities is stored in the shoes and may be used later to power devices such as a lamp, a radio, or a fan. Containers could be used to collect energy from the shoes of a whole family to feed more power domestic appliances.
This is one of the projects that we did not cover before, but it is astonishingly similar in concept to Alberto Villarreal's BrightWalk, the winner in last year's Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design Competition.
Villarreal's shoes were mentioned in a post with other projects experimenting with piezoelectric membranes as an infrastructural with which renewable energy can be harnessed. These other projects include a Japanese train station whose ticketing gates are embedded with piezo pads and Elizabeth Redmond's PowerLeap, both of which also investigate the potential of piezoelectricity and, in the case of these two, how can be spatialized on an urban scale.
Also worth mentioning here is Crowd Farm, a proposal by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk to — you guessed it — “harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings.”
Weaving through the urban landscape along with our already dense infrastructure of consumption will be an equally dense filigree of an infrastructure of production.
Speaking of human kinetics, there is the Power Assist Suit, “a battery-powered exoskeleton” built by Dr. Keijirou Yamamoto of Kanagawa Institute of Technology as “a response to the fact that Japan does not have adequate number of healthy young people to take care of its rapidly aging population. The suit is designed to help a caregiver carry a bedridden patient.”
Again, we never wrote about this, but there was one similar project that we did. It's called the Bleex, or Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, and this DARPA-funded exoskeleton allows the wearer to carry hundreds of pounds (potentially more) with little physical effort. In other words, using the Bleex, you can carry as many as a dozen bedridden patients, if you wanted to.
Or:
It's the future of guerrilla gardening. You get suited up with the Bleex, and with your night vision goggles, satellite navigation systems and weaponized hoe, you set about re-wilding urban concrete wastelands. Under the cover of darkness, a squadron of Bleex Soldier-Gardeners carries out sabotage on Wal-Mart parking lots. With prairie grasses and wildflowers.
The Bleex, unfortunately, may be too expensive for the local garden enthusiast, in which case there is the Muscle Suit.
And finally for today is the image above from one of The Inner Life of the Cell animations, conceived by professors at Harvard University and animated by XVIVO. This animation and others in the series are used as a teaching tool for undergraduate students.
It was quite extraordinary seeing it then, and it still is. The video used by MoMA for its website is a bit tiny, but a larger version — with a soundtrack — can be viewed here.
(To be continued in Part II.)
