|
|
|---|
Sunday, June 7, 2009
On the coast, in a landscape of instabilities and ambiguities, there are surprisingly three things that are constant. Firstly, sea level is rising. Secondly, a huge percentage of the global population live along the coast, a number that's steadily rising. Even if hurricanes after hurricanes after hurricanes kept pummeling their cities of ramshackled hovels, they will not budge. So rather than retreating, they will dig themselves deeper and deeper. And thirdly, they will entrench themselves by basically building walls.
One of these future walls may be the Flemish Island Constellation, a proposal by the Office of Permanent Modernity for a chain of artificial islands shielding the entire Belgian coast.
Unlike a similar project further up north, the Tulip Island in the Netherlands, and even the Palms of Dubai, this archipelago will be “based on morphological logic.” Instead of plopping down “arbitrary geometries,” the islands will be “built up from existing banks in the North Sea, using the current morphology to determine their placement.” Instead of isolating themselves, they will be opened up to the dynamic flows of the landscape. They will be “North Sea-specific.”
Once divined out of the sea, these extended coastlines will host natural reserves and sanctuaries for migrating wildlife, windmills and “dune villages.”
Meanwhile, we are of the persuasion that managed retreat is the best of possible solutions to coastal erosion and future inundation by sea level rise. What possible benefits local businesses and the heritage preservation police get from fortifying themselves in concrete are offset by the massive infrastructural cost needed, a multi-decade investment now even more unsustainable in the current financial crisis. And if past projects are anything to go by, what gets built will create more problems than it's supposed to solve.
But we're thinking of the eastern seaboard and the gulf coast of the United States. We don't know much about the coastal geology of Belgium. Sea level rise by climate change may be global, but hyperlocally, it will manifest itself in ways as myriad as the varying geomorphological conditions at every stretch of every coastlines. So maybe this artificial archipelago will work. It's already been conceptualized as anti-Dubai, so it rests on a good footing.
On the coast
Monday, September 29, 2008
As reported today in New Scientist and elsewhere, the same basic principles used in recent experiments to render objects invisible at least in some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum have been employed to develop a dike system that can shield objects they surround from water waves.
This system is composed of “concentric rings of rigid pillars.” Waves passing through its “labyrinth of radial and concentric corridors” are not cancelled out but rather are reconfigured (re-sculpted?) in such a way that they pass through the object inside with little or no effect.
If this scheme can work in scaled-up versions, it may well protect vulnerable coastlines, entire islands and offshore oil platforms from destructive tsunamis.
While acknowledging the skepticism of so many directed at this tsunami cloaking device, we have to confess to being quite mesmerized, to the detriment of our rational faculties, by the incredibly poetic image of these barriers submerged in the gloomy depths: a flooded forest of concrete colossi diffracting sunlight into its own prismatic corridors.
Perhaps they've been turned into artificial coral reefs to generate some ecotourism income to diversify the local economy and offset construction costs. Or maybe they've been topped off with wind turbines. Or both: The Anti-Tsunami Wind Farm and Barrier Reef Wildlife Park. Surely an ideas competition must be held so as to generate other possible programmes.
In any case, it's probably something Peter Eisenman would design if hired by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Thousands of years from now, when the glaciers come to reclaim back territories they had once surrendered and sea levels retreat in response, they will begin to emerge out of the waters: false skyscrapers barnacled with the ossified remains of countless generations of organisms but still retaining their minimalist geometry; a labyrinth of monoliths taking measurements of a landscape in flux but whose true functions have long been forgotten.
“They are memorials to ancient mariners lost at sea,” one of our many-times-great-grandsons will speculate.
“They're astronomical observatories,” another will suggest.
“You're both wrong,” a future crypto-geographer will shout. “It's a contemplative space designed by a 21st century landscape architect, though rather than being used as a place of serene meditation, it became the well-concealed playground of horny teens, drug dealers and rapists, as well as the pissoir of inebriated sports fans.”
Soon afterwards they will shriek in frustration like Kubrickian apes.
Versailles in the Pacific
“On evacuation and atomization uses his self-energy and on drifting atomization sea waters skywards”
Submerged Ziggurat?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Mapping the Ecotone, Ashley Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi's winning entry in the design competition Envisioning Gateway, is one of those things that we have been meaning to post for months.
Having earlier attempted to communicate our fascination with coastal interventions and our belief that by merely being sited on such tenuous terrain, they are by default the most interesting type of project there is, we think that the duo's project will be a good postcript to our previous post.
Their proposal is certainly among the best that we have encountered last year, and it definitely deserved its First Prize.
Kelly and Wakabayashi had a two-fold task. First, they had to develop a master plan that unifies the separate units of the Gateway National Recreation Area scattered all over the New York-New Jersey harbor. Second, within this larger scale, they had to design a new park at Floyd Bennet Field in Jamaica Bay, the result of which are seen in the images accompanying this post.
A major element of their proposal is a series of jetties and piers, rigid infrastructure in an otherwise shifting landscape. It's the urban edge intersecting with the natural landscape. From above, they look like the runways of the now defunct airport, here realigned not to direct people off to distant locales but to the site itself.
It's a simple design but a fantastically genius one. It allows park visitors to come “into direct contact with marshlands, tides and fluctuating sea levels” but, in keeping with the natural condition of the park, a place in “necessary flux,” this infrastructure vacillates between accessibility and inaccessibility.
In other words, during low water levels, you can throw around a frisbee or have a picnic or take a hike on dry ground; you can do most anything what you can at a national park or an urban park. But when the waters come and inundate the site, there will certainly be some things that you won't be able to do, although you would now be able to fish from the jetties, do some kayaking and more — until, of course, the site reverts back to drier conditions.
The great deluge may have come but there's no reason to panic. The design being as resilient as it is, the infrastructure hasn't collapsed. The symbiotic relation between the varying ecological and cultural systems hasn't deteriorated.
This is disaster, designed.
There is an important lesson here for coastal cities threatened by sea level rise, especially cities like New Orleans. The prevailing paradigm is to separate urban settlements from the waters, to fortify against attacks from the elements. But it's a catastrophic mistake to think that one can contain something as eternally mutable as the landscape. You cannot freeze the outline of the shores or the riverbanks forever in time and place.
What Kelly and Wakabayashi are saying is open up the city to the waters. Give it a zone of transition — an ecotone — where both land and water can be occupied simultaneously.
In the abstract, replace classical notions of formal clarity and structural stability with an orthodoxy of flexibility and adaptibility.
Meanwhile, it must be mentioned that in addition to being points of access, the jetties and piers are pedagogical tools as well. As the landscape changes around them, they provide a backdrop with which one may be able to discern the various habitats, the disappearance and reemergence of landforms, and fluctuating sea levels.
One may even possibly detect the creeping effects of global warming.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Earlier this month, the president of Kiribati warned the nations of the world that his country will be gone by century's end. Submerged under rising sea level, a casualty of climate change.
And even if, by some ridiculously well-timed miracle, everyone reduces their carbon footprint to near zero, the 92,000 island inhabitants “may be at the point of no return” where reversing the effects of the emissions already in the atmosphere will not come before their atolls get flooded. The president thus asked for help in resettling his people.
While very impolitic, he should demand from the worst polluting nations that as an act of “redemption” they should set aside “reservations” in prime real estate, for instance, some of the Hawaiian islands, where the entire population can collectively forge a new set of geographic identitites instead of being dispersed in diasporic communities around the world.
Maybe China is open to the idea of deleting a part of the Tibetan plateau and exporting the pulverized geology to the Pacific. They will, of course, argue that this a form of carbon emission trading.
Or the European Union could give the president an order or two of Vincent Callebaut's Lilypad.
Quoting Archinect, where we first saw this featured.
LILYPAD is a true amphibian - half aquatic and half terrestrial city - able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters. This artificial lagoon is entirely immersed, ballasting the city. It enables inhabitants to live in the heart of the sub aquatic depths. The multi functional program is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated to work, shopping and entertainment. The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline. The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature, exploring new modes of cross-cultural aquatic living.
Kiribati would probably need a less pimped out version, unless, of course, they realign their economy away from fish and phosphate towards eco-tourism — which leads us to wonder: will future climate change refugees become a new caste of service sector workers inhabiting a sort of Floating Hotel & Duty Free Mall, the port of call that comes to you, wherein the fine art of the greeting and linen folding is treated as a Masonic secret passed down from one generation to the next?
In any case, some more unabashedly digital images.
Meanwhile, this is MER, by PLOT, now BIG and JDS.
The Vortex of 80,000 Nikes
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Contrary to popular beliefs, Fresh Kills in New York City's Staten Island doesn't contain the biggest collection of garbage in the world. What Wikipedia says “could be regarded as the largest man-made structure on Earth, with the site's volume [...] exceeding the Great Wall of China” and was once the temporary dump site for the remains of the WTC Towers isn't the largest landfill at all.
In fact, the largest landfill isn't even on land, but rather it is trapped in an oceanic riverine system known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Wikipedia again: “The centre of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste, leading to the informal name The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Eastern Garbage Patch. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris.”
It is so vast, apparently, that these floating clouds have a total area equal to that of 2 Texas.
Which directly leads me to wonder: can you collect these patches to create a floating solid ground?
It'll be like a new Pacific island nation molded together out of “80,000 Nike sneakers and boots” and “tens of thousands of bathtub toys and hockey equipment” lost overboard from cargo ships.
Or a recycled ocean cruisers from where eco-terrorists hunt down polluting holiday cruise ships in the high synthetic seas.
Or better yet, dump it all on the Polynesian archipelago of Tuvalu, which Der Spiegel says is “currently only 10 centimeters above sea level” and “likely to become the first country to succumb entirely to climate change.”
Paradise Lost it may certainly be, but it may yet still be Arcadia Regained from the bottom of the ocean.
Of course, the islanders have the option of not anchoring this newly accumulated stratum of detritus to their former nation; they could submit it to the whims of the ocean currents and trade winds.
And in their intraoceanic meanderings, they'll meet other climate change refugees on their own island nations made out of Barbie dolls. A new trade group could be formed, with the goal of developing self-sufficient economies and expanding their territorial boundaries by mining the Pacific for consumer goods Made in China.
Is this the future site of the New Central Park of the Pacific, designed by Fresh Kills head designer James Corner?
Open-Ocean Aquaculture
Friday, September 7, 2007
In the 1940s, archaeologists discovered the ancient city of Seuthopolis, the capital seat of the Odrysian Kingdom beginning in the 4th century BCE.
Unfortunately, the discovery came too late, because under construction nearby was a reservoir dam, which would soon flood the valley and drown “the best preserved Thracian city in modern Bulgaria.”
Now over half a century later, a project proposed by Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev would uncover and preserve the ruins using “a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis.”
Indeed, most everything about the project is theatrical: “Approaching the surrounding ring by boat from the shore Seuthopolis is completely hidden for the eye. But the view from the wall is breathtaking - with its scale, comprehensiveness and unique point of view; from the boundary between past and present. The possibility to see the city from the height of 20 meters allows the perception of its entirety.”
Once there, and if your interest in exploring archaeological sites wanes considerably faster than expected, there are other things to do on the ring-wall. For instance, there will be restaurants, cafes, shops, bike rental facilities, and also other facilities for various recreational sports and fishing.
Programmed as “a unique modern tourist complex,” the ring-wall will also house a museum, a hotel complex, open-air exhibitions, concert and festival halls, conference centers, and hanging gardens.
It's a classic case of horror vacui, in other words.
There are three sites where this should be done as well:
1) New Orleans (i.e., having abandoned the city, its inhabitants now live and work and die on grossly heightened and fattened levees; everyone will laugh at them, but when the deluge comes, they will have the last laugh)
2) Alexandria
3) Yonaguni (i.e., if it's actually manmade)
POSTSCRIPT #1: For a different strategy than the one planned to uncover and preserve the ancient city of Seuthopolis, see the planned underwater museum of Alexandria.
