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Wednesday, February 2, 2011
During the Vietnam War, the United States flew more than 580,000 bombing missions over Laos. That's equal to one bombing mission every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 full years. In fact, the country's Xiengkhouang Province, where the famous Plain of Jars is located, is considered the most heavily bombed place on earth. This intensive bombing campaign left the landscape pockmarked with craters. 
One of these craters formed mere feet away from the house of Prince Souphanouvong, later President of Laos. A trained civil engineer, he turned the hole into a kidney-shaped swimming pool, flourished with a fine biomorphic indentation.
A symbol of decadence cultivated out of hellfire and Cold War geopolitics.
While the pool may no longer be filled with water, many of these craters are permanently inundated, forming an aberrant hydrology of micro-lakes. In fact, some of them have been converted into aquafarms. Here's a photo of one of those fish ponds. In the south of neighboring, similarly pockmarked Vietnam, according to Places, “bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replenishable source of protein at the doorstep.”
Perhaps one day a cluster of these craters will be turned into an inverse archipelago fed by hot springs, connected together by channels, next to a luxury eco hotel, both designed perhaps by a Laotian Paisajes Emergentes, that is, a cadre of bright, enthusiastic, young tykes helping to lift their country from decades of economic strife and social conflict through design.
In any case, the Klimt-like pattern of these circular craters embedded into a tapestry of rice fields may be mesmerizing to look at, nevertheless, these aerial photos belie the fact that millions of unexploded bombs remain on the ground, all posing a deadly threat to civilians. There are still millions of silent craters waiting for that human touch.
Crater Garden
Friday, June 4, 2010
A team led by Alex Lehnerer from the University of Illinois at Chicago won first prize in Mine the Gap, the ideas competition which asked entrants for ideas on how to adaptively reuse the hole excavated for the foundation of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire.
The winning entry, titled The Second Sun, envisions the hole as a home base for a yellow hot air balloon. As a whimsical twin to the ferris wheel (or the AeroBalloon) across the way in Navy Pier, it would be a fantastic addition to the Chicago skyline, whose sharp lines and pallid complexion would be awesomely contrasted by its voluptuous curves and cheery brightness. Watching it slowly bobbing up and down amid a static forest of glass and concrete would certainly be a marvelous sight, perhaps not unlike Alexander Calder's red Flamingo in its Miesian aviary.
Attached to this bubble monument to the bubble era is a disc-shaped swimming pool. While frolicking about in the water, you can enjoy the panoramic lakefront views from the ghost condominiums of a ghost skyscraper, the promise of those enchanting marketing brochures at last fulfilled. (We can't fully make out what's printed on the bottom of the pool — nor can we read the text, so we'll just fantasize that it's an actual floor plan.)
Surrounding the hole is an artificial beach where you can soak in the sunlight from the real sun or the reflected rays from a latex sun. The beach actually extends beyond the project site, going under bridge and into the adjacent and still undeveloped DuSable Park, where a circular soccer pitch is added.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
A quick acknowledgment of a faint signal from the usually noisy Dezeen: O+A's “conceptual floating swimming platform for the river IJ in Amsterdam.”
We wouldn't mind seeing several of these “urban beaches” plopped down on Chicago's lakefront beaches, perhaps as a sort of super designery groynes to slow the erosion of alien sand. Weighty, crisp and angular, one could mistake them for Tony Smith sculptures appropriated as an infrastructure of leisure — by way of disused, water-filled Midwestern quarries re-purposed into swimming and diving hot spots.
Of course, a better proposition would be to liberally sprinkle them on the banks of the Chicago River, as this would necessitate mitigating water pollution and massive rezoning, which also would require equally monumental alteration of the city's rotten political landscape — all precursors we definitely wouldn't mind seeing coming to pass (with or without an urban beach in the end).
In fact, we're beguiled by the possibility (however remote) of O+A's jagged shorelines spurring or accelerating profound changes in how Chicago relates to its river. Some cities buried theirs under soil and concrete; Chicago, for the most part, turned its back to it, cordoning off public access with a veil of industrial and commercial thicket, made more exclusive by bubble-era condominiums and converted lofts. With some choice editing of its brief, this Urban Beach would thus be rescripted as a vision of a “forever free and clear” Chicago River, a battle cry to daylight our river, an antidote to our collective alluvial amnesia.
That or how about installing just one and using it as a dry dock for canoes and kayaks?
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Speaking of swimming pools, here's an illustration of what an orbiting, low-gravity swimming pool might look like.
The pool itself is a large cylindrical drum rotating slowly about its main axis. Due to this rotation, the water is pressed against the sides.
Because of the lack of natural buoyancy, terrestrially-taught swimmers might struggle a bit when trying to keep their heads above water. But at least here, starting with a hard kick, one could take off from the “bottom” and then do a slow flying series of loop-de-loops before diving into a floating water blob for a couple of laps before again reverse-diving into the “ceiling.”
This is where the sea is the sky is the sea.
Yet Another Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
at 9:26 PM
The shipping industry is in a crisis, reports Der Spiegel. The brutal downturn in global trade has left many container ships idling in ports around the world and will soon be accompanied by newer ships placed on order during an economic boom that seemed unending. With this much glut in the market, no doubt rental rates are dropping precipitously. When some of the shipping companies go bankrupt, perhaps anyone would then be able to afford to buy (not just rent one) a Panamax or post-Panamax vessels at bargain basement prices.
But then what will you do with it? You'd offer it, of course, to the Chicago Olympic Organizing Committee (that is, if Il Duce gets his wish) for conversion into their Aquatics Complex. Park it right in the middle of Lake Michigan; cleanse it of its toxic fuel, lead pipes and other hazardous materials; gut it; and then install all the necessary accoutrements of an Olympic natatorium.
Not enough space? Simply purchase a second vessel and a third one for good measure; they'll be similarly dirt cheap, we're sure of it. And then solder one to the port side of your first purchase and the other to the starboard side: two aisles and a central nave.
Instead of competing in outhouses built where Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux would have been violently gang raped, Michael Phelps will swim his last laps inside a floating, inverted St. Peter's.
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
In the past couple of months, the IOC mafia has been inspecting the four cities vying for the rights to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Naturally, our curiosity in Chicago's candidacy heightened a bit; we even felt compelled to look through the city's updated bid book, heading straight first for what people really care about: the pretty pictures of proposed venues.
Amidst the technicolor gumbo of humdrums, the aquatics complex is a noticeable thick glop. Remember when you're watching a major stadium sporting event and the camera pans for a few seconds outside, catching sights of adjacent buildings — those temporary structures wrapped in white tarpaulin, topped with awnings, used as crafts service stations and staging area? Placed as it is next to the proposed Olympic Stadium, Chicago's aquatics complex is sort of like a collection of those outhouses.
Of course, this is not to say that the venue isn't going to redeem itself in other key areas. Aesthetically unimpressive it may be, it could leave a truly lasting legacy, filled in the many years to come with raucous kids and their families from the surrounding neighborhoods instead of staying empty until the rare national or international competition comes along, accumulating large maintenance bills with only the Flickr hordes frotteurising its skillfully designed skin to keep it company. Bucking the trend of the past two Olympics, it might not also morph into some ethically obscene monster, disenfranchising people left and right, funneling funds from social services and ruining the city's cultural heritage. It might even attain a LEED Quadruple Gold-Diamond Crown rating. And during the two weeks of competition, everyone's spirits are elevated higher than ever before, their soul stirred into rapture.
All we're saying is that the physical elements of the proposal could be more interesting.
As a counter venue, then, we propose a concept aquatics complex in the middle of Lake Michigan.
The superstructure, constructed on land and towed into place, will be wholly submerged, tethered to the lakebed with anchors or resting on pylons. Underwater may be an entire oil rig or Tatlin's decoiled tower, but only jutting out will be the viewing stands, the diving platforms and a few other decorative verticals. A circulation network of gangplanks, metallic or of fine timber, will just break the surface.
While the main competition pools are closed containers, the practice lanes may just simply be on open water. The actual spaces of these ancillary pools are delineated by border frames. These Euclidian hydro-geometries, in turn, will be arranged so that from Google Maps, they will look like they belong in a Piet Mondrian grid painting or a Suprematist collage.
Something like BIG's Copenhagen Harbour Bath, Wilk-Salina's Berlin Badeschiff and White's Kastrup Sea Bath but much further away from shore, much more sprawling and much less of that solid stuff visible.
If the Water Cube and London's Aquatics Centre are pure architecture and pure engineering, this natatorium is pure landscape.
Floating Pool
Yet Another Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Try as we might, we couldn't find a lot of information about these swimming pools in Câmara de Lobos on the island of Madeira. Designed by Lisbon-based Global Arquitectura Paisagista, Lda., they were shortlisted for the 5th Rosa Barba European Landscape Award.
We sent inquiries about hi-res images and followed links after links after links hoping that one would lead to site plans and project statements. So far, we only managed to unearth the image above and a terse, unattributed text describing the pools as a “seafront recuperation project that incorporates traditional elements so as to intervene in the landscape in a way that adapts the project to the geomorphic specificities of the island.”
Are there only those two pools? Are those rust-colored gardens part of the project? Is that gray-colored wall concealing interior spaces of, say, changing rooms, restaurants and access corridors to nearby buildings? We haven't a clue.
We were tempted to muse about what this has to say about our research skills (has our reliance on Google over the years eroded them to embarrassingly remedial level?) or the reach of our network (are we just not frequenting the right boîte in the Meat Packing District?) or the media savviness of landscape architects (is the profession not selling itself enough?).
But then we were reminded of our favorite post from Super Colossal and thought that reproducing it here, with some drive-by commentaries, would be a better use of our time.
In that post, then, Marcus Trimble introduced us to the wonderful ocean pools of Sydney.
Trimble wrote:
Sydney, as we all know shares one of its edges with the Pacific Ocean, and another with the Blue Mountains. Along the eastern edge are many beaches, and to my surprise in putting this post together, almost all of these beaches has its own pool carved somewhere into its rocky perimeter.
The geometry of each is slightly different. They are skewed rectangles, triangles, they are of indeterminate length - although most are around about 50m - they are embedded along the edges of cliffs, they sit solitary on reefs, they occasionally like at Narrabeen, spectacularly hinge off the point of a peninsula. At Wylies Baths they play host to a wonderful timber platform. At Collaroy, the ocean side edge of the pool bends as an abstraction of the bend of the cliff behind.
Suprematist fractalogy on the coast of Australia.
Perhaps after reading Trimble's post, The New York Times then commissioned their own article about these watering holes.
“Rock pools,” their travel guide proclaims, “are one of Sydney’s defining characteristics, along with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, though not as well known.”
Just about every Sydney beach has one, usually at the southern end, to give swimmers some protection when the southerly winds bring cold air and big seas. Most have changing rooms and showers, and are free for swimmers. Serene at low tide, choppy at high, they are, in many ways, the original infinity pools.
Each pool has its own colorful history. Some were built by wealthy individuals in the 1800s, when Victorian-era morals banned daytime swimming at the beach, a concept hard to fathom in a country where going to the beach seems to be required. Some pools were built by convicts, others during the Depression. They come in all sizes and shapes, from 50 meters long (roughly 55 yards) and many lanes wide to much smaller boutique pools.
Sydney today has some 40 traditional public 50-meter pools (New York and Los Angeles each has two!), which may explain how swimmers from Australia, with a population around 20 million, were able to haul off 15 medals at the 2004 Olympics in Athens — second only to the United States.
But it might be said that the beginning of Australians’ love affair with swimming was at the rock pools.
One wonders here if it might not be too far off to say that this infrastructure of leisure is a key generative matrix of Australian national identity or perhaps of just Sydney's civic identity.
Reading the article, you sense that so embedded are they in the cultural geography of the city that they've become an indelible part of its psyche, soaked into its citizens' genetic makeup after so many decades dipping into these baptismal fonts.
At the very least, though, and if we can go by Trimble's biographical anecdotes and those of the commentators to his post, this urban hydrological network is a spatial generator of collective memory and nostalgia.
I learnt to swim at one of these pools, waking up at dawn to walk down to the pool with my cousins every morning of every summer for far too many years. We would trudge down, get shouted at and our strokes demolished by an ex life guard by the name of Johnny who it seems, had never spent a moment out of direct contact with the sun and had the skin to prove it. If Johnny was feeling particularly nasty, he would lead all the kids up to the point, and instruct us all to jump and swim back to shore.
We suspect that should a more frequented blog were to write of these pools, it would receive a torrent of reminiscences from Sydneysiders waxing poetic about whiling away the halcyon days of their youth there; about their very first swimming lessons under threats of being swept out to sea; about the time when sharks were on the hunt just outside the trapezoidal walls; and about graduating from these shallow enclaves and into the vast abyss — their rites of passage.
In any case, a few things:
1) The most extensive online resource on these pools seems to be the one maintained by M. L. McDermott, whose dissertation covers their environmental and cultural history. She also maintains a Flickr account with tons of photos. Unfortunately, both have not been updated in a while.
2) One of the more interesting facts we read in The New York Times article is that one pool is only for women and children and is officially exempt from antidiscrimination laws. “Built in the 1800s, it was long known as the ‘nun’s pool.’ Today, Muslim women in scarves are more often seen, along with pregnant women and older women.” This pool is “a venerable Sydney institution.”
3) We were reminded of a proposal by Vicente Guallart — whose Microcoasts we wrote about previously — for a hexagonal beach layered atop a rocky headland in Vinaròs, Spain, thus smoothing out the rugged surface for easier occupation. There is also an artificial wooden island, floating in open waters during the summer and berthed onshore during the winter, further extending the coastline. In the middle of this mobile landscape is an opening, a hexagonal ocean pool of sorts.
Should a beach, say, in Long Island have its sand eroded away down to jagged bedrock by sea level rise and the Army Corps of Engineers isn't going to pay for expensive beach nourishment schemes and coastal fortifications (and not because they've realized that such efforts will do more harm than good but because, let's face it, with two wars and a federal treasury doling out hundreds of billions willy-nilly, is there any money left to be earmarked for projects that will only benefit so few?), this is a convincing alternative.
4) Maybe there should be a remake of Frank Perry's masterpiece The Swimmer, set not in the rotting morass of pre-1968 suburban New York but in the sun-dappled waters of a heroic landscape.
We're not going to imagine our protagonist suffering from existential angst. It's much worse than that: he's just watched that Oscar-mongering drivel that is Australia.
To cleanse himself of the movie's gooey confection, he decides to take a dip and run a few laps in each of the rock pools, a redemptive journey that leads from the movie theater back to his home.
Along the way, he'll meet kooky characters whose doppelgängers have appeared in such quirky 1990s Australian fares as Muriel's Wedding, Cosi, Proof, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Love Serenade, and Flirting.
In the frothy, Champagne surf, he'll stitch together a contemporary narrative and discover a (more) real Australia.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Super Colossal has a follow-up to their survey of Sydney's ocean pools.
Rosa Barba Prize 1: Nicolai Kulturcenter
On the coast
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
