|
|
|---|
Sunday, February 13, 2011
1) This is pure awesome: Namibia has designated its entire coastline as a national park. “The Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park covers 26.6 million acres, making it larger than Portugal” and “stretches for 976 miles (1,570km), from the Kunene River, at the northern border with Angola, to the Orange River, on the border with South Africa, and is expected to be promoted as a unified destination. The protected coastline consolidates three national parks: Skeleton Coast, Namib-Naukluft and Sperrgebiet. The last is the site of Namibia’s diamond mines, which have long been closed to the public.” The U.S. should do the same with its coastline. Evict all squatters!
2) The Times asks: Can you disappear in surveillance Britain? “Back in January last year, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going – he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was ‘I’m going to leave my life behind and disappear,’ he said.”
3) Can't live with them, can't eat salad without them: The Guardian on salad slaves.
4) On Tuesday, February 15, the Arid Lands Institute will present the next speakers of their lecture series, Excavating Innovation: The History and Future of Drylands Design. They are Vinjayak Bharne and Pruned hero Dilip da Cunha. See the poster below for the title of their talks. If you can't make it, videos of the event will be posted on the institute's website.
5) Another SoCal event is Made Up at the Art Center College of Design. “MADE UP: Design's Fictions presents the work of major and emerging international practices that forecast, hypothesize, muse, skylark, role-play, put-on-airs, freak-out or otherwise fake-it to produce work that is relevant to our increasingly confusing and accelerated world.”
6) Check out Canalscape: “The Phoenix Metro region has a vast network of canals, initially constructed by early inhabitants of this region two millennia ago and rebuilt during modern times. These canals are our lifeline, supporting farming and providing a good portion of our drinking water. We have yet to leverage this amazing asset, however, to produce a distinctive and more sustainable desert urbanism. At this critical juncture, canalscape seizes this opportunity by: a) Creating vital hubs of urban activity where canals meet major streets; b) Enhancing the canals to offer more comfortable recreational corridors, non-motorized transportation options, and alterative energy generation.”
7) Excess for excess: “A local authority in England has given the go ahead for a swimming pool to use energy created by the next-door crematorium to heat its water. The plan, the first of its kind in Britain, will see waste heat from the incinerator chimney used to warm up the neighboring leisure center and its new pool.”
8) Peeling Back the Bark on “what forestry and logging were supposed to look like today as predicted by the best minds of the mid-20th century.”
9) With gold prices soaring, old mines in California are reopening.
10) From March 4 to April 1, 2011, “media-artists, speculative designers, avant-garde businesses and bleeding edge researchers working between life and technology” will gather together in Amsterdam for the second TransNatural event.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
1) “Take a deep breath. Even if the air looks clear, it’s nearly certain that you’ll inhale tens of millions of solid particles and liquid droplets. These ubiquitous specks of matter are known as aerosols, and they can be found in the air over oceans, deserts, mountains, forests, ice, and every ecosystem in between. They drift in Earth’s atmosphere from the stratosphere to the surface and range in size from a few nanometers—less than the width of the smallest viruses—to several several tens of micrometers—about the diameter of human hair. Despite their small size, they have major impacts on our climate and our health.”
2) “The Norwegian documentary Bergensbanen details the gorgeous 300-mile, 7.5-hour-long train ride from Bergen to Oslo. An intrepid group of DJs have scored the entire journey.”
3) Turkey plans to supply northern Cyprus with fresh water via a pipeline. “As for Turkey, its own water supplies are not so abundant as to be able to be so generous in its desire to share its own dwindling water resources with Northern Cyprus. This only points out the continuing political rivalries going on between Greece and Turkey that has resulted in so many problems in Cyprus over the years.”
4) Another dispatch from the #Super-Versailles: Using two vehicles with high-powered heaters, “Beijing will collect and melt snow this winter in a bid to quench the water shortage that has plagued the Chinese capital for years.”
5) A recent New York Times Room for Debate question: “[E]ven if the U.S. and other countries can find and [mine rare earth minerals], do they have the technical expertise to compete with China in their processing? Is the domestic production of rare earth elements essential to American economic and national security interests?”
Saturday, November 6, 2010
1) “Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.” For instance, try the 2010 Pakistan floods, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Chernobyl Disaster.
2) Check out David Bowen's tele-present wind and mildly creepy fly drawing device.
3) In Chance Encounter on the Tiber, two American Academy in Rome Fellows, Lisa Bielawa and Robert Hammond, transformed “the walkway along the Tiber River in the center of Rome into a vibrant social open space by focusing on two simple means: movable seating and musical performance.” Their post-event summary of what worked and what didn't work is a good read.
4) “During the 1850s and 1860s engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago. Streets, sidewalks and buildings were either built up or else physically raised up on jacks.”
5) “You don’t expect to find a full murder investigation, rangers with rifles and warning signs, hikers trembling and looking anxiously around the corner of every trail. For the first time in the 72-year history of one of the nation’s most beloved national parks, a wild animal has fatally assaulted a human.” The killer is a goat.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
1) Go check out BIG's beautiful proposal for a forest crematorium at the famed Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm.
2) Also go check out what InfraNet Lab has been up to this summer. You'll find out that Bracket #1 will be available this October and that the call for submissions for #2 is imminent. The grapevine earlier told us what the chosen theme is for the next issue, and it is awesome. Repeat: AWESOME!
3) Chicago Magazine takes an illustrated look back at an interesting civic project: “Mid-19th-century Chicago was an emerging titan of agribusiness, a burgeoning transit hub, a potential star of the Midwest—and a disease-infested swamp in danger of being reclaimed by Lake Michigan. By 1855, with roads knee deep in sludge, city hall faced a massive undertaking: hoisting Chicago out of the muck by raising the streets and structures as much as 14 feet.” You can read more about the raising of Chicago here.
4) “Paris is fast becoming the urban beekeeping capital of the world,” reports the BBC.
5) “Parasite is an independent projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Parasite projects films inside a tunnel. These tunnels bear something mystic – most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Confusing the routine of your train-travelling-journey, your habits and perception the projections parallel worlds – making use of parasite – allow you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery.”
Saturday, August 7, 2010
1) An ecological succession of sorts: from the pioneer turf of the Endless Pasture to the arboreal climax of the Endless Forest.
2) “Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it,” reports Reuters.
Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.
Some 50,000 square meters of water (more than half a million square feet) had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season in July, [state media] said. The trash is around 60 centimeters (two feet) deep, and in some parts so compacted people can walk on it.
3) Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) is “a coalition dedicated to ensuring swimmable waters around New York City through natural, sustainable stormwater management practices in our neighborhoods. This approach is environmentally and fiscally responsible because it utilizes stormwater, currently viewed as waste, as a resource.” Related: Urban swimming in Bern, Switzerland.
4) “A genetically modified (GM) crop has been found thriving in the wild for the first time in the United States,” reports Nature.
5) New York's Department of City Planning recently unveiled an interactive map of all 200 miles of the city's publicly-accessible waterfront: beaches, wetlands, wildlife habitats, parks, esplanades, piers, street ends, vistas and waterways.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
We noticed that the new layout isn't a fan of our quickie, non-titled posts, so we've taken them offline and collated their tidbits into this single, titled post.
We like storm drain stenciling. They usually read: No Dumping / Drains To River. But how about: Dump Here / Your Kids Get Cancer. Or: You'll Be Drinking That Soon.
“A new type of 'lunar concrete,' made by mixing moondust and carbon nanotubes, could be used to construct buildings, solar power arrays, and monolithic telescopes on the moon,” National Geographic reports.
Watch the films of Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille beside their remains at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Necropolises as occupiable urban open spaces.
Watch David Barrie explain how to
The People's Liberation Army against hydrology —
Charles Holland, of Fantastic Journal, writes:
In his book Looking at the Overlooked Norman Bryson describes the strange impossibility of the scenes depicted in Dutch still life painting. Vases teeming with exotic flowers would be painted in lavish detail despite the fact that the flowers themselves could never have existed together in that state. Coming from different continents and time zones they would flower at different times of the year and their representation together in full bloom is a perverse distortion of nature. The flowers represent both a temporal and spatial collapsing of distinctions and difference. The pictures instead celebrate a new found knowledge and power within the world, they are the product of empire.
In our post-humanist era, the direct descendants of Dutch still life painting — and also this sort of Northern Renaissance genre painting — must be our cloned sheep and GM rice fields and auricular mice and Martian designer plants and transgenic zoos, especially when visually composed for mass consumption via CNN, press releases and blogs.
A 26-ton miniature earth core filled with boiling metal will spin at about 90 miles per hour in a laboratory to generate “the world's first artificial, spherical and self-sustaining magnetic field.” It will help scientists better understand our planet's magnetic climate, which “acts like a protective shield, blocking harmful particles from the sun, which fry the electronics on board orbiting satellites and mess with the electrical grids powering homes and offices.” It will also birth a new industry in magnetic weather modification.
Polar Inertia visits some abandoned swimming pools.
New York's Central Park has turned into a battleground, New York Magazine tells us — joggers vs. bikers vs. dog walkers vs. drivers. “It’s about the politics of public space. Who gets that space? And how is it apportioned?”
We ♥ P-REX.
Is Mother Nature a bulldyke?
According to National Geographic, anthropologists have mapped a “latticework” of “dozens of densely packed, pre-Columbian towns, villages, and hamlets.” Combining local knowledge with GIS and satellite imagery, Michael Heckenberger and his colleagues have identified two major settlement clusters, each with “a central seat of ritualistic power with wide roads radiating out to other communities.” Furthermore, “between the settlements, which today are almost completely overgrown, was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms.” The organization has similarities to Ebenezer Howard's garden cities, says Heckenberger. This is the mythological city of Z, says another.
So there's this reality show, plainly titled Architecture School, on the Sundance Channel. For six episodes, we get to see students from Tulane University's School of Architecture design and build a house for a low income family in New Orleans. You can catch the first episode on Hulu. Hopefully, it will become a massive success, as it may make television producers more receptive to our own reality series, The Surreal Life: Bungalow Edition.
In Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler stars as Leslie Knope, the head of the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana. “Knope takes on a project from a nurse named Ann to turn a construction pit into a park, while trying to mentor a bored college-aged intern.” It will be a mockumentary style series like The Office.
Archinect and InfraNet Lab are previewing the first issue of [bracket], On Farming.
“The people of the Carterets Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are the first entire people to officially be evacuated because of climate change.” And this blog chronicles their plight.
Freshkills Park has a blog.
Atlas Obscura is a growing compendium of “out-of-the-way places that are singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange” from Dylan Thuras, of Curious Expedition, and Joshua Foer, of the long-dormant Athanasius Kircher Society.
“The Dutch Dialogues workshops are the outgrowth of extended interactions between Dutch engineers, urban designers, landscape architects, city planners, soils/hydrology experts and, primarily, their Louisiana counterparts.”
Most likely it was because spring has arrived, but we like to think the recent passage of the health care reform bill and the fact that municipal budgets everywhere are being crippled by the recession (and perhaps even the growing popularity of urban farming and street fruit foraging) may have also instigated The New York Times to commission Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening, to write an op-ed piece on cultivating an allergy-free urban forest. “Many arborists and landscapers like to plant male trees and shrubs because they’re 'litter-free' — that is, they produce no seeds or seedpods.” No fruits messing and stinking up the streets also mean cities don't have to spend much on clean up. “But male trees shed lots of pollen; that’s their job. And once it’s released, it can be blown around for months,” inducing severe allergic reactions and asthma attacks.
SHIFT, a new print and web publication of the Student Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (SASLA) at North Carolina State University College of Design, is seeking submissions for its inaugural issue, SHIFT: Infrastructure. The deadline is June 1, 2010.
Walton Ford's Bestiarium is marvelous!
Urban Omnibus has posted some of the entries to Minds in the Gutter, a recent ideas competition organized to gather alternative designs for stormwater management systems in New York City.
In an e-mail alerting us to the upcoming broadcast on public television of Children of the Amazon, a documentary which “follows Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol as she travels a modern highway deep into the Amazon in search of the Indigenous Surui and Negarote children she photographed fifteen years ago,” this brief blurb about one of those tribes particularly stood out for us, considering our longstanding interest in participatory GIS and the synergy between high-tech geospatial technologies and human rights activism:
Through a groundbreaking relationship with Google, the Surui tribe is using GPS, Google Earth, Android phones, and other digital media to document the devastation and connect with activists worldwide.
Learn more about this partnership in this nearly 3-year-old article from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Smithsonian magazine has a longer piece here, while BBC News has a video report.
One of the recipients of the 2009-10 Branner Traveling Fellowship is Eleanor Pries. During her yearlong globetrotting, she will research “buildings and systems that catch, convey, store, and filter water through basic hydrological principles.” These include stepwells, reservoirs, foggaras, qanat and Andalucian gutter-scapes, all of which she'll awesomely catalogue in her blog, drip | dry. Already she's explored some irrigation channels in the Peruvian Andes and geothermal pools in Iceland.
The Los Angeles Urban Rangers had planned to wrap up their 3-year Malibu Public Beach project with 3 mini-safaris last February before canceling them due to rain. They have since rescheduled these “last-hurrah” safaris for Sunday, May 23.
Are you tired of Zuma and Surfrider? Want to find and use the 20 miles of public beaches that are lined with private development? Our safaris will equip you with the advanced skills necessary to find and use the Malibu public beaches legally and safely. Activities include signwatching, trailblazing the public-private boundary, and a public easement potluck.
The safaris are free, and no sign-up is required. Just don't plan to join mid-safari.
We recommend booking a passage on Agnes Meyer-Brandis's Research Raft for Subterranean Reefology.
“When Robert De Niro flushes his toilet in Tribeca, Harlem has to deal with it.”
Saturday, March 20, 2010
1) Edible Geography on It's A Tasty World, an exhibition on cutting-edge food science and food culture currently on display at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo, Japan.
2) Loud Paper on the Banham-esque gadgetry of boutique farming.
3) FASLANY on Bukowski-scapes. “The Red Hook Farm is a Bukowski-scape. It takes the nasty, the damning, the painful, the destructive- much of it self-inflicted- and makes it meaningful, interesting, alive, and sometimes beautiful. It utterly embraces the underbelly of the American Dream- the legacy left post-WWII urban policies, by drug and crime economies, the undefended communities harmed by classist and racist initiatives and by self-destructive tendencies. And it is prolific- the farm is growing, and not just producing more food, but expanding social interactions, forms of recreation, education and work, and diversifying local economies.”
4) On the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi/Benaras, India.
5) sportsBabel on the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
1) Videos of the Foodprint NYC panel discussions are now on iTunes U.
2) The Wall Street Journal on Mumbai's skywalks. “To lift the pedestrians that power this city above the fray, Mumbai is building more than 50 elevated walkways. The skywalks will sprout from train stations across the city and snake over the traffic for up to two miles to create a pedestrian express lane.” So many wrongs.
3) Mammoth on the future forests of the Eastern Seaboard.
4) F.A.D. on reclaiming the Florida Everglades. “The debacle at the south shore of Lake Okeechobee demonstrates that the Everglades restoration is a bit of a misnomer. The science-based engineering effort is much more a project of reclamation because it’s virtually impossible to recreate the Everglades as they originally were due to the extent of transformation that has occurred and the existing colonization of the territory by corporate processes. Not to mention all of the imported invasive plants, animals (such as escaped and willfully released Burmese Pythons) and other organisms that will never be fully removed.”
5) FASLANYC on James Corner and Field Operations. “[W]hile long renowned for his pretentious intellectual attitude, it is now reaching a new level. In a phone interview he and Mr. Hawthorne were discussing the new Santa Monica project. When discussing the budget, Corner had the temerity to remark of the 25 million dollar budget that 'it's hardly generous, but it's not bad'. Well, excuse us, Mr. Corner. Excuse us for not having 130 million to throw at a project!! Excuse us for putting only 25 million toward the park in the middle of the worst recession in 80 years when forced furloughs, state budget crises, home foreclosures, and long-term unemployment are all common place.”
Sunday, March 7, 2010
1) The Guardian on the 21st century African land grab. In 20 or more African countries “land is being bought or leased for intensive agriculture on an immense scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era.
An Observer investigation estimates that up to 50m hectares of land — an area more than double the size of the UK — has been acquired in the last few years or is in the process of being negotiated by governments and wealthy investors working with state subsidies. [...]
The land rush, which is still accelerating, has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages and the European Union's insistence that 10% of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015.
In many areas the deals have led to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of “land grabbing”.
One of the countries is Ethiopia. It's “one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.”
2) Serial Consign on airlocks.
3) Foreign Policy on China's golf obsession. “While between 100 and 300 courses are expected to be built [on China's tropical island province of Hainan], the most mysterious project — and by far the most audacious — is the latest offering from Hong Kong's Mission Hills Group, already owners of a 12-course resort in southern China's Guangdong province. Its Hainan club, when completed, will be the world's largest, with some 22 courses covering an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Manhattan.”
4) Wikipedia on the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.
5) Spiegel on the garbage of Naples. “The Italian-German solid-waste profiteering scandals provide insights into a booming industry. According to investigations by Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), up to two million tons of household waste have already been dumped illegally in German waste dumps and former landfills.”
Sunday, February 28, 2010
1) On Urban Omnibus is an interview of the organizers of Foodprint NYC, Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich. Says Twilley, “[F]ood is an incredibly powerful tool for connecting seemingly disparate issues. It is a magical lens that allows you to see the landscape in a different way.”
2) Metropolis on landscape architect Jacques Wirtz's garden in Schoten, Belgium.
3) Spillway on Kieran Timberlake's winning design for the new U.S. Embassy in London.
4) The public comment period on the National Mall Plan is open until March 18, 2010. We knew that the National Mall is the most contested territory in the Western Hemisphere, if not the entire world (which would include Jerusalem), but we were dumbstruck to learn just how many government entities have jurisdiction over the lands and roads within and adjacent to the plan area. In addition to the competing interests of a bewilderingly heterogeneous citizenry, planners have to do deal with the following agencies: the National Park Service, the Architect of the Capitol, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of Agriculture, the General Services Administration, the District of Columbia, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the D.C. Historic Preservation Office.
5) The Pop-Up City on a floating park for Amsterdam.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
1) The Wall Street Journal on Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last December. “Erosion threatens nearly 59% of Florida's 825 miles of sandy beaches, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Under a 1961 law, the state dredges sand from one area and dumps it on another, expanding the width of a threatened beach. Six property owners in Walton County, banding together as Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc., argue that they should own the new beach and visitors shouldn't be allowed to spread their towels on it. The owners say their deeds entitle them to all land up to the mean high water line, including the additional 80 to 100 feet of beach the state added.” More on the SCOTUSblog.
2) 3quarksdaily on Tings Dey Happen, a one-man play by Dan Hoyle set in the sublime petroscape of Nigeria.
3) InfraNet Lab on the Thermarium. “The Thermarium envisions a new beach typology for the Toronto Waterfront. Responding to the lack of swimming at Toronto’s new urban beaches and consistent CSO (combined sewage overflow) closures at surrounding swim areas, the Thermarium offers new possibilities for water immersion and activity that are enabled, rather than prohibited, by the polluted run-off instigated by heavy rainstorms.”
4) Metropolis POV on protecting the Netherlands from sea level rise via soft coastal engineering.
5) A seven-story aquarium on Times Square. “Jerry Shefsky, a Toronto-based developer, said on Wednesday that he has signed a preliminary agreement with the landlord of an office tower on the western edge of Times Square to go forward with the $100 million project. He would install tanks featuring sharks, rays, penguins, otters, and other animals in the bottom floors of the 40-story building, known as 11 Times Square, hoping to attract some of the 35 million people who pass through Manhattan's major crossroads every year.”
6) The New York Times on military training sites as wildlife preserves.
7) Miller-McCune has an ongoing series on wildfires. “The war being waged against wildfires from Southern California to Greece and Australia is almost as complex as the infernos themselves. Innovative computer mapping tools advance, as do airborne imaging techniques that can look straight through black smoke for views of emerging dangers no firefighter ever sees. However, some crews battle blazes on bulldozers older than they are, and funding is tight all around. Still, the breakthroughs keep coming.” One article looks at state of the art remote sensing technologies while another looks at computer modeling to understand and hopefully predict the behavior of wildfires. A third looks at lo-tech strategies in places with modest budget.
8) The Wall Street Journal on the politics of the Asian carp.
9) The Los Angeles Times on the complicity of turfgrass in global warming, pollution and the water crisis. “For the first time, scientists compared the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed by ornamental turfgrass to the amount emitted in the irrigation, fertilizing and mowing of the same plots. In four parks near Irvine, they calculated that emissions were similar to or greater than the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the air through photosynthesis.”
10) Yahoo! Sports on the looming Peak Curling Stone crisis. Will curlers turn a Scottish island into the next Nauru?
Saturday, February 13, 2010
1) Hubble on Saturn's twin “fluttering” aurorae.
2) On March 9, the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition will open at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. “[T]he 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.”
3) Bustler on the winning concept for the revitalization of Toronto’s Lower Don Lands.
4) Alphabet City on urban public baths. “When the public bath moves into the city, it may frame natural landscapes, as in an indoor wave pool or a Japanese open-air rotenburo, or amplify the elemental qualities that buildings usually try to moderate, such as heat and cold, wet and dry, darkness and light. These urban bath cultures, like the Roman thermae and balnae, Turkish hammam, Japanese sento, and Russian banya, have formed a cornerstone of their cities’ spatial forms and their citizens’ daily rituals.”
5) An apiary on the west site of Chicago.
6) Wikipedia on the River Thames Frost Fairs.
7) The Guardian on damming the Amazon. “The Brazilian government has given the green light to the construction of a controversial hydroelectric dam in the Amazon rainforest that environmentalists and indigenous activists claim will displace indigenous tribes and further damage the Amazon basin.” The Belo Monte Dam will be the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, behind the Three Gorges Dam in China and the Itaipu Dam shared by Brazil and Paraguay. And according to the BBC News it is one of “at least 70 dams” planned for the Amazon basin.
8) On drive-ins.
9) e360 on rewilding. “A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the “island” effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators.”
10) BBC News on climate change tours in the Alps using GPS and mobile phones.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
1) This American Life on people bidding for the contents of abandoned self storage units in California. According to the Self Storage Association, there are 2.35 billion square feet in the United States. That's 7.4 square feet of self storage for every man, woman and child in the country, meaning all of us could stand inside self storage units at the same time. Plus: underwater Byzantine archaeology.
2) Mammoth on the best architecture of the decade.
3) On the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver: Will one venue be foreclosed before/during/after the games? Will another even have enough snow or might it necessitate a nightly Busby Berkeley meteorological extravaganza of snow machines billowing an artificial blizzard? Will you be among “the anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents?”
4) Archinect on minarets.
5) Low-tech Magazine on the history of trolley canal boats. A short concluding section argues for bringing them back as a zero-emission transport system. Be sure to read this comment thread at The Oil Drum for counter-arguments.
6) Polar Inertia on seaside shacks.
7) On February 27, Foodprint NYC, an event organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, will touch upon “how our urban food systems work today, how historical forces have shaped them till now, how they might develop in the future — and how these food systems, in turn, have shaped our environment and ourselves.”
8) Also on February 27 but on the other coast, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will be wrapping up their 3-year Malibu Public Beach project by offering 3 mini-safaris. They're free and no sign-up is required. Just show up for any one of the tours, but don't plan to join mid-safari.
9) An exhibition on the 1910 Great Flood of Paris. If the flash website drives you up the wall, there is Paris Under Water, both the book and the blog.
10) Year-old NPR piece on grain silos converted into ice climbing walls.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
1) Strange Harvest on Stonehenge and tourism infrastructure.
Stonehenge is a monument to contemporary doubt, to fallibility, competing theories and conflicting mythologies. And perhaps these confusions explain the curse of the Stonehenge Visitors centre. Because, though seemingly benign, visitors centres are highly strung cultural artefacts.
The role of a visitors centre is more than corralling cars and dispensing cappuccinos. The real substance of a Visitors Centre is to articulate our relationship to history, nature or whatever it is we happen to be visiting. The current visitors centre typology employs a kind of eco-high tech that steers a path between various controversies. It's a building type that attempts to feel authentic, natural and generically vernacular but contains enough contemporary tropes of transparency and engineering to differentiate it from commercialised 'themed' heritage. If you only visited Visitors Centres, leaving before you saw the significant site, you'd develop a nuanced understanding of the ways contemporary culture relates to nature and history.
It just seems so strange to us that the country of garden follies (culturally mediated engagement with nature and history), the grided architecture of metes and bounds, and the literary invented landscapes of the Lakes District could still be having problems negotiating between the manmade and the natural and between authentic experience and drive-by tourism. Haven't these issues been resolved already over there?
2) Bustler on the winners of the Brooklyn Grand Army Plaza competition.
3) BLDGBLOG on nuclear power stations as national historic landmarks. Reading this and remembering Fantastic Journal's travelogue to England's seaside village of Dungeness, we were reminded of Derek Jarman's garden and how it appropriated the nearby nuclear power station into a landscape folly. It's the radioactive machine in the garden.
4) SUBSURFACE Magazine on Issuu.com. A student publication from the Department of Landscape Architecture, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
5) The New York Times on planting a meadow.
[W]ith the growing interest in sustainable gardening and the widespread dissatisfaction with the time, expense and chemical fertilizers required for traditional lawn care, meadows are becoming increasingly popular. A perennial meadow in bloom, its colors constantly changing with the play of light and shadow, may be nature at its most alluring. Yet, as random and natural as a meadow looks, there is nothing haphazard about creating one. Planting a meadow, it turns out, is as rule-bound and time-consuming as planting any perennial border.
6) Defense Tech on liquid-cooled underwear, BBC News on robo-skeleton for the paralyzed, and Wired Gadgets on d03: ready-to-wear for extreme landscapes. (As a possible ground cover, d03's “intelligent shock absorbers” calls to mind Stoss' Safe Zone, a temporary garden installation for the International Garden Festival, Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens.)
And with that, this series is retired.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Some blogs discovered recently or otherwise:
InfraNet Lab, the digital playground of Mason White, Lola Sheppard and Lateral Architecture, investigates “the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics,” such as enviro-veillance, Icelandic data islands, artificial wave-breaking reefs, etc. They must be after our hearts.
Art21 Blog
boiteaoutils
David Barrie
Design Under Sky
local ecologist
Friday, August 1, 2008
The New Republic on the demographic inversion of the American city. For example, “Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city—Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center—some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white—are those who can afford to do so.”
BBC News on the first truly global map of the world's rocks.
New Statesman on the secret history of Vienna's Nazi flak towers. “These reinforced concrete colossi...still dominate their surroundings without a hint of remorse” but they “do not exist as part of 'official' Vienna, the tourist temple to Mozart, Strauss and chocolate cake. Other than a brief mention in guidebooks and the occasional academic study, they are invisible. Yet Vienna is, of course, also the city of Sigmund Freud, and these relics of a dark past are poised to burst out of the city's subconscious.”
BBC News on Bangladesh's growing landmass: “1,000 square kilometres” over the “next 50 years,” according to Maminul Haque Sarker of the Dhaka-based Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services. But Dr. Atiq Rahman, a lead author of a UN report on climate change, says this may not make the country any less vulnerable: “The rate at which sediment is deposited and new land is created is much slower than the rate at which climate change and sea level rises are taking place.” In other words, The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game is still on.
Cabinet Magazine and Rosalind Williams on subterranean spaces.
Bustler on the CityRacks competition to find new solutions for NYC’s bike locking/parking fixtures. The finalists are announced.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
We're clearing our bookmarks again, and here are some links that were worth saving: Project New Orleans /// Fake Soil /// Designing Greener Dirt /// Chicago's Green Alley Initiative /// GROW:DC /// Cooking at the South Pole /// Pechet and Robb Studio Limited /// International Rivers /// Earth House /// USA evacuation routes /// Wanted: Space Experiment Volunteers /// Who owns the moon? /// Public Participation GIS /// Your Sewer on Drugs /// High Tech Crosswalks /// Baghdad's Red Lake /// Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial /// Alan Berger /// National Helium Reserve /// The CERES Water Trail /// Mars Soil Resembles Veggie-Garden Dirt /// The Sliding Rocks of Racetrack Playa /// The Waters of the City of Rome: hydraulic infrastructure, aqueducts, fountains and sewers.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
BusinessWeek on T. Boone Pickens, the “modern-day John D. Rockefeller” who “owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.”
The LA Times on farming with the sea.
The New Yorker on the American lawn. “What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them.”
GOOD Magazine on pollution tourism.
Pink Tentacle on some floodgates.
Off-Grid on soil power. “Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that make use of the energy given off by soil microbes are amongst the technologies that hold promise for bringing power to developing states.”
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Now that we'll be posting some of the more interesting links and articles that we find out there as individual entries, our Prunings will be retired soon. But not before we reach L, because this auspicious initial calls for something special. But what? Any ideas?
Meanwhile, here are some blogs, discovered recently or otherwise:
Architectural Scholar
Buildings & Grounds
Check-in Architecture
Fantastic Journal
Metropolis POV
Paisajes Mineros
Saturday, May 17, 2008
1) The National Science Foundation on a sprawling subterranean science laboratory that will allow “researchers to probe some of the most compelling questions in modern science.”
What are the invisible dark matter and dark energy that comprise more than 95 percent of everything visible in the universe? What is the nature of ghostly particles called neutrinos that pervade the cosmos, but almost never interact with matter, and what can certain kinds of extremely rare radioactivity and particle decay reveal about the fundamental behavior of atoms? Will this site help reliably predict and control earthquakes? What are the characteristics of microorganisms at great depth?
They might as well study the physical, psychological and social effects of living in underground communities, perhaps as an analogue of future lunar and martian urbanism.
2) The Guardian on post-water Barcelona. Remember that plan to import water to the city because of the severe drought? It's no longer being considered; it's being carried out.
3) Subtopia on Germany's involuntary park.
4) In chronological order, we make money not art, WorldChanging, Click opera and designboom blog on Atelier van Lieshout's SlaveCity, “a dark architectural vision of perfect efficiency, and sustainability-as-principle-of-oppression.” Zero carbon footprint, zero humanity.
5) The Wall Street Journal on cooking at the South Pole.
6) Buildings & Grounds on Peter Walker's celebrated Tanner Fountain.
7) Scientists at the Research Center Jülich on artificial photosynthesis.
8) The National Science Foundation on gasoline growing on trees.
