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(How law enforcement agencies might monitor narcotic gardens and genomic dark spots of illegal pharms, according to Thomas Thwaites. Via GOOD's Food HQ via we make money not art.)

(Growing anti-terrorist shrubs and trees in the sun-dappled landscape of eastern France. Photo courtesy of The Daniel Soupe Group. Source.)

Discovered via the breathless Bryan Finoki of Subtopia and his epic feral version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is Sinnoveg, a France-based tree nursery and horticulture research center specializing in “securitizing sites, goods and persons by a concept of anti-intrusion security integrated into the environment.” As described, this “natural concept is based on planting of a hedge of thorny plants, weaved into each other and into metallic elements of reinforcement.”

According to Agence France-Presse, the company has planted “vegetation barriers around a nuclear research centre outside Paris, a juvenile detention centre, train stations and airports.” And now, they want to take their patented shrubs to Baghdad's Green Zone and replacing its “vast network of concrete blast walls with terrorist-proof trees and bushes.”

To make the vege-walls more secure, “traditional barbed wire, tyre spikes, sensors and even metal barriers can be placed within the hedges - an invisible back-up layer of security sure to surprise any potential suicide bomber.”

(This is the first in a series of five time-saver nanoposts on somewhat related items. Other spatial high jinks.)

(Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

Winners of the ASLA 2007 Student Awards have been announced. Filtered through the jumble of thematic threads on Pruned, one remains.

It's the entry by Bret C. Wieseler, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He writes: “(In)Security explores a new design vocabulary in direct response to the climate of fear and paranoia that currently drives the program and aesthetic of much contemporary urban design. The project addresses the current and future state of security in and around the Wall Street financial district, creating viable security alternatives while simultaneously questioning our nation’s current philosophy that security = freedom.”


(It's THE TITHING, “a shallow, cor-ten steel” that's a cross between a public sculpture/vaporous fountain and a Medieval moat. Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

“Four security barricades were conceived. By creating thresholds into and throughout the district, (In)Security sets the tone for the experiences within this walled city. During the design process, archaic and contemporary methods of fortification were researched. Forms were explored as a result of the hybridization of the two. Each barricade is an investigation of both fortification and subversion; designing for the defense of each checkpoint, while simultaneously attempting to undermine it’s perceived raison d'être through a means of confrontation, provocation, or absurdism.”


(It's THE PRONGS, a “tectonic hybrid of tire spikes and medieval Abbatis castle fortifications.” Image by Bret C. Wieseler.)

There are other projects that are equally great and worth mentioning here, but for those, you'll have to visit the ASLA website.

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