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Monday, May 3, 2010
In March, Circle of Blue reported that the Shimo la Tewa prison near Mombasa, Kenya, is to replace its broken sanitation infrastructure with an artificial wetland to clean its wastewater. Funded in part by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), it is the first project of its kind in Kenya.
Shimo la Tewa’s new system uses gravity to pipe waste water 200 meters away from the main prison buildings to a screen that traps the solid waste. The remaining effluent enters a septic tank to break down anaerobically before it flows through the wetland, which is filled with plants that naturally filter pollutants, such as water hyacinth.
When the wetland is completed in April 2010 it will provide the added benefit of recycled water that the prison can put to economic use. Shimo la Tewa will install aquaculture ponds that will create work for prisoners at a neighboring minimum security facility, [Shimo la Tewa's Senior Sargeant Paul Cheruiyot] said. Any excess water will irrigate plants on the prison grounds.
As estimated by UNEP, “operating and maintenance costs for the constructed wetland are roughly $50 per person served, compared to $300-$500 per person for the pumped systems.”
Though mindful of the ethical implications of using inmates as guinea pigs, we're nonetheless tempted to think that prisons are, or most likely have always been, ideal testing grounds in which to form and develop new and alternative systems to redress conditions of resource scarcity. It's not shockingly revelatory to say that these carceral spaces are really miniature cities or the whole world condensed, continually concerned with issues of food, health and shelter. Increasingly burdened with over carrying capacity and diminishing financial inputs, they're on a perpetual crisis mode, a disaster in waiting, just like the world outside their walls. One could thus understandably assume that such threat of catastrophe would turn a prison into a hotbed of innovations.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Popular Science paid a visit to Disaster City in College Station, Texas. It isn't a city, of course, but “a vast disaster-simulation center designed to look and feel as close to catastrophe as you ever want to be. Each hairline crack, each mangled car, all the mountains of rubble are modeled on wreckage from real disasters, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles that killed 72 people and injured nearly 12,000. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired the collapsed parking garage, with cars dangling off the sides like spiders from a ceiling, while the 12-foot-deep rubble catacombs resemble those from Ground Zero.”
This “Jerry Bruckheimer set” is where search-and-rescue teams go to train.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Another testing ground is this field of telephone poles located in Chester Township, New Jersey. It's an arboretum of sorts, “planted” with several hundred tree trunks, the total of which may have peaked close to a thousand, carved out of different arboreal species and preserved using various methods. All are arranged in a formal grid and tagged with data-rich metal plates.
Here, AT&T and then other telecommunication companies subjected their lifeless midget forest to the elements and time. A menagerie of woodpeckers and pocket gophers were brought in to attack the poles. Humans and their spiked boots, too, ran rampant about the place in a balletic dance of ascents and descents, empirically choreographed.
All that just to create the perfect telephone pole.
Once a research center partly turned into a weird kind of aviary or a petting zoo or an even weirder sort of artificial ecology, the site is now part of a recreational area and an archive of our infrastructural past.
Monday, June 1, 2009
To register once more our fascination with testing grounds, or sites of experimentation and simulations, here is the rack map of concrete slabs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' materials testing facility at Treat Island, Maine.
On the island, material specimens are exposed to natural severe environmental conditions to test for durability. They are subjected to between 100 and 160 freeze-thaw cycles, cyclic inundation of saltwater and air-drying, chloride intrusion, wetting and drying, and abrasion-erosion. There and in many other testing grounds, arranged in museological, Donald Judd-like intervals of solids and negatives, these perfect geometries are coming undone. The building blocks of future cities and monuments fracture and decay in a way that belies their solidity and intended permanence. Bit by bit, atom by atom, structures get nullified and give way.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Welcome to Chicago! No, not that Chicago.
This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built by Israel in the middle of the Negev desert to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” are collected in this book and are replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial “authenticity” is the fact that the “history” of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set. Here, with props on hand or littered about, they perfect their stage presence, try out some new moves and hand gestures, and fine tune their dialogues in front of cardboard cutouts of generic terrorists. Here also, they practice their showstopper: walking through walls. And then it's time to step out in front of live television cameras, the whole world already a captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of their history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to study.
Subtopia: MOUT Urbanism
BLDGBLOG: A miniature city waiting for attack
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Behold! The world's largest vacuum chamber constructed for vehicle testing of the new Orion spacecraft.
Thermal vacuum testing and electromagnetic interference testing will take place in the vacuum chamber. Thermal vacuum testing will confirm that the spacecraft can withstand the extreme hot and cold temperatures present in space, and electromagnetic interference testing will verify the reliability of Orion's communication and electronic systems.
Adjacent to this chamber is an earthquake simulator that will also subject the ship to the violent conditions of liftoff.
The 75,000-pound craft will sit on a huge vibration table; comprising a 125,000-pound mass that must be shaken with an intensity equal to that of a launch.
And:
Twenty-four horns will blow high-pressured nitrogen gas to match the intensity level of the sounds produced during the launch. Most acoustic facilities have around two or three horns. But for this facility, everything is being built bigger in scale to more accurately assess the spacecraft.
In other words, when fully operational, or even when not, these will be two of the most interesting spaces in the world.
If ever Sandusky, Ohio becomes the unlikeliest host to an edition of Postpolis!, this certainly would be the perfect venue. Cut off from normal air, curators, speakers and audience will don pressurized spacesuits, communicate via crackling shortwave radio, move about and sit through sonic stillness. Can a lively, at times riotously boisterous, conversations be had under threat of suffocation? About such things as the testing grounds for space exploration and the messy historiography of their microearth capsules?
We think so.
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Other Disaster Labs
Poseidon vs. Aeolus
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Of mini-Big Bang birth chambers, server farms, neo-cathedrals and the Tenth Circle of Hell
at 9:48 PM
While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?
In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.
And self-powered lighting fixtures; some artificial turf and mildly meditative Zen boulders; a few dozen rabbits, cute or otherwise; anti-gravity hydrology; and of course, the all-important signage: “Warning: If Not Rapture, May Cause Death.”
And after you push a few buttons, flick one or two switches and drain Europe of all of its electricity, your floating garden then goes on an endless subterranean ringed journey.
It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.
In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.
We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.
In other words:
Where the Big Bang might have been simulated endlessly, extra dimensions observed for the first time, and the fundamental construct of Nature elucidated, it might soon be filled with the buying patterns of ex-urbanites at Wal-Mart, hilariously awful credit ratings of college graduates, and our entire archive of bukkake porn.
You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
During a seemingly endless nighttime hypertextual journey through Wikipedia — one that took us from Tempelhof to a crash course on Nazi architecture and inevitably on to Hitler's imagined future capital, Welthauptstadt Germania, a city that became a ruin without first having existed, and to Albert Speer, whose post-war gardening activities are worth detailing, which we will in a future post, i.e., if we still have the stamina to trudge through his excruciatingly long diary for the few relevant entries, before looping back to the start to then read about the Berlin Airlift, whose infrastructural and spatial organization, including the three air corridors above the blockaded Soviet Occupied Zone, we find so utterly interesting — we discovered the Schwerbelastungskörper.
It's a massive cylindrical block of concrete, standing 18 meters high and weighing in at 12,560 metric tons. It is located in the Berlin neighborhood of Tempelhof, where the eponymous airport is found. Under all that tonnage is a slimmer cylinder with a lower and an upper chamber, both of which were outfitted with measuring instruments. In profile, the whole structure would look like a mushroom.
But what exactly is it? And what are those instruments measuring?
The name is translated as “heavy load-bearing body,” although someone in the discussion page of the wiki article has suggested that “heavy load-exerting body” might be more accurate. It was constructed in 1941 to test how well the marshy ground upon which Berlin sits could handle the massive projects planned for Germania. More specifically, it was built to see how the landscape would react to Hitler's gigantic Triumphal Arch, whose opening would have accommodated the triumph in Paris.
The results were not encouraging:
The Schwerbelastungskörper sank 7 inches in the three years it was to be used for testing, a maximum depth of 2.5 inches was allowed. Using the evidence gathered by these gargantuan devices, it is unlikely the soil could have supported such structures without further preparation.
Hitler dismissed these findings, perhaps confident that the landscape can be subjugated with fine Teutonic engineering. But his Third Rome had to wait; there was a war to be waged.
Of course, history then happened, and the Schwerbelastungskörper remained where it stood, waiting for a city that will never come, sinking, still taking measures of the landscape, accumulating trash and graffiti, outliving its original function and its planned 20 weeks' worth of existence.
In 1995, it gained historic status and thereafter given some preservation work that continues today. And if we deciphered the BabelFish translation of this webpage correctly, the structure is to be turned into a history museum, a major component of a redevelopment plan to revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, we are reminded of an article published in The New York Times earlier this month about two full-size mock-ups of the future Freedom Tower, one built in California and another in central New Mexico, which “can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.” In order to see how well the facade and the structure perform under extreme conditions, they were subjected to simulated hurricanes and earthquakes, among other things.
Water jets simulating winds of 74 miles per hour were sprayed at the facade. During the 15-minute test cycle, each square foot of glass was hit with more than a gallon of water.
In another test, a dismounted airplane propeller was switched on to simulate even-stronger and more-scattered winds.
[...]
Hydraulic jacks were used to simulate the different horizontal sway of various floors, both fully occupied and empty. The surface was also chilled to 10 degrees (refrigerated piping was applied to the glass) and baked at 100 degrees (by heat lamps).
Gusts up to 167 m.p.h. were simulated by using pumps to pull air out of the chamber, creating a condition in which the external air pressure was far greater than the internal pressure. The process was reversed, too, by pumping air into the chamber, simulating conditions on the side of the tower away from the wind.
An earthquake was simulated by jacks pulling the mock-up in different directions.
And since everyone believes that the tower will be a prime target of terrorist attacks, the mock-up in New Mexico was blasted with an “explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.”
These near-analogues are actually not the only ones. Three years ago a mock-up of the WTC memorial fountain was also built, installed somewhat incongruously above ground in a suburban backyard in Canada. Of all places!
Unlike the simulated Freedom Towers, however, this lobotomized fountain wasn't placed under structural duress. Instead, it was used primarily to help determine the ideal hydrological conditions in which the “billowing silvery curtains of falling water” do “not splash visitors or disintegrate in the wind or roar deafeningly or freeze in winter or clog up in autumn when the oak leaves begin falling in the surrounding plaza.”
One wonders what actually happens to these structures and others like them after all the tests have been carried out?
One of the Freedom Tower replicas was built for $537,000. It would sound rather wasteful to have it scrapped and dumped in oversaturated landfills instead of being repurposed.
Give it to us, in other words, and we'll convert this representational “corner of three typical tower floors” into our new HQ, its “enclosed steel chamber” chicly decorated. When things are slow or when we need a little breather from mining the interweb, we will simply gaze through the laminated glass panes out to the waters of our ¼ fountain cascading down into a truncated void.
Architect and Landscape Architecture Magazine will come knocking on our armageddon-proof aluminum doors to do a feature. The article, of course, will come with hyper-glossy photos of us on another clicker-happy run through Wikipedia. We will be quoted pretentiously proclaiming that “Near-Analogues are the new prefabs.”
In any case, we also wouldn't mind flying off with the Schwerbelastungskörper and dumping it into some deltaic expanse. A pulverized mountain molded around a metallic skeleton bobbing about for solid ground in tenuous terrain. In metaphorical glee.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Over a year since their last newsletter, the CLUI has now put up the latest edition. Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”
Vast asphalt geometries and bounded trajectories tattooed on the surface of the earth, they are described as the “nurseries” for our vehicular companions, reared in “a microcosm of the country, built for subjecting vehicles to all the types of terrain - from interstates, to suburban stop and go; from dirt roads to black ice” — where America is geographically, meteorologically and infrastructurally condensed.
The automotive test tracks of America are mostly in the West and Midwest. Around Detroit, each of the “big three” operates at least one major complex. Test tracks are located around Phoenix, Arizona, to test in conditions of extreme heat, on top of everything else. On the fringes of this city's sprawl are tracks for companies whose home terrain has no desert to work in, such as Volvo, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Nissan. Honda and Hyundai's tracks are in the desert north of Los Angeles. And, in Illinois, Caterpillar, the global earth mover, tests its machines in a giant hilltop sandbox.
You can tour these places, at least via photographs, in Autotechnogeoglyphics: Vehicular Test Tracks in America, CLUI's contribution to the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The exhibition lasts till August 17, 2008.
Dugway Proving Ground
Monday, February 11, 2008
Having been covered apparently by everyone, the details of Robert Fidler's architectural cloak and dagger should by now be very familiar to all. But just in case some of our readers have yet to hear about it, the general narrative is as follows.
Six years ago, reports the Daily Mail, after failed attempts at getting a planning permission to build his dream house, Fidler erected a “40ft stack of hay bales covered by huge tarpaulins” so that he could secretly put it up — a mock-Tudor castle complete with ramparts, turrets and cannons. When it was finished two years later, the family moved in.
Their homestead still being very much illegal, the Fidlers kept their wall of hay standing, thinking that if they can keep their house a secret and no one complains about it to the local council for four years, it would automatically become legal. Unbelievably, it actually managed to hide the bulky structure from everybody. It even became a host to a transient microecosystem of birds, insects and vegetation, all as fugitive as the wall and the house themselves.
The ruse, however, was for naught. When the hay wall was taken down after the four years, officials ordered the Fidlers to destroy their castle after people discovered and expectedly complained about it.
While others may deplore the Fidlers for building what could understandably be described as a monstrosity, on the other hand, we take them to task for being unambitious.
We have always considered agricultural landscapes as ideal grounds for new and alternative theories of architecture and landscape architecture, contributing since time immemorial to significant developments in the history of landscape design. But what do we often hear?
We are told, for instance, that they are ideal sites for serial killers to lay undetected, whose barns and silos breed not a predilection for artistic avant-gardism but rather criminally deviant behaviors and the darkest of souls.
That they are the future landing sites of alien invasions and ground zero for a worldwide pandemic scourge.
That they are not potent territory for testing out new forms of landscape design and are instead the territory of demonic creatures with a penchant for body parts and experimental techniques in body modification.
You will not find François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville pursuing new modes of engagements with rural landscapes, but you will likely encounter innocent looking country bumpkins experimenting with new forms of pseudo-Christian cults, converting cornfields into outdoor temples.
But what about hearing stories of, say, a couple getting stranded somewhere in the sun-drenched expanses of Kansas, and instead of stumbling into a farmer who wants to crucify them, they befriend a farmer who for decades has been tunneling a complex system of underground passages, which until recently have lain unused except for when the local freemasons rent them for their arcane rituals. He is using them now for experimental pharming.
Or it could be that the farmer isn't hiding from federal agents and endangering the world's food supply. Instead, he is formulating new designs and construction techniques for constructed wetlands, which will function as a park, a wildlife buffer zone and most importantly, a treatment plant for agricultural runoffs.
Or discover not mock-Tudor monstrosities but sentient homesteads, flexing and contorting and scampering about in response to the vagaries of weather, geology and maybe the extreme fluctuations of the price of corn.
Somewhere in the gridded vastness of the American agricultural landscape is a farmer who takes nightly field trips through his cornfields. He goes on these walks not because he's a little bit off kilter after years of living in near total isolation, a prisoner of his own cultivated hortus conclusus, but because it's part of his creative process. You see, he's writing a novel, the new Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for the 21st century, and believes that these agricultural immersions — through hypnotic formalities, altered vistas and tenuous dimensions — induce a Sibylline state of frenzied creativity necessary for tackling such a major literary undertaking.
We want to read about this guy.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Broken Column House is so named because it takes the form of a ruined classical column — truncated, jagged and riven with fissures. It was built by the aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville who used it as his main residence during the years immediately before the French Revolution. Nestled within the confines of Monville's private pleasure garden, the Désert de Retz, it “stands like a solitary beacon, signaling the visitor to prepare for an encounter with the bizarre.”
And what bizarre encounters!
Visitors to the Désert would have encountered not just the Broken Column but also the Chinese House; the Tartar tent “cut from tin and gay with painted stripes” and sited on an artificial island in an artificial lake; a grotto through which one enters the property (before Paradise, one must first journey down to the Abyss); and a peasant-chic thatched-roof cottage. There was even the false ruins of a Gothic church. You could say, then, that the Désert was an outdoor museum of crypto-architectural history.
The garden itself was rather eccentric. Set within a natural-looking park were a model farm, a working dairy and an orangerie. But since Monville had no need to earn income from agriculture, they were more for leisure than production. Indeed, one shouldn't be surprised if one learns that some of Monville's guests, many of whom were members of the aristocracy, may have role-played as farmers or milkmaids for an afternoon.
And perhaps stranger things may have happened inside the walls of a garden presided over by a monied gentleman, an inveterate socialite who was said to have been “built like a model,” had “superb legs,” and bedded a different woman every night, either in the house or in any one of his fantastical follies.
One might think Monville had suffered mentally, the Ludwig of the Ancien Régime, and that his gardens were but the whims of one with too much money on his hands. But the Désert was a robust testing grounds for new forms and theories of landscape and architecture. Perhaps not unlike the Nevada Test Site and other military training facilities, it was an experimental terrain within which alternative systems to, say, Le Nôtre and Vitruvius, were dreamt up, cultivated and then promoted.
And for these and other reasons, Diana Ketcham, in her slim but copiously illustrated book, judged it accurately as “one of the glories of the architecture of fantasy.”
To a more modern visitor, meanwhile, fed with a steady diet of science fiction movies and literature, the Broken Column may evoke a distant Age of Titans, when giants roamed the land and built massive temples and homes, and the epic conflagration that ushered in the era's end, and then in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Lilliputian survivors made shelters out of the ruins and waited for Nature to return and erase the evidence of the disaster.
As absurd as that may sound, it is the sort of reaction Monville and other contemporary designers and patrons of irregular gardens in the English style intended to elicit. With their carefully composed views, such gardens were meant as the “stage sets for the enactment of fantasies of a pastoral or mythic character” — or “the stage for terror.”
Ketcham elaborates: “The sight of the [column] fragment generates a [...] superhuman dimension in the mind of the viewer. A corollary response is the realization that giants are at hand. Coming upon the Column, a human visitor feels the fear of the fairy tale hero stumbling up against the giant's boot.”
For the viewer who identifies with the giants, on the other hand, or with the old Testament God who struck down the Tower of Babel, the conceit of the colosal temple is exhilarating. In our unbelieving age, it is easier to respond to the purely spatial implications of the imaginary real. According to the Doric formula, height equals eight times the diameter, the full-scale column would stand at 384 feet. The architectural footprint of such a temple would extend beyond the borders of the garden.
Scale, then, becomes a technique with which Monville could create “a mood of altered reality.”
Ketcham again: “In the conventional picturesque garden, the presence of follies enhances the viewers' sense of physical and intellectual power, placing them in a controlling relation to the architecture of all times and all places, which has been scaled down to the comfortable proportions of the rural everyday landscape.” But here at the Désert, “it is the viewer who is reduced, rendered small and bewildered before the mysterious bulk of the Broken Column.”
Comparable contemporary architecture — the ones that you might expect to see in Las Vegas and RoadsideAmerica.com — may be ridden with gaudily clad tourists unknowingly suffering from post-modernist angst or architecture students, with copies of Baudrillard stuffed in their backpacks and gallons of ennui, seeking self-consciously ironic experiences.
The Désert, on the other hand, welcomed guests of a different sort. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, while serving as a minister to France, paid a visit to the Désert and “used elements of the floor plan of the the Broken Column in his design for the University of Virginia rotunda. Other illustrious persons who made it a favored retreat included Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV; the Duc d'Orléans; and Queen Marie Antoinette, who found inspiration there for her English gardens at Versailles.
There are so many interesting things to be said about the Broken Column House and the Désert de Retz, but we'll limit them to two here.
Firstly, the Désert is the only folly garden of France's eighteenth century that still exists close to its original state. Some of the grandest were leveled after the Revolution while others now exist heavily renovated or in fragments, leaving little sense of the original schemes.
But “decades of neglect saved the Désert de Retz from this common fate. Forgotten or ignored by a series of absentee owners, the park and its architectural contents were permitted to decay undisturbed and were taken up only in the 1980s as the object of restoration.”
The result is that what the eighteenth century devised as an artificial ruin became in the twentieth century a literal one, an irony whose poignancy has moved all of those who have pushed through the underbrush to enter into this forgotten place.
Secondly, as mentioned above, a program of restoration was carried out in the 1980s and one that still continues today. And therein lies some very interesting questions.
How does one return an artificial ruin, which became a true ruin, back to its original artificiality, a condition which aspired to be what it had become?
How does one restore decay from a state of real decay?
Here one imagines the restorers waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched with sweat, unwilling to return to sleep for fear of dreaming recursively the horrors of authenticity. “Is this a fake crack? A real crack? Fake? Real? Fake? Real?"
Such is the terror of the Picturesque garden.
By Diana Ketcham, 1997.
By Michael Kenna, 1990.
The Broken Column on Google Maps
Flickr: Le Désert de Retz
A Pyramid For Serving Glaciers
At the Gates of the Desert
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Two more disaster machines, which were also featured in this New Scientist pay-per-view article along with the shake table and the portable hurricane.
First, from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives comes the Fire Research Laboratory, the “first facility dedicated to aiding criminal fire investigations.”
The lab is so huge, New Scientist tells us, that it can fit “a three-room apartment or even a two storey office building, all beneath the world's largest stainless calorimetry hood for measuring the heat output of fires.” There, “engineers study ignition methods, the causes of electrical fires, the speed at which items burn and the way flammable liquids affect a fire's spread.”
With 3675 Americans killed in 2005, “more than all natural disasters combined,” everyone strives for precision and accuracy. “When recreating a fire, the engineers and craftsman are faithful to the original right down to the furnishings. The total amount of combustible material is crucial. If a room had bundles of laundry tossed on the floor, it is carefully replicated.”
Next is the Tsunami Wave Basin, housed in a “hangar-size building” at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
It is “seriously big: 49 metres long by 26.5 wide by 2.1 deep. It is the largest and most sophisticated wave tank in the world, and the first dedicated to tsunamis.”
A major question is exactly what impact tsunamis can have on coastal structures and sediment. So in July, researchers built miniature model of a coastal town along a sloping “beach” at the edge of the basin. They are now setting up experiments to measure the resulting forces as the water hits the shore, and to test whether buildings of certain shapes, such as cylinders, might be better than others for withstanding a tsunami.
One wonders if Architecture for Humanity has signed up for some wave time to better improve their anti-tsunami projects.
Meanwhile, since we obviously can't help ourselves, we'd like to see these disaster machines strapped onto The Jardinator©.
You then let it loose. And fortunately for all Japanese cities, it will not topple down skyscrapers and stomp on Hello Kitty; this monstrous stillborn love child of Godzilla and ThyssenKrup will actually help your home and cities avert major disasters. It will improve the quality of your life.
If you see it surfacing offshore and rumbling onto the beach, soon aftewards you will fear no more hurricanes and tsunamis. Children will come running down the streets to greet it as if it were the ice cream truck, because they know that they will no longer be in danger of getting burnt alive in the middle of the night. Everyone will deem it of monumental importance that virgins will be sacrificed along its path.
But then it becomes self-aware. Uh oh.
The 17th St Canal Physical Model
Monday, September 17, 2007
We're big fans of the shake table, obviously, so here's another photo. On top this time is a wind turbine ready to ride a simulated seismic wave.
One wonders if this set-up isn't really for a science experiment but rather for an avant-garde staging of The Odyssey. It's Poseidon — the god of the sea, the enemy of Odysseus, the earth-shaker — as a hydrostatically pressurized steel platform against a mechanomorphosized Aeolus, the ruler of the winds. In Homer's tale, the hero managed to return to Ithaca with some help from Aeolus, but in this contemporary retelling on that tectonic proscenium, Poseidon may yet neutralize the winds and thwart the return of the king.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Though this New Scientist article on “the biggest and baddest platforms for faking quakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and fire” is unfortunately behind a subscriber-only firewall, there is this short video on one of the featured “disaster machines” uploaded to YouTube. It's the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table, the largest of its kind, topped with a 7-seven story building weathering a seismic storm.
Personally, we'd like to subject the Farnsworth House to a few tests just to see if it can survive a major New Madrid event. We'll seat on plush, midcentury Eames chairs, eat popcorn, and wait for the moment of disintegration. Or maybe Mies will completely surprise us, and we witness his house escape a tectonic hurricane unscathed. That too much context, apparently, isn't a problem at all.
Portable Hurricane
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
A few years before the first landing of an Apollo crew on the moon, scientists recontoured a volcanic field just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, with artificial impact craters resembling those found on Mare Tranquillitatis, the proposed first manned American landing site.
With high explosives, they terraformed a lunar surrogate right here on the surface of the earth.
There, during the 60s and 70s, nearly all of the Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon were taught the basics in extraterrestrial exploration and earthworks. They learned how to make field observations, how to make maps, and how to properly collect lunar samples. It is there as well that the tools with which human beings would physically deform another world for the first time were tried out.
Hammers, adjustable sampling scoops, rakes and tongs, rock drills and rover vehicles. Together with astronaut boots and gloves, these would soon leave an imprint, albeit minimal, where before meteors and the solar wind held a monopoly in lunar resurfacing.
If we can digress here briefly, it would be to ask whether these simulated landing sites — where the earth is turned and upturned, displaced and scarred — are a kind of Japanese rock gardens.
Because are not the tracings of human activity highly considered gestures, laden with abstract notions and cultural baggage?
Are not these scoured terrains imprinted with a complex, messy network of interrelated cultural, political, technological, philosophical and even metaphysical concerns that are worth contemplating? A field turned into a text which, if it cannot be understood through the writings of a revered Buddhist monk, can perhaps be deciphered through the Cold War speeches of John F. Kennedy.
Did the astronauts not use a rake?
To return back to Crater Field, as the Arizona training site is called, one wonders whether there are other simulated moons out there, or in the drawing boards now that plans are underway for an American return mission.
And is there a surrogate Mars, wherein a duplicate Opportunity tested entry descent scenarios into a duplicate Victoria Crater?
A Titan facsimile?
An analogue for Venus?
Two things seem worth mentioning right about now.
Firstly, a post at Wired Science last month told us that a group of nine intrepid scientists and engineers spent four months cooped up together in a remote simulated Martian habitat.
Their space habitat (the size and shape of an expected martian abode) is located near a crater on Devon Island above the Arctic Circle in Canada. The simulation is an experiment in planetary exploration and its demands. The team was looking at what happens to a crew in a remote, harsh, close-quartered environment under simulated Martian conditions (crews would only go outside the habitat during a fully simulated EVA) when they are working on real science.
Secondly, from an article in Reuters, we learned that “scientists are using the pine-forested slopes of a Mexican volcano as a test bed to see if trees could grow on a heated-up Mars.” At an elevation of 13,780 feet, planetary scientists from NASA and Mexican universities are investigating “what makes trees refuse to grow above a certain point, where temperatures drop and the air becomes thinner, to see how easily they could grow on Mars.”
But one last thing: are there others?
Please let us know.
“Ground truth”: or, Wanted: Fake Moon Dirt
Monday, July 2, 2007
Tunneling into the abyss to gaze out into the firmament. It's the Super-Kamiokande once more, simply because the whole thing's so incredibly beautiful, here photographed after its reconstruction and before it was filled with 50,000 tons of pure heavy water. Once disused again, can we have it, rent free? It'll be the summer residence for Pruned.
Download some high-resolution photos from here to decorate your websites and blogs.
Unraveling the cosmos in the depths of Antarctica
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Trawling through the labyrinthine website of the U.S. Army of Corps of Engineers, always an enjoyable activity here at Pruned headquarters, you will eventually come across the Directional Spectral Wave Generator, an ultra-cool, hyper-sophisticated toy that can create “realistic three-dimensional waves in a laboratory environment for coastal projects that support coastal research and development and site-specific project studies.” Using this gadget you can make your own — what else — artificial waves: tsunamis, underwater explosions, anti-waves, cnoidal waves, and waves that can overturn hundred million dollar yachts.
So if you were ever to install one of these in your ex-urban sprawl, it will be the talk of the neighborhood. And if this one of a kind fountain were to be tele-choreographed by data sets from NOAA's Tsunami Center, your homestead will certainly be the talk of the county.
Towering tsunamis racing across the world's oceans simulated in real-time behind your MacMansion. There will be no need to watch CNN for updates on this major breaking news.
Or the rantings of Midwestern bloggers -- over their tax dollars being spent to replenish beaches inaccessible to the public and to protect coastal properties built or bought by idiots who know full well the risks and go begging for federal money (our money) when disaster strikes to rebuilt yet again on the same, no-less risky post-disaster sites, even when those wealthy bastards can afford to pay for the repairs! -- retransmitted to that fountain as swells and ripples.
Summertime backyard barbecues will never be the same.
And then there's the 10-ft and 5-ft Wave Flume Facility, and the Flood-Fighting Products Research Facility, and the Ice Engineering Flume Facility. What fun engineers must have during off-hours.
But let's move on to the main subject of this post, to a research facility that is better documented photographically: the 17th St Canal Physical Model.
The model measures 14,500 sq feet and replicates at 1:50 scale one of the New Orleans canals whose floodwalls failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was constructed to help develop “time histories of local wave and water level forces acting on flood protection structures, including flow over the levee or floodwall, wave overtopping, and static and dynamic pressure forces on the structures.” To explain why the levees failed miserably, in other words.
If there is ever going to be a design competition for a Hurricane Katrina Memorial — and there definitely will be one — someone should propose repurposing this canal model, its bold yellow pigment preserved, into a park-fountain-memorial-plaza, programmed to be flooded and drained periodically. It's the anti-WTC Memorial. Less of an absence and more of an event.
You can be sure that its shallow pools will be very popular with kids during the hot, muggy summers. They might even get a lesson in natural and man-made hydrology.
But with every artificially-generated wave cresting and rolling over New Orleans one immediately becomes aware of what is being memorialized, without the intermediation of silly, obtuse symbolism, which in only two years time people will need Fodor's to decipher, or the semiotic screams of a post-modernist banshee.
Hopefully the project site will be along the banks, because rather than purchasing an expensive wave generator, you simply let the fluctuating water level of the Mississippi River inundate this city in miniature.
Or the next Category 5 hurricane?
