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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
It's All Hallows Eve once again, and this year, for my costume, I've decided to replicate Nicholas de Larmessin's design for the Fountain Maker's Costume. It may at first seem insufficiently frightful and quite campy, like Louis XV's high heels or an ancien régime beauty spot.
However, once I tell people that though the spraying jets and frothy pools are mere representations in generic cardboard but back at home all the faucets have been turned on at full flush — i.e., for such frivolity and hydrological gaiety, Lake Michigan is presently being drained of its clean waters wastefully, while the American South and Southwest are in the midst of a historic drought; while children in developing countries are dying due to the lack of accessible freshwater; mothers in China are giving birth to infants with mental defects because they had drunk tainted water; while genocide brought on by drought erupts in parts of the world; while aquifers everywhere are getting drained faster than it can be replenished, the imbalance of which will result in the collapse of global food security; and while Las Vegas and Phoenix want to turn Canada's river rich western territories into a desert.
When all this has been said, when people realize that they've wasted 30 minutes listening to me when they could have spend all that time drinking and whoring, they will surely be horrified by my Larmessin couture.
Happy Halloween!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Behold the future avant-gardener, conceived at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, “the world's only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence,” as an extraterrestrial explorer to be deployed to Mars where “[i]ts roots would explore the soil, while power and telecommunications are provided by the main stem and the solar 'leaves.'”
And when its science mission has ended, it will then prune a full scale version of Versailles Gardens out of Martian bedrock.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Here are a couple of snapshots taken from DeLaval's business presentation for its milking rotaries, the TURN-STYLES™ PR1100 and PR2100. During the brief seconds when the camera locks in on the “parlours” as they slowly twirl about their bovine passengers, industrial food production is transformed (un)expectedly into a Busby Berkeley's musical number.
In their precisely calibrated choreography, these elegantly designed machines are undeniably mesmerizing. Singularities subsumed by symmetry and repetition, merged wholly into a patterned geometry. Frolic and hypnotic spectacle together side by side with cooly modernist efficiency. And though the rotaries do not appear to conflict with Cartesian topography, any sense of site and context can be nullified if you ignore the spoken and textual commentaries in the videos.
But perhaps they can still defy gravity. Rotate them fast enough and they will detach, a gyroscopic whirligig on its way to a dairy farm halfway across the world. With cows still on board.
Or better yet, for one week each year, the cows are replaced by these bloggers plus Kazys Varnelis, who are herded daily and singly into the compartments to blog whatever they want to write about while they are turned and “pampered” until they are returned exactly one hour later. And for anyone who did not produce an interesting post by the deadline, the abattoir awaits. Such is the brutal nature of the blogosphere.
Our Daily Bread
Chicken Wing
Brave New Edible Estates
Sunday, October 21, 2007
A group calling itself the ATM Azionefuturista 2007 has turned one of Rome's most famous monuments into a bloodied protest canvas.
One of its members, in full Futurist glee, “threw a bucket of red paint or dye into Rome's Trevi Fountain on Friday, coloring the waters of the 18th-century monument bright red in front of a crowd of astonished tourists and residents.”
The man escaped, leaving the fountain, which normally runs on a closed cycle, spouting red water. Police arrived and technicians briefly shut off the water before restoring a clear flow.
Experts said the baroque fountain was not permanently damaged and the marble statues depicting the sea deity Neptune on his chariot had not absorbed the color.
At first I thought the guy read an advance copy of The New York Times Magazine's extended report on the neverending water problems of the American Southwest, and so was compelled to carry out this guerrilla attack to highlight the impending climate change disaster to an audience of intensive carbon-producing tourists. Like a self-righteous Moses to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses.
But alas, based on leaflets found nearby, officials think that he was simply protesting against the “expenses incurred in organizing the Rome Film Festival.” The red waters of the Trevi, then, “symbolically referred to the event's red carpet.”
It was one simple gesture by one person, but the whole world has taken notice. So perhaps next year, another famous fountain will be made to spew vermillion waters — or preferably, made to stagnate and concoct a toxic stew of fluorescent green algae — to successfully call international attention to our present shared hydrological crisis.
Since the fountain is constantly being monitored by CCTV cameras, there is a video of the incident:
But here are some clearer photos, courtesy of Corriere della Serra:
The spirit of Umberto Boccioni still hovers over the heady waters of Italy.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Immediately after posting this photo of exposed layered deposits in Mars, I discovered these recently released images of possible landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory. Like the earlier one, these obscenely stunning landscape photographs were taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. There are 153 in all.
One wonders if the most interesting landscape photographers aren't working here on earth and are rather spaceborne or on other planets, collaborating with NASA and government contractors. Could we be in another WPA era?
Are Opportunity and Spirit the new Anselm Adams?
Since I couldn't resist posting just one image, there will be two this time. The first one shows the swirling geology of Candor Chasma, a major canyon of Valles Marineris; the other shows a slice of East Meridiani, though it's obviously a lost texturological work by Jean Dubuffet.
Interestingly, both seem imminently palpable. If you were to decide to reach out for your computer screen, you might actually touch something other than a mechanically smooth surface. Lick it and you'll taste Martian salt.
In any case, enjoy!
Thursday, October 18, 2007
When Jardinators have lived out their usefulness, they apparently go to pasture in Ferropolis.
Located right in the middle of a former open-pit mine near the city of Dessau, in Bauhaus country, it is part open air museum and part multimedia venue inhabited by monolithic machines, perhaps belonging to the same species that had turned the surrounding landscape into a post-industrial desert.
Meant to be “an ominous monument and symbol of the extensive exploitation of the countryside and the ecological consequences of doing so,” this City of Iron “also represents a new start in dealing with nature and the countryside. It is an attempt, at the end of an epoch, to create new perspectives for a landscape depleted by industrial exploitation. It is also an attempt to find answers to what are currently two of the most frequently asked questions: where is structural change in the region leading, and what will a post-industrial cultural landscape look like?”
To both questions, Peter Latz has some great answers at Landshaftspark Duisburg-Nord.
And of course, there's Niall Kirkwood's Manufactured Sites. It's no coffee table book, and maybe a little bit technical for the lay person, but it's an incredibly important book.
Meanwhile, we read that there are only five mechano-titans. Surely that isn't enough. There should be at least 1,000, either arranged like the formal aeronautical gardens at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or irregularly, an inorganic forest waiting for Bangladeshi migrant loggers and for descendants of the Brothers Grimm to pen new fairy tales.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
No one really wants global warming. Unless you are mentally disturbed, you wouldn't want to see whole nations and cities hydrologically erased or entire ecologies and cultures go extinct. Some may find designing for climate change refugees an extremely fascinating studio project, but the growing inevitability of catastrophic displacements and their attendant economic and social upheavals must surely make everyone sleepless at night.
But then there's Greenland.
BBC News, off-grid and National Geographic tell us that higher temperatures and retreating ice caps are opening up the island's “vast mineral rich wilderness” to exploration. From the off-grid article:
The belief in Greenland’s potential riches stems from the fact that the geology is identical to that found across the now ice-free north-west passage in Canada, which has led to large opencast mining in the Arctic region.
But Greenland has other potential riches too. Gold has been discovered and is already being mined, although so far at a loss, and there are deposits of other minerals such as zinc, that could be exploited. Oil giants are negotiating licences to explore blocks of the coastline covering thousands of square miles.
The melting glaciers themselves may even have some economic benefits, as a source of hydroelectricity. In fact, according to the BBC News article, “Greenland has signed a memorandum of understanding with the US company Alcoa to build a huge aluminium smelter using the country's plentiful water reserves.”
What all these mean, then, is that Greenland could achieve financial independence from Denmark, who each year gives the province about $600m, and perhaps full political independence. So while global warming could end a traditional way of life, particularly those of the Inuit in the north of the country, they may gain a new nation with a new (and very large) immigrant population of prospectors.
A newly revealed landscape for creating new cultural identities.
In any case, a few things:
1) A new landscape needs, of course, a new breed of landscape architects.
2) What if Greenland — realizing how strategically important it will be in an iceless-Arctic-Ocean and navigable-Northwest-Passage future — rents the Thule Air Base to the U.S. for a whopping $600m+ a year? What if instead of letting Halliburton or some other sinister oil company run rampant around its virgin territory, the U.S. military somehow becomes a sort of environmental steward? There will be some fascinating examples of greenwashing, obviously, but what subtopian landscapes will come about?
3) And this is worth asking again: What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain? How about Atlanta?
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
There was an interesting article published in the August 2007 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine about Punta Pite, a residential development on the Chilean coast with perhaps the most awesome oceanside trail system.
Actually, it is more than awesome. The opening image, somewhat similar to the one above, immediately put me into a state of delirious ecstasy, a reaction no other article published by the mothership has ever elicited from me, as far as I can recall.
The article, parts of which appear online, begins thus:
Punta Pite is a 27-acre piece of land that follows the contours of a bay between Zapallar and Papudo, two sea towns located 93 miles north of Santiago, Chile. A residential development planned and built here between 2004 and 2006 takes its name from this place and is laid out in a way that surrenders to the power and beauty of the ocean. It was developed as a series of parts connected by a walking path, one part of which seems to be sculpted out of the existing cliffs, while the other part passes through a restored creed that were meant to create one single spatial experience of the site.
While the article says these Inca-like stony trails are on private property, it also reports that they will be open to the public in the coming months.
Nothing like Punta Pite's cliffside walking path would probably be built in the U.S., or at the very least minor design tweaks would have to be implemented to meet federal regulations and to appease anxious attorneys. Certainly if it's publicly funded, the Americans with Disabilities Act would swoop down demanding railings and specifying turning curves and maximum ramp gradients. And with even more certainty, developers would not want to subject themselves to expensive litigations.
There are, of course, many landscape projects that meet both ADA and attorney approvals and still look and work marvelously. Bureaucratic regulations are in and of themselves not anathemas to great design as some vocally voice.
But the incredible thing about the path, or El sendero, at Punta Pite is the possibility for multiple-compound fractures and even death. It is designed to be accessible and relatively safe, but landscape architect Teresa Moller wonderfully did not diminish the sublime quality of the landscape — and by sublime, I mean, terrifying.
Knocks-you-unconcsious-and-petrifies-your-soul-as-if-falling-eternally-into-the-abyss terrifying!
One second you're enjoying the cliffs, its geology, the ocean crashing against the rocks. You're lulled by the beauty of it all, but then exactly one second later, you slip and bash your head down below.
One second you are assured solidity and logical direction, and the next second, you find yourself unable to move, incapacitated by too much landscape, by the knowledge that your foot is but a millimeter away from the precipice and bloody ecstasy.
Or perhaps you find yourself lost, completely subsumed by the wilderness — an unintended reenactment of Picnic at Hanging Rock or a similarly accidental homage to the late Michelangelo Antonioni.
Or so I imagined, as I obviously have yet to visit the site. But the photos are quite suggestive.
Meanwhile, Moller explains in the article that she was guided in her design by “the words of a famous Chilean poet who describes Chile as 'pure geography.'” We are not told who this poet is, but one wonders if the country will now give birth to a national Romantic movement, a whole new generation writing peans to geomorphology, tectonics, hydrology and coastal erosion.
Or perhaps dark Romantic souls will haunt these cliffs, searching for a more sinister, far truer side to Nature, but in finding it too incomprehensible that even Edgar Allen Poe will have trouble expressing it in paper, will sink ever deeper into mire.
How deeply am I willing to go into the wilderness?
Saturday, October 6, 2007
On hydropower and why it doesn't count as clean energy.
On Sydney's ocean pools. In B&W but nevertheless absolutely fascinating Suprematist shapes carved into the city's rocky perimeter.
On Minnesota's sensible plan to generate $20 trillion in revenue by diverting water from Lake Superior to the parched Southwest, as reported by Garrison Keillor in 1995.
On Brooke Singer, a Yahoo! Pick profile on the creator of Superfund365.
On underground wind farms. A coalition of local utilities in Iowa is “building a system that will steer surplus electricity generated by a nearby wind farm to a big air compressor (diagram). Connected to a deep well, the compressor pumps air into layers of sandstone. Some 3,000 feet down and sealed from above by dense shale, the porous sandstone acts like a giant balloon. Later, when demand for power rises, this flow is reversed. As the chamber empties, a whoosh of air flows back up the pipe into a natural-gas-fired turbine.”
On ghost craters, uncharted territories, and the organic remains of a former world.
