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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Speedster is first of all a super-light, minimalist race car for the street, with as few concessions to weight as possible. Its nominal weight, according to Opel, is a mere 945 kg, and that includes 75 kg for an average driver. So what we’re talking about here is a two-place car that weighs only about 2,100 lb ready to go out and kick some butt. The chassis is constructed of bonded, extruded aluminum, and the body is made of bonded composite panels with fiberglass reinforcements.
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First of all, if you go to the Hyundai incentive page, you'll see there isn't much there -- which means, folks, they're selling cars without rebates, promotions and gimmicks piled atop one another.
However, we would like to alert you to two ways to get a 2006 Hyundai Sonata -- either a buy deal, with a $1,000 rebate [plus an additional $1,00 if you finace through Hyundai], on a 6-cylinder, or a very easy to digest lease deal on a 4-cylinder for $189 a month, with $2,488 down, for only 27 months.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
For a more sober take on urban farming than Work AC's agro-fantasia, check out this project by Mossop+Michaels for a Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans. Today, it garnered a 2008 ASLA Professional Award.
Quoting the brief in part:
The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans, and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional Vietnamese way. The proposed market on the site will provide a location for the individual farmers to supplement their income as well as serve as a central meeting space for the larger Vietnamese community along the Gulf Coast. Based on the history of the markets in the area before Katrina, as many as 3,000 people are expected to come to the site for a Saturday market, perhaps more on traditional festival days. Specialty vegetables and foods used in Vietnamese cuisine will be sold at the market. Local Vietnamese restaurants will have a space to sell prepared food during market days as well.
Another goal of the project is to bring together the different generations with the local community through the shared endeavor of the farm and that the traditional skills and practices of the culture brought from Vietnam to America are passed down by the generation of elders. Thus it is also important that the farm also acts as a community center and areas for sports and playgrounds are proposed for the site. The community sees this project as the centerpiece for the rebuilding efforts in the New Orleans East.
If you're at all interested in urban agriculture, this is a good case study to review.
On agro
Four architects were asked by New York magazine to submit ideas for a vacant lot in lower Manhattan. It's merely a design exercise, as none of the proposals will actually be built. Or maybe one or all will be used to fill other urban voids. Equally plausible, it's all been done in the past.
Undoubtedly of greatest interest to us is Work AC's sequel to its upcoming installation at P.S. 1. This iteration of the same idea takes the form of a multi-tiered apartment building with agro-roofs, propped up towards the sun by Brancusi sculptures and above what looks like a farmers' market. Or perhaps a flea market, where the detritus of a capitalist culture gets recycled in survivalist fantasia below a mythological rural idyll.
In any case, the whole structure reminds one of bleachers found in sports fields everywhere, leading us to wonder whether the second sequel in an urban agriculture trilogy by Work AC is an adaptive reuse of Shea Stadium, the soon-to-be former ballpark of the New York Mets, into a locavore utopia.
Build a duplicate stadium — why not 1,000 — and you could have the beginning of a Queens rice terrace to rival those found at Banaue in the Philippines.
Part Grand Canyon, part Norwegian fjords, lining the edges of the five boroughs, built high up, protecting the megalopolis from sea level rise, bad diets and the coming global food crisis.
On agro
Monday, April 14, 2008
Those bored executives and hedge fund managers inexplicably unaffected by the worldwide economic freefall and seeking for new thrills that only a handful have ever experienced can peruse through the online catalogue of Cloud 9 Living.
This adventure outfit, based in Boulder, Colorado, advertises itself as “the premier experience gift company that offers the highest quality experiences as unforgettable gifts.” Such offerings include, for instance, diving with a Great White shark from a private luxury yacht. Priced at $100,000, you'd better be diving from and uncorking champagne from The Gigayatch. If wading in the deep doesn't interest you, you can fly a Mig 25 from a top-secret Rusian airbase. Of course, this chance of surveying the landscapes in rarefied air, at supersonic speeds, will also cost you dearly.
There are, however, plenty of affordable options as well, such as a night-for-day white water rafting expedition — reading the terrain in unfamiliar wavelengths of light with night vision goggles. And again, if floating in water bores you, you can sign up for nighttime tour, by helicopter, of the neon-drenched alien landscape of Las Vegas.
But one “experience gift” we wouldn't mind giving to ourselves is a day or two or even a whole week spent at Dig This. There, at “the 1st heavy equipment play arena,” you can “play in the dirt - super sized” with an array of “empowering” heavy machineries.
From the Dig This website:
You can get lost in our 10-acre site with hills, valleys and a spectacular views of the Yampa Valley. Under the supervision of Dig This instructors, you can remove yourself from the external influences of life and focus only on the adventure at hand, automatically building self-confidence and adrenaline levels.
As if to feed some primal urge, starved by a 21st century lifestyle disconnected from the earth, emasculated by the droning shrills of sustainability and pastoralism, you can “doze and excavate dams and ponds” and “move and remove sand, gravel, rock, and other materials from your own individual area.” In climate controlled machines.
We can call this Post-Industrial Romanticism. Mineral lyricism?
Making tiny mountains or rock gardens seems to be a popular task there, as are team building and character building. But for some real fun, why not spend a whole month excavating a new city, another Denver ex-urb without its McMansions. The roads, streets and the cul-de-sacs are tilled; so, too, are the driveways and the outlines of the property prepared. Billions of years of tectonic activities undone for efficient drainage and to conform to prescribed slopes and turning radii.
They are all ready to be paved and occupied but no lawns or SUVs will come. It's as if the developers and creditors have fled, the bankrupt homeowners unwilling to visit their spectacularly failed investments. It's a landscape in a perpetual state of waiting.
In any case, exactly how popular Dig This, we don't know. But the operators and instructors are certainly attuned to the zeitgeist.
Reporting over a year ago on research by geologists Brandon McElroy of the University of Texas in Austin and his colleague Bruce Wilkinson of Syracuse University, the Discovery Channel wrote that “human changes to landscapes are now on par with the wasting power of weather and tectonic uplift.”
In other words, we are on par with the same natural forces that move continents across oceans and erode entire mountain ranges down to hills.
A new take of the scale of human changes to the face of the Earth shows that by farming alone, humans have now managed to move a thousand times more earth than the annual sediment loads of all the world's rivers combined. That's enough soil to cover the state of Rhode Island nearly two miles deep in dirt.
And the rate of human changes to the land is increasing.
Indeed, a recent article in The New York Times reported that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” There are 36.8 million acres of land in the program, bigger in area than the state of New York; “last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Why?
“Because of a growing global middle class as well as federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand.” So naturally, farmers want “to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybean, corn and other crops.”
And then there are the reports of a growing breed of diggers who also want to cash in on the boom in the mineral trade. Again in the The New York Times, we read that “160 years after a flake of gold found not far from here incited a frenzied stampede to the Sierra Nevada foothills, a new gold rush is on.”
Driven by record high prices and a suburban thirst for new outdoor activities, tens of thousands of ’08ers are taking to historically rich streams and hills all across the West in search of nuggets, flecks and — more often than not — specks of gold.
However, not everyone is foraging along rivers.
Some prospectors have taken to scouring ore dumps — discarded piles of rock left by old-time miners — with high-tech metal detectors hoping to divine what previous generations missed. In Arizona, clubs head for dry creeks, sifting through the dirt where gold might have washed down in past floods.
Here, one wonders how the big transnational mining companies will take advantage in this uptick in prices of not only gold but also copper, titanium, coal and whatever China wants to gobble up all for itself. But then again, one only needs to see the photos included in this Wikipedia entry on open-pit mine to get a fairly accurate prediction.
Just check out this grossly beautiful panorama of the open-pit coal mine in Garzweiler, Germany.
And this is the Grasberg Mine in Indonesia, the largest gold mine in the world. Here and in other gold mines across the world — where the earth is undone, where billions of tons of dirt get displaced, enough perhaps to save every Pacific islands from sinking beneath the climate-changed waters — is where the staggeringly complex relationship between gold prices and the global credit crisis, the falling value of the dollar and the failure of Bear Stearns are physically manifested in the landscape.
As new slums begin to appear out in the peripheries of American cities and even further afield and as the next generation of grandiose projects like the Orange County Great Park and Louisville's Museum Plaza stall due to lack of funds, elsewhere not covered by the top-tier and middling architectural press are new abysses being excavated, swirling towards the inner core, overlaying new un-earthly soil horizons, suffocating lives and geographies alike.
We won't be surprising anyone by saying that there is currently a construction boom everywhere. Read any articles published in The New York Times, The Economist and the BBC, especially those of Dubai, China and the quarterly profits of Caterpillar or those of earlier reports on Mecca eradicating its historic Mohammedan neighborhoods to make way for billion-dollar developments and Singapore pirating sand from Indonesia, and you're already well-informed of the situation.
As but one more iteration of this global phenomenon, there is the recently approved $5.25-billion Panama Canal expansion project. To accommodate post-Panamax vessels and to better cope with the projected increases in cargo traffic, new locks are to be built. New approach channels will be dredged and existing ones deepened and widened. Gatun Lake will similarly be deepened and its water level raised to increase water storage capacity. It is thus rightly labeled an engineering megaproject.
Earlier this month, ENR.com gave us an update by reporting that a dredging contract was given to the Belgian firm Dredging International. No new fascinating details are given, but it's interesting to note the other companies who made bids for the same contract. They are Boskalis International, Jan De Nul and Van Oord.
Long-time readers of this blog may recognize these names. Jan De Nul and Van Oord are, of course, responsible for conjuring up Dubai's artificial archipelagos, both The World and The Palms, from the bottom of the sea. And Boskalis is known for its trailing hopper suction dredgers, a fleet that includes the largest THSD in the world; no doubt they'll be deployed to carry out the company's newly awarded contract, worth nearly $1.5 billion, to create a new port for Abu Dhabi.
All this, then, is the milieu in which Dig This, intentionally or inadvertently, has set up their operations, a creative playpen where future terraformers might be reared in the form of chief executives instilled with the acumen to capitalize on a very profitable futures market or lowly, overworked but extremely well-paid diggers and excavators.
Or the next generation of Robert Smithsons and Michael Heizers. A new breed of Olmsteds and Capability Browns liberated from the ancient paradigms of the Picturesque, Romanticism and Sustainability.
Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers
Friday, April 11, 2008
“As Barcelona runs out of water,” New Scientist reports, “Spain has been forced to consider importing water from France by boat.”
“Barcelona and the surrounding region are suffering the worst drought in decades. There are several possible solutions, including diverting a river, and desalinating water. But the city looks like it will ship water from the French port of Marseilles.”
The amount of water being considered is “small – 25,000 cubic metres, less than what's needed to grow an acre of wheat, and not enough to keep 30 Spaniards going for a year.” But should this drought continue, growing worse and worse for years to come, we could see a new river, armored in metal and artificially propelled, flowing through the Mediterranean Sea.
And possibly more than one, all circulating through other seas and oceans: a braided, de-terrestrialized hydrology connecting parched landscapes and water-rich regions, knitted by climate change.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The plan is no longer being considered; it is being carried out. From The Guardian:
“The tanker Sichem Defender arrived at the port of Barcelona yesterday carrying something far more precious than its usual cargo of chemicals.
“Nearly 23m litres of drinking water - enough for 180,000 people for a day - was the first delivery in an unprecedented emergency plan to help this parched corner of Spain ahead of the holiday season.”
What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Apparently Landscape Architecture Magazine will be covering the urban phenomenon known as parkour in a future issue. But they need some help.
In an email to the LARCH-L, editor-in-chief Bill Thompson writes:
LAM is still trying to find information about a Parkours article. We are now trying to establish a good LA connection to the sport.
-LA s who have designed parks or who manage parks where Parkours is practiced
-LA s who have thoughts or theories about Parkours as a social phenomenon whom we could interview
-LA s who do Parkours.
Please get in touch if you know any of the above.
You can contact Bill Thompson via bthompson@asla.org.
We've been intermittently tracking parkour for years now, so we're genuinely curious to find out who will answer the call and what “LA connection to the sport” the mothership will come up with.
Will we read in a few months' time of a registered landscape architect designing public spaces that are conducive to such high-octane urban exploration? Could this be an un-ironic attempt at injecting vitality into the built environment or just another lame attempt at co-opting subculture elements, distilling and making them palatable to the New Bourgeois of the New Condominiumed City?
Or is this RLA really working with municipal bureaucrats and private developers to specify time-saver anti-parkour construction standards and details, similar to anti-skateboarding strategies and anti-teen sonic devices?
Will we read instead about an RLA working as a research fellow with the Mayo Clinic to create a new city — a carbon-netural, car-free model city in the middle of the Arabian Desert — wherein pedestrians can only navigate through aerobic and anaerobic traceries, thus helping to eradicate obesity?
Or will we read about a landscape architect, registered or otherwise, collaborating with NASA scientists to design new landscapes for Mars or in other extraterrestrial locales by studying the aerial acrobatics of parkour devotees?
Will a studio tutor come forward and admit that he's been requiring students to perform hours of parkour at their project site, broken bones, bloody scrapes and litigous parents be damned?
Perhaps Bill Thompson will discover that one of his regular contributors had done a similar kind of site reading to better inform his critique of Martha Schwartz's new plaza or a new post-industrial heritage park by Peter Latz?
Or — woe upon woe — no one comes forward and we are all left wondering if the field of landscape architecture is truly dominated by residential design and thus is duplicitous in runaway urban sprawl, natural habitat destruction and the continuing mortgage crisis?
In any case, what exactly is parkour? An article published in The New Yorker almost exactly one year ago begins thus:
Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. Spread mainly by videos on the Internet, it has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill seekers and martial-arts adepts, who regard it as part extreme sport—its founder would like to see it included in the Olympics—and part gruelling meditative pursuit. Movies like its daredevil qualities. A bracing parkour chase begins “Casino Royale,” the recent James Bond movie. It includes jumps from the boom of one tower crane to that of another, but parkour’s customary obstacles are walls, stairwells, fences, railings, and gaps between roofs—it is an urban rather than a pastoral pursuit. The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.
Feeling a bit indulgent, here's another very long quote, as found in Space and Culture:
Traceurs unanimously agree that PK changes their perception of space and the world around them. Viscerally they describe it as if the three dimensional landscape were being flattened out. Or sometimes as if they were able to see a two dimensional world with occasional three dimensional aspects - would-be obstacles that, instead of restricting movement, are now used to escape - mockingly — the confines of the flat landscape. If this sounds confusing to a non or newbie Traceur, start by allowing your eyes to travel across the landscape of Relativity by M. C. Escher. PK transforms the entire urban environment into Escher inspired paths where stairwells become ceiling, railings become steps, and walls become walkways. Traceurs move about in a world loosely defined by a Non-Euclidean Geometry where the shortest distance between two points is a great arc or a Parkour Cat Leap. That’s not vertigo you’re feeling. That’s the Flow. It’s a quick revision for the average Traceur to translate this into a creed for everyday living - there are no obstacles in life, only opportunities.
More fantastic photos by Jon Lucas of Daniel Ilabaca in this Flickr photoset. And if you want to know more about Ilabaca, you can watch him in the documentary video Parkour Journeys.
