Pruned

This Land Is Really Your Land

2009-07-07T16:34:00.006-05:00

(From a field guide [pdf] to the public beaches of Malibu by the Los Angeles Urban Rangers.)

Next month, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will again be leading safaris to the beaches of Malibu. The safaris are free and scheduled as follows:

SUN Aug 2, 11:00am-2:30pm
SUN Aug 16, 9:00am-12:30pm
SAT Aug 22, 3:00pm-6:30pm

Spaces are limited, so e-mail info@laurbanrangers.org with your name, the number of people and preferred date as soon as possible.

The beaches you'll be touring are all public. In fact, all that stretch of wet Malibu sand are yours, mine, ours. All that awesome views of the Pacific, blocked from the road by developments that line the beaches, are your right.

But there seems to be a concerted effort by private property owners to obfuscate the lines of ownership, making the public feel like criminal trespassers in some exclusive enclave of millionaires and celebutants. If you aren't met by security guards at the very few public access entrances, this after navigating through barriers just to get to public parking lots, there are signs warning you that you are passing through “private property” and entering a “private beach.”

Thankfully, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will show you how to hunt for these hidden entrances, spot the illegal signs, and map out the public-private beach boundary. There will even be a public easement potluck, one of the many activities you can do (legally) in your beach.

On Agro Redux

2009-07-06T23:25:00.010-05:00

(Yang Zhichao, Planting Grass, 2002.)

Last year, we collected all our agriculturally themed posts in a single link-tastic post. We thought we might do the same with all the agriculturally themed posts published since then.

But first we'd like to alert our readers to two marvelous events even though all are assuredly have been aware of them for some time now.

One is London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground, a seminar moderated by David Barrie which focused “on what has, is and will be done to increase the integration of food production into the city.” It was held in late May, and lucky for everyone who didn't make it, Nicola Twilley posted a wonderful summary of the talks for BLDGBLOG.

The other is Foodprint: Exhibition currently on view at Stroom Den Haag. Artists and designers in the show include Agnes Denes, Fritz Haeg and Atelier van Lieshout. The exhibition will end in August 23, 2009, but it's actually part of a 2-year-long series of programs exploring “the influence food can have on the culture, shape and functioning of the city, using The Hague as a case study.” For instance, there is Foodprint: Art projects for the city, which will involve new commissioned works. In one of these, Atelier Van Lieshout will make “a machine that turns human meat into food for pigs.” Huh? If you're intrigued (and can read Dutch), you can probably find out more about this machine at the Foodprint: Weblog.

Now on to the link-o-rama.

1) Agro Park: on the competition to design a new hyper-park for Memphis, Tennessee.

2) Locavore Utopia: Work Architecture Company's prequel to their P.S. 1 installation, Public Farm 1.

3) After the Deluge, The Farm: urban farming in post-Katrina New Orleans.

4) The Machinic Landscape of Tulips.

5) Fish Works: N.E.E.D.'s aquafarm proposal for South Street Seaport, New York.

6) Small Food Nation: tiny cows for tiny houses for tiny footprint living.

7) It Still Turns and Returns: the gyroscopic whirligigs of gravity defying cows, sort of.

8) Michael Jackson as Landscape Architecture.

9) Agro-veillance: will our horizons soon darken with a data aviary of pilotless surveillance drones kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?

10) South Central Farms: The Documentary.

11) Aquapod®: what would Buckminster Fuller and Archigram have come up with had they taken up underwater agriculture?

12) Oceansphere™: Cf. Aquapod®.

13) AAgrotecture 1: King's Vineyard London.

14) AAgrotecture 2: Aquaculture.

15) AAgrotecture 3: Farmacy.

16) [farming]: announcing [bracket], a new annual publication from InfraNet Lab in collaboration with Archinect.

17) Baby Farmer: a hazmat suit for USDA certified organic supplier of replicant Jude Laws.

19) AAgrotecture 4: Gastronomic Garden.

20) Ensuring the Future of Food in Japan: Good Japanese eat Japanese food.

21) Arbor tremuloides: a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

22) A Toxic Tour Through Maryland's Industrial Poultry Landscape.

23) Tactical Horticulture: nursery for anti-terrorist shrubs.

To be continued.

A few bloggers, nude, each with a headless young child's large-finger-armed body attached by the neck to their chests, standing on a landscape

2009-07-03T22:51:00.007-05:00

(Or "A deformed young man, nude, with a headless young child's body attached by the neck to the chest of the young man, in the place of arms, the child has a large finger at either side of his torso; at right an inscribed pedestal," from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585. Source.)

This month's wunderkammer of marvelous blogging:

1) Critical Terrain, by Alan Rapp, editor of The BLDGBLOG Book, etc. (Also: @Kipple1.)

2) Flores en el ático.

3) Governors Island Blog. The island, in Upper New York Bay and legally part of Manhattan, is the site of a planned major series of public open spaces by West 8. (Also: @Gov_Island.)

4) Inspiration Wall, by Lisa Town. (Also: @lisastown.)

5) Mark Lamster was formerly the anonymous author of The Gutter. (Also: @marklamster.)

6) NL Architects Blog.

7) Spillway, by Will Wiles, senior editor of Icon magazine. (Also: @WillWiles.)

8) Urban Omnibus is an online project of the Architectural League that explores the relationship between design and New York City's physical environment. (Also: @UrbanOmnibus.)

9) UrbanTick.

For more, check out our public list of RSS feeds on Bloglines.

Sewer Zeppelins for the Era of Infrastructural Anarchy & Other Roman Tales

2009-07-02T11:55:00.031-05:00

(“Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin,” part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Héctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)

Last month, a cadre of guerilla architecture critics (or just plain vandals) splashed the white walls of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum with green and red paint, thus rendering the Italian tricolor in an unintentional homage to America's greatest living painter, though permanent Roman habitué, Cy Twombly.

It was presumably the first outwardly visceral manifestation of popular distaste for the building.

(The Natural History of Cy Twombly. Photo by Riccardo De Luca/AP Photo. Source.)

Many others no doubt would like nothing more than to deface the museum. The mayor, for instance, has been very vocal about wanting to remove it (minus the altar, of course) and then reconstruct it fuori le Mura. Whether this would mean that the original will be recycled for the new building or entirely torn down into unsalvageable detritus, these urbicidal fantasies of demolition, alteration and displacement are pretty much on par with the spatial history of the piazza.

The new building, for instance, replaced a pavilion partly designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo under Benito Mussolini to house the Ara Pacis, which was discovered somewhere offsite and relocated to its present location. This earlier building was dismantled, because it was deemed incapable of protecting the ancient monument from Rome's damaging pollution and summer weather. However, a stone wall containing inscriptions of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti was saved from total annihilation and incorporated into Meier's building design. A new temple built on top of the foundations of an old temple.

Meanwhile, the demolished pavilion itself was part of a Fascist program of erasure. Mussolini wanted to create a new piazza, the center piece of which would be the Mausoleum of Augustus. At the time, parts of the tomb laid buried beneath several layers of urban fill and topped with a concert hall, the latest in a long line of adaptive reuse programs. The tomb was further “hidden” by narrow streets and dense urban growth. To “liberate” it, Mussolini simply obliterated the surrounding neighborhood.

Left untouched were a couple of churches, one of which, San Rocco, is a fascinating impasto of Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical and Palladian styles. These survivors — together with Morpurgo's pavilion and a complex of new modern buildings for use by Fascist Party functionaries — were calibrated to frame the bounded space of the new Piazza Augusto Imperatore.

It's interesting to note here that embedded on the facades of the new buildings are friezes, mosaics and inscriptions, a decorative program no doubt intended to create a link with the sculptural reliefs on the Ara Pacis on the other side of the piazza. One of those inscriptions, apart from mythologizing Mussolini and Fascism, actually commemorates the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus and by extension celebrates the urban pogrom that had to be metted out in order to “liberate” the tomb from its shadowy grave. So perhaps if the mayor were to carry out his own pogrom, then he, too, may commemorate it with yet another set of friezes on the front of the new museum. These will also memorialize our liberation from starchitectural stupor.

In any case, to add to these violent, cross-spatiotemporal architectural critiques, Meier stated after the demolition of Morpurgo's pavilion but before the start of construction of his new museum that he wanted (and may yet still want) to tear down the other Fascist-era additions to the piazza. These buildings may have perfectly acted out Mussolini's urban scenography of Fascist ideologies but the resulting piazza is an incredibly failed urban space. It's inhospitable to everyday use and pedestrians avoid it. Meier presumably knows better. And if he gets his way, then there would be another occasion for textual frotteurism and iconographical link-orgy: a sculptural band of friezes in which we see the wannabe urban planner in the guise of the Angel of Modernism — Meier Dux, the liberator of the Eternal City from its own ancientness.

But we're obviously digressing.

(“Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin,” part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Héctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)

When reading about the incident, what grabbed our complete attention wasn't the paint job. What actually spurred us into confecting this post was the porcelain toilet and the two packs of toilet paper left at the scene.

Because these scatological implements aren't the most imaginative form of “activism” (or for no other reason than just because), we set about concocting less facile, though dubiously practical, strategies of protest. We used the following as points of departure.

1) As far as we know, no one has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the vandalism. The presence of Graziano Cecchini in the crowd of onlookers at the scene, however, elicited some very faint accusatory speculations. Cecchini, you might remember, was the artist and member of the neo-Futurist group, ATM Azionefuturista 2007, who dyed the Trevi Fountain red nearly two years ago, an incident which we covered here then. If you can also recall, he turned the fountain's crystal clear waters into a vermillion Nile — like a self-righteous Moses preaching to a bunch of uber-consumerist Ramesseses — as a way to protest the obscenely high cost of organizing that year's International Film Festival of Rome.

2) Earlier that summer, another incident occurred at the Trevi Fountain and at other Roman fountains. You can say that it was similarly faintly Biblical: the waters parted — or rather dried up — which is probably the same thing. The culprits that time weren't hydro-anarchists venting out grievances with the hegemonic elite or vandal-artists enacting one of their staged happenings using the built environment as their canvas and minor urban disasters as their paint. As we reported at the end of last year, the water supply to the fountains were cut short when construction workers across town damaged an ancient pipe while building a private underground car park. The blockage was discovered when a waterborne camera was slithered through the city's rhyzomatic ecosystem of voids to pinpoint its location.

While the tired, sweaty tourists around the city didn't erupt into a riotous mob, this incident left us wondering whether they could be agitated into a pillaging horde, ransacking archaeological sites and museums, by strategically pinching the right combination of ganglial pathways of the city's infrastructural network.

3) Staying in Rome but venturing more than a century back in time: in the 1870s, we read in The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, archaeologists dug up the floor of the Colosseum and exposed its basement corridors. This apparently upset so many people, including the Pope, because it meant removing the arena's religious paraphernalia, such as the Stations of the Cross, a huge crucifix in the center and a hermitage and its hermit. The recently unified Italian state, in other words, was seen to be trampling over sacred ground, and the birthplace of so many martyrs and saints, was to be converted into a secular artifact, an archaeologist's play pen.

But of greater interest for us here is the fact that during the excavation, drainage was such a problem that the sewers and underground corridors had filled with water. Harkening back to when it used to host mock naval battles, the Colosseum remained an artificial lake for many years until a new sewer was built to channel the water away.

4) Returning to the present but now venturing out of the city: decorating this post are CC-licensed photos of Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin, one of several installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora at this year's Venice Art Biennale.

5) Further afield: in an article published by The New York Times in 2003, we learned that public works officials in New York sent a self-propelled, submersible Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) down into in the 85-mile long Delaware Aqueduct that supplies New York City with half of its drinking water. Millions of gallons have been leaking, and they wanted to know where and how it was seeping out.

Leakage of up to 36 million gallons a day was detected starting in 1991. The leaking stretch lies somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir in the Catskills and the West Branch Reservoir, a way station for city-bound water here in Putnam County.

The escaping water is just a small percentage of the 1.3 billion gallons supplied by the system each day, but still equals the daily consumption in Rochester.

Water percolating upward hundreds of feet from tunnel leaks has created wetlands and damp areas in Ulster and Orange counties that endure even in the region's worst droughts.

The city's engineers have been periodically sending, as recently as last month, torpedo-shaped, deep-sea robots to monitor the cracks.

There are important lessons about crumbling infrastructure and the importance of surveillance and maintenance in an age of peak water and climate change that no doubt could be extracted from here, but we have to move on.

(“Stuck Inflatable Zeppelin,” part of a series of installations collectively called Sciame di Dirigibili by Héctor Zamora at the 2009 Venice Art Biennale. Photo by Stunned.org. Source.)

So. Instead of leaving cute trinkets next to one's object of disgust, you go for the jugular.

First assemble together a fleet of self-propelled, subterranean dirigible. Be sure that they can navigate through both water-filled tunnels and more airier ones. To be able to track their location and velocity, implant each one with an iPhone or any cheap, GPS-enabled mobile device.

With maps of the negative labyrinth on hand, you let them loose. At designated strategic nodes, you phone them. They pause in mid-flight. Seconds later, they inflate and wedge themselves very tightly in the tunnel. If the tunnel is too big, then several of your dirigibles will clump together to ensure total blockage. And then finally, using the sewers' miasmic vapour as a reagent, their nylon skins fantamagically fuse with the tunnel walls and turn metallic, nearly diamond-hard. An hour or two later, manholes and storm drains begin venting your furious critique. A further hour or two, an artificial lake lays stagnant next to (or better yet, surrounds) the target building.

Of course, the target needn't be a building. It could be a new plaza as anti-pedestrian as the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Or an obscenely overbudget hyper-park. Or a grotesquely earnest memorial. Or a similarly ghastly public art installation whose aesthetics suggest it has time-travelled from the 80s. Whatever it is, you consider it a pestilential addition to the built environment in the same way your artificial lake is a deadly public health hazard.

Not surprisingly, others with their own beef and their own agenda will copy your tactics. Sewers all over the world will be swarming with dirigibles, buzzing with the amplified hum of their tiny propellers. Artificial lakes will bubble up and vanish, rising and falling in accordance to the perennially shifting climate of architectural taste.

Not surprisingly as well, officials will try to stop these acts of sabotage. They will take sewer maps out of the public domain. They will even request the federal government to classify them as state secrets. Consequently, all public works employees will have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Urban adventurers will be charged with espionage if found hiking through the tunnels. Or simply shot on site as they claw their out of the sewers like Harry Lime in The Third Man.

If the public before were oblivious to the vast underground landscape that makes their life possible, only getting a hint of what lies beneath when an underpass is flooded or when a boy mysteriously goes missing while out exploring an abandoned section, then they will now be utterly, completely, permanently ignorant.

When a boy does indeed go missing, there will be no search and rescue and thus no wall-to-wall television coverage of melodrama. There will be no prolonged national hysteria over the fate of the child, and there definitely will be no photogenic heros confected out of the whims of the masses. The missing kid will simply be censored from the day's news, and the parents will be told they never had that child.

The kid, like the sewer maps, will be redacted.

In response, sewer anarchists will outfit their dirigibles with DIY sonars or laser scanners. They will make their own maps.

As a counter-countermeasure, combat engineers will reconfigure the network into an even more bewildering jumble of tunnels. They will dug fake tunnels, tunnel that leads to dead ends, tunnels that impossibly knot into themselves, tunnels with sonar-cancelling pings, tunnels that lead to police headquarters, tunnels that effloresce into a thicket of infinitely bifurcating tunnels, and tunnels that lead to other dimensions.

Alternatively, they will de-tangle the network. Obsolete tunnels will be filled in, others consolidated. Certain segments will be expanded into rationally planned, naturally lighted, cathedral-like vaults. These tunnels will actually be more than what the city needs to funnel its wastewater and stormwater, but at least they will be hard to be barricaded. It's the Haussmannisation of the sewers.

The other side, of course, will simply hack their dirigibles into more sophisticated mapping tools and employ advanced computer modeling techniques to simulate alternative infiltration strategies.

It's one side always trying to outwit the other side.

Because whoever rules the sewers rules the city.

Poule mouillée!

2009-07-02T02:18:00.001-05:00

(Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury, Poule mouillée!, 2008, 2009. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And still yet another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens: with the caveat that we haven't yet seen any of the gardens in person — to repeat: not a single one — and thus we're only judging by image and text alone, our handicapped favorite is the entry by the team of Claudia Delisle, Karine Dieujuste, Philippe Nolet and Sami Tannoury.

“This garden,” they write, “takes its form from the most common garden tools: 66 sprinklers that remind us of the residential garden. This installation takes roots in the collective memory, reminding us of spontaneous childhood water games.”

Watery naves fleeting in and out of form. Infectiously joyous children and adults shooting through the spritely, melodically sputtering fountains, shrieking as if experiencing a kind of hydrological rapture — that is, until keeling over, comatosed from too much nostalgia of domestic bliss.

This installation is called Poule mouillée!, which can be loosely translated as: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

In the Archives:
The Hydrological Playground

Sonic Garden

2009-07-01T19:11:00.013-05:00

(Doug Moffat and Steve Bates, Soundfield, 2007, 2008, 2009. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

Another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens is Soundfield by Doug Moffat and Steve Bates.

According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.”

As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response.

But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”

(Alex Metcalf, Tree Listening Installation, 2008. Photo by Richard Braine.)

Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears.

As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”

(Markus Kison, touched echo, 2008. Photo by the artist.)

Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks of those trees to hear the soundtrack.

And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup.

To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie flat on your stomach and press your ear against dirt.

And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.

(With thanks to Geoff Manaugh, specifically for this.)

Returning to Métis/Reford

2009-06-29T03:05:00.004-05:00

(Réflexions colorées by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

Exactly four years ago today, in one of our very early posts, we noted the start of the latest edition of the International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens. We would like to tip our readers again the start over the weekend of this year's festival, which will last until 4 October. Below are some photographs of the gardens to temp you to make a trek to Quebec.

While the gardens look rather inventive, something you'd expect when the designers are given absolute creative freedom, however, you can be sure that there will always be some sort Picturesque-esque visualary:

(Réflexions colorées by Hal Ingberg. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And hyper-modern geomet-o-rama:

(bois de biais by Atelier le balto. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And everyday objects given post-modern cooptery for high designery:

(Passe-moi un sapin Rita by Stéphane Halmaï‐Voisard, Francis Rollin and Karine Corbeil. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And algorithmic computerary:

(Camouflage View by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And volup-terra-ry (see this one with bouncing, infectiously joyful kids):

(Safe Zone by Stoss Landscape Urbanism. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And green-goism (though this one isn't overtly treebuggery):

(Pomme de parterre by Angela Iarocci, Claire Ironside and David Ross. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And pushing-it-with-the-project-statement:

(Dymaxion Sleep by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

And rhythmametry:

(Le jardin de bâtons bleus by Claude Cormier Landscape Architects. Photo courtesy of Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens.)

It's interesting to note briefly that not one of the gardens are peddling in what Piet Oudolf, the avant-gardener of the High Line, would call “the soft pornography of the flower.” The installations are less about botany and almost singularly about sculpting spaces and programming them with melodrama.

Go see (and play).

Par-veillance

2009-06-15T23:06:00.010-05:00

(Illustration by Graham Roberts and Bedel Saget for The New York Times.)

In trying to absolve themselves of their litany of environmental sins, some golf courses have started using treated effluent water to maintain their unnatural lushness.

According to The New York Times, “Golf courses are all but weaned from municipal fresh-water systems, with 86 percent now using some other source, liked recycled effluent water, surface water or water treated by reverse osmosis. Significantly, 70 percent of superintendents surveyed said they were keeping their turf drier.”

Additionally, those that can afford it have been experimenting with “subterranean wireless sensors” to better manage and monitor their water use. In terms of water conservation, they're turning out to be quite a success. One club superintendent is quoted as saying that they have cut the amount of water they use in half.

The implication here, of course, is that giving high-tech intelligence to other landscapes — to athletic fields, farms, parks and home gardens — could mean a reduction in resource consumption there as well.

Now if only some of these golf clubs try to absolve themselves of their racist, sexist and other socio-exclusionary policies.

In the Archives:
Agro-veillance

And:
Of golf courses, filtration plants, and green roofs

We ♥ Irish Handball Alleys

2009-06-14T23:31:00.005-05:00

Some photos of Irish handball alleys taken from a research blog devoted to cataloguing them and studying their histories. They're not something we were specifically searching for. In fact, we can't now remember how we came upon them, but we're glad we did. Somehow, in all that time-devouring sonic cloud of nighttime mouse clicks, we managed to discover something marvelous.

Make Use, the research group coordinating the project, writes:

The handball alley was built wherever a site was available, on parish or donated private lands, institutional lands, and often attached to lime kilns and religious ruins. The later 60x30 feet alley tended to be free standing and typically unroofed. Referred to as the ‘big’ alley, this form seems to be indigenous to Ireland and continued to be built until the introduction of the international 40x20 feet standard in 1969.

These alleys now dot the landscape. In the countryside, freestanding alleys appear like the remnants of houses and buildings abandoned by emigrants to the New World and subsequently truncated wall by wall in the years and decades ahead by those left behind: a Brutalist void-sculpture commemorating the lost generation and a nostalgic reminder of a mythic happier time before the diaspora. In cases where they are attached to buildings, they look like the remains of a former church, specifically its jutting buttressed walls, a victim of Henry VIII's Catholic pogroms, now ivy covered. Or they look like blast protection walls of an abandoned military base, a magnet for explorers of post-industrial landscapes. Or a fake ruin in a folly garden. Of course, many are actually true ruins, overgrown with shrubbery, disintegrating and inundated by the earth.

Things only get more interesting in urban areas where many of the alleys seem to have been absorbed, or accidentally adaptively reused, as the city grew around them. That side of that building or that wall or that parking lot or that space sculpted by three buildings in the back — all are actually the artifacts of codified game-spaces. Strikingly devoid of decoration, these alleys now adorn façades as archaeological ornaments.

(Photograph by R. Ryan.)

(Photographer unknown.)

(Photograph by E. Timmoney.)

(Photograph by Neil McDermot.)

(Photographer unknown.)

(Photograph by Neil McDermott.)

Related:
Grain Elevators

Exit Oil

2009-06-13T23:43:00.020-05:00

(Not part of the exhibition mentioned below but otherwise related: a photo of the eternal flames of Ebocha, Nigeria. Photo by Michael Kamber. Source. Previously.)

Exit Art is a little gallery in New York that's been putting together some incredibly fascinating exhibitions. Like Storefront for Art and Architecture, it always seems to be beckoning us with thematically enticing programs.

A recent exhibition, for example, tackled the controversial field of bioart. We featured several projects from this show, called Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), including Richard Pell's Center for PostNatural History.

Another recent installation featured vertical farms, urban gardens and green roofs. If you follow much this trendy landscape genre, no doubt you've seen most, if not all, of the projects, but sometimes it's nice to see what previously has been just a disparate and rather messy jumble of bookmarks littering your hard drive now collected into one, easily surveyed room.

Even some of the ancillary events sound interesting, such as a lecture once given by Oleg Mavromatti, the co-founder of the art collective ULTRAFUTURO. His talk was on Russian Cosmism, which was a “philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” and how this mystical philosophy “affected the development of Soviet science and space research.”

A quick wiki-research on Russian Cosmism brought up Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a “representative” of the movement and who was “an advocate of radical life extension by means of scientific methods, human immortality and resurrection of dead people,” and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who we read “believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.”

One wonders if the early development of space exploration in America and by extension the nation's popular imaginings of the landscapes of other worlds have similarly interesting antecedents, or does everything trace back to a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists and not to some deep philosophical inquiry into the human condition?

In any case, opening today at Exit Art is The End of Oil, “an exhibition of photography, prints, videos, installations and new media that addresses human dependence on oil and other fossil fuels; the ramifications that this dependency has on the future of the environment and of global geopolitics; and the recent push towards viable alternative energy resources.”

The works in this exhibition draw attention to and investigate the violent conflicts (such as in Nigeria, Burma and Sudan) and negative environmental effects that result from mining and drilling; the politicization of the oil industry; carbon-footprinting; and renewable energy options, such as vegetable and electric-powered cars, geothermal energy, and solar power. The End of Oil does not prophesize a dystopian future, but looks critically at the way in which we use and generate energy, encouraging a dialogue on this issue for the benefit of future generations.

This exhibition is a project of SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics).

SEA is a unique endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. SEA will assemble artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series that will communicate international activities concerning environmental and social activism.

So many good things piled up on top of one another.

If you're in town, consider stopping by.

A Zoo in Vienna

2009-06-12T05:01:00.009-05:00

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna is host to a fascinating series of temporary art installations by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf. In one animal enclosure, the German duo have half-submerged a car in a watering hole used by the resident rhinos. In another enclosure, penguins frolic in the shadow of an oil pump, and in yet another, alligators must share their modest bayou with a bathtub and a monster truck tire.

According to the artists, these scenes of ecological nightmares are “experimental set-up[s]” in which “the viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging 'natural' environments while they are increasingly endangered.”

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

Quoting further: “Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects. Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.”

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

The installations will last until October 18, 2009.

Related:
Other Simulated Worlds

Some Freshly Fallen Hills

2009-06-11T21:54:00.006-05:00

(You can be forgiven for mistaking this to be a photo — bigger version — of an art installation in a beautiful new pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale — something to do with the human and environmental cost of mineral resource extraction, perhaps. Or for thinking that Leah Beeferman is finally going through “the step-by-step process of building a landscape of freshly fallen hills into an industrious winged city.” Or Geoff Manaugh terraforming habitable artificial hills for future intergalactic archaeologists. But this building is actually a in . Photographer unknown. Source.)

More Spatial High Jinks 4: Arbor-veillance

2009-06-10T22:47:00.002-05:00

(Image by Rebecca Macri.)

Proposal #1: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensing system to predict and detect forest wildfires.

(Image by Rebecca Macri.)

Proposal #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a remote arboreal border homeland security system.

Proposal #3: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna.

Proposal #4: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power concealed speakers sculpting the extinct sonic landscapes of a former ecosystem.

Proposal #5: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power mobile telecommunication devices long enough for passing hikers, park rangers and loggers to send a couple of tweets.

Proposal #6: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power fog machines which can be used, depending on your artistic persuasion, to render non-classically the very much classical scene of an aerosolized Jupiter raping Io, or equally classical scenes of wars and heroes, for instance, napalm defoliation during the Vietnam War.

In the Archives:
Agro-veillance

(This is the fourth in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.)

Year 5

2009-06-09T14:13:00.006-05:00

(Very briefly, Pruned turns 4 today. Or to inflate that number a bit, we are starting Year 5 today! Here's to 4 more years! Oh, no. The image above, meanwhile, comes from UK-based Earth Images, which sells fine art prints of these sonorous lithic Turners — cue Ligeti — and of other pictorial stones but unfortunately not the polished rocks themselves.)

Ghost Houses

2009-06-08T23:28:00.005-05:00

(From our repository of decorative whatnots and filler knickknackeries, this photogenic ghostly imprint of aborted architecture. Some refer to them as medianeras, others as the unconscious art of demolition. Our own fancy phraseology is urban graffiti of absence. The photograph above by Marcus Buck comes from his photo series called Restarchitektur, viewable via “Freie Arbeiten” on his flash website. With thanks to the artist for the photo.)

Flemish Island Constellation

2009-06-07T23:50:00.014-05:00

(Vlaamse Baaien 2100, a project by Office of Permanent Modernity in collaboration with the engineers Arcadis, AT&M, IMDC, and the dredging companies DEME and Jan de Nul. Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)

On the coast, in a landscape of instabilities and ambiguities, there are surprisingly three things that are constant: 1) sea level is rising; 2) people living along the coast — a huge percentage of the global population, a number that's steadily rising — will not budge, even if hurricanes after hurricanes after hurricanes keep pummeling their cities of ramshackled hovels — rather than retreating, they will dig themselves deeper and deeper; 3) they will entrench themselves by basically building walls.

One of these future walls may be the Flemish Island Constellation, a proposal by the Office of Permanent Modernity for a chain of artificial islands shielding the entire Belgian coast.

(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)

Unlike a similar project further up north, the Tulip Island in the Netherlands, and even the Palms of Dubai, this archipelago will be “based on morphological logic.” Instead of plopping down “arbitrary geometries,” the islands will be “built up from existing banks in the North Sea, using the current morphology to determine their placement.” Instead of isolating themselves, they will be opened up to the dynamic flows of the landscape. They will be “North Sea-specific.”

Once divined out of the sea, these extended coastlines will host natural reserves and sanctuaries for migrating wildlife, windmills and “dune villages.”

(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)

(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)

(Image by Office of Permanent Modernity.)

Meanwhile, we are of the persuasion that managed retreat is the best of possible solutions to coastal erosion and future inundation by sea level rise. What possible benefits local businesses and the heritage preservation police get from fortifying themselves in concrete are offset by the massive infrastructural cost needed, a multi-decade investment now even more unsustainable in the current financial crisis. And if past projects are anything to go by, what gets built will create more problems than it's supposed to solve.

But we're thinking of the eastern seaboard and the gulf coast of the United States. We don't know much about the coastal geology of Belgium. Sea level rise by climate change may be global, but hyperlocally, it will manifest itself in ways as myriad as the varying geomorphological conditions at every stretch of every coastlines. So maybe this artificial archipelago will work. It's already been conceptualized as anti-Dubai, so it rests on a good footing.

In the Archives:
On the coast

More Spatial High Jinks 3: The Forests of Isratine and Palesrael

2009-06-06T19:31:00.002-05:00

(Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Saints Forest, 2005.)

(Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Canada Park, 2005.)

“Around Jerusalem,” write Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago, “acres of pine forest are used as popular family picnic spots. On the weekends they fill up with cars, people, pets, barbecues. But in the early mornings, just after dawn, the forests are completely silent, serene and untainted, giving the impression of timeless landscapes in which trees have been standing forever.”

But this apparent natural wilderness is a carefully constructed scene, as “many of these forests have been systematically planted on the expropriated land of Arab villages, which were forcibly evacuated and deliberately destroyed in 1948. It was not only sandy desert that was forested, but also cultivated olive groves and rural villages, the underlying intention being to obscure the locations of these villages so as to prevent any further cultivaton or re-settlement of the land by non-Jews.”

“These are places of erasure and amnesia.”

(This is the third in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.)

Bloggers with a Twin Conjoined at the Belly, Standing in the Landscape

2009-06-05T23:57:00.021-05:00

(Or “A naked man with a twin conjoined at the belly, standing in the landscape,” from Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri's Monsters from all parts of the ancient and modern world, 1585. Source.)

Because sometimes we think bloggers, particularly those on the built environment, are a monstrous sub-breed of humanity: preening, humorless, fringe feeding, attention whoring polemicist and apologists who take too many things too seriously too many times.

But these ones aren't.

arch-peace news and articles: blog of Architects for Peace.

By Design: by Allison Arieff.

High Line Blog: if you're one of the most famous post-2000 designed landscapes, you gotta have a blog.

Hungry City, the blog: by Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City, the book.

People and Place: a tumbleblog by @a_me1, we think.

rory hyde dot com blog: via @roryhyde.

Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome Weblog: so far just a smattering of posts that interest us, but the few that do, such as those on Alan Berger and the academy's Rome Sustainable Food Project, make subscribing to its feed worthwhile. And then there are the photos of boozy jamborees of the Veuve clique and the culturati and arrivistes greasing Last-Tango-in-Paris-like around the canapé trays.

Sustainable Stormwater Management: they must be after our hearts.

Veg.itecture: an off-shoot of Landscape+Urbanism.

Water in the Sustainable Environment: blog of Natural Systems International, specialists in alternative wastewater/stormwater management, and part of the design team of the Sidwell Friends Middle School project.

For our public blogroll, see our list of RSS feeds on Bloglines. Which of these you are going to subscribe to (or whether or not you are going to follow even one of them) will be up to you.

The Wetland Machine of Sidwell

2009-06-04T23:16:00.029-05:00

(The wetland machine of Sidwell Friends School by Andropogon Associates, Kieran Timberlake Associates and Natural Systems International. Image by Andropogon Associates.)

Reading an ASLA interview of Jose Alminana, a principal at Andropogon Associates, we were reminded that Sidwell Friends School, the Quaker school of choice for the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, the Bidens, the Nixons — practically every member of Washington's politocracy, except for the Carters, of course — has in the courtyard of a recently renovated building an artificial wetland.

Not merely an eco-ornament, it's a machine that “manages all the wastewater generated by the building, as well as all the rain water that falls on the site.”

(View from top of the wetland terrace towards the new building extension. Photo by Andropogon Associates.)

Typically, wastewater is drained away via a complex network of tunnels that requires vast financial resources just for its maintenance, an infrastructure that's undoubtedly deteriorating just as fast as tax revenues get siphoned off away from public works budgets to General Motors and Bank of America. Miles and miles away from its point of origin, the water then gets treated in an energy intensive process. But it still isn't entirely clean afterwards. Thus, when discharged, it still poses a risk to bodies of water, contributing in many instances to elevated bacterial count and eutrophication.

At Sidwell, wastewater is treated on-site, somewhat off-the-grid and using comparatively minimal infrastructure. The treatment cycle begins inside the building in a tank filled with anaerobic bacteria. Among other things, these bacteria help break down solids. The effluent is then pumped outside to a trickle filter before continuing on by gravity to a series of tiered wetlands. To lessen the health risk of contact with students and to mitigate any odor problems, water flows through beneath layers of pea gravel; there's no surface flow, in other words. This planting medium contains phytoremediating plants which, together with the microorganisms attached to their root hairs and to the gravel stones, extract contaminants from the water. After slowly trickling its way outside for about a couple of days or so, the water then re-enters the building and gets collected in storage tank ready for reuse in flushing toilets, among other uses for greywater.

(Site plan: 1. Existing Middle School; 2. Middle School addition with green roof; 3. Trickle filter with interpretive display; 4. Wetlands for wastewater treatment; 5. Rain garden; 6. Pond; 7. Outdoor classroom; 8. Butterfly meadow; 9. Woodland screen at neighborhood edge; 10. Playground. Image by Andropogon Associates.)

Just as with wastewater, managing urban stormwater typically involves massive infrastructure to dispose runoffs as efficiently and as quickly as possible. In addition to being a drain on municipal coffers, such a method is known to increase the probability and the intensity of a flood event during major storms, endangering human life and property. Moreover, since stormwater isn't allowed to remain where it falls, (1) water doesn't have enough time to infiltrate the soil and seep into waiting, possibly depleted groundwater aquifers, and (2) what may have been clean at first contact with the surface undoubtedly will not remain so as it moves through sidewalks, roads, parking lots and sewers before going on to pollute rivers, lakes and other sources of our drinking water.

(Two students on the border between the rain garden and the pond. Photo by Andropogon Associates.)

At Sidwell, we get a hint of an alternative system for stormwater management: hyperlocal, lo-fi, modular (i.e., implementations at multiple sites would be needed to bring about an appreciable effect on urban hydrology), soft and comparatively cheap.

(Section cut through the 1. tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment; 2. rain garden; and 3. pond. Image by Andropogon Associates.)

Runoff is directed to a rain garden and a permanent biology pond located downslope from the tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment.

(Flow diagram of stormwater runoff. Image by Andropogon Associates.)

Some of the runoff gets in an underground cistern. During dry weather, this storage tank provides water to the pond. During heavy rains, excess water flows from the pond into the rain garden, simulating the hydrological dynamics of a floodplain environment. Water seeps through the soil and gets naturally filtered.

(Flow diagram of stormwater runoff from pond to rain garden. Image by Andropogon Associates.)

Andropogon describes this project as a “working landscape” but we might prefer calling it an “event landscape,” wherein natural processes are co-opted into a cybernetic amalgam of landscape, architecture, geology, biology and institutional pedagogy. Rather than in the inaccessible subterranean voids and in scientific abstractions, this eco-machine is made to perform out in the open for the edification of the elite who, in their dirty, smelly, real-world engagement with the landscape, will hopefully turn into great stewards of the earth.

In the Archives:
On constructed wetlands

2009-06-03T14:41:00.002-05:00

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. Marvelous!

Pole Farm

2009-06-02T20:09:00.004-05:00

(Get out your 3D glasses for this anaglyph image of a telephone pole farm. See also this panorama. Both images by Jay Yarm.)

Another testing grounds is this field of telephone poles located in Chester Township, New Jersey. It's an arboretum of sorts, “planted” with several hundred trunks, the total of which may have peaked close to a thousand, carved out of different tree 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.

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.

(Thanks, Chris F., for the tip.)

Arrangement of Test Specimens at Treat Island Natural Weathering Exposure Station

2009-06-01T22:19:00.005-05:00

(Image courtesy Army Corps of Engineers.)

Registering once more, if not for the first time, our fascination with so-called, or rather so-tagged, testing grounds, an interest which we weren't acutely aware of having until we started labeling our posts only a couple months ago and realized that we have actually posted many examples of this type of landscape, these sites of experimentation, simulations, and novel theories and forms of landscape and architecture: this rack map of concrete slabs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' materials testing facility at Treat Island, Maine.

There, these test 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.

More Spatial High Jinks 2: How to Build a Park in Jerusalem

2009-05-21T00:15:00.002-05:00

(Photo by Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times.)

Last week, we read in The New York Times that “Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.”

As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history.

To be intentionally obvious and understated, the plan is controversial.

(This is the second in a series of five time-saver nanoposts of somewhat related items.)

Kerb 17

2009-05-20T13:01:00.002-05:00

(Coming soon to terrorize the status quo?)

Mitchell Whitelaw, of The Teeming Void, alerted us that Kerb 17 is now available or at least will be soon. Last Friday was its launch party. We checked Amazon, and it doesn't seem to be listed, though copies of two previous editions are still available for purchase: Kerb 15 - Landscape Urbanism and Kerb 16 - Future Cities.

Compiled and edited each year by landscape architecture students at RMIT, the latest issue tackles the question, Is landscape architecture dead?

kerb 17 critiques current modes of thinking about the practice of landscape architecture, offering up a discussion of where landscape architecture is, what it has evolved from, and what it might become in the future. The collection of works and ideas by international and Australian designers and artists featured in kerb 17 respond and demonstrate how through the medium of landscape and a potential mediation of design disciplines we can reconsider contemporary ideas of landscape.

Except for Whitelaw's article, the content remains a mystery to us. We can thus only speculate what's on offer inside from the riotously wacky cover.

Are we to expect a repudiation of hyper-modern designery and a celebration of the informal?

Is there a call away from the Dutch School of slick sustainability and cosmetic urban regeneration towards the messier logistics of radical sustainability?

Is someone making the case for post-nature as a legitimate site not just of landscape inquiry but of landscape design?

Rural nostalgia run amok?

Meanwhile, we wait.

More Spatial High Jinks 1: Tactical Horticulture

2009-05-20T00:50:00.004-05:00

(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.)