Pruned

Waterpleinen

2009-11-02T23:59:00.010-06:00

(Image by De Urbanisten and Studio Marco Vermeulen.)

To launch its 14th anthology, Water, Alphabet City has organized a series of events this week in Toronto, two of which are the HYDROCity symposium and its accompanying exhibition at the University of Toronto. Another event is a lunchtime talk in which Jeroen Bodewits will discuss Waterpleinen, a project designed by Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen to reconfigure the stormwater infrastructure of Rotterdam.

(Image by De Urbanisten and Studio Marco Vermeulen.)

In Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen's proposal, rainwater runoff isn't funneled into a complex system of underground pipes, a system that is rather expensive to build and maintain, but is managed instead through a network of surface reservoirs, the Waterpleinen, or Watersquares. These storage spaces will be dry for most of the year, but during storm events, they will collect water from the surrounding neighborhood. If one reaches capacity, excess water will overflow into another basin. After the rain, the collected water will slowly recede into nearby bodies of water or seep into the soil.

So instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old.

(Image by De Urbanisten and Studio Marco Vermeulen.)

Originally developed in 2005, this concept has since become official urban policy. At least 25 watersquares are planned for Rotterdam in the coming years, with a prototype to be constructed soon.

In the Archives:
Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape

FantastiCity

2009-11-01T21:21:00.011-06:00

(MEtreePOLIS, by NYC-based HWKN's contribution in Kerb 17: Is Landscape Architecture Dead?, envisions a genetically modified Atlanta, Georgia, a hundred years from now: stratified like a forest, with a canopy at the top collecting water and energy and a single-surface city floor below of bio-renewable moss with no roads or pavements. Watch Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner give a tour of their “fantasticity” here.)

Coinciding with the next issue (#18) of Kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal edited by students at RMIT, Melbourne, is their first ever international design competition, PlastiCity FantastiCity. The competition brief sounds wildly open ended, which could frustrate some but hopefully will only foster astonishing visions of the future city.

Imagine the limitless world of a child. Creative boundaries have not yet been conceived, limits not yet understood. We want to see your city in all its wildness. A child can compose a world of immeasurable fantasy and pleasure yet the regulations that we currently adhere to have diminished our ability to make this our reality.

What if when you take a lunch break, parks literally broke from the earth, airlifted above the clouds escaping into the sunlight, landing within the hour leaving you at peace with the world?

PlastiCity FantastiCity is remodeling the constructed city at any chosen scale to become a world of playful opportunity, where nothing that manifests itself in today's cities is present. This ideas competition seeks a multidisciplinary approach to discover new potentials and possibilities within the world and in particular for the Landscape Architecture profession.

The registration deadline is December 18, 2009, and the submission deadline for panels is January 18, 2010.

Winners will receive cash prizes in addition to page spreads in Kerb 18.

(Image courtesy of the Kerb 18 Editorial Team.)

Links for 2009-10-21 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

Peak Water in Yemen
"Yemen is set to be the first country in the world to run out of water, providing a taste of the conflict and mass movement of populations that may spread across the world if population growth outstrips natural resources." [Times]

Great Street Games

2009-10-20T17:14:00.010-05:00

(Image by KMA.)

Speaking of augmented game spaces, here is an interesting interactive installation set to come online at the of the month in three UK cities. Created by KMA, Great Street Games will be a “huge, participatory, high-tech athletics tournament” in which participants in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough compete against each other virtually in real-time using the city as platform.

KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology to create interactive 'courts' in which human movement triggers light effects. The physical movements of players determine the outcome the games, which will run on ten-minute cycles. Participants develop their game-playing skills as they progress through a number of levels to help their area to victory or to simply have fun.

The parameters of this urban sport are described thus:

The ‘courts’ created by projected light; each court comprising a central playing area and two zones representing the other two locations. Balls of light appear from the centre of each court – these projected images can be moved by players physically ‘touching’ them. The aim of the first game is for each location to gain points by moving as many balls as possible to the other locations. Games last 90 seconds and 5 games make a series – through which the games increase in complexity as players become more familiar with the rules. The town or city with the most points at the end wins.

It reminds one of the telepresent urban spaces of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

(Image by KMA.)

You're walking home alone one night through pedestrian unfriendly, darkly lit corridors. All of a sudden, you trigger a sensor and projectors spray the pavement with technicolor lights. Ebullient geometries seemingly float above the asphalt.

“Wanna play,” a disembodied voice rings out from a speaker.

“Umm, sure,” you instinctively respond, even if you don't how to play what is to be played. “I'll learn along the way,” you say to yourself.

And then it's hours later; the sun is about to rise and wash out the lights. The two of you promise to return the following night (tonight, actually) to continue the game, with friends to make it a team competition. It'll be Chicago vs. Manchester.

“Is this some sort of a next generation MMORPG game?” you wonder.

A week or two later, you find out on Twitter that there are other similar game spaces installed throughout the city, but their locations are a secret. There's no iPhone app for it yet. So you set on a walkabout, hoping that you might again trigger a sensor.

(Spotted on Designboom.)

Urban Golf

2009-10-20T12:28:00.015-05:00

(All photos via Urbangolf.fr.)

Actions: What You Can Do With The City finally comes to Chicago at the Graham Foundation. Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the exhibition features “experimental interactions with the urban environment [that] show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city.”

These “actions” tend to be modest in scale and budget, opportunistic and informal, communal and participatory. If broadly categorizing, they might fall messily under the heading of urban hacking. They are not the great tectonic reconfiguration of urban landscape and infrastructure dreamt up by messianic urban planners, urbicidal architects and despotic graphic designers. Rather, they are merely common activities like walking, playing and garden but reprogrammed with new tactics to “instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.”

As there are 99 “actions”, we'd like to offer one more to round out the number: urban golf.

While the rules may differ in cities and even within cities, the game is invariably played in urban settings. Rather than in well-tended lawns, players tee offs on the street, sidewalks, alleys or on top of buildings. Urban parks, it would seem, are avoided, though certainly not a prohibited course.

One aspect of the game that we find interesting is that it isn't merely the manifestation of ennui among the hipster crowd. It's guerrilla theater with the requisite social commentary.

Quoting Wikipedia (though we might be quoting an outside text copied almost verbatim but uncited by a wiki editor):

Urban golf is seen by many as social commentary on the nature of golf and its traditional opinions and attitudes [i.e., elitist, sexist and racist club policies]. Considering golf pompous, dogmatic and quite often inaccessible, urban golfers worldwide have adopted many different urban environments as their new course to engage in this recreational pastime. Commonly, urban golf organisations tend toward using disused or under utilised urban areas to play golf, not just to reduce the risk of damage or injury, but also as a statement toward the development and reuse of the city.

We haven't used this meme on this blog yet, so: is there an iPhone app for that?

If not, it probably isn't too difficult to program an app that maps out an urban golf course, pinpoints where the teeing ground and “hole” are located, shows and vectorizes the streets or alleys or parks or bridges or whatever disparate features of the built landscape comprise the “fairway,” and lists what hazards to expect, for instance, traffic, storm drains and street furniture.

Wired to sensors strategically placed on buildings and lamp posts outside the course, this app could even forecast wind speeds at various urban canyons. Perhaps a popular feature would sync your urban golf calendar to Twitter or Facebook, announcing your scheduled tee off time in the hopes that you will be joined by other enthusiasts.

Once finished with one course, it will direct you to the next one and then further on to another and so on until the final hole. Collectively, these courses represent a new urban layer augmented physically and virtually onto the city. At the end of play, you will have explored your city from one end all the way to the other end, perhaps experienced it anew.

It's worth further fantasizing, meanwhile, this imagined urban layer becoming more and more codified. Teeing grounds become permanently delineated, not just marked with chalk. Viewing stands are placed next to the hole. Building facades that abut the fairways will be colored to denote this border. As urban golf becomes grotesquely popular and insanely profitable through sponsorship, these courses become permanent fixtures, like (18) stadiums but carved out of existing urban fill. Traffic and pedestrian flow will be diverted. Commerce will colonize their edges. And the city will grow thick around these recreational voids, encrusting the stadiums with an enveloping shell.

When urban golf suffers the inevitably crash in popularity, what happens to its walled game-spaces will be similar to The Stadium of Domitian, which later became Piazza Navona.

It's also worth further fantasizing the notion that playing through all 18 holes across the city is a form of tactical tourism. The photos decorating this post were downloaded from Urbangolf.fr. Self-indulgently, we thought those who maintained that website were part of an underground scene whose members are mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent, the ones probably represented in La Haine. At night after a day of parkour, they trace the imaginary outlines of urban golf courses. Starting from the suburban ethnic ghettos that encircle Paris, from streets disconnected locally from Haussman's boulevards yet ironically connected via immigrations to the rest of the world, they infiltrate the interior arrondissements of the French capital.

From cramped public housing high-rises of the banlieues to fin de siècle hôtels particuliers, from ringed roads to the spacious Jardin du Luxembourg, from the outer flames of race riots into the City of Light, a new breed of urban critics embarks on a self-guided tour of spatial inequity and conflict.

Fore!

Related:
We ♥ Irish Handball Alleys

CH2O

2009-10-19T18:55:00.023-05:00

(New Switzerland. All images by Waterproof.)

The Maldives' climate change media event reminded us of an exhibition mounted by a group of architects, designers and artists for EXPO.02 in Switzerland. Working under the collective name Waterproof, they imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.

(Goodbye, glaciers! Hello, oceans!)

Waterproof's imaginative, sometimes hilarious, but always thought provoking images reflect something we've always been interested in: how countries might adapt to a climate changed world.

If in the unlikely event that everyone becomes carbon negative, not just carbon neutral, tomorrow, climate change isn't likely to be reversed anytime soon. Before whatever historical climatic condition that was codified as the international goal is reached, countries will experience water and food shortages, hotter and wetter weather, habitat lost, perhaps even extinction. During this interim, how will countries cope logistically? They will be geographically transformed, but will they also (intentionally) mutate culturally, even biologically?

(Switzerland on stilts.)

(Switzerland not on stilts.)

(Fjords as the new national — i.e., sacred — landscape.)

(Hawaiiana as the new traditional costume.)

(From premier winter destination to the new Riviera. The rich and powerful will arrive at Davos for the World Economic Forum not in chartered jets and snowmobiles but in swanky yachts loaned to easily bribed world leaders by shipping oligarchs.)

(A new breed of mountain dogs for sea-level domesticity. Where's Flipper?)

(With access to new local ingredients, a new national cuisine, or at least new dietary practices, develops.)

(New mountain hamlets. Instead of against ice avalanches, the landscape will be augmented to protect people from tsunamis.)

(The elite Swiss Navy SEALs.)

(Eternally landlocked, Switzerland emerges as a new naval superpower. Everyone will turn to them to patrol shipping lanes in pirate-infested seas, that is, if there is still a global trade to speak of when much of the world has presumably drowned.)

(Swiss engineering, which once conquered voids and perforated mountains, is retasked to traverse maritime abysses.)

(Just as soon as the flood arrives, land reclamation begins. Switzerland is the new Netherlands.)

(The national sport, Schwingen, on a sandy patch of an actual beach.)

(Pasty white Swiss permanently tanned.)

(New Canton heraldry with oceanic iconography.)

(Surfing in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Best known for tennis in the singular figure of Roger Federer, Olympic swimming becomes a national obsession.)

Waterproof were Alexandre Bettler, Sara Bochicchio, Manuel Borruat, Cédric Decroux, Eric Emery, Yves Fidalgo, Axel Jaccard, Sébastien Rappaz and Frédéric Seydoux.

Links for 2009-10-19 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

Where Land Slides, Trying to Learn Why
"Given that it was denuded by a wildfire just four months before, Mission Canyon is a likely place for a landslide — in this case, more properly called a mudslide, or, even more properly, a debris flow. In Southern California and other parts of the West, where the wildfires of spring and summer are followed by the rains of fall and winter, slides are the almost inevitable result." [NYT]

New Maldives

2009-10-19T18:52:00.001-05:00

(The very media savvy President Mohamed Nasheed of Maldives held a government cabinet meeting underwater to call attention to the real possibility that his low-lying island will disappear due to sea level rise. Among the deluge of press coverage of the event, we read a brief mention about a climate change trust fund set up in case the Maldives does get inundated in the future. It's worth speculating how this fund will be used. See also New Tuvalu, New Kiribati and New Nauru.)

Public Water Purification Island

2009-10-15T16:47:00.002-05:00

(Image by Jakub Szczęsny.)

Here's an art installation from Synchronicity, an architecture/arts festival in Warsaw, Poland. Conceived by Jakub Szczęsny as a member of the design collective Centrala, it consists of a floating island fitted with exercise machines. When the machines are being used, water gets pumped from the polluted Vistula River to a filtration device located overhead at the center of the platform. The water is intended to be potable at the end of its purification cycle, ready for use by thirsty festivalgoers.

(Image by Jakub Szczęsny.)

(Image by Jakub Szczęsny.)

According to Szczęsny: “The whole installation is supposed to perform a role of a propaganda tool changing the consciousness of Warsawers by showing the efficiency of human action in the process of purifying the waters of their river. What’s meaningful is the fact that many Poles, even after twenty years of liberalization, still don’t believe in their own potential as individuals or members of communities, in positively changing their environment.”

(Image by Jakub Szczęsny.)

Could Szczęsny also be presenting us an alternative to the much maligned bottled water? One could set up a stringed necklace of these water islands on a river, say, the Thames, or along a waterfront, say, Chicago's Lakefront, besides trails frequented by joggers, bikers and marathoners in training who, as a communal activity (a civic responsibility, in fact), keep the tanks full for use by themselves and the marginally active.

In the Archives:
The Hydrological Playground

Irrigation

2009-10-13T14:21:00.001-05:00

(We can't be certain if this is a scale model of an irrigation canal or an actual distribution nodal point, an art installation or a gardener's plaything, Mesopotamian or Army Corps of Engineers. But it's absolutely marvelous. Photographer and source unknown. Larger version.)

Hydrocity: Call for Projects

2009-10-07T10:40:00.014-05:00

(Image by Fei-Ling Tseng. Download original version.)

On November 6, 2009 at the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab, in collaboration with Alphabet City, will oversee a daylong symposium and launch an accompanying exhibition that will travel throughout North America. Called Hydrocity, they will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”

If the twentieth century has been marked by our global thirst for fuel, the twenty-first century, will be defined by our collectively growing need for water. Impending water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source, collect, divert and transport water to the urban centres that hold a growing majority of the world’s population. These population centres will in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate increasingly precious water resources while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding their cities’ relationships with the complex watersheds on which they are built and upon which they depend. The resulting liquid infrastructure is poised to redefine our notion of natural and artificial landscapes, as disparate ecological environments are networked and conflated. What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?

Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, whose have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.

As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but InfraNet Lab is very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.

To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6Mb) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.

Send tips if you haven't a project of your own. We've suggested Watery Voids by MMBB Arquitectos and SpongeCity, which was designed by former students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Chicago 2018, or: A Proposal for the First Wholly Urban Winter Olympics

2009-10-05T15:29:00.026-05:00

(Reconfiguring a mountain in Trysil, Norway, by Ecosign. Via InfraNet Lab.)

So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we'll help them out.

Almost everything is going for Chicago. Its infrastructure is less than perfect for the huge Summer Olympics crowds, but would be more than able to handle the modest attendance at a Winter Olympics and would definitely be unmatched by the usual winter bid cities and their smaller scale public transportation systems. Its gargantuan hotel industry would easily surpass capacity requirements.

There will also be no need to build a hulking, temporary 80,000-seat stadium, as Soldier Field will be more than able to seat the smaller crowd at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. And perhaps it can even host another event. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the venue for the ceremonies was also the same arena for ski jumping events. As the following photograph shows, this combination is possible at Soldier Field.

(Summer ski jumping exhibition at Soldier Field in 1954. Note the tiny, solitary jumper in mid-flight. Also note the capacity crowd. Might Chicago 2018 set attendance record?)

And as we re-imagined it a few months ago for a new century, this new prosthetic mountain analogue would be hinged, meaning it can be flipped up and down. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower.

It's the technolicious descendant of the first Ferris wheel, built in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

(Vicente Guallart can show you how to make a mountain.)

It's easy to re-render venues in the failed summer bid into venues for a winter bid. For instance, next door to Soldier Field is the cluster of convention halls where various sports such as gymnastics would have been held; its sprawling spaces would be converted to house figure skating, speed skating and curling competitions. The United Center — formerly proposed for basketball — would host ice hockey competitions; it already serves as the home of the city's professional hockey and basketball teams anyway.

Some of the large urban parks in the old bid will again be drafted into the new bid. At Millennium Park, medal ceremonies will take place against the backdrop of the greatest skyline in the world. One or two will be re-landscaped for freestyle skiing, snowboarding and sliding competitions. As for the serpentine race track used in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, one is tempted to hire Frank Gehry to replicate his BP Pedestrian Bridge.

Since all the venues will be wholly situated inside a major global metropolis and not in some sequestered, exclusive mountain spa resorts hundreds of gas-guzzling miles away from the supposed host city, chances are that they will be heavily used after the games; maybe a subculture of urban snowboarders will clique together. Perhaps one of the better legacies of the games would be the popular adaptation of winter sports (some or all of which are seen as the domain of the privileged) by new socioeconomic and racial classes.

In any case, during the summer, these same installations will add interesting landforms to the parks. The slopping concave hollow of the half-pipe could be re-landscaped as the seating lawn for an outdoor theater. The sliding track, meanwhile, becomes a monumental piece of public sculpture-cum-skating park.

(Snow Mountain by S333 is “the first indoor ski complex to be built in the US and uniquely combines an all year multi-functional skiing centre with hotels, time-share apartments, indoor water parks and extensive recreational areas.”)

Of course, there is one major thing that's going against Chicago. It's not the availability of snow, since this is also a concern in many alpine areas. Climate change is evaporating glaciers everywhere, and natural snow cover grows increasingly tenuous.

Chicago's gritty landscape shouldn't be much of a handicap as well. It may seem that way at first, as it definitely doesn't embody a certain sort of nature — rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc. — which is presumably a prerequisite for certain venues. But have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?

The one glaring negative is the city's glacial-flattened topography. Where does one hold the alpine events?

They'll be held in an artificial mountain. Obviously.

(Urban Ski Mountain by Natalie Ghatan is “a high-rise geometry that can simultaneously accommodate a vertically-arrayed subsidiary ski community program, along with indoor outdoor skiing amenities.”)

But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.

(A proposal by Liam Young, of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, with Andrew d’Occhio and James Pierre DuPlessis, for Bathouse, Visitor Centre and Research Station for a London Wetlands site.)

(Quoting Liam Young: “Made from a growing medium of peat moss and spray concrete the material that forms the bulk of the Bathouse is sprayed over these volumes of public occupation and steel reinforcement. The material, a variation on the ‘Hypertufa’ commonly used by home gardeners, is lightweight and highly porous. It binds the other elements together, the whole structure performing with the same properties as reinforced concrete.”)

(Again quoting Liam Young: “This is a dark, discovered, augmented wilderness embedded with technology for remote virtual bat viewing and arranged for intimate but unobtrusive onsite observation.”)

And its scale will need to be exponentially inflated. This is the Make No Little Plans for the 21st century.

If one is worried that no future host city will ever be able to architecturally outdo the Beijing Olympics (as if organizing and building the games once again in a free and democratic country with no ethnic cleansing being carried out along its periphery isn't enough to surpass it?), this Everest of the Prairie will surely top a fantasy list of the greatest Olympic venues.

How can the IOC mafia refuse this big, bold vision?

(After the airport, comes The Berg.)

It's an Olmstedian park writ large, and it's going be sited in the heavy industrial Lake Calumet sector of the South Side. Unless the Lakefront is larger, this will be Chicago's largest public open space, something which this part of the city sorely needs. Moreover, it will provide the opportunity to finally clean up this Superfund site.

(Guallart Architects' proposal for Denia Cultural Park, Spain.)

Embedded within this double twin of the Loop Skyline and Millennium Park are spaces for use by athletes, officials and spectators. One could also hallow out spaces for the media center and even a satellite Olympic Village. After the games, they'll be converted into community centers, offices and residences, even theaters and indoor rock climbing caverns, all sheathed by the largest green roof in the world. And the views will undoubtedly be spectacular. On the outside surface, meanwhile, parts of the mountain will be turned into a refuge for imported wildlife.

As for the cost, we'll get back to you.

First Draft:
Ski Delft

Links for 2009-10-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-09T00:00:00-07:00

Water Conflict Chronology
"In an ongoing effort to understand the connections between water resources, water systems, and international security and conflict, the Pacific Institute initiated a project in the late 1980s to track and categorize events related to water and conflict."

Links for 2009-10-07 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities
"Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world." [TED.com]

Links for 2009-10-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

Urban Sports Take German Cities by Storm
"Whether it's bike polo, urban golf or scaling public buildings, interesting new urban sports are leaving a distinctive mark on German cityscapes. The metropolitan antics add a twist to traditional sports -- and may be cropping up on stretch of tarmac near you soon." [Spiegel]

Clouds

2009-10-01T23:58:00.025-05:00

Another fascinating project from Paisajes Emergentes in collaboration with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve. Called Clouds, it's a proposed installation to be located in every town that will be flooded by the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam megaproject in Colombia.

(Image by Paisajes Emergentes with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve.)

Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.

While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.

(Image by Paisajes Emergentes with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve.)

Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.

But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.

The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.

(Image by Paisajes Emergentes with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve.)

But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?

Pavilloons™?

(Image by Paisajes Emergentes with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve.)

In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?

Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.

More Paisajes Emergentes:
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street

See also:
Balloon Park

Links for 2009-10-02 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-03T00:00:00-07:00

Smuggling Europe’s Waste to Poorer Countries
"Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming." [NYT]
Artificial Auroras
"The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has spent nearly two decades using radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere. One of the most obvious results of the experiments is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras, the glowing curtains of light that naturally appear in the polar skies when electrons and other charged particles pour down from Earth's protective magnetosphere into the upper atmosphere." [Nature News]
Aquacalypse Now
"[I]t is not just the future of the fishing industry that is at stake, but also the continued health of the world’s largest ecosystem. While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people--even those who profess great environmental consciousness--continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee." [The New Republic]

Links for 2009-09-28 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-29T00:00:00-07:00

In a Parched Los Angeles, the Streets Suddenly Run Wet
"To the threat of quakes, wildfire and mudslides that give Los Angeles an air of impending collapse, add a multitude of recent damaging water main breaks that have buckled streets, flooded businesses, exasperated residents, blocked traffic and perplexed engineers." [NYT]

Egg Digesters

2009-09-23T23:35:00.007-05:00

(Emschergenossenschaft Kläranlage, Bottrop, Germany. Photo by “cowboyofbottrop”. Source.)

We've set up a new Flickr set and stuffed it with photos of egg-shaped sludge digesters culled from the web, simply because they're absolutely beautiful. They're readily photogenic — with or without dramatic lighting.

In the sewage treatment process, these extraordinary womb-like structures break down the organic solid matter in the wastewater into more stable materials. With additional processing, some of these byproducts are turned into fertilizers. These digesters also generate biogas with a high proportion of methane that can used to power the machines. In fact, in large treatment plants, they can produce more electricity than the installations require. The egg shape makes this process more efficient. Compared to their more conventional cylindrical counterparts, they require less energy, maintenance and space. That they are aesthetically pleasing is probably just a happy coincidence.

(Emschergenossenschaft Kläranlage, Bottrop, Germany. Photo by “RainiP”. Source.)

They're clearly calling out for a book deal, so it's worth asking again if they've ever been the subject of a 1,000-pound coffee table book published, say, by the interior decorator Taschen.

Or have they perhaps been the object of interest in a typological study by a special-interest niche publisher and released as a slim print-on-demand pamphlet?

(Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gas Tanks, 1982 – 1992. View larger.)

Are the next Bernd and Hilla Becher out there now documenting these industrial Fabergés?

In the Archives:
Grain Elevators

Also:
Buttology 2

Strange Weather

2009-09-22T20:34:00.003-05:00

(Continuing a visual meme of late, above is a thick vermillion fog re-landscaping the city of Sydney anew. Writes The Sydney Morning Herald, “Sydneysiders have woken to a red haze unlike anything seen before by residents or weather experts, as the sun struggles to pierce a thick blanket of dust cloaking the city this morning.” Photo by Kate Geraghty. Via @cityofsound.)

Edible Geography & Other Blogs

2009-09-20T23:41:00.013-05:00

(A false-color Landsat image of farms in northwest Minnesota. Through classes offered in nearby colleges, farmers can learn how to download satellite images of their farms from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, and more importantly, how to interpret them to better gauge the health of crops and manage their water and pesticide use. See also Agro-veillance. Image courtesy of the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium.)

Now our monthly list of blogs and sorta-kinda-maybe-like-blogs blogs. First up is the pick of the bunch:

Edible Geography. After working behind the scenes of BLDGBLOG and contributing marvelous posts for years, Nicola Twilley now has her own blog. Check out her post on mushroom farming in an abandoned railway tunnel and cupcake gentrification. (@nicolatwilley.)

And the rest:

Animal Architecture. With an interesting niche claimed, all it needs are more projects to post. Help them out with tips.

Delta National Park. John Bass blogs about the contested terrain of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, through which approximately 40% of water in California flows before entering San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific. Liberally covered are aquapolitics, agriculture, hydro-infrastructure and other spatial systems, from small to large scales. Also be sure to check out the non-blog part of the site. (@DeltaNatlPark)

Diffusive Architectures.

Landezine. With a bit more hard work, a few extra help and guilt-free copy-pasting, it could turn out to be the ArchDaily of Landscape Architecture.

Oh Boym.

Polis. The talented roster of writers include a couple of Where alumni.

Spatial Robots.

Subterranea Australis. One of those copy-paste blogs but we're glad it's returned after a summer hiatus, with a changed name, to copy-paste some more.

Tommy Manuel Blog. This interview with the photographer Harald Finster should help you dig in into the archives. The discussion centers on the aesthetics, documentation, preservation and rehabilitation of industrial installations.

For more, check out our RSS subscriptions on Bloglines.

Call for Paradises

2009-09-19T23:29:00.006-05:00

There are still two weeks left in this year's International Garden Festival at the Jardin de Métis/Reford Gardens in Quebec, but organizers have already sent out the call for proposals for next year's festival.

The theme will be Paradise.

(One paradise spotted at 35°56′24″N 83°56′20″W.)

From the competition brief:

Since time immemorial mankind has re-imagined the idea of paradise on earth through the garden and has imagined places of great beauty. These places, by evoking our senses, have pulled us out of our everyday world to experience the sublime.

What does paradise look like today?

By reading paradise in different directions (not only the religious one), designers are invited to frame the theme by using, for example, the notion of the landscape or garden as a metaphor and framework to support a story or myth, whether religious or not. Another direction to explore would be to frame paradise within the technical or pragmatic imperative to recover the world in its primeval state prior to the destructive forces that are perceived to be undermining the environment; the notion of the lost state of “nature” as a kind of environmental and technical ideal. It would also be interesting to explore the notion of Utopia, bringing the metaphoric ideas of paradise within the realm of the real.

Building on emerging practices in landscape architecture, we ask you to imagine your garden of paradise; a creation that will speak to the history of gardening, to philosophy, to religion and to history in general, as well as to contemporary society and to your own personal history. This contemporary garden should be considered as an exploration, an experimentation and a strong expression of community. It will be a complex landscape, living and responding to the human condition, a composition of natural and artificial elements that will give meaning to everyday life. Proposed projects must demonstrate through the use of new practices the role that landscape architecture may be expected to play in our current historical and social context.

The deadline is November 6, 2009. If selected, you will be given a budget of C$25,000 to develop and construct your installation.

In the Archives:
Returning to Métis/Reford
Sonic Garden
Poule mouillée!
Dymaxion Sleeps

Yellow Fog

2009-09-18T22:10:00.002-05:00

(Less sinister, at least we think so, than Artigas' vapor is Olafur Eliasson's Yellow Fog. In this permanent installation, fog rises up the sides of the Sammlung Verbund in the center of Vienna, Austria, shrouding it from street level to the roof. Fluorescent tubes embedded in the pavement emit a yellow light, which illuminates and substantiates something that's barely visible. Obviously related: Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building. Photo by Rupert Steiner.)

Chemical Misunderstanding

2009-09-18T17:16:00.002-05:00

(In Chemical Misunderstanding, Gustavo Artigas vented a plume orange smoke from out of the air shafts of a subway station under construction in Istanbul. A video of the “public intervention” can be seen here. On a very vaguely related note, check out Atmospheric Intoxication, a guest post by Nicola Twilley on BLDGBLOG.)

The Rape of Io, or: The Birth of the Centaurs

2009-09-18T16:39:00.001-05:00

(Or some cloud formations in some primordial garden, as photographed by Axel Antas. See also Vapour City.)

Real Remnants of Fictive Wars

2009-09-18T16:19:00.005-05:00

(Still from Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V, 2004, one of five films documenting the work of Cyprien Gaillard. Here, on the grounds of an old French château, “a billowing cloud of white smoke erupts from the central tree, infecting its branches with fungal-like spores.”)

(Still from Cyprien Gaillard's Real Remnants of Fictive Wars II, 2004. Here, a similar thick smoke from fire extinguishers bursts out of a tunnel.)

Untitled

2009-09-17T23:58:00.003-05:00

(Pascual Sisto, Untitled (red), 2006. Source.)

Dying in the Dying-field

2009-09-16T22:16:00.009-05:00

(Photograph by James Ricalton.)

We have already published the above photo on this blog, just yesterday in fact, way at the end of Buttology 2. But we're reproducing it here, as it is possibly the most haunting photo we have ever posted. It deserves its own entry.

The photo is actually a stereograph, taken by the prolific traveller and photographer James Ricalton during a lengthy trip to China in 1900. Unfortunately, we can't find its twin. Published in China Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising, Ricalton describes this “dying-field” and its occupants on page 62 thus:

Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.

A bit later, he directs the reader to another person in this wrenching scene.

This far-gone case of destitution and misery is not the only one in this last retreat of human agony; you see another in the distance, probably a new arrive, as he yet has the strength to site erect.

Transfixed as we were with the man in the foreground, we hardly noticed at first the other figure in the background. Even the camera seems to have cast him aside.

(Thanks, Louis Carrogis, for the tip!)

Buttology 2

2009-09-15T23:55:00.019-05:00

(Have egg digesters been the subject of a 1,000-pound coffee table book? The object of interest in a typological study? Pictured above are the egg digesters at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn with a lighting scheme designed by the French design firm L'Observatoire International. Photo by Walter Dufresne.)

Here now is the fantasy table of contents for the fantasy second issue of Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.

*

Examining The Waste Stream CLUI
“Garbage is the effluent of our consumption, and it flows backwards through the landscape of Los Angeles. Unlike liquid wastes, which drain downslope to the sea, the tiny tributaries of trash, from millions of homesteads, collected by a fleet of thousands of trucks circulating in constant motion, hauling to nodes of sorting, distribution, reuse, and, finally disposal, flow up the canyons and crevices to the edge of the basin.”

*

(“Almost all of Nauru is missing, picked clean right down to the corral skeleton supporting the island.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. Source.)

No Island is an Island This American Life
Mining and exporting its rich deposits of phosphates, formed from bird shit deposited over thousands of years, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru had for a time the highest GDP per capita. But with the depletion of its major natural resource and the mismanagement of the trust fund set up to provide for its post-phosphate future, the country now has one of the lowest. It wasted away its island in return for not much.

To keep its economy afloat, it allowed the creation of secret offshore banks. Some of these banks' headquarters are no more than shacks, but through one of these shacks in 1998, “Russian criminals laundered about $70 billion, draining off precious hard currency and crippling the former superpower.”

In 2001 until 2007, Nauru agreed to settle Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and seeking asylum from Australia. With the millions of dollars in aid the government received in return, one would have expected decent accommodations for them, but living conditions were not much better than those at Guantanamo.

And then there was that deal it made with the United States to set up safe houses in China for North Korean defectors.

*

(Illuminated urine containers by Luz Interruptus. See also astronaut urine lighting the nighttime sky aglow.)

*

Growing Water UrbanLab
Runner-up in the Pamphlet Architecture #30 competition, and currently on view in the Burnam Plan Centennial exhibition Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century (where it's one of a very, very, very few handful of projects that actually fit those three modifiers) is UrbanLab's proposal for an alternative wastewater treatment system for Chicago.

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Frog's Dream Calvin Chiu
“[T]he Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.”

*

puRE Craig England
“The peri-urban Revitalization Element [puRE] is a catalyst for fostering sustainable development within existing suburban areas, by re-envisioning a classic suburban icon—the swimming pool—and transforming it into a productive, water-treating element within a community.”

*

(A proposal by FAT for a public toilet.)

*

Q&A with Rose George NYT
Rose George is the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. Last month in The New York Times, she answered questions sent in by readers about toilets, sewage and other topics about waste disposal in New York City. Here's a sample:

Q: Are there any ways to use the large amount of human waste generated by New York City for the common good, like turning it into drinking water or compost, for example, that would not require a huge financial commitment or a significant change in infrastructure?

A: Human waste is such a misnomer. It is an extremely useful product. As you point out, it can make biogas, for a start. In China, 18 million or so households get their cooking fuel by linking their latrine to a biogas digester (an airtight underground tank), tapping off the methane and cooking with it. It cuts down on deforestation and is cheap and infinite. There is really interesting stuff going on in Europe, too, where Lille in France, Stockholm in Sweden and a few other cities are running buses and taxis on biogas produced from sewage and household garbage.

In fact, the only waste about human waste is that it goes to waste; even in the 19th century, Karl Marx calculated that London was losing a fortune by throwing all that potential fertilizer away into its water system.

But back to biodiesel: Yes, there are companies working on that, including one in Canada which you can find if you search online for “biodiesel” and “human waste.” The trouble with sewage as an energy source is that the technology for now — even though it’s ancient (Marco Polo reported seeing biogas tanks in China in the 13th century) — it’s not yet cost-effective. Some wastewater treatment plants get gas or electricity from the process, but by no means all. It is often seen as prohibitively expensive, especially when the plants are struggling to run and meet all sorts of regulations.

Money is going into the wastewater infrastructure from the federal stimulus bill, which is great, but I would like to see more of it dedicated to exploiting this chronically and acutely undertapped source of energy. It will cost money, but so did putting in the infrastructure in the first place, and it will probably pay its own way eventually. It’s definitely a chronically and acutely underexploited source of energy.

*

(Human waste. Photograph by James Ricalton.)

Dying in the Dying-field James Ricalton
“Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.”

*

Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.

In the Archives:
Buttology 1
BUTT: A Proposal for a Zine

Crater Garden

2009-09-14T02:18:00.003-05:00

(And speaking of bomb craters, here's a photo of a victory garden flourishing in a blitzed crater in London, a slightly different and cropped version of which appeared in our post about Kenneth Helphand's book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. See more defiant gardens here. On a related note, check out Depave and PlantSF, two very fine organizations on a mission to rid cities of unnecessary concrete and asphalt. And on yet another related note, see also the Crack Garden. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)

Genetically Modified Ordnance

2009-09-13T23:59:00.020-05:00

(Image courtesy of Aresa.)

Speaking of genetically modified organisms, we only just now learned that research on the land mine-detecting plant, which we briefly noted here, was discontinued last year.

Aresa, a Denmark-based biotech company, had genetically modified thale-cresses and later tobacco to change color when their roots come in contact with a chemical released into the soil by decaying explosives. This new technology promised to become a cheap and safe method to detect landmines, which still injure and kill thousands of civilians each year.

But the company felt the market potential of its land mine plants was declining. It would take a few more years to develop the technology, and mine-clearance machines, according to them, has already gained “official status as the preferred mine-clearance method. Mine-clearance machines are able to clear larger areas more efficiently, which has led to falling prices in mine clearance.” Consequently, they decided to focus on “investment in mine contaminated land in Croatia” — real estate, in other words.

(During the Vietnam War, the US flew more than 580,000 bombing missions over Laos. This is equal to one bombing mission every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 full years. In fact, Xieng Khouang, shown above, is considered the most heavily bombed place on earth. This intensive bombing campaign has left the landscape pockmarked with bomb craters. Some have been converted into aquafarms and even a Laotian prince turned one into a swimming pool, but all belie the fact that countless of bombs have not exploded and formed craters, that they still pose a deadly threat to civilians. Photographer unknown.)

Aresa will still work towards de-mining its properties, no doubt using those mine-clearance machines. So probably unrealizable now are some of the more beguiling methods they would have used (or not) to broadcast their botanical sensors, such as misting mine fields with a GMO gas cloud. And using cargo airplanes: instead of carpet bombing them with high explosive TNTs, they'll drop cluster seed bombs, which disintegrate a few feet above the ground before showering these killing zones with transgenic seeds. Re-bombing landscapes to save thousands of lives.

Arbores Laetae

2009-09-12T23:51:00.005-05:00

(Botanic Bridge Gwangju by West 8.)

One item that we ended up not including in our survey of reclaimed under spaces is a proposal by West 8 “for transforming the 10.8 km disused railway line surrounding the city-heart of Gwangju [South Korea] into a usable green corridor.” One element in their proposal is a botanic bridge containing massive concrete tree-pots planted with representative samplings of indigenous Korean flora.

(Botanic Bridge Gwangju by West 8.)

(Botanic Bridge Gwangju by West 8.)

(Botanic Bridge Gwangju by West 8.)

Which would creep along the entire length of the redesigned railway line in staggered but graceful steps. A forest on move and on the prowl for new vistas, rustling their branches and leaves melodically with their own velocity.

Or not.

On rooftops across the city and with binoculars on hand, people will wait for these walking shrubs to pass by and try to identify one or all of the specimens, which would be changed periodically. Treewatching. It's the new urban hobby.

Or not.

(The title of this post is borrowed from an installation by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.)