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Portable Hurricane
Portable Hurricane


Our second anniversary is fast approaching, so we've been looking for something to treat ourselves with, the same way we treated ourselves to some passkeys to Kubrickian and Schnitzlerian sex orgies. A very promising candidate comes from the University of Florida: the world's largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator.

According to the article linked above, the simulator has eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans that can whip up winds up to 130 mph (Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale). Researchers at the university will use it to blast vacant homes not only with hurricane winds but also with high-pressure jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.

“The goal: to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage.”


Obviously, we'll have better use for it:

1) Take it to New York during Postopolis! and blast the Storefront to see how well Vito Acconci and Steven Holl can structurally withstand a Category 3, if its configurable façade is supple enough, malleable enough to respond to weather (architecture vs. landscape; objectified forms vs. enigmatic forces; formalism vs. uncertainty; fixed dynamism vs. ambiguous processes; starchitects and MoMA'd provacateurs vs. landscape architecture bloggers). That or to demonstrate the effects of climate change on the city with exceedingly more immediacy and greater visceral effects than some Google Earth overlay showing the city inundated by sea-level rise. In any case, we'll call it an art installation.

2) Take it to Montana where we'll seek out a Hollywood mogul with millions of dollars to spare, and because he is bored out of his wits, he's more than willing to fund our proposal for a landscape intervention: a hurricane-scoured Floridian landscape simulated on the badlands - terrifying, sublime, beautiful.

And 3) take it to our nearest constructed grove and then let loose our inner Axel Erlandson.
1 COMMENT —
  • Anonymous
  • May 31, 2007 at 8:18:00 AM CDT
  • I bet if we had invested all the time money and technology into our earth rather than space, we'd have figured this stuff out already. But they simply dont have easy military applications. a neutrino bomb? a gravity gun?


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