No doubt you're already aware of the Animal Architecture Awards, and probably hard at work on your submission. But just in case, here's part of the brief:
Animal Architecture seeks exciting projects that engage the lives, minds and behaviors of our alternate, sometimes familiar companion species — insects, birds, mammals, fish and microorganisms — each one with unique ways of world-making. As our society re-examines its place in the global ecology Animal Architecture invites your critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other — or as we say it here: to illustrate cospecies coshaping.
The deadline to register is 15 May 2011. Check the project's website for more information.
Meanwhile, here are the posts we've tagged with #faunaphilia since the last retrospective. Hopefully they'll provide some inspiration.
31)Fish Ladder: a new hydrological continuum for fish to bypass brackish rivers and reach their spawning grounds.
32)Walking Apiary: foreclosed houses turned into roving urban honey farms.
33)GPS Coyotes: a tour of the city in search of indigenous cyborg fauna.
In Chicago, don't call 811! / Our Solar Garden has rhizomatic subways bulbous with solar aviaries designed by Lequeu and Boullée. / In Mapping Abysses & The Catacombs of Rome in 3D, we call for a distributed network of autonomous laserscanning spelunking rovers to map out necropolises, ancient underground aqueducts, sewers, stormwater megatunnels, abandoned subway tunnels and transdimensional portals.
18) A camera trap captures sublime scenes of wildlife escaping a wildfire and then returning to a devastated landscape. Also captures the firestorm itself.
19) The Animal Messaging Service is an alternative form of communication whereby Extreme Green Guerrillas “send messages internationally by hacking into the animal migration system.”
20) From the American Museum of Natural History, photographs of landscape facsimiles in various stages of recreation; creatures undressed or nearly dressed; ethology imprinted on a three-dimensional canvas; and exterior habitats crammed into architectural spaces.
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21) In Small Food Nation, miniature pigs, miniature spring lambs, miniature deer, miniature cattle and miniature other are reared alongside chickens in the backyard.
22) Take a toxic tour through Maryland's industrial poultry landscape.
28) Connected by flexible tubing to ports in a perimeter wall, the interior volumes of Chair I and Chair II are literally part of the outdoors, making them inhabitable by insects.
For Glacier/Island/Storm Week, we rummaged through our archives for some thematically relevant material. Rather than simply linking to the analogous hashtags (our #ice for #glacier, for instance), we decided to do a bit of curating, ending up with 10 posts per hashtag. We've got nuclear-powered glaciers, a proto-Archigram city in quasi-flight, a pyramid for serving glaciers, ice caps turned space observatories, Thoreau's frozen New England pond reconfigured vertically, avalanche protection structures, an anti-hurricane toy for the rich and famous, vapour cities and more. Go see. #glacier#island#storm
Meanwhile, above is the Morris Island Lighthouse, which has been standing on the same spot on the South Carolina coast since 1867. As the island migrated towards the mainland (as coastal islands wont to do), fans of the lighthouse decided to save the historic structure from certain collapse by armoring its base. The island kept on retreating, and they kept on fortifying. Once it overlooked a wide stretch of beach, but now the lighthouse is itself an island located half a mile out to sea, an immovable geoglobule secreted by its parent island. However, the two islands may yet rejoin, perhaps in the next Ice Age. Or it might attach itself to a different nomadic island just passing by. No doubt that after awhile, it will be secreted once again. Other islands, other shores and other continents will come and go, and the lighthouse will fuse with and disentangle from them all, a static marker recording not just the dynamic processes of geomorphology but also the irrational geopolitical mechanics of coastal development and the mercurial aesthetic tastes of those that will (or will not) seek to preserve it for eternity.
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. 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.
3)Beached: the self-replicating, self-similar geology of Chicago's mercurial edge.
4)Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers: the sort of seafaring vessel you need to rehabilitate dying beaches, fortify riverbanks, recontour ports and harbors, construct offshore multi-terminal airports or realize a real estate developer's wettest wet dream.
5)Climate Ghettos: some will be saved and some will simply drop to the sea.
7)The Sands of Singapore: on mineral piracy; the then still booming global construction industry; immigrant topographies; and of course, Kiefer Sutherland in 24: The Movie.
9)Real Estate for the Future: setting the stage for the real estate boom and bust, the cycle of irrational exuberance and spectacular crash, ~10,000 years from now.
11)Pure Geography: an oceanside trail in Chile that is knocks-you-unconcsious-and-petrifies-your-soul-as-if-falling-eternally-into-the-abyss terrifying.
25)This House Turns and Returns, Too: the future adaptive re-use of the future Pavilion of the Netherlands, designed by John Körmeling for Expo 2010 Shanghai.
We rather liked collecting our posts on agricultural landscapes into one, so we'd like to do the same with our posts on fountains, in reverse chronological order.
On Michael Cross' Bridge, a sort of interactive reflecting pool from which an outbreak of messianic prophecies, marian visions and apocalyptic auguries will precipitate.
On some selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Because is not the heavily controlled Mississippi River really just a fountain writ-large?
With our recent series of agriculturally-themed post at an end, and with original blogger Jorn Barger's sage advice for other bloggers to “re-post [their] favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time” still very much worth taking, here then are some of our past dealings with agricultural landscapes, in chronological order.
