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.
Here's a site for those bored executives and hedge fund managers inexplicably unaffected by the worldwide economic freefall and seeking new thrills that only a handful have ever experienced: Cloud 9 Living.
This adventure outfit, based in Boulder, Colorado, advertises itself as “the premier experience gift company that offers the highest quality experiences as unforgettable gifts.” Such offerings include, for instance, diving with a Great White shark from a private luxury yacht. Priced at $100,000, you'd better be diving from and uncorking champagne on the deck of The Gigayatch. If wading in the deep doesn't interest you, you can fly a Mig 25 from a top-secret Rusian airbase. Of course, this chance of surveying the landscapes in rarefied air, at supersonic speeds, will also cost you dearly.
There are, however, plenty of affordable options as well. You can sign up for nighttime white water rafting expedition in which you can survey the terrain through unfamiliar wavelengths of light with night vision goggles. And again, if floating in water bores you, how about a nighttime helicopter tour of the neon-drenched alien landscape of Las Vegas?
One “experience gift” we wouldn't mind giving to ourselves is a day or two or even a whole week spent at Dig This. There, at “the 1st heavy equipment play arena,” you can “play in the dirt - super sized” with an array of “empowering” heavy machineries.
You can get lost in our 10-acre site with hills, valleys and a spectacular views of the Yampa Valley. Under the supervision of Dig This instructors, you can remove yourself from the external influences of life and focus only on the adventure at hand, automatically building self-confidence and adrenaline levels.
As if to feed some primal urge, starved by a 21st century lifestyle disconnected from the earth, emasculated by the droning shrills of sustainability and pastoralism, you can “doze and excavate dams and ponds” and “move and remove sand, gravel, rock, and other materials from your own individual area.” In climate controlled machines.
We can call this Post-Industrial Romanticism. Mineral lyricism?
Making tiny mountains or rock gardens seems to be a popular task there, as are “team building” and “character building.” But for some real fun, why not spend a whole month excavating a new city, another Denver ex-urb without its McMansions? In this supersized urban sandbox, you can scrape the outlines of future roads, driveways and cul-de-sacs. You can will into existence an entirely new hydrology of storm culverts and drainage channels, thus undoing billions of years of natural tectonic activities.
These foundational landscapes are all ready to be paved over and occupied, but no lawns or SUVs will come. It's as if the developers and creditors have fled, the bankrupt homeowners unwilling to visit their spectacularly failed investments. It's a landscape in a perpetual state of waiting.
In any case, exactly how popular Dig This is, we don't know. But the operators and instructors are certainly attuned to the zeitgeist.
Reporting over a year ago on research by geologists Brandon McElroy of the University of Texas in Austin and his colleague Bruce Wilkinson of Syracuse University, the Discovery Channelwrote that “human changes to landscapes are now on par with the wasting power of weather and tectonic uplift.”
In other words, we are on par with the same natural forces that move continents across oceans and erode entire mountain ranges down to hills.
A new take of the scale of human changes to the face of the Earth shows that by farming alone, humans have now managed to move a thousand times more earth than the annual sediment loads of all the world's rivers combined. That's enough soil to cover the state of Rhode Island nearly two miles deep in dirt.
And the rate of human changes to the land is increasing.
Indeed, a recent article in The New York Timesreported that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” There are 36.8 million acres of land in the program, bigger in area than the state of New York; “last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Why?
“Because of a growing global middle class as well as federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand.” So naturally, farmers want “to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybean, corn and other crops.”
And then there are the reports of a growing breed of diggers who also want to cash in on the boom in the mineral trade. Again in the The New York Times, we read that “160 years after a flake of gold found not far from here incited a frenzied stampede to the Sierra Nevada foothills, a new gold rush is on.”
Driven by record high prices and a suburban thirst for new outdoor activities, tens of thousands of ’08ers are taking to historically rich streams and hills all across the West in search of nuggets, flecks and — more often than not — specks of gold.
However, not everyone is foraging along rivers.
Some prospectors have taken to scouring ore dumps — discarded piles of rock left by old-time miners — with high-tech metal detectors hoping to divine what previous generations missed. In Arizona, clubs head for dry creeks, sifting through the dirt where gold might have washed down in past floods.
Here, one wonders how the big transnational mining companies will take advantage in this uptick in prices of not only gold but also copper, titanium, coal and whatever China wants to gobble up all for itself. But then again, one only needs to see the photos included in this Wikipedia entry on open-pit mine to get a fairly accurate prediction.
And this is the Grasberg Mine in Indonesia, the largest gold mine in the world. Here and in other gold mines across the world — where the earth is undone, where billions of tons of dirt get displaced, enough perhaps to save every Pacific islands from sinking beneath the climate-changed waters — is where the staggeringly complex relationship between gold prices and the global credit crisis, the falling value of the dollar and the failure of Bear Stearns are physically manifested in the landscape.
As new slums begin to appear out in the peripheries of American cities and even further afield and as the next generation of grandiose projects like the Orange County Great Park and Louisville's Museum Plaza stall due to lack of funds, elsewhere not covered by the top-tier and middling architectural press are new abysses being excavated, swirling towards the inner core, overlaying new un-earthly soil horizons, suffocating lives and geographies alike.
We won't be surprising anyone by saying that there is currently a construction boom everywhere. Read any articles published in The New York Times, The Economist and the BBC, especially those of Dubai, China and the quarterly profits of Caterpillar or those of earlier reports on Mecca eradicating its historic Mohammedan neighborhoods to make way for billion-dollar developments and Singapore pirating sand from Indonesia, and you're already well-informed of the situation.
As but one more iteration of this global phenomenon, there is the recently approved $5.25-billion Panama Canal expansion project. To accommodate post-Panamax vessels and to better cope with the projected increases in cargo traffic, new locks are to be built. New approach channels will be dredged and existing ones deepened and widened. Gatun Lake will similarly be deepened and its water level raised to increase water storage capacity. It is thus rightly labeled an engineering megaproject.
Earlier this month, ENR.com gave us an update by reporting that a dredging contract was given to the Belgian firm Dredging International. No new fascinating details are given, but it's interesting to note the other companies who made bids for the same contract. They are Boskalis International, Jan De Nul and Van Oord.
Long-time readers of this blog may recognize these names. Jan De Nul and Van Oord are, of course, responsible for conjuring up Dubai's artificial archipelagos, both The World and The Palms, from the bottom of the sea. And Boskalis is known for its trailing hopper suction dredgers, a fleet that includes the largest THSD in the world; no doubt they'll be deployed to carry out the company's newly awarded contract, worth nearly $1.5 billion, to create a new port for Abu Dhabi.
All this, then, is the milieu in which Dig This, intentionally or inadvertently, has set up their operations, a creative playpen where future terraformers might be reared in the form of chief executives instilled with the acumen to capitalize on a very profitable futures market or lowly, overworked but extremely well-paid diggers and excavators.
Or the next generation of Robert Smithsons and Michael Heizers. A new breed of Olmsteds and Capability Browns liberated from the ancient paradigms of the Picturesque, Romanticism and Sustainability.
In the 1940s, archaeologists discovered the ancient city of Seuthopolis, the capital seat of the Odrysian Kingdom beginning in the 4th century BCE.
Unfortunately, the discovery came too late, because under construction nearby was a reservoir dam, which would soon flood the valley and drown “the best preserved Thracian city in modern Bulgaria.”
Now over half a century later, a project proposed by Bulgarian architect Zheko Tilev would uncover and preserve the ruins using “a circular dam wall, resembling a well on the bottom of which, as on a stage, is presented the historical epic of Seuthopolis.”
Indeed, most everything about the project is theatrical: “Approaching the surrounding ring by boat from the shore Seuthopolis is completely hidden for the eye. But the view from the wall is breathtaking - with its scale, comprehensiveness and unique point of view; from the boundary between past and present. The possibility to see the city from the height of 20 meters allows the perception of its entirety.”
Once there, and if your interest in exploring archaeological sites wanes considerably faster than expected, there are other things to do on the ring-wall. For instance, there will be restaurants, cafes, shops, bike rental facilities, and also other facilities for various recreational sports and fishing.
Programmed as “a unique modern tourist complex,” the ring-wall will also house a museum, a hotel complex, open-air exhibitions, concert and festival halls, conference centers, and hanging gardens.
It's a classic case of horror vacui, in other words.
There are three sites where this should be done as well:
1) New Orleans (i.e., having abandoned the city, its inhabitants now live and work and die on grossly heightened and fattened levees; everyone will laugh at them, but when the deluge comes, they will have the last laugh)
POSTSCRIPT #1: For a different strategy than the one planned to uncover and preserve the ancient city of Seuthopolis, see the planned underwater museum of Alexandria.
“Why build a one-off ride that will eventually lose its appeal when you can create an infinite number of rides by using a programmable industrial robot?” asks gizmag.
Indeed, why go through all the trouble of clearing the last remaining stands of old-growth forest to make way for amusement parks that would only further unsustainable ex-urban development and extend travel time for gas-guzzling über-SUVs, when you could be building them, say, in the Loop or Millennium Park in Chicago as an interactive kinetic sculpture?
Quoting the article at length: “German company KUKA Roboter GmbH builds industrial robots for the automotive, aerospace and foundry industries, among others. Its fully-programmable 5- and 6-axis robots can reach of up to 3.7 metres with payloads of 570kg and are employed around the world for applications such as material handling and machine loading. Kuka has partnered with Canada’s Primal Rides to provide a new fully interactive amusement ride. The KUKA KR 500 robot will be used as the building block of Primal Rides’ new robotic gaming ride. The interactive ride can be designed to match customer’s requirements in theme, intensity and realism and to cost effectively change themes to adjust to rider appeal.”
And you can order the rides singly or as a whole group of Robocoasters, “each with its infinite range of programming options and ride variants: lined up in a row and performing the same acrobatic ride program in perfect harmony.”
Or you can order the Octomone, a swirling, gyrating mass of mechanized tentacles not that taxonomically different from a triffid.
In a remarkable stroke of decontextualization, our favorite developers in Dubai have concocted the largest indoor snow park in the Mall of the Emirates, itself one of the largest malls in the world.
Ski Dubai, as it is called, comes complete with ski lifts, tobogganing hills, a twin track bobsled ride, and a snow cavern with interactive, multimedia delights. There is even a Swiss chalet. We haven't seen any images of it yet, but we imagine it to be straight right out of Heidi. And for all the migrant workers and petrocrats unaccustomed to frolicking in the snow, there is the Snow School, the first in the region.
And all of these will be chilled precisely to -2˚ Celcius.
The snow will be 100% real, we are told, meaning you can build real snow men, have real snow ball fights, make real snow angels and perhaps even get real frostbites. We imagine it falling as soft, gentle flurries on suntanned cheeks. It may even bring back fond memories, if you've got some, of winter wonderlands from childhood.
But they should also program a Midwestern zero visibility blizzard and a New England Nor'easter ice storm (you would need defoliated trees for this, preferably ones that break easily for that recognizable twig snapping and crashing sound), and even a Swiss avalanche to match the quaint alpine cottage.
A totality of tundral experience like nowhere else: you've just been on a Lawrence of Arabia desert tour, under the sun for a week, lips blistering and peeling and there's sand in every crevices of your body; you then shower, put on a jacket and a pair of boots; and a mere hour after getting off a camel, you're tearing down the slopes of the Matterhorn.
Even during the bitter winters here in Chicago, it would be quite a chore to replicate most of what you can do at Ski Dubai.
