To alleviate its space problems, the tiny island nation of Singapore has been reclaiming land from the sea since the mid-1960s, expanding its total land area by nearly 25% as a result. And it's still growing.
With no hinterlands to supply it with natural resources, however, it has to import sand, the primary landfill material. But exactly where, the Singaporean government does not disclose. Its supply lines are not public information.
Perhaps partly because of this blackout, reporters from the Associated Press recently tried to track down some of these supply lines. They ended up in Cambodia's Tatai River, where they found “an industrial nightmare” in the middle of “a tropical idyll.”
Lush jungle hills give way to a flotilla of dredgers operating 24 hours a day, scooping up sand and piling it onto ocean-bound barges. The churned-up waters and fuel discharges, villagers say, have decimated the fish so vital to their livelihoods. Riverbanks are beginning to collapse, and the din and pollution are killing a promising ecotourism industry.
The environmental degradation caused by these illegal dredging operations can explain why Singapore is reluctant to reveal its sources. It does not want to be seen as taking advantage of its poorer neighbors or counter its image as a leader in sustainable development.
A few years ago, Singapore's insatiable demand for sand was blamed for the disappearance of some islands and beaches in Indonesia, then a major supplier, which resulted in that country banning sand exports. A decade earlier, Malaysia imposed a similar ban, and last year, it was Vietnam's turn. These bans, however, did not stop the flow of sand from these countries, as an illegal trade flourished. And then there's the secretive police state of Myanmar, which might become a major supplier.
We're inevitably left to wonder if Trevor Paglen or other experimental geographers might want to continue the AP's investigative tour of sand piracy in Southeast Asia, tracing all the dark lines of mineral extractions and trade, starting from erased islands, dying beaches and nightmarish “tropical idylls,” all the way to the strategic sand reserve depots, booming construction sites and artificial islands of Singapore.
Might this dark geography be mapped out like this?
A couple of years ago, architect Jakob Tigges proposed building an artificial mountain on the grounds of the defunct Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. The outsized ambition not only matched the building's monolithic swagger but also provided a provocative alternative to the mediocre plans the city was considering for the site.
Perhaps inspired by Tigges, sports journalist Thijs Zonneveld wrote a column a couple of months ago proposing that the Netherlands builds its own artificial mountain. Like Tigges's, Zonneveld's mountain would serve as a recreational space, an iconic landscape with spectacular views, and a popular destination for climbers and ramblers. It's nature reconstructed into a pleasure machine.
But this one “caught the public's imagination.” In fact, there are serious plans in the making.
That many people are taking Zonneveld's idea seriously shouldn't be a surprise, because according to him, the Dutch are “obsessed” with mountains. More significantly, this monumental terraforming is not unknown to them. They're even experts at it.
Take Flevoland, for example, the youngest and flattest of all Dutch provinces. The province, which was created starting in 1916, lies to the east of the IJsselmeer artificial lake, and much of it is below sea level. Cornelis Lely, an engineer, spent more than 30 years devising a plan to reclaim more land from the sea, in tried-and-true Dutch fashion. He wanted to drain the Zuiderzee, a bay with an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles). The megalomaniacal plan succeeded, creating the IJsselmeer and Flevoland — and the Netherlands gained an additional 2,412 square kilometers of land mass.
Flevoland is the proposed site of the mountain, and its construction would just be a continuation of Lely's project.
One wonders if there's a new geological meme brewing, albeit one with a lineage we can trace back to the heroic age of literal nation-building and to the topographical fantasies of aristocratic gardens. Will it be popping up all over the place much like another meme, the artificial island? Although with sea levels on the rise and cooler latitudes migrating to warmer coordinates, might the exuberant and cooler contours of artificial mountains become the more popular plaything among the megalomaniacs?
Last week, government and commercial websites in South Korea and the U.S. were targeted with denial-of-service attacks. In the U.S., “[the websites] of the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department were all affected at some point over the weekend and into this week.” And in South Korea, “at least 11 major sites have slowed or crashed since Tuesday [July 7], including those of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the mass-circulation newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the top Internet portal Naver.com.”
There is evidence to suggest that the cyberattacks were instigated by North Korea, though a link to the rogue state may never be proven definitively.
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From rogue states or not, from Russia or China, from the domestic front or not, cyberattacks like those of last week are real and significant threats to America's computer network systems. To develop defenses against such online attacks, the U.S. Defense Department has been creating specialized forces. For the Army, there is Army Network Warfare Battalion, which was activated last year. For the Air Force, there is the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron, whose hackers “spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit” in “a series of inconspicuous trailers” at Nellis Air Force Base. Meanwhile, at West Point and the other federal military academies, cadets can now choose to receive training in cyberwarfare.
“There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them,” wrote the New York Times. “If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.”
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Also last week, New Scientistreported that the first node in space of the interplanetary internet went online. This newly installed system aboard the [International Space Station] could one day make communication automatic and less prone to data loses between earthbound networks and spacecrafts and astronauts orbiting the earth or in deeper space.
According to a press release prepared earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, researchers at the university assisted Astrobotic Technology Inc. in developing conceptual robots capable of preparing lunar landing sites for a future moonbase.
Specifically, these lunar bulldozers would be tasked “to build a berm around a landing site to block the sandblasting effect” of multiple landings and takeoffs. Alternatively, a fleet of “small robots could comb the lunar soil for rocks, gathering them to pave a durable grit-free landing pad.”
It is envisioned that these robots would be sent to the moon in advance of human expeditions. In other words, these telepresent digging machines would be operated from earthbound venues — and thus prone to takeovers from hackers.
Not that that would be easily done. As far as we know, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity haven't yet been commandeered by hackers and programmed to dredge arabesque parterres on the surface of Mars.
Certainly, what would be easy is fantasizing about a rogue landscape architect with previous training in cyberwarfare at the National Security Agency. Because of the financial meltdown, he is between jobs, simmering and festering in soul-draining temp jobs, constantly bombarded by the cackles of gossiping colleagues in adjacent cubicles.
Clearly in need of a creative outlet, he sets up a botnet of thousands of infected computers to try to take control of the moon rovers. He will have to wait, however, until those robots have landed and their calibrations finished to start hacking the servers of NASA and what would then be a greatly expanded interplanetary internet. But once appropriated, he will upload a different set of instructions.
He will program them to terraform a full scale, regolithic Versailles on the surface of the moon.
We return back to Berlin, this time to point our readers to Noah Beil's photographic series, Mountain As Monument.
Quoting his project statement:
The intense bombing of World War II left the streets of many European cities clogged with the remains of demolished masonry buildings. In Berlin alone, over 45 million cubic meters of debris had to be cleared as a part of post-war rebuilding efforts. After intact bricks were recovered for reuse, with much of the manual labor performed by women, waste materials were transported to distributed collection locations and piled into hills known in German as Schuttberg or Trümmerberg. Today, these debris hills are difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring features as they have been landscaped into parks with manicured grass and densely vegetated sections.
When Beil e-mailed us about his project, the image of a half-built skyscraper burning in Guangdong, China's manufacturing powerhouse province, was still fresh in our minds. The building looks to be unsalvageable and so likely to be torn down, a plausibly enough infill material to make an artificial hill. If it's not, one only needs to wait.
Wait for the country's economic woes to sink deeper and deeper, even with all those stimulus packages, and soon there will be a huge population of disgruntled, unemployed workers. They can't all go back home to their farming villages, because only drought awaits them there. They will stay put, ever growing restless, seething in anger, each one a potential arsonist of half-built skyscrapers. Almost anything could turn them into a riotous mob. Maybe blocking one too many of their favorite YouTube videos is enough to trigger a transformation. When the tipping point is reached, though, Guangdong will be pockmarked with a constellation of infernal cities. The cities of Koolhaas' Pearl River Delta will burn like Dresden and Berlin of 1945.
When the army has regain control, wait no longer: there should be enough debris for several artificial hills, a mountain range uplifted not with the detritus of war but of a wrecked economy. Part urban regeneration, part city beautification, part state reconstruction of official history, they will then be landscaped as though they have always been there.
Or so we imagined.
Could one also imagine Dubai uplifted with its own artificial hills?
Flooding the recently closed Tempelhof Airport would open up a catalogue of new opportunities for the city, not least a vast beach with what would become the largest beach hut on earth forming a grand backdrop. Surfing and beach volleyball would come to central Berlin, bringing with them a fresh wave of slackers, hippies and drop-outs to contain the growing army of yuppies and investors. Parts of the reservoir could be left to nature, forming wetlands and wildlife reserves, other parts could be given over to city infrastructure such as forms of energy generation and water cleansing systems (solving the sewage problem).
Provide for an access system radiating throughout this inland sea from its sandy edges, and you can transform this new negative mountain into a destination, which is definitely something that's a thousand times more interesting than some clusters of buildings and trees surrounded by turf.
Urban infrastructure designed as a tourist attraction.
Surely we can hope that someday NASA will grant landscape architects access to the Phoenix Mars Lander, specifically to its multi-million dollar garden ho, if only to make intentionally artistic marks on the cryoturbated terrain of Vastitas Borealis.
When the spacecraft's primary goals have been achieved quite awhile back and in fact have been exceeded exponentially, surely scientists and mission administrators will universally agree then that the scientific return of its instruments — at the very near end of their operational life — can be outweighed by purely creative pursuits.
If not the Phoenix, then perhaps either of the two rovers, Opportunity and Spirit. They are certainly two of the best landscape photographers working anywhere, comparable to Ansel Adams, but they could also carry on the artistic and philosophical endeavors of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson.
With their extendable rock abrasion tools, one can have a field day excavating swales in mathematically precise parallel rows that may or may not foreshadow the coming terraforming activities of terrestrial exiles. At the moment neither delineating accessibility and inaccessibility or co-opting distant terrain under one's control but perhaps soon there will be Martian ha-has marking territorial claims while simultaneously constructing views for the sole enjoyment of the privileged class in a socioeconomically stratified new world.
Or with their set of wheels, one can make patterned incisions in some patch of sandy soil. They seem to recall Richard Long in the beginning but a snapshot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter later reveals that they are the outlines of future cul-de-sacs. The sad origin of Martian urbanism.
How about piles of rocks? Each one given names so as to weigh them down with cultural signification?
Or maybe none of the above because you consider these iconographies as ancient and irrelevant vocabularies. In which case, we wait to see what you come up with.
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.
Originally, we thought what great news this must be to mothers (and fathers), to the aged and to the simply incontinent, because this new material is classed in the same group of super absorbent polymers that also includes gels found in diapers. It turns out, however, that the substance was designed not for consumers but rather primarily for industrial applications, for instance, to suck up leftover waste chemicals in brownfields and absorb oil spills about to wipe out an entire ecosystem.
Having now brought up the subject of super absorbent polymers (SAP), we would now like to quote a rather generous portion of Deena DeNaro's report for Core77 on the 2nd Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale, curated by Adriaan Geuze of West 8.
It concerns a radical reconsideration of SAPs as a landscape application. Presently, they are used mostly to increase the water reserve of soils and to mitigate erosion.
In SPONGEcity, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Transportation, Public Works and Water Management, and designed by Niall Kirkwood [and 15 landscape architecture graduate students from] the Harvard Graduate School of Design, floodwaters are captured by a dual sponge system both soft and structural. Elbows, or man-made oxbows, are built along the river Waal expanding the floodplain. Within each floodplain, canals are dug out to hold some of the floodwater. Cellular networks of Super Absorbent Polymers (SAP's) are placed in these elbows and when the dikes close to the river are breached a new absorbent sponge landscape is created along the entire river. The sponges create a dramatic new terrain as they swell to a height of up to 20 meters. This sponge matrix radically re-imagines the traditional Dutch city by proposing a hybrid structure that contains water and constructs space for urbanization. Capable of holding 100 times its own weight in water, the structural sponge is realized by adding a hardening agent to the SAP, which creates a shell on the surface for development. The soft sponge is a fluctuating system of undulating hills that rise and fall according to seasonal floods. As mean water levels rise, soft sponge is converted to structural sponge and a new band of soft sponge is established on the periphery. The overall sponge matrix allows development to exist within a floodplain. The urban conditions benefit from the framework of sponge elbows by structuring newfound ground within the floodplain.
This one paragraph seems to be the most extensive description of the project found online, with the possible exception of this terragram. In that Niall Kirkwood interview, we hear more about the project and learn that he was tasked to challenge the mentality of defense — of instinctively spending billions and billions of euros to build sea walls and dykes, to raise an entire country, and then subjecting the population to equally costly mass migration when the concrete crumbles — by speculating on ways to open up the landscape to disaster but not to catastrophe.
Did New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers receive this terragram? The relevant part starts at 46:12 and ends roughly around 54:30.
Meanwhile, we cannot help but wonder why the Netherlandses and the New Orleanses of the world should have all the speculative fun with super absorbent polymers.
Give us tons of the stuff and Pruned will drive out to the glacier-flattened terrain of the Illinois prairie. And using vertical drain installation rigs, we'll inject (infect?) a whole township with the gel so that when the rain comes, the landscape balloons with Himalayan peaks and Alpine valleys, an entire state county positively giddy with heretofore unknown contour lines. Instant topography.
This is a patch of the Karakoram mountain range claimed by India but currently occupied by China. It lies in the contested region of Kashmir.
Except, of course, that it isn't located where it's supposed to be, but rather deep in central China besides a military installation near the remote village of Huangyangtan.
A 450x350-kilometer area of rugged terrain — whole peaks, ridges, valleys, an entire hydrology — is scaled down to a 700x200-meter sandbox. There are two obvious questions that must be asked immediately: 1) How was it made, or rather, what is it made of? Since it would be more than a bit ironic to find that a part of the Himalayas, maybe even the actual source of its simulation, was dynamited, then transported for thousands of miles to the Gobi Desert, grounded up, mixed with cement, and finally painted as it were a Qing vase. Or maybe it's more likely that China, with its limited supply of so many natural resources, had to import the aggregate material from Africa and Australia.
And 2) what is it for? Pruned's resident Busby Berkeley fanatic thinks it's the stage setting for another lavish production of the Mahabharata. Vishnu made in China. Because apparently, filming in Bollywood is a lot more expensive now.
The Register, meanwhile, posits this “sensible explanation”: rather than a bewildering landscape expression of globalization and mass entertainment, instead “it's a training aid for pilots - possibly helicopter jockeys - designed to familiarise them with the landscape should military action ever be required.” But then one wonders why there are no Spratly Islands, arguably a more strategically important target than Kashmir, to be found.
Not content with any of these speculations, we telepathically interviewed BLDGBLOG, who guessed it to be yet another example of topographical terrorism gone voodoo: “simulacra as a threat to national security.” Or simply a form of tactical intimidation. Instead of being blasted with nighttime sonic booms and recursive Spice Girls medleys until they capitulate, your enemy watches televisually on Google Earth as you rape and pillage their own backyards, growing ever more paranoid of the real invasion, the one precisely choreographed and endlessly practiced, to the point of civil unrest.
This is landscape architecture as tactical psychological warfare.
It could also be the modern equivalent of spoils-taking. Forget about the gold, the obelisks, the giant menorahs, the virgins (supposedly), or chunks of churches, mosques and palaces. The victors will slice off entire topographies and then cart it all the way back to the homeland.
For instance, once the current incursion provisionally ends, the Israeli army shaves off a whole mountain (or two) from the Anti-Lebanon and transplant it to the Negev Desert. Similarly, after yet another Greco-Turkish skirmish on the high seas has concluded, a Greek island gets yanked off from the Aegean and placed atop a pedestal in front of Atatürk's mausoleum. Perhaps just before the U.S. forces leave Iraq, a segment of the Tigris and the Euphrates will be flown off on a C-130 halfway around the world to Nebraska, where landscape architects, in the spirit of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, have prepared grand parades and mass celebrations as lavish as any organized by Kim Jong-il for the arrival and installation.
In any case, whatever the conflict and the geography, all terrestrial spoils will be assembled in plain sight for all Google Map and Google Earth tourists alike.
Finally, above, a photo of the Karakoram mountains and its analogue, their lakes in perfect rhymming scheme.
“The Hopewell Indians,” The New York Times reports, “used sharp sticks and clamshells here 2,000 years ago to sculpture seven million cubic feet of dirt into a sprawling lunar observatory and the spiritual center of their far-flung empire.”
“The mounds' purpose remained a mystery until 1982, when professors from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., discovered that they aligned perfectly with part of the lunar cycle. Once every 18.6 years, the moon rises at the northernmost point in its orbit. Pregnant and huge, its light framed by rounded earth, the moon hovers within one-half of a degree of the octagon's exact center. This makes the Newark Earthworks twice as precise as the lunar observatory at Stonehenge.”
But unlike any other ancient sacred earthworks, a golf course has been inscribed atop the great circle and the octagon.
An atrocious act of desecration or a masterful, dizzying collage of seemingly dissimilar but truly related landforms? An experiment to combine two popular subfields of landscape architecture, i.e. historic presevation and golf course design, gone phenomenally great or monstrously awry? Admittedly, we are having a hard time forming an unambiguous, unambivalent opinion.
One thing is clear, however: we can't wait for yet another landscape to get grafted onto the site. A subdivision, perhaps? A park? A cemetery? A military proving ground? In 2,000 years, it will be as archaeologically dense as Jerusalem.
There are controversies as one would expect. Between archaeologists who question the existence of a golf course and the club's general manager: “We have a lease, and we have rights.”
And between the public who would like to gain more access to the site, to experience the carefully staged astrological events and the club who fears “its greens would be destroyed” but nevertheless allows “a few dozen golf club members attending a charity event [walk] onto the mounds and [watch] the moonrise.”
Naoya Hatakeyama. Japanese. Born 1958. Artist extraordinaire.
It's easy to translate Naoya Hatakeyama's blast series as a critique of man's wanton destruction of nature and its capacity to do so in nanoseconds, undoing what has taken millions, even billions, of years to form. And yet, whenever the two confront each other (i.e., Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Stan, Tsunami of 2004, Pakistan Earthquake of 2005, et al.), it's human frailty that's exposed.
