While searching for images of heliodons, we stumbled upon this map of the artificial night sky brightness of North America. More info and maps at lightpollution.it, a website maintained by Pierantonio Cinzano.
Here's a detail showing Chicago as a white blob blazing at the center of an artificial Midwestern galaxy of flaming star cities.
Seeing that made us wonder how much of that light pollution is coming from Millennium Park, from a certain twin towering LED bonfire inferno. Or for that matter, from all the neighborhood parks, forest preserves, prairie restoration sites, green roofs and other public spaces combined.
Say you had an electronic zoning map monitoring the electric consumption of the various zoning areas. Would you find the Parks with their xenon-drenched baseball fields spiking a little higher than the Single-Family and Multi-Family parcels?
Which outshines which? Cahokia Mounds vs. Empire State Building. Gettysburg National Military Park vs. Golden Gate Bridge. Yellowstone National Park vs. Highway 80.
Continuing the shopping spree for our billionaire Dubai clients, we were inspired by a photo of Markus Peskoller under an artificial sky dome as reported earlier, and bought several dozens of heliodons.
Used mostly by architects and architecture students to stimulate light conditions within and around buildings, they would surely please the princes' landscape-architects-in-residence already having fun at the wind tunnels.
And this time, they'll be pruning away — yup, you guessed it — phantasmagorical phototropismic bansais, using imitation latitudes, the artificial passages of days into nights, and simulant seasons as their pruning tools. In due time, there will be a grove set to the Tropic of Cancer or the Tropic of Capricorn. Or set to perpetual twilight. Or impossible solar progressions to create helical, torqued or similar deformations.
Reviewing the checklist:
Aeoliotropism. Check.
Phototropism. Check.
Gravitropism. In progress.
Hydrotropism. Queued.
We could, come to think of it, form a limited liability company from which to coordinate our Dubai landscape enterprises: Earth Wind Rain & Fire LLC?
“The sun has stopped shining in Rattenberg,” the AP reported recently; winter darkness has gripped the picturesque Austrian town. But a solution, cinematic über-villainy in sensibility and scope, has been engineered by Bartenbach Lichtlabor GmbH involving 30 heliostats, “essentially rotating mirrors, mounted on a hillside to grab sunshine off reflectors from the neighboring village of Kramsach.” And those 4 months of gloom and seasonal clinical depression may soon be alleviated.
But rather than illuminating the entire city, which would take a football-size mirror and basically would cover an entire mountain, Lichtlabor “plans to create about a dozen 'hotspots' — areas not much bigger than a front yard scattered through the town, where people can gather and soak up rays. The mirrors would also reflect at various times of day onto building facades to show daylight slowly turning to dusk.”
More from Lichtlabor in a nearly year-old Telegraph article: “Sunlight brings security and a better standard of living. We decided that the light should come from above, not from artificial lights at house-level, and we decided to create an impression that the sun really is there.
“In the neighbouring village of Kramsach there is plenty of sun and so we can catch the light from the mountain there and send it to Rattenberg."
“The mirrors will be clustered to give the appearance of the sun and will be turned away in spring and summer to avoid confusion with the real thing.”
To repeat: to avoid confusion with the real thing.
“The first major retrospective of the internationally renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky will bring together more than 60 works by the Toronto-born artist from both public and private collections.
“Burtynsky, a modern-day counterpart to nineteenth-century landscape photographers, examines the intersection between land and technology, creating images of unorthodox beauty. His subjects include locations that have been changed by modern industrial activity such as mining, quarrying, rail cutting, recycling, and oil refining.”
No, Al-Qaeda has not mastered the trigonometric art of granular blitzkrieg. Simply it's the Earth-Fountain undergoing some preliminary tests in Iraq to resolve some mechanical kinks before its delivery to yet another outrageously themed megapark in Dubai.
In the meantime, go here for more ridiculous sand storm photos. We do not know who the photographer is, but please, anyone, let us know. The same person presumably took these amazing photos of ordnance disposal as well.
Meanwhile, how about designing a landscape where the earth is truly destabilized, temperamental. Where the ground plane is not treated as an immovable canvas whereupon trees and paths and benches are simply thrown in. After all, we stand on a surface that shifts and glides everywhere, all the time.
So you're strolling down the beach one afternoon — walking the dog, if you will. That night the 67th hurricane of the season comes along and plows through your oceanfront enclave. You think everything has been destroyed. But the morning after, you find that you can still walk your dog along the same path, on that same boardwalk. It may have migrated half of a mile and is now oddly reconfigured, but it's still functional nevertheless.
Or a levee system that meanders with the river. End the tyranny of cement and the Army Corps of Hubris for all time.
Screen captures from some amazing QTVRs of a wind tunnel at the Office National d’Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales.
Sadly, this wind tunnel is not a companion piece to Ski Dubai. But it should. And there should be at least one per billionaire Dubai prince. Michael Jackson, two.
Surely landscape architects must then be invited over, some pines or maples or some others installed, and with those hypersonic, hypervelocity fans turned on, they'll sculpt and prune away a grove of phantasmagorical aeolian bansais.
“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.”
In the tradition of great world novels such as David Copperfield, Gravity's Rainbow, and Ulysses, photographer Hu Yang gives us a dense portrait of modern life. A whirlwind, encyclopedic tour through Shanghai's varied modes of habitation with characters, numbering 500 or so, from seemingly every socio-economic-political-geographical-historical strata.
Of course, the narrative isn't simply about interior furnishings. By turns poignant, (melo)dramatic, even comical, Hu Yang documents 500+ tales of the Chinese diaspora (actually, every sort of displacement conceivable), globalism, loneliness in supra-dense Shanghai, Shanghai itself, thwarted dreams, dreams fulfilled, foreigners abroad, and the post-Communism neo-Communist Party for good measure. Certainly much more. And with the everpresent television as a marvelous leitmotif. Or perhaps even the main protagonist.
Truly a remarkable piece of work.
We imagine excutives and the creative directors of Barneys, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, even the LOT-EK gang studying each photograph closely, taking careful note of that homemade wallpaper, those gadgetries, the extraterrestrial plants and ancestor shrines in the corner, the ad hoc architecture and interior design, the bedroom-kitchen-living room-bathroom “prefab fabulous“ combo aesthetics. All part of a concerted strategy to enter the lucrative Chinese market and make 1+ billion people stark raving consumerists. May heaven help us.
Meanwhile, more Shanghai living.
Clearly, next stop for Hu Yang should be Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
And then, obviously, to Lagos (it'll be better than Koolhaas!), Pyongyang, Baghdad, and New Orleans.
