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Public Water Purification Island
Here's an art installation from Synchronicity, an architecture/arts festival in Warsaw, Poland. Conceived by Jakub Szczęsny as a member of the design collective Centrala, it consists of a floating island fitted with exercise machines. When the machines are being used, water gets pumped from the polluted Vistula River to a filtration device located overhead at the center of the platform. The water is intended to be potable at the end of its purification cycle, ready for use by thirsty festivalgoers.
According to Szczęsny: “The whole installation is supposed to perform a role of a propaganda tool changing the consciousness of Warsawers by showing the efficiency of human action in the process of purifying the waters of their river. What’s meaningful is the fact that many Poles, even after twenty years of liberalization, still don’t believe in their own potential as individuals or members of communities, in positively changing their environment.”
Could Szczęsny also be presenting us an alternative to the much maligned bottled water? One could set up a stringed necklace of these water islands on a river, say, the Thames, or along a waterfront, say, Chicago's Lakefront, besides trails frequented by joggers, bikers and marathoners in training who, as a communal activity (a civic responsibility, in fact), keep the tanks full for use by themselves and the marginally active.
The Hydrological Playground
Here's an art installation from Synchronicity, an architecture/arts festival in Warsaw, Poland. Conceived by Jakub Szczęsny as a member of the design collective Centrala, it consists of a floating island fitted with exercise machines. When the machines are being used, water gets pumped from the polluted Vistula River to a filtration device located overhead at the center of the platform. The water is intended to be potable at the end of its purification cycle, ready for use by thirsty festivalgoers.
According to Szczęsny: “The whole installation is supposed to perform a role of a propaganda tool changing the consciousness of Warsawers by showing the efficiency of human action in the process of purifying the waters of their river. What’s meaningful is the fact that many Poles, even after twenty years of liberalization, still don’t believe in their own potential as individuals or members of communities, in positively changing their environment.”
Could Szczęsny also be presenting us an alternative to the much maligned bottled water? One could set up a stringed necklace of these water islands on a river, say, the Thames, or along a waterfront, say, Chicago's Lakefront, besides trails frequented by joggers, bikers and marathoners in training who, as a communal activity (a civic responsibility, in fact), keep the tanks full for use by themselves and the marginally active.
The Hydrological Playground
Hydrocity: Call for Projects
On November 6, 2009 at the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab, in collaboration with Alphabet City, will oversee a daylong symposium and launch an accompanying exhibition that will travel throughout North America. Called Hydrocity, they will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”
Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, who have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.
As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but InfraNet Lab is very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.
To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6MB) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.
Send tips if you haven't a project of your own. We've suggested Watery Voids by MMBB Arquitectos and SpongeCity, which was designed by former students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
On November 6, 2009 at the University of Toronto, InfraNet Lab, in collaboration with Alphabet City, will oversee a daylong symposium and launch an accompanying exhibition that will travel throughout North America. Called Hydrocity, they will be “devoted to studying the relationship between urban forms and the hydrological systems in which they are embedded.”
If the twentieth century has been marked by our global thirst for fuel, the twenty-first century, will be defined by our collectively growing need for water. Impending water shortages are changing patterns of urbanization and requiring increasingly elaborate infrastructures by which to source, collect, divert and transport water to the urban centres that hold a growing majority of the world’s population. These population centres will in turn need to be redesigned and retrofitted to conserve, collect, repurify, and recirculate increasingly precious water resources while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding their cities’ relationships with the complex watersheds on which they are built and upon which they depend. The resulting liquid infrastructure is poised to redefine our notion of natural and artificial landscapes, as disparate ecological environments are networked and conflated. What forms of urbanism and landscape systems will emerge, and what design potentials exist, in this expanding liquid infrastructure?
Participants in the symposium include such top-notch hydrospatialists as Alan Berger, of P-REX; Katherine Rinne, of Aquae Urbis Romae; and Aziza Chaouni and Liat Margolis, who have also organized a traveling exhibition with a similar theme, The Out of Water Project.
As for the exhibition, some projects have already been selected, but InfraNet Lab is very keen to include other visionary projects — “built, unbuilt, dreamed, etched, scripted, carpet-bombed, etc.” — that address the same issues, preferably recent and unpublished.
To be considered, send a PDF (3 pages or less and under 6MB) of any project by October 15 to editors[at]infranetlab[dot]org. Space is limited, so earlier submission is preferred.
Send tips if you haven't a project of your own. We've suggested Watery Voids by MMBB Arquitectos and SpongeCity, which was designed by former students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Chicago 2018, or: A Proposal for the First Wholly Urban Winter Olympics
So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we'll help them out.
Almost everything is going for Chicago. Its infrastructure is less than perfect for the huge Summer Olympics crowds, but would be more than able to handle the modest attendance at a Winter Olympics and would definitely be unmatched by the usual winter bid cities and their smaller scale public transportation systems. Its gargantuan hotel industry would easily surpass capacity requirements.
There will also be no need to build a hulking, temporary 80,000-seat stadium, as Soldier Field will be more than able to seat the smaller crowd at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. And perhaps it can even host another event. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the venue for the ceremonies was also the same arena for ski jumping events. As the following photograph shows, this combination is possible at Soldier Field.
And as we re-imagined it a few months ago for a new century, this new prosthetic mountain analogue would be hinged, meaning it can be flipped up and down. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower.
It's the technolicious descendant of the first Ferris wheel, built in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
It's easy to re-render venues in the failed summer bid into venues for a winter bid. For instance, next door to Soldier Field is the cluster of convention halls where various sports such as gymnastics would have been held; its sprawling spaces would be converted to house figure skating, speed skating and curling competitions. The United Center — formerly proposed for basketball — would host ice hockey competitions; it already serves as the home of the city's professional hockey and basketball teams anyway.
Some of the large urban parks in the old bid will again be drafted into the new bid. At Millennium Park, medal ceremonies will take place against the backdrop of the greatest skyline in the world. One or two will be re-landscaped for freestyle skiing, snowboarding and sliding competitions. As for the serpentine race track used in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, one is tempted to hire Frank Gehry to replicate his BP Pedestrian Bridge.
Since all the venues will be wholly situated inside a major global metropolis and not in some sequestered, exclusive mountain spa resorts hundreds of gas-guzzling miles away from the supposed host city, chances are that they will be heavily used after the games; maybe a subculture of urban snowboarders will clique together. Perhaps one of the better legacies of the games would be the popular adaptation of winter sports (some or all of which are seen as the domain of the privileged) by new socioeconomic and racial classes.
In any case, during the summer, these same installations will add interesting landforms to the parks. The slopping concave hollow of the half-pipe could be re-landscaped as the seating lawn for an outdoor theater. The sliding track, meanwhile, becomes a monumental piece of public sculpture-cum-skating park.
Of course, there is one major thing that's going against Chicago. It's not the availability of snow, since this is also a concern in many alpine areas. Climate change is evaporating glaciers everywhere, and natural snow cover grows increasingly tenuous.
Chicago's gritty landscape shouldn't be much of a handicap as well. It may seem that way at first, as it definitely doesn't embody a certain sort of nature — rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc. — which is presumably a prerequisite for certain venues. But have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?
The one glaring negative is the city's glacial-flattened topography. Where does one hold the alpine events?
They'll be held in an artificial mountain. Obviously.
But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.
And its scale will need to be exponentially inflated. This is the Make No Little Plans for the 21st century.
If one is worried that no future host city will ever be able to architecturally outdo the Beijing Olympics (as if organizing and building the games once again in a free and democratic country with no ethnic cleansing being carried out along its periphery isn't enough to surpass it?), this Everest of the Prairie will surely top a fantasy list of the greatest Olympic venues.
How can the IOC mafia refuse this big, bold vision?
It's an Olmstedian park writ large, and it's going be sited in the heavy industrial Lake Calumet sector of the South Side. Unless the Lakefront is larger, this will be Chicago's largest public open space, something which this part of the city sorely needs. Moreover, it will provide the opportunity to finally clean up this Superfund site.
Embedded within this double twin of the Loop Skyline and Millennium Park are spaces for use by athletes, officials and spectators. One could also hallow out spaces for the media center and even a satellite Olympic Village. After the games, they'll be converted into community centers, offices and residences, even theaters and indoor rock climbing caverns, all sheathed by the largest green roof in the world. And the views will undoubtedly be spectacular. On the outside surface, meanwhile, parts of the mountain will be turned into a refuge for imported wildlife.
As for the cost, we'll get back to you.
Ski Delft
So Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Rather than brood about what might have been or haggle over alternatives to the massive dose of money the city would have been given to stimulate its limping finances, it should immediately develop a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Since the deadline is less than two weeks away and the bid committee may still be suffering from their Copenhagen hangovers, we'll help them out.
Almost everything is going for Chicago. Its infrastructure is less than perfect for the huge Summer Olympics crowds, but would be more than able to handle the modest attendance at a Winter Olympics and would definitely be unmatched by the usual winter bid cities and their smaller scale public transportation systems. Its gargantuan hotel industry would easily surpass capacity requirements.
There will also be no need to build a hulking, temporary 80,000-seat stadium, as Soldier Field will be more than able to seat the smaller crowd at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. And perhaps it can even host another event. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the venue for the ceremonies was also the same arena for ski jumping events. As the following photograph shows, this combination is possible at Soldier Field.
And as we re-imagined it a few months ago for a new century, this new prosthetic mountain analogue would be hinged, meaning it can be flipped up and down. Those traveling along Lake Shore Drive or boating on Lake Michigan would see the wavy profile of a half Eiffel Tower.
It's the technolicious descendant of the first Ferris wheel, built in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
It's easy to re-render venues in the failed summer bid into venues for a winter bid. For instance, next door to Soldier Field is the cluster of convention halls where various sports such as gymnastics would have been held; its sprawling spaces would be converted to house figure skating, speed skating and curling competitions. The United Center — formerly proposed for basketball — would host ice hockey competitions; it already serves as the home of the city's professional hockey and basketball teams anyway.
Some of the large urban parks in the old bid will again be drafted into the new bid. At Millennium Park, medal ceremonies will take place against the backdrop of the greatest skyline in the world. One or two will be re-landscaped for freestyle skiing, snowboarding and sliding competitions. As for the serpentine race track used in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton, one is tempted to hire Frank Gehry to replicate his BP Pedestrian Bridge.
Since all the venues will be wholly situated inside a major global metropolis and not in some sequestered, exclusive mountain spa resorts hundreds of gas-guzzling miles away from the supposed host city, chances are that they will be heavily used after the games; maybe a subculture of urban snowboarders will clique together. Perhaps one of the better legacies of the games would be the popular adaptation of winter sports (some or all of which are seen as the domain of the privileged) by new socioeconomic and racial classes.
In any case, during the summer, these same installations will add interesting landforms to the parks. The slopping concave hollow of the half-pipe could be re-landscaped as the seating lawn for an outdoor theater. The sliding track, meanwhile, becomes a monumental piece of public sculpture-cum-skating park.
Of course, there is one major thing that's going against Chicago. It's not the availability of snow, since this is also a concern in many alpine areas. Climate change is evaporating glaciers everywhere, and natural snow cover grows increasingly tenuous.
Chicago's gritty landscape shouldn't be much of a handicap as well. It may seem that way at first, as it definitely doesn't embody a certain sort of nature — rustic mountains, pastoral evergreen forests, a lonely goatherd, etc. — which is presumably a prerequisite for certain venues. But have the more traditional Winter Olympic sites not been over the years transformed into high-tech event landscapes, carefully managed and augmented with artificial snow and heavy plows that sculpt the slopes to a pre-programmed set of topographical parameters?
The one glaring negative is the city's glacial-flattened topography. Where does one hold the alpine events?
They'll be held in an artificial mountain. Obviously.
But not that sort of tectonics, as this venue will have a more organic and geological veneer.
And its scale will need to be exponentially inflated. This is the Make No Little Plans for the 21st century.
If one is worried that no future host city will ever be able to architecturally outdo the Beijing Olympics (as if organizing and building the games once again in a free and democratic country with no ethnic cleansing being carried out along its periphery isn't enough to surpass it?), this Everest of the Prairie will surely top a fantasy list of the greatest Olympic venues.
How can the IOC mafia refuse this big, bold vision?
It's an Olmstedian park writ large, and it's going be sited in the heavy industrial Lake Calumet sector of the South Side. Unless the Lakefront is larger, this will be Chicago's largest public open space, something which this part of the city sorely needs. Moreover, it will provide the opportunity to finally clean up this Superfund site.
Embedded within this double twin of the Loop Skyline and Millennium Park are spaces for use by athletes, officials and spectators. One could also hallow out spaces for the media center and even a satellite Olympic Village. After the games, they'll be converted into community centers, offices and residences, even theaters and indoor rock climbing caverns, all sheathed by the largest green roof in the world. And the views will undoubtedly be spectacular. On the outside surface, meanwhile, parts of the mountain will be turned into a refuge for imported wildlife.
As for the cost, we'll get back to you.
Ski Delft
Clouds
Another fascinating project from Paisajes Emergentes in collaboration with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve. Called Clouds, it's a proposed installation to be located in every town that will be flooded by the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam megaproject in Colombia.
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street
Balloon Park
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Quito 1: Paisajes Emergentes
Rainwater Harvesting in Quito
A Proposal for an Aquatics Complex for the Chicago 2016 Summer Olympic Games Bid
Four Plazas and A Street
Balloon Park
Egg Digesters
![Egg Digesters]()
We've set up a new Flickr set and stuffed it with photos of egg-shaped sludge digesters culled from the web, simply because they're absolutely beautiful. They're readily photogenic — with or without dramatic lighting.
In the sewage treatment process, these extraordinary womb-like structures break down the organic solid matter in the wastewater into more stable materials. With additional processing, some of these byproducts are turned into fertilizers. These digesters also generate biogas with a high proportion of methane that can be used to power the machines. In fact, in large treatment plants, they can produce more electricity than the installations require. The egg shape makes this process more efficient. Compared to their more conventional cylindrical counterparts, they require less energy, maintenance and space. That they are aesthetically pleasing is probably just a happy coincidence.
![Egg Digesters]()
They're clearly calling out for a book deal, so it's worth asking again if they've ever been the subject of a 1,000-pound coffee table book published, say, by the interior decorator Taschen.
Or have they perhaps been the object of interest in a typological study by a special-interest niche publisher and released as a slim print-on-demand pamphlet?
Are the next Bernd and Hilla Becher out there now documenting these industrial Fabergés?
Grain Elevators
Buttology 2
We've set up a new Flickr set and stuffed it with photos of egg-shaped sludge digesters culled from the web, simply because they're absolutely beautiful. They're readily photogenic — with or without dramatic lighting.
In the sewage treatment process, these extraordinary womb-like structures break down the organic solid matter in the wastewater into more stable materials. With additional processing, some of these byproducts are turned into fertilizers. These digesters also generate biogas with a high proportion of methane that can be used to power the machines. In fact, in large treatment plants, they can produce more electricity than the installations require. The egg shape makes this process more efficient. Compared to their more conventional cylindrical counterparts, they require less energy, maintenance and space. That they are aesthetically pleasing is probably just a happy coincidence.
They're clearly calling out for a book deal, so it's worth asking again if they've ever been the subject of a 1,000-pound coffee table book published, say, by the interior decorator Taschen.
Or have they perhaps been the object of interest in a typological study by a special-interest niche publisher and released as a slim print-on-demand pamphlet?
Are the next Bernd and Hilla Becher out there now documenting these industrial Fabergés?
Grain Elevators
Buttology 2
Strange Weather
Continuing a visual meme of late, above is a thick vermillion fog re-landscaping the city of Sydney anew. Writes The Sydney Morning Herald, “Sydneysiders have woken to a red haze unlike anything seen before by residents or weather experts, as the sun struggles to pierce a thick blanket of dust cloaking the city this morning.”
The photograph is just one of hundreds documenting this freak meteorological event. No doubt there will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, taken before the last grain of sand settles down. And as these images find their way into each and every blog in the universe, alighting twitter, Facebook and forums, and yes, even as they infiltrate the local evening news, the water cooler and the rest of old media, it's worth quoting again from Diller + Scofidio's Blur: The Making of Nothing.
Continuing a visual meme of late, above is a thick vermillion fog re-landscaping the city of Sydney anew. Writes The Sydney Morning Herald, “Sydneysiders have woken to a red haze unlike anything seen before by residents or weather experts, as the sun struggles to pierce a thick blanket of dust cloaking the city this morning.”
The photograph is just one of hundreds documenting this freak meteorological event. No doubt there will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, taken before the last grain of sand settles down. And as these images find their way into each and every blog in the universe, alighting twitter, Facebook and forums, and yes, even as they infiltrate the local evening news, the water cooler and the rest of old media, it's worth quoting again from Diller + Scofidio's Blur: The Making of Nothing.
When we speak about weather, it's assumed that more meaningful forms of communication are being avoided. But is not the weather, in fact, a potent topic of cultural exchange - a bond that cuts through social distinction and economic class, that supersedes geological borders? Is not the weather the only truly tangible and meaningful thread that glues us all together? Is not the weather the only truly global issue? In truth, contemporary culture is addicted to weather information. We watch, read, and listen to weather reports across every medium of communication, from conventional print to real-time satellite images and Web cams. The weather channel provides round-the-clock, real-time meteorological entertainment. Boredom is key. But boredom turns to melodrama when something out of the ordinary happens. Major weather events are structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.