Bidding for this oil drilling station augmented with a lighthouse will start this spring. One wonders what potential buyers would want to use it for. Might they convert it into an oceanic summer McMansion with an amazing 360º ocean view (that is, if they're lucky enough to get financing), the vanguard of an incoming sea-level-rise real estate speculative bubble?
We actually don't mind this sort of irrational housing fad, if it means seeing beachfront McMansions get razed to the ground and rebuilt offshore as part of a managed retreat program while at the same time curtailing further coastal development. If it means halting the billions of tax revenues annually earmarked to protect these properties of the very few, money which can be used in ways that can benefit the very many, then by all means speculate away.
Adding to the growing list of stormwater management projects posted on this blog is the Mount Tabor Middle School Rain Garden in Portland, Oregon, designed by Kevin Robert Perry with Brandon Wilson and built in 2007.
It is included in the American Society of Landscape Architect's recently launched website Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes, a sort of glossy brochure of 10 mothership-approved projects to showcase the ASLA and its members to a lay public and some allied fields that unsurprisingly are unfamiliar with what they actually.
“Through this site,” we are told, “you will learn how landscape architects improve your world through projects ranging from the large-scale sustainable master plans and housing communities to small-scale green streets, parking lots, and private yards. You will also learn how landscape architects, planners, architects, engineers, horticulturalists, and others work in interdisciplinary teams to create innovative models that outline a path to sustainable future practice.”
Here, most of the rainwater falling on the school grounds are captured and allowed to infiltrate the soil rather than piped away on aging sewers.
Quoting the project statement: “The 80-year old combined sewer pipes serving the Mount Tabor neighborhood are inadequately sized to effectively manage the amount of impervious area runoff generated from neighborhood buildings, streets, and parking lots. During intense rainfall events, the overload of stormwater entering the neighborhood combined sewer system will 'push' sewer water back into the basements of local residences. The City of Portland, dedicated to solving this problem, began working with Portland Public Schools to reduce, as much as possible, the amount of stormwater entering the combined sewer system from Mount Tabor Middle School.”
This depaved parking lot also has the added benefit of cleansing the water of pollutants, cooling the school's south-facing classroom and providing an on-site, real-world example of environmental design.
We won't say much more about the project, because the program is similar in many ways to others we've covered before, most recently the rain garden at Sidwell Friends School, though that is technically more complicated, as it also manages wastewater. We have also covered the environmental and aesthetic benefits of rain gardens with another project by Perry: Portland's Green Street Project. In that post, we also touched upon their potential economic and social benefits to places where local governments are fiscally unable to maintain basic infrastructural services. Finally, we once attempted to summarize for our mostly lay readers all the key concepts in our posts on Grasscrete®; simply substitute “Grasscrete®” with “rain gardens.”
Now if only someone were to make the hydrological Edible Schoolyard.
This Olympic Stadium is inspired by the historical transformation of the Stadium of Domitian into Piazza Navona in Rome and also to some extent the post-games strategies of Atlanta's Olympic Stadium, which was reconfigured into Turner Field; Albertville's circus-like Théâtre des Cérémonies, which like a circus big top was wholly dismantled and recycled; and the future London stadium, whose seating capacity will be downgraded, the same legacy plan for Chicago's holdover stadium for its failed bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Rather than remaining a stadium in a city already saturated with athletic and outdoor cultural venues, this proposed stadium will be adaptively reused post-games into low-rise affordable/low income housing or for mixed uses. It'll be truncated down, and the excised modular units will be clustered around the stadium proper. This newly formed neighborhood will then be infilled with further development to reach a certain density. Additionally, the stadium proper itself will be carved out into segments (not too many, perhaps just two or three openings) in order to open up the interior to the urban grid and link it to the city's Olmsted-designed Emerald necklace of large parks and green boulevards. This open space may be a park, a plaza or whatever the winning proposal will be in an official design competition to repurpose the grassy turf.
The stadium exterior may have the ebullience of FAT, the lushness of a vertical garden or the networked interactivity of a vast multimedia screen of pure data. But the design will have to bear in mind its edited future and that the interior, too, will be a facade facing a park/plaza/whatever.
This stadium or the Olympics needn't be in Chicago.
2) On March 9, the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition will open at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. “[T]he practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.”
3)Bustler on the winning concept for the revitalization of Toronto’s Lower Don Lands.
4)Alphabet City on urban public baths. “When the public bath moves into the city, it may frame natural landscapes, as in an indoor wave pool or a Japanese open-air rotenburo, or amplify the elemental qualities that buildings usually try to moderate, such as heat and cold, wet and dry, darkness and light. These urban bath cultures, like the Roman thermae and balnae, Turkish hammam, Japanese sento, and Russian banya, have formed a cornerstone of their cities’ spatial forms and their citizens’ daily rituals.”
7)The Guardian on damming the Amazon. “The Brazilian government has given the green light to the construction of a controversial hydroelectric dam in the Amazon rainforest that environmentalists and indigenous activists claim will displace indigenous tribes and further damage the Amazon basin.” The Belo Monte Dam will be the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, behind the Three Gorges Dam in China and the Itaipu Dam shared by Brazil and Paraguay. And according to the BBC News it is one of “at least 70 dams” planned for the Amazon basin.
9)e360 on rewilding. “A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the “island” effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators.”
To the ever growing list of computer interfaces now infesting our bodies like viral prosthetic limbs, you can add another, one that's far less arthritic than a keyboard, less prosaic than a tablet/stylus combo, and while without that technolicious sheen of a multi-touch screen is nevertheless as immersive and unconventional as one can get.
By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way. Born out of a motivation to close the gap between our bodies and the digital world, the Mud Tub frees the traditional computer interaction model of it’s rigidity, allowing humans to use their highly developed sense of touch, and creative thinking skills in a more natural way.
Gerhardt further describes how this interface might work.
Where the Mud Tub differs from [other experimental interfaces] is its use of a richly textured organic substance that takes advantage of human ingenuity and complex sensory ability; pioneering a new open-ended interaction typology where prescriptive goals are centered around states, rather than specific user manipulation. I.e., instead of having a user click a mouse button with their pointer finger, or gesture with two fingers in a specific way, he or she is simply asked to create a state in the Mud Tub surface, which can be accomplished in any manner of ways, including digging, molding, pressing, piling, etc. This creates a “buffer” between physical user action and digital result that allows for user improvisation and makes the system inherently adaptable.
So can we soon tweet by playing in the mud? Our tweets will just be gibberish, meaning there won't be much difference from the norm.
When might we expect to be able to go to our neighborhood park, find a patch of wet or merely damp earth, plug in our iPad and update our blog, all the while using the soil for power?
Can we use our (muddy) backyard garden to create a digital 3D model of our next landscape project?
We're reminded here of David Gissen's chapter on mud in his marvelous book Subnature. Mud, he writes, is “a type of unstable ground that must be overcome in the construction of foundations. In the development of modern cities, rather than discussing mud as something wanted or desirable, it was identified as the product of poor drainage and ineffective engineering.” It “signifies a type of failed engineering” and “operates against modern concepts of circulation; it slows the city down like slush.”
[T]he development of ideas about mud is intimately related to the rise of modern economies, industrialization, urbanization, and the birth of the modern state. Mud has run counter to virtually all of these formations. When economic prospects went bad, in a sense, they turned into mud (or dust); urban routes were slowed, and mud infiltrated all manner of economic enterprises, from farms to mines.
It's interesting, then, that Gerhardt is using mud to facilitate communication, enable commerce and bridge distances. By lessening the disconnect between our physical bodies and our network identities, this mud liberates rather than bog us down. Rather than neutralize the city, mud is seen as engendering community, virtual or otherwise.
Here's another competition, and it's organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. The site is the Chicago Spire hole.
The Chicago Architectural Club is pleased to announce the 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP, a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?
The goal of the competition is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to thousands of homes.
Note that this is foremost an art competition, meaning “the installations are art first, power plants second. There may need to be sacrifices to be made in terms of efficiency of energy generation in order that the design function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level. The objective is not to design and engineer a device that provides the cheapest KWh or the most energy per square meter of land.”
