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?
We're betting this is the brief for an independent landscape studio to be hosted by Studio-X NYC and led by its newly appointeddirectors, one of their night schools in which participants from diverse fields such as computer science, geography, botany, meteorology, statistics and geoinformatics meet together to sketch out an algorithm for ecological totality.
It is common today for even consumer-grade cameras to tag the images and videos that they capture with the location of the image on the earth's surface ("geolocation"). However, some imagery does not have a geolocation tag, and it can be important to know the location of the camera, image, or objects in the scene. For this imagery, analysts work hard to deduce as much as they can using reference data from many sources, including overhead and ground-based images, digital elevation data, existing well-understood image collections, surface geology, geography, and cultural information. Such image/video geolocation is an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive activity that often meets with limited success.
Several research and consumer-oriented systems have developed useful and relevant capabilities using techniques that include large-scale ground-level image acquisition, crowd sourcing, and sophisticated image matching. These largely automated systems tend to work best in geographic areas with significant population densities or that are well traveled by tourists, and where the query image or video contains notable features such as mountains or buildings.
The Finder Program aims to build on existing research systems to develop technology that augments the analyst's abilities to address the geolocation task. Required technical innovations include the 1) integration of analysts' abilities and automated geolocation technologies to solve geolocation problems, 2) fusion of diverse, publicly-available, but often imperfect data sources, and 3) expansion of automated geolocation technologies to work efficiently and accurately over all terrain and large search areas. If successful, Finder will deliver rigorously tested solutions for the image/video geolocation task of any outdoor terrestrial location.
To sign up, visit the website of who we believe to be the studio's sponsor, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an agency described as the DARPA for the intelligence community.
At night when you're out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you're in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you're definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood's chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. When you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward's assigned spectrum.
For Lift11, an urban installations festival being held this summer in Tallinn, Estonia, architects Siiri Vallner and Indrek Peil chose a “weathered and deformed” pier as the site for their temporary intervention.
There, they covered up some of the upturned concrete slabs with terrace boards on which one can sit and relax.
“This way,” as the project statement explains, “a derelict and crumbling object can be revived as part of the modern city space, opening up the seaside area of Tallinn for local people and for visitors.”
We would love to see the rough edges of the pier similarly boarded up in its entirety, though with some modulation on the surface like Vicente Guallart's microcoasts.
This is one of the more interesting photos we've come across in recent weeks. It shows South Korean soldiers searching for North Korean landmines that may have been dislodged from the Korean Demilitarized Zone by last month's devastating floods and landslides. This is a familiar drill, as heavy rains often carry mines across the border. In fact, dozens of them washed up in South Korea last year, killing one and injuring another.
What we like about the photo is that it runs counter to our mental picture of a DMZ that's sharply defined by clipped vegetation, chain-link fences and concrete barriers. Instead, it conjures up an image of a no-man's-land pulsating on the margins. During periods of geologic and hydrological excess, it expands and bulges, then contract when soldiers have comb through the hazardous aggregate of earth and explosives with their metal detectors. You see a crisp line on the map, but it actually sprouts invisible, lobate foliation.
That decorative workhorse of gardens since time immemorial — the water feature, pond scum included — gets a makeover in the Algaegarden, one of the new additions at this year's International Garden Festival at Les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, Quebec.
In the installation, an art/science/landscape collaboration between Synnøve Fredericks, Brenda Parker and Heather Ring, several different species of algae course through “curtains of tubes hanging from steel frames.” For the moment, the soupy mixture of nutrients and pointillist vegetation looks rather pallid, but the collaborators hope the algae will thrive and their colors grow bolder, like any foliage chromatically mutating through the seasons: reds becoming more vibrant, greens more lush, and blues turning bathypelagic.
“The algae, often considered a nuisance in the garden pond, here become an object of secret beauty and curiosity,” the avant-gardeners explain. “The garden leads the visitor to appreciate algae both as an alternative to oil and other energy sources and a source of food and nutrition.”
It's a technolicious pergola (or is it an archetypal labyrinth? an espaliered cyborg-plant?) providing a cool respite from our post-millennial angst over peak oil and peak food.
We've posted Hal Ingberg's marvelous pavilion, Réflexions colorées, at least a couple times before, and we're doing it again to alert our readers that Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens' annual festival of avant-gardening in Quebec is well under way.
As described by the artist, this “semi-reflective equilateral triangle (20 x 20 x 20 ft) provides an intimate, courtyard-like enclosure that both frames and intensifies the perception of the forest. Within the enclosure, the colour of the glass establishes a sense of spatial definition, while its semi-reflective surface creates surprising perceptual readings that change with the conditions of light and the visitor’s position towards trees and angles at which glass corners meet. From the outside, the installation is physically understood, but its receptor quality transforms it into an enigmatic object.”
