Previewing an upcoming exhibition co-organized with The Center for Land-Use Interpretation (CLUI), Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography, takes us on an abbreviated tour of North America's coldscape, the “vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space” that “is as ubiquitous as it is varied.” Exactly how varied? According to her undoubtedly incomplete list for Cabinet Magazine, these spaces of “distributed artificial winter” include shipping containers, floating fish factories, international seed banks, livestock semen storage, cheese caves, banana-ripening rooms and sushi coffins.
These are spaces in which a perpetual winter has distorted or erased seasonality; spaces that are located within an energy-intensive geography of previously unimaginable distance—both mental and physical—between producers and consumers. Artificial refrigeration has reconfigured the contents of our plates and the shape of our cities—it has even contributed to the overthrow of governments, as anyone familiar with the rise and fall of United Fruit can attest. Perhaps most bizarrely, although their variations in form reflect the particular requirements of the perishable product they host, coldspaces have, in turn, redesigned food itself, both in terms of the selective breeding that favors cold-tolerance over taste and the more fundamental transition from food as daily nourishment to food as global commodity.
Information about the CLUI exhibition is, I'm hoping, forthcoming.
Last month, I tweeted four psychological syndromes named after cities, and I think it's worth briefly mentioning them here, with the links for further investigation.
1)Paris Syndrome: wherein mainly Japanese tourists experience severe culture shock.
2)Jerusalem Syndrome: wherein tourists become religious zealots to the point of acting like ancient prophets.
3)Florence Syndrome (aka Stendhal's): wherein tourists become overwhelmed by art.
I've asked then, and I'll ask again: what other mental disorders are named after cities, particularly ones that are induced by a specific city? Peer reviewed, urban legends, literary, etc.
Could there be such a thing as a Berlin Syndrome, wherein you attach abnormal levels of affections to a barrier wall or a security fence? Could there be an epidemic of this, of which Banksy is Patient Zero, in the West Bank? How might a New York City Syndrome manifest itself? Chicago Syndrome?
In any case, I'd love to see a department of speculative urban syndromes at the Center for Disease Control, tucked away in the basement, crowded with filing cabinets and a poster, manned by two agents, one convinced of the growing aberrant psychosomatic effects of cities on a now mostly urban global population, the other a skeptic; you know them already, I think.
A couple of years ago, Arquine magazine sponsored an ideas competition challenging entrants to design a flood observatory located on a flood plain of the Usumacinta River, near the town of Tenosique in south-eastern Mexico. The program also called for a museum and community center, a shelter and refuge, and a hostel.
For their entry, Taller Veinticuatro presented two structures. Hosting most of the program is a triangular tower measuring 48m tall. The second is a water basin in the form of a conical ziggurat, which is inverted and driven deep into ground, its upturned base measuring 40m in diameter. Alluding to the limestone geology of this part of Mexico, the designers refer to it as an artificial cenote.
This artificial cenote is, simply put, a rain gauge, with full capacity designed for a major storm event. It's also a rainwater harvester, which provides water to the tower.
While it's meant to observe terrestrial phenomena, the designers suggest that it could be used as an astronomical observatory.
One wishes the complex wasn't meant to serve so many functions; so many programs, so little supporting infrastructure. They only diminish the whole project. Cure it of its pestilential horror vacui, and we are left with a marvelous landscape instrument.
Macheted out of the jungle by archaeologists, these structures appear like ruins from a crypto-civilization, taking measurements of the terrain. However fruitless the endeavor is, they're constantly mapping that blurred boundary between solid ground and wet earth. A lost Jantar Mantar instrument, they stand in rigid opposition to all that softness, suppleness and ambiguity, getting inundated, stained and corroded. Soon enough, they become not just a flood observatory but a flood archive, the history coated on surfaces and accumulated in cracks, patinas which you can catalog and read.
How will you concern yourself with issues of materials, technology, politics and economics, waxing and waning through countless eons? How do you imagine your users, your many million-times great-grandchildren, will come to experience it, being ultra-post-human as they are? Will you be that optimistic and not include a built-in fail safe monument to our extinct species? How will it endure such unimaginable timescales, when any potential site is subject to the hyper-migration of rivers and oceans, the deep exhalations of mountains, and continents splitting and evaporating? In an era of apocalypses, perhaps the only solution to our problems is to subject ourselves to the terrifying sublimity of deep time.
To extend our pavilion festival briefly for another day, here some images of the new visitor center for the Giant's Causeway, the famous rock formation and popular tourist destination on the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland. Designed by Heneghan Peng Architects and built to replace the original center which burned down in 2000, it had its grand opening last week.
The usual suspects will no doubt be smitten by its green roof, which helps to seamlessly blend the building into its surroundings. Indeed, the center seems to have just been slipped under a “fold,” incised and lifted slightly off the ground. It's a landform building.
In the words of the architects, “There is no longer a building and landscape but building becomes landscape and the landscape itself remains spectacular and iconic.”
Here's another view of the façade. It has such a gorgeous rhythm to it, a horizon-bound movement that flings visitors out into the cliffsides, farmlands and coastlines. Evoking the towering pillars of the causeway, it also gives this newly reconfigured landscape a nice inner rhyming scheme.
Despite a lull in China's never-ending parade of coming-out megaspectaculars, this summer's pavilion season still seems to be as rabid as any other year. Spend even a little time in any of the spatialist hot spots, and you'll be conked in the retina with Instagrams of the newly installed and/or the unapologetically Rococo renderings for the Tumblr-Pinterest-Twitter circuit. Should you be lucky enough to make the pilgrimage to the season-ending Venice Biennale, no doubt you'll be psychosomatically Florence Syndrome'd with pavilions within pavilions within pavilions, all swarming with the toterati.
In any case, I thought I'd insert myself into all the festivities with one of my favorite pavilions: Giovanni Bologna's Appennino.
Measuring about 35 feet tall, it's arguably the most spectacular feature of the gardens of Villa Medici at Pratolino, now part of Villa Demidoff, located about 7 miles north of Florence, Italy. A personification of the Apennine mountain ranges, it's sculpted as though on that liminal margin between landscape and man, its smooth skin emerging out of the rough terrain or morphing back into a mountain. He even has stalactites for a shaggy beard.
This colossal sculpture recalls the figure of Atlas in Virgil's Aeneid, and also the architect Dinocrates' proposal to shape Mount Athos into a man in honor of Alexander the Great.
With seemingly all the might of his hand, he squeezes the head of a monstrous beast, which spills a cascade of water out of its hell-mouth and into a fish pond.
Of course, the Appennino isn't just a sculpture. He's also a building.
Inside you will find a network of grottoes, their walls studded with shells, corals, pearls and crystals, and painted with frescoes of muscled men mining precious ores. In this way, Appennino is both mountains and abysses. You enter not only the belly of a garden giant but also down into the belly of the earth. There were also two working fountains, one of which portrayed Thetis, and located in his head is a chamber for a small orchestra.
I haven't been able to confirm this in any of the literature, but I've been told that there's also some sort of fireplace in the head. When lit, smoke would billow out of Appennino's nose, thus adding, I'd imagine, another sensory element to the Mannerist theatrics of a raging battle between god and beast.
For many, it's been an unrelenting period of record drought, suffocating high temperatures and epic wildfires. As a sort of salve for the end of another superheated week, and as an escape option for the weeks ahead, below is a video of scuba divers at Austria's Green Lake park.
“During the winter,” to quote the ever reliable Wikipedia, “the lake is only 1–2 m deep and the surrounding area is used as a county park. However, during the spring, when the temperature rises and the water melts, the basin of land below the mountains fill with water. The lake reaches its maximum depth of around 12 m from mid-May to June.” Seeing all that amazingly crystal-clear water and that submerged meadow freshly efflorescent, there's no wonder why it's a popular diving spot.
While that's hardly in an urban setting, I am nevertheless reminded of a festival in Rome once held during the city's sweltering summer. It's one my ultimate favorite spatial stories, and it involved blocking the drains of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi at Piazza Navona and letting the waters overflow and create a mini-lake. Crowded with all manner of vehicles, it was a sort of reincarnation of antique naumachiae, or mock naval battles, that may have been staged on that very same piazza, inside the former Stadium of Domitian, more than a thousand years previously.
This is how the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described this urban cryo-spectacle:
Every Saturday afternoon in the sultry month of August, this spacious square is converted into a lake, by stopping the conduit-pipes which carry off the water of the fountains. Vehicles of every description, axle-deep, drive to and fro across the mimic lake; a dense crowd gathers around its margin, and a thousand tricks excite the loud laughter of the idle populace. Here is a fellow groping with a stick after his seafaring hat; there another splashing in the water in pursuit of a mischievous spaniel, who is swimming away with his show; while from a neighbouring balcony a noisy burst of military music fills the air, and gives fresh animation to the scene of mirth. This is one of the popular festivals of midsummer in Rome, and the merriest of them all.”
This temporary, theatrical reemergence of the marshy landscape on which the Eternal City was built, unfortunately, was last staged in 1866.
Setting aside concerns over peak-water (“It's the heat, I tell you!”), a city hollows out one of its parks into a crater (or an archipelago of parks, not just one; or maybe add quarries into its park system). When the temperatures are forecast to hit above 100°F for more than a day, the dams are uncorked. Along the shallow periphery, children frolic, while on deeper waters, scuba divers slither over and under park benches and swing sets, round public art installations in the round, and cool down next to drowned fountains. For the more adventurous, there are artificial cenotes filigreed with tunnels. Forget roof gardens and depaving asphalts, this is how cities should cool themselves.
Another city, gripped with delirium, decides to gouge its glacier-flattened grid with deep canyons, which are then plastered with meadows and planted with flowering orchards. Ur-dreams of fjords come true. At the start of its Midsummer Festival, the locks lining its Great Lake are raised, and this irrational exuberance in topography is transformed into a micro Marianas Trench, hosting mock sea battles, flotillas, pop-up aquariums and James Cameron.
