And that's a wrap for Year 5. Tomorrow we'll start Year 6!
To set the festive mood, above is one of the many super-energizing scenes from one of our favorite films of all time, the “docu-musical” Latcho Drom by Tony Gatlif. It's sure to bring everyone here on Pruned HQ and hopefully elsewhere up dancing on their feet, gliding a few inches above the floor, with limbs and shoulders frenetically jerked about by cosmic marionette strings. No one can resist its infectious pulse.
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Meanwhile, as per tradition, we purchased our anniversary architectural notecard from Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Adams. Going through the choices this year, we were ecstatic to find out that some of the extant and nonextant follies of the Désert de Retz were added to the catalog last year. Rendered so beautifully in watercolor and in such small dimensions, they look so ridiculously precious.
What better way to introduce invasive species; cluster bomb pollens on nature-deprived asthmatic children and, to the delight of Big Pharma, Claritin-addicted allergy sufferers; and deplete the coffers of post-econopocalypse cities by littering their streets with fallen fruits and leafy detritus for their under budgeted public works department to clean up, than with a floating mobile garden.
As envisioned by Rael San Fratello Architects, these nomadic gardens “would be suspended in the air from large remotely controlled dirigibles. Each inflatable craft would house thousands of smaller plants attached to long vines. A family of dirigibles would migrate within a city, moving towards areas where the heat island effect is greatest, and also migrate seasonally, traveling to southern cities during winter months and northern cities during summer months.”
One wonders if there will be an outbreak of botanical piracy, whereby someone lassos in one of the floating mobile gardens by the tentacles and anchors it right above his house all summer long, its cooling shades cutting down the use of air conditioning, not to mention the electricity bill.
Perhaps urban adventurers will also snag one of these gardens, but only temporarily, long enough for them to explore its feral tendrils and gelatinous parterres. They'll emerge out of their sewers and their abandoned hospitals, and, squinting hard at the fullness of the sun, they'll climb up, up, up, up towards the clouds, the heaviness of their claustrophobic playgrounds giving way to buoyancy and vistas.
Nearby, meanwhile, will be another parked garden crawling with Avatar cosplayers.
Finally, we read that “each plant is attached to an individual propelled device that allows it to be set free from it’s base. Controlled by GPS and GIS information and organized in flocking patterns, plants move through the city in swarms hydrating, providing shade, and bring oxygen to greenless spaces in the urban field.”
Clearly this means that any rogue robo-botanical hacker will be able to stage a vegetal version of The Birds.
From time to time we'll gather some of the coastal debris that have been cluttering our desktops, bookmarks, inboxes, newsreaders and post queue for months (years, in a few cases), and bundle them together into a single post. It'll be a rush job.
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The U.S. Geological Survey reviews the proposal to build sand berms along the Louisiana coast to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from reaching interior marshes.
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Lebbeus Woods has proposed “the construction of a terrace along the six-kilometers of The Malecón, which is dedicated to public recreation, a type of urban park or abstract beach cantilevered from The Malecón over the sea. Shelter from the sun is built into the layers of each structurally independent terrace segment, which rests on heavy steel hinges such as those used for modern drawbridges. The independent segments can be built one at a time, and also shaped to the curving line of the roadway, so that their ensemble is continuous. Most importantly the segments can be designed to accommodate differing recreational needs along its six-kilometer extent; for example, a set of terrace segments serving one neighborhood could be very open, while another, serving a different neighborhood, could provide more layers of shelter and semi-enclosed spaces.”
“The estuaries of Essex form a liquid edge to the county. This fragile boundary, which extends and retracts with the ebb and flow of the tide, reinforces the connection between the sea and the land. The proposal responds to the current thinking on a managed realignment of the coast, removing hard sea defenses such as sea walls and embankments that prevent the natural landward movement of the salt marshes, and allowing the land to be flooded by the incoming tide. Returning land to salt marsh encourages brackish vegetation and establishes the flood plain as an environmental bugger. A shallow plate is inserted into the intertidal zone, lying low on the horizon. The plate beds into the mud flats, with its extremities in the retreating tide and reaching up to the higher grass land beyond.
“Three territories are formed: oyster lanes fed by nutrient-rich runoff from the salt marsh and high tide, grazing land, and a market. The panorama is framed and partially concealed by the tilted reflected edge to the marketplace, which reaches out endlessly between the sea and sky.”
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In Turenscape's Qinhuangdao Beach Restoration project, “a heavily eroded, badly abused and decaying beach has been ecologically recovered and successfully transformed into an aethestically pleasing and well-visited place, demonstrating landscape architects can professionally facilitate the initiatives of rebuilding a harmonious relationship between man and nature through ecological design.”
A team led by Alex Lehnerer from the University of Illinois at Chicago won first prize in Mine the Gap, the ideas competition which asked entrants for ideas on how to adaptively reuse the hole excavated for the foundation of Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire.
The winning entry, titled The Second Sun, envisions the hole as a home base for a yellow hot air balloon. As a whimsical twin to the ferris wheel (or the AeroBalloon) across the way in Navy Pier, it would be a fantastic addition to the Chicago skyline, whose sharp lines and pallid complexion would be awesomely contrasted by its voluptuous curves and cheery brightness. Watching it slowly bobbing up and down amid a static forest of glass and concrete would certainly be a marvelous sight, perhaps not unlike Alexander Calder's red Flamingo in its Miesian aviary.
Attached to this bubble monument to the bubble era is a disc-shaped swimming pool. While frolicking about in the water, you can enjoy the panoramic lakefront views from the ghost condominiums of a ghost skyscraper, the promise of those enchanting marketing brochures at last fulfilled. (We can't fully make out what's printed on the bottom of the pool — nor can we read the text, so we'll just fantasize that it's an actual floor plan.)
Surrounding the hole is an artificial beach where you can soak in the sunlight from the real sun or the reflected rays from a latex sun. The beach actually extends beyond the project site, going under bridge and into the adjacent and still undeveloped DuSable Park, where a circular soccer pitch is added.
After scientists had perfected the technique of splicing human DNA into the DNA of a tree, the Bureau of Forestry, the department which is responsible for the more than half a million trees on public right-of-ways, entered into a business partnership with the multi-billion dollar funeral industry to turn the city's urban forest into a living necropolis.
In previous revenue-generating schemes, the perennially cash-strapped city had privatized its airports, toll roads, parking meters — much of its public infrastructure, in fact — which proved disastrous. Not so with this arboreal venture.
The number of trees increased exponentially, even the types of species used. Every tree is lush and vigorous, since not only are they well maintained by caretakers with an eternally flowing revenue stream but also by the bereaved, who in their grief come daily to tend lovingly to the trees and the surrounding planting beds. Tear-drenched anguish has been appropriated into the city beautification program.
The sidewalks, too, look immaculate. Not a single stray candy wrapper can be found, and no one dares urinate on the botanically re-encoded dead. The pavement, after all, is now hallowed ground.
On the Day of the Dead, the streets in the city's many Hispanic neighborhoods become the site of deliriously exuberant block parties. Arbor Day is moved to coincide with Memorial Day.
Later, Google pays exorbitantly for the rights to geospatilize and network the data on all the trees onto its suite of web mapping service applications. Consequently, gravesite visits needn't be performed exclusively in real space; the pilgrimage can now be undertaken virtually. From anywhere and at anytime, you can check up on how the tree is faring, see it grow and mature and bear transgenic fruits, watch as your loved one unconsciously experience an after life.
Chair I: Rococo Armchair Retrofit and Chair II: Ghost Chair Retrofit belong to a series of projects by Analog Media Lab exploring interfaces between insect and human communities. These works focus on domestic insects that have not been domesticated — meaning, they are generally considered invasive, unproductive or otherwise problematic (e.g., ants, termites, moths).
Connected by flexible tubing to ports in a perimeter wall, the interior volumes of Chair I and Chair II are literally part of the outdoors, making them inhabitable by insects. Active nesting and reproductive behaviors are made visible within the context of the domestic interior.
Analog Media Lab is a collaborative practice founded by David L. Hays, Kevin Stewart and Shuangshuang Wu.
Still need something to do this summer? How about revisiting some of your much cherished childhood (or yesterday's) dreamscapes of a fantastical lunar city and then propping it (or not) with a bit of scientific credibility for SHIFTboston's Moon Capital competition.
When considering the moon destination, competitors are welcome to explore any concept, however, we recommend the submission address one of the following criteria:
PROTECTION The moon has no atmosphere. Envision shielding to protect the habitat from radiation, space debris, and temperature extremes.
MICRO-GRAVITY How would life and industry be in 1/6g?
FOOD A self-sustaining community that incorporates agriculture and food production.
ENERGY How would we harness or generate enough energy to run an entire community?
WATER production, purification and recycling.
How about a moon CULTURE?
How about a moon TRANSPORTATION?
This might be just the perfect opportunity for you to team up with those civil engineering students on the other side of campus to help you better understand constructing on indigenous soil material. If you're thinking of designing a lunar food system, surely you would want to exploit the expertise of a lunar farmer. Are you wondering if the entire moon could be turned into a giganticbattery? No doubt our readers already know who to consult first.
In any case, it's probably no different from designing for extreme environments here on earth, or a second Phoenix in a much harsher desert. Perhaps it's better to conceptualize your city as a company mining town, after all an independent moon would be more likely be supported by an exo-natural resource-based economy than tourism or scientific research, right?
