Can't say I've fully grasped the science behind cross-bedding yet, but I was quickly and fully hypnotized by these computer animations of sedimentary migration and deposition. Some screen caps follow.
I'll assume that everyone will download and watch them on a continuous trance-inducing loop.
I wonder if you can harness energy from these land migrations and conceive a park out of it: a terrestrial version of the Wave Garden. Just settle yourself atop a dune, watch landscapes after landscapes pass by, and at the end of your picnic, you find yourself on the other side of the continent.
You can, in fact, download the bedform simulation software, supposedly the same one used to produce the animations, to create your own rippling topography.
Such as these:
Obviously, it brings up interesting scenarios of landscape architects, in drunken stupors at 3 in the morning, downloading the software to design their own sinuous landforms. Perhaps as a gag, to throw off the visiting critic. Or to one-up Michael van Valkenburgh and Kathryn Gustafson, ending their monopoly on tumuli earthforms. Or perhaps a moment of inspired experimentation. But most likely because they simply can't navigate their way through formZ or Maya or even AutoCAD inebriated.
And just to add a bit more oddity (or realism) to the scenario, imagine them sprinkling a few digitized models of Classical architecture into the simulation and laughing, still drunk, at their fixed proportions and rigid geometry rapidly crumbling, dissolving in the ever shifting landscape.
Fisk and his endlessly fascinating geological investigations will surely return in varying permutations, recognizably or otherwise, throughout the new year. So please visit often and stay awhile.
Assorted bookmarks collected throughout the year, pruned here not so much for your edification but rather dumped just so that they and the discarded multitudes that do not appear here won't clutter my archives any longer.
On container gardens: wading pools, feed sacks, used tires, etc. With a guide to starting a community garden.
On The Return of Lenin, a mildly disquieting recreation of his stop at an allotment garden in Sweden on his way to the Russian Revolution. “Lenin was totally unresponsive to [the benefits of allotment gardens], to poke in the soil was to prepare the ground for political laziness in the class-strugle. The workers shouldn't be occupied with gardening, they should rather devote themselves to the proletarian revolution.”
On arbortecture: or, plants growing out of buildings.
On expanding and densifying the Mall further and further. “The architects and designers were giddy with the possibilities: They talked about giant sculptural bridges, soaring waterfront museums, inland canals, water taxis and monuments that would forever change the nation's capital.”
On the Fab Tree Hab. “Imagine a society based on slow farming tress for housing structure instead of the industrial manufacture of felled timber.”
On the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens, “an ever-changing series of walk-through gardens, showcasing new and innovative designs from the world’s finest landscape architects and designers.” What's Christophe Girot doing amongst such a stellar crowd? But never mind, I kid.
On Urban Dead, a massively multi-player web-based zombie apocalyse. “The city is dying. Some months on from the first reported outbreak, military quarantine units have closed Malton's borders, and are moving in to eliminate the looters, to forcibly evacuate those civilians who still refuse to leave their homes. The city is dying, and the urban dead are filling its streets.” In other words, Zombie Urbanism is the new urbanism.
More John Pfahl: “The title of this series pays homage to the fifteenth century illuminated manuscript entitled Tres riches heurs du Duc de Berry. In it the Limbourg brothers depicted, in minute and loving detail, the passage of the seasons over various medieval landscapes.”
“My Compost pile, situated in a hidden corner of the garden, constantly changes with the passing months. The rich efflorescence of rotting vegetable matter creates a daybook of both the memorable and mundane meals that grace my table.”
The obvious question is: why in a hidden corner?
It needs to be a centerpiece of the garden — a technicolor tapis vert, lush and vibrant as any medieval tapestry. It even has its own sprawling battle scenes whose iconographies are taken from Charles Darwin.
This is no Paradise Garden. It's a Naturalist Wonderland of consumption, putrefaction and defecation, a celebration of decay where growth and vigor are venerated.
Invite neighbors to help maintain the parterres. Chitchat about each other's dinner: “Chicken pot pie?” “Oh, no. We had fish last night.” “So how are the kids?”
Building a sense of community in a landscape of decay.
The sun has set in the Nigerian town of Ebocha, but the day has not turned to night as one would expect.
“Across Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta,” we read, “hellish towers of fire throw an auburn glow, scorching the communities that live under them and sending dark columns of smoke into the sky.”
Which you can have a front row seat for at a brothel-tavern called “One For the Road.” Across from the 200-foot high columns of flames that leap and roar from a tangle of pipelines, its proprietress complains(?): “It is always like this. Every day, every night. We no get darkness.”
The flares have been illuminating the landscapes since the 1970s, residents say, night and day continuously, because Nigeria has not built the infrastructure to make use of one of the world's largest reserves of natural gas. So rather than putting it to use, the fuel is burned off, or flared.
A colleague pointed me to the article I linked to above. He wrote: “While it is essential to recognize and address the issues of environmental justice present here, it is also important to acknowledge the power of the spectacle. Obvious references are to the work of Richard Haag, Julie Bargmann, and Peter Latz. Environmental justice demands that these facilites not spew their toxicity on populations who derive little benefit from them, but a sense of environmental poetic justice, or of economic transparency, would demand that these facilites somehow be visually integrated into the societies they serve. Why should societies whose lifestyle depends on oil be deriving their aesthetic templates from a pastoral economy. Let the derricks and flares dot the distant hillsides! The follies in the distance are likely poly-resin anyway.”
“Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”
Instead of scattering these creatures on a beach, why not release them into the arid, wind-swept open spaces of Antarctica as well? Wait a decade or so until its ice caps have melted away, and watch them scamper about over newly revealed soil. With pollens, seeds and alien microbes gestating inside their plastic yellow tubes, they'll plant new orchards and forests, maybe a farm or two, like an army of robotic Johnny Appleseeds.
How about dropping them off in Chernobyl? Using the ample ambient radiation as their power source, they'll proceed to deposit phytoremediating flora and fauna. In future sites of nuclear disasters, they'll become part of the primary emergency response protocols.
Let's also send them to Mars or Titan or some extrasolar planet. A new breed of intergalactic planetary landscape architects capable of exploration and terraforming: fast, cheap, and out of control.
Powered this time by dust devils, they will seed entire ecosystems, cultivating and pruning for centuries. And even when the planet has been fully colonized, they will still be marching across the landscapes they had created. Inorganic and extraterrestrial they may be, no one is going to dispute that they're an inalienable part of the planet's natural history.
They will also become central figures in the colony's mythology as well. Around machine oxygenated campfires across the planet, terraformers will entertain themselves with stories of The Creation that might as well have been written by Ovid. “The Animaris geneticus wasn't manufactured by NASA, but rather the result of incestuous and bestial trysts between the Gods and the First Colonists,” is how future Aesops and fabulists will start to spin their yarn.
As a way of maintaining social cohesion in a still unforgiving place, colonists will scare their extaterrestrial children with ghost stories of disobedient youths snatched from their beds in the middle of the night by these ancient beasts, who then imprisoned them inside their skeletal frame as their pneumatic creaking, clicking, trilling howls fill the terraformed air.
“It could only happen in space,” NASA's interplanetary gardeners explain. “A tiny bubble of air hangs suspended inside a droplet of water. The droplet rests in the cup of a delicate green leaf, yet the stalk doesn't bend at all.”
On gravity-laden Earth, however, “[t]he air bubble, lighter than water, would race upward to burst through the surface of the droplet. Meanwhile, the leaf would be busy tipping the heavy water onto the floor below. Everything would be in motion, the picture a blur.”
As it is, the photo can be upside down or even sideways and still get the same photographic result.
So if and when space gardens have outgrown their primary role as agriculture or a sort of organic HVAC in the early stages of space colonization, and our intrepid colonists attempt a more recreational approach, well, how would they design it when one can float? When a wall is a floor is a ceiling is a floor is a wall in zero gravity. (Except when it's got a door.) A simple gesture like craning your neck up at a tree may no longer be necessary when it's a simple skip and a jump to the canopy. A truly three-dimensional space, not just up to 10 feet off the ground.
And fountains, infamous for their gravity-defying acts, may simply be a billion-dollar lava lamp, which would be awesome actually.
I suppose labyrinths may have to be reimagined as well. As Swiss cheese.
