Conceived in the 1960s by architect Paolo Soleri, who coincidentally started the desert techno-ashram Arcosanti, an Asteromo is “an asteroid for a population of about 70,000 people. It is basically a double-skinned cylinder kept inflated by pressurization and rotation of the main axis...the weight of a person will vary from zero at the axis to a fraction of his earthly weight on the ground. He will be able to fly without the need of any power devices.” In other words, to get around this outside-inside ellipsoidal earth, you do a starting jump and then simply float away, guided perhaps by a tether system emulating the trajectories of honeybees. Here where the earth is the sky is the earth, your office might be directly above/below your home, that is, if such distinctions still exist in this spacebound utopia.
For those preferring not to fly, there will be “Dantesque promenades at different levels of physical prowess — from weak (center) to strong (periphery),” which leads us to wonder if there will be class stratification in this arcology-in-space based on gravity.
While Soleri's design involved metal-clad cylinders, a prior plan by futurologists Dandridge Cole and Donald Cox proposed using actual asteroids, fusing and sculpting them with the heat from solar mirrors to form the gigantic geodesic interior chamber “in much the same way as a glassblower shapes a small solid lump of molten glass into a large empty bottle.”
As described here, future landscape architects will knock out an asteroid out of its gravitational orbit and then “[d]rill a hole down the middle of [the] asteroid — about a kilometer (3,280 feet) in diameter — and pack the cavity with water ice. Reseal the ends with the original material and heat the mass with giant mylar-film solar mirrors. By the time the heat reaches the center, the mass will be semi-liquid and the explosively expanding steam that results when the ice at the core is heated to the same degree will inflate the molten asteroid like a balloon.”
Moreover, attendant to Asteromo is Cole's concept of the Macro-Life: “This vehicle or creature of the Macro-Life could move (with rocket propulsion), grow (given to a food source under shape of natural resources drafts from other asteroids), could answer to the stimuli through its optical sensors and electronic, to think with the brains of its human colony and its computers, and, finally, reproduce.”
So one asteroid then two then four and pretty soon Earth will have its very own Kuiper Belt of geosynchronous bioplanetoid organisms in constant mitotic cell divisions.
And in death, they'll simply drop down to Earth in a blazing, funerary meteor shower towards their cratered necropolis.
While browsing around here for images to use in a previous post, I was reminded of the Hill of Crosses near the city of Siauliai, Lithuania.
From the Catholic Church of Lithuania: “In the beginning of the 20th century the Hill of Crosses was already widely known as a sacral place. In addition to many pilgrims visiting, it was also a place for Masses and devotions. The Hill of Crosses became of special importance during Soviet times – this was the place of anonymous but surprising persistence to the regime. The Soviet government considered the crosses and the hill a hostile and harmful symbol. In 1961 wooden crosses were broken and burnt, metal ones used as scrap metal and stone and concrete crosses were broken and buried. The hill itself was many times destroyed with bulldozers. During the 1973–1975 period about half a thousand crosses used to be demolished each year without even trying to do this secretly. Later the tactics became more subtle: crosses were demolished as having no artistic value, different 'epidemics' were announced forbidding people to come into the region or the roads were blocked by police. The Hill was guarded by both the Soviet army and KGB. In 1978 and 1979 there were some attempts to flood the territory. Despite all these endeavors to stop people from visiting the Hill, crosses would reappear after each night.”
The New York Times recently had an article on the proliferation of roadside memorials, which indeed seem to dot — if not now, then soon will be — each and every mile of America's highways and byways.
Usually DIY affairs crafted out of crosses, balloons, teddy bears, flowers and Ziplocked photos but now can also be purchased commercially from online sources such as roadsidememorials.com, they are the very intimiate and very public lamentations for loved ones killed in auto accidents. They mark and sanctify where death had occured.
“Something happened in American culture when the Vietnam Wall went up and there was an outpouring of offerings in front of it that no one was expecting. It became more acceptable to express personal grief in these public areas.”
But those expecting Varanasises to start materializing alongside the Lincoln Highway or L.I.E. or the Dan Ryan Express or some other concrete Ganges meandering through the American landscape may have to temper their daydreams for a bit, as anything in the US that rests on some mercurial internal logic, such as memorializing our dearly departed, will invite twitchy, bureaucratic fingers to rein all of that in with central, regulatory control.
Take for instance Montana and California. While they don't object to memorials, they only allow them “if alcohol was a factor in the crash.” Wisconsin and New Jersey, meanwhile, “limit how long the memorials can remain in place.” And “Florida, Colorado and Texas will erect a nonreligious marker at the scene of a death. Missouri allows memorials but encourages victims' families to participate in the state's adopt-a-highway program instead.”
Also, “Delaware is taking a different approach, establishing a memorial park near a highway exit in hopes of discouraging the roadside shrines. The park will include a reflection pool and red bricks — provided free to the loved ones of highway accident victims — with names inscripted to honor the dead.”
Still, parts of the US are quite receptive: “Often called descansos, a Spanish word for 'resting places,' roadside memorials are most common in the American Southwest. Most researchers believe they descend from a Spanish tradition in which pallbearers left stones or crosses to mark where they rested as they carried a coffin by foot from the church to the cemetery. Because of this heritage, the memorials are protected in New Mexico as 'traditional cultural properties' by the state's Historic Preservation Division.”
A few things:
1) It's only a matter of time (if not already) before roadside memorials become as iconic as the Land Survey grid, the gas station and the clover-leaf highway interchange — that is, a crucial part of the parageographic experience of the American landscape.
2) We should definitely reinstitute the ancient practice of siting cemeteries along traffic arteries: the celebration of death again a part of daily life. Besides the occasional shuttered malls, exuberant auto dealerships, and monolithic grain elevators, the ride up to Chicago from points southern can be intensely boring, even the political billboards and “Adult” signage have lost their amusement value after several passes.
But what if Interstate 57 looks decidedly Roman or Subcontinental — or imagine a hysterical combination of a Hindu cremation ritual, a New Orleans jazz funeral march, Jim Crace's quivering, and a High Baroque Requiem mass plus the nonstop visual, aromatic and aural assault from this thanatological mixture. The drive can be much livelier, in other words.
3) Why not a pyramid or a baker'stomb or statues in relief and in the round or an Eisenman or the winning entry in the Annual International Roadside Memorial Student Design Competition?
4) In a hundred years or in the next decade, pilgrimage routes crisscrossing the country will be very much well-established with all the varying roadside caravansaries stitched scenographically together — a tourist circuit populated by fans of vernacular America and by readers of Roadside(memorial)america.com.
Jump (Adam) by Dutch artist Job Koelewijjn. Watch him and a companion surgically remove the patch of Dutch countryside — soil, ditch, worms and all — from its quaint surroundings.
Today is World Wetlands Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Wetlands, or the Ramsar Convention, in Ramsar, Iran in 1971.
Throughout history, wetlands have been vilified, feared and ostracized as the breeding grounds for malaria, yellow fever, and probably the entire menagerie of Ancient pestilential miasma. Considered useless, a wasteland, an obstacle to a civilization's Manifest Destiny, power, and glory. Cursed by architects, e.g. Vitruvius, and civil engineers for their anti-classical instability and suppleness. Deemed a cesspit. Sulfuric. Methanous. A neverending putrescence that poisons the air of nearby cities. The abode of the Swamp Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the boogey-man; the hiding places of escaped murderers and pederasts; the secret rendezvous of satanic occultists; and where incestuous cousins come for their tryst. Dante and Milton have certainly demonized them. The embodiment of sin and impurity. The darkest expression of a corrupted inner self.
The anti-Eden.
That wetlands came under nonstop systematic military-agricultural-industrial eradication programs, that suffocating them out of their own hydrology has been a cause célèbre of empires and nations since time immemorial, should thus come as no surprise.
Because to destroy wetlands is to be civilized.
Fortunately, we now realize the myriad benefis they offer to society. And there truly are many: a defense against hurricanes, tsunamis, and the less energetic but no less destructive normal ebb and flow of ocean waves; a water purification system, or “the kidneys of the landscape”; a habitat for fish and wildlife, some of which are endangered; a “biological supermarket”; flood storage and mitigation; a key biogeochemical recycling complex; an atmospheric filtration system; an ecological phytoremediating machine; a cheap alternative to municipal waste water treatment. Etc.
Eat your heart out, green roofs!
So perhaps today, one should offer lengthy benedictions and some offerings, maybe a lamb or two, in celebration of this joyous occasion. Or even sacrifice a virgin. Wetlands are that deserving.
Cloud seeding, or the manipulation of clouds by chemical means to change precipitation patterns, is scientifically unproven. Even purported successes are said to rest on shaky statistical proof.
Nevertheless, many still see great potential in appropriating it as an effective water resource management tool in places where fresh water supplies are dwindling due to overpopulation and climate change. Which is why, as the Associated Pressreported last month, Wyoming is committing $8.8 million to a 5-year project to gauge its viability with unprecedented scientific rigor.
“Like most other Western states, Wyoming is rich in oil, gas, coal and other mineral deposits. What it lacks is simple: water.
“So, like other Western states, Wyoming is trying to conjure up rain by embarking on a cloud-seeding project to bolster mountain snowpack -- the reservoirs of the arid and semiarid West -- and create more water from spring and summer snowmelt.”
If Wyoming follows past tactics, expect to hear about fleets of aircrafts or ground-based anti-aircraft guns and rockets impregnating cloud systems with “a fine spray of silver iodide crystals” to coax extra inches of water out of them. Atmospheric sorcery.
Weaponized droplets to win the war against desertification and to stave off any future cataclysmic Hydrological War between arid Western states and the Great Lakes states and provinces.
Perhaps landscape architects will form outrageously successful sky writing businesses or become celestial propaganda insurgents under the employ of Voice of America.
It seems that a fake rock, The New York Timesreports, may briefly reignite the Cold War between Russia and the UK: “A grainy black-and-white video, broadcast on state television on Sunday night and shown repeatedly again on Monday, was said to show a British diplomat picking up a fake rock that was said to conceal a communications device used to download and transmit classified information through hand-held computers.”
Placed near a leafless tree to add, I suppose, more naturalism to an otherwise fabricated still life, “the rock, the size of a watermelon, and the device, said to be able to transmit and receive data at distances of more than 60 feet, were seized near Moscow, prompting a search across the city for similar device.”
One has to wonder how many other rocks and stones and boulders were overturned, inspected and shaken, provoking perhaps mildly amusing Heidegger meets Monty Phyton soliloquies: “Is this fake? Hello? Is this thing on?” (In Russian.)
Or how many deciduouses and evergreens were stripped and frisked. Knowing how trees can be great masters at disguise, I imagine this militarized tree hugging love fest may have played out on an unprecedented scale.
Perhaps in a decade or so, we will be told that the entire Yellowstone National Park has been the real ECHELON listening post all along.
