Alluvial Fan

Another from the USGS Landsat Project: “A vast alluvial fan blossoms across the desolate landscape between the Kunlun and Altun mountain ranges that form the southern border of the Taklimakan Desert in China's XinJiang Province.”

Marvelous!

“Ground truth”, or: Wanted: Fake Moon Dirt

(Photo courtesy of NASA.)

Again, while in the process of searching for images of the Asteromo, I came across this year-old article from Space.com: “If humans are going back to the Moon for real, there’s need for counterfeit lunar materials. Known as simulants, tons of fake lunar soil is likely needed to assure that future explorers can sustain their stay on Earth’s neighboring Moon.

“Any thought of setting up machinery that converts lunar regolith — that’s the Moon’s topside rug of rock and dust — into building materials, solar cells, or fuel, water and oxygen supplies — demands a lot of beforehand work.”


(Salad greens, tomatoes, and citrus trees growing in lunar soil samples from the Apollo 15 mission.)

Quoting the article further: “Tons of lunar simulant, called JSC-1, were produced years ago under the auspices of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, hence the name. Made from volcanic ash of basaltic composition, JSC-1’s composition mimicked many of the attributes of lunar mare soil samples.”

To establish “ground truths,” as it were, with local landscapes simulating alien landscapes.


(A false-color photograph of the moon used in interpreting surface soil composition. Image courtesy of NASA.)

Not really following a direct line of thought here, but I wonder when will the moon have its own USDA Soil Survey Map — or these fake moon dirt their own taxonomic classes — in which landscape architects can check their potential agricultural productivity (how many bushels of corn, for instance, can they yield); floral and faunal habitation (hardwood or coniferous or herbaceous); structural support capacity (dwelling with basements or dwellings without basements); gradient (good, moderate or severe); hydrological management concerns (wetness, slow refill, erodible), etc.

So that an avowed soil survey map addict can curl up in bed, coffee in hand and maybe some post-rock in the background and why not with these soil maps as well, and just have a good read.

Everyone knows what I'm talking about, right?

Article:
Leonard David, “Wanted: Fake Moon Dirt.” SPACE.com (24 January 2005)

Future Tense:
Lunar regolith

Komsomolets

From the USGS Landsat Project: “This early spring view shows a rectangular maze of collective farms near the city of Komsomolets in northern Kazakstan. The walls surrounding the farms are actually dense rows of trees that serve as windbreaks. Snow has piled against the trees, which along with the accompanying shadows gives the scene a 3-dimensional appearance. The windbreaks were planted shortly after collective farming began in northern Kazakstan in the 1950’s, when it became evident that wind erosion of the soil was a problem. Also shown is a major roadway extending from lower right to upper left, crossing the Tobel river near Komsomolets, which appears as a dark circular patch mid-way up the left border of the scene.”

Encyclopedia Retrofuturologica

While searching for images of Asteromo, I stumbled upon Fabio Feminò's gargantuan futurological collection. Here's one image taken from the gallery Il Futuro Visto dal Passato.


(The future iPod-Segway Outerwear, as envisioned by Syd Mead. Public spaces will never be the same.)

Asteromo

(From Paolo Soleri, Arcology: City in the Image of Man, 1969.)

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.


(“Complexity, miniaturization, frugality, inwardness, interdependence, ecological balance, 3-dimensionality — all principles of arcological design — are all necessary characteristics for a space habitat.”)

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.


(An asteroid Asteromo. Illustration by Roy G. Scarfo.)

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.”


(“Man, standing head toward the axis of rotation, will be enveloped in a solid ecology.” Illustration by Roy G. Scarfo.)

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.


(The astronaut training site Crater Field in Cinder Lake, Flagstaff, Arizona, as a prototype for the Roadside(memorial)america© Asteromo Cemetery.)

Future Tense:
Where the earth is the sky is the earth

Hill of Crosses

(Photo by Dries Willems. Source.)

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.


(Photo by Dries Willems. Source.)


(Photo by Dries Willems. Source.)

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.”

Roadside(memorial)america.com

(Depending on whom you ask, roadside memorials are poignant, ghoulish eyesores, dangerous, unconstitutional, necessary therapeutic devices, macabre, or hollowed ground. All images taken from here.)

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's tomb 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.

In the Archives:
Roadside America

Displaced Pasture

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.