Last week, occasional tipster Chris D. sent us an email that instantly put us into an uncontrollable state of giddiness. He writes:
I live in Holland which is very flat, so there's nowhere for the kids to go sledding when it snows. However, the Technical University of Delft has a library that's a sort of modern architecture grass-roofed four-story gently-sloping hill. When it snowed a week ago I took a few pictures showing the kids going crazy sledding down the library.
Also in the email were some links, including the architect's website, where we read that “the vast lawn is lifted on one edge like a sheet of paper and shapes the roof of the new library. A roof that can be walked upon. The grass roof of the library is freely accessible for walking and lounging, creating a new amenity for the whole campus.”
So perhaps not only can this building open up new multi-use strategies for urban open spaces but also, one hopes, inspire Alps-less and Rockies-less cities to create viable bids to host the Winter Olympic Games. Mt. Fuji or the Arctic Circle need not have to be nearby. A bit of artificial snow and some dramatic re-contouring of terrain, and cities unblemished by tectonic uplifts can compete with the likes of Salzburg, Sochi and Jaca.
Chicago, for instance. Here at Pruned HQ, a new Delftian library could serve as the venue for aerial and moguls freestyle skiing. Or the halfpipe.
Instead of taking a ride on ski lifts, alpine skiers will instead ride on elevators in the city's newest skyscraper up to their starting gates before slamming down on the building's sloping façades.
And rather than through a forest of Christmas trees populated by reindeers and other cute woodland creatures, cross country skiers will navigate their way through restored prairie flora and reanimated Pleistocene megafauna at Millennium Park v2.0, a new sprawling green roof covering subterranean parking garages, railyards and even the West Loop segments of the Dan Ryan, Kennedy and Eisenhower Expressways.
No doubt Chicago's Pritzker family will ask their lackey Frank Gehry to design the luge, skeleton and bobsled tracks to be sited at this new park.
And why not a hockey stadium arena atop the figure ice skating venue atop the speed skating tracks atop the Medal Ceremony Plaza right on Block 37, further densifying downtown. The Über-Loop.
In other words, the first truly urban winter olympics, one that will also please the legacy-minded IOC when it comes to post-games use.
One also hopes that the monopolistic hold on Olympic master planning by the big landscape architecture firms (Sydney/Hargreaves Associates; Beijing/Sasaki; London/EDAW) can be broken finally, allowing for mid-size and emerging studios to be hired.
Simon Norfolk's thesis is straightforward: landscape is a function of war.
In parts of London, for instance, “the Roman stones are still buried beneath the modern tarmac. Crucially, it needs to be understood that the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter - a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army that could move quickly and safely along these paved, all-weather roads. It is extraordinary that London, a city that ought to be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers and modern international Finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.”
So not by island-making tectonics, alluvial scouring, gravitational erosion, photosynthesis, or even supernatural wizardry.
It's no surprise then that Simon Norfolk went on an enviable trip to Ascension in the South Atlantic.
Where it seems that the paradisical-sounding island is not simply an occasional lithic extension of the Earth but a gigantic surveillance machine: a weaponized island. Hardwared and networked into the global ECHELON infrastructure to eavesdrop on each and every communication of each and every person on the planet. What is spoken in the caves of Afghanistan is readily picked up in Ascension.
Certainly for some, a manufactured Fantasy Island.
I'm certainly left to wonder: which came first — the island or ECHELON?
Take equal parts Merzbau and your choice of amusement park of the American roadside vernacular variety; add a dash of Gregor Schneider for some kick and a dollop of Teletubbyland; mix all that in a Target® Michael Graves bowl; throw in one or two Richard Serra toruses if you'd like.
Designed by the artist Shusaku Arakawa and poet Madeline Gins and “[o]pened in October 1995, the Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park is an 'experience park' conceived on the theme of encountering the unexpected. By guiding visitors through various unexpected experiences as they walk through its component areas, the Site offers them opportunities to rethink their physical and spiritual orientation to the world.” Can you train astronauts there?
Perhaps Virgin Galactic might require its future space tourists to log in a few hours at Yoro Park as part of their preparation in addition to visits to Baikonur. Or the now cash-strapped NASA substitute time on the centrifuge or on the vomit comet with an afternoon stroll at the Site of Reversible Destiny.
In any case, to get the most out of the park, be sure to follow the instructions, which read more like Zen koans.
Instead of being fearful of losing your balance, look forward to it (as a desirable re-ordering of the landing sites, formerly known as the senses).
Try to draw the sky down into the bowl of the field.
Use each of the five Japans to locate or to compose where you are.
If accidentally thrown completely off-balance, try to note the number, and also the type and the placement, of the landing sites essential to reconstituting a world.
Frequently swing around to look behind you.
If an area or a landing site catches your eye and attracts your interest to the same degree as the area through which you are actually moving, take it up on the spot, pursuing it as best you can as a parallel zone of activity.
Make use of the Exactitude Ridge to register each measured sequence of events that makes up the distance.
Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person.
Wander through the ruin known as the Destiny House or the Landing Site Depot as though you were an extra-terrestrial.
In and about the Kinesthetic Pass, repeat every action two or three times, once in slow motion.
Meanwhile, check out more photos of the park by Liao Yusheng here. Jaunty angles, crazy scales, party colors, graphic landscaping.
On J.G. Ballard, a Flickr photo pool. “Drained swinmming pools in suburban landscapes, gated communities with their security video surveillance, highway embankments, deserted airport concourses, the post industrial nightmare of the end of the western empire.”
On sampling the park, exploring “the social history of a downtown city square in Montreal using sound, image and GPS sensors” and looking “at the ways in which memory is inscribed in space, drawing on field recordings, oral history, and archival material to form a deeply-layered mediascape.”
Edenfern™ has been shown to remove arsenic deposited in the soil through heavy industrial and agricultural activities. And does so without the benefit of genetic manipulation.
“Discovered in the southeastern U.S. by university researchers, this beautiful fern has a unique ability to soak up arsenic from the ground into its fronds, which may be clipped and disposed of safely. With a powerful cleaning action 200 times stronger than in other plants, the fern quickly lowers soil arsenic levels. Use the edenfern soil cleaner if you know arsenic is in the ground, or even 'just in case' - because whether or not arsenic is present, the fern serves as an attractive addition to a lawn or garden.”
So while they're giving you peace of mind in peace and quiet™, they're sucking out poison and carcinogenic chemicals. Hope they can also suck out shit?
Obviously, I'm repeating myself here, but this fern is worth mentioning again, a second time to point out that it is commercially available exclusively from Edenspace Systems Corporation. The name sounds mildly sinister, nevertheless the company offers actual working solutions to environmental degradation: phytoremediation of lead, uranium, chromium, and other metals, metalloids and organic compounds; brownfield site development and use; wetlands restoration and protection. Etc. No superficial cosmetics. Just heavy duty stuff.
An air-conditioned landscape-within-architecture-within-landscape architecture-monument-landscape as proposed by the engineer Charles-François Ribart for the site where the Arc de Triomphe now stands in Paris. I personally prefer Ribart's. Where else can you now dine in a forest in the underbelly of an elephant? The mad modern Parisian traffic might be circling outside, but inside you're refreshed and calm, cooled down by an elaborate internal pachyderm hydrology.
POSTSCRIPT #1: For a much larger and color version of the image, go here.
If Peter Yeadon had his way, citizens of Toronto would now be happily feeding cloned sheep and petting human-ear-clad mice amidst bioluminescent vegetation at the Transgenic Zoo.
Situated in an urban park in downtown Toronto, the relocated Toronto Zoo would be supplemented with Dr. Moreau's menagerie: “The bioengineered beings are a stock of genetically modified creatures that are already available to us today, and will be tomorrow. Through recombinant DNA practices, we already make beings that heretofore never existed. We have spliced phosphorescence genes from fireflies and jellyfish into plants and animals to make them glow in the dark. We can easily change the color of peppers, even the taste. We have cloned goats, transgenically modified with spider genes to secret spider silk for military and industrial applications. These are 'designer' plants and animals of the biotech sector.”
One wonders what fantastic disembodied, self-living bio-souvenirs would be available at the gift shop.
But that's not all. Further blurring the line between living and nonliving, between the organic and inorganic, the zoo is envisioned as part of a “mixed development wherein humans live and work alongside animals in their habitats,” an unnatural combination that wouldn't be possible unless artificially assembled.
Like cloning. Like zoos. Like gardens.
In a hair and nail salon, for instance — at the zoo! — a polymer developed for growing human organs such as a liver or heart would be “used to decoratively cultivate and harvest growing parts of the human body” or as “cladding to support a snake-like skin that exfoliates and continually renews the facade.”
Which brings up endless scenarios of weather, air pollution, and even a raging smallpox epidemic affecting changes to the epithelial surface and tissued structure of buildings. Landscape as a modifier of architecture. Or landscape architecture.
The building is sick, and that's a good thing.
And: in trying to decide which new fashion to have for 2010, perhaps you can visit your plastic surgeon's petting zoo to have a look — and feel — at your choices of nose, ears, or limbs. After you've made your decision, you can help raise the donor animal, feed it lovingly with genetically modified vegetables grown in your prescribed allotment garden, and watch your face develop, your eyelashes lengthen on the back of a pig.
Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning — no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics — other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.
Look for them in the spring catalogues of Martha Stewart Living.
