Inspired by Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, I went for a southbound cruise on the Mississippi River. Starting from Kaskaskia, the geoannexed former state capital of Illinois, I went in search for other traces of past geopolitical skirmishes. There were many, it seems.
One certainly feels lucky to have these Mississippian provinces culturally homogeneous and politically stable. Because what would happen if a wildly meandering river forms the international boundary of two future countries who consider the other their mortal enemy? What if after a major earthquake redraws the path of this river and the capital of one gets geoannexed by the other?
Now what would happen if you designed a park on anyone of these shifting territories, and the boundaries follow the meandering course of the river, rather than fixed to an ancient silhouette. And both sides are as heterogeneous as Israel and Palestine. You've gone for a stroll one afternoon, only to find the next day that the park had migrated to the other side, where roses are considered invasive species and fountains symbolizes the excesses and economic immorality of a capitalist society. Or capital punishment is legal on one side, outlawed on the other, and public hangings have suddenly become all the rage again. Or the frontline merely bisects the park for now.
Here are some views of a terrific site specific installation, titled Flying Carpet, by the Iranian artist Seyed Alavi. It's fifty miles of the Sacramento River, or at least aerial photographs of it, woven onto a walkway bridge at Sacramento International Airport. A beautiful pairing for sure.
And then the lights come on: why not use less arcadian, more politically charged satellite images as well?
Fifty miles of the US-Mexico border fence, for instance. Or fifty miles of the San Andreas Fault coated onto an actual vehicular bridge, say, a Calatrava. Or fifty miles of Fisk's Mississippi or the future underwater trenches of the Arbonian Sea inside the corridors of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Or how about fifty miles of the Israeli security barrier inside perhaps this very brave synagogue.
Or even less as a sanctioned work of public art and more as a mode of political dissent: the bombed out shell of the al-Askari Mosque unfurled on sites heavily trafficked by Halliburton executives; the scarred landscapes surrounding an African diamond mine on the sidewalks of Antwerp's Hoveniersstraat or New York's 47th Street; the parched terrain of Mexico City during that city's ongoing 4th World Water Forum.
TerraServer appropriated as a guerilla tactic. Google Maps as acts of civil disobedience.
I can certainly imagine scenarios in which disaffected but still idealistic students in dorm rooms or co-ops or in a badly-lit cafe preparing for a rally the following day. Seated on mismatched vintage chairs, they enter long strings of longitude and latitude coordinates into TerraServer, all abstract sets of numbers but potentially worldchanging. Then a westward, eastward, northbound, southbound scopic drive all through the night in a drone of mouse clicks. Reading the landscape, strategizing with geography. Click. Click. Click. Icarus as an anarchist. And then, with their downloaded patches of terrestrial ecologies stitched together on Photoshop, they head on out to Kinko's for a late night print run, hoping against all hope that the plotters are working.
On security design: “ASLA seeks images of poor security solutions at public buildings to aid in bringing national attention to the persistent problems of security design.”
Just 24 of 101(!) low resolution mini-movies from the centerpiece installation of sLowlife, a traveling exhibition now at the US Botanical Garden. Be sure to cue the music.
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.”
