A cylindrical projection of Jupiter stitched together from photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its December 2000 flyby of the planet.
Can someone confirm for me whether or not the Army Corps of Engineers are salivating over this photo? Is it tempting them, taunting them to pack up all their trinkets — their weirs, flumes, levees, spillways, etc. &mdash and head on over to the gas giant to arrest its whorls and vortices in time and place?
The Giant Red Spot National Park. And no, it's not a dog park.
But as there really is no financial or ecological reason to be creating another national park, landscape astroengineers might just simply construct dentritic hyper-mississipian superstructures — a Jovian Theatrum Machinarum — to funnel its turbulent bands over and under, disrupting their neat parallel formation. Vortices against vortices. Cataracts against cataracts. All colliding and churning to the point when, despite falling short of critical mass and what the laws of physics might have to say otherwise, Jupiter collides in on itself and finally detonates, reborn into a star.
The Star of Fisk. The Star of Pruned? Perhaps there will be a naming competition.
This is a very old story, but it involves a perennial subject here on Pruned. Architect John Ronan apparently wants to turn Chicago's old main post office behemoth—located a mere block away from Sears Tower—into the largest municipal cemetery in the world. In Downtown Chicago!
I'm all atwitter.
Once the major processing and storage center for interstate commerce and communication, John Ronan wants to return the building to its former function, though this time to process and store something of a different sort: dead bodies — by the millions. And he sees them “floating up the Chicago River, driving down the Eisenhower, riding in on the rails.”
It's worth mentioning that Union Station and the Greyhound Station are a block away, and the Blue rail line, which connects directly to O'Hare International Airport, is even closer. In fact, it sits on top of rails, an expressway, and a subway. It could not have been better sited. The singularity of a spectral vortex. An axis mundi.
There are a lot things we like about the project. Actually, we like everything about it. Obviously at the top of the list are its location and its fidelity to the existing façade and superstructure.
Also at the top is Ronan's theatrical staging of a funeral: “A funeral barge floats silently down the Chicago River to the site where the Old Post Office once stood. A figure clad in white steps onto the river landing, and leads those gathered at the river's edge up an incline to the foot of the large, rusting steel doors. The figure knocks. A hollow echo precedes the slow opening of the doors to reveal a long hall lined on one side with chapels. The white figure leads the group to the open chapel where the ritual of life and death takes place. The rear wall of the chapel opens wide, leading the funeral party to the crypts above. Upstairs, the funeral procession winds through the glass crypts, past the reliquaries that hold souvenirs of lives now past. The reflection of candle flames flicker in the polished floor, animating the wind that passes through the open facade.”
In a lot of ways, Ronan's proposal finds close affinity with the current vogue in green burial. For instance, there are no water-guzzling grass lawns, and no lawns also means no toxic fertilizers to maintain a healthy, luxurious shade of green and to intimate a vision of Paradise to soothe grieving visitors.
Additionally, for a planned internment of millions of dead bodies, it's a highly efficient use of so little land, reusing, as it were, what's already there: “Seventy percent of what's in landfills right now is old buildings. The silliest thing would be to put a green building in its place [and] you carted away this three-million-square foot thing.”
Owing to its central location, the funeral cortege could make use of public transportation. If a CTA train car can be gutted and transformed into Santa's sleigh — with a Santa, his reindeers, elves and carollers merrily riding back and forth across Chicago, roofless(!!!) in the dead of winter — so can it be converted into a hearse.
Lastly, you can probably set the heater and air conditioner at very low levels.
“Landscapes are produced and maintained in ways that are largely unseen by those who happen to drive past, admiring the beauty of the landscape. Deeply embedded in the landscape are human costs invisible to the eye. In this paper we investigate some of the many social and material relations that underlie the pastoral views that characterize one particularly beautiful village. Bedford, a suburb of New York City, is a site of aesthetic consumption practices in which the residents derive pleasure and achieve social status by preserving and enhancing the beauty of their town. We explore the way in which the beautiful landscape of Bedford is internally related to the poor living conditions of Latino day laborers in a neighboring town, Mount Kisco. Global political and economic structures as well as the structure of local zoning, supported by a socio-spatial ideology of local autonomy and home rule, lie beneath Bedford's successful exclusion of its laborers and Mount Kisco's failure to keep out what they see as Bedford's and Latin America's 'negative externalities.' Our argument is that aesthetic concerns dominate social and economic relations between Latino immigrants and receiving communities.”
While on a recent clicker-happy run through the interweb, I stumbled upon this beautiful photo taken by Flickr user “haupthase.”
Of course, I can't resist quoting J.B. Jackson. On his time as an intelligence officer in World War II and how that experience had given him a heightened sense of environmental awareness, he writes: “the military landscape provided us with a spatial order dedicated to sudden and violent movement, a set of relationships based on total subordination and anonymity, and a sensory experience based on death and the premonition of death; it was the ugly caricature of a landscape. Nevertheless, it functioned, and even its horrors instructed us in what a good landscape, and a good social order, should be.”
In other words, to train better landscape architects, reinstitute the draft and send them off to boot camp. Embed BLA, MLA I, MLA II, and PhD candidates in combat missions, for in order to understand landscapes, one must experience how they “satisfy elementary needs,” how they “establish bonds between people, the bond of language, of manners, of the same kind of work and leisure, and how [they] should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relations; spaces for coming together, to celebrate, spaces for solitude, spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them.”
You might object, arguing 1) that you're a pacifist; 2) that you can probably acquire similar range of skills from somewhere else; and 3) that it all sounds very much like touchy-feely psychoanalytical drivel.
However, 1) landscape architecture is not a pacifist profession; 2) you can, but probably not in the very short amount of time available to you in college; and 3) the visceral, concrete quality of experience afforded by combat -- for instance, your best friend dies right in front of you, a bullet through his head, simply because someone had misinterpreted the topography, exposing the entire platoon to an ambush -- should translate into actual results, conditioning students to read landscape more critically and with keener perception.
To postscript an earlier wintry post, here are some awesome icy stalagmites sculpted by members of the Alaskan Alpine Club, where one can learn all the “non-standard stuff about mountain climbing.”
Admittedly, my interest in mountain climbing goes only so far as highly recommending the documentary Touching the Void and the neglected bergfilme of Leni Riefenstahl. I simply want to learn how to construct these monoliths.
And fortunately, the instructions seem pretty straightforward: first you attach your choice of nozzle head at the end of a garden hose and then “mix random parts of water and freezing air.” Sub-zero landscape architecture in no time.
Or if you adopt their uncompromising individualist philosophy and contempt of authority: arctic guerrilla gardening.
And then there's the upcoming 2018 Chicago Winter Olympics. Expect several of these colossal frozen spires standing side by side with the city's historic skyscrapers — one of which will be the venue for an as yet nonexistent winter sport. A skyline second to none. And for the sideshow, how about a WTC-esque twin installation at the mouth of the Chicago River? The site should still be empty.
Or farther afield, ridiculously vast fields of ice towers standing as a memorial to past and future glacial ages, where you can either do some climbing or ponder the question, what is the sound of an ice tower falling in the middle of a forest of ice towers?
It's amazing that no one has yet appropriated this freezing process to create X-treme Winter Vacation Hotspots. Better but still no less safer than K2. In Antarctica or Siberia or back in Alaska.
With ike™, you can gather incredibly rich, georeferenced spatial data sets with point-and-click precision and ease. Packed inside its relatively tiny but rugged casing reside a mobile GIS with a GPS, a digital camera, a compass, an inclinometer which eliminates the need for a tripod, and a laser distance meter. The laser, in fact, also eliminates the need to be on site, allowing for data collection to be conducted from as far away as 1km. The perfect accessory for The Bleex.
In a disaster scenario, for instance, you can photograph and map out the location of breached levees, downed electricity pylons, impassable points on roads and bridges, pockets of survivors, etc., all at a safe distance, then quickly disseminated at headquarters or analyzed on the field by yourself. And the photos, hopefully, should prevent, or at least reduce, the lies and obfuscations at future congressional hearings.
All it needs then is a blog editor and a wireless internet connection. Bloggers embedded as citizen soldier-engineers in post-apocalyptic disaster zones. Reading the terrain, directing aid relief traffic.
Once, for a school project, I was tasked to delineate the border of a large waterbody in a wetland using an ancient GPS device, getting as close as possible to the water's “edge,” whether accessible or not, and shouting at frequent intervals the coordinates to my partner. This had to be done a second time, in fact, after originally misreading the “edge” entirely — only to end up with mildly accurate, incomplete data sets, which someone then painstakingly entered into ArcGIS. Suffice it to say, with ike™, the entire process would have quickly produced far more extensive and far more accurate information. And also been a lot less wet.
