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Proto-mississippian hydroengineering
Are these Rube Goldberg machines or the playthings of future hydroengineers?
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Theatrum Machinarum
La Machine de Marly
Are these Rube Goldberg machines or the playthings of future hydroengineers?
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Theatrum Machinarum
La Machine de Marly
Waiting
Some amazing photos of pay phones in Africa from The Payphone Project. In some places, they can be quite active communal spaces.
Unfortunately, it's a different story in the U.S. and elsewhere. They're dead spaces.
For some reason, I've come to associate pay phones with architectures of waiting. Or landscapes of waiting. The anticipation of a call, or the prank call, ticking silently but surely like a bomb counting down to an as yet unknown detonation time. You can even watch Colin Farrell sweating, quivering, crapping his pants, waiting to see if Kiefer Sutherland shoots him in the head, all the while an entire New York City block erupts into pandemonium. And of course, all it takes to neutralize the anxious terrain of Metropolis begins with a phone booth.
Much has been written about architecture as event. Frequently cited as a classic example are those flying buttresses keeping so many gothic cathedrals upright. From a very early BLDGBLOG post: “They're events of gravity channeled downward toward the earth's core; they're the building always on the verge of falling apart – and then not falling apart.” I suppose Hoover Dam can be described as an event: tons of concrete and the entire Colorado Plateau in a delicate dance for equilibrium (and counter-equilibrium) with hydrology and gravity.
But can you situate architecture as event in the larger context of landscape as waiting? Can we say that Notre Dame Cathedral was built to ride out tourists and lost Dan Brown fans, biding its time until its buttresses reach a critical structural point and collapses in on itself? And Hoover Dam ticks and tocks away the centuries until the Colorado River has eaten away the canyon walls?
Last I've heard, the Army Corps of Engineers will rebuild New Orleans's levee system, this time bigger, stronger, and better, whatever that means. No doubt they're anticipating another Katrina or an even more damaging one. Judging from precedents, however, it won't be entirely immune. So a city waits. Perhaps somebody decides to build levees of levees. Are there levees of levees of levees? The landscapes of waiting.
Meanwhile, how do quaint Swiss villages wait for the next avalanche? How is Tokyo waiting for the next big earthquake? San Francisco for Los Angeles? Yellowstone for the next major wildfire or even for the impending cataclysmic eruption of its supervolcano?
Ultimately however, I'm more intrigued by the idea of a landscape in which you're perpetually waiting. Godot finally arrives, even Guffman and the Messiah, and yet you keep on waiting. And while you're waiting, you go and tend to your garden, plant some cucumbers, prune some trees, water your roses. It doesn't come, whatever it is. You're waiting. Still. So you decide to build a pergola, go to TruValue, and buy some lumber. It's a beautiful pergola, the best in the neighborhood. But rather than admiring it, checking out the views from inside, you take a look at your watch. Twice. And twice again. The summer solstice arrives. And here comes the winter solstice at last, finally. But you only stare at the horizon. Summer and winter again. You harvest your crops. Everything else wilts and dies. But still you and everyone else wait, tense, ecstatic, and apprehensive. Speculating. North America returns to the equator. New landscapes, new species. You wait. The sun becomes a red giant. You wait.
Unfortunately, it's a different story in the U.S. and elsewhere. They're dead spaces.
For some reason, I've come to associate pay phones with architectures of waiting. Or landscapes of waiting. The anticipation of a call, or the prank call, ticking silently but surely like a bomb counting down to an as yet unknown detonation time. You can even watch Colin Farrell sweating, quivering, crapping his pants, waiting to see if Kiefer Sutherland shoots him in the head, all the while an entire New York City block erupts into pandemonium. And of course, all it takes to neutralize the anxious terrain of Metropolis begins with a phone booth.
Much has been written about architecture as event. Frequently cited as a classic example are those flying buttresses keeping so many gothic cathedrals upright. From a very early BLDGBLOG post: “They're events of gravity channeled downward toward the earth's core; they're the building always on the verge of falling apart – and then not falling apart.” I suppose Hoover Dam can be described as an event: tons of concrete and the entire Colorado Plateau in a delicate dance for equilibrium (and counter-equilibrium) with hydrology and gravity.
But can you situate architecture as event in the larger context of landscape as waiting? Can we say that Notre Dame Cathedral was built to ride out tourists and lost Dan Brown fans, biding its time until its buttresses reach a critical structural point and collapses in on itself? And Hoover Dam ticks and tocks away the centuries until the Colorado River has eaten away the canyon walls?
Last I've heard, the Army Corps of Engineers will rebuild New Orleans's levee system, this time bigger, stronger, and better, whatever that means. No doubt they're anticipating another Katrina or an even more damaging one. Judging from precedents, however, it won't be entirely immune. So a city waits. Perhaps somebody decides to build levees of levees. Are there levees of levees of levees? The landscapes of waiting.
Meanwhile, how do quaint Swiss villages wait for the next avalanche? How is Tokyo waiting for the next big earthquake? San Francisco for Los Angeles? Yellowstone for the next major wildfire or even for the impending cataclysmic eruption of its supervolcano?
Ultimately however, I'm more intrigued by the idea of a landscape in which you're perpetually waiting. Godot finally arrives, even Guffman and the Messiah, and yet you keep on waiting. And while you're waiting, you go and tend to your garden, plant some cucumbers, prune some trees, water your roses. It doesn't come, whatever it is. You're waiting. Still. So you decide to build a pergola, go to TruValue, and buy some lumber. It's a beautiful pergola, the best in the neighborhood. But rather than admiring it, checking out the views from inside, you take a look at your watch. Twice. And twice again. The summer solstice arrives. And here comes the winter solstice at last, finally. But you only stare at the horizon. Summer and winter again. You harvest your crops. Everything else wilts and dies. But still you and everyone else wait, tense, ecstatic, and apprehensive. Speculating. North America returns to the equator. New landscapes, new species. You wait. The sun becomes a red giant. You wait.
Landscapes as Diagnosis
Star Pruned commenter e-tat has a new blog. There are only three posts so far, but what it lacks in frequency, it makes it up in sheer speculative brilliance. In the most recent entry, e-tat takes on Semantic Landscape, a biomedical information retrieval and visualization tool using the language of geography. Data mining, literally.
Here's the most succulent bit: “Distinctions between the body and landscape will be blurred in the new practice of geomedicine and the related science of medical geology. Spa treatments and garden retreats will be internalised, with microbiotic centres of horticultural therapy (also). Conversely, parallel or complementary practices of landscape surgery, medicinal gardening, pharmo-remedial therapies and other site-specific modes of treatment will be established and treated as symbiotic aspects of whole-person medicine. Patients will inhabit the relevant landscapes, and the landscape will be subject to regimes of health, cure, and where relevant, mortality. Consequently, existing medical procedures will have to take on the symbolic aspects of geography: transplants will be regarded as relocations, with attendant vehicle hire and organisation of removals; surgery will be regarded as an exclusion or death in the family, with attendant funeral services; and, routine checkups will be regarded as terrain mapping exercises, bringing us back to the images above, and their implication for the discourses and practices of remediation at previously unexplored scales.”
But what happens when these symbolic terrains start to resemble actual landscapes?
The geography of lung cancer, for instance, matches the peaks, valleys and biomass color gradient of Yosemite Park. And the cartography of AIDS corresponds with the dizzying contours of the Grand Canyon.
Will people stop visiting these treasured national parks for fear of contracting a fatal disease?
Or how about imagined landscapes? What happens when long considered paradisiacal terrains become the classic diagnosis for the plague? Or after an abortion, your biomap now looks like the Garden of Eden.
A bit about landscapes as therepeutic devices here
Here's the most succulent bit: “Distinctions between the body and landscape will be blurred in the new practice of geomedicine and the related science of medical geology. Spa treatments and garden retreats will be internalised, with microbiotic centres of horticultural therapy (also). Conversely, parallel or complementary practices of landscape surgery, medicinal gardening, pharmo-remedial therapies and other site-specific modes of treatment will be established and treated as symbiotic aspects of whole-person medicine. Patients will inhabit the relevant landscapes, and the landscape will be subject to regimes of health, cure, and where relevant, mortality. Consequently, existing medical procedures will have to take on the symbolic aspects of geography: transplants will be regarded as relocations, with attendant vehicle hire and organisation of removals; surgery will be regarded as an exclusion or death in the family, with attendant funeral services; and, routine checkups will be regarded as terrain mapping exercises, bringing us back to the images above, and their implication for the discourses and practices of remediation at previously unexplored scales.”
But what happens when these symbolic terrains start to resemble actual landscapes?
The geography of lung cancer, for instance, matches the peaks, valleys and biomass color gradient of Yosemite Park. And the cartography of AIDS corresponds with the dizzying contours of the Grand Canyon.
Will people stop visiting these treasured national parks for fear of contracting a fatal disease?
Or how about imagined landscapes? What happens when long considered paradisiacal terrains become the classic diagnosis for the plague? Or after an abortion, your biomap now looks like the Garden of Eden.
A bit about landscapes as therepeutic devices here
Future Sky
For those eager to find out, the correct answer to the Landscape challenge #3 is D — the perfect venue to witness the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies coalescing into a new galaxy. And here is a fantastic preview of that intergalactic collision from astronomer John Dubinsky and composer John Kameel Farah.
“The harsh reality of the distant universe with all of its violent interactions seems remote from our human existence and all might seem to be quiet and normal in our home the Milky Way. But it seems likely that in a mere 3 billion years, our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda and the Milky Way will fall together and have a close collision. They will likely merge and be reborn as a single giant elliptical galaxy over the course of another billion years or so. How might this metamorphosis play out and what might you see if you looked up at night over the next 4 billion years!”
And I have to ask: can landscape architecture, whose mastery of time distinguishes it from architecture and most other related fields, concern itself with time scales in the billions?
“The harsh reality of the distant universe with all of its violent interactions seems remote from our human existence and all might seem to be quiet and normal in our home the Milky Way. But it seems likely that in a mere 3 billion years, our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda and the Milky Way will fall together and have a close collision. They will likely merge and be reborn as a single giant elliptical galaxy over the course of another billion years or so. How might this metamorphosis play out and what might you see if you looked up at night over the next 4 billion years!”
And I have to ask: can landscape architecture, whose mastery of time distinguishes it from architecture and most other related fields, concern itself with time scales in the billions?
Vicksburg Harbor Project
My favorite group of images downloaded from thenow defunct Visual Images Database of the USACE Mississippi Valley Division.
All of which begs the creation of an Artist-in-Residence Program at the Army Corps of Engineers. Imagine what hydrological labyrinths would Mary Miss have constructed. Or what cryptographic alluvial hagiography of the Mississippi would Robert Smithson have written; the encryption key is in the meanders. Michael Heizer in coitus at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory meets John Deer meets ThyssenKrupp Fördertechnik. And perhaps Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with Naoya Hatakeyama might be permitted the use of a small nuclear warhead.
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
My favorite group of images downloaded from the
All of which begs the creation of an Artist-in-Residence Program at the Army Corps of Engineers. Imagine what hydrological labyrinths would Mary Miss have constructed. Or what cryptographic alluvial hagiography of the Mississippi would Robert Smithson have written; the encryption key is in the meanders. Michael Heizer in coitus at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory meets John Deer meets ThyssenKrupp Fördertechnik. And perhaps Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with Naoya Hatakeyama might be permitted the use of a small nuclear warhead.
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Landscape challenge #3
A multiple choice question this time. What is the function of this concrete protrusion on the plains of the Negev Desert in southern Israel?
a) An ancient observatory for equatorial auroras.
b) A twenty-first century 10,000-square-meter “contemplative space” used by horny teens and meth junkies.
c) A twentieth century freedom sculpture commemorating an Israeli war victory.
d) A future astronomical viewing platform for the coming galactic collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies.
e) All of the above.
(Answer)
Is Dani Karavan a cargo cultist?
Landscape challenge #2
Landscape challenge #1
a) An ancient observatory for equatorial auroras.
b) A twenty-first century 10,000-square-meter “contemplative space” used by horny teens and meth junkies.
c) A twentieth century freedom sculpture commemorating an Israeli war victory.
d) A future astronomical viewing platform for the coming galactic collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies.
e) All of the above.
(Answer)
Is Dani Karavan a cargo cultist?
Landscape challenge #2
Landscape challenge #1