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Malaspina
 A spectacular satellite image of Alaska's Malaspina Glacier in infrared, near infrared, and green wavelengths. Hopefully someone out there is wondering how (not if) you can build a visitor center atop Malaspina's undulating “tongue.”
Val Bavona
A couple of weeks ago and without much fanfare, as can be discerned from my end of the world, an entire Swiss valley was awarded the 17th International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens. The prize, which is awarded by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, recognizes responsible long-term stewardship of landscapes rich in natural and historical values.
 Val Bavona is a “short, rugged valley high in the mountains of Canton Ticino, Switzerland, an 'awesomely beautiful' place, gouged by the glacier, shaped by water and stone, in which a community (about a thousand people) has come to terms with the power and harshness of nature and over time has developed the ideas, the attitudes, the actions and the artefacts of human life when pushed to its limits.” And furthermore, the community of Val Bavona “continues to celebrate the beauty of a lifestyle reduced to essentials (houses still do without electricity) as a real utopia, a simple, practical way of continuing, conserving and innovating the resolute search for living space that has characterized its history, finding a use even for the great rocks dislodged in landslides by using the earth they brought down with them to create fragments of vegetable garden and pasture or by the exploitation of jagged ravines to make grondàn, cantìn and splüi.”   And here I'm inexplicably forced to mention the movie Careful by Guy Maddin. Set in an Alpine village tucked inside a valley perhaps not unlike Val Bavona, everyone must speak in whispers and suppress all loud noises — the cries of a baby, the bleatings of goats, even coitus — lest they want to set off a deadly avalanche. These forced propriety and decorum, however, lead to emotional repression. Here, landscape nurtures a lurid, baroque internal pathology which outwardly manifests itself into incestuous desires, suicide, self-mutilation and murder. And some people say Sick Building Syndrome is bad?  I am hardly saying that incest occurs at all at Val Bavona, and would only be speculating if I were to suggest that it may have ran rampant in the past, caused by anxieties over jagged ravines or impending landslides and secretly carried out in any one of the many colloquial architecture. I am, however, wondering if there are landscapes somewhere else that can induce such aberrant pathology, landscapes that are the antithesis of Healing Gardens. Or how about landscapes that somehow have been transformed by pathology. Are prairie restorations, for instance, the result of a self-perpetuating quest for redemption? I'm sure that visiting a patch of prairie, reconstructed or otherwise, can result in a prolonged irrational dependence on Claritin. (I'm forced again to mention another movie here — Safe by Todd Haynes.) So if after visiting a site by Ken Smith or Martha Schwartz or Peter Walker and you started having migraines, nose bleeds, or seizures, let us know. And if any doctor consultation and expensive therapies failed to treat your symptoms, after which you joined a cult-like desert commune and now spend your nights holed up in a futuristic igloo isolation chamber, let us know about that, too. Or better yet, start a blog, and we'll link to each and every one of your posts.
Crashed
Please pardon the recent inactivity. Five weeks ago, my hard drive suffered a major crash, the sort of complete and systematic failure that instantly erases months, or years in some cases, of labor into the nothing-evermore. Gone. Sayonara. Or to impulsively hijack an oft quoted Gertrude Stein phrase: There is no there there.
Suffice to say that in between bouts of hysterical weeping and sudden, intense flashes of Frostian awareness, I've been trying to recover ever since. It wasn't a total disaster as I originally feared though, but unfortunately, all Pruned-related materials were lost. The blog now survives precariously in the servers of Blogger. Irregular posting will be the status quo around here as I try to refill my now severely diminished archives and recreate my notes and drafts to the nearly two months worth of future posts that were wiped clean during the meltdown. But hopefully, some semblance of regularity will return.
MILF:05 “The Best Things In Life Are Free”: Selections of Feature Films from the Internet Archive
 Le voyage dans la lune (dir. George Méliès, 1902) This short film from the earliest days of the cinema follows a group of astronomers on a journey to the moon. Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) The great Expressionist classic with Werner Krauss as Caligari, the fairground showman who hypnotizes his servant (Conrad Veidt) into committing murder at night.” M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1931) “A series of schoolgirls are murdered by a psychopath who terrorizes a large city and is hunted by the police through a network of beggars. Inspired by the real-life 'vampire of Dusseldorf,' Fritz Lang's great film is one of the key films of German Expressionism. Peter Lorre's performance as the murderer is one of the great screen performances of all time.” Things to Come (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1936) “A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primative localized communities. In 1966 a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organisation which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world's population is now living in underground cities. In the year 2035, on the eve of man's first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.” Swamp Women (dir. Roger Corman, 1955) “The film follows undercover police officer Lee Hampton after she infiltrates a prison, befriends three female convicts, and helps them all escape. In reality, this planned escape is part of a larger plot to find a diamond stash hidden deep within the swamps of Louisiana.” Atom Age Vampire (dir. Richard McNamara, 1960) “A stripper is horribly disfigured in a car accident. A brilliant scientist develops a treatment that restores her beauty and falls in love with her. To preserve her appearance the doctor must give her additional treatments using glands taken from murdered women. His unexplained ability to turn into a hideous monster helps with this problem but does nothing to win her love. The doctor's woes multiply as the police and the girl's boyfriend begin to close in on him.” Feature Films / Internet Archive MILF:04 The World MILF:03 Nanoscapes MILF:02 Spatializing the Marvelous: The Musicals of Busby Berkeley MILF:01 Figures in the Field MILF MILF:06 Thick City
Prunings XX
 On Derek Jarman's garden. On some crazy bike lanes. More here. On the security features of the newly redesigned Washington Monument grounds. On London's guerrilla gardeners. From the BBC: “Striking at night, armed only with shrubs and plants, they set out to brighten up roundabouts and verges.” On NYC garbage. Real garbage. For just $50. On a design research study for the reuse of Silverlake Reservoir in Los Angeles.
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
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. |
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