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Prunings XXII
On IIT. Mies van der Rohe's citadel now offers a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture. This bit of news may be of little interest to a lot of our readers, but since Pruned is headquartered in Chicago, we think it's at least worth noting.
On urban traffic patterns in developing countries.
On solar-powered pavers. Obviously for use with Owen Jones' The Grammar of Ornament.
On air wells, dew ponds and fog fences, low tech versions of DARPA's dehumidifier.
On outsider gardens and gardeners.
On Jude Law. That's hot. Previously, Mark Ruffalo. Hot.
On IIT. Mies van der Rohe's citadel now offers a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture. This bit of news may be of little interest to a lot of our readers, but since Pruned is headquartered in Chicago, we think it's at least worth noting.
On urban traffic patterns in developing countries.
On solar-powered pavers. Obviously for use with Owen Jones' The Grammar of Ornament.
On air wells, dew ponds and fog fences, low tech versions of DARPA's dehumidifier.
On outsider gardens and gardeners.
On Jude Law. That's hot. Previously, Mark Ruffalo. Hot.
Advertisement: Crowd Dynamics Ltd.
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Counting Crowds
The Parkless Park
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
Got problems with crowds?
Do hundreds of people always seem to die from riots and stampede in and around your sporting venues every time the local team looses? And has one of your most sacred religious festivals become a little less of an ecstatic experience due to mass accidental deaths? What about some of your public spaces, have they lost their charm because of congestion?
Are your mass evacuation plans efficient enough? Do you want to be able to quickly device new ones whenever a disaster occur? Or maybe you want to mitigate the effects of the coming worldwide great pandemic?
Would you even like to accommodate even more people in your store and thus make a lot more money?
Do you have £443?
If so, then contact Crowd Dynamics Ltd. now.
Counting Crowds
The Parkless Park
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
Faraday's Wave Garden
First, read the research paper. The abstract is replicated below. Familiarize yourself with the mathematics, the materials, and the instruments.
Be sure to watch the video of the experiments as well. [mpg, 28MB] [avi, 4MB]
And so: you construct mega-scaled oscillating machines, ones that can create optimum viscosity without cornstarch, all which then get tossed into Lake Michigan. You watch as the waters begin to protrude, becoming a mass of hysterically delocalized pillars slithering upwards, outwards, onwards towards the shore. To Chicago.
Hydrology is coming to get you!
And not just you. The urban grid, Jefferson's Land Survey, Burnham's neo-classical city plan, even Frederick Law Olmsted's carefully constructured park systems — all dissolve as they meet the edge of chaos.
People will scream and faint; they will have nightmares for sure. But of course, we'd like to imagine that it will be greeted enthusiastically as yet another marvelous Chicago open space project: the New Millennium Park. The city's new watery skyline.
And then it becomes sentient. Uh oh.
Versailles in the Pacific
Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi
We observe stable holes in a vertically oscillated 0.5 cm deep aqueous suspension of cornstarch. Holes appear only if a finite perturbation is applied to the layer for accelerations a above 10g. Holes are circular and approximately 0.5 cm wide, and can persist for more than 106 cycles. Above a ~ 17g the rim of the hole becomes unstable, producing fingerlike protrusions or hole division. At higher acceleration, the hole delocalizes, growing to cover the entire surface with erratic undulations. We find similar behavior in an aqueous suspension of glass microspheres.
Be sure to watch the video of the experiments as well. [mpg, 28MB] [avi, 4MB]
And so: you construct mega-scaled oscillating machines, ones that can create optimum viscosity without cornstarch, all which then get tossed into Lake Michigan. You watch as the waters begin to protrude, becoming a mass of hysterically delocalized pillars slithering upwards, outwards, onwards towards the shore. To Chicago.
Hydrology is coming to get you!
And not just you. The urban grid, Jefferson's Land Survey, Burnham's neo-classical city plan, even Frederick Law Olmsted's carefully constructured park systems — all dissolve as they meet the edge of chaos.
People will scream and faint; they will have nightmares for sure. But of course, we'd like to imagine that it will be greeted enthusiastically as yet another marvelous Chicago open space project: the New Millennium Park. The city's new watery skyline.
And then it becomes sentient. Uh oh.
Versailles in the Pacific
Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi
So many interviews, so little time
Archinect's resident landscape architect Heather Ring interviewed Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, wherein post-industrial landscapes, phytoremediation, landfills and quarries, Duisburg-Nord, the poetics of civil engineering, and the toxic sublime are all covered. Plus more outrageously interesting topics.
Previously, Heather interviewed 3/5 of the crew of NIPpaysage, a landscape collective based in Montreal. Last year the group was a co-winner in the design competition for Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you're thinking of starting your own firm, this one's an excellent read.
We get to hear Julie Bargmann again via the brilliantly-named Terragrams, “a series of conversations about the fundamental, all too often invisible, role that landscape plays in our lives -- An open dialog with the people in charge of making, designing and thinking about our constructed landscapes.” And also Bet Figueras and Elias Torres. Be warned though that the spotty quality of the podcasts may drive you insane. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the Jane Amidon and James Corner interviews.
We're also still waiting for the complete interviews from the Landscape Legends Oral History Initiative by the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Only tantalizing tidbits of the interviews with Richard Haag, Ruth Shellhorn, Lawrence Halprin, and Walt Guthrie are available.
Care for more interviews? The Institut fuer Landscahftsarchitektur has six in its archive. The video interview of Alessandra Ponte is a must see.
And what's a laundry list of interviews without our two favorites of the year: 1) David Maisel by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Topics discussed include “Californian hydropolitics, the line between architecture and photography, 'replicant' landscapes, the dusty fate of human remains, Iceland, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Mars rovers, 9/11, and the aesthetic power of sterility.”
And 2) Wes Janz by Brian Finoki of Subtopia. Topics discussed include squatter urbanism, post-disaster landscapes, relief architecture, and low tech design tactics.
Finally, only because our post about an interview with Walter Hood by Andrew Blum for Metropolis was published a year ago almost exactly to the day, here it is again, wherein Hood confesses that he likes public space messy.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Tarnation! We forgot to mention the September edition of LAND Online Podcast, which include an interview with American Academy in Rome President Adele Chatfield-Taylor, and with Chris Hindle of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., discussing the second round of planting for the ASLA green roof.
Archinect's resident landscape architect Heather Ring interviewed Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, wherein post-industrial landscapes, phytoremediation, landfills and quarries, Duisburg-Nord, the poetics of civil engineering, and the toxic sublime are all covered. Plus more outrageously interesting topics.
Previously, Heather interviewed 3/5 of the crew of NIPpaysage, a landscape collective based in Montreal. Last year the group was a co-winner in the design competition for Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you're thinking of starting your own firm, this one's an excellent read.
We get to hear Julie Bargmann again via the brilliantly-named Terragrams, “a series of conversations about the fundamental, all too often invisible, role that landscape plays in our lives -- An open dialog with the people in charge of making, designing and thinking about our constructed landscapes.” And also Bet Figueras and Elias Torres. Be warned though that the spotty quality of the podcasts may drive you insane. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the Jane Amidon and James Corner interviews.
We're also still waiting for the complete interviews from the Landscape Legends Oral History Initiative by the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Only tantalizing tidbits of the interviews with Richard Haag, Ruth Shellhorn, Lawrence Halprin, and Walt Guthrie are available.
Care for more interviews? The Institut fuer Landscahftsarchitektur has six in its archive. The video interview of Alessandra Ponte is a must see.
And what's a laundry list of interviews without our two favorites of the year: 1) David Maisel by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Topics discussed include “Californian hydropolitics, the line between architecture and photography, 'replicant' landscapes, the dusty fate of human remains, Iceland, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Mars rovers, 9/11, and the aesthetic power of sterility.”
And 2) Wes Janz by Brian Finoki of Subtopia. Topics discussed include squatter urbanism, post-disaster landscapes, relief architecture, and low tech design tactics.
Finally, only because our post about an interview with Walter Hood by Andrew Blum for Metropolis was published a year ago almost exactly to the day, here it is again, wherein Hood confesses that he likes public space messy.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Tarnation! We forgot to mention the September edition of LAND Online Podcast, which include an interview with American Academy in Rome President Adele Chatfield-Taylor, and with Chris Hindle of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., discussing the second round of planting for the ASLA green roof.
Self-erasing Bolivia
The deforestation of Bolivia's tropical dry forest continues apace as the above false-color image shows. And no, it isn't the aftermath of some boozy rampage by Michael Heizer and some rogue scientists from Dugway Proving Ground. These Suprematist geometries are actually the physical results of a massive agricultural development program and the resulting intensive resettlement of people from the Andean highlands to the Santa Cruz lowlands.
In the scene above, “land use types are delineated with lines. Solid white lines show the locations of planned colonies, dashed white lines show spontaneous colonies, and dotted white lines show Mennonite colonies. All other regions of development are non-Mennonite industrial soybean farms.”
If you'd like to go on a scopic drive through the Tierras Bajas, download this placemark from the Google Earth Community and then fire up Google Earth.
Be sure to inspect the rather fascinating radial patterned fields. Visible Earth tells us that “[a]t the center of each unit is a small community including a church, bar/cafe, school, and soccer field-the essentials of life in rural Bolivia.” Which sounds or rather looks like a bastardization of the Green City movement.
In case you're wondering about the sustainability of some of the cleared land, they aren't. This entry from Business & Politics in Bolivia explains: “You shouldn't be surprised by the fractioning of the land, this is a common feature of 'ancestral' altiplanic methods of production. In post-colonial altiplano, land is/was inherited in such a fractional manner, and of course, with time, efficiency began to suffer. Eventually the mini-fundio became commonplace and nowadays, some communities subsist even under a 'surco-fundio' system. The pattern is being replicated in the Bolivian lowlands, despite the availability and knowledge of alternative production methods, we can only expect the same ultimate result for any redistributed lands. The fields illustrated in the photograph are not producing soybean or any other 'cash crops' such as rice or wheat, they are too small for efficient production.”
As always, then, there is jarring contrast between the messy lived experience on the ground and the hypnotic beauty of satellite imagery.
The deforestation of Bolivia's tropical dry forest continues apace as the above false-color image shows. And no, it isn't the aftermath of some boozy rampage by Michael Heizer and some rogue scientists from Dugway Proving Ground. These Suprematist geometries are actually the physical results of a massive agricultural development program and the resulting intensive resettlement of people from the Andean highlands to the Santa Cruz lowlands.
In the scene above, “land use types are delineated with lines. Solid white lines show the locations of planned colonies, dashed white lines show spontaneous colonies, and dotted white lines show Mennonite colonies. All other regions of development are non-Mennonite industrial soybean farms.”
If you'd like to go on a scopic drive through the Tierras Bajas, download this placemark from the Google Earth Community and then fire up Google Earth.
Be sure to inspect the rather fascinating radial patterned fields. Visible Earth tells us that “[a]t the center of each unit is a small community including a church, bar/cafe, school, and soccer field-the essentials of life in rural Bolivia.” Which sounds or rather looks like a bastardization of the Green City movement.
In case you're wondering about the sustainability of some of the cleared land, they aren't. This entry from Business & Politics in Bolivia explains: “You shouldn't be surprised by the fractioning of the land, this is a common feature of 'ancestral' altiplanic methods of production. In post-colonial altiplano, land is/was inherited in such a fractional manner, and of course, with time, efficiency began to suffer. Eventually the mini-fundio became commonplace and nowadays, some communities subsist even under a 'surco-fundio' system. The pattern is being replicated in the Bolivian lowlands, despite the availability and knowledge of alternative production methods, we can only expect the same ultimate result for any redistributed lands. The fields illustrated in the photograph are not producing soybean or any other 'cash crops' such as rice or wheat, they are too small for efficient production.”
As always, then, there is jarring contrast between the messy lived experience on the ground and the hypnotic beauty of satellite imagery.
“What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?”
Another pragmatic utopia, this one envisioned by Bruce Mau, in which Greenland harvests its melting iceberg water and market it to places with severely limited access to clean water, e.g. Africa.
According to the catalogue, which you can download from the website of the exhibition Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks, “Greenland's Home Rule government issued the first license to collect and export its melt water to Aquapolaris, a private company. In Beverly Hills, bottles of iceberg water sell for $10 U.S. each. And in Newfoundland, icebergs are replacing fish as the basis of new business opportunities. Every spring, icebergs from Greenland parade south, past the coast of Newfoundland. The same people who used to fish now harvest icebergs from a floating barge, using a grapple crane to break off chunks of ice. The ice is crushed, melted and stored in tanks. The water is used for free by the Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation to produce Iceberg Vodka.”
So instead of letting others profit from their own natural resource, instead of drowning Manhattan and Bangladesh, before all those tons of fresh water catastrophically disrupts ocean circulation and with it world climate, Greenland can bottle up the billions of liters of water flowing into the sea, and acquire a portion of the lucrative bottled water market. And it needn't be a big portion. As Bruce Mau calculates, for Greenland's 57,000 citizens, “controlling just one percent...produces an additional capital income of 62,000 euros.” With that much wealth, a country could create national infrastructure, improve educational services, and achieve economic, social and ecological sustainability.
Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, Bruce Mau writes that “[u]sing the ocean to transport bulk water is an industry in its infancy, but evidence of experiments and new technologies abound.”
For instance, the Medusa Bag, “a giant bag designed in 1988 by James Cran of Calgary, Alberta to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It can carry 1000,000 m3 of bulk water. The Norwegian Shipping Company used a similar bag to transport water in Scandinavia.”
Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks
Pharmland™
Another pragmatic utopia, this one envisioned by Bruce Mau, in which Greenland harvests its melting iceberg water and market it to places with severely limited access to clean water, e.g. Africa.
According to the catalogue, which you can download from the website of the exhibition Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks, “Greenland's Home Rule government issued the first license to collect and export its melt water to Aquapolaris, a private company. In Beverly Hills, bottles of iceberg water sell for $10 U.S. each. And in Newfoundland, icebergs are replacing fish as the basis of new business opportunities. Every spring, icebergs from Greenland parade south, past the coast of Newfoundland. The same people who used to fish now harvest icebergs from a floating barge, using a grapple crane to break off chunks of ice. The ice is crushed, melted and stored in tanks. The water is used for free by the Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation to produce Iceberg Vodka.”
So instead of letting others profit from their own natural resource, instead of drowning Manhattan and Bangladesh, before all those tons of fresh water catastrophically disrupts ocean circulation and with it world climate, Greenland can bottle up the billions of liters of water flowing into the sea, and acquire a portion of the lucrative bottled water market. And it needn't be a big portion. As Bruce Mau calculates, for Greenland's 57,000 citizens, “controlling just one percent...produces an additional capital income of 62,000 euros.” With that much wealth, a country could create national infrastructure, improve educational services, and achieve economic, social and ecological sustainability.
Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, Bruce Mau writes that “[u]sing the ocean to transport bulk water is an industry in its infancy, but evidence of experiments and new technologies abound.”
For instance, the Medusa Bag, “a giant bag designed in 1988 by James Cran of Calgary, Alberta to meet the anticipated requirement for large scale water imports to California as well as to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It can carry 1000,000 m3 of bulk water. The Norwegian Shipping Company used a similar bag to transport water in Scandinavia.”
Too Perfect: Seven New Denmarks
Pharmland™
Astrogeology
Gorgeous renderings of the geology of the Martian and lunar polar regions, just the right patterns to replace the rose windows of Notre-Dame. Because surely there's something more transcendent when one is lit with the creative primordial forces of alien landscapes, your entire body aglow with abstracted asteroid impact craters, volcanic ejecta and ancient river channels, rather than with dubious hagiography and occultish propaganda. Right?
The iconography of extraterrestrial landscapes
Gorgeous renderings of the geology of the Martian and lunar polar regions, just the right patterns to replace the rose windows of Notre-Dame. Because surely there's something more transcendent when one is lit with the creative primordial forces of alien landscapes, your entire body aglow with abstracted asteroid impact craters, volcanic ejecta and ancient river channels, rather than with dubious hagiography and occultish propaganda. Right?
The iconography of extraterrestrial landscapes