Two years ago, a piece of a mountain in Japan self-mutilated. Luckily for us, it was captured on video, which can be downloaded from YouTube.
Hope no one is repulsed if I simply link to this classic BLDGBLOGpost, wherein Geoff Manaugh via John McPhee describes “how architecture can survive in the fallout paths of rock slides, debris slugs, and other flows of geologic mass wasting.” And also to this post here on Pruned, in which the formative potential of a different kind of disaster, i.e., the super-crowd, in landscape design is covered.
From the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, a scene from a “camouflage class in New York University, where men and women are preparing for jobs in the Army or in industry.” The assignments sound rather intensive: “make models from aerial photographs, re-photograph them, then work out a camouflage scheme and make a final photograph.”
But what would happen if you repeat the same process, only this time you make the model not from aerial photographs but from that final photograph of the camouflage scheme? And the same process gets repeated again. And again and again. Over and over until you've produced a township of simulated simulacra, a camouflage of a camouflage of a camouflage that actually gets built.
Calcutta (dir. Louis Malle, 1969) “With minimal narration by the director and very little context this is a kaleidoscope of stunning visuals from Calcutta, a city of 8,000,000 in the late 1960's: rich and poor, exotic and mundane, secular and religious, children and adults, animate and inanimate. Given only the images, the viewer can read any meaning she or he wants into the film.”
What Have I Done To Deserve This? (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1984) “A dysfunctional family in Madrid: Gloria is a cleaning lady, hooked on No-Doze, living in a crowded flat with Antonio, her surly husband, a cabby who adores an aging German singer he used to chauffeur; he's also a forger. One teen son sells heroin, the other sleeps with men. Her mother-in-law keeps bottled water and cupcakes under lock and key, selling them to the family. Two alcoholic writers cook up a plot to sell a manuscript as Hitler's memoirs, if Antonio will transcribe it in Hitler's hand. He won't, so they ask the German singer to intercede. Meanwhile, Gloria has given away one son to a sex-crazed dentist, and grandma picks up a pet lizard. Can this chaos be tamed?”
Night on Earth (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1991) “A collection of five stories involving cab drivers in five different cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.”
London (dir. Patrick Keiller, 1992) “A travelogue by architect-turned-filmmaker Patrick Keiller captures a year in the life of England's capital through the eyes of the enigmatic Robinson, whose literary reflections and historical speculations are voiced by an unnamed, unseen narrator.”
Café Lumière (dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003) “Commissioned by the Japanese studio Shochiku as an homage to its famous house director Yasujiro Ozu, it's a haunting look at Tokyo and the overall drift of the world that's slow to reveal its secrets and beauties.”
Kontroll (dir. Nimród Antal, 2003) “The massive labyrinthine netherworld that is the Budapest subway system provides the stunning setting for Kontroll, a high-style, high-speed romantic thriller in which the lives of assorted outcasts, lovers, and dreamers intersect and collide. One handsome young hero, one mysterious maiden, and one particularly nasty killer must conduct a race against time, trains, and destiny itself in their frantic pursuit of one another.”
Our post on tunnel-digging yesterday reminded us of an earlier one about Indian stepwells, wherein we imagined a robotized version going in search of aquifers — stretching, self-replicating, branching out in ever increasing spatial incoherence.
And then we imagined future landscape architects spelunking through this subterranean labyrinth, something that's a cross between a karst terrain and an M.C. Escher print. Presented with the dark and the unknown, each one of our adventurers wonders how much they want to explore. They ask of themselves:
How deeply am I willing to go into the wilderness?
As a landscape design problem, it is truly worth contemplating.
How can we access the wild?
How much of it can we handle?
How deeply do we allow the tyrannical claws of the A.D.A. and other institutional regulations to extend into the wilderness?
At which point do we allow for the loss of control, from which one may begin to experience moments of unexpected wonder, terror, even compound multiple fractures?
Where is the limit of designed access?
How much longer can we allow tourists have access to Yellowstone National Park knowing that underneath the expertly designed tourist infrastructure lies a supervolcano long overdue for a cataclysmic eruption?
How deeply are we willing to allow urbanization creep into the wilderness before wildfires, floods, avalanches, animal attacks, earthquakes, mud volcanos, and dormant super Ebola-HIV hybrids push back with catastrophic results?
How much urban density can we allow over tectonic faults, in the shadow of a volcano, besides an overzealous river meander, on the paths of hurricanes, tornados and tsunamis?
How much can you handle seeing the government spend billions of dollars in shoreline fortifications and in subsidized insurance policies to protect oceanfront mansions, summer cottages, and exclusive and discriminatory golf courses — mostly benefiting the few and the rich, and which in an era of rising sea levels are downright idiotic — before you and all the other taxpayers without beach properties, i.e., the vast majority of the population, erupt into a rampaging murderous mob?
How much are we willing to allow for the genetic manipulation of the wilderness?
And how much of that are we willing to introduce back into the landscape?
According to a months-old Popular Science article, the next generation of fish farmers will cultivate their crops inside retro-futuristic flying saucers reminiscent of 50s sci-fi flicks. A prototype of which lies about 2 miles from the shores of Hawaii and 40 feet down below the surface.
Inside this underwater cage, some 100,000 silvery fishes swim around a central steel column. “They are adolescent moi,” we are told, “also known as Pacific threadfin or Polydactylus sexfilis. For the first 50 days of life, the moi are raised on land, in a series of progressively larger tanks—from fertilized eggs smaller than grains of salt to two-inch fingerlings. The young fish are taken by boat to the submerged cage and pumped into it through a long tube. The moi swarming around the spar now each weigh half a pound. But in a few months they’ll have doubled or tripled in size. At that point, the moi will be harvested and sold at fish markets and to top restaurants across Hawaii, where they are a much-coveted delicacy.”
And outside the cage, “[s]everal sandbar sharks circle the cage, their hungry eyes fastened on the fish of kings.”
While the prototype mentioned above is tethered to the ocean floor, there are plans for an untethered version with “remote-controlled thrusters to maneuver within ocean currents.”
Cliff Goudey, who directs the Center for Fisheries Engineering Research at MIT, “envisions a flotilla of Ocean Drifters, each filled with hundreds of thousands of fingerlings in Florida and set loose in the Gulf Stream. The warm Caribbean current is like a river within the sea, carrying the cages across the North Atlantic and delivering the by-then-grown fish to markets in Europe.”
If open-ocean aquaculture turns out to be a bust, however, you could always turn them into a tourist attraction — mobile aquariums in a continuous transoceanic loop around the world, perpetually migratory, each one housing a swirling vortex of self-organizing non-Euclidean topology.
From one of the pages of Modern Mechanics and Invention, scanned and transcribed here by Modern Mechanix, we learn that “one of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home.”
And he was quite the mole: digging and removing the dirt without the help of heavy machinery, Dyar still managed to excavate “almost a quarter of a mile of tunnels,” which he “lined with concrete. The deepest passage, illustrated in the accompanying diagram, extends 32 feet down.”
In case you're wondering: yes, Dr. H. G. Dyar is Geoff Manaugh's nom de plume. So watch out California, his tunneling activities will undoubtedly compromise the tectonic integrity of the San Andreas Fault.
Meanwhile, a recent BBC News article reports that “an Italian sociologist has taken up residence in an underground cave, where he is hoping to spend the next three years of his life” in order to “better understand the body's natural cycles.” And apparently this would not be his first subterranean self-exile: “In an earlier attempt, Mr. Montalbini's sense of time was shifted by a lack of exposure to natural light,” explaining that “when [he] remained 366 days underground, [he] had the impression of only spending 219 days.”
A couple of things: 1) Was it the lack of landscape or the incredible abundance of landscape that messed with his internal chronometer? Quite a lot of people would tell you of having spent hours in a mall and of having walked for miles and miles through its shopping aisles and quaintly-named corridors without having realized it.
And 2) can you design a landscape in which your sense of time is absurdly skewed, wherein you think you've spent an hour fumbling about in the dewy darkness but in actuality you were there for a whole week, perhaps a lot longer? Or vice-versa? The Super-Mall-of-America and the Super-Hospital-Waiting-Room.
Meanwhile, we're hoping to stumble upon some examples of Tsunami Baroque, Hurricane Baroque, and even Avalanche Baroque, those mind-bogglingly beautiful fusions of landscape and architecture.
Living in Indonesia must be very trying these days: “First came the 2004 tsunami. Then Indonesia was afflicted by the Merapi volcano and a major earthquake in Yogyakarta. Now, a heavily populated region of East Java has been consumed by an unstoppable 'mud volcano' that may have been caused by a gas- and oil-drilling project.”
“The geyser,” we are told (in fantastically descriptive prose, by the way), “bubbles, gurgles and occasionally emits loud bursts, constantly spurting steaming, inky dark mud from the bowels of the earth. The putrid stench is sometimes interspersed with the odor of petroleum. The plume occasionally contains larger amounts of hydrogen sulfide, producing sulfur's telltale odor of rotten eggs.”
But no one knows for certain what's causing the eruption; how long it will continue; who's to blame, i.e., how much is the drilling company to blame; and how to stop it. If anything, it may take “[m]ore than 100 magicians, shamans, and witches,” the “Queen of Bali,” and “hordes of engineers and scientists” to plug the hole.
In a totally unrelated but nevertheless visually related event, here finally is the answer to a long-standing question here on Pruned: what if Busby Berkeley had a handful of depth charges?
And still yet another completely different but visually related phenomenon, “geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the 'air' have been discovered on Mars.”
All they need now are some “environmentally sound” boardwalk, one or two interplanetary park rangers, and vacationing Martian terraformers.
