“Fed up with the cost of caring for the trees, with their errant fronds that plunge perilously each winter, and with the fact that they provide little shade,” Los Angeles has declared war on its iconic, though invasive, palm trees.
According to the New York Times, “The city plans to plant a million trees of other types over the next several years so that, as palms die off, most will be replaced with sycamores, crape myrtles and other trees indigenous to Southern California. (Exceptions will be the palms growing in places that tourists, if not residents, demand to see palmy, like Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards.)”
Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes us on a tour through the dizzyingly spectacular landscape of high-tech agriculture: from hermetically sealed chicken hatcheries as sterile as computer chip factories to geospatially precise cultivated fields where crops mature right on cue and on to utopian factories with frightening efficiencies but whose assembly lines would be the perfect setting for a Busby Berkeley musical.
No voice-over commentary and no interviews; just some choice music, and the “whirring, clattering, booming, slurping” hydraulic breathing of heavy machineries.
Designed by NL Architects, presumably with input from the local government and the public, the “intervention provides a quick solution to re-establishing the connection between the two parts of the divided township whilst also regenerating a space that had become dead, literally and symbolically in the shadow of the flyover.”
Moreover, this was the Joint Winner of the 2006 European Prize for Urban Public Space, a biennial competition organized by several architecture institutions.
A similar urban intervention in nearby Amsterdam is West 8's CarrascoSquare, whose vacuity and hilarious desire lines inscribed on its neatly drafted geometry only make me wonder if letting it be inhabited by the homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes and their tricks, the idled youths, migrant workers, hardy native grasses, and landscape architecture PhD candidates on so-called field research would simply be a better use of public space.
In the U.S. there is Louisville's Waterfront Park, designed by Hargreaves Associates. This is the Great Lawn. The same office was also commissioned to do a temporary installation for SFMOMA's Revelatory Landscapes exhibition, taking as their site the intersection of Interstate 280 and Highway 87 — “a forbidding, yet somehow common landscape.”
Finally, from the master of messy public spaces, Walter Hood, there is Splash Pad Park in Oakland, California. Although you don't get to see much of the design in the website provided, just imagine the teeming masses you see in the photos buying their groceries, cooling off in the fountain, displaying a bit of civil disobedience, or simply minding their kids and walking the dog are doing so underneath a heavily trafficked highway.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Walter Hood's finished website now include photos of Splash Pad Park.
The Amos Power Plant in Raymond, West Virginia, as seen from an ordinary backyard, and as photographed by Mitch Epstein, who coincidentally is part of ecotopia, the 2nd ICP Triennial of Photography and Video.
“In a time of rampant natural disasters and urgent concerns about global environmental change,” the catalogue tells us in that familiar bombastic messianic tone that so many often employ, “this exhibition demonstrates the ways in which the most interesting and engaging contemporary artists view the natural world. Shattering the stereotypes of landscape and nature photography, the thirty-nine international artists included in this survey boldly examine new concepts of the natural sphere occasioned by twenty-first-century technologies; images of destructive ecological engagement; and visions of our future interactions with the environment. Considering nature in the broadest sense, this exhibition reflects new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants, and—increasingly—frightens us.”
The exhibition ends 7 January 2007.
Those not living or traveling to New York before then are fortunate in that some of the artists have their own website. For instance, Mary Mattingly, featured earlier here in this post -- her entire line of post-apocalypse haute couture, New Time timepieces, and wearable homes are online.
Sam Easterson's animal and vegetable videos, which I once mistook to be part of an extensive surveillance network in the American West monitoring the mental condition of reclusive landart artists and alerting the Army Corps of Engineers whenever their earth moving activities compromise the tectonic integrity of Nevada -- well, a handful of them are here.
As for the others, a search through artnet should suffice. Hopefully, fellow bloggers will start downloading some of these photographs, and create their own personal surveys of ecotopias for everyone to view for free. After all, an admission price of $12 is obscenely extravagant; the best things in life should be free.
“Why build a one-off ride that will eventually lose its appeal when you can create an infinite number of rides by using a programmable industrial robot?” asks gizmag.
Indeed, why go through all the trouble of clearing the last remaining stands of old-growth forest to make way for amusement parks that would only further unsustainable ex-urban development and extend travel time for gas-guzzling über-SUVs, when you could be building them, say, in the Loop or Millennium Park in Chicago as an interactive kinetic sculpture?
Quoting the article at length: “German company KUKA Roboter GmbH builds industrial robots for the automotive, aerospace and foundry industries, among others. Its fully-programmable 5- and 6-axis robots can reach of up to 3.7 metres with payloads of 570kg and are employed around the world for applications such as material handling and machine loading. Kuka has partnered with Canada’s Primal Rides to provide a new fully interactive amusement ride. The KUKA KR 500 robot will be used as the building block of Primal Rides’ new robotic gaming ride. The interactive ride can be designed to match customer’s requirements in theme, intensity and realism and to cost effectively change themes to adjust to rider appeal.”
And you can order the rides singly or as a whole group of Robocoasters, “each with its infinite range of programming options and ride variants: lined up in a row and performing the same acrobatic ride program in perfect harmony.”
Or you can order the Octomone, a swirling, gyrating mass of mechanized tentacles not that taxonomically different from a triffid.
Next month Vancouver-based Polaris Mineral Corp., in partnership with the 'Namgis and Kwakiutl First Nations, will begin mining sand and gravel deposits from the Orca Quarry on Vancouver Island. Once extracted, they will then be transported via conveyor belts to waiting Panamax ships. Interestingly, parts of the conveyance system are submerged, supposedly, so as not to pollute the pristine view for passing hikers, kayakers, and mountain bikers.
Initially, most of what's mined there will be sent to the San Francisco area where “overall demand for construction aggregate is driven primarily by population growth and the resulting need for infrastructure expansion and maintenance.” Afterwards, who knows. Maybe soon all the new houses in the continental U.S. will be built entirely of imported Canadian soil. Or perhaps in the decades to come a freer global trade in islands and mountains will result in skyscrapers constructed entirely out of the Himalayas or interstate highways built from Pacific archipelagos, ingeniously self-erased before the impending sea-level rise had the chance to do so.
