Carlos Barrios was an accountant for over two decades. It was a nice comfortable desk job. And then he quit. Now he dives into the sewers of Mexico City, into “the bowels of one of the most polluted cities on Earth,” amongst “garbage, bacteria, excrement, dead animals—even the occasional murder victim.”
You can watch him at work here, courtesy of National Geographic.
“In the darkness of the sewer,” we read from this years-old Washington Postarticle, “Barrios could see nothing. He doesn't bother to carry a light, because it would be of no use in the thick waters. He inched forward in his bright red suit, an airtight model that sealed away the disease all around him, feeling his way with his rubber gloves, listening in the darkness. He could hear the powerful, whirring pump that pushed the flow through a six-foot-wide pipe. His mission was to clear away the debris around it so it wouldn't back up into city streets. Thousands of homes have been flooded in the past by dammed-up wastewater.”
Nothing will bring your dinner guests to discuss ironically about urban blight, spectacularly failed city planning policies and grotesque economic inequalities faster than David Monsen's graphically neat wallpaper, Sunnydale Trailer Park.
Neo-Baroque for the socially conscious.
Or could this be a new form of environmental determinism? Plaster this all over the nursery, and you've got yourself the next Daniel Burnham. Use it to cover the walls of a kindergarten classroom, and you'll soon have a litter of future Baron Haussmanns. But whether that's a good thing or not will depend largely on the prevailing mood, fickle or otherwise, of landscape urbanists 20 years hence.
Next on the production line: Addis Ababa Slums, Harare Squatter City, Rio de Janeiro Favela, Casbah Algiers, Sadr City.
No, it isn't a long lost episode of Star Trek, but Ned Kahn's “tourbillion” installation art, a collaboration with architect Uwe Bruckner, for the Duales Systems Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.
This “dancing airborne funnel of whirling fog,” we read here, was 7 stories tall; powered by large turbines; fed with fog from an ultrasonic humidifier; and observed from a ramp wrapped around the cylindrical atrium.
What a Marvelous sight it must have been.
But as it is, we can only now see it writhing and screaming in this unfortunately compressed video. Fortunately, videos of Kahn's other works are available here. Similarly lo-res, but better than none at all.
Anouk de Clercq, Joris Cool, and Eavesdropper are your tour guides to Kernwasser Wunderland, a “deserted landscape” of “abandonment and brooding emptiness,” where the asphyxiated din and howls of a former ecology are replaced by the boisterous clicking of a geiger counter.
Wherever you might have gone to, listen! Hear that? That's your DNA being sliced, repaired, and then snipped again. Hear that feedback loop? That's you being genetically recombined into a subspecies. And those incomprehensibly mesmerizing chants — the crackling, humming, ticking, whirring, pulsing, buzzing, throbbing from the deep? Those are the birth pangs of new landscapes borne out of contamination. New biotopes for new species.
Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.
Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.
Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.
“This is evidence as far as we are concerned for planning terrorist attacks,” said an intelligence officer with the Royal Green Jackets battle group. “Who would otherwise have Google Earth imagery of one of our bases?... We believe they use Google Earth to identify the most vulnerable areas such as tents.”
Taryn Simon will be taking us on a tour through the “weirdness hidden in plain sight — on our sidewalks, along our roadsides and in our public rituals and spectacles” next March in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a volume available later that summer.
If you can't make it to the exhibition or can't wait for the book, The New York Times Magazine has published some of Simon's photographs, including the one above taken at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Contraband Room at the Kennedy International Airport: “Among the items seized from passengers in the 48 hours before the photograph was taken: African cane rats infested with maggots, Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, a pig’s head from South America.”
One wonders if these detention rooms might just be some of the most biologically diverse places in the lower 48 states.
Another photo takes a look inside the Avian Quarantine Facility New York Animal Import Center in Newburgh, New York. What we see caged are “African gray parrots and European finches, seized upon illegal importation into the U.S., in quarantine. Imported birds must undergo a 30-day mandatory quarantine in a U.S. Department of Agriculture animal-import facility. Before release, each bird is tested for avian influenza and exotic Newcastle disease.”
Again, seeing how empty the sky above Chicago is at the moment, one wonders if it's an ecological wasteland compared to these secret aviaries.
Considering that 1) public squares in northern climes generally turn lifeless during winter; 2) people become even deader once seasonal depression leads to suicides; and 3) landscape architects et al. are always looking for ways to improve the livability of urban landscapes — Perpetual (Tropical) SUNSHINE is thus worth investigating.
“This space is out of sync both temporally and climactically. A spatial screen, composed of 300 infrared light bulbs, transposes the state and image of a summer sun on the 23rd South parallel, thanks to live information transmitted by a network of weather stations all the Tropic of Capricorn and around the globe.
“Thus, the spectator can constantly track the path of the sun, thereby experiencing an abstract and never-ending, planetary form of day and of summer, across longitudes and time zones.”
Next up: Millennium Park's LED-tiledCrown Fountain gets retrofitted into blazing Prozac towers by CDC-licenced landscape architects.
