From Sleep City comes this photo of a hillside cemetery with a view of Nagasaki and its port, a cityscape within a cityscape, suggesting perhaps that it might not be such a bad idea to place cemeteries again in the center of town.
That is, not simply inside the city limit, but rather build them right in the middle of downtown — in front of City Hall; on the 20th through the 35th floors of a skyscraper; converted from disused subway tunnels; next to Macy's. And with the right business model, it might even become a highly profitable venture, helping to turn a once blighted section of the city into a thriving urban scene.
Convince celebrities and high society to be laid to rest inside, and it becomes a major tourist attraction. If, say, another Princess Di or a new River Phoenix dies unexpectedly and spectacularly inside and is then later buried there, then it could become the new Père-Lachaise. In other words, a cultural and community asset comparable to museums, theaters, schools and churches.
But best of all, the throngs of daily commuters will get your daily dose of healthy philosophical musings on life, death and landscape architecture as they pass them by.
Remember the Sundarbans, that “tapestry of waterways, mudflats, and forested islands at the edge of the Bay of Bengal” and home to an unbelievably huge array of endangered species? The Independentreported last month that one of the inhabited islands there, Lohachara, has “disappeared beneath rising seas.”
“Eight years ago,” we further learn, “the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.”
So while global warming is uncovering islands elsewhere, it is expected to wipe out about a dozen or so inhabited islands in the Sundarbans in the very near future, resulting in an estimated 70,000 sea level refugees.
The Sundarbans, in other words, couldn't be a more perfect setting for The Army Corps of Engineers: The Game.
As originally and inadequately fantasized here, you as a game player will be given an island, forested or slightly so, but intentionally inhabited so as to give your choices and actions an element of real consequence.
Without intervention, your tropical paradise will be wholly submerged exactly ten years from the start of play. And lest some bothersome Republican Apologist or a second-rate SF novelist obfuscate the science, the data predicting catastrophic sea level rise is irrefutable, its analysis impeccable and unassailable.
Per island is a lone seaside village. You will notice that its plan closely follows the principles of New Urbanism. This is probably because the principal game designers have read too much Nicolai Ouroussoff and consequently have turned homicidal and, like CIA expert waterboarders to a terror suspect, would like nothing more than to see anything that is quaint and earnest placed under simulated drowning and environmental stress, with the possibility of stylistic expiration or total erasure. That or perhaps they have been proselytised by Andrés Duany enough to have developed a raging hero complex for things wholesome and bourgeois.
But whatever.
The waters are coming, and you are tasked to prevent your assigned island and its village from sinking.
You will have a budget of $1 trillion, of course, and have all the structures and widgets ever used in the long history of hydroengineering — from the Garden of Eden to the Three Gorges Dam — to choose from: groynes, seawalls, revetments, rip raps, gabions, breakers, levees, dams, canals, bridges, channels, spillways, pumping stations, marram grass, artificial reefs, imported sand and fleets of trailing suction hopper dredgers.
As this is being sponsored by IKEA®, the challenge will be in their assembly.
Since you'll be taking on the role of Chief of Engineers and the rank of lieutenant general, you will command an army of migrant workers from Southeast Asia and the Subcontinent. Choose carefully among the enlisted, since each nationality has been genetically altered to display certain traits.
For instance, the Vietnamese are supremely creative, prone to fits of the imagination. The Thais, meanwhile, are practical and reliable, but there are instances when they get distracted completely. Filipinos are the most collegial and unlikely to disrupt your schedule to air out grievances on their quasi-indentured status. The Laotians are the most hardworking, though sometimes they can be too Western about certain things, namely wages and working conditions. The Indonesians have undertaken the most extensive training, but unfortunately, they lack imagination. The Bangladeshis hate the Indians and vice versa. Everyone dislikes the Pakistanis.
Again, draft wisely, for when the tenth cyclone of the season is on a direct course towards your island, the right mixture of skills and a collaborative team atmosphere will help you weather the flood.
With the grunt work placed on the shoulders and backs of others, you'll have time to strategize. So if you like, you can invite Cornelia Dean and Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock for a candlelight dinner to gather some pointers and maybe even create a cheat sheet. After dessert and a fine digestif, you hold a seance to channel Arnold de Ville and Salomon de Caus. Alternatively, everyone gathers around the bonfire on the beach and take turns reciting stories from The Deluge.
You could even organize a weekend charette or a hydrologically-themed lecture (and film) series. For something that's a bit more rigidly curated, you can host an international symposium showcasing the latest hydroengineering research by leaders in the field. Perhaps a design competition can coincide with this event. Countless students and emerging young firms — everyone oozing with talent, vigor, and infectious enthusiasm to make even the most cynical archiblogger weep for joy — will all send in wildly radical yet uncannily practical designs. Of course, your chosen jury will unfortunately have decided long before that they will only going to pick the OMAs and the Hadids and the Schwartzes and the Walkers. They'll laugh; so too will the Pritzker Laureates and the FASLAs. (Unless perhaps you're Rem Koolhaas and decide to throw a fucking hissy fit.)
Or at night, with the impending sea softly breaking against the dunes, you reflect upon the monumental task of lifting Venice above the lagoons for inspiration.
While still clinging on to the pretense that this game is real — and temporarily setting aside the fact that this post wasn't published primarily to point you to The Independent article, but rather to provide a dumping ground for 1) leftover images of TSHDs from this previously mentioned post; 2) some newly collected images of tetrapods; and 3) various links collected last year — here are some prohibitions:
3) You cannot use any part of your budget to embark on a worldwide conservation crusade or to fund research into alternative, non-polluting forms of energy.
4) Your island must remain tectonically stationary, as opposed to airborne.
5) You cannot mechanize your island and install too many A.I. systems that it becomes sentient.
6) It goes without saying that a strategy of managed retreat — arguably the most sensible but, inexplicably, rarely implemented planning approach to future coastal disasters — is not allowed, because that would be too easy.
So if this were indeed a real game, whoever keeps their island with roughly the same pre-game acreage above sea level the longest, wins.
That your construction looks like a Rube Goldberg machine or a psychosis-inducing theatrum machinarum will not count against you. In fact, you might be awarded a Jury Prize.
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.”
