On January 29, 2007, strange cloud formations appeared over parts of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
“This strange phenomenon,” explains NASA's Earth Observatory, “resulted from a combination of cold temperatures, air traffic, and perhaps unusual atmospheric stability. The cloud blanket on January 29 consisted of supercooled clouds. Supercooled clouds contain water droplets that remain liquid even though the temperature is well below freezing, and such clouds are not unusual. According to the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) Satellite Blog, cloud-top temperatures ranged from –20 to –35 degrees Celsius. As aircraft from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport passed through these clouds, tiny particles in the exhaust came into contact with the supercooled water droplets, which froze instantly. The larger ice crystals fell out of the cloud deck, leaving behind the 'holes,' while the tiniest ice particles in the center remained aloft.”
Of course, we would also have believed a report telling us that Cy Twombly, Pruned's favorite 20th century painter, was simply putting together an atmospheric installation art for Houston's Menil Collection with a hijacked Boeing 747.
It seems that any American landscape can be turned into a battleground in the culture wars.
“In August 2003,” according to a news release from the Public Employee for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), “Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.”
However, “a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.”
Meanwhile, if you're interested in finding out just how wrong the scientific community is about the age of the Grand Canyon, Tom Vail regularly organizes rafting trips through the canyon during which, presumably, he preaches the eight evidences that support a catastrophic formation of the Grand Canyon, a global Flood, and a young earth.
And in one of these trips, a reporter from The New York Times tagged along.
So what we want to find out now is: how can landscape architects better design places wherein lies, hate, and idiocy can be disseminated with great success?
How does one, for instance, turn a Floridian seaside development into a seemingly eternal paradise, unblemishable by coastal erosion, sea-level rise, and hurricanes? Is there some sort of street configuration or a planting scheme that will make residents go: “If global warming is true, well, it's not that a big of a deal, and it's not gonna come here! Just look at this place!”
And how does one regrade a community park, or for that matter, the sacred precinct of Central Park, into an effective propaganda tool against homosexuality and same-sex marriage? Might this involve walking tours and buggy rides along reconfigured paths, freshly coated with porous asphalt and punctuated with carefully structured picturesquegardenviews of heterosexual couples and their strapping, handsome kids in familial bliss, complemented with scenes of equally heterosexual deers, birds and bunnies?
The national historic homesteads of America's founding fathers turned as headquarters in the crusade against the separation of church and state?
This surely must be old news to all, as it was the runner-up in last year's Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition, but we think it needs to be entered into our archives, so that it can hypertextually decorate future posts, endlessly referenced in the hopes that heretofore unrelated ideasand/orfantasies just might spontaneously coalesce into a new landscape paradigm in a violent reactive explosion right in front of our dumbstrucked faces.
So what exactly is it? It's a proposal by Mark Oberholzer to install double-stacked Darius turbines “into the barriers between highway lanes that would harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy,” which, in his original concept, is fed into the grid.
However, when Metropolis recently caught up with Oberholzer, we learn that he now wants to use that electricity where it is generated, as for instance, “integrating a subway or light-rail train right where the barrier is.” This, we also learn, “avoids energy losses that occur during transportation and eliminates the cost of adding extra infrastructure.”
“The ability to harness wind in an urban environment—where buildings impede airflow and installing 260-foot turbine towers isn’t exactly an option—makes his project particularly inventive.” Indeed.
In his novel, The Songlines, the peripatetic Bruce Chatwin tries “to get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime,” and learns, in somewhat rudimentary terms, that one “had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis — with one significant difference.”
“In Genesis,” Chatwin explains, “God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.”
And “each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.”
Furthermore, “a song can be thought of as both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.”
So, “in theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odyssey, writhing this way and that, in which every episode was readable in terms of geology.”
Illegal immigrants planning to cross the desert and enter the US on foot are to be given hand-held satellite devices by the Mexican authorities to ensure they arrive safely.
Those who get lost or fall sick during the dangerous four-day crossing will be able to activate the device, to alert frontier police on both sides of the border.
The satellite tracking service will require would-be illegals to register their intentions before setting off — a paradoxical move, given that secrecy is necessary for success — but Mexican authorities are predicting that about 200,000 devices will be handed out when the project is launched formally in the coming year.
I once thought - in fact, I still think - that it'd be interesting to grow a garden using only seeds and plants seized at the Customs office.
A garden of seized plants. Captured flowers. Find out what weird, hybridized landscape results. Take pictures of it and submit the film for an ASLA award. Write a new Pamphlet Architecture book about it.
Grow more of the things. Seize whole landscapes coming over the border. An 18-wheeler hauling an open truck bed gets stopped at the gate - because the bed is planted with seeds seized at Customs a year earlier. A small, somewhat disorganized garden grows. So of course, you let it through... It's going back to where it came from...
But you don't. You re-seize it. The loop starts all over again.
You take a dozen or two prospective immigrants. So as to minimize controversy, let's identify them as French.
Through an unimaginably improbable series of events — including years despairing about their country's economic model; being inexplicably listed on the FAA's no-fly list; and a Congress growing increasingly impotent when dealing with immigration reform — they find themselves outside the border of the US, looking in. Just beyond that grove of trees is Arizona.
And they've just eaten some fruits, you see, or brushed up against a pollen-field plant, indigenous to Mexico but not the desert Southwest — or, since this is a design project after all, you, the designer, have them swallow the seeds and lodge a few more on their persons, in their hairy chests, lanky arms, and perfumed armpits. And for good measure, you surreptitiously stuff their pockets with ones you've gathered from other exotic locales.
Then off they go.
Unfortunately, most of them will die. Without a map, they will get lost, and dehydration will come long before they reach Tucson. That or they get accidentally killed by members of the border militia or by wildlife, if distinguishable. But where they stumble and fall, a garden grows.
These gardens would then act like vegetated outposts, a constellation of caravansaries which subsequent border crossers can follow or add to. Wave after wave, and tragedy after tragedy, this new underground railroad would become as well-established and well-marked as elephant jungle tracks, and as easily traceable as a Songline.
A hundred years later, they'll become the de facto national memorial park for immigrant America, a landscape record for the migrant experience.
The Ellis Island of the Southwest.
To follow a trail there is to embark on a pilgrimage, a sacred reenactment of collective memory and a paean to the soul of the country.
VII.
Can you connect the dots?
Below is a map showing the locations of migrant deaths in 2003, as compiled from maps available on the website of Humane Borders. Red dots are deaths due to heat; yellow dots, unknown causes; and light blue, vehicles. In areas beyond the map, deaths have occurred due to exposure to cold temperatures, homicide, drowning, existing medical condition and train accidents.
The built-up area at the top is Phoenix, Arizona. The white line at the bottom is the US-Mexico border.
Daniel Traub has photographed a curious spaceship parked somewhere in the periphery of a Chinese city. Many more will soon be arriving, apparently: “China intends to build 400 new cities by 2020. We see all the elements of this new and contradictory world: homogenous, industrial parks and residential communities pressing against age old rhythms of villages and farms; the new rich living in gated communities next to migrant workers shanty towns; burning mountains of trash next to lushly watered golf courses and country clubs.”
Or: by an Act of Congress, Dugway Proving Ground gets transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Park Service.
Landscape architects are hired to turn the site as open and occupiable as all the other parks under the care of the NPS. Because why bar humanity for thousands of years from visiting the place when it can offer new ways of experiencing landscapes?
So they, i.e., the landscape architects, set out do what they do: master planning for uses, choreographing circulation, stagecrafting experiences, preservation, etc. Meanwhile, the CDC concocts treatments for Ebola, Avian flu, smallpox and all other bioweapons the U.S. military had played around with at Dugway.
Soon the first visitors arrive.
They swallow the pills and are immunized.
After a waiting period of a few minutes for the drug to take effect, they then set off on foot, backpacking from one square to another square, from one circle to another, tracing arcs, diameters and circumferences, each and every geometry carefully measured and inscribed on the parched Nevada landscape.
Sure enough, red marks begin to appear on their skin, turning blue, then to black. Cutaneous necropsy. Trigonometry has infected you with a plague. Maybe it's anthrax.
Meanwhile, you are inspecting some angles, their hypotenuse pointing NNE towards some distant, rock-strewn hills. A fog rolls in from aerosol fountains, then evaporates. Seconds later, your lymph nodes begin to swell and a rash starts to spread from your crotch.
But you worry not. It's all part of the tour: a fantastic voyage into militarized infection, from the initial cough to nose bleeds to coma to fully restored health.
There won't be any baby sneezes or sunburns or watery eyes or any of the allergic sort. Because after all, this is not Yellowstone, and you're certainly not on the beach. Camping here aren't made memorable with the mere brush up with poison ivy. That headache isn't caused by altitude sickness. It's something more terrifying, more sublime, more marvelous.
And so with your first contagion cured, you go explore another part of the park. Wide airport runways, a whole series of them, their perfectly straight chalked edges extending far to meet the horizon.
“What superlative surveying techniques,” you shout, perhaps quoting Maria Reiche, and all the while every orifice in your body begins to ooze with blood.
