Muslim pilgrims in the next Hajj will see a new four-tiered Jamarat Bridge, a sort of multi-limbed amoeba of reconfigurable inflow and outflow ramps, emergency exits, and subway tunnels directing the flood of supplicants safely through the rocky landscape of Mina, and curiously ornamented with anemone-like efflorescences above the pillars on the upper level.
The bridge has been the site of numerous disasters in the past, with the most recent one occurring in 1426H (January 2006) when nearly 400 people died during a stampede. The reconstruction, authorities say, will lessen the risk of such disasters from happening in the future.
The new design, which was developed in consultation with Dirk Helbing, a professor in crowd dynamics at the Dresden University of Technology, et al., will be complemented by a reorganization of the streets leading up to the bridge, and a time schedule and route assignments as determined in real time through video monitoring and on-site surveillance.
Moreover, to ease the flow of people, the jamarat were previously modified into elliptical pillars/walls with the help of Crowd Dynamics Ltd. using similar computer crowd behavior simulations.
Finally, one has to ask: fifty years from now, when pilgrims visiting Mecca number in the hundreds of millions, will the Jamarat Bridge be rebuilt again to something resembling the 10 Mile Spiral?
About three hours northwest of Mexico City, in the Parque EcoAlberto, a reporter from The New York Times got to experience “one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.”
For about $18, you get to cross deserts, hills, brambles and riverbeds, and have men playing Border Patrol guards chase after you and taunt you from somewhere in the dark: “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”
Interestingly, the organizers received financial help from the Mexican government.
The article also tells us that “the idea of tourists’ aping illegal immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.”
What the organizers should do next is join forces with these Latvian hoteliers, and develop a whole series of packaged reality tours, recreating death marches, diasporas, and other mass displacements of people.
For instance, rather than experiencing the Cold War holed up inside a building, you set out on a gulag-bound train, inside a boxcar packed with fifty other adventurers, and with only an inch or two opening between the wooden panels through which you can view the passing beauty of the Russian steppes. You try reading Solzhenitsyn, of course, but there aren't nearly enough light, and the sound of metal grating on metal and that smell — what is that smell! — make it difficult to concentrate.
If warm weather is to your liking, there's the Bataan Death Tour. Searing temperatures. Humid air — thick, gelatinous, in your crotch. Sun beating down heavily on your head. The din of the forest. The specter of cholera. Hired Filipinos as Japanese soldiers barking orders.
Also on offer is the Armenian Death Tour. But as this would be impossible to recreate in Turkey, a substitute for the desert of Deir ez-Zor will have to be found in France.
On blogs discovered recently or otherwise, wherein the first three are the recorded observations by recipients of the 2007 John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship from UC-Berkeley, and the last is maintained by the Design Trust for Public Space.
The collaborative Supersudaca engages in what the group calls direct architecture. Writing in the new issue of Monu Magazine, they describe that this is “at a scale smaller than the building but at which effects can have urban proportions nevertheless. At a scale where nobody claims competence, there aren’t any responsibilities nor is there guilt. There we can exercise the knowledge of architecture by practicing a no-budget urbanism of minimum resources but maximum impact. A space where the main tool is ingenuity, where projects are executed without means or intermediaries.”
One such project is an anti-urinal banner for a neighborhood in Lima, Peru. “Since law is not enough a dissuasive element for controlling incontinent bladders, more powerful forces will have to be appealed. Nothing is more respected in this city than Jesus and Sarita Colonia, the informal Peruvian saint which protects those who operate outside law. The combination of such holy powers should assure its operability both on formal and informal believers.”
And judging by the pictorial narrative, it seems to have worked.
So speaking of public urination, Spiegel Online reported recently that Berlin's Holocaust Memorial became one massive public toilet in the first few months after it opened in 2005, which should have surprised no one as its many dark passages provide enough privacy.
The problem was mitigated when a temporary wooden pavilion with shops and toilets was built nearby, only to worsen during last year's World Cup. Permanent service buildings and public toilets are now called for.
In other words, appealing to decency and reverence is no substitute for good design. No amount of sacredness, historical importance, and even beauty can fully immune places from the incontinent.
So embrace it completely, after all it is surely most common public ritual, the most universal means of experiencing landscape apart from walking and seeing; or don't design anymore enclosed “contemplative” spaces and inward-folding, self-obscuring corners; don't give Richard Serra a commission; install obtrusive surveillance systems; give away free stadium pals; or...?
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.
