To cap our unintended series of posts on sacred landscapes, let us point you first to contour crafting, a fabrication technology being developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis whereby “a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.”
And then to Gallica, from where you can download the following images of Etienne-Louis Boullée's designs for tombs and memorials.
It's rather unfortunate that Khoshnevis and Boullée did not live in same century. What beautiful collaborations they might have had.
And everyone could easily have ordered cheap Pharaonic mausoleums towering over cities and landscapes. Entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting hundreds of encapsulated monumental voids.
The last important bathing date of the half Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, is set for next Friday, February 16. By some estimates about 60 million people will have participated by the festival's end, and as mindboggling as that number sounds, even more pilgrims are expected to attend the Maha Kumbh Mela in 2013.
Here are some photos from Getty Images, which are copyrighted, hence the empathic branding. Nevertheless, the photos are still quite stunning.
So: how much electricity can be generated from 60-70 million ecstatic people walking, parading, running, crossing pontoon bridges, or simply splashing about? How many kilowatts can a teeming mass of people, roughly equal to the population of France concentrated into an area the size of three Central Parks, produce?
Say, for instance, a network of perambulatory channels is grafted onto Allahabad, the Ganges, and Yamuna, something resembling a High Italian Baroque fountain, or if one were to prefer something vernacular, a Mughal fountain, but in either case, unabashedly flamboyant in design and engineering, crazily interlooping, fractal, and stampede-proof.
It's a water feature writ large. The Maha Kumbh Mela Fountain.
And imagine then that these human aqueducts were somehow rigged to harness the kinetic energy of tens of millions flowing through them: would there be enough electricity produced to power the city for a couple of months? Or perhaps just to power a handful of emergency hospitals and aid stations? A dozen defibrillators?
A couple of things: 1) We sort of like the image of ash-covered naga sadhus only going through certain channels, and women wearing brightly colored saris on other channels: the turmeric yellows over here and the vermillions over there. And petal-bedecked priests carried on floats by their technicolor-hued devotees each taking over a channel. But all are surging towards the water, coiling and recoiling, circling one another on their own separate paths, brushing up against each other, color against color, but without mixing. Until finally, they merge together into a single crowd in the holy rivers.
And 2) while waiting for the next mela, you can probably rig pedestrian subway tunnels to generate electricity from the morning and afternoon rush hour traffic; from sports fans exiting sporting arenas; from the throng of New Year's Eve and Independence Day revelers as they scamper about urban squares, sidewalks, and plazas, if only to power nearby traffic signals and street lights.
Apparently, some of the people displaced by the devastating floods in Jakarta have found shelter in a cemetery located in the center of the city.
“For several hundred evacuees,” reports The New York Times, “the cemetery offered a refuge, with public toilets and working water pumps for washing. An informal community has emerged there, with women cooking donated food at a communal fire under a big blue tarpaulin.”
Says one evacuee, “We are afraid to sleep in the cemetery. But we have no other place to go. We are sleeping among the dead.”
But “during the day, the cemetery is now a lively place, as displaced people from surrounding neighborhoods come to wash at its pumps and use its outdoor toilets.”
Cemeteries, planned on high ground, sacred spaces normally detached from the rest of the city, becoming critical centers in post-disaster relief and humanitarian aid.
Which reminds us of a Cairene cemetery, pictured above. Known to Westerners as the City of the Dead, it is home to thousands of refugees from Cairo's housing shortage, a “necropolis turned metropolis”, where tombs and mausoleums have been converted to house families, schools, and small business. There is even the occasional wedding parties.
The last four photos are by Ed Kashi, whose amazing though unfortunately downsized photos of the City of the Dead first appeared in the Winter '96 issue of Atlas Magazine, with a brief essay by Julie Winokur.
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.
![City of the Dead](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_yiiPzeRfNBQ/TJWV7_BMjqI/AAAAAAAACM0/jMkdfNXRkEs/s800/070206_cemetery_4.jpg")
